Language Log

By now, practically everyone has heard of the remarkable basketball performances of Jeremy (Shu-How) Lin 林書豪, the Harvard grad who came off the bench for the New York Knicks last week and helped them win seven straight games.

So sensational has his play been that enthusiasts swiftly coined the term "Linsanity" to describe it.  Of course, because Lin is of Chinese (er, Taiwanese [more about that later]) ancestry, there had to be a Mandarin equivalent.  Unfortunately, I think that the translation of Linsanity, Línfēngkuáng 林疯狂, that was circulating most widely (267,000 ghits; had 212,000 ghits two days ago) is not a good one.  No sooner had I heard the expression Línfēngkuáng 林疯狂 a few days ago than was I disappointed by it.  Not only did it fail to capture the nuances of "Linsanity", it sounded as though it had been invented by someone who doesn't have a native feel for Chinese word formation.  To quote Deadspin:  "Our resident Chinese expert, Tom Scocca, gives the translation of 林疯狂 as "Lin-insane," which carries a somewhat different connotation."  Tom Scocca's unease is not unfounded.

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

From the AP wire…

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP)—So what that the Texas Rangers won their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander.

This sentence tripped me up in a couple of different ways. First, I initially had trouble parsing the subordinate clause, "the Texas Rangers won their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander." Now, obviously it doesn't mean that the only game this season that the Rangers won was against Verlander. For a little while, I thought it was a muddled way to say that the only game this season that the Rangers won against the Tigers was against Verlander. Eventually, I got it: the only game in which the Rangers faced Verlander this season was a game that the Rangers won. In other words, it's:

the Texas Rangers [won [their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander]]

not:

the Texas Rangers [won [their only game this season] [against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander]]

Now that's settled. But what about the introductory "So what that…"? Shouldn't it be "So what if…"?

Hockey is not a popular sport in the Punjab but it is THE sport in Canada, which now has a large Punjabi population. An interesting example of cultural integration is the fact that CBC Sports now has hockey commentary in Punjabi.

Is the young soccer player Jack Wilshere ready to start playing on the England team? Don't dig into your sports knowledge, because this is Language Log, not Soccer Log, and we are interested in what Arsene Wenger (coach of Wilshere's team, Arsenal) said in answer to this question. According to Reuters (take a deep breath and start counting negations):

"Is he ready to start for England against France next month? If you asked me the reverse question, is he not ready to start for England, then it would be difficult to not say no."

The popular sports blog Deadspin isn't the first place you'd expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post "Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way," featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook:

Five years ago, Geoff Pullum wrote a post here entitled, "Pick-up basketballism reaches Ivy League faculty vocabulary," about the spread of the apologetic interjection "my bad." In an addendum, Geoff raised the possibility that Manute Bol had popularized or even originated the expression while in the NBA in the late '80s (or a bit earlier, in his days playing ball in college). I had sent Geoff a bit of supporting evidence, two snippets from newspaper articles in early 1989 talking about Bol's use of the phrase when playing for the Golden State Warriors.

All of this came up again after Bol died this past weekend, as commentators were looking for ways to eulogize him. Geoff's post was frequently linked to by bloggers (e.g., Kottke, Boing Boing, Deadspin, The Atlantic Wire), and the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg gave the "my bad" story a thorough going-over on D.C. Sports Bog.

Earlier I posted a video of UK football commentator (and former Hull striker) Dean Windass recapping some play in a Premier League match between Everton and Portsmouth. It had been posted on Today's Big Thing under the headline "Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English," and I referred to Windass as "wildly disfluent." But a few of our British commenters said that beyond some comic stumbling over the name of presenter Jeff Stelling, Windass was speaking in a manner that would be perfectly comprehensible to a listener familiar with the Hull dialect of Yorkshire and with the relevant footballer lingo. Ian Preston provided a very helpful transcript, the highlight of which is the colorful expression, "He sends Jagielka for a pie" — glossed by Ian as "he jinks so as to send [Everton player Phil Jagielka] the wrong way."

I noted in the comments that "for me, 'He sends Jagielka for a pie' has all the magic and mystery that 'Terwilliger bunts one' had for Annie Dillard's mother." I was referring to a passage in Dillard's memoir An American Childhood, which is worth reproducing here as a reminder of the opacity of sports-talk to non-initiates on both sides of the pond.

A video from Today's Big Thing, under the headline, "Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English":

On NBC's "Meet the Press" this morning, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty grasped for a baseball metaphor in this exchange with David Gregory (see the end of this video clip), and came up with the proposal that the Republicans "need to be not just the party of saying, 'We hope President Obama continues to kick it in the dugout'." Here's the context:

Four years ago I wrote a Language Log post looking into the use of podium as a verb at the Winter Olympics in Torino — and the often extreme reactions that the usage provoked. Now with the Vancouver Olympics coming up, I return to the theme in my latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine. It is no doubt the first (and last) article in the Times to cite both a senior editor of Ski Racing magazine and Eve & Herbert Clark's crucial study of denominal verbs.

Snowclones, in Geoff Pullum's early formulation, were defined as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." Of course, the field of snowclonology has moved beyond "lazy journalists" to a consideration of phrasal templates used by the broader populace, in varieties exhibiting a wide range of creativity. But journalists who have many column inches to fill remain a fertile source for the more clichéd strain of snowclones.

Sports journalism might be particularly prone to such hackneyed phrase-making. Case in point: in his most recent Monday Morning Quarterback column for Sports Illustrated, Peter King wrote that Carolina Panthers receiver Steve Smith "leads the NFL in guts." The sports blog Deadspin had already been tracking King's "funny little tic of expressing abundance by saying something like, '[Person or Team X] leads the league in [Intangible Category Y].'" Deadspin's Tommy Craggs then laid out the damning evidence of King's endless snowcloning.

When the U.S. soccer team plays Brazil this afternoon in the Confederations Cup final,  the stadium will be buzzing with the sound of plastic trumpets called vuvuzelas. (See Delia Robertson "Vuvuzela: Popular Symbol of South African Football", VOA News, 6/25/2009).

Here's an example (with simulated crowd noise) of how a vuvuzela sounds:

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