Language Log

"Girl Talk: What’s more annoying — vocal fry or the way we criticize how women speak?", by Sophie Goldstein, in The Nib ("Political cartoons, comics journalism, humor and non-fiction").

Also see xkcd on "How it works".

Unfortunately, several of the associated audio clips seem to be missing (e.g. here and here), and some others load for me but then don't produce any sound. I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the clips, or a problem with the "thing link" service used to add them to the images.

Jeroen van de Weijer sent in the following photograph of a veterinary hospital in Shanghai:

I received the following message from David Moser on 6/2/11, but it got lost in my inbox until just now when I was able to retrieve it while cleaning out a bunch of old and unwanted messages:

Wow, talk about digraphia!  I just got this text message on my cell phone here in Beijing:

You may have seen "The Ascent: Political Destiny and the Makings of a First Couple", now featured on the e-front-cover of The Atlantic magazine:

If you click on the link, the top left of the resulting page bears a little tag telling you that you're reading "sponsored content" — and if you mouseover that tag, you'll learn that

This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, The Atlantic's creative marketing group, and made possible by our Sponsor. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic's editorial staff.

One piece of that "The Ascent" page, down at the bottom under the heading "Frank and Claire: Patterns of Power", presents a bit of computational psycholinguistics:

We can tell a lot about ourselves by the words we use. But not the big words. The small ones: you, we, I, me, can’t, don’t, won’t. In fact, if we pan back far enough, we can see broader traits, like dominance and submissiveness. Which is exactly what we did by analyzing all of Frank and Claire Underwood’s private dialogue throughout House of Cards Seasons 2-3, using a special language-processing software. The results were fascinating.

This post gives a bit of the background of that segment, including my own small role in its genesis. The main point is to prepare the ground for a discussion of the ideas involved, which I think are interesting and important; but maybe a description of the process will also be interesting.

From today's Scenes From A Multiverse:

Bob Bauer writes:

Yesterday I discovered that the concept 'person who is continuously looking at or obsessively interacting with his/her smartphone or other type of electronic handheld device' has been lexicalized in Cantonese as 低頭族 dai1 tau4 zuk6 (literally, 'head-down tribe') (according to an article by Mark Sharp in the South China Morning Post).

[VHM:  See "Beware the smartphone zombies blindly wandering around Hong Kong" (3/2/15)]

Have you heard of this word?  It may have originated in Taiwan Mandarin.

"低頭族" 853,000 Ghits (on March 4, 2015)

Video for a new Chinese electronic watch, submitted by Stephen Hart:

Earlier today, Jianjing Kuang pointed out to me something interesting and unexpected about the sounds in a LLOG post from last month, "Vocal creak and fry, exemplified", 2/7/2015.

Charlie Spiering, "Hillary Clinton touts 'macaroni and cheese' issues at Emily's List gala", Breitbart 2/4/2015:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touted the importance of “macaroni and cheese” issues in the federal government, as she teased a presidential run in a speech last night.  

During her appearance at the EMILY’s List 30th anniversary gala, Clinton recognized Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who recently announced she’ll retire after 2016.  

Mikulski, she explained, helped her when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.  

“She knew the ropes, but she also knew how to cut through all the hot air,” Clinton said. “She understands that, yes, we have to work on macro issues and also macaroni and cheese issues, too.”

The following is a guest post by Graham Katz. It makes an interesting point (which I haven't seen elsewhere) about the phrase that's at the center of King v. Burwell: "an Exchange established by the State".

People are always trying to exoticize things Chinese.  Now comes this article with the sensationalistic and patently suspect headline:

"If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different" (2/24/15)

I think I know how an unsuitable but immensely rich desert peninsula got chosen by FIFA (the international governing body for major soccer tournaments) to host the soccer World Cup in 2022.

First, a personal anecdote that triggered my hypothesis about the decision. I recently sent a text message from my smartphone and then carelessly slipped it into my pocket without making sure it had gone to sleep.

The whole dress that melted the internet thing has brought back a curious example of semi-demi-science about a Namibian tribe that can't distinguish green and blue, but does differentiate kinds of green that look just the same to us Westerners. This story has been floating around the internets for several years, in places like the BBC and the New York Times and BoingBoing and RadioLab, and it presents an impressive-seeming demonstration of the power of language to shape our perception of the world.  But on closer inspection, the evidence seems to melt away, and the impressive experience seems to be wildly over-interpreted or even completely invented.

I caught the resurrection of this idea in Kevin Loria's article "No one could see the color blue until modern times", Business Insider 2/27/2015, which references a RadioLab episode on Colors that featured those remarkable Namibians. Loria uses them to focus on that always-popular question "do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?"

[Update — apparently the experiment under discussion never actually existed, but was concocted for illustrative purposes by the authors of a BBC documentary: see "Himba color perception", 3/17/2015. And that's why the stimuli don't seem to correspond to the claims made about them — they're essentially fraudulent.]