Language Log

At this page in the Daily WTF you may find a verbatim reproduction of an email in which an office worker told her colleagues:

Please be advised- I will be bouncing Nude in 5 minutes. Please let me know if this presents an issue.

Presents an issue? It sure does! Does this woman have no conception of workplace manners? I find it hard enough to concentrate when co-workers are just sitting around nude in the common room. When they start bouncing around, I really feel I have to draw the line.

One minute later, however, came a second email explaining that the word "Nude" had been — can you guess? — a cupertino. OK, everybody, false alarm. Debbie will not be bouncing nude after all. It's just some server called NewDev that will be bounced (i.e., taken down and quickly rebooted). Nothing to see here, folks; back to your desks.

[Thanks to: Jens Fiederer and Urban Garlic.]

Here is one of today's top headlines on the AP wire:

The same headline is currently being used online by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Guardian, Yahoo News, and many other news sites. The Twitterati were, of course, quick to pick up on the grammar problem (here, here). It's been to corrected to "…love to hate" by a few outlets already, however (like the Houston Chronicle).

Hard to say how this one slipped by so many editorial eyes. Perhaps an earlier version of the headline had "loves to hate" agreeing with "(the) GOP," such as "2012 hopefuls crowd town GOP loves to hate," and then a last-minute change in word order loused up the agreement.

[Possible background influences for the verb choice range from Gershwin ("I Loves You Porgy") to Gollum ("We wants it, we needs it").]

[Update, 4 pm EST: The AP has now corrected the headline.]

Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Maybe the L.A. Times editors could have spared themselves some confusion by paying more attention to the American Dialect Society voting for Word of the Year. For 2008, I included hopey changey in my list of nominations, defining it as follows:

hopey changey: Derisive epithet incorporating Obama’s two main buzzwords (also dopey hopey changey).

In the '08 WOTY voting, hopey changey (hyphenated as hopey-changey) ended up in a special category of election-related terms, finishing a distant third behind maverick and lipstick on a pig (but ahead of hockey mom).

Working on a paper today, my partner Barbara found that Microsoft Word objected to her use of the word relativizing as nonexistent or misspelled, and suggested firmly that she should change it to the most plausible nearly similar word: gelatinizing. But she is wise to the extraordinarily bad advice Word gives on spelling and grammar, and firmly resisted what could have been one of the worst cupertinos in the history of philosophy.

'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' —'definitely'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

So reports CNews in Canada here.

But I think what they meant was that Professor Budra (who is talking about the disastrous state of the spelling and grammar skills of students in Canada's universities today) said (or rather, emailed) 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' —'definately'. The in-house automatic spelling checks, I conjecture, flagged definately as an error (which it is: undergraduates take note), and they incorrectly corrected it to the correct spelling, which here was incorrect!

Andrew Dowd sends me a genuine, attested case of the kind of sentence that I have elsewhere called plausible angloid gibberish. It is a particular kind of mangled comparative that somehow seems English when it isn't. It has absolutely no right to be called grammatical, and nothing can explain why it is that we (falsely) believe that it has a meaning that could be accounted for in the regular way — it doesn't and it couldn't. No syntacticians that I know of can say why it sort of slips by, in comprehension and sometimes (as here) even in production. The sentence came from http://www.backspace.com/notes/2004/06/, citing AdAge, and it reads thus:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

Complete and utter syntactic nonsense. And yet when you read it you see what they meant long before you realize that they couldn't have meant it.

Top story of the morning in the UK for the serious language scientist must surely be the report in The Sun concerning a children's toy mouse that is supposed to sing "Jingle bells, jingle bells" but instead sings "Pedophile, pedophile". Said one appalled mother who squeezed the mouse, "Luckily my children are too young to understand." The distributors, a company called Humatt, of Ferndown in Dorset, claims that the man in China who recorded the voice for the toy "could not pronounce certain sounds." And the singing that he recorded "was then speeded up to make it higher-pitched — distorting the result further." (A good MP3 of the result can be found here.) They have recalled the toy.

Shocked listeners to BBC Radio 4 this morning heard the presenters read this story out while collapsing with laughter. Language Log is not amused. If there was ever a more serious confluence of issues in speech technology, the Chinese language, freedom of speech, taboo language, and the protection of children, I don't know when.

I was trying to keep up with the news on Iran's "secret new nuclear enrichment facility" a couple of weeks ago, as I'm sure many of our readers were also doing. In reading one update in the NYT, I came upon this quotation:

[Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's nuclear program, said in an interview with ISNA news agency on Sunday, said] that Iran had taken defensive measures against possible military threats against the facility into consideration. "We are always faced with threats," he said. "We don't think that those threats would necessarily take place but we have prepared ourselves for the worse."

In the past week my new credit card had been sent by courier service to someone called "Pullem"; a student paper had cited a linguist named "Pollum" for work of mine; and a kindly administrator had sent out an email to a large list in Edinburgh congratulating "our own Geoff Pullman" on being elected to the British Academy. Things had not been going well. But now the general quality of life was improving. United Airlines had asked me to switch to a later (and delayed) flight via London Heathrow on my way back from San Francisco, and for this had given me an upgrade to business class. Definitely a mood-changer. No longer the 247th economy-class passenger from the left in the departure lounge: I'm an F.B.A., and I'm sitting in business class sipping free champagne over the Rocky Mountains. Dinner is coming up soon, with a smoked salmon starter and real metal cutlery. Life is sweet. The long, long wait to board is forgotten, and I'm actually mellow. And now the purser was coming down the aisle with a seating plan on a clipboard so he could ask each passenger by name about their menu choices ("Mr. Fortescue, Mrs. Fortescue: can I ask you about your main course preferences tonight?"). He arrived at my seat and checked his clipboard. "Mr… Pullman?"

The xkcd cartoon calls it "qwertial aphasia", but aphasia isn't quite the right term. The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.

By the way, qwertial is a cute derivative from QWERTY.

(Hat tip to John Riemann Soong.)

When a big news story is breaking, like the passing of Walter Cronkite, it's not surprising that reporters and editors might be a little hasty in getting the word out. Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe spotted a search-and-replace error in the Chicago Tribune's online obituary for Cronkite, where all instances of "Cronkite" got replaced by "Mr. Cronkite." Here's a screenshot of the uncorrected version:

Bizarro takes on a species of semantic error:

From my 1980 booklet Mistakes (p. 14):

Corresponding to the semantic errors above are PRIVATE MEANINGS … I have one friend who thought for a long time that Indo- meant 'southern, lower' (from its occurrence in Indochina) and another who believed that ritzy meant 'in poor taste' (as a result of her parents' deprecating tone in using the word).

My two examples illustrate two routes to private meanings: a misapprehension about the meanings contributed by parts of a word (Indochina); and a misapprehension of a word's meaning based on its use in context (ritzy). Just yesterday I posted on my blog about another instance of the first sort: spendthrift used, in a Cathy cartoon, for 'penurious person', no doubt because of a connection of the element thrift to the adjective thrifty.

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part because of the proper name problem: a reasonably restrictive spellchecker dictionary can never encompass all the proper names that might appear in a given text, particularly unusual foreign names. Consider the old Obama/Osama tangle: after 9/11, Osama was added to Microsoft's spellchecker dictionary, but at the time no one could have predicted that Obama would also be an important name to include. Thus they had to scramble to add Obama when he rose to prominence and spellcheckers were giving Osama as the first suggestion.

Now, as if on cue, the District of Columbia Republican Committee kindly illustrates my point in a new press release.