Language Log

It's not very often that an observation about articulatory phonetics goes viral. Josef Fruehwald points out a rare example ("Britney Spears tongue", 8/19/2010):

In "Beginning of the Semester Blues," I surmised that Chinese translators and translation software seemed unable to handle the construction "XX zhōng" "XX 中" ("in the process / midst of XX"). Two more examples sent in by Dan Bloom would seem to confirm that surmise.

According to Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, and Joseph Rhee, "Whistleblower Claims Many U.S. Interpreters Can't Speak Afghan Languages", ABC Nightline 9/8/2010:

More than one quarter of the translators working alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan failed language proficiency exams but were sent onto the battlefield anyway, according to a former employee of the company that holds contracts worth up to $1.4 billion to supply interpreters to the U.S. Army.

"I determined that someone — and I didn't know [who] at that time — was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades," said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. "Many who failed were marked as being passed."

She hasn't announced her candidacy, and frankly, I doubt that she would accept a draft. But still, a curious chain of associations yesterday led me to wonder.

It all started  when Andrew Sullivan linked to an article by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones on "Why Rick 'Man on Dog' Santorum can't beat his Google troubles":

Santorum's problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the "definition of marriage" has never included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal."

And the winning suggestion is currently memorialized in at least four of the top ten Google hits for Santorum.  (This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with Prof. Althouse and her potential bid for the White House. Be patient, the connection is coming.)

President Obama went off script, briefly, on Labor Day in Milwaukee:

A couple of days ago, and within minutes of each other, David Moser and Brendan O'Kane called my attention to the latest graphemic pun going around the "Nèi liánwǎng 内联网" (what some netizens call the firewalled Chinese Internet, and what we might translate as "Intranet") is to refer to the 目田 and 氏王 enjoyed by Chinese citizens.

John McWhorter on Talk of the Nation, "DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move", 9/6/2010. (Download mp3 here.)

Dan Bloom just sent me this photograph that is making news in Taiwan:

Riders are advised against taking bus no. 1203, because the authorities don't know where you might end up if you do.

Geoff Nunberg sent around a link to C.W. Nevius, "Coit Tower attacks a catalyst for park crackdown",  San Francisco Chronicle 9/4/2010. The Landmark's Revenge?

The following picture appears on the cleverly named "Ni Howdy" blog:

The background: in 2009, the Bishop Miege high school football team had a 12-0 record and won the state championship in the 4A division. This year, they moved up to the 5A division. And according to Candace Buckner, "Bishop Miege’s step up into 5A not a hard one in opener", Kansas City Star, 9/4/2010:

[senior lineman Shane] Ray said, “Every article I read, it’s more so like ‘Miege is moving up to 5A, will they be able to compete against these other teams? And I don’t really like that. As a team, we don’t like that feeling of being underlooked because we did win a state title. Not any team can just win a state championship, otherwise everyone will have one.”

I mean, if you can overlook things, why shouldn't you be able to underlook something? (By not looking high enough, naturally.)

A few days ago, I asked for help in tracking down some of the scientific support for Matt Richtel's claims about the bad effects of "digital overload" ("More factoid tracking", 9/1/2009). One of the more trackable factoids was the "study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks". And sure enough, The Neurocritic quickly came up with a reference that fits: Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, "Cognitive control in media multitaskers", PNAS, Published online before print 8/24/2009.

I believe that the full paper is freely available at the link given above (please let me know if this is wrong), and if you're interested in this topic, I urge you to read it. As in the case of the last paper by a Stanford psychologist that was discussed here, you should start by asking "Never mind the conclusions, what's the evidence?". And again, you may conclude that the descriptions of this research — in the popular press and even in the original paper — lead readers pretty far beyond the interpretations warranted by the research itself.

Here's one sent in by Jeffrey Kallberg: