Language Log

[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:

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.)

There's been a certain amount of discussion recently about a grammatical aspect of Rick Perry's recent TV ad, which starts with a clip of President Obama saying "We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades", and continues with Governor Perry commenting

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Do you believe that?
That's what our president thinks wrong with America?
That Americans are lazy?

The Prologue of Martin Dugard and Bill O'Reilly's new book (Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever) begins like this:

The man with six weeks to live is anxious.

He furls his brow, as he does countless times each day, and walks out of the Capitol Building, which is nearing completion. He is exhausted, almost numb.

A couple of days ago, Victor Steinbok sent to ADS-L some examples like this one, which he heard on a Canadian TV show:

I had to drive him on account of he lost his license.