Language Log

Forbes reports that the April 21, 2008 New Yorker article, “Vengeance is Ours,” by Jared Diamond, has recently generated a $10 million dollar lawsuit brought by Daniel Wemp,  a New Guinean who Diamond claimed was pursuing vengeance for his uncle’s death. His efforts are said to have led to six years of warfare that have claimed the lives of 47 people in New Guinea.  Rhonda Roland Shearer’s very long blog at StinkyJournalism.org provides more details. There’s a connection to Language Log because Shearer asked linguist Douglas Biber to assess whether the long, numerous, and allegedly direct quotations in Diamond’s article were actually spoken language or whether they were written language modified to look like direct quotes. Biber is an expert on measuring the differences between written and spoken language, so it was prudent for Shearer to seek his help with corpus linguistics to help resolve the issue.

… as translated by Nancy Friedman from the original MoDonese.

Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — a rather peculiar topic for Forbes, I suppose, but they put together a pretty decent lineup of contributors. From the Language Log family there's John McWhorter and me, with good friends of LL Grant Barrett and Mark Peters also pitching in. There really was no news hook for the report, unless you count the claim by Global Language Monitor that English will be adding its millionth word on April 29, 2009. No, make that June 8. Scratch that, June 10.

All right.  Something seems to be afoot.

You will note in the this news story from China that there have lately been calls for a speedy and complete restitution of the complex / traditional (FANTI) characters.  Of course, that won't happen (at least not right away), but if you read between the lines, it does seem that there will be a retrenchment of the simplified (JIANTI) characters.

In the coming weeks, during the leadup to the promulgation of the new list of revised characters, we will see many more articles like this one from today's Economist, "Not as easy as it looks."

For an excellent account of this most contentious issue, I strongly recommend an article entitled "The Chinese Character — no simple matter" from the China Heritage Quarterly of The Australian National University, 17 (March, 2009). Note particularly the link to chinaSmack near the end for netizens' reactions.

If you happen to be in the San Diego / La Jolla area this afternoon at 5pm PDT, why don't you cruise by the beautiful UC San Diego campus to enjoy a screening of The Linguists followed by discussion with one of the linguists featured in the film, David Harrison? It's free and open to the public. Many more details can be found here. (If you miss it today, there's another screening at 5pm tomorrow at San Diego State University.)

In responding to bad publicity about the "Craigslist Killer", Jim Buckmaster has been accused of violating the norms of English grammar. An article in the Boston Globe  ("Craiglist CEO: Our site is not sex-related", 4/22/2009) quotes him as telling CNN that "We feel terribly, and it's quite sad that anyone would lose their life". To which Paul Mulshine, a syndicated columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, responded "No, you feel terrible; you merely speak terribly".

According to Mr. Mulshine, feel in this case is what he calls a "linking verb", which is followed not by an adverb but by a "predicate adjective", describing "not the action of the predicate but the condition of the subject". He calls Mr. Buckmaster's usage a "hypercorrectionism", caused by "some time-server of a teacher" who warned "little Jimmy" against leaving the -ly off of adverbs, but "never got around to explaining the role of a predicate adjective".

On Language Log you get new, fresh language, not just recycled phrases and repetitions of earlier prose. A search of the web suggests nobody had ever written down the phrase "epic paroxysm of poppycock" in the previous history of the world until Mark used it in the foregoing post. (It has some other very striking phraseology too. Mark is angry at this latest piece of junk science journalism! Check it out.)

A little more than a week ago, our mass media warned us about a serious peril. "Scientists warn of Twitter dangers", said CNN on 4/14/2009:

Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development.

