Language Log

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.

Spiegel Online, Germany's biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections. (See my primer on OUPblog as well as our ongoing coverage on both the old and new Language Log.) I was interviewed for the piece, which was written by Konrad Lischka for his column on everyday things that do not work (Fehlfunktion, or 'malfunction'). Though I don't read German, the article looks pretty solid. I especially like the German Cupertinos that are provided, based on spellchecker suggestions in German Mac Word 2008. For instance, Barack Obama prompts the suggestion Barock Obama (barock means 'baroque'), while Stinger-Rakete ('Stinger missile') prompts Stinker-Rakte ('stinker missile'). Looks like a job for the intrepid Microsoft Office Natural Language Team, Teutonic division.

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?

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama made a hash of the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, most early commentators — including me — assumed it didn't really matter what they said, since Obama had officially become president at noon (shortly before they actually got to the oath). But some legal scholars pointed out that the oath is still required under the Constitution and argued that a "do-over" should be performed, just to be safe. Today, the do-over proponents won out, and at 7:35 pm EST, Roberts again swore in Obama in the Map Room of the White House. From the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

“We decided it was so much fun,” Obama joked before again stating the words written in the Constitution. “Are you ready to take the oath?” Roberts asked. “I am, and we’re going to do it very slowly,” Obama quipped.
The oath took 25 seconds, and the recitation was flawless this time. “Congratulations, again,” Roberts said. “Thank you, sir,” Obama replied.
“The bad news for the [press] pool is there’s 12 more [inaugural] balls,” Obama joked.

The "Bushisms" industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate's Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past. But Weisberg's colleague at Slate, Christopher Beam, got an exclusive scoop on a behind-the-scenes eleventh-hour Bushism when he managed to get into a farewell party for the outgoing administration on Sunday night. Here's what Bush told the crowd, according to Beam:

"I am glad we made this journey," he went on. Then he engaged in a little reminiscence. "Remember the time in 2003 when Bartlett came to work all hung over?" Laughs. "Nothing ever changes."
He continued: "We never shruck—"
"Shirked!" someone yelled.
"Shirked," Bush corrected, smiling. "You might have shirked; I shrucked. I mean we took the deals head on."

Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. Early reports differ in saying who stumbled: NBC and ABC say the flub was Roberts', while the AP says it was Obama's. I think both men were a bit nervous, and the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.