Language Log

"Switching strength on and off", Nature 6/9/2011:

A material has been designed to switch back and forth between a strong, brittle state and a weak, ductile one.

Hai-Jun Jin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and Jörg Weissmüller at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte. When the applied electrical potential shifted, the material showed distinct and reversible changes in strength, flow stress and ductility.

Andrew Rotherham, "A looming shadow over No Child Left Behind", Time Magazine, 6/16/2011:

The chattering class was even sourer. American Enterprise Institute scholar and pundit Rick Hess accused Duncan of trammeling on the Constitution.

Typo for trampling? Maybe, but this word-confusion  is commoner than I would have expected.

Reader CL writes:

I've been using "lengthly" all this time; my mother used it; I believe her mother, an English teacher at a high school in Brooklyn, used it. Today, at almost 33, I saw a wiggly line from a word processor that was my first clue it's not actually a word. Wiktionary says "misspelled form of lengthy."

How did this happen? Is it widespread though (prescriptively) wrong?

A couple of months ago, an Italian friend brought to my attention a quirk of Italian usage. Like English, Italian has adopted the Latin word forum to mean "a place for public discussion".  In English, as usual with borrowed Latin words, the plural is sometimes "fora" (the original Latin plural) and sometimes "forums" (the regular English form). In Italian, borrowed words are often treated as invariabile ("invariant"), so that the plural is the same as the singular. For forum this yields the plural "forum", and (for example) "in tutti i forum" (meaning "in all forums") is common on the web.

But there are also two Italian words foro, plural "fori": one means "hole, opening", and the other means "court, tribunal".

Following up on my post "Counterfeit cultural capital" (5/11/2011), David Russinoff sent some additional information about the early history of expressions like "angles comprised of equal right lines" in English translations of Euclid.  I reproduce his note in full below, in order to make his efforts available to other interested scholars, while adding a warning to others that this may go a bit deep in the historical-lexicography weeds even for hardened LL readers.

Around the water cooler at Language Log Plaza yesterday, David Beaver noted a HuffPo headline "With Pitfalls Abound For Prosecutors, Could Edwards Case Fall Apart?", where abound is used like aplenty. He also reported that a quick web search turns up many examples where abound is used like afoot: "speculation is abound", "excitement is abound".

Today's political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester. National issues, particularly the debate over Medicare, played a big part in the race, but local factors were key as well, with the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, losing votes to Jack Davis, a third-party spoiler running on the Tea Party line. Hochul was helped by squabbles between the Corwin and Davis campaigns, most notably a confrontation between Davis and Corwin's chief of staff outside a veteran's event a couple of weeks ago. The video of the confrontation memorably featured Jack Davis saying, "You want punched out?"

Rob Cox and Anthony Currie, "Glencore I.P.O. Mimics Blackstone and Draws Skeptics", NYT 5/3/2011:

Is Glencore the new Blackstone? It has become a theme from Wall Street to the City and beyond that the commodity trader’s planned $12 billion stock offering signals the top of its industry’s cycle, just as Blackstone’s did for private equity. But investors should watch for other similarities when scrubbing Glencore’s prospectus, due out Wednesday.

Say what?

Ben Yagoda shows in this article in Slate (not for the first time) that he is one English professor cum journalistic writer who really is smart as well as witty when writing about language. In this article he actually does some empirical research on the extent to which the prescriptivist conservatives are holding their ground — he makes an attempt at quantitative assessment of the extent to which recently shifting word meanings have caught on (the words whose meanings he studies include decimate, disinterested, eke, fortuitous, fulsome, momentarily, nonplussed, presently, toothsome, and verbal).

WAG is a curious word in British English, confined mainly to journalism, and at first mostly spelled in capital letters (I actually discussed it here once before, here). It's an acronym, not an abbreviation. (Abbreviations are the other kind of initialism: they are pronounced by saying the names of the successive letters, as with IBM; an acronym is an initialism with a sequence of letters that can be pronounced in the usual way as a word, e.g. AIDS.) The etymology of WAG comes from the initial letters of the phrase Wives And Girlfriends. The word denotes the class of people who serve in the sometimes arduous but newsworthy role of wives and girlfriends of British sports stars, especially soccer players. There is always a cluster of glamorous women hanging around top professional soccer team members, and some players choose brides from among these admirers. Hence the headlinese word "WAGs". The puzzling thing is that WAG has developed a singular. It is increasingly well established. See for example, today's story Dundee football star Kyle Benedictus facing jail over 'wag rage' attack, where the word is not just in the singular but lower-cased. (It's an inspiring story of professional soccer culture: a young player going to his ex-girlfriend's home, violently assaulting two men he finds there, and then accusing her of having made him do it.)

The OED's first citations for tsunami:

1897 L. Hearn Gleanings in Buddha-fields i. 24 ‘Tsunami!’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock‥as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.
1904 Publ. Earthquake Investigation Comm. Foreign Lang. (Japan) xix. 6 Records and reports of earthquakes and ‘tsunamis’.

On ADS-L a bit more than a year ago, there was a discussion of possible antedatings.

In this morning's post, I noted an early example of metaphorical literally in William Robertson's History of America (Volume I), 1777:

The Andes may literally be said to hide their heads in the clouds; the storms often roll, and the thunder bursts below their summits, which, though exposed to the rays of the sun in the centre of the torrid zone, are covered with everlasting snows.

This struck me as a perfect example of the case noted by Henry Bradley in the 1903 edition of the OED, where literally is "used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense". A quick Google Books search showed that Robertson was by no means alone: in the last half of the 18th century, the phrase "may literally be said" was a fairly reliable indicator of metaphor or hyperbole.

The opinion section of The Guardian is blessed with the name "Comment Is Free", and sometimes what they publish is worth every penny of that. Long-time Language Log readers will recall that we have often said here before that whenever someone says that the X people have no word for Y in their language you should put your hand on your wallet — to make sure it's still there. The people who witter on about who has a word for what hardly ever even know the languages they are talking about, and in the vast majority of cases (check out some of the cases on this list) their claim is false. At this page you can read an editorial about spelling reform saying that "phonetic languages like Italian and, apparently, Finnish not only have no problem with dyslexia, they don't even have a word for it." I find it almost unbelievable that people imagine they can continue to get away with printing flamingly obvious drivel about language in major newspapers. They always assume that since there are no linguistic scientists and no cross-linguistic dictionaries or encyclopedias, no one will check on them. The multiple genetically-linked effects of dyslexia don't go away if you alter the orthography. And to set the record straight: The Italian word for dyslexia is dislessia. Finnish has three words for it, two native and one borrowed: dysleksia is the borrowed one, and the others are lukivaikeus (literally "reading-difficulty"), lukihäiriö (literally "reading-writing-disturbance": lu is the first syllable of the stem meaning "read", ki is the first syllable of the stem meaning "write", and they have been collapsed to coin this word).