Language Log

Joseph Berger, "Modesty in Ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn Is Enforced by Secret Squads", NYT 1/29/2013 (emphasis added):

“We give out proclamations,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, its executive director. “We don’t enforce. It’s like people can decide to keep Shabbos or not. If someone wants to turn on the light on Shabbos, we cannot put him in jail for that.”

But Hasidim interviewed said squads of enforcers did exist in wildcat form.

“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider themselves Gut’s polizei,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist, using the words for “God’s police.”  “It’s somebody who is a busybody, and they’re quite a few of them — zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”

About the expression "in wildcat form", AMG asks:

I have never heard of this expression and when I Googled it, I only found the football term "wildcat formation" but no references that seem to indicate that this term has entered popular (e.g., non-football) culture.  Have you heard of it? Do you know what it means?  It seems odd to use such an obscure phrase in a NYTimes article.

I recently wrote on Lingua Franca about my astonishment over Piotr Cichocki and Marcin Kilarski. In their paper "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The Life Cycle of a Linguistic Misconception" (Historiographia Linguistica 37, 2010, Pages 341-377), they mistook my 1989 humorous opinion column "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" for a research paper, and bitterly attacked it for dogmatism, superficiality, offensiveness, and all sorts of scholarly sins. But there is an additional thing about the paper that puzzled me deeply. It concerns the word "misconception" in the title.

I have read the early sections of the paper over and over again trying to figure out what Cichocki and Kilarski think the misconception is, and I just cannot figure it out.

I learned a new word today: "hospitalist".  The fist time I saw it, in a paper on "Determinants of Hospitalist Efficiency", I mis-read it as "hospital's", then realized it wasn't that, and thought it might be a really spectacular typographical error. But in fact it's a real word, coined in 1996 by Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman, which now gets nearly 34,000 hits on Google Scholar (where hit counts seem to be more or less believable).

Reader ESM sent in a link to David Weigel, "Democrats Say They Have the Votes for Filibuster Reform, and for the 'Nuclear Option'", Slate 1/22/2013:

…even if you're a reformer, do you think there's ANY filibuster reform that wouldn't be interpeted by the Rand Paul-Mike Lee-Tim Scott-Ron Johnson quartet as the hi sign to "blow up the Senate"?

and asked

I'm curious about the use of "hi sign." I've heard the phrase spoken, but always understood it as "high sign." A quick search online didn't turn up any meaningful commentary, even of the speculative or anecdotal variety.

Far be it from me to pervert the noble institution of Language Log by exploiting it as a place to rant about the shortcomings of an unusably vile word processor. I know you wouldn't want that. This is Language Log, not Vile Word Processing Software Log. However, since the topic seems to have come up… Could I make a brief remark?

Miranda Leitsinger, "11 killer whales free after being 'locked' in ice, mayor says", NBC News 1/10/2013:

Twenty of the Inukjuak villagers were tasked with doing much the same: they were going to remove the broken ice around the area and use chainsaws to enlargen the hole, which was getting increasingly smaller.

Adam Czarnota, who sent in the link, noted that "'Enlargen' put me in such a good mood that I got a chuckle out of 'increasingly smaller', too".

The American Dialect Society (meeting in Boston in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has chosen its Word of the Year for 2012: hashtag. The Twitter term, which has become a pervasive metalinguistic marker, beat out such contenders as YOLO, fiscal cliff, marriage equality, 47 percent, and Gangnam style. The official announcement is here, and you can read my recap of the voting here.

I happened to catch this Q&A on the radio today, at the start of program segment about a course on "Shakespeare and Financial Markets":

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Raymond Li has an article in the South China Morning Post (Friday, 21 December, 2012) in which he announces the results of a poll by the Education Ministry that has selected mèng 梦 ("dream") as the character of the year, ostensibly because it represents the hopes and achievements of the nation.  But mèng 梦 ("dream") is definitely a double-edged sword, and critics of the government put a totally different spin on the word.

On the MBTA train ticket I bought the other day, entitling me to travel seven zones on the commuter rail system, it says boldly: One Way Adult Interzone.

Does that sound exactly like a name for a pornography website, or is it just me? "Welcome to the One-Way Adult Interzone (must be 18 or older to enter)…" Perhaps it's just me. Never mind.

Someone who heard me interviewed on the radio wrote to ask:

Do you know the derivation of "sleeping in"? I know it means sleeping late, but why do people say "sleeping in" instead of "sleeping late"?

Short answer: "sleep in", in the meaning of "sleep late(r than normal)", seems to have developed as an idiom within the past 100 years, apparently borrowed from Scots.  It's common in English for verbs in combination with intransitive prepositions — sometimes called "phrasal verbs" — to develop idiosyncratic uses and meanings, related in some metaphorical or analogical way to the meanings of the verbs and prepositions involved, but not entirely predictable from them.

Reader and fan Will Thompson wrote to Mark Liberman, who passed his letter on to me, about a recent article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times, discussing a book by the Russian political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin in which he explains weird/different American cultural norms to Russians.

Will notes that towards the end, the reviewer states:

He [Zlobin] devotes many pages to privacy, a word that does not exist in the Russian language[.]

And Will is suspicious of that claim.

In a review of the game Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw goes on at length about what a ridiculous word "warfighter" is ("Medal of Honor Warfighter & Doom 3 BFG Edition", Zero Punctuation 11/7/2012):

So this week I've been playing a bit of Medal of Honor: Warfighter {laughs}  Sometimes I do a thing where I incrementally alter a game's name each time I say it until it's something stupid, but I'm feeling pretty fucking undercut here — you know, "Warfighter", because he just fights wars all over the place, and then he gets his tax return done by his friend Numbers Accountant.  I don't know anyone who didn't immediately laugh at this fucking name, so why didn't anyone involved in its development put their hand up, or is that a flogging offense in the EA slave pits?

He continues in the same general vein for few dozen clauses, and throughout his review, he makes a point of emitting a loud fake laugh whenever he mentions the game's name. But I thought I'd stop with his question "Why didn't anyone involved in its development put their hand up?", because even though he means this to be a rhetorical question, in fact it has an easy answer.