Language Log

A "short imagined monologue" by Ben Greenman at McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "I am the invisible thing that holds together the two halves of a compound word":

When I first came to town, they were all around me, the words. They waved at one another in the street and chatted at parties. I was careful then because I was a newcomer and it is not my personality to stride right into the center of things and announce myself, especially since I am invisible. But I noticed it at once: some words looked good together.

In a few rare cases, like with "sword" and "play" and "rain" and "storm," they found their way to each other, but most words didn't really know what was good for them. "Trouble" liked "coat," and "sweet" liked "bone," and "air" spent years pining for "pickle." Can you imagine?

Jan Freeman, "I could care less: A loathed phrase turns 50", The Boston Globe, 10/24/2010:

It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’

Ann voted with her reader — “the expression as I understand it is ‘I couldn’t care less’ ” — but she thought the question was trivial. “To be honest,” she concluded, “this is a waste of valuable newspaper space and I couldn’t care less.”

She couldn’t have known it at the time, but her reader’s trivial question would be wasting newspaper space (and bandwidth, too) for decades, as it blossomed into one of the great language peeves of our time.

The new Musselburgh health center, quite close to where I live in Edinburgh, is not complete; the construction process is at a standstill. The problem? According to the Scotsman newspaper's rather startling headline, it seems to be the workforce:

In an article entitled "Yuan more pun" on The Economist's "Johnson" blog (Oct 28th 2010), Lane Greene Gideon Lichfield has tracked a long string of bad puns based on the name of the Chinese unit of currency.  The Economist's Yuan groaners stretch back several years.

Six and a half years ago, in a Language Log post about the spread of texting in Japan, I commented on the lack of enthusiasm for texting in the U.S. ("Texting", 3/8/2004):

I don't think that I've even seen anyone texting in the U.S. Now that I think about it, this is a bit surprising, since there are plenty of foreign students at Penn who come from places (like China, Korea and much of Europe) where texting is common.

Times have certainly changed. Now pretty much everyone in the U.S. — certainly every high school and college student — seems to be texting all the time. And a recent Nielsen blog post cites some extraordinary statistics ("U.S. Teen Mobile Report", 10/14/2010):

From TPM, a billboard in Houston:

Passed on to me via Nancy Whittier, this disturbing and bitterly funny animation, here, "So you want to get a PhD in the humanities", which has elicited some Facebook discussion about advising undergrads about going to grad school and about advising grad students.

I was born at the right time, knew that I wanted to be a college professor when I was in high school, and achieved it all as easily as these things can be done (though that involved periods of deep self-doubt and anxiety). Now it gets harder and harder to advise students. Wonderful to teach people, but is it moral to attract them into an academic career? Could any young person find a life doing what I do?

(Allowing comments, with considerable trepidation.)

Following on the announcement of the death of my dear friend Ellen Prince (here), I'm now passing on three further death announcements from recent days: sociolinguist Faye Vaughn-Cooke and lexicographers Fred Mish and Sol Steinmetz.

Language Log has not so far commented on Jason Wire's 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World on the Matador Network. You might expect (since I yield to no Language Log writer in the fierceness of my hatred for things-people-have-no-words-for genre of writing about language) that I would hate it like poison. But in fact I rather liked it. I just want to point out, however, that not a single one of the words shows any of the promised untranslatability.

A note from the Penn Linguistics Department, written by Gillian Sankoff and Tony Kroch:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our colleague Ellen F. Prince. Ellen died peacefully at home in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 24, after a long battle with cancer.

Yesterday, the "most viewed" and "most emailed" item on the New York Times website was Deborah Tannen's essay, "Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier", which opens this way:

"Having a Sister Makes You Happier": that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as "I am unhappy, sad or depressed" and "I feel like no one loves me."

These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?

The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.

Back in 2003, Mark Liberman recounted a line attributed to Roman Jakobson when asked if Harvard should give Vladimir Nabokov a faculty position:

I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?

And in 2006, I mentioned a snippy remark that The New Republic's Martin Peretz made about Garrison Keillor, who had panned Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville in The New York Times Book Review:

So maybe Keillor was actually an inspired choice. Why shouldn't a bird review an ornithologist?

Now the political historian Garry Wills provides another zoological analogy in his new memoir, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer.

In the month of Poe's death (in October 1849), and of course the month of Hallowe'en, BBC television showed a program called "Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women". As I watched it, and listened to the speaker of standard American English that they used for the readings from his poetry (as so many radio and TV programs have done before), reminded me that I have always thought the dialect Poe had in mind when he wrote The Raven couldn't possibly have been one of the rhotic ones. It has to be one of the non-rhotic New England accents. That is, I don't think anybody who pronounces nevermore with an r sound at the end is reading The Raven correctly.

The sound made by ravens and crows is not [kɔɹ], like a typical Midwesterner saying core; it is much more like [kɔ:], reminiscent of a speaker with an Oxford accent saying the word (rhyming it with the educated Southern British pronunciation of law). The repeated nevermore has to sound like that, or the poem makes no sense as far as I can see. The raven's invariant repetition of "Nevermore!" at the end of each stanza has to sound like a raven cawing. Ravens don't have postvocalic r.