Language Log

Although I know it's illogical, I've always said "fall between the cracks", and most people I know say that too.  In retrospect, it makes more sense to say "fall through the cracks".

Mark Swofford did a bit of ngram research on the matter:

It looks like the expression kicked off mainly in the 1960s. Interestingly, "between" seems to have had a small edge early on; but a look at the sources reveals a lot of government documents that appear to be transcripts (i.e., recorded speech rather than formal writing that went through an editor).

Full disclosure:  I'm not an expert on felines, except sort of for Hello Kitty.  I've owned a lot of dogs, but have never had a kitty kat since the time I was a little boy.  I have a poor understanding of their psychology and behavior, although I very much like to observe them, especially when they're sleeping or sunning themselves, and I love to hear them purr.  Occasionally it's fun to pet them, and I like it when they walk around my legs, twirling / wrapping their tail as they go.

Here's a reddit thread from last fall:

Posted by u/Curious_Cilantro, Oct. 1, 2021

[Chinese] xīmāo 吸猫 – to zone out and enjoy the company of a cat, as if it were a drug. Lit. “snort/suck cat”

Example: After work, I just want to relax at home and xīmāo 吸猫 (enjoy my cat’s company).

It’s a new phrase mostly used by young people. Since snorting drugs is xīdú 吸毒，and cats are so charismatic, appreciating their company is like snorting a drug that helps you relax.

A variation is yún xī māo 云吸猫 (cloud snort cat), which refers to browsing pictures and videos of cats online. A significant portion of reddit is dedicated to accommodating this activity.

[VHM:  Romanizations / Hanyu Pinyin added]

A screenshot of this has been making the rounds on Facebook, shared via the page "Cats on Cocaine" (CokedOutCats), appropriately enough.

An anonymous reader sent in this stumper:

I discovered the attached while researching for a new laminating machine.  The device mentioned is pictured in the screen shot. I did save my money by not choosing this one.

(source)

Mehmet Oguz Derin writes:

Recently, while reinspecting the numerals, I found that the case of forty in Turkic is a bit more challenging (kırk/qwrq). It made me wonder, could this possibly be a very early borrowing from Indo-European, from the same stem that produces the quaranta word with the same meaning? Maybe the base got in with the kır- part as somehow verbalized and then nominalized again within the framework of language family using -k coda, or directly from a nominal functioning base. Or would that be a too-far-fetched idea to think?

Google Researcher discovers sentient AI pic.twitter.com/3D0vcQBjEm

— Julian Togelius (@togelius) June 13, 2022

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

[VHM:  watch as much or as little of this 24-minute video as you wish; the most pertinent portion runs from 2:17 to 3:40]

Lauren Hernández, "Teen, 16, fatally shot on Oakland street with high-powered rifle", 6/9/2022 (emphasis added):

A 16-year-old boy was killed in a shooting in Oakland on Thursday evening and police are urging witnesses to come forward, authorities said.

At about 6 p.m., Oakland police received a call of shots fired in the area of 3000 block of 64th Avenue, where one person was reported to be down and a potential second victim was “somewhere else,” Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said in a video posted to Facebook.

Officers found the teen who had been shot with a “high-powered rifle,” Armstrong said. Police also received a ShotSpotter activation for the shooting, Armstrong said. “Several shots” were fired, he said.

“We are following up on the second individual who appeared to be a victim as well,” Armstrong said, adding that police believe that victim is in stable condition. Information on that victim was not immediately released.

A motive was immediately unknown on Thursday evening, Armstrong said.

Western observers of Japanese society generally believe that sararīman サラリーマン ("salaryman") have a super strong work ethic.  According to a survey of Japanese employees in their twenties and thirties conducted by the management consulting company Shikigaku, however, 49.2% said that there was a hatarakanai ojisan (middle-aged man who does no work) at their company.

"Survey in Japan Finds Half of Companies Have Morale-Draining Slacker 'Ojisan'", nippon.com (6/13/22)

The article has colorful charts listing responses to four main questions.  Here I omit the charts, while rearranging and summarizing some of the findings.

Quotation is at 1:43 / 2:59; article below the break.

Received from Nathan Hopson:

If you stand at the southwest corner of 40th and Chestnut in Philadelphia, this is what you'll see:

According to a recent press release ("Scientists Have Established a Key Biological Difference Between Psychopaths and Normal People"),

Neuroscientists using MRI scans discovered that psychopathic people have a 10% larger striatum, a cluster of neurons in the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain, than regular people. This represents a clear biological distinction between psychopaths and non-psychopathic people.

The journal article (Choy et al., "Larger striatal volume is associated with increased adult psychopathy”) tells us that "Psychopathy was assessed using the PCL-R, which consists of 20 items rated by interviewers on a 3-point scale". (Wikipedia on PCL-R here). And from MRI scans, "segmentation of the caudate, putamen, nucleus accumbens, and globus pallidus was conducted together with the thalamus and cerebellum using standard FreeSurfer parcellation. Total striatal volumes were defined as the sum of the volumes of the four striatal subregions".

The generic plural "psychopaths" suggests a natural kind. And the phrase "a clear biological distinction" suggests well-defined and well-separated clusters of values on both neuro-anatomical and social-psychological dimensions. But what the researchers found was two weakly-correlated variables, each an amalgam of several measurements or evaluations, without any strong indication of clustering. Their Figure 3 (n=108):

Anne Cutler, our beloved colleague, recently became ill with an opportunistic lung infection shortly after traveling to London for her official induction as a 2020 Fellow of the British Academy. From there she traveled to Nijmegen, where on May 31st she received medical treatment that revealed an underlying leukemia. After just one week in the hospital, with her husband, Bill Sloman, by her side, she died on June 7th. We thank Bill for keeping us apprised of Anne’s condition.

So many of us have vivid and delightful memories of Anne. They are welcome in the comments below, or will be included in posts to follow.

Here is a link to an obituary on the website of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where Anne was director from 1993 to 2013.

Update 6/12/2022 —

• An obituary at Western Sydney University, home of the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, where Anne was Distinguished Professor.
• Anne in a group picture of the Arc Centre of Excellence for The Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), a project she conceived in collaboration with Jane Simpson and Jill Wigglesworth in 2013.
• A 2018 interview with Anne on the CoEDL website.
• A remembrance, with a photo of younger Anne, by the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the UK Medical Research Council, Cambridge, England.

Condolences may be sent to Anne’s husband, Bill Sloman: Anthony William Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>.

Update — "In Memoriam Anne Cutler" ISCApad 8/6/2022.

Update — "Spoken language expert's exuberant life of science" Sydney Morning Herald 9/23/22

Update — "A Remembrance of Anne Cutler", 7/13/2022.