Language Log

In response to my post "Inaugural Americans", Steven Bird wrote:

It's easy to do something like this with NLTK:

import nltk
inaugural = nltk.Text(nltk.corpus.inaugural.words())
inaugural.dispersion_plot(['America'])

This produces plots like:

Shermin de Silva, who studies communication among elephants in Sri Lanka, recently sent me a link to a Wikipedia article about Batyr, the talking Kazakh elephant, which begins:

Batyr was an Asian Elephant known for his ability to precisely reproduce human speech. Born on July 23, 1969, he lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. He died in 1993 having never seen or heard another elephant. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian Elephants (a subspecies of the Asian Elephant). Batyr's mother "Palm" and father "Dubas" had been presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

There's a little lake near here called Sob Lake. I only recently learned the etymology of this name. According to Akrigg and Akrigg's British Columbia Place Names, the lake was originally named by a survey party. Finding the homesteader who lived nearby obnoxious, they recorded their opinion of him by naming the lake "S.O.B. Lake". The authorities in Victoria, however, felt that this was improper and bowdlerized it to "Sob Lake" by removing the periods.

Reports that the textbook The World: Social Studies asserts that: "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus." have triggered considerable controversy. Some maintain that this is a gross inaccuracy reflecting the intrusion of anti-Semitism, to which others respond that it is correct and so unexceptionable. The former are correct: the description of Jesus as a Palestinian is both inaccurate and offensive.

Jesse Sheidlower, who as editor-at-large of the Oxford dictionary has a special right to an opinion about such things, emails:

Please, please, someone write about this. I especially love the mouseover text.

"This" is a recent xkcd strip:

The mouseover text is "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

From Ben Smith's blog on the 2008 presidential campaign (from 6 October):

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks.

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

The notable feature here is the use of two different avoidance characters: asterisks in "f***ing", hyphens in "n—-r". I don't recall having seen this sort of typographical differentiation before.

In a comment on my post about relative word frequencies in the vice-presidential debate, Roo suggested that there's "a difference in mindset/strategy between conservative and liberal politicians", where conservatives tend to use "America" while liberals use "United States". While this was true in that debate, I'm not sure whether it's true in general. As a start towards addressing the question, I took a quick look at the frequency of words based on the morpheme America (e.g. America, American, Americans) in the repository of inaugural addresses at the American Presidency Project.

The results show an overall rising trend, but no clear conservative/liberal division (at least none that's clear to me):

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The East Asians have an ongoing contest propelled by dictionary size envy. Everybody wants to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries. The Koreans at Dankook University have just pulled off the amazing feat of compiling a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31,000,000,000 KRW (equal to more than 25 million USD), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters. You can read more about the Dankook dictionary and its bested competitors here and here.

Michael Erard, who wrote the book about speech errors ("Um"), discusses the latest slip of the tongue to make political news. We've previously commented on John McCain's substitution of Iraq for Iran, Barack Obama's substitution of president for vice-president, David Kurtz's substitution of Republican for Democratic, and Jo Ann Davidson's substitution of Sarah Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

Two recent sightings of superlative swingest 'most powerful in swinging an election'. From The Field on 3 October, about the state of Ohio:

And so it is a turnout war, plain and simple, in this swingest of swing states with a whopping 20 Electoral Votes.

And from the Daily Show on 7 October, in a report by "senior polling analyst" John Oliver (described here) on

the swingest of the swing voters

namely the stupid. There are also some instances of the alternative most swing, as in this story about the Not-So-Straight Talk Express (going from Massachusetts to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama), quoting one of the organizers, Marc Solomon:

"It was the make-or-break state, and we lost Ohio last time. It’s the chance to go to the quintessential, most swing state and make a difference," said Solomon.

I lived in Maryland many years ago and it’s a good thing I’m not living there now. Why? Because yesterday I attended a church meeting about Montana’s efforts to rid this state of its death penalty. If I still had been living in Maryland in 2005 and 2006, simply attending a meeting like this would have landed me on the state and federal terrorist watch lists. This Washington Post article tells me I could be in a heap of trouble for my Biblically supported views against capital punishment. The Maryland Judicial Proceedings Committee is now studying the matter and there is at least some hope that sanity will soon return to Maryland.

The complexity of the English vowel system, specifically the tense/lax distinction, in nefarious conspiracy with our phonemic word-initial glottal fricatives, strikes again: France's foreign minister was quoted as saying that he wasn't too worried about Iran potentially developing nulcear weapons, because Israel would eat them before that could happen.

Perhaps M. Kouchner might consider a quick burst of training in the HPVT method.

Hat tip to Andrew Carnie.

In a recent post on "Affective demonstratives", I quoted the curious codicil to the OED's entry on that:

"Also that one, used disparagingly of a woman."

and I wondered whether this disparaging demonstrative really always has a female referent. And sure enough, this evening's presidential debate provided a counterexample.