Language Log

My colleague Bob Ladd wondered how many people noticed the translingual pun at the top of a recent Economist article. The topic was the ascent of Ma Ying-jeou to the presidency of Taiwan— sorry, to the presidency of the the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei). Mr. Ma is a Mandarin speaker. Now, every linguist knows that one of the large number of meanings the syllable ma can have, along with "mother", "hemp", and "scold", is (if the 3rd tone is used) "horse". (See this site for a tutorial on Chinese tones.) Chinese teachers delight in sentences with meanings like "Horse eats hemp, suffers mother's swearing" (ma₃ chi₁ ma₂ a₁i ma₁ ma₄) containing four different ma words. So The Economist's headline choice was: Ma's horse comes in. The ‘Ma’ can be read as both "Ma" (personal name) and "ma₃" ("horse") — and in fact both of these are written with the character 馬. But the allusion to Chinese lessons was not picked up anywhere in the story. I wonder how many readers will have noticed it.

A few days ago Geoff Pullum reviewed an Economist article that relied heavily on the recent work of Naomi Baron. The article cited her as saying that cell phones, pagers, laptops, and wireless devices are the weapons of mass language destruction that we see everywhere around us. But those of us who read newspapers these days know better. The real cause of linguistic chaos is right under our noses. It's the New York Times crossword puzzles, that's what it is! In terms of language correctness, almost anything goes there.

Certain people apparently find it fascinating to read speculations about the possibility that cellphones and texting and wireless devices might be completely altering our language, and through that (in accordance with the usual vulgar Whorfianism) our thought. They will enjoy the special report on mobility in The Economist, and particularly the article entitled Homo mobilis. Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University, detects worrying trends that relate to what the culture of cellphones, pagers, laptops, and wireless has done to the minds of the young:

Society's attitude towards language has changed, she thinks. For about 250 years, the consensus in Western societies has been that grammar, syntax and spelling matter, and that rules have to be observed. That consensus now appears to be at risk.

The consensus that supports syntax itself is at risk! People who like to read this sort of alarmist stuff will find that here they have exactly the sort of alarmist stuff they like to read. But me? I'm a skeptic. I think it's a load of nonsense.

(1) Michael Erard, "A 10,000-year-old word puzzle", Globe and Mail, 4/14/2008: an excellent account of recent work on the relationship between the Na-Dene languages of western North America and the Yeniseic languages of Siberia, briefly described in a post last month by Heidi Harley ("Big news from the Arctic Circle", 3/15/2008).

The article's sub-head ("A linguistic 'long ranger' chases down an ancient language in Siberia and discovers a surprising connection to modern languages in North America") is a bit misleading, as Michael Erard has pointed out to me in email, since "long ranger" is a term that has come to refer to a particular group of historical linguists that Edward Vajda definitely does not belong to. Newspaper headlines, main and sub-, are not provided by the writers of the articles that they introduce, but rather by editors who typically know little or nothing about the subject under discussion. (A cross-reference to the standards of intellectual sausage-making is appropriate at this point.)

(2) "Mark Peters on Eggcorns", Good Magazine, 4/12/2008:

So next time you see an eggcorn, don’t curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don’t start a blog about kids these days and how they’re spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart—not stupid—and this process of the masses’ getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.

[Update — Mark Young writes:

The Globe and Mail article you mentioned in this morning's LL has had its sub-head changed. Someone at the G&M reads LL? Or maybe someone else noticed the same thing you did….

]

From John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun ("With friends like this", 4/14/2008):

Editors are inherently prescriptivist, because we’re employed to make judgments about what is most appropriate for publication, audience and context — and to get out of the way of elegance. Descriptivists, like the doughty linguists at Language Log, range over all written and spoken language, formal and informal, standard and nonstandard, to turn their findings into scholarship. (That’s the grand thing about an academic discipline: Once you own a grinder, you can turn anything into sausage.)

Thanks, John… I think.

Recently the news has been full of horrible and terrible things — or, to be more precise, horribles and terribles. In last week's Senate hearings on Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker outlined what might happen following a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces, testimony that Barack Obama described as a "parade of horribles." Meanwhile, the actor Rob Lowe went public with an extortion attempt from a former nanny who he said was threatening to accuse him and his wife of "a vicious laundry list of false terribles." The entertainment blog Defamer sarcastically applauded Lowe's "keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun." Neither horrible or terrible are particularly new as nouns, but their latest appearances still merit a closer look.