Language Log

The prime minister of Belgium, Yves Leterme, has tendered his resignation after his government failed in its attempt to grant greater autonomy to the country's Dutch- and French-speaking regions. Belgium's linguistic quandary is an issue of enormous consequence (and one on which Language Log has been peculiarly silent), but I'll let more informed voices chime in on the collapse of the Leterme government. Instead, as is my wont, I'm going to sidestep the weighty geopolitical repercussions and focus on a small but interesting typo in the Associated Press article, "Belgian premier offers resignation amid deadlock":

A column in the Sunday New York Times from the newspaper's public editor Clark Hoyt is essential reading for anyone concerned with modern journalistic practices of taboo avoidance. Running under the headline "When to Quote Those Potty Mouths," the piece takes its cue from the Rev. Jesse Jackson's notorious comments about Sen. Barack Obama, recently caught on tape by Fox News. (See Mark Liberman's post "Political castration" for more on the incident.) The Times coverage didn't reveal what Jackson said exactly (and the Washington Post got away with saying that Jackson "wanted to castrate" Obama), but Hoyt pulls no punches:

For those curious about Jackson’s exact words — “I want to cut his nuts off” — The Post’s Web site provided a video link. The Times did not. (The Times agreed to an exception to its decision for this column because what he said is central to this discussion.)

The exception made by the Times editors was evidently good for one obscenity only, since Hoyt spends the rest of the column dancing around what the paper has and has not printed. Below I've provided a guide to the linguistic taboos Hoyt was forced to avoid, with relevant Language Log links.

On his "Freakonomics" blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error). In a July 8th post entitled "Dept. of Oops," he notes this lead sentence in a recent article in The Economist:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

Dubner writes:

They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.

When it comes to taboo mystification, sometimes the New York Times is just too damn coy. Last November, the name of the punk band "Fucked Up" ended up rendered in a Times concert review as a string of eight asterisks, with some oblique talk about how the name wasn't fit to print in the Times, "unless an American president, or someone similar, says it by mistake." And here they go again: in a July 3 review of a concert by rapper 50 Cent and his crew G-Unit, critic Jon Caramanica writes:

One of the few bright spots in the later part of the show was the belligerent 2002 single with the unprintable title about fake gangsters that saved 50 Cent from becoming just a mixtape-slinging obscurity.

Where might we find out the mysterious title of 50 Cent's "belligerent 2002 single"? Well, one place to look is the Times' own coverage of the rapper.

As has already been the subject of much blogospheric mirth, news about sprinter Tyson Gay's record time in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials was reported in peculiar fashion by the American Family Association's OneNewsNow site. Here's a screenshot from BoingBoing:

And here's one from Outsports showing a series of Google News headlines:

Regret The Error picks its favorite quote:

Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued.’

In an Editorial Observer column in the New York Times (16 June), Lawrence Downes goes to a museum in search of good feelings:

I went to the Newseum, a shiny new building in Washington that news companies and foundations have erected as a shrine to their industry. Since it’s my industry, too, I thought a museum, where sacred relics and texts have been placed safely in the equivalent of a big glass jar, might make me hopeful about the future.

He starts by looking for the section on copy editing — "Copy editors are my favorite people in the news business", he says — but finds nothing. Indeed,

A call later confirmed that the museum has essentially nothing about how newspapers are made today, and thus nothing about the lowly yet exalted copy editor.

The editor of a journal for teachers sets out to write and publish some helpful materials for those teaching grammar "at the coalface" (a worryingly dark metaphor for what it must be like in classrooms these days!). After publication she finds that she has made so many gross mistakes that the material is worse than useless. One can sympathize with someone in such a position. It is the position Dr Lenore Ferguson managed to put herself in about a year ago when she started publishing a series of articles on elementary English grammar, under the title "Grammar at the coalface", in Words’worth, the journal of the English Teachers' Association of Queensland (ETAQ) — see this Language Log post.

It is certainly sad to see good intentions going so far awry. Rodney Huddleston thought that too, which is why his initial efforts at suggesting that her errors needed correction were polite and tentative. I could even understand it if Dr Ferguson initially hoped that she might be able to just minimize her errors or cover them up. However, my sympathy for her and her association has diminished as the days have gone by. ETAQ has started to strike back, and its defensive manoeuvers have headed rapidly toward outright dishonesty. Various rhetorical strategies are being deployed, but frankness and attention to the evidence are not among them.

On 6/10/2008, the Fox & friends crew discussed viewer response to a piece on spelling reform:

Laura Beil, "Opponents of Evolution Adopting New Strategy", NYT 6/4/2008, includes a nice negative specimen of the phrasal template "What happens in X stays in X":

Yet even as courts steadily prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design, creationists on the Texas board grew to a near majority. Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design, and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.

