Language Log

The OED has wazoo, n., glossed as "The buttocks; the anus",  noting that it is used "Freq. as a (euphemistic) substitute for ass in fig. phrases, as pain in the wazoo, etc.", giving special notice to the expression up (also out) the wazoo, glossed as "in great quantities, in abundance, to excess.

Wiktionary has the gloss "(vulgar, slang) the anus; ass", with derived terms listed as up the wazoo and out the wazoo, both glossed as "(vulgar, idiomatic) up the ass; excessive or excessively; too much".

But as a result of phonetic processes like those discussed here the other day, the pronunciation of the in a phrase like "up the wazoo" often overlaps with what the pronunciation of to would be in a similar context.

[This is a guest post by Silas S. Brown]

It seems a few native Cantonese speakers employed in the production of Cantonese language courses are quite happy to read out Mandarin vocabulary with Cantonese pronunciation, rather than the actual native Cantonese versions of the words, and I can't help wondering why.

Today's xkcd is distressingly close to not being a joke:

I doubt that many native speakers of American English will recognize this word:

But with a little more context, more people will get the message:

And if we play the whole pause group, it becomes obvious:

Fascinating episode of a Japanese TV program called Detective Knight Scoop (Tantei Knight Scoop):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfeiAF4EKwQ&feature=youtu.be

The press release is here:

In its 27th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted for dumpster fire as the Word of the Year for 2016. Defined as “an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation,” the term dumpster fire was selected as best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year.  

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. Zimmer is also the language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

LLOG covered "Dumpster fire" a little more than six months ago. Can we repeat-predict the 2017 WOTY? Stay tuned …

It's one thing to lose your first language when you move as a child to another country where a second language is spoken, but it's quite a different matter when you go to another country as an adult and make a conscious choice to give up your native tongue and adopt the language of the place you have chosen to live.

Yiyun Li (b. 1972), the Chinese American author, is such a person.  In some respects, her story of conversion to English reminds me of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who wrote in English as the natural outgrowth of his cosmopolitan multilingualism, and Ha Jin (b. 1956), who chose English "to preserve the integrity of his work".

Nicola Davis, "Bat chat: machine learning algorithms provide translations for bat squeaks", The Guardian 12/22/2016

It turns out you don’t need to be Dr Doolittle to eavesdrop on arguments in the animal kingdom.  

Researchers studying Egyptian fruit bats say they have found a way to work out who is arguing with whom, what they are squabbling about and can even predict the outcome of a disagreement – all from the bats’ calls.  

“The global quest is to understand where human language comes from. To do this we must study animal communication,” said Yossi Yovel, co-author of the research from Tel Aviv University in Israel. “One of the big questions in animal communication is how much information is conveyed.”

Ad in the Beijing subway:

A readworthy article by Julie Sedivy: "Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine?  How similar-sounding words in ambiguous languages may lead to taboos", Nautilus (1/5/17).

David Brooks may be a fantasy-nonfiction author manqué, but Jorge Luis Borges has set a standard in that space that's hard to match. From  "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in Ficciones:

There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.)

An excellent article by Lane Greene: "Language: Finding a voice", The Economist 1/5/2017.

Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016:

Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses 130 nouns and 166 verbs. In a similar passage from “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens uses 96 nouns and 38 verbs. […]

Link notes that Indo-European languages tend to use nouns even when verbs might be more appropriate. Think of the economic concept inflation. We describe it as a thing we can combat, or whip or fight. But it’s really a process.

Link takes this thought in a very philosophical direction, but it set me wondering how much our thinking is muddled because we describe actions as things. For example, we say someone has knowledge, happiness or faith (a lot of faith or a little faith, a strong faith or a weak faith); but faith, knowledge and happiness are activities, not objects.

Of course I wondered about this, since David Brooks was post-truth before post-truth was cool (see e.g. "Reality v. Brooks", 6/1/2015). And it's likely to puzzle both philosophers and psychologists to be told that they view faith, knowledge, and happiness as objects.

So I went to the cited essay — Perry Link, "The Mind: Less Puzzling in Chinese?", NYRB 6/30/2016.