Language Log

When I started taking Mandarin in the fall of 1967, one of the first words we learned was "Zhōngguó rén 中國人".  A classmate of mine translated that as "Chinaman", provoking our teaching assistant to reprimand him severely, saying that it was a racist term, and to give him a stern lecture about the history of anti-Chinese discrimination in the United States.

Now a West Virginia candidate for the US Senate, Don Blankenship, has fallen into the same trap by referring to the Asian-American father-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a "China person" (see here, here, and here for news reports).

From Lane Greene at The Economist, "The ban on split infinitives is an idea whose time never came," with boldfacing by yours truly:

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on “correcting” split infinitives. “Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place,” Shaw fulminated, “without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go’, ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’.”

This spring a new edition of The Economist’s style guide is published*. Many of its changes are of a kind only a copy-editor would notice; but on an issue that has set teeth grinding for centuries, it marks a sea-change that Shaw would have appreciated. It says infinitives may be split.

While this strikes a blow for linguistic sanity, it is not an unmixed blessing. The Economist's prohibition of split infinitives within its pages has provided a steady supply of topics for blogospheric descriptivists (especially those with the initials "GKP"), who will now have to find something else to write about.

Economist still chicken: botches sentence rather than split infinitive (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
No-excuses split infinitive in the Economist (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
To more than justify the split infinitive (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
At last, a split infinitive in The Economist (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
Economist Sticklers trying to bug me (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
Active seeming: dumb grammar fetishism yet again (Geoff Pullum on Language Log)
Rules that Eat Your Brain (Geoff Pullum on Lingua Franca)
The Economist Should Lighten Up and Split Some Infinitives  (Geoff Pullum on Slate)
Led astray by the no-split-infinitives fetish (Gabe Doyle on Motivated Grammar)
To offensively split infinitives (Stan Carey on Sentence First)

Caitlin MacNeil, "Jackson Considers Withdrawing As VA Nominee As New Allegations Surface", TPM 4/26/2018:

Jackson denied the allegation that he crashed a government vehicle while drunk on Wednesday evening and told reporters he would press on in the confirmation process.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error."

I'll leave it to readers to compose the corresponding jokes for economists, physicists, anthropologists, literary theorists, stand-up comedians, and so on.

Non Sequitur for 4/25/2018:

Exercise for readers: Is the order "Live and Learn" motivated by meaning or sound?

In the recent decision enjoining the suspension of DACA (but giving the government a 90-day mulligan), the court referred to the people who are affected by DACA’s suspension as “undocumented aliens” rather than “illegal aliens,” and it dropped a footnote explaining why it made that choice:

Some courts, including the Supreme Court, have referred to aliens who are unlawfully present in the United States as “illegal” instead of “undocumented.”  See, e.g.,  Texas  v.  United  States, (explaining that this “is the term used by the Supreme Court in its latest pronouncement pertaining to this area of the law”); but see  Mohawk Indust., Inc. v. Carpenter (using the term “undocumented immigrants”). Because both terms appear in the record materials here, and because, as at least one court has noted, “there is a certain segment of the population that finds the phrase ‘illegal alien’  offensive,” Texas v. United States, the Court will use the term “undocumented.” [pdf (citation details omitted)]

Although the court didn't similarly decide to use immigrant instead of alien, that may well be due more to the fact that alien is a frequently used term in the context of immigration law than to any view about the term's possible offensiveness.

The first case mentioned in the footnote, Texas v. United States, is the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that had enjoined the DAPA program (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, which was related to but separate from DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). That decision used the term illegal aliens rather than undocumented aliens, but like Tuesday’s DACA decision, it explained its choice of terminology.

For years I've noticed a regular Language Log commenter whose moniker is "maidhc".  Since  LL commenters often have the weirdest, most sui generis nicknames, I usually don't pay too much attention to them (not even when it's "Bathrobe" or "siweiluozi" or whatever).  But this "maidhc" bugged me because I couldn't figure out how to pronounce it.

