Language Log

I'm all too familiar with the idea that people from such-and-such a country can't deal with concept X because they simply have no word for it. One common version of this is the idea that without a word for something bad like bribery, people are incapable of understanding that they shouldn't do it.  Alternatively, the idea may be turned around the other way — without a word for something bad like lying, people allegedly don't understand that it's even a possible option.

I wasn't aware, but it seems that until 1990 or so, a linguistic gap of this kind protected Australians from such social evils as begging and armed robbery.  As Andrew Herrick explains ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age 8/6/2010):

When Australian vernacular is replaced by franchised American terms, exotic tropes are too often introduced into our social and political ecology. Twenty years ago, Australia didn't need the terms homey, mugging, drive-by shooting, gated community and panhandling because these were foreign concepts. But they are not so strange to us now.

We've imported America's toxic culture with its language, and react by resorting to a questionable American "solution".

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake):

Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed?

Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use of passive or active voice can tell you a lot about the person who wrote this.

Of course! Passive versus active voice. Why didn't I think of it. That should tell us what we need to know about who wrote the note.

This notice on the window of a shop selling a very special type of life-extending egg in Hakone, Japan vies for the worst signage translation we've ever seen.

Google Books isn't the only outfit that sometimes has trouble with metadata. I happened to notice this morning that Oxford University Press has classified Herbert A. Simon's "On a class of skew distribution functions" (Biometrika 43:425-440, 1955) as "Religious Studies..Death":

A commenter named bloix here on Language Log recently pointed out yet another case of passive allegations:

First Read, a reliable purveyor of Beltway conventional wisdom, tries out the passive voice: "As for the media, we've allowed this story over race [to] bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama's presidency thus far (the financial reform legislation becoming law, Senate passage of the jobless benefits, and Kagan clearing the Senate Judiciary Committee). Whether it's Sherrod, Gates, or Jeremiah Wright, the topic of race pushes the media's buttons like no other issue."

The facts: there are seven verbs between the quotation marks, and not a single one of them figures in a passive construction. Yes, zero for 7 (following zero for 4 here and zero for 5 here). If passives were UFOs, the country would be frantic over all the sightings, but the Air Force wouldn't be scrambling any jets.

Karen M. Davis sent me this (I've edited slightly, but this is basically a guest post by her):

A story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune displays a fine if rather inexplicable example of obscenity avoidance:

A man who got between a guy and the woman he was hitting says:

"I just simply say, 'Dude, that's enough,' [thinking] maybe he'll back off," Skripka said. "He got in my face. I didn't flinch. I said, 'Dude, back off,' pardon my French but that's the words I used. Then I finally said, 'Dude, what's your problem?' The next thing I know is I'm waking up on a gurney. I was knocked out cold."

"Dude, back off" requires the familiar "pardon my French" apology for obscenity? Somehow I don't think that's the words he used!

Reader JL sent this picture, with some questions:

First of all, there's the word "jegging." A quick search tells me that it's a cross between "jeans" and "leggings." I might have been able to figure that out myself if they had gone with "jeggings"–but "jegging"? That sounds like some novel form of crime. ("I totally got jegged last night!")

But then there's also the "live in" part. Presumably this is an exhortation to wear your jegging all day and thus "live in" it. But when I first saw this I read it more in the "live in Tokyo" sense.

Or maybe the "live-in housekeeper" sense?  Amazingly enough, "live in jegging" isn't yet indexed by Google or Bing, so you lucky readers get first shot at figuring out what this means.

Consider this passage from Kate Lahey, "DJs case will be a watershed", The Age, 8/4/2010, sent in by an alert reader:

Margaret Thornton, a law professor at the Australian National University specialises in discrimination law and policy.

She says the high profile of this {sexual harassment] case would undoubtedly encourage other women to speak out. […]

The $37 million message is also likely to resonate with employers, Thornton says.

"A huge percentage of women, if not most, have actually been subjected to some form of sexual harassment in the workplace … this is going to have an enormous ramification."

My piece on Sarah Palin’s refudiate — “Got to celebrate it!” — is on Fresh Air  today (weirdly edited and repunctuated on the NPR site but fixed now). I noodle over why Palin never cottoned to the error before she was caught called out and felt obliged to defend it: probably because repudiate is an item that you're most likely to encounter in books with semicolons in them.  (I wanted to call the piece "Never a Duh! Moment" but NPR likes titles that tip their hands.)  In the end, though, I was more interested in the keening indignation that these things evoke among the logotariat (can’t find any other hits for that one, but a claim of first coining requires more intense Zimmering than I’m capable of). It's a point that has been made before in these pages, particularly by Mark (for example here, here, and here); I defended Palin against the de-haut-en-bushwah (Ben?) condescension of her critics here and here. But it isn't as if it doesn't still need saying:

Take the way the logotariat reacted to Palin's use of "verbage" in place of "verbiage" during the 2008 campaign. It's a very common error, and in its way a logical one. The "i" in "verbiage" doesn't make any sense if you think, as most people do, that the word is related to "verb" and "verbal." (It actually comes from the same root as "warble.") But in The New Yorker, James Wood took "verbage" as Palin's own invention, calling it a perfect example of the Republicans' disdain for words: "so close to garbage, so far from language."

"Where do you begin with that? With the remarkable condescension of "garbage" (so close to "trash")? Or with the insolence of asserting that faulty usage betrays stupidity and turpitude?

Adam Kilgarriff, writing at the Macmillan Dictionary Blog:

An idea that has been provoking widespread interest in applied linguistics circles in the last few years is ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, ELF for short. There are now many circumstances where non-native speakers of English, of different language backgrounds, all accomplished English speakers, work together or do business in English. There are often no native speakers present, and even if there are, it is not clear that their perspective on the language has any special status. Communication can successfully be achieved, in English, without reference to the native speaker, and the ELF research agenda is to explore ELF and see if it has linguistic characteristics that set it apart as a distinct variety of English.

The latest PartiallyClips:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

The Associated Press obituary for Mitch Miller includes this highly questionable tidbit:

Miller's square reputation in the post-rock era brought his name and music to unexpected places… During Queen's nonsensical camp classic, "Bohemian Rhapsody," the group chants "Mitch MILL-uh!" as if to affirm the song's absurdity.

Surely that's a mondegreen. The AP would have been well-served to consult Am I Right or Kiss This Guy, online repositories of misheard lyrics. It's not "Mitch Miller" that Queen is singing, but bismillah, the formulaic utterance in Classical Arabic that introduces each sura (chapter) of the Qur'an. (It means "In the name of God"; the full formula is bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, "In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.")

Thanks to several commenters on our recent most-a-thon ("Most", 7/31/2010; "Most examples", 7/31/2010; "Most and Many", 8/1/2010), I've learned about an interesting literature on the semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics of most, which I think is worth collecting in one place for those unexpectedly unobsessive readers who don't repeatedly scan and cross-classify the comments on this kind of Language Log posting sequence.

These publications provide a variety of (mostly perceptual) evidence for the view that most really does mean "more than half", while offering a greater variety of theories about the strategies that (different sorts of) people use to determine whether this is true in particular cases.