Language Log

Michael Robinson sent in this photograph of a strip mall in Flushing Meadows taken by Spencer Kiser and posted on Flickr:

Steve Butcher and Maris Beck, "Journalists appeal in bid to protect sources", The Age 2/5/2013:

The grounds of appeal announced on Monday state Justice Sifris erred in not finding Mr Goldberg was wrong in failing to set aside the summonses.

Five negatives. Degree of difficulty: E. Judges' score: 9.6.

Thomas Lumley sent in this nice multilingual pun from Sydney, Australia:

The following feature from the Nandu website includes many strange and droll language games:

"Editorial: Of cats, dogs and convection", The Independent, 2/3/2013:

One of the more widespread urban myths whose veracity is disputed is that the Inuit peoples have scores, even hundreds, of different words for snow. Whatever the precise truth, it is certainly the case that those who live in the Far North have more snow-words than those in the temperate latitudes, with the implication, of course, of many different kinds of snow.

Where the Inuits lead, we may be about to follow. The chairman of the Environment Agency is warning of a new kind of rain. Convective rain, says Lord Smith of Finsbury, does not sweep across the country as a curtain, but dumps a deluge in just one place. This altogether alarming, climate-change-related phenomenon may not only add to the problem of flooding; it may also add to the language. “What’s it like outside?” could soon be followed by: “It’s coming down convective”. A useful, if worrying, addition to cats and dogs.

"Convective rain" events may be becoming more common in Britain, but most of us already have ways of referring to them — we call them thunderstorms.  And among meteorologists, the term "convective rain" has been around for a while, even in the British Isles…

One week from tomorrow (Tuesday) night I give my Jesse and John Danz Lecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. And although the summary published on the registration page is entirely accurate, I would still conjecture that as many as half the people planning to attend will think that the scandal is people who write bad. They will assume that I will be dinging ordinary folks for writing (and speaking) ungrammatically. Little will they know what lies in store: that my target is the grammarians. It is the rule-givers and knuckle-rappers and nitpickers that I will be castigating for their ignorance of the content of the principles of English syntax.

Several people have asked me about Alexander M. Petersen et al., "Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words", Nature Scientific Reports 12/10/2012. The abstract (emphasis added):

We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This “cooling pattern” forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.

The paper is thought-provoking, and the conclusions definitely merit further exploration. But I feel that the paper as published is guilty of false advertising. As the emphasized material in the abstract indicates, the paper claims to be about the frequency distributions of words in the vocabulary of English and other natural languages. In fact, I'm afraid, it's actually about the frequency distributions of strings in Google's 2009 OCR of printed books — and this, alas, is not the same thing at all.

It's possible that the paper's conclusions also hold for the distributions of words in English and other languages, but it's far from clear that this is true. At a minimum, the paper's quantitative results clearly will not hold for anything that a linguist, lexicographer, or psychologist would want to call "words". Whether the qualitative results hold or not remains to be seen.

A few years ago, "KateMonkey" posted this query on Flickr:

What is this language?

This was a poster of a book cover on the wall at the Dickens Museum, and all it said was "foreign language".

Really? You can't do better than that? "Foreign language"?

Charles Dickens Museum, Bloomsbury, London

James Errington sends this along via Twitter:

Jessica Mason Pieklo, "Texas GOP Considers Turning State Into Tax Dodge Over Contraception Mandate", RH Reality Check 1/30/2013 (emphasis added):

To be considered constitutional, a state tax generally cannot discriminate against interstate commerce. Broadly speaking, the Supreme Court has taken that to mean that any tax which, by its terms or operations, imposes greater burdens on out-of-state goods, activities, or enterprises than on any competing in-state goods, activities or enterprises violates the Commerce Clause and will be struck down. The basic logic of this conclusion is pretty clear—states shouldn't be able to simply preference their own industries at the expense of others if those industries touch or are part of national commerce.

AC asks:

Is this use of "preference" as a verb commonplace? It didn't sound right to my ear. We already have the verbs "prefer" and "show preference".

Joseph Berger, "Modesty in Ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn Is Enforced by Secret Squads", NYT 1/29/2013 (emphasis added):

“We give out proclamations,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, its executive director. “We don’t enforce. It’s like people can decide to keep Shabbos or not. If someone wants to turn on the light on Shabbos, we cannot put him in jail for that.”

But Hasidim interviewed said squads of enforcers did exist in wildcat form.

“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider themselves Gut’s polizei,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist, using the words for “God’s police.”  “It’s somebody who is a busybody, and they’re quite a few of them — zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”

About the expression "in wildcat form", AMG asks:

I have never heard of this expression and when I Googled it, I only found the football term "wildcat formation" but no references that seem to indicate that this term has entered popular (e.g., non-football) culture.  Have you heard of it? Do you know what it means?  It seems odd to use such an obscure phrase in a NYTimes article.

In Dilbert for 1/30/2013, a rhetorical implied question:

I recently wrote on Lingua Franca about my astonishment over Piotr Cichocki and Marcin Kilarski. In their paper "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The Life Cycle of a Linguistic Misconception" (Historiographia Linguistica 37, 2010, Pages 341-377), they mistook my 1989 humorous opinion column "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" for a research paper, and bitterly attacked it for dogmatism, superficiality, offensiveness, and all sorts of scholarly sins. But there is an additional thing about the paper that puzzled me deeply. It concerns the word "misconception" in the title.

I have read the early sections of the paper over and over again trying to figure out what Cichocki and Kilarski think the misconception is, and I just cannot figure it out.