Language Log

This Yahoo News headline shocked Bethany M.: "Women, girls rape victims in Haiti quake aftermath", 3/16/2010.

It's been a while since I complained about the way that some journalists use real people as if they were hand puppets. (See here, here, here and here for a sample, from the good old days before bashing the Main Stream Media became one of the favorite rhetorical strategies of dishonest people.)

So it's a pleasure to link to this elegant rant by Jerry Coyne, "Ken Miller can’t win? P.Z. and me gets pwned". The offending journalist, one David Sharfenberg, published the offending piece in the Boston Phoenix, which is not exactly the New York Times or the Washington Post. But the theory is the same, however main the stream.

Here is one of today's top headlines on the AP wire:

The same headline is currently being used online by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Guardian, Yahoo News, and many other news sites. The Twitterati were, of course, quick to pick up on the grammar problem (here, here). It's been to corrected to "…love to hate" by a few outlets already, however (like the Houston Chronicle).

Hard to say how this one slipped by so many editorial eyes. Perhaps an earlier version of the headline had "loves to hate" agreeing with "(the) GOP," such as "2012 hopefuls crowd town GOP loves to hate," and then a last-minute change in word order loused up the agreement.

[Possible background influences for the verb choice range from Gershwin ("I Loves You Porgy") to Gollum ("We wants it, we needs it").]

[Update, 4 pm EST: The AP has now corrected the headline.]

Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Maybe the L.A. Times editors could have spared themselves some confusion by paying more attention to the American Dialect Society voting for Word of the Year. For 2008, I included hopey changey in my list of nominations, defining it as follows:

hopey changey: Derisive epithet incorporating Obama’s two main buzzwords (also dopey hopey changey).

In the '08 WOTY voting, hopey changey (hyphenated as hopey-changey) ended up in a special category of election-related terms, finishing a distant third behind maverick and lipstick on a pig (but ahead of hockey mom).

My education in the rhetoric of press relations continues. On February 8, the BioMed Central Press Office sent out an email to registered readers with the Subject line "Chocoholic mice fear no pain". On February 9, a press release under the same title appeared on Eureka Science News wire, which began

Ever get a buzz from eating chocolate? A study published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience has shown that chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix.

For my sins, I was recently appointed to the Linguistic Society of America's Public Relations Committee. This is a new venture for the LSA, and boy, do we have a lot to learn. This was brought home to me, yet again, when I read Sarah Kershaw's "A Viagra Alternative to Serve by Candlelight", NYT 2/9/2010:

[T]he chocolate fondue offered on the Valentine menu at MidAtlantic in Philadelphia comes with a possible secret weapon for anyone trying to put a man in an amorous frame of mind: doughnuts. But don’t be too quick to load up, because according to one study, male sexual response was heightened by the scent of doughnuts only if it was combined with licorice, not exactly a standard pairing. (The only combination of fragrances the study found to be more potent is perhaps even less common: lavender and pumpkin pie.)

Under the title "English without Chinese at exams 'traitorious,'" China Daily ("China's Global [English] Newspaper") presents an article by Wu Yiyao describing the uproar over the decision by four Shanghai universities to include an English test as part of their independent admission examinations, but not to include a corresponding examination for Chinese language. The controversy swiftly spilled over into other media reports, with strong opinions on both sides.

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log:

All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants". Examples of a typical snowclone are: grey is the new black, comedy is the new rock'n'roll, Barnsley is the new Naples, and so on.

Xgate as a snowclone? Not quite. I see the conceptual similarity, but the very words he quotes show that I originally defined the concept (in this post) as a phrase or sentence template. The Xgate frame is a lexical word-formation analog of it, an extension of the concept from syntax into derivational morphology.

The BBC, perennially careless on language issues, incorrectly states here that radio talk show host Jon Gaunt was disciplined by Ofcom (the UK communications regulation authority) for calling a local councillor a Nazi. The error is repeated by The Times here, and by The Independent's headline here (and there may be many more). They misreport Gaunt's alleged offense. As the BBC article reports further down the page:

The pair had been debating Redbridge Council's decision to ban smokers from fostering children when Mr Gaunt called Mr Stark a "health Nazi" and an "ignorant pig".

I don't know the extent to which "ignorant pig" was the issue, but I do want to point out that "health Nazi" is not to be equated with "Nazi". The longer phrase evokes the bad-tempered and bossy lunch counter boss in Seinfeld — the one that they referred to with awe, though only when out of earshot of the awful man, as "the Soup Nazi".

Regular LL readers know that we're not naive about the relationship between "news" and truth, especially when it comes to science reporting or the accuracy and context of MSM quotations and even video clips. In fact, we could fairly be accused of excessive cynicism. But this is breathtaking: "Science Reporting Gone Wild", Neuroworld, 1/18/2010; "The British media's 'Blonde Moment'", Neuroskeptic 1/28/2010.

Either Aaron Sell, a psychologist at UCSB, is lying about what he said to John Harlow, the West Coast Bureau Chief for the Sunday Times, or John Harlow seriously needs to be fired.

In his latest article, "Packing a Series of Pluses," New York Times tech columnist David Pogue went 1 for 2 in his phonetic terminology:

Apparently, the people in positions of power at Palm weren’t completely pleased with the plethora of P’s in the appellations “Palm Pre” and “Palm Pixi,” the app phones Palm produced for Sprint. Palm has now expanded the parade of P’s with a pair of improved products: the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.
(We’ll pause while you repair your palate after all those plosives.)

Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire:

One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.

At the end of a recent post ("Opening up the Google-China mailbag", 1/14/2010), James Fallows adds this "language note":

Usually when quoting reader responses, I leave them just as they are, warts and all. But if I am sure that the note is from a non-native speaker of English, I will sometimes correct small mistakes of spelling, grammar, or usage — "have" for "has," "hypocracy" for "hypocrisy," — that would unduly draw attention to themselves. In this note I made three or four of these tiny copy clean-ups while leaving the rest of the phrasing and word choice unchanged. Writing in a second or third language is one of the harder intellectual challenges that exist. (Hey, writing in a first language is not always that easy!) Even though English has a larger share of non-native speakers and writers than any other language and therefore a greater tolerance for "diversity," I think it's justified to remove minor brambles from the writer's path.

I admit that this practice leaves a logical gray zone. If somebody seems to be a native speaker who just writes sloppily, I don't bother trying to save that person from himself. But if I quickly get the sense that this is not a native speaker — and within a sentence or two I think I can always tell — I may do a little cleanup. The gray zone is when the command of grammar is shaky enough to raise questions, but not unusual enough to suggest that the writer grew up with a different language and therefore deserves affirmative-action help. This is all part of the endless saga of language being one of the most absorbing aspects of dealing with different cultures.