Language Log

The other day on NPR's "Marketplace," Robert Hass tells me, a Wall Street analyst said that Obama "has to show Americans that he is making strident progress toward stabilizing the credit crisis." A new one on me, but Google turns up about 100 hits for strident progress, 50 or so for strident advances, and almost 400 for strident growth, the great majority of them suggesting simply "great" or "impressive," with no intimation of shrillness or unpleasantness:

Today, some of the most strident advances in technology overall have been in the arena of forecasting… (CBS3, Springfield, Mass.)

Sizzler made strident progress throughout the 1980s, blossoming into a vibrant enterprise. (Worldwide Restaurant Concepts, Inc.)

The failure of real gains to trickle down the income scale has been mitigated by… a strident expansion of public sector activities and the public funding of employment within the public and private sectors. (Economic Research Council, UK)

The shares are trading on about 23 times forecast 2007 earnings, but there is no sign that Capita's strident growth is likely to slow. (The Telegraph)

Quite a few of the hits seem to be from Asian English-language  sources, but as the examples above show, the phenomenon is pretty widespread. And it goes back quite a while: a 1922 collection of items by the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor includes the item

"SINCE her tour of the Pacific Coast," declares a Berkeley bulletin, "Miss Case has made strident advances in her art." The lady, it appears, sings.

Is this just the influence of "making strides," or is there some way to get here from the literal meaning of strident?

Chris Massey wrote to point out that shovel-ready has already been cloned: Gardiner Harris and Kenneth Chang, "Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few", NYT, 1/23/2009.

Scientific writing is full of great noun compounds. My favorite recent example is part of the title of a paper featured in this morning's email from BioMedCentral: "Representations of odor plume flux are accentuated deep within the moth brain".

Odor plume flux turns out to mean just what you'd think: time variation in airborne smells. I look forward to using it in everyday life: "Mm, what's that delicious odor plume flux?"

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum pondered the use of subject to mean "person" in police jargon ("One subject in the residence", 2/13/2009):

A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English.

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let's stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

Read more about it in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

We are still encountering cases of people who leap to attack uses of particular word-senses without carefully checking the dictionaries and usage books first. Several emailers and commenters (some comments are now deleted) saw that I had repeated the BBC's claims that it had sought a "sincere and fulsome" apology from Carol Thatcher, and instantly wrote comments insisting that this was a gross mistake (on my part, some thought; I have now put in the quotation marks that I should not have risked leaving out), since fulsome doesn't mean anything like "full" but is in fact close to being an antonym of sincere.

People don't seem to look anything up before they leap to the comments box. (See Mark Liberman's documentations of astonishing earlier cases of ill-informed objections here and here, and similar remarks of mine on grammatical usage here and here.) The original senses of fulsome are, according to Webster (which is a constantly updated and extremely reliable dictionary of American English available online):

1 a copious or abundant;
1 b generous in amount or spirit;
1 c full and well developed.

Clearly the BBC intended one or more of these senses.

Yesterday, in explaining why he didn't open his post "Half golliwogs and other UK linguistic news" to comments, Geoff Pullum wrote:

"I'd rather eat a live Madagascan hissing cockroach than see a hundred comments on the above."

My reaction was to wonder "Madagascan?" I always thought it was "Madagascar hissing cockroach", with the simple place name used as a modifier. A quick check verified that Geoff's version is indeed in the minority, 3,180 to 24,200, though not nearly by a large enough factor to explain my confusion. (It also turned up the image reproduced on the right, which suggests that there are some people out there who might actually enjoy eating Madagascar hissing cockroaches.)

Two items on the pop-cultural neologism front. First, the Cleveland Cavaliers are pretty upset that point guard Mo Williams hasn't been selected for the NBA All-Star game. Teammate Ben Wallace sounded off to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"It's a tragedy," Ben Wallace said. "I think it's an injustice. It's a fraud. We've got the best record in the league, and we've only got one guy going. You always make it the next year, after the year you were supposed to make it. It's a travesty and a sham and a mockery. It's a shamockery."

And when Williams wasn't even selected to be an All-Star reserve, team owner Dan Gilbert continued the neologistic assault in an email to the AP:

"Ben Wallace was right when he called Mo originally being passed over for the All-Star game a shamockery," Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said in a tongue-in-cheek e-mail to The Associated Press. "But not naming him as the natural and obvious replacement for the unfortunately injured Jameer Nelson is stupidiculous, idillogical and preposterageous."

Shamockery, or more fully traveshamockery (also spelled travishamockery), goes back to a 2004 ad campaign for Miller Lite, specifically this campaign-themed "President of Beers" spot featuring comedian Bob Odenkirk:

As I got out of my taxi at the Helsinki Vantaa airport on my way home, in bright sunshine, I noticed something strange. There were sparkles in the air. Tiny flickering rainbow-sparkling air sequins were all around my head. At first I blinked, thinking my eyes were playing tricks. But it was real. Every cubic inch of the cold air around me had tiny floating ice crystals in it. Gently drifting almost-invisible nano-snowflakes, falling from a clear blue sky, sparkling like tiny prisms — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — in the bright winter sun. Finland didn't want me to leave, and was showing off new forms of beauty. I had never seen precipitation of this kind before. I hate to admit it, since it can only encourage the millions of people who will insist this is connected to some sort of profound insight about language and thought, but… it was a kind of snow I didn't have a word for.

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:

Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."

What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.

I don't know about the languages that Montaigne was thinking of, but the claim that some languages lack a word for lying is one that has continued to crop up. A few months ago Steven Point, who is currently the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, asserted that there is no word for "lying" in his language, Halkomelem. It appears, however, that he is mistaken: my sources say that in his language smétnqən means "to lie, speak falsely" and that q̓íq̓əl̓stéxʷ means "to lie, deceive".

An earlier example of the same theme is due to no other than John Wayne, who in the classic western Hondo asserts that "The Apaches have no word for 'lie'." That is sort of true: the Western Apache dictionary that I own lists not one but two different expressions for lying. There is a verb meaning specifically "to lie", e.g. ɬeíɬchoo "he lies", as well as an expression meaning "to lie, deceive", e.g. bich'ii' nashch'aa "I lie to him".

It may well be true that these cultures have a particularly negative view of lying, but tall tales about the lack of a word for it aren't a good way of making this point.

As we've recently seen, people love the idea that a culture is revealed by its lexicon. The earliest example of this trope that I can think of is in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "Of Cannibals". This is one of the founding documents of the "noble savage" tradition, and presents the alleged lack of certain words for certain bad things as evidence of the essential goodness of humanity in the state of nature:

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection? [emphasis added]

I'd be curious to know whether it's now possible to determine which New World language (or language-family) the "cannibal" that Montaigne interviewed in Rouen in 1562 spoke, so that the truth of his assertions about the lack (for example) of a word for lying could be checked. [Update: it was Tupinambá.] I'd lay my money against him, if there were any chance to settle the bet one way or the other.

Mark has just supplied new Language Log readers with a reference archive of Language Log posts about languages with lots of words for certain things, and languages with no words for certain things. It is a theme that intrigues ordinary folk; it almost mesmerises them. It is clear that nothing Language Log can do will ever discredit the twin notions that (1) lexical abundance correlates with conceptual or environmental or perceptual richness, and (2) that lexical thrift betokens a poorer and meaner experiential world.