Language Log

It's bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like "Xerox" and "Coke", and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as "Windows", but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term "cloud computing". The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

Rules Grammar Change, from The Onion Radio News.

Everyone knows that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". But it's less well known that he became one of the great curmudgeons of literary history. I thought of him when I read Motoko Rich's NYT article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?" (7/27/2008). And so for your online reading pleasure, I'll reproduce footnote 1 from Chapter III of his  Biographia Literaria (1817).

For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement, (if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never bent) from the genus, reading, to that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely; indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry in prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprizes as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete a tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the daily advertizer in a public house on a rainy day, &c. &c. &c.

A graph of the current Google hit counts for "N minutes", 2 ≤ N ≤ 66, expressed as a proportion of the total hits for all 65 searches, looks like this:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

My posting on glass as a technical term, with both mass and count uses, elicited an off-topic thread on myriad, which I'll reproduce below, after some (more) discussion of the Language Log comments policy.

The thread began with this query from kip on 8/1 at 9:58 a.m. (times are U.S. Eastern Time):

Does anyone else have a mass/collective distinction problem with the word "myriad"? I see uses like "the movie has myriad problems" and in my head I change it to "the movie has a myriad of problems" because that's what sounds right to me. Maybe I'm alone in that though…

So what's the problem with this comment?

We learn from the newspaper that Salk Institute researchers recently have found two new drugs, Aicar and GW1516, that improve muscle tone in mice without requiring them to exercise. And that's exactly what all us couch potatoes have been dreaming about–a pill rather than a treadmill. Okay, it hasn't been applied to humans yet, but just you wait.

Aicar works on a user's own genetics, mimicking the effects of exercise and signaling the cells that it has burned the necessary energy and needs to generate more through a process called pharmacological exercise. They say red wine works almost the same way, but you need to drink gallons of it to get the same effect. So why are we reporting this in Language Log?

Dinosaur Comics for 7/28/2008 featured Gricean inference:

The comments on my posting "Commercial categories" struck me as useful, and also fascinating. They illustrated my observation that though technical, semi-technical, and everyday uses of expressions can be distinguished, these uses aren't fixed in stone, but can vary from person to person and time to time; and that both what's included in a category and also the label that's used for that category can vary in the same way.

Now comes a technical usage that was new to me, in a NYT Science Times article on Tuesday, "Anything But Clear", by Kenneth Chang, on glass. Two small points (none of them new): a technical usage that's an extension of everyday usage; and a mass-to-count conversion, taking a noun denoting a substance X to a noun denoting a type of X.

Last September a group of women spent a weekend at Foxwood's Casino to celebrate the 40th birthdays of three of their party. Two casino workers made vulgar comments about them in Spanish, thinking that they would not understand. One did and complained to the casino. One of the casino workers was fired as a result and the women received an apology and free food, drink, and rooms.

What prompted the press accounts of this incident is the fact that the ladies are not satisfied with the compensation that they received and are suing the casino for a total of $3.5 million: it seems to me and evidently a lot of other people that the casino reacted rapidly and appropriately and that the women were reasonably compensated for offensive conduct that nonetheless did little real injury.

What I find so curious about this is the belief of the two offending casino employees that they could speak Spanish without fear of being understood. With 322,000,000 Spanish speakers in the world and 34,000,000 in the United States, the odds of someone at a roulette table in Connecticut understanding the language are not exactly remote, and it doesn't take a linguist to be aware of this. Ironically, the casino is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, who have used part of their income from the casino for efforts to revive the extinct Pequot language.

More shabulengdengde poetry, from the menus of Chinese restaurateurs who put their trust in bad machine translations (as usual, click on the images for larger versions):

After all, who'd want to eat the hair blood of an impoverished person? Or a cowboy bone fried by a merely pentangular germ?

Many, many years ago I was privileged to study American regional dialects with one of the leading dialectologists of that era, Raven I. McDavid. It was a career-changing experience for me because he taught me the sheer joy of gathering and analyzing the actual language spoken by everyday people in everyday settings. The focus of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada was on older people, mostly in rural settings, so he sent me out to interview and tape-record a large sample of such Americans, first in the northern half of Illinois and later in the rest of that state. My experience of listening to 70-80 year-olds talk about farming and other topics was new and exhilarating to this city boy, making the arduous task of doing the phonetic transcriptions of their speech rather exciting.

Luckily, no one is paying me for doing this.

Ben Zimmer, posting on Monday on Visual Thesaurus ("Of Showdowns, Throwdowns, and Hoedowns"):

Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling.

(Ben then went on to discuss a few other -down words: beatdown, throwdown, and hoedown.)