Language Log

Murray Smith writes:

Friday afternoon in the car I heard a radio news report about the closing of an art gallery on Boston's tony Newbury Street.  The reporter had interviewed the gallery owner and learned that due to economic conditions gallery sales had been down forty percent the last two years.  Now the landlord was imposing a thirty percent rent increase, and the owner was throwing in the towel.  The reporter concluded, "The decision was academic; she had to do it."  The intonational profile showed that the second clause was a gloss on the first.  I was surprised, not having heard this use of "academic" before.  I have always understood "academic" in this sort of context to mean something like "without significant consequences".

James Parker, reviewing Matthew Pearl's new novel The Technologists, has a question ("Science Will Save Us", NYT 2/24/2012):

Bad prose […] is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What’s going on here?

My reaction to Pearl's first novel, The Dante Club, was similar, although more charitable to the author:

The Dante Club's front matter tells us that "Matthew Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School". I ask you, is it likely that a person with that background would be so insensitive to the norms of the English language?

No, a much more plausible hypothesis is that Pearl graduated from a slightly different Harvard University, in a universe slightly different from our own, and read a body of English and American literature that is also just a bit different.

Last Wednesday, the judge in the "Zombie Mohammed" case dismissed a charge of harassment against Talaag Elbayomy for attacking Ernest Perce V during a Halloween parade in Mechanicsburg PA. Mr. Pence, a member of the Parading Atheists of Central PA, was costumed and labelled as "Zombie Mohammed", marching next to a "Zombie Pope" who was not attacked. There's been an extensive discussion of this case over at The Volokh Conspiracy (here, here, and here).

Mr. Perce apparently recorded the hearing (without permission from the judge, whose name is Mark Martin) and posted it on YouTube. Eugene Volokh linked to the recording and noted:

Commenters have queried whether the judge is actually Muslim; I think that at 31:25 in this audio he does expressly say “I’m a Muslim, I find it very offensive,” and not in a context where a “not” seems to be lost or somehow implied; but some commenters disagree, partly based on other passages in the audio — if you’re interested, check out the discussion in the comment thread. Naturally, I think the judge’s condemnation of the victim is out of place (and casts doubt on the judge’s objectivity in his decision about the defendant) whether or not the judge is a Muslim. [NOTE: The judge, in the message below, says he is not a Muslim.]

The question at issue here is not whether the charges against Mr. Elbayomy should or should not have been dismissed, nor whether the lecture that Judge Martin directed against Mr. Perce was or was not appropriate. What I hope to explain is why, if Judge Martin is not in fact a Muslim (apparently he's a Lutheran), he seems to have said "I'm a Muslim".

[Tip of the hat to Andrea Mazzucchi.]

"The pit in Thomas Friedman's stomach" (5/23/2011) is back:

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach. […]

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
[Thomas Friedman, "Freedom at 4 Below", NYT 2/7/2012]

In the interview discussed in the previous post, there was one place where some combination of phonetic variation in vowels and cultural variation in measurement units left me puzzled. The context is as follows:

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For a recent story on the arrest of Kim Dotcom, The World's Lisa Mullins turned to Georgina Ball from Radio New Zealand ("Cyber Tycoon Wanted for Internet Piracy Arrested in New Zealand", 1/26/2012). One of the things Ms. Ball says is this:

they're worried he'll flee to Germany which is where he's from
which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Evan McMorris-Santoro, "South Carolina GOP Chair Says His State Is GOP Primary Reset Button", TPM 1/11/2012:

“Our voters are fiercely independent and pretty fickle,” [SC GOP chair Chad] Connelly told me over coffee at a downtown shop brilliantly named Immaculate Consumption. “They watch what happens in Iowa, they watch what happens in New Hampshire. They may take that under advisement kind of thing, but they’re going to make their own decisions.”

This is a lovely example of the  use of "kind of thing" as a sort of floating discourse adjunct, something that I've noticed recently here and there. It seems to be similar in force to discourse-particle like, and to more conventional phrases like "so to speak" and "as it were":

They may, like, take that under advisement, but they're going to make their own decisions.
They may take that under advisement, as it were, but . . .
They may take that under advisement, so to speak, but . . .

However, I'm not sure about the syntax of this apparently free-floating "kind of thing".

One of the requirements for the Introduction to Linguistics course that I teach is a term project, for which I ask students to

In plain language: explain something about how a piece of talk works.

More exactly: analyze the communicative effects of some aspects of one or more linguistic performances, attending to at least two different levels of linguistic analysis.

This is just one part of one introductory undergraduate class (it counts for 20% of the grade), but most of the 120 course participants do something interesting. This year, two students looked at the differences in g-dropping rates between musical performances and interviews, for two quite different performers.

And the referent is Newt Gingrich! Mitt Romney, on Fox and Friends today, in response to Newt calling him a liar:

Well um uh I- I understand Newt must be very angry
and I- I don’t exactly understand why, but uh
look, I wish him well, it’s a long road ahead,
i- he's a good guy, I like he and Callista, and uh-
uh we got many months ahead of us, so
uh I’ll leave it at that [laugh].

"James" asked

A few folks at work are engaged in a debate about the difference, or lack thereof, between empathetic and empathic. Could someone from LL elaborate? Our turn to the dictionary only explained that they have the same meaning and usage as a form of speech. Thank you!

In the course of checking out stimuli for an experiment, I came across an interesting word pronunciation. The speaker is a woman in her mid-20s who has lived all her life in central Ohio. Here's a short version — see if you can guess what the word is:

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Note that the preceding clip includes the word in question and also the initial consonant of the following word…

Today's installment of John Allison's web-comic short story "Murder She Writes" features the youthful amateur detective Charlotte Grote ("Lottie") using well as an intensifier of the adjective brutal.

This is a traditional usage — the OED's sense 16.a. for well, "With adjectives. Formerly in common use, the sense varying from ‘fully, completely’ to ‘fairly, considerably, rather’", has citations going back to the 9th century:

c888 Ælfred tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. xxv,   Seo leo, þeah hio wel tam se,‥heo forgit sona hire niwan taman.
c900 tr. Bede Eccl. Hist. iv. ii. 258   Wæron her stronge cyningas and wel cristene.

But now well ADJ is rare except in the cases listed in sense 16.b. "In modern use esp. in well able, well aware, well worth, well worthy", a list that obviously doesn't include "well brutal". (Well is freely used as a modifier on past participles, as in "a well-cooked egg", but that's another matter.)