Language Log

Robert Ayers sent in this cartoon:
And asked "Was the 'colored person' fall from grace strictly a one off due to history? I see no movement from, eg, 'Asian person' to 'person of Asia'. Or 'Irishman' to 'man of Ireland'."

Is there a mistake here?

This is a full length martial arts action movie (English title "Sword Master"). You probably won't be able to stand watching much of it, and you have to put up with some pretty atrocious fighting scenes, but if you stick around for a few minutes of the Chinglish subtitles, you'll find them to be quite bizarre, although most seem to be just poor automatic translation.

https://youtu.be/ImsxMek2XgI

From Eoin Ryan:

I noticed this in an article on Salon.com, "Charter schools are pushing public education to the breaking point: Charters are driving Boston’s public education system to the financial brink" by Jeff Bryant, published on Friday, February 8.

The overall tenor of the piece, as the headline and subhead make clear, is that the way charter schools are funded in Massachussetts is sucking funding from public schools, with bad consequences throughout the state and especially in Boston. So, per the article, the charter school situation is not good in Massachussetts:

This is not to say Massachusetts might be doing a better job of managing the charter industry than any other state. Charters in Massachusetts are more regulated than they are in most other states, and their numbers are capped…

Or so says the text. But I think this should be "[]his is not to say MA might not be doing a better job", with a second "not". The construction with two "not"s is hard to parse (maybe I'm wrong that there should be a second "not"!), perhaps leading to a sort of "edito" based on the thought that so many "not"s can't be right, but the trickiness seems partly related to the presence of the "might".

What do you think?

(For more  than no one doesn't want to read about misnegation, see here.)

From Zeyao Wu:

From "How to Complain at a Restaurant? Just Ask Our Critic", NYT 2/5/2019:

In general, the more specific your complaint, the more likely it is to be understood. The worst, most useless and potentially dangerous complaints are broad, sweeping condemnations.

“There is complaining that makes you think about what you’re doing, and there is complaining where everybody thinks they’re entitled to say anything,” said Rita Sodi, the chef and owner of the Tuscan restaurant I Sodi in Manhattan. “Saying, ‘This is terrible’ is not complaining. That is being rude. It’s like, ‘You’re ugly.’ It’s telling me that I’m ugly. It’s personal. It’s my food.”

Even when the person you’re grousing to did not cook your pasta personally, you should proceed gently, in nonconfrontational terms. It may be helpful to imagine that you are speaking with an air traffic controller trying to land 20 jets during a snowstorm; you would try very hard not to add to the overall stress level in the tower, even if your child was on one of those jets.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover text: "There's one person in Missouri who says "carbo bev" who the entire rest of the country HATES." alt="Carbonated Beverage Language Map"

Mongolian gets 97 points for singing "Amarillo by Morning" on US TV show but didn't understand a word he was singing. His pronunciation was perfect.

[VHM:  The YouTube video linked to here is currently unavailable, but our resourceful Language Log readers have elsewhere found this song sung by Enkh Erdene and others by him as well, some of them captioned.  See the comments below.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuTWBXyDA4Y

Happy and healthy year of the Pig!

From Anand Mahindra's Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/anandmahindra/status/1090479366235213824

Sign in Beihai Municipality, Guangxi Province that is circulating on WeChat:

When human beings hear others speaking but are unable to comprehend what is being said, to what do they compare such speech?  We will gain one common characterization from this article about a prematurely dying Iraqi dialect:

"Iraqis amid Mosul's silent ruins fear the loss of a dialect", by Sam Kimball, SFGate (2/1/19)

It begins thus:

For centuries, residents of Mosul have spoken a unique form of Arabic enriched by the Iraqi city's long history as a crossroads of civilization, a singsong dialect that many now fear will die out after years of war and displacement.

Much of Mosul's Old City, where speakers of the dialect are concentrated, was completely destroyed in the war against the Islamic State group. Thousands of residents were killed in months of heavy fighting, and tens of thousands fled, taking with them the city's local patois and memories of its more cosmopolitan past.

Photo taken in the reception area of a hospital:

(Source)