Language Log

[This is a guest posting by Larry [Laurence] Horn (of Yale), taken, with his permission, from a posting he made today on the American Dialect Society mailing list. If you comment on it, remember that these are his words, not mine.]

In the first paragraph of a letter to the editor in this weekend's NYT Magazine, a writer offers the following grammatical argument against the use of transgendered:

Amusing inversion of gendered communication stereotypes:

Shorter Louann Brizendine, from today's Non Sequitur:

Randall Munroe has  a great post on the xkcd blog that reports and discusses the results of an online color survey.  With 222,500 user responses, this was almost certainly the largest scientific experiment ever run by a cartoonist.

The most interesting result reported so far is an experimental test of the old stereotype about sex differences in color naming.

This is from a little while back (I've been sick — a brief account of the crisis point, back in early February, here, but the condition has continued to dog me and consumes much of my life). It's a Zits combining two of our enduring interests on Language Log, the language of adolescents and language and gender, especially the latter:

Here we see the affectionate couple (with the girl breathlessly telling the story in detail, while the guy interrupts her with an eight-word summary) enacting a gender stereotype that's often been a focus on Language Log: the talkative, emotional female versus the laconic, bare-bones male. Plus another gender stereotype, of the relationship-oriented female versus the fact-oriented male (the hell with the cuddling and all that stuff, let's get on to the important stuff, the making out).

I've been playing with the idea of assembling a gallery of Language Log cartoons (many from Zits) on gender stereotypes, and maybe another one of strips on teenspeak, along the lines of the gallery of my academic "postcard collages", most on language-related themes, linked to here.

The cover of Louann Brizendine's new book The Male Brain is puzzling.

Louann's Brizendine's The Male Brain has just come out.  I haven't read it yet — for some reason, the publisher didn't send me a review copy — and so I'll reserve judgment until my copy arrives. But Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks has an evaluation ("Brizendine, true to stereotype", 3/24/2010) based on an Opinion piece by Brizendine on CNN 's web site ("Love, sex, and the male brain", 3/24/2010).

I'm still noodling over Grant Barrett's  "On Language" column in the New York Times the week before last, which tracked the recurring claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in English. It was a model of dogged word-sleuthing, which took us from George Jean Nathan to Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer and Donnie Darko (winnowed down, Grant said on the ADS list, from more than 80 citations for the story he collected).  But the very breadth of the material raised questions that couldn't be addressed in that forum. What accounts for the enduring appeal of this claim in English linguistic folklore? And more specifically: is there a reason why everybody settles on cellar door in particular? I think there is, ultimately. Are you sitting comfortably?

Here's a case where English has it relatively easy. There's been plenty of fuss over whether to retain actress or to use actor for females as well as males, whether to adopt new gender-neutral terms like chair and craft in place of chairman and craftsman, and so on. But most English words for social roles and titles are already linguistically gender-neutral: president, senator, minister, dean, secretary, teacher, boss, judge, lawyer, …

In languages like Italian and Spanish, in contrast, nearly all such words are specified for grammatical gender, and their grammatical gender is usually interpreted sexually. Furthermore, the option to create gender-neutral replacements is linguistically unavailable — the only practical alternatives are to use one gender (usually masculine) as the default for both sexes, or to coin a new word for the marked sexual category (as in English chairwoman or househusband).

This issue is discussed at length in Miren Gutierrez and Oriana Boselli, "Rejecting the Derogatory 'Feminine'", IPS,  12/26/2009. And what I learned from this article is that Italian and Spanish have dealt with the issue in strikingly different ways.

It's been a while since we posted on differences between the sexes, so here's a Zippy on the subject:

Yes, I know, this isn't really about language, but Language Log stumbled into sex differences a few years ago, mostly thanks to Leonard Sax and Louann Brizendine (via David Brooks).

Reader KR writes:

It is reported to me that in the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the following sentence appears:

"The snow fell nor did it cease to fall."

At the Straight Dope Message Boards some people are discussing whether the sentence is grammatical. To some it seems ungrammatical. To others it seems awkward. And to still others it seems fine, though perhaps archaic sounding.

But I've been googling and I can't find any parallel usages of the word "nor" anywhere else. What I am wondering is whether this really is a unique usage of "nor" or whether there is precedent for it somewhere.

David Brooks, starting his conversation with Gail Collins on why "Western Men are Doomed" (NYT, 11/19/2009):

China always gets me thinking big. I look at the long history and bright future of that civilization-state and suddenly you’ve got to chase me down with a butterfly net to impose the grip of reality on my grandiose and free-floating ideas.

Wielding a butterfly net would be a welcome change, in my opinion — I feel more like the guy with a shovel assigned to follow behind a circus elephant.  Luckily the elephant is putting out pretty much the same old stuff, which makes the clean-up easier.

On The Lousy Linguist, blogger Chris takes on a media report on "The Healthiest Way To Fight With Your Husband" (linked to via Slate):

It's a classic piece of idiot journalism worthy of a Full Liberman* if only it weren't so trivial and obvious as to be beneath the man, so I'll take a crack at it.

… *I'm going to start using the term "The Full Liberman" to refer to Mark Liberman's excellent manner of debunking bad journalism (see here and here for examples).