Language Log

At a rally a few weeks ago in Newport News, Obama criticized McCain's economic program, claiming that the average CEO would get a $700,000 tax break, and then added: "Not only is it not right, it ain't right." Apart from the obvious "just folks" implications of the register shift, the line exploits a subtle distinction in evidentiality that Tom Wasow pointed out to me some years ago, which I worked into a "Fresh Air" piece back in 2002:

A while ago my Stanford colleague Tom Wasow sent me an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted a dean at a prestigious Eastern university: "Any junior scholar who pays attention to teaching at the expense of research ain't going to get tenure." That ain't was a nice touch: it made it clear that the dean's conclusion wasn't based on expert knowledge or some recent committee report — it was something that should be clear to anyone with an ounce of sense.

That's the message that ain't conveys in all those common expressions like "It ain't over till the fat lady sings" or "If it ain't broke don't fix it" —ain't tells you that you're dealing with a nitty-gritty verity that you don't need a college education to understand.

I was interested in this comment by BeachSaint on Matt Yglesias' post "Duberstein for Obama":

Someone should check the seismic activity in the Simi Valley between now and election day because Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave over the antics of the McCain Campaign.

I am a registered Republican who has received extensive campaign training from the national committee. I am ProObama, ProLife. I’m not sure how much longer I can remain registered in a party run amok by the likes of Sarah Palin, Joe-the-Plumber and the other uneducated members of the radical right.

At first, I thought that the phrase "a party run amok by the likes of Sarah Palin [and] Joe-the-Plumber" was a passive of a causative: Sarah and Joe ran the party amok, i.e. caused the party to run amok, and so the party was run amok by them. (N.B. No political commentary is intended here — this is linguistics.)

But … Well, before going further into this analysis, let's back up on amok.

We haven't had anything recently about how clever starlings are, but what with all the discussion about parrot lips, I thought that some of you might enjoy this:

There are no associated news stories, so far, about vocal organs or communication skills, though commenters on several web forums have made suggestions about demonic possession and (from those who listen more carefully) the possible dangers of keeping vocal mimics as house pets.

My latest email from johnmccain.com, sent at 10:18 this evening, starts with four typos in two lines:

(Click on the image for a larger version)

Linguists occasionally encounter examples parallel to mistranslated signs like the one Mark wrote about. The situation arises when someone with little or no knowledge of the native language, typically an anthropologist, elicits information such as place names and writes down whatever the response is. When a linguist familiar with the language later reviews these records, some place name will prove to be uninterpretable until the linguist realizes that what has been recorded, usually in a garbled form, is the response "I don't know". There are various stories of this type in linguistic folklore, and I have encountered this myself.

I came across a variant of this in the census of a Carrier village carried out by Oblate priests, none of whom had much command of the language, in the 1870s. Several women are recorded as having been named tsandelh. What the priests didn't know is that tsandelh is not a name: it means "widow".

According to the BBC, the Swansea council should have gotten a second opinion on this road sign:

The most recent guide to "punctuation, grammar, and style" (quotation from the subtitle) to come across my desk is Jan Venolia's Write Right! (4th edition, 2001). "Over 500,000 copies sold", the cover exclaims — but still I'd overlooked it until Wednesday (when I found it for sale at my local carwash, of all places, along with books about cooking, pets, parenting, travel, and advice for businesspeople — a category I'm still trying to wrap my mind around).

The field of books offering to help people improve their writing on the job or at school is crowded, and some of them seem to sell well. But their treatments of English grammar are almost all seriously flawed and not especially helpful. Write Right! is better than some of its competitors, but it really starts out on the wrong foot, in its discussion of what nouns are and how you can tell which words are nouns. (Like most of these advice books, Write Right! begins with the parts of speech, nouns first.)

As a bonus, I'll tack on a wonderful bit about English "subjunctives" that readers couldn't possibly understand unless they already knew what the passage was talking about.

While researching my post on Dr. Jane Orient's theory that Barack Obama is using NLP hypnosis, I listened to Dr. Ron Paul's speech to the 62nd annual convention of the AAPS.  Dr. Orient's explanation of the techniques of trance induction ("… rhythm, tonalities, vagueness, visual imagery, metaphor, and raising of emotion") prepared me well for this experience, and I was especially taken by one particular metaphor that Ron Paul repeated three times, and reinforced in other ways:  true believers as a scriptural remnant.

