Language Log

Last week a truce was brokered in the great Philadelphia Alt-Weekly Battle over Meh. But fresh fighting has broken out on the webcomic front. Here's today's Overcompensating strip from Jeffrey Rowland (click to expand):

Meh has its supporters, particularly among fans of "The Simpsons" (see this piece by Mark Peters for more Simpsoniana). But in his comment on the Overcompensating strip, Rowland has a retort to the pro-Simpsons crowd:

I know it started with a Simpsons episode. So did "don't have a cow man." People had the good sense to knock that crap off though.

(Hat tip, Dan Holbrook of Language is the People's, who notes that Rowland is no stranger to word rage.)

The announcement that the next edition of Collins English Dictionary will be including the indifferent interjection meh (having beaten out other submissions from the public) has set off a bit of a squabble between Philadelphia's two alt-weeklies. Molly Eichel of Philadelphia City Paper blogged that "meh isn't a word — it's a sound effect." Joel Mathis of Philadelphia Weekly responded that meh is "not only a word, but a great word." Eichel emailed me to try to settle the dispute, and I was only too happy to oblige, given my interest in meh ever since my June 2006 post here, "Meh-ness to society." You can read all about it in my latest Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus (where I hang my hat these days).

While I'm in self-promotion mode, why not try the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee? It's an addictive spelling challenge that adapts to your skill level, and it comes with the seal of approval from such Friends of the Log as Languagehat, Mr. Verb, and Jan Freeman. If you're interested in some background on how we made it adaptive, check out my recent post on OUPblog, "Building the Ultimate Spelling Bee." I hope you find the results anything but meh.

[Update: There's a truce in the meh wars. Mathis responds here and Eichel here.]

WAG is a very unusual initialism that has evolved in the last decade or so in the language of British newspapers. It is a back-formation from an acronym. Its origin lies in the the initials of the phrase Wives And Girlfriends, the phrase used to refer to the often newsmaking entourage of female companions surrounding (in particular) British soccer-playing celebrities. But once the acronym was established, and said females (often glamorous models or wannabes much sought after by celebrity photographers) could be referred to collectively as the team's WAGs, a singular noun was created as a kind of back-formation, and today an individual woman in a relationship with a soccer player can be referred to as a WAG.

In this earlier post, I was critical of the FCC's claim that the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" no matter what the context. (The Supreme Court took up this question yesterday.) However, my post doesn't offer any suggestions for how to get a clear look at what the F-word does contribute to a discourse. Though I don't have results for the F-word in particular, I do have results for more mildly-taboo items, including English damn and the Chinese intensive tama(de). (I'm hoping that this follow-up post allays any fears Geoff Pullum might have that I now see language as a big bag of words…)

Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote:

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the case of the fleeting expletive. Bono got things going when exclaimed "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards.[*] The FCC first judged such usage non-offensive, then back-tracked in the face of pressure from the Parents Television Council. In this note, the FCC declares that

given the core meaning of the "F-Word," any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation

Language Loggers have commented on this and related topics before, and Arnold recently went meta on the Times coverage of the case. I recently spoke with Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal about the FCC's statement and the coming Supreme Court hearings. (His article with Amy Schatz appeared today, along with a cool wordle-like graphic on the results below.) During out conversation, Jess asked how a linguist might test the FCC's claim about the connotations of the F-word. Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono's "really, really fucking brilliant"?

Collaborative post by John Kingston and Chris Potts

Newspaper stories about the financial markets often contain quantitative information that is intepretable only by experts. The headline screams "Dow Up 200!", but what does that mean? In some contexts (say, apartment rentals), 200 is a lot. In others (e.g., houses prices), it is hardly anything at all. Similiarly, what is a 3% change like? Sometimes we're asked to shrug off 3% differences as irrelevant (think of polling data). For the markets, though, most of us have the sense that 3% is a big deal.

The headlines do contain some information that all of us have intuitions about: the verbs and other predicates that describe the change. We know that rise says that the change was upwards, and we can intuitively juxtapose it with soar, which suggests really dramatic upward change. Conversely, fall and plummet describe motion in the downward direction, with the second implying much worse news than the first.

So much for our linguistic intuitions. Do they square with the way newspaper headline writers use these predicates in describing financial markets? This is much less clear. As part of our Data Rich Humanities project, sponsored by UMass Amherst CHFA, we have been exploring this question using the collection of 23,327 NY Times financial headlines described in this earlier post.

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has not been without controversy, but I think that we can all agree that one way in which it has been a good thing is that it has increased the visibility of the important topic of moose, which in burger form is reportedly her favorite meal. For those of you who are alcestically challenged, this is a bull moose:

In a recent comment, Amy asked:

If […] "go mad" is a modern formation that is perfectly grammatical, why would Mr Pullum label "head dagenham" as "…a little beyond the syntactic fringe"? What's the difference?

The Dagenham business is in Geoff Pullum's post "Beyond Barking", 6/24/2008; and the assertion about "go mad" is here. And I'm afraid that Amy's question doesn't have a very impressive answer, because this isn't, as far as I can tell, something that can (or should) be deduced from the fundamental axioms of grammar and logic. Essentially, it's just a fact about the verbs go and head.

No, not about whether "professional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad". More on that later. Nor was I wrong about James Wood's sneer at Sarah Palin's "verbage". No more on that is needed.

Several readers have pointed me to Anu Garg's  A.Word.A.Day entry for yesterday, obambulate:

MEANING:
verb tr.: To walk about.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.

USAGE:
"We have often seen noble statesmen obambulating (as Dr. Johnson would say) the silent engraving-room, obviously rehearsing their orations."
The Year's Art; J.S. Virtue & Co.; 1917.

In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue 1, page 99), and again made it clear that for him it was a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items. Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University, an expert on the history of the OED (author of Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED and creator of the marvellous Examining the OED website), mentioned in a paper presented at the ISLE-1 conference in Freiburg last week that she was baffled by the word mumfordish. So am I. Can any Language Log reader shed serious (rather than speculative) light on its etymology? Comments are open.

Visiting the New York Times homepage has become rather predictable over the last few weeks. The only question: will the headline scream that the markets are soaring or plummeting?

With the anniversary of Black Monday near (and the prospect of another such Monday looming), I got curious about what financial headlines have been like over the past few decades. The Times search links are amenable to reverse engineering, so I was able to get 23,372 headlines mentioning stocks, markets, dow, nasdaq, from October 13, 1981 to October 13, 2008. This seems like a large enough data set to explore the question, What have the markets been doing since 1981 — or, more accurately, what has the Times been saying that the markets have been doing?