Language Log

Yesterday the NYT had a feature on Jean Twenge's work — Douglas Quenqua, "Seeing Narcissists Everywhere", 8/5/2013 — and also "A Back and Forth About Narcissism":

The social-science journal Emerging Adulthood recently invited Jean M. Twenge and one of her most prominent critics, Jeffrey Arnett, to debate “whether today’s emerging adults are excessively ‘narcissistic,’ ” as Dr. Twenge asserts. Both wrote papers outlining their positions, then each wrote a reply to the other.

Amber Woodward, an attorney for the federal government living in Dallas, TX (originally from the Kansas City area), recently had a run-in with her father-in-law when she called him "ornery". I'll let her tell her own story in a moment, but first I want to say that I personally never use "ornery" in a pejorative sense. In fact, I always use it to convey affection. For example, if I say "ornery little fellow" about a child, I mean that he is mischievous but loveable, and I'll go up and hug him after I call him that. If I say it about an animal (e.g., "ornery critter"), I intend to convey the notion that I respect it for its strength, agility, wiliness, etc., not that I despise it for being hard to handle. Even when I declare that someone is an "ornery old cuss", I usually want to let him know that I like him for being the curmudgeon that he is (cf. this Language Log comment [near the end, in red]).

By the way, I normally pronounce "ornery" with three syllables, but occasionally will lapse into two syllables ("orn-ree") when I'm relaxed or in a hurry. Oh, yeah, I'm from Ohio.

The Visual Thesaurus gives "cantankerous; crotchety" as first level synonyms for "ornery", and pronounces the word with three syllables. These seem to be standard for dictionary definitions of the word.

Dean Baker, "Brooks and Marcus on PBS News: Getting Just About Everything Wrong on the Economy", Beat The Press 8/3/2013:

The PBS Newshour won the gold medal for journalistic malpractice on Friday by having David Brooks and Ruth Marcus tell the country what the Friday jobs report means. Brooks and Marcus got just about everything they said completely wrong.

Starting at the beginning, Brooks noted the slower than projected job growth and told listeners:

"Yes, I think there's a consensus growing both on left and right that we — the structural problems are becoming super obvious.

Paul Krugman, "Structural Humbug", NYT 8/3/2013:

In short, the data strongly point toward a cyclical, not a structural story — and there is broad agreement, for once, among economists on this point. Yet somehow, it’s clear, Beltway groupthink has arrived at the opposite conclusion — so much so that the actual economic consensus on this issue wasn’t even represented on the Newshour.

Pete Warden, "Why you should never trust a data scientist", 7/18/2013:

The wonderful thing about being a data scientist is that I get all of the credibility of genuine science, with none of the irritating peer review or reproducibility worries. […]

I’ve never ceased to be disturbed at how the inclusion of numbers and the mention of large data sets numbs criticism. The articles live in a strange purgatory between journalism, which most readers have a healthy skepticism towards, and science, where we sub-contract verification to other scientists and so trust the public output far more. If a sociologist tells you that people in Utah only have friends in Utah, you can follow a web of references and peer review to understand if she’s believable. If I, or somebody at a large tech company, tells you the same, there’s no way to check. The source data is proprietary, and in a lot of cases may not even exist any more in the same exact form as databases turn over, and users delete or update their information. Even other data scientists outside the team won’t be able to verify the results. The data scientists I know are honest people, but there’s no external checks in the system to keep them that way.

We've often written about horrendous Chinese tattoo blunders on Language Log (with a general survey here), there is a whole website dedicated to them, and now BuzzFeed offers a generous assortment of "34 Ridiculous Chinese Character Tattoos Translated". All of the photographs are great, and many of the translations are serviceable, some even inspired, but several of them are wrong or could be improved. I won't go through all 34, and indeed, I've already covered at least one of them on Language Log, but will concentrate on a few that are particularly interesting.

Yesterday, I posted on Speakout/Truthout about Rachel Jeantel's African American Vernacular English use in the Zimmerman trial/verdict: "Race, Credibility, Communication and Evidence in the Zimmerman Trial, and Beyond", 7/30/2013.

Readers of my Language Log post of July 10 — written before the verdict was announced — may recall that I felt that despite its vernacular character, Jeantel's testimony would be understood by the jury, but that they might not relate to her. Turns out I was both right and wrong. They didn't relate to her, didn't even find her credible, but they (at least Juror B37) also found her difficult to understand.

In an interview with Talking Points Memo, Barbara Morgan, spokeswoman for New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, called former Weiner intern Olivia Nuzzi all sorts of names after Nuzzi publicly criticized the campaign. While the New York Times only revealed that Morgan used "several vulgar and sexist terms," the TPM report spelled it out: Morgan called Nuzzi a "bitch," a "cunt," a "twat," and most colorfully, a "fucking slutbag."

There was a language-peeve Op-Ed piece in the NYT yesterday called "A crescendo of errors", written by a violist who hates the expression "reach a crescendo". In music, a crescendo is a gradual increase, but it's widespread in non-musical contexts to use it to mean "reach a very loud state" or something like that. "But here’s the thing: as God — along with Bach, Beethoven and Mozart — is my witness, you cannot “reach” a crescendo." (Well, of course, as many commenters noted, you can reach a crescendo in the sense of reaching the point where it begins.)

Comments were closed before I saw the piece; it got 144 comments. Many applauded the author, but what struck me was how many didn't, and instead made the point that is so often made here, that languages change, and that peeving by "purists" won't prevent change. That seems heartening.

Commenters on a recent post ("Australian hypocoristics") discussed the vowel quality of the first syllable of McDonald's in detail and at length. The issues involved are interesting enough to deserve a post of their own.

Worth reading if you were interested in the computational stylometric analysis by Patrick Juola that helped to unmask J. K. Rowling as the author of The Cuckoo's Calling: an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Juola's work.

In "Has Sadomasochism Arrived? Confrontations of power at the level of sexuality in China", author Li Yinhe approves of the translation of the term "sadomasochism" as "nuedailian" in the following paragraph:

Also known as S&M, and sometimes abbreviated as SM or S/M, the terminology, "sadomasochism," was first developed by Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In Chinese, I use a term to signify "cruelty" and "love," first proposed by sociologist Pan Guangdan. I applaud the phrase, "nuedailian," both for its simplicity and recognition of conflicting dynamics, rather than a term that would only denote sadistic or intentionally harmful activities.

I was surprised that someone of Victor Mair's broad and deep erudition was unfamiliar with mozzie ("Magic grass of queerness", 7/26/2013). So for other Americans who have not been following the adventures of our Commonwealth cousins in developing the nickname-like vocabulary items known technically as hypocoristics, here's an attempt by the Australian branch of McDonald's to join the club:

The Chinese electronic commerce company called AliExpress offers for sale this unusual product:

Magic grass of queerness diy desktop mini plant bonsai mosquito radiation-resistant qu wencao

Because I know Chinese and am used to reading Chinglish, I could figure out this product name on the first go, but to provide an adequate exegesis for Language Log readers, I shall endeavor to recreate the Chinese upon which it is based, then retranslate it into more immediately intelligible and idiomatic English.