Watching the embedded video in this article, "Korean Air Chairman Fires Two Daughters Over Rage Incidents" (Bloomberg News [April 22, 2018, 8:45 PM EDT]), my attention was drawn to the word "gapjil" — arrogance by people in power, especially those from family-run conglomerates.  The reporter pronounces "gapjil" as though it were "kapjil", at least to my ear.  So I asked several Korean-speaking colleagues and friends how this could be so.

There's a university in Wales with this name:

Evidently "prifysgol" means "university".

Etymology

From prif- (“chief”) +‎ ysgol (“school”).

Noun

prifysgol f (plural prifysgolion)

1. university

The news about sexism in China's high tech industry is out and it's all over the internet:

• Huge numbers of job postings in China specify 'men only' or dictate women's appearance (TechCrunch)
• Chinese tech giants, government under fire for 'men only' job ads  (Reuters)
• HRW: 'Men only' job ads show ongoing discrimination in China (Associated Press)
• China sexist adverts: Tech firms apologise after damning reports (BBC News)
• China's Top Employers Routinely Publish Sexist Job Ads, Study Says (NPR)
• China: Job Ads Discriminate Against Women.  Government, Companies Seek ‘Men Only,’ Hype Having ‘Beautiful Girls’ (Human Rights Watch)

The most damning account of all comes in Lijia Zhang's "Chinese Tech Companies’ Dirty Secret" (New York Times Opinion, 4/23/18), which includes a video presentation.  At 1:34, there's a job ad from the Chinese tech company Meituan which is so disgusting that I've purposely put the screenshots on the second page.  (What follows in the video is even more repulsive.)  I didn't want to pass up the Meituan ad altogether, however, because it does have an interesting linguistic hook.

Graeme Orr writes:

In the hit post-apocalyptic movie A Quiet Place there is a touching scene where the mother is home-schooling her son.  He is being drilled in numeracy; but on a whiteboard she has written out the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s "Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer’s Day".  With metrical feet and accents neatly marked.

The entire conceit of the movie is that the world is overrun with bloodthirsty aliens, whose hearing is so acute that to survive one must avoid not only speech but any deliberate noise.  The family has survived, when seemingly no-one else has, because it has an eldest daughter who is deaf.  They not only can communicate (as they must to stand any chance of protection as a group) via sign language, but they are collectively acutely aware of sound, its sources and significance for everyday life.

How, if at all, is it possible to communicate meter in poetry without any sound?  I’m aware there’s an old debate about deaf poets, and the essence of poetry as image rather than music, e.g. John Lee Clark, "Melodies Unheard", 10/30/2005.  In the film, the poem-on-whiteboard is shown twice, in letters so large the audience is deliberately drawn to it.   The tease is surely something more than just ‘Shakespeare, like cockroaches, will survive any apocalypse’.

Currently on the internet in China, there is a flurry of discussion on characters that are mirror, flipped, reversed, or inverted images of each other.  Here are some of the examples that have been cited (except for the last two sets, which were added by me to illustrate other types of minimal differences):

chǎng 厂 ("factory") || yí, jí 乁, ancient form of yí 移 ("move; shift") or jí 及 ("and; reach to")
移

piàn 片 ("sheet; piece; slice") || pán 爿 ("half of a tree trunk")

yù 玉 ("jade") || sù 玊 ("jade with a blemish; a jade worker; a surname")

chì 翅 ("wing; fin") || chì 翄 ("wing; fin"), a variant of chì 翅 ("wing; fin")!!

chǎng 昶 ("bright; long day; expansive; surname") ||  ǎi 昹 ("name of a star")

zè 仄 ("narrow; oblique tones in prosody; a feeling of unease") || wáng 亾 ("death; destroyed; lost perished"), an early variant of wáng 亡; another early variant is 兦

Yuanfei Wang, who sent in this photograph of a menu from a Chinese restaurant called Chef Jon's (Chú wáng 厨王) in East Hanover, New Jersey, refers to it as a rèdiǎn 热点 ("hot spot"):