Language Log

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.)

In the current Penny & Aggie strip, Lisa continues to enjoy her first linguistics lecture. She's entranced by the International Phonetic Alphabet, which hits her like the green-screen "digital rain" from The Matrix:

According to recent Penny & Aggie strips (here and here), this can be the effect of a single linguistics-class lecture:

BEFORE	AFTER

Today's Non Sequitur:

In the most recent Penny & Aggie, needing an apparently random choice of college class to play a role in an undergraduate interaction, the author chose "Linguistics":

This presupposes that linguistics courses are a normal part of the college landscape, which would certainly be a step forward.

On your feet. No hesitating. This will count toward your overall Language Log grade: Take a glance at the latest xkcd cartoon and tell me Senator Grayton's present approval rating.

It's not just those translating Chinese and Japanese into English who sometimes encounter problems. Today's Doonesbury:

The linguist Zellig Harris (he was Noam Chomsky's mentor and doctoral adviser) drew an important distinction between imitation and repetition. You can imitate the sound of anyone saying anything, even in a language you know nothing about, and you might even do it quite well, but you can only repeat something in a language that you know. When you repeat, you use the sound system (or at least, you can use it) in your own usual way. You know the phonemes of the language, and you know what is just linguistically insignificant low-level phonetic detail that you don't need to replicate. You know which utterance in your language you're repeating, and your target is to say that, and you have some license about doing it in your own voice, your own pronunciation of the language. It's not at all clear that Alice, the aggressive engineer in the Dilbert strip, has got this right:

Today's Zits:

Jeremy expresses indfference, lack of interest, apathy, boredom via the interjection meh, breaking out briefly to use it sarcastically (or cynically) to express enthusiasm.

Those who enjoyed the "semantically unpredictable sentences" in the S3-WG91 Standards Working Group's test of TTS intelligibility will appreciate the latest SMBC:

The latest lesson from Surviving the World:

The most recent xkcd:

The mouseover title: "If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon."

The Breakfast Club, in case you happen to have missed it, was a 1985 movie about high-school detention.^* And the guy who played Principal Vernon was born in 1939 and died in 2006 at the age of 67, so he was 45 or 46 in 1985; and someone who was 15 or 16 then would be 41 or 42 now, so Randall's guess turns out to be quantitatively exact pretty close.

Today's Stone Soup: