A painfully sad health story in today's news media. For some time now there have been suspicions that isotretinoin (= Roaccutane = Accutane = Amnesteem = Claravis = Clarus = Decutan — drugs have more names than the devil) tended to increase the risk of depression and suicide in its users. But it wasn't the drug. It was the acute acne (and of course the social consequences thereof). For once the familiar cliché is reversed: it turns out the disease was worse than the cure.

This is funny, though unfair:

From a letter to the editor in the Nov. 8 New Yorker:

Such rhetoric then [by left-wing critics of George W. Bush] was hardly less corrosive, or less supported by scholarly reasoning, than the crackpot vitriol now spewed by Beck and his ilk.

As we've noted many times, combinations of negation and scalar predicates are hard for our poor monkey brains to process.

What in the hell motivates the tweeting craze? Twitter seems insane to me. If all my Language Log posts had to be 140 chars I wouldnt be abl

And people wreck their lives tweeting. A UK politician's "joke" suggesting a muslim writer should be stoned to death got him arrested by th

The Linguistic Data Consortium will change its network IP address between 4PM and 6PM EST on Friday, November 12th. During that time, Language Log will be unavailable, since its server is on the LDC network.

It may take up to 72 hours for external networks to propagate the new IP addresses, so Language Log readers may have trouble accessing the site until Monday, November 15th. The new IP address, if you're able to make use of this information, should be 128.91.252.31.

In addition, I'm now in Groningen for ExAPP 2010, and will be traveling back to the U.S. on Saturday, so I may be an even worse correspondent than usual this weekend for independent reasons.

From the AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), a holiday t-shirt:

The Nov. 10 Subnormality , featuring a tour of the Museum of the Theoretical, has a nice example of dude used as an interjection:

The crash blossom of the day comes to us from Rebekah Macdonald via Twitter. This headline appeared on the New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz:

Police chase driver in hospital

Of course, the police didn't chase a driver in a hospital, like some wacky action movie sequence. The subject of the headline is "police chase driver," a compound noun pileup typical of headlinese in the UK and other countries.  The driver had "led police in a 150 kmh chase in Lower Hutt" and landed in the hospital after crashing (!) into a power pole. We await the inevitable followup headline, "Police chase driver out of hospital."

Everybody acquainted with colloquial English knows that Yes has alternations in pronunciation: it may lose its final [s] and add a centralizing offglide to become Yeah, and it may pick up an alternative final consonant, an unreleased [p] (simulating the sudden closure of the lips at the end of the utterance), to make Yep. No also gets a final unreleased [p] sometimes, hence the spelling Nope (notice that in each case there is a conventional spelling of the [p]-final pronunciation for use when direct reporting speech, e.g. in novels). But my colleague Heinz Giegerich just pointed out to me a surprising constraint on the final-[p] pronunciations: for a long time those pronunciations have been current only as single word utterances.

In particular, he noted (on receiving an email from a Chinese student who agreed to a meeting by writing "Oh, yep", and noticing that it seemed odd) that the [p]-final pronunciations don't seem to occur when preceded by the interjection oh.

I recently noticed that the category of English autoantonyms now includes a derivational suffix.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., "New Lines of Attack in H.I.V. Prevention", NYT Science Times today:

Because 95 percent of gay men and 40 percent of heterosexual American women have had anal sex at least once during their lifetimes, according to surveys, rectal versions of the [microbocidal] gel are being developed.

Where to start?

At the end of his abbreviated trip to Indonesia (cut short because of the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Merapi), President Obama gave a half-hour address at the University of Indonesia that finally showed off his skills in the Indonesian language, a subject we've been examining. Granted, it was a prepared speech, but Obama went out of his way to include Indonesian phrases and sentences that would resonate with the crowd (mostly composed of students and staff at UI), and he even worked in at least one ad-lib.

From the official transcript, here are the relevant Indonesian passages from the speech, accompanied by my quick analysis. (Video of the speech is available on C-SPAN here and on the White House site here.)

The word random is being used with a new meaning by young people in Britain (or in Edinburgh, anyway), as Miriam Meyerhoff first pointed out to me. The new meaning is nothing like "distributed according to chance". Young people will see a surprising thing and say, "Wow, that's random!".