Language Log

I think perhaps the most delicious name I have ever encountered on a real human being, certainly on anyone moderately well known, is Tiggy Legge-Bourke. I don't know why I find it so deliciously silly, but I do. Tiggy was back in the news the other day because she had a reaction to the recently announced royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton — a much less sour and disloyal one than that of the Mad Bishop), and more newsworthy than most people's, because Tiggy used to be Prince William's nanny. (For a long time the newspapers had tried to establish that she had been Prince Charles's lover as well, but that never came to anything.) Tiggy's comment on the news of the nuptials was: "fan-flaming-tastic".

That kind of infixing of an expletive in the middle of what is quite clearly a single morpheme is well known to linguists, and has some intrinsic interest, but one doesn't see it that often in the newspapers, so I cherished this instance. Coming in a story mentioning Tiggy Legge-Bourke, it was (for me) a small extravaganza of linguistic pleasures.

Among the many things that we have to be thankful for is the interesting new web app that generated this fascinating list.  Two questions: (easy) what is the app? and (hard) what input resulted in this output?

In case that one's too easy, here's another.

How to count words is sometimes an issue for people like writers and translators, but it is rarely if ever a political issue. It is now, in British Columbia.

What speech acts are permitted under the various restrictive laws current in the British Isles, and what penalties accrue to people who step outside the bounds laid down by the law? As I have often mentioned here before, the UK has no real constitutional guarantee of free speech, so a lot of things that any American would take to be unquestionably expressible turn out to bring down fines or imprisonment if you say them in the UK. But since all the cases have hidden complexities, and the issue strikes me as important, and I am currently the only Language Log correspondent in the British Isles, I thought I would give you an update. I will deal with four cases: the Ranting Diplomat, the Mad Bishop, the Robin Hood Airport Twitter Bomber, and (perhaps the strangest of them all, a story from Ireland): Fruit Bat Fellatiogate.

Like half of the U.S., I've been reading the first volume of Mark Twain's recently-published autobiography. I'm sure that there's some sociolinguistics in it somewhere, but for now you'll have to be content with this rumination about discourse structure, which I present to you just in case you're in the half that hasn't bought the book yet:

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published another in its Your Brain on Computers series, which "examine(s) how a deluge of data can affect the way people think and behave". The latest installment is Matt Richtel's "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction", 11/21/2010:

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

Bob Ladd visited his doctor's office today. Which wouldn't normally be news for Language Log; but while waiting to be called he idly picked up a magazine, as one does. It was Birds, the magazine of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and he spotted a linguistically interesting item in an advertisement offering this:

5% off your next cottage holiday for Bird’s readers

Bob was truly puzzled by the spelling of the penultimate word. Rightly so, I think.

Earlier this year, I discussed an interesting paper from a poster session at ICASSP 2010 ("Clinical applications of speech technology", 3/18/2010), which used an automated evaluation of dysphonia measures in short speech samples to match clinicians' evaluations of Parkinson's Disease severity.

That work, extended and improved, has been published as Athanasios Tsanas et al., "Nonlinear speech analysis algorithms mapped to a standard metric achieve clinically useful quantification of average Parkinson's disease symptom severity", J.  Roy. Soc. Interface, 11/17/2010.

Everyone who writes a lot and is cursed with at least a smattering of knowledge about Latin must have had the experience of feeling that they wanted to imply continuation of a list of alternatives with a short expression like etc. but meaning "or other things". I had the experience in something I was writing just this morning. What would the right expression be?

There was some grumbling on the American Dialect Society list last week after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced its selection of refudiate as Word of the Year (like Christmas decorations, these days the WOTYs go up before people have even ordered their Thanksgiving turkeys). The choice was a blatant publicity stunt, some said, and besides the word wasn't coined by Palin — indeed, it wasn't a coining at all, but a mistake. As Jonathan Lighter put it, "It's a gaffe no matter who uses it… So it isn't a good word for a serious dictionary to lionize, if you ask me."

But others defended the choice in the name of fair-&-balanced even-handedness. Ron Butters, a sometime NOAD consultant, charged that the critics were being selective:

So [the NOAD editors] are whores when they jump on Palin's word but not whores when they promote "truthiness"?…Why does it really matter that she misspoke–and was clever enough to make a virtue of it–whereas the "truthiness" people set out to find fame by promoting a stunt word… [Anyway] if linguists really believe that whatever it is that the people choose to say is OK–if we are really opposed to prescriptivism and proscriptivism–then how can we object even to a dictionary reporting a usage from a source that millions of Americans admire and respect, whether it is a right-wing entertainer such as Palin or a left-wing-beloved entertainer such as the truthiness guy?

Is any of this worth bothering about? Not for its own sake, but it foregrounds a paradox that runs deep in modern lexicography

A couple of years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy was making news for the idiomatic informality of his language. Now he's made a bit of a stir in the media for using the imperfect subjunctive, a characteristic of formal written style that's apparently rare enough in spoken French that a public figure can make news by using it. (The last example that came to our attention here at Language Log involved the serial killer Michael Fourniret: "Il fallut que j'accusasse: the morphology of serial murder", 3/27/2008).

The Pope has changed his mind about condoms: they can be used after all!

That's what the world's media has decided to splash over the front pages this weekend. ("Pope Benedict's condom U-turn" said the headline over Andrew Brown's blog piece at The Guardian.) They are being scandalously irresponsible as usual: the Pope has said nothing of the kind. Rather, he grudgingly acknowledged, in one answer during a book-length interview, that perhaps in some cases perhaps the use of a condom by a prostitute (una prostituta) might be "a first step toward a moralization, a first act of responsibility, on the way toward recovering awareness of the fact that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants." Absolutely no sign of a Catholic Church volte face on contraception there. But I have a linguistic question: what did he mean when he used the word prostituta?

"Pope condones condom use in exceptional cases", BBC News, 11/20/2010:

Catholic commentator Austen Ivereigh said that although this was the first time the Pope had voiced such an opinion, it was in line with what Catholic moral theologians have been saying for many years.

"The Church's teaching on contraception predates the discovery of Aids," Mr Ivereigh told the BBC news website. […]

"If the intention is to prevent transmission of the virus, rather than prevent contraception, moral theologians would say that was of a different moral order." [emphasis added]

As usual in such cases, we don't know whether this was Mr. Ivereigh's slip or the BBC's.  But on the basis of past performance, I'm not inclined to trust the press in cases like this one.