Language Log

On Facebook, Fahrettin Şirin shared this special card for linguists and other lovers of ambiguity:

From the allmusic.com biography of the heavy metal band Celebrity Skin (apparently unrelated to the 1998 Hole album of the same name), a recent addition to the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct's collection of epically dangling modifiers:

At one show in particular, ex-Germs/45 Grave drummer Don Bolles went to review the band's live performance for the L.A. Weekly newspaper and gave the band a favorable review. The following week the band went to Bolles' apartment in hopes of persuading him to join the group. When asked to join the band, Bolles' pet rat went into a spastic fit and died. Bolles took this as some sort of strange sign and joined the group cementing his spot as the band's permanent drummer.

After almost a month, I'm finally following up on the results of the single-question surveys that I asked Language Log readers to participate in. Each survey received an overwhelming 1500+ responses, and I didn't realize that I needed a "pro" (= "paid") account on SurveyMonkey in order to view more than the first 100. I owe special thanks to Mohammad Mehdi Etedali, to whom I transfered the surveys and who kindly sent me the overall percentages.

Kira Simon-Kennedy wrote to me from Beijing that she is chaperoning 30 French high school students on their first trip to China to learn Mandarin.

Yesterday afternoon, the French students were trying to decipher the following banner at a bus stop:  "没有共产党, 没有新中国."  Most of the students have already taken a couple years of lessons, so they could be classed as having reached intermediate level.  They got as far in their interpretation of the sign on the banner as "There is no collective __, there is no new China."  Not bad for intermediate level learners, but the banner remained a mystery to them, if only at the lexical level because they didn't know what 共产党 meant.  However, when Kira told the students that 共产党 meant Communist Party, they were all the more puzzled.  "Are they allowed to say that ('there is no Communist Party')?" one student asked.  "Isn't that really dangerous to deny the existence of the Party in public?"

The students thought that someone had the nerve to buy a public ad to tell the world:  "There is no Communist Party, there is no New China" — superficially that's what the sign on the banner seemed to be saying.  The close grammatical parallelism of the two clauses only made such an interpretation seem all the more certain.

In his short but cutting review of Simon Heffer's Strictly English, Steven Poole remarks that the book "condemns hanging participles yet perpetrates a monster (on p165, too tedious to quote here)." What was this tedious monster, I feel sure you Language Log readers are asking? The sentence in question is the second one in this quotation (from the beginning of a section; I underline the relevant phrase):

Partridge has a long entry in Usage and Abusage on the word got – he could as easily have made the entry about the word get – but, if anything, this unusually strict grammarian lets the promiscuous and often thoughtless use of this term off lightly.³ Without detracting from Fowler's point that the Anglo-Saxon is to be preferred to the Romance at all times, the use of the verb to get in an increasing number of contexts is not merely "slovenly" (Partridge's word): it is downright confusing.

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3. Usage and Abusage, p136.

Is that really a mistake?

One of the strangest stories gets one of the strangest headlines in a strange, strange August. The headline is from CBC in Canada, and the story is from the strange state of Florida:

Days from death, Fla. wildlife officials free plastic jar that was stuck on bear cub's head

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty that plastic jar is free at last! Though the news about the Florida wildlife officials being close to death is alarming, of course. You may find you need some explanations. If you don't, my compliments. But read on if you do.

A most perfect garden path headline. It’s interesting that this one depends on our automatic processing of headlines with their own syntax.

The classic garden path sentence, “The horse raced past the barn fell”, is a full sentence and not a headline, and in that one the garden path is created by our preference for initially interpreting “raced” as a main verb; only when we hit “fell” do we backtrack and reprocess “raced” as a passive participle and “raced past the barn” as a modifier of “horse”.

In the sea turtles headline (Yahoo Science News, July 16, 2010), “rescued” is a passive participle in both the initial and final parsings – we don’t mistakenly interpret “rescued” as a main verb in the past tense, because we are not inclined to think that the sea turtles rescued anything, and the “from” phrase further makes it clear that the turtles were the rescued ones, not the rescuers. So what’s the garden path about?

When we last posted about Tyson Gay, he'd been entertainingly cupertinoed. And now, from Reuters on July 3, this:

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters

In a meeting the other day I heard a colleague say something that was either the first of these or the second:

A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it an aim.
A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it a name.

Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire:

One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.

Crash blossom of the week: Andrew Morse, "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event", Total Telecom 1/4/2010.

Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website:

SNP signals debate legal threat

Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize as the abbreviation for the Scottish National Party. Then comes signals, which can be a plural noun or a singular present verb; following a noun, most readers would expect it to work as a verb. The third word, debate, can be a singular noun or a plural verb, and if you've parsed the first two words as Noun + Verb, then you'll be inclined to take debate as the direct object of the verb. So far, so good. But then comes legal threat. What to do now?

I'd like to echo Arnold Zwicky's praise for the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's fan-fucking-tastic dictionary, The F Word. (See page 33 to read the entry for fan-fucking-tastic, dated to 1970 in Terry Southern's Blue Movie. And see page 143 for the more general use of -fucking- as an infix, in use at least since World War I.) Full disclosure: I made some contributions to this edition, suggesting possible new entries and digging up earlier citations ("antedatings") for various words and phrases. I took a particular interest in researching effing acronyms and initialisms. For instance, I was pleased to contribute the earliest known appearance of the now-ubiquitous MILF — and no, I'm not talking about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. (For the record, a Buffalo-based rock band adopted the name MILF in early 1991, based on slang used by lifeguards at Fort Niagara State Park.) Another entry I helped out on is the endlessly flexible expression of bewilderment, WTF.