Language Log

If you know your modern East Asian history at all well, the name Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) will be familiar to you as that of the man chiefly responsible for the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing, and the father of the Republic of China.  Like most Chinese with any pretensions to cultural dignity, Sun Yat-sen has many names (the renowned 20th-century author Lu Xun had over a hundred).  His real (genealogical) name was Sūn Démíng 孫德明 (Sun Virtue-Bright).  Sun Yat-sen, the name by which he is best known in English, is actually derived from the Cantonese pronunciation of one of his pseudonyms, 逸仙 (Leisurely Immortal; pronounced Yìxiān in Modern Standard Mandarin).  Most ironically, the name by which he is best known in China, Zhōngshān 中山 (Middle Mountain) is based on his Japanese name, Nakayama Shō 中山樵 (Woodcutter Nakayama).

A note in "Random Samples" in the July 9 Science relates how in graduate school, evolutionary biologist James Harriman

wondered whether [quirks of personal taste in drinks] evolve into popular cocktails much as mutations give rise to new species, through a sort of taste-based natural selection.

So Harriman, now a visiting scientist at Cornell University, fired up a computer program for generating phylogenetic trees. Instead of genes, he plugged in the ingredients of 100 cocktails, taking vodka as the tree's common ancestor. The program divided cocktails into several distinct families–drinks based on champagne or Irish cream , for example, or punch bowl drinks … A poster of the tree, which doubles as a mixology guide, is available online [for $20] from ThinkGeek.

Such programs do phylogenetic reconstruction based on the Darwinian assumption of descent with modification from a common ancestor. The trick is in the mathematics, of course, but otherwise this is the program of comparative reconstruction suggested to Darwin by the achievements of 19th-century historical linguistics (and ultimately traceable back to the reasoning used by philologists in studying manuscript descent), though in these other applications there is usually no stipulating the common ancestor (vodka in the cocktail case).

Crash blossom of the day:

A reader asks the NYT Science Times (in C. Claiborne Ray's "Q+a" column on July 13):

Q. How does the weather service determine whether it was a tornado that caused the kind of destruction that recently occurred in Bridgeport, Conn.?

Before I go on, step back and ask yourself what sort of answer the reader was expecting.

[Note: Thanks to a link from Andrew Sullivan, our server is maxed out at around 2,000 visitors/hour, and things are a little slow. If you come back in a few hours, response times for browsing or commenting should be better.]

Back on July 14, when Sarah Palin used the blend refudiate in her role as Fox News contributor, I considered posting about it, but decided not to, since I'm not a fan of pouncing on political slips of the tongue.

But today, a week later, she used the same blend in a message on Twitter:

Reader JL sent in a pointer to this wonderful picture from the blog The Thought Experiment:

Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #.  I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I've never actually seen the symbol used that way.

Today, after some further research, I'm still not completely sure. But I've found a new theory, which I think has a better chance to be correct: it's all Emile Baudot's fault.

Under the name "Arnold Zwicky" I have returned to the top of the list of Language Log authors, having spent some time in the guise "Zwicky Arnold" at the very bottom of the list. Let there be wild celebrations! Boundless e-Champagne and i-Bûche de Juillet for everyone!

Amusing inversion of gendered communication stereotypes:

Mark Liberman recently asked, "What was the earliest use of mixed typographical symbols (as opposed to uniform asterisks or underlining) to represent (part or all of) taboo words?" The use of such symbols appears to have originated as a comic-strip convention. Comic strip fans, following Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana, have often called these cursing characters grawlixes, though I prefer the term obscenicons. In Gwillim Law's history of grawlixes, he lists examples of cartoon cursing going back to the Sep. 3, 1911 installment of "The Katzenjammer Kids." Here is the panel in question (which I found in the Washington Post archives):

Along with a sequence of asterisk-dash-exclamation point-dash-exclamation point, the speech balloon also features what appears to be a stick-figure devil firing a cannon, with three more exclamation points for good measure. As delightful as this example is, it's not the earliest use of obscenicons on the comics page. I found another "Katzenjammer Kids" strip using them, from two years earlier.

By Mitchell and Webb:

[Hat tip to Steve Fitzpatrick]

A recent post on Arnold Zwicky's blog features Kevin Fowler's Pound Sign, which brings cartoon cussing to the medium of music for the first time (?):

Just in case there might be little ears around,
I won’t say it, I’ll just spell it out –
I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point,
Don’t give a blank, and a whole lot of other choice words I can’t say –
Today I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point.

The documentary film The Linguists has just received an Emmy® nomination for "Outstanding Science and Technology Programming". The press release can be found ; for those of you who would like a downloadable keepsake, the relevant nomination can be found on p. 25 of the PDF and Word versions of the press release.

In related (and even more awesome) news, the stars of The Linguists — K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson — are also featured members of the Nat Geo E-Team on the National Geographic Kids website. You can spot their cartoon likenesses in the full image fairly quickly: they're the only ones who are talking. But there they are on the right for those who just want a quick peek.