Language Log

If you have even a passing interest in crosswords, you may know the legendary name of Merl Reagle, whose syndicated Sunday puzzle appears in many major newspapers (the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc.). In the 2006 documentary Wordplay, he gave a stunning demonstration of his pencil-and-paper method of constructing crosswords, and in 2008 he showed up in an episode of The Simpsons with New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz.

Reagle, it turns out, is an eggcorn enthusiast, and for this Sunday's puzzle he managed to squeeze ten twelve eggcorns into the grid. Though most are included in the Eggcorn Database, a couple of them have only appeared in the forum. All are clued with Reagle's signature wit.

You can solve the puzzle online here in its Java version, or print out the PDF here.

Back of April 27, I linked to Aspen Swartz's volcano-themed sea chanty ("Eyjafjallajökull FTW"), and in the comments, Ray Girvan suggested that in the tradition of sailor-style anglicization that transformed the Bellerophon into the Billy Ruffian, Eyjafjallajökull should become "Fat Yokel". Ray embodied that suggestion in four sample verses.

Now it seems that Ray's creation has joined William Blake, H.V. Morton, and Rudyard Kipling on a one-page postcard-sized serial publication called The Rambling Urchin ("Dispatches from Adanaland", JSBlog, 5/7/2010).

A guest post by Joe Campbell:

Gordon Hempton, aka SoundTracker, is amazing. Listen to this episode of On Point Radio, or watch this short YouTube clip:

Late-breaking news:

The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new "On Language" columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. [alas, a non-restrictive relative clause missing its comma] The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets – from grammar to usage – of our language. "On Language" will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

Yes, our very own Ben, who was proud enough to tell the rest of the LLoggers, but too modest to post the announcement himself.

Massive pleasure at Language Log Plaza and on ADS-L.

I wouldn't have predicted that this would work as well as it does:

Before I had even met American Heritage Dictionary supervising editor Steve Kleinedler, I knew about his tattoo. A 2005 New York Times article about the young Turks of American lexicography revealed that Steve "has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back." Recently Steve upgraded his ink with an even more elaborate IPA chart. Since my brother Carl has supplemented his science blog The Loom with the Science Tattoo Emporium, I asked Steve to send along a shot of his new improved body art to add to the collection. Read all about it here.

(Also in the Emporium, there's an Aztec speech glyph, some Paiute IPA, and a glottal stop. Feel free to email Carl with photos of your own linguistic tattoos.)

Just in case you haven't seen this:

In the days following my accidental Annie Lennox sighting in Edinburgh, a gorgeous picture of the honoree in her doctoral robes was published, and I have added it here; don't miss it. And (returning to phonology) Julian Bradfield (who normally studies things like fixpoint logic and concurrent programming, and teaches operating systems and programming, in Edinburgh's School of Informatics) gave a talk on the phonology and phonetics of the utterly spectacular Khoisan language sometimes known as "Taa" but more usually referred to (at least by those who can pronounce the voiceless postalveolar velaric ingressive stop [k!] followed by a high tone [o] and a nasalized [o], which Julian can) as !Xóõ (the ASCII spelling is !Xoon).

People probably imagine that the life of a linguistics professor is moderately dull. Think about language; sit at desk, type stuff; go to classroom, teach stuff; go to lunch, eat stuff; repeat… But no, in actual fact my life as a professor at the University of Edinburgh is one of thrills and excitement. Yesterday, after teaching my undergraduate class on English grammar in the David Hume Tower, I walked to the nearby Chrystal Macmillan building to hear a talk on phonology, and as I entered the building I realized there was something really special going on. Tea had been laid out in the public area of the ground floor; two security men lurked in the shadows; the room seemed tense, but somehow it was in a pleasant way; university people who were extremely smartly dressed were standing around, and all were looking in the same direction. I followed their gaze, and there, a few yards away from me, stood Annie Lennox.

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

This is beautiful work, showing that certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon "light up" when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces:

The NLTK book, Natural Language Processing with Python, went on sale yesterday:

"This book is here to help you get your job done." I love that line (from the preface). It captures the spirit of the book. Right from the start, readers/users get to do advanced things with large corpora, including information-rich visualizations and sophisticated theory implementation. If you've started to see that your research would benefit from some computational power, but you have limited (or no) programming experience, don't despair — install NLTK and its data sets (it's a snap), then work through this book.

Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he's not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency.  Sejong the Great, the 15th-century Korean ruler who developed the Hangul alphabet, can be found on the South Korean 10,000-won banknote.

This is from the most recent series of South Korean currency (the 2006-2007 series), though Sejong has been featured on Korean banknotes in the past. According to Wikipedia, the new note also features text from Yongbieocheonga, the first work of literature written in the Hangul script.

For more about Sejong and Hangul, see Bill Poser's Oct. 9, 2005 post, "Hangul Day." And for more pictures of scientific scholars on paper currency, see the online collection of Jacob Bourjaily.