Language Log

Today's Strange Brew:

From Iceland, via Thor Lawrence, a Zits cartoon (from a free daily newspaper) with Eskimo snow words in it:

Alex Baumans and Eric Lechner independently sent in copies of today's Speed Bump, for our "Words for X" file:

A recent xkcd:

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.)

It's been a couple of years since we looked at Erdős numbers here on Language Log; see the posting by Sally Thomason here and the ones by by Geoff Pullum here and here. A fuller explanation of Erdős numbers can be found in those postings, but here it's enough to say that your Erdős number is is your minimal distance from the incredibly productive and collaborative mathematician Paul Erdős via a chain of joint publications. There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff).

Now cartoon xkcd gives us (on 19 June) a view of what happens when the Apocalypse is on its way and the news gets to mathematicians:

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Yet another Rhymes With Orange cartoon, mostly silliness, about tongue twisters:

There's tons of stuff on tongue twisters, most of it what I think of as "tongue twister appreciation": collections  of them, sometimes in a number of languages, for the reader's enjoyment.

There's also a certain amount of technical literature about them, in particular some linguistic studies about the patterns that make people prone to the errors (of the substitution/transposition type) in certain expressions. The /s/-/ʃ/ alternations in "She sells seashells …" are somewhat troublesome, but far from the worst there is (as in things like "rubber baby buggy bumpers", which makes grave problems for almost all "normal" speakers, especially when these speakers are asked to repeat the expression).

As far as I know, speech therapists don't use tongue twisters as a teaching tool (though I could be wrong).

In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:

(Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)

Today's Rhymes with Orange:

Somehow a discussion of language universals ends up with fart noises:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

In today's Doonesbury, Zonker riffs on the "no word for X" meme:

There are a bunch of insulting sk- words — scummy, scurvy, scruffy, scuzzy, sketchy come to mind. And everybody, even a snoot, seems to like negative-vibe phonetic symbolism. So if you try to make up a new word on this general pattern, say "skudgy", you'll probably find that many others have been there before you: "…by the next time we drag them out for bath-time play, we find that a skudgy sort of water is dispelled from the interior"; "The poet noted that the garage had a 'skudgy down-to-earth-ness'". Maybe skudgy is just a portmanteau of scummy and sludgy, or maybe we need to recognize the resonance with other words like scuzzy and dingy; but in any case, it's out there, waiting to be re-invented.

And that's how I reacted to the last word in today's Tank McNamara:

In today's Get Fuzzy, we learn about Bucky Katt's extension of the Principle of Explosion to the semantics of questions: