Language Log

If a desert island is uninhabited by humans, it doesn't follow that humans uninhabit it. Likewise, if half the money was unaccounted for, that doesn't mean that anyone unaccounted for it. And you can say that someone's support was unwavering, but you can't say that it unwavered.

But wait a minute, maybe you can after all.

According to Dennis Wagner, "Typo vigilantes answer to letter of the law", The Arizona Republic, 8/22/2008:

Two self-anointed "grammar vigilantes" who toured the nation removing typos from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon.

Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park, and were ordered to pay restitution.

We discussed Deck and friends in "Angry linguistic mobs with torches", 4/16/2008.

From Andy Bull's interview with Acer Nethercott, cox for Britain's Olympic eight ("The little guy with big brains and Olympic ambition", The Guardian, 8/7/2008):

Likeable, and clearly happy to be in Beijing, Nethercott is indecently intelligent. Two months ago he completed a DPhil in the Philosophy of Language. "What exactly?" I ask with all the confidence of a man who has a 2:1 in English Lit.

"Linguistics. The semantics of complex demonstratives."

"Uh-huh".

In between qualifications (he has a BA in Physics and Philosophy and a Masters as well), Acer says he "fell into" international rowing.

The website for BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth describes today's program this way:

Peggy Reynolds is sitting in for Michael Rosen on Word of Mouth, the programme about language and the way we use it.

This week, Peggy investigates the world of language guardians.

Once, they wrote to the letters pages of newspapers. Now they have the internet. Peggy looks at the battles raging on the language blogs.

One of the guests on the program was Geoff Pullum.

At the moment, at least, the audio is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00d0hw7. Geoff's segment starts around 3:10.

Congratulations to Hanzhi Zhu, who won an individual gold medal; to the team of Jae-Kyu Lee, Rebecca Jacobs, Morris Alper, and Hanzhi Zhu, who won a gold medal in the team competition; and to the other participants who won individual and team silver and bronze medals, as described in the press release on the NSF web site ("Team USA Brings Home the Gold", 8/15/2008).

We're talking, of course, about the 2008 International Linguistics Olympiad, held in Slanchev Bryag ("Sunny Beach"), Bulgaria.

A quick follow-up on this part of Bill Poser's post on the pronunciation of Beijing (and building on Ran Ari-Gur's comment, as I discovered while composing this post):

The article mistakenly asserts that the sound [ʒ] does not occur in English. It is indeed found in English, not only in measure but in such words as azure, pleasure, leisure, and treasure. What is true is that all of the words in which it occurs are loans from French, so the sound apparently has an exotic flavor even though it has existed in English for centuries.

Some readers may be a little puzzled by this. Many if not most English speakers, I think it's fair to say, don't know that the words in question are borrowings from French, and in any event (as Bill points out), these have been English words for a very, very long time. So how is it that [ʒ] retains this 'exotic flavor' to English speakers? I don't have the definitive answer to this question, but I do know one thing that undoubtedly plays a part in that answer.

What with the Olympics being in 北京, reporters are pronouncing it in various ways and the question of how to pronounce it is in the news again. Our local paper has an AP article by David Bauder which, Google reveals, is being carried all over the place. Here's one version.

Meghan Daum's LA Times column on "nonplussed" came out a few days ago — "I'm nonplussed, maybe: Many people use words outside their original meaning, but does that make them wrong?", 8/9/2008. She's refreshingly up front about her own reaction:

I need to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

The word "nonplussed" does not mean unfazed, unperturbed or unconcerned. I know just about everyone uses it that way, but I really wish they'd stop.

Meghan is the journalist whose questions I answered last week in "Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008. She was nonplussed, in the sense she prefers, by the fact that instead of setting up a phone interview, I asked her for questions by email, and then posted my answers on Language Log (though I left her role anonymous until now). Her email response:

Thanks, Mark. I must say, I've never received a personal answer in a public forum (you are the Madonna of linguists!)

Yes, of course, it happens all the time. But not often to two men, and it usually doesn't get reported in the New York Times. Entirely by accident, I came across the announcement (Sunday 10 August, p. 14 of the Style section) of the marriage of Michael Flier and David Trueblood. Flier

is the Oleksandr Potebnja professor of Ukrainian philology in the Slavic languages and literatures department at Harvard and is the director of its Ukrainian Research Institute. He was the chairman of Harvard's linguistics department from 1994 to 1999.

Trueblood

is the director of public relations at the Boston Foundation, which makes grants to nonprofit organizations in the Boston area and …

Week after week the language-and-literacy pontificators fulminate in newspapers and magazines, nearly always revealing how little they know about language. The worst case I've seen in the past week is a column by Howard Jacobson in The Independent about how old teaching methods worked and new ones don't (muted thanks to Steve Jones for pointing it out to me). In the column he foams at the mouth over a contestant on a reality show who did not understand the meaning of the idiomatic phrase at your peril. Peril means "danger", of course but is somewhat archaic. Proceed at your peril means "If you proceed you will be in danger", but crucially, this is not compositional: the meaning does not follow from the regular principles for the rest of English phrase semantics. For example, you can't say ^??Proceed at your trouble to mean "If you proceed you will be in trouble"; you can't say ^??Proceed at your error to mean "If you proceed you will be in error". At your peril is a fixed phrase you have to learn as a whole. It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know this single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practice (rather than practise) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.

I did get one question phoned in by a journalist during my long stint on the night semantics desk. A reporter from the New York Daily News called to ask me about some things that former yoga instructor Rielle Hunter had said, about former Democratic politician John Edwards being "an old soul" with a "special energy" who could be a truly "transformational leader" if only he would use his heart more and his head less; and about her purpose on this Earth being "to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves." The reporter wanted to know what this meant — what becoming a better reflection of one's true repressed self would amount to, in precise terms. Doesn't it suggest that one's real self is trapped inside, he asked, and one's apparently real self that walks around among us, and eats breakfast, and experiences temptations regarding sexual relations with blonde videographers, is merely a reflection of that inner reality? Is this not, he went on (having apparently majored in philosophy at Columbia), a remarkable inversion of the way language is normally employed by philosophers talking about the self? Has Ms Hunter not got the outside inside and the inside outside?

I'm afraid I was unable to answer. In fact I have something of a headache, and since it is now breakfast time and I have been on duty all night I think I will have breakfast and go to bed. Ask Language Log, yes; but don't ask it absolutely anything at all. In particular, we are generally powerless to interpret reincarnationspeak and yogababble.

Here are two snippets from news items about the actor Shia LaBeouf, who was recently involved in a car accident:

Shia LaBeouf has been released from hospital in Los Angeles, five days after he crushed his hand in a car crash. (Contact Music, Aug. 2)

The "Transformers" star didn't just injure, but crushed his hand in the crash last Sunday that flipped his truck, reports The Associated Press. (Metro NY, Aug. 4)

I'm not happy with either of these sentences. My internal verb-ometer tells me that crush just doesn't work that way.

In case you haven't already seen it, or heard it discussed anywhere, here's the cover of the 21 July New Yorker ("The Politics of Fear" by Barry Blitt):

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong (from Sesame Street). Question: which one?