Language Log

In yesterday's Questionable Content, the "combat AI" Bubbles rejects the gift of a collapsible cardigan. The first couple of panels:

This is a follow-up to "Again and again " (3/20/16), in which we looked at two different Mandarin words for "again", yòu 又 and zài 再, both of which are very common in the language, but which are used in different ways.

A commenter, Nathan, asked:

So if yòu 又 is associated more with the past and unwanted things, and zài 再 more with the future and wanted things, how do you say something future and unwanted –- "Never do that again!"?

I thought that was a good question, so I asked a number of my students and colleagues who are native speakers how they would say it, and was astonished at the wild variety of answers I received.

Biologists are figuring out what many other fields learned decades ago:

What it feels like trying to publish. #ASAPbio pic.twitter.com/bJCaFqrop7

— Jonathan A. Michaels (@JonAMichaels) February 25, 2016

See Amy Harmon, "Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet", NYT 3/15/2016. Also see "Reviewer Two must die".

Academic journals are on their way to playing the same role in the life of science and engineering that caps and gowns do: a quaint cultural relic that plays a role in celebratory rituals, but has nothing to do with the day-to-day process of exploration, discovery and communication.

St. Patrick's Day was last Thursday, but this afternoon I saw someone wandering around in a sparkly green top hat.  In that spirit, I offer a post about perhaps-fictional attitudes towards a variety of Scottish Gaelic.

The content comes from Ken MacLeod's novella The Human Front, which the publisher's blurb calls "a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization". We learn that "the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic teenage Scottish guerilla warrior who must change his tactics and alliances with the arrival of an alien species". The protagonist tells us that

My mother, Morag, was a Glaswegian of Highland extraction, who had met and married my father after the end of the Second World War and before the beginning of the Third. She, somewhat contrarily, taught herself the Gaelic and used it in all her dealings with the locals, though they always thought her dialect and her accent stuck-up and affected. The thought of her speaking a pure and correct Gaelic in a Glasgow accent is amusing; her neighbours' attitude towards her well-meant efforts less so, being an example of the the characteristic Highland inferiority complex so often mistaken for class or national consciousness. The Lewis accent itself is one of the ugliest under heaven, a perpetual weary resentful whine — the Scottish equivalent of Cockney — and the dialect thickly corrupted with English words Gaelicized by the simple expedient of mispronouncing them in the aforementioned accent.

A note from Cullen Schaffer:

It seems bizarre to me to distinguish repetition in the past and future in this way.  Can you or anyone else contributing to Language Log tell me (1) if this feature is unique to Mandarin or if there are parallels in other not-too-closely-related languages (2) how this distinction came to be a part of modern Mandarin?

In "Trump on China" (8/29/2015) we reproduced the Huffington Post's collection of Donald Trump' diverse performances of the word China. Last month, Iggy Jackson Cohen created a cover version on the bass guitar:

From reader Brad D:

You've been doing some interesting studies of Trump's speech patterns, and I wonder, have you done an analysis of his overall word choice since he started running for President?  Watching him speak in interviews, I often get the impression that he's translating his thoughts into small words so as not to seem to be speaking over the heads of his supporters (kind of like a political "Thing Explainer"). I'd be interested to know if there's any truth to that.

Brad added in a later note:

His overuse of simple adjectives does appear to be fairly consistent. "Good", "bad", "big", "smart", and "stupid" are the ones I notice most, but perhaps it's simply that he uses them when another word would be more precise. 

Today's Frazz:

Cullen Schaffer sent me the following scan (click to embiggen):

From Peter Weinberger:

My group at work was discussing a proposed outing:
I said "I'm up for that".
Our intern said "I'm down with that".

Do you know if this is purely generational, or is there some sort of geographic component?

I trust that everyone will support the work of the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, once they figure that neglect is not a verb with fatalities as its object:

[h/t Karen Rothkin]

@LitCritTrump has taken up the Trump Insult Haiku form as an instrument of literary evaluation. My favorite:

Odysseus took 20 years to travel 600 miles. Would not want him as captain of my boat. BAD SAILOR pic.twitter.com/iZWpQhBwJQ

— Trump Reviews (@LitCritTrump) March 8, 2016

Geoff Pullum to me:

What the hell is going on with all the years except 1920 being labeled "11 PM"? [link]

Me to Geoff Pullum:

You mean on the x axis? I'm not seeing it — must be a special feature for Scottish readers.

Geoff Pullum to me:

Yep.   1920  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM  11 PM on the x axis. Corresponds to decades. It's not Scots dialect: 1930 is known here as "1930".