What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country. [emphasis added]

The first page of the estimated 117,000 Google hits for {"what happens in * stays in *" -vegas} includes X = Terokkar, Aldershot, Blogshares, Negril, Uncasville, Bucksnort, Mushpoie, Cancun, Rumspringa, and Galera. The negative pattern {"what happens in * does not stay in *" -vegas} is less popular — 3,040 hits — but equally diverse: the first page of hits has X = Whistler, Uganda, Nevada, California, China, Kårsta, Bakersfield, Homo-land, and Pinebrook. There are another 5,960 hits for {"what happens in * doesn't stay in *" -vegas}, with first-page X = Lebanon, Gaza, the Capitol, Facebook, Washington, Mexico, Pascagoula, Zimbabwe, prison, and Minneapolis.

Flash! From the Toronto Star on 2 June: "Language test spells trouble for newcomers", in which Lesley Ciarula Taylor (the Star's immigration reporter) tells us that all immigrants to Canada would soon be required to take a specific "rigorous language test", the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, widely used in Britain and Australia and already used in Canada for foreign students seeking to go to Canadian universities.

This much is accurate. But the story leads off with an especially tricky grammar question:

Think you speak English? Try this test.

Find the grammatical (or syntactic) error in this sentence: The standard of living has increased.

Stumped? Soon, that will count against you if you're hoping to immigrate to Canada. The rigorous language test that will be a requirement is vital to be fair to the influx of newcomers or vastly discriminatory and fatally flawed, depending on whom you talk to.

The correct answer is: The standard of living has risen.

And that, as it turns out, is just wrong. I wasted considerable time trying to find this sample question on the IELTS site, until I realized that there weren't any grammar questions at all on the exam. Then, illumination from Brett Reynolds (Professor of English for Academic Purposes at Humber College) on his English, Jack blog the same day, under the heading

Language tests for immigrants & Honesty tests for newspapers

Yes, more reportorial mischief.

Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today's "Washington Wire" blog on the online Wall Street Journal. The piece describes an anti-Obama Youtube video from the Republican National Committee that uses clips of other Democrats talking negatively about Obama in the past:

Clips of former President Bill Clinton and former candidate John Edwards are also used. “Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough,” says Edwards from a debate appearance.

As linguistic metaphors go, I thought Surya Prakash chose very well for the title of his op-ed piece in The Daily Pioneer in India, which concerned the way in which bygone sins of American politicians rise up to blight their hopes and make them anxious about their prospects. He called it "Past imperfect, future tense." Nicely suited to its topic. But of course the tempting juxtaposition of grammatical terms with a double meaning is too nice not too have been used before, as I'm sure Surya knew. There are 560 Google hits for the phrase, and they range from a museum exhibit to journal articles to an article about the U.N. to articles about libraries… It seems almost a cliché if you start browsing around looking for it.

But that's the way language use is: we do not constantly create brilliant jewels of originality in every few words we string together in speech or writing. We mouth clichés, we borrow snowclones, we cite famous phrases and sayings intending them to be recognized. George Orwell seemed to think this was disastrous, a terrible sign of corruption in thought. I think Orwell was utterly misguided on almost everything he said about language. But in any case, I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.) Surya's use (or the headline-writer's use) exhibits only the first element: he doesn't try to attribute the phrase to anyone (you can't, in a headline).

Sure, the line between phrase-borrowing and plagiarism is perhaps subtle and fluid in some cases. But then the boundary of the ocean and the beach at Santa Cruz is likewise subtle and fluid. That doesn't mean you can't still tell when you're walking on the sand and when you're ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean.

I CAN'T TALK ENGLISH PROPER SAYS PREZZA

Thus trumpeted a headline in last Wednesday's issue of The Sun (the UK's trashiest tabloid; Scottish edition, page 6). Prezza is John Prescott, a burly politician in the UK Parliament (at one time deputy prime minister), much loved for his newsworthiness. He makes amusing gaffes in his public pronouncements, and he had an affair with his secretary, giving him a mockability index something like Bill Clinton and George Bush combined as far as the UK tabloids are concerned. The story begins: Former Deputy PM John Prescott finally admitted it yesterday — he has trouble speaking English. He simply had not mastered the grammar of the English language, for reasons going back to his non-academic public secondary school. Plenty of quotes follow to illustrate what The Sun calls "his often-garbled ramblings".

Well, let's just get an expert diagnosis before we buy the story, shall we? Language Log has examined the evidence. And — perhaps you can guess if you remember such previous posts of mine as Does Julia Gillard know subjects from objects? back in 2006 and Arnold Zwicky's It's all grammar in 2004 — the evidence shows not a single trace of what it is supposed to show.

The sad fact is that when accusations of not being able to speak the language are tossed around, it is common — such is the level of public ignorance about grammar — for neither the accusers nor the accused to know what they are talking about, or to be able to tell whether the accusations are true or not.

I stress again, this is not a defense of bad grammar, or a defense of John Prescott. It is a sociological remark, a metacomment about the degree to which my profession has failed to instill in the typical politician, journalist, or (presumably) newspaper reader any real idea of what the notion "grammatical" might mean.