MSNBC asked "Is Twitter Evil?". The Telegraph explained that "Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn". Other headlines from 4/14/2009 include "Twittering, rapid media may confuse morals", "Does texting make U mean?", "Hooked to facebook? Beware", "TV News More Damaging to Empathy Than Twitter", "The social networking, anti-social paradox","Study: Twitter erodes morals", "Twitter makes users immoral, research claims", "Twitter's moral dangers outlined", "Facebook hurting moral values, says study", "Twitter, Facebook Turn Users Into Immoral People", "Twitter could make us immoral", "Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists", "Facebook and Twitter 'make us bad people'", "Digital Media Confuse the Moral Compass",  …

As usual when stuff that people like is shown to be bad for them, the public apparently discounted these dire warnings. According to a poll reported at the Marketing Shift blog, when asked "Do social networks and rapid updates desensitize you to sad news?", 74% said "no", 13% said "maybe", and only 13% said "yes".

In this case, the public skepticism was a good thing, because the news reports were a load of hooey.

Poor Sam Roberts. He begins his New York Times article "'The Elements of Style' turns 50" (April 21) thus:

How does a professional writer discuss "The Elements of Style" without nervously looking over his shoulder and seeing Will Strunk and E. B. White (or thousands of readers of their book) second-guessing him? (Is "second-guessing" hyphenated or not? Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice?)

Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice? Great Caesar's ghost, it is just as bad as I thought out there, or worse.

I happened to be browsing through my copy of Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire and came upon a passage I had forgotten about. The Emperor Justinian is known, if at all, for his legal code. The Justinian code was indeed a great success as a codification. It settled numerous disputed points of law and relieved judges and lawyers of the need to consult a huge range of often contradictory legal sources dating back to the Laws of the Twelve Tables, and in some areas, it was progressive. In areas relating to religion and to sex, however, it was just plain awful, in some ways worse than Shari'a Law.

Anyone who looked at the front page of the New York Times today probably noticed the article by Sharon LaFraniere entitled "Your Name's Not on Our List?  Change It, Beijing Officials Say." Featured in the article is a young woman named Ma Cheng, whose surname Ma is written with the character for "horse" and whose given name Cheng is written with a very rare character composed of three horses lined up closely in a row:  馬馬馬 (the latter character is exceedingly difficult to write in a small square exactly the same size as the space allotted to one horse [and to all other characters, even if they have as many as 64 strokes]!).  The article states that this character pronounced Cheng is not to be found among the 32,252 characters in the Chinese government's computer systems, so Ms. Ma has been told peremptorily that she must change her name.

In the world of linguistic peevery, there are several levels of hell. On the lowest reside expressions that incite some people to rage, the symptoms of which are frothing at the mouth, extreme physical revulsion, and an inclination towards violence (up to homicide) against the perpetrator. You hope that all of this is merely verbally hyperbolic, but it's nevertheless disturbing. (We've posted on Language Log a number of times about word rage.)

One circle up are the cringe expressions, which merely make some people shrink back, but not puke or attack with weaponry. (Again, we've posted a number of times on Language Log about cringe words.)

And then we have the circle of prejudices, expressions that some people merely disapprove of.

(Some of these dislikes are widely shared, disseminating from one person to another or through advice givers of one sort or another. Others are more idiosyncratic, apparently arising from individual experiences with the expressions in question, which gave rise to unpleasant associations — a topic I hope to blog about eventually. There are people, for example, who dislike frankly as a sentence adverbial.)

A little while back, Jan Freeman posted on her Boston Globe column "The Word" on prejudice against foreground as a verb.

Over at Ask Metafilter, someone recently asked for an explanation of David Foster Wallace's characteristically frequent use of which N constructions, as in

Now I'm writing this sort of squatting with my bottom braced up against the hangar's west wall, which wall is white-painted cinder blocks, like a budget motel's wall, and also oddly clammy.

One of the MeFites began a response this way:

You know how "whom" exists to clarify that you aren't asking "who?", but telling?

The charitable thing is to take this absurd question as a joke, parodying the ambiguity-avoidance arguments for stylistic choices that Arnold Zwicky has often dissected. Unfortunately, it's not very funny. But it has the virtue of reminding me of a genuinely funny parody of whom-related usage advice, from James Thurber's Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage. In case some of you haven't seen this small masterpiece, I reproduce it below.