Language Log

The American Dialect Society (meeting in Pittsburgh in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has selected nominees in the various categories for Word of the Year. You can check out the full list here.

The final votes in all categories will take place tonight (Friday) at 5:30 pm in Sterlings 1, 2, 3 at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel. Attendees of the cabal LSA conference (and interested members of the public who happen to be in Pittsburgh) are welcome to attend and participate. Those who are unable to attend can follow the action via Twitter at @americandialect (using the #woty10 hashtag).

[Late update: And the winner is… app — a word not on the original list of candidates, but instead nominated from the floor, much like tweet last year.]

I'm on my way to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. And while I'm waiting for my plane, I think I have just about enough time for a question, even if I fluff it out a bit by giving you the train of thought that led up to it.

I was amused this morning by the headline on William D. Cohan's opinion piece in the New York Times about Goldman Sachs' investment in Facebook: "Friends With Benefits".  Standard dictionaries haven't picked up on this phrase yet,  but Wikipedia tells us that it means "non-exclusive recurring sexual (or near-sexual) relationships", and offers links to  a telenovela, a sitcom soundtrack CD, an independent film, an upcoming TV series, and a big-time Hollywood movie due out this summer. The Urban Dictionary, though not always reliable, nails it this time: "Two friends who have a sexual realtionship without being emotionally involved. Typically two good friends who have casual sex without a monogomous relationship or any kind of commitment." (Well, "realtionship" is slightly under-proofread, but you can't have everything.)

It was a disappointment to find that Cohan didn't do anything further with this metaphor in the body of the article.  I thought about blogging the headline, but decided not to.

For the eggcorn file, from the buffet at our Hawaii hotel. It brings to mind the legend of the Wandering Jew, fated to peregrinate the world with a blintz in his breast pocket until someone says to him, "What is that, a kuhnish?"

I thought that Tucker Carlson was being lexically creative when he walked back his statement that Michael Vick should have been executed for his dogfighting sins:

"This is what happens when you get too emotional," Carlson said […] "I'm a dog lover…I love them and I know a lot about what Michael Vick did … I overspoke. I'm uncomfortable with the death penalty in any circumstance. Of course I don't think he should be executed, but I do think that what he did is truly appalling."

Two years ago, the favored lunar New Year's greeting in China was "Happy 牛 Year!" where 牛 ("bovine") is pronounced niú in Mandarin and is standing in for "New" in the Year of the Ox / Bull / Cow.

Last year, the Year of the Tiger, "I 老虎 U", where lǎohǔ 老虎 (which means "tiger") sounds like "love" to some Chinese speakers, was conveniently and concurrently being used to celebrate the New Year, Valentine's Day, and a famous golfer's amorous escapades.

Well, this is the year of the rabbit, so you can be sure the Chinese would come up with a clever way to incorporate their word for rabbit (or hare) in this year's favored New Year's greeting, and indeed they have.

Stanley Fish, discussing John Paul Stevens' reasoning about the value of anonymous speech ("Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet", NYT 1/3/2011):

… it is not true that a text’s meaning is the same whether or not its source is known. Suppose I receive an anonymous note asserting that I have been betrayed by a friend. I will not know what to make of it — is it a cruel joke, a slander, a warning, a test? But if I manage to identify the note’s author — it’s a friend or an enemy or a known gossip — I will be able to reason about its meaning because I will know what kind of person composed it and what motives that person might have had.

Antonin Scalia, arguing for a textualist rather than intentionalist theory of legal interpretation ("Law and Language", First Things 11/2005; discussed here; a pirated version appears to be here):

Two persons who speak only English see sculpted in the desert sand the words “LEAVE HERE OR DIE.” It may well be that the words were the fortuitous effect of wind, but the message they convey is clear, and I think our subjects would not gamble on the fortuity. […]

If the ringing of an alarm bell has been established, in a particular building, as the conventional signal that the building must be evacuated, it will convey that meaning even if it is activated by a monkey. […]

What is needed for a symbol to convey meaning is not an intelligent author, but a conventional understanding on the part of the readers or hearers that certain signs or certain sounds represent certain concepts. In the case of legal texts, we do not always know the authors, and when we do the authors are often numerous and may intend to attach various meanings to their composite handiwork. But we know when and where the words were promulgated, and thus we can ordinarily tell without the slightest difficulty what they meant to those who read or heard them.

From Erick Erickson, "A Concern About Reince Priebus", RedState 1/3/2010:

Back in January of 2009, I raised the concern that Michael Steele was using Blaise Hazelwood to run his campaign for the RNC. The concern related to the willingness and ability of the Republican consultant class to glum on to their preferred RNC Chairman and bilk the GOP of gobs of cash.

On a flight from Australia to Scotland, Bob Ladd bought "a packet of very tasty dried strawberries, packed in Thailand for the airline market". He writes:

On the back of the packet we were informed of the benefits of the contents, which were:

– Contains high Vitamin C which acts as antioxidants.
– Contains dietary fibres which facilitate defecation.

Will Brockman of Google explains that

There was a problem with apostrophes in the Ngram viewer front end – my fault, and I corrected it yesterday (1/1/2011).

In yesterday's "auldies but guidies" post, Geoff Nunberg observed that in "the unparsable 'Star-Spangled Banner' … not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse". As the subsequent discussion demonstrated, this is roughly as true of LL commenters as it is of the public at large.

(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")

We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.

A Carrier friend recently told me, somewhat to my surprise, that his father, who passed away in 1995 at the age of 95 and never went to school, had liked opera. He called it "shun be lhehudulh" ᙖᐣ ᗫ ᘱᐳᑐᒡ [ʃʌn be ɬehʌdʌɬ] = "they fight each other with songs". I'm not sure how much Italian he understood, but he seems to have understood opera pretty well.