Language Log

This morning we're continuing to explore the difference between somebody and someone, which all started on 11/10/2009, when David Landfair wrote to Arnold Zwicky ("Ask Language Log: someone, somebody") to ask for protection against the bizarre idea that someone is nominative (like he/she/who) while somebody is accusative (like him/her/whom).

In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I consider the enormous linguistic impact of an internal memorandum published at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on November 12, 1990. The memo, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, was entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," and needless to say, we've all been webified ever since. Read all about it here.

You have to see this cute article by Giles Turnbull. It's about the deep-seatedness of children's need to have names for all the things they deal with — and the lack of any necessity for there to be pre-existing names in the language they happen to have learned.

From Doghouse Diaries:

Back in July, the New Scientist's Feedback page reported that

THE powers that be at Guy Robinson's place of work insist that employees tell the office if they're "working from home". Human laziness being what it is – sorry, we meant to say "the employees being committed to maximising productivity in a forward-looking sense" – the welter of emails on Monday mornings got shortened to the three letters "WFH". Then someone was stuck working at an airport and sent the message "WFA".

Then, given the insistence by the virus that is language on mutating whenever possible, the changes poured in and escaped the limitations of the alphabet: "WFT" working on a train, "WF\__" working from a sunlounger (not being smug or anything) and "WF\_O__/" working from a plane (ditto).

Guy's colleagues suggest "WF#" for "working from prison", but they have not needed to use this, yet. Feedback suggests a few others: "WF=====" for working at a linear accelerator and "WF() – -()" for working in a laser lab (with lenses).

Linguists around the world right now are packing for a trip to Scotland to attend the 50th Anniversary Golden Jubilee meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain here in Edinburgh (it starts on Sunday). And those listening to the BBC's Radio 4 this Friday morning may have been a little discomfited to hear the weather man, in his official capacity, use the adjective atrocious to describe the weather in Scotland over the past few days. Really! Adjective control is getting lax at Broadcasting House. The word choice should be interpreted, however, in a cultural context. Not to put too fine a point on it, a linguistic context of whingeing, moaning, snivelling, grumbling, and overstatement about the weather that probably goes back to the first settlement by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The fact is that no one whose experience has been limited to the British Isles has any idea what would be an appropriate meteorological use of the adjective atrocious.

A couple of weeks ago, Yale University Press decided to remove the illustrations from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book The Cartoons that Shook the World. (See "Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book", NYT, 8/12/2009). Among the many condemnations of this decision that I've read, Christopher Hitchens' ("Yale Surrenders", Slate, 8/172009) is the only one that makes a lexicographical argument:

[YUP director John] Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar to readers of Language Log and my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. So here is our nepotistic "diavlog" for your enjoyment. (Diavlog is a second-order blend, by the way: it blends dialog and vlog, with the latter element representing a blend of video and blog. Or make that third-order, since blog blends Web and log.)

Yesterday Rob S wrote to ask about a sentence from the newspaper ("Women's Work and Japan's Hostess Culture", NYT, 8/11/2009):

"A recent New York Times article described the Japanese profession of hostessing, which involves entertaining men at establishments where customers pay a lot to flirt and drink with young women (services that do not, as a rule, involve prostitution)."

So, does this quote mean that there exists a rule that says it cannot involve prostitution? Or is it rather stating that there is no rule that it must involve prostitution?

Is it forbidden, or just not required?

I responded, somewhat unsympathetically, with the opinion that "as a rule" is just a  quantifier over instances, meaning something like "in general" or "in most cases", and not evoking any concept of a rule in the deontic sense at all. This invalidated Rob's curiosity about "whether there was the absence of some rule mandating it, or the presence of a rule forbidding it".

Rob was a bit disappointed, I think, so I decided to try to do better, first by confirming my impression of how the expression "as a rule" is now used, and second by tracing its history to see if his interpretation has a basis in the past.

People's aversion to the word moist has attracted our attention for a while now (most recently in this post — see also the links in this one). Mark Peters recently wrote about the moist phenomenon for Good, quoting Language Log discussion as well as a Word Routes column I wrote for the Visual Thesaurus. And now Mark's Good column just got noticed by the folks at "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!" on NPR — Mark and I were quoted in their "limericks" segment (skip to about 3:00 in):

After his NPR interview and MSNBC honor for debunking the Cronkiter myth, Ben Zimmer is subbing for William Safire as this week's NYT's On Language columnist: "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", 8/7/2009.

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

It isn't often that I encounter an English word that I don't know other than names of chemical compounds, but I recently learned a new word for something not all that obscure. In a context in which I expected the word monopoly, I encountered monopsony. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it recurred. It turns out that economists distinguish between monopolies and monopsonies. When there is a single source for a product, that is a monopoly, but when there is only a single buyer for a product, that is a monopsony. Who knew?

The classic example of a monopsony is what I have hitherto known as the Chinese salt monopoly. Throughout most of Chinese history, anybody could produce salt, but they had to sell it to the government, which then sold it to consumers. This is why the classic work of Chinese economics, the proceedings of a conference held in 81 BCE with appended commentary, is entitled 塩鉄論 Discourses on Salt and Iron.

If you haven't picked up a copy of Michael Adams' new book, Slang: The People's Poetry, well, what are you waiting for? For starters, it's a lively and engaging look at English slang and its multitudinous forms. At the same time, it's a thoughtful interrogation of what "slang" actually is, and how we might determine its boundaries. One way that Michael expands traditional notions of slang is in his treatment of affixation, or what he amusingly calls "unorthodox lexifabricology." I talked to Michael about slangy affixation in the second part of my two-part interview with him for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt follows below.