Language Log

Yesterday's Zits:

For a teenage boy, according to this joke, the idea of cleaning up his own messes is so alien that learning to understand its expression in simple English is part of learning a foreign language. I suspect that the stereotype is at least somewhat unfair, in terms of age as well as sex; but this comic strip also mocks (and thus illustrates) a common tendency to equate language and thought.

Verb phrase ellipsis in English normally requires an overt linguistic antecedent of approximately the right morphological form. That is, I can't normally begin my conversation with "He did!", but this is perfectly normal after "Sam said he would win, and …". There are exceptions, of course (Geoff Pullum's Hankamer Was! is lively and informative on this topic). Obama's campaign slogans "Yes, we can" and "Together, we can" were prominent exceptions. Lacking antecedents themselves, they invited inferred antecedents or allowed Obama to fill in occasion-appropriate ones. The first time I noticed headline writers playing with the slogan was November 5, 2008:

Using Google News, I gathered a bunch more, based on can, can't, and do.

Reporting from the geriatric desk at Language Log Plaza: I retired from the classroom almost 13 years ago and I sometimes miss teaching linguistics to my students. I’ve continued to consult with lawyers on their criminal and civil law cases and I still write articles and books, but I’ve found that I rather miss my daily contact with students. So, in an effort to keep some kind of contact alive, I set up my website in such a way that if people who want access to some of my papers on it, they first have to email me and tell me something about themselves and why they want access to this material.

Even when the information they give me is minimal, I usually give them my password anyway. We often have two or three email exchanges about their questions, but most of the time I never hear from them again. Once in a while I actually get an opportunity to teach that is more than simply giving them access to my published papers. One example of this bears some amplification. Here’s the story.

The December 15, 2008 issue of Newsweek contains an article called, “Desperate Housewares”, a catchy title that plays off the name of a popular television program called “Desperate Housewives” (full disclosure: I’ve never watched this program but I do subscribe to Newsweek). In the article was this sentence:

Shoppers seem inured to the relentless Christmas spirit.

From this I’d guess that most readers understand that shoppers are accustomed to and even accept this relentless Christmas spirit and that it’s not a good thing– except perhaps for the retail trades. Inure, that is, conveys something negative here. Hold that thought while I describe a very different use of inure.

This morning's NYT article on conflict at the New School mentioned a linguistic dimension (Lia W. Foderaro and Marc Santora, "To New School Critics, Their Leader Lacks Focus", NYT, 12/21/2008):

Even a 2005 campaign intended to help integrate what one professor called academic “silos” fell flat with names that made clear the programs were part of a larger whole but were tortuous to say: Parsons the New School for Design; Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts.

The institutions in question used to be known as "Parsons School of Design" and "Eugene Lang College". Although the new names are certainly longer,  they're not exactly tongue twisters — if they're "tortuous to say", it must be because of their unusual syntax. (And of course the names of such institutions are always in practice reduced to a syllable or two, in this case "Parsons" and "Lang".)

Vi Hilbert, a fluent speaker of Lushootseed, the native language of the Puget Sound area, known for her dedication to her language and culture, passed away Friday. She taught courses in Lushootseed at the University of Washington, founded Lushootseed Research, and wrote extensively. Her work includes: Lushootseed Texts, Lushootseed Dictionary, and Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound. She was the recipient of a Festschrift: Writings About Vi Hilbert, By Her Friends.

Snowclones, those endlessly flexible phrasal templates, have already spawned their own database, launched by Erin O'Connor in March 2007. Now Mark Peters, who has helped bring snowclones to the masses in articles for Psychology Today, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Good, has created an even cozier online niche: a blog devoted to a single snowclone. It's called "The Rosa Parks of Blogs," and as you can guess from the title it's based on the "X is the Y of Z" snowclone, discussed here, here, and here. Mark explains:

Everybody is the Rosa Parks of something—or at least the Michael Phelps, Cap'n Crunch, Dick Cheney, Elmer Fudd, or Paris Hilton of whatever. This blog collects examples of the adaptable idiom "X is the Y of Z", which is a snowclone. Feel free to use these descriptions when discussing your beautiful children, longtime companions, sworn enemies, favorite foods, and elected congressvermin.

Charles Lewis wrote to draw my attention to an Op-Ed by Danielle Allen in the Washington Post ("Red-State Army?", 12/19/2008). Allen discusses the social effects of the change to a smaller and all-volunteer military in the U.S. over the past 35 years, from what used to be a larger force mainly made up of draftees. She argues that "the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states"; and she suggests that this is a bad thing, because

Military institutions across nations and throughout time have always been important creators of culture. They strive to develop unbreakable bonds of solidarity among their members based on shared values, experiences and outlooks.

Her conclusion is that there should be "a new structure for national service" — though she avoids the issue of whether it should be mandatory — in order to "weave a fabric of shared citizenship anew".

I agree with her general position about the value of military service in creating a shared culture. But she gives a prominent role to a linguistic argument that I found unconvincing.

A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few times back East since I moved to California, but this is the first time he's come out here — he says his excuse is that he's got a "real" job and "kids" — so I felt it was worth the 5-6 hours of total driving time to have dinner with Ed (and two of his co-workers, as it turned out) and drive him to the airport to catch his red-eye flight back East.

Ed ended up missing his flight, which is why I thought he had announced to the (twittering) world that I am dead to him, but it turns out that he's just upset with me for not posting the latest in his comic series, Pigeontown. "Arnold posts Zippy and Mark posts Zits; why don't you post Pigeontown already?", Ed said to me, apparently while his plane was leaving the gate at LAX. So, in part to get myself back in Ed's good graces (maybe) but also because it happens to have actual linguistics content (about which see below the fold), here's the latest Pigeontown (click image to enlarge):

Due to a scheduled power interruption in the building where our server is located, Language Log will be unavailable between approximately 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. tomorrow, Dec. 20. (That would be 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. GMT, if I've done the arithmetic right.)

[Update 12:07 12/20: Or maybe not — in fact, things seemed to go down in the wee hours of the morning, and they're back as now, which is noon, and might be down later. Anyhow, everything seems to be OK…]

Swearing is risky behavior. Many of its implications are out of the speaker's control. Thus, it is advisable to know your audience well before, say, dropping the F-bomb. I think this is basically true in any setting, and I expect it to be even more powerfully felt in situations where swearing is highly transgressive.

The Enron email dataset provides a nice chance to test out these claims. It is large (about 250,000 distinct messages, sent and received by over 11,000 distinct email addresses), and it contains a moderate amount of bad language. Not everyone swears, but a fair number of people do. The topics range widely: fantasy football, faith, energy markets, vacation time (and of course bankruptcy and the FERC). So, with some qualifications that I'll get to, it is a useful testing ground for claims about swearing and risky verbal behavior. The following email network graph is my first stab at conducting such a test:

The latest xkcd:

The mouseover title: "And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined."

… now available here.