I've been musing recently about minutiae of English punctuation: apostrophes, periods, commas, and all the rest of it. There is considerable variation in usage on many points, and astonishingly passionate opinion about some of these points, even when they are mind-numbingly inconsequential.

Case in point: the use of periods in abbreviations composed of initial letters: I.B.M. or IBM? U.C.L.A. or UCLA? F.B.I. or FBI? Style guides vary, from those that are fond of periods (because the periods clearly mark the words as abbreviations and indicate where material has been suppressed) to those that are shy of them (because the result looks cleaner and takes up less space). Something can be said in favor of each scheme, and there is no issue of substance here. But some people have strong preferences.

The Wikipedia entry on abbreviation surveys a variety of schemes, noting that

The New York Times is unique in having a consistent style by always abbreviating with periods: P.C. [personal computer], I.B.M., P.R. [public relations]. This is in contrast with the trend of British publications to completely make do without periods for convenience.

Now a few words about the NYT's practices, and about the value of consistency.

Yesterday afternoon, as I tried to stay warm on the sidelines of a junior-high soccer game, another father and I discussed the upcoming continuation of the fifth World Series game, suspended in a 2-2 tie by a downpour, two days earlier, after the top half of the sixth inning.

"Seems like they ought to win", I said, "with four at-bats versus three for the Rays."

The response: "You're not from here, are you?"

I agree with Politico's John Harris and Jim Vanderhei that the charges of media bias against the McCain campaign are exaggerated. On the other hand, no one ever went broke overestimating the media's capacity for offhand condescension, as witness these excerpts from the transcript that ABC published of Elizabeth Vargas' interview with Sarah Palin:

ELIZABETH VARGAS: If it doesn't go your way on Tuesday … 2012?

GOV SARAH PALIN: I'm just … thinkin' that it's gonna go our way on Tuesday, November 4….

… PALIN: Absolutely not. I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken, that … that would … bring this whole … I'm not doin' this for naught.

…PALIN: Well, I think that people can … can read the comments and hear the comments that he made, because again, the, the refreshing thing about that tape being revealed … from 2001… it's candidness there. It's not … it didn't seem to be his typical scripted, kinda … rhetorical message read off a TelePrompter.

Now you wouldn't expect the transcribers to photoshop Palin's anacolutha and false starts (though I don't think the public's need for full information would be compromised if they cleaned up a repeated "the" here and there). But do they imagine that Palin is the only one of the candidates who drops a g now and again, much less says kinda for kind of or gonna for going to? And if you want to hear condescension compounded, listen to Wolf Blitzer having a Tina Fey moment as he reads from the Vargas interview transcript and dutifully drops Palin's g's where indicated.

No matter how hard I try to locate the world's most stupid animal communication story, they keep outflanking me. I am always left behind. An even stupider one always comes along. All I can say as of this morning is that I never thought I would see a story as stupid as this in a respected news source, and right now I cannot imagine how it could be surpassed (though within a few weeks I suppose it probably will be). The Economist has published (10/25/08:103) a review of a new book called Alex & Me in which Dr Irene Pepperberg tells the story of her scientific life with Alex the grey parrot (see here and here for a couple of Alex's earlier appearances on Language Log Classic). The Economist has already shown a certain affection for Alex's story: it devoted its obituary of the week to Alex when he died in 2007. The review calls the new book "a memoir of two unusual scientific careers, one of them pursued — not exactly by choice — by a bird." Now, I should make it clear that I do not have the book. If this merited scholarly investigation I would of course obtain it; but given what I know so far, I am deeply reluctant to part with $23.95 to get hold of a trade book for sentimental parrot fanciers (the subtitle is: "How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence — And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process"). So I will simply tell you about the stunningly stupid part of the review, and leave it to you to determine, if you care to, whether the review misrepresents the book on this point. But I warn you, especially if you know a little elementary articulatory phonetics, that this one will boggle your mind. Are you prepared to face the rest of the day with a boggled mind? Then read on.

Rumors had been percolating for a while now, and today it was finally announced: Google has reached a settlement with U.S. authors and publishers who had filed lawsuits challenging the massive digitization project of Google Book Search. According to Google's press release, the settlement resolves lawsuits from the Authors Guild and five major publishers (McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin, Wiley, and Simon & Schuster). Google will shell out $125 million, much of which will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, a system for locating and representing copyright holders (a way of dealing with so-called "orphan works").