Language Log

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

The Australian minister of transport and infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). He delivered a speech in which one passage, a piece of nicely honed rhetoric about the leader of the opposition (the Liberal party), was lifted with hardly any alteration from a speech that Michael Douglas was seen giving in a 1995 American romantic comedy, The American President (script by Aaron Sorkin). Naturally the two speech segments are now available side by side on YouTube. Albanese's staff, who prepared the speech for him (Albanese claims never to have seen the movie) had apparently forgotten that (1) millions of Australians have in fact personally visited a movie theater, and (2) some of them remember at least parts of movies that they have seen.

Joel Martinsen writes:

Here's a comment I came across on Sina's microblog service today from someone reading various terms used by the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese media to report Kim Jong-il's death and inferring politeness based on the Chinese usage of the terms. Is there a name for this sort of phenomenon?

Josef Fruehwald has an excellent post "On vocal fry". (For some background, see "Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011.)

He observes that the media coverage has been an intellectual "train wreck", and he promises to explore the whys and wherefores in a future post. I'll look forward to his analysis — but I came to my own conclusion a few years ago ("Bible Science Stories", 12/2/2006):

I've concluded that "scientific studies" like these have taken over the place that bible stories used to occupy. It's only fundamentalists like me who worry about whether they're true. For most people, it's only important that they're morally instructive.

What would the producers of CNN Headline News, NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me" or the BBC's "Have I got news for you" say, if presented with evidence that they've been peddling falsehoods? I imagine that their reaction would be roughly like that of an Episcopalian Sunday-school teacher, confronted with evidence from DNA phylogeny that the animals of the world could not possibly have gone through the genetic bottleneck required by the story of Noah's ark. I mean, lighten up, man, it's just a story.

In the tumultuous run-up to the momentous announcement of the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year (to be proclaimed on January 6, 2012), Language Log's own Ben Zimmer is the main point-man with the media.  See here, here, and here.

The Chinese, of course, are not to be outdone, so they have for the past few years been choosing a "Character of the Year."  This year, 2011, the character selected is kòng 控.  Everybody seems to think that kòng 控 means "control".  In this post, however, I'm going to question that assumption, and I'm also going to cast doubt upon the whole usefulness and validity of choosing a "Character of the Year".

A note from Stephen Mouritsen:

I wanted to give you a heads up about a second judicial opinion (again by Justice Tom Lee on the Utah Supreme Court) that overtly relies on data from Mark Davies' COCA.  The opinion is here, and the discussion of corpus data is found in paragraphs 36 through 40.

"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife."

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn't count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

Winter has definitely come to Scotland. It is cold, and when light first returns to the sky around 9 a.m. I can see snow on the cars outside my apartment that have driven in from out of town. The winter silly season in the UK newspapers has begun. Here is Charles Nevin in a putatively quite serious newspaper, The Independent:

Minor British Institutions: The white hell

The most unexpected regular event in Britain is on its way, if it hasn't already arrived.

The Inuit may have more than a few words for snow, but so do we: transport chaos, hundreds stranded in sub-zero misery, grounds to a halt, disrupted flights, mass cancellations, forced to spend another night, enjoying another day off school, clear or don't clear the pavement outside your house if you don't want to be sued, it doesn't happen in Norway.

UK broadcasting personality Jeremy Clarkson is paid millions of dollars a year out of the BBC's revenue, which is raised by means of a tax that all owners of TV equipment are required to pay. Wouldn't you agree that he should be fired from his job if he used his privileged position to advocate on nationwide public TV that nurses and teachers on strike should be rounded up and shot in front of their families?

I think I'd be happy to see him fired for that. If he had done it. Over this weekend an extraordinarily stupid manufactured news brouhaha led to a large proportion of the British public believing that he had. But he hadn't. Journalists either don't know how to report speech acts accurately or they aren't trying.

The lower-grade newspapers in Britain this morning have been making much of what happened to a group of birdwatchers, gathered excitedly in a coastal area for a rare chance to photograph a Hume's leaf warbler. It seems they happened upon a calendar photo shoot and had a rare chance to also snap a blonde model, draped over a motorcycle, wearing nothing but a thong.

Last month ("Xtreme Isisism", 8/13/11), Mark Liberman analyzed a TED talk by Kevin Slavin, a speaker who is particularly prone to copula-doubling ("the point IS IS that…", "the reality IS IS that…", etc.). Slavin even produced an impressive case of copula-tripling: "and the thing IS IS IS that this isn't Google." The triple IS is rare enough that any instance in the wild is worth noting. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Jonathan Lighter reported one that he heard in an interview of Ron Suskind by Howard Kurtz on the CNN show "Reliable Sources." Well, it's an IS IS IS with a vocative "Howie" inserted, but close enough.

A few days ago, Ben Goldacre, or someone pretending to be him on twitter, tweeted

dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick.

As Geoff Pullum recently observed

I despair when I see this kind of drivel. What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense.

Spokespersons for the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) often complain that the words or actions of individuals or groups from other nations "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  This is true even when those individuals or groups are speaking or acting on behalf of some segment of the Chinese population (e.g., political prisoners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, people whose houses have been forcibly demolished, farmers, and so forth).  A typical cause for invoking the "hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people" circumlocution would be for the head of state of a country to meet with the Dalai Lama or Rebiya Kadeer.  A good example is Mexican President Calderon's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, which the PRC government denounced in extremely harsh terms.  The vitriolic rebuke led one commentator to refer to the PRC denunciation of the Mexican President as a kind of "bullying".