Language Log

I love reading Montana newspapers.   Today's Missoulian has an article entitled "Helena man reassembles five $100 bills eaten by dog".  (The article notes that the dog ignored a $1 bill; apparently it didn't taste so good.) The man reassembled the bills after picking the pieces out of subsequent piles of dog poop.   Local banks refused to accept the washed, reassembled, and taped-together bills, and eventually he was told to submit them to the government, where, according to (for instance) the website of the Bureau of Engraving, US Department of the Treasury, each case of damaged currency "is carefully examined by an experienced mutilated currency examiner".   I infer that non-mutilated people don't get any experience as currency examiners.

The following article appeared in the April 7, 2013 issue of the Times of Israel:  "When Hitler and Schindler are the same character:  A Chinese translation of Irene Eber’s Holocaust memoir ‘The Choice’ exposes unique cross-cultural linguistic quandaries".  As soon as I saw the main title, I thought that something was a bit gefilteish.  After reading the subtitle, I knew for sure there was a problem.

Many Language Log readers are no doubt familiar with the Dictionary of American Regional English, which I hailed in a Boston Globe column last year as "a great project on how Americans speak — make that the great project on how Americans speak." At the time, I was previewing DARE's fifth volume, which completed the alphabetical run all the way to zydeco.  Since then, a sixth volume of supplemental materials has also been published, and plans are underway to launch the digital version of DARE, which would serve as an online home for future expansions and revisions. But now DARE editor Joan Hall passes along some troubling news about the dictionary's financial fate.

Mark Mazzetti, "A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood", NYT 4/6/2013:

"John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority."

GeorgeW, who sent in the quotation, added "I wonder if failure to underestimate contributed to the CIA difficulties associated with the drone issue".

A feature on Philadelphia dialects that appeared a week ago on the local public radio show Newsworks Tonight ("How the Philly accent is changing", 3/28/2013),  was recast yesterday on the national show All Things Considered, starring Penn grad student Joe Fruehwald: "Dialects Changing, But Not Disappearing In Philadelphia".

Zack Seward did a terrific job on the local story, and the quality of his treatment also emerged in the ATC piece.  For a more complete and more technical discussion, see  William Labov , Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald, "One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis", Language 89.1 pp 30-65 2013.

"No pictures should have been sent out, let alone been taken," said Trent Mays after he was found guilty of disseminating a nude photo of a minor, according to this account of the notorious Steubenville rape case.

If that is what Mays said, then he has apparently internalized the wrong meaning of the idiom let alone. He used it as if it had the inverse of its usual meaning. In other words, he apparently thinks that let alone means or even.

Geoff Wade sent in the following banner:

Y.M. sent in a link to a story with the headline "Jury awards $6.5M in CA case of nozzle thought gun", remarking that

This is the first I ever heard of nozzle thought guns. Needless to say, I am worried.

George Orwell, in his hugely overrated essay "Politics and the English language", famously insists you should "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." He thinks modern writing "consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else" (only he doesn't mean "long") — joining togther "ready-made phrases" instead of thinking out what to say. His hope is that one can occasionally, "if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs." That is, one can eliminate some popular phrase from the language by mocking it out of existence. In effect, he wants us to collaborate in getting rid of the most widely-used phrases in the language. In a Lingua Franca post published today I called his program elimination of the fittest (tongue in cheek, of course: the proposal is actually just to depopularize the most popular).

For a while, after I began thinking about this, I wondered what would be the ultimate fate of a language in which this policy was consistently and iteratively implemented. I even spoke to a distinguished theoretical computer scientist about how one might represent the problem mathematically. But eventually I realized it was really quite simple; at least in a simplified ideal case, I knew what would happen, and I could do the proof myself.

Apparently awakened early this morning by a stray cosmic ray, a mainframe somewhere in the depths of the University of Pennsylvania Health System sent me this email:

Subject: Required Training Expiration Notification

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL – SYSTEM GENERATED

These items on your Knowledge Link Learning Plan may need your attention as soon due or overdue:

POCT: Bedside Glucose Testing – UPHS (HS.10010.ITEM.POCT112A)
due on 7/31/1990

Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University:

Matthew J.X. Malady summarizes readers' comments on his Slate "word aversion" piece — "Which Words Do Slate Readers Hate?", 4/2/2013:

Hundreds of commenters chimed in to report aversions keyed to words extending from apple to zesty. Among the others mentioned: foyer, salad, hose, lapel, plethora, funicular, groin, nostril, and munch. Several commenters noted an aversion to belly. Additional repeating themes included 1) using known word aversion weaknesses to torment and tease siblings, spouses, and other family members, and 2) an uncomfortable commenting posture that amounted to, as PaisleyScribe put it, “shuddering as I type” the offending word.

He ends his list of striking comments with two co-MVP ("most vividly plaintive"?) awards:

In the meantime, I will bid you adieu by ceding the floor to the “Why Do We Hate Certain Words?” commenting co-MVPs. First up is ochnas2, who wins the prize for best description of what it’s like to experience an aversion to the word gorgeous. “I have hated this word as long as I [can] remember. It is a visceral reaction. I wouldn’t say it makes me nauseous, but hearing it gives me the same creepy feeling you would get when you first notice a spider crawling on you that has obviously been there a while.”

And, finally, there’s fsutrill, a “writer/editor/proofreader and bilingual” who maintains a list of aversive words that includes pus, spittle, and putrid. But beyond all others, fsutrill cannot stand the word cigarette, a word that seems so deeply repulsive that fsutrill has never once spoken it aloud. “I’m 43,” fsutrill notes. “Crazy, huh?”

John J. Gumperz, the Berkeley sociolinguist who, among his many contributions, introduced "the speech community" as a unit of linguistic analysis, died on Friday at the age of 91. Margalit Fox has a thoughtful obituary in the New York Times.

Professor Gumperz, who at his death was an emeritus professor in Berkeley’s anthropology department, was a sociolinguist, whose field stands at the nexus of linguistics, anthropology and sociology. But though sociolinguistics as a whole embraces spoken language and the printed word, he concentrated on face-to-face verbal exchanges.

The subfield he created, known as interactional sociolinguistics, studies such exchanges in a range of social situations. It is especially concerned with discourse as it occurs across cultures, seeking to pinpoint the sources of the misunderstandings that can arise.

“He was one of the first people to look at how language is used by people in their everyday lives,” Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of popular books on language, said in a recent interview. “Gumperz was paying attention to the details of how language is used: your intonation, where you pause, the specific expressions that people from one culture or another might use.”