Language Log

My colleague Bob Ladd wondered how many people noticed the translingual pun at the top of a recent Economist article. The topic was the ascent of Ma Ying-jeou to the presidency of Taiwan— sorry, to the presidency of the the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei). Mr. Ma is a Mandarin speaker. Now, every linguist knows that one of the large number of meanings the syllable ma can have, along with "mother", "hemp", and "scold", is (if the 3rd tone is used) "horse". (See this site for a tutorial on Chinese tones.) Chinese teachers delight in sentences with meanings like "Horse eats hemp, suffers mother's swearing" (ma₃ chi₁ ma₂ a₁i ma₁ ma₄) containing four different ma words. So The Economist's headline choice was: Ma's horse comes in. The ‘Ma’ can be read as both "Ma" (personal name) and "ma₃" ("horse") — and in fact both of these are written with the character 馬. But the allusion to Chinese lessons was not picked up anywhere in the story. I wonder how many readers will have noticed it.

Language Log brings little surprises into my life — this week, the report by Geoff Pullum that there are people who believe that the English conjunction or is always understood exclusively (so that and/or and or both might be useful expressions to have around, to convey an inclusive reading).  Geoff countered with an argument that the meaning of or is in fact just inclusive disjunction, though the conjunction can be used to convey exclusivity via conversational implicature.  

The usage literature largely agrees with this position, and so and/or is widely (but not universally) reviled, as unnecessary. But there's more to the story.

In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I discussed cases where someone substitutes one person's name for another, on the basis of a relational analogy or associative similarity: sister for daughter, child for pet, ex-spouse for current spouse, and so on. A particularly interesting extension is the phenomenon of chains of incorrect names, often arranged in chronological or other stereotyped order. Some examples from readers' email:

My grandmother would often call me by a string of names: my mother’s name, then my aunt’s name (my grandmother’s other daughter) and then my name.
… my mother ran through the string of family thus: Mary Ann, Robert, Paul, John, Kitty, Pat. Mother did not make much pause between names, just stopped (usually) when she got to the one she wanted. Pat got added last, so she came in after whatever the current cat was. Mother always used Kitty for the cat.
… his mother was famous for doing the string-of-names thing when she wanted to call out to any of her 6 children, and Emmon as the youngest was usually on the receiving end of the longest string, “Stanley-David-Austin-Sven-Betty-Emmon!”
My name is often fourth or fifth in the chain of names I’m called, coming after my father and sister (almost always), my uncles (usually), and various other relatives (sometimes).
I am Italian and my grandmother used to have to go through the whole list of her six daughters’ names before saying mine. It occurred all the time she was addressing a close relative and it annoyed her enormously. Her daughters are now also doing it – it seems the older one gets, the more likely it happens. I can think of quite a few other people who do it, and they all seem to be women. And I would say it mainly occurs with relatives’ names.

I wondered whether there is any existing term — scientific or informal — for this chaining of family-members' names. It seems that the answer is "no", and so I've tentatively staked a terminological claim with the term "name chain". (If you felt the need for a term with more gravitas, you could try "onomastic catenation". But why would you, in a world where physicists spend billions on equipment to distinguish among the categories of quark known as up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom, and biologists pursue the sonic hedgehog gene?)

In the Metro, a free newspaper that I often pick up in Edinburgh, there is an entertainment gossip page called Guilty Pleasures, which of course I never look at. Perhaps the most poisonous of the regular features is a couple of square inches, buried amongst the candid paparazzi shots of heiresses' breasts and film stars' bellies, under the title News from the Molehill, which I certainly never look at. It has a very particular and routinized syntactic form.

The piece always begins with a wh-phrase, usually of the form which + Adjective + Noun, the noun being something like actor, celebrity, TV personality, or singer. That wh-phrase is then used as the hook on which to hang a bizarre gossip item. Further references to the unknown individual with definite noun phrases are used to supply enough clues to get you guessing as to who it might be referring to. I quote one such item below in its entirety. (They are known in journalism as "blind items", Grant Barrett tells me.) I offer it for your scrutiny not so that you can start guessing who is being talked about, but because the piece, which unusually conceals the sex as well as the identity of the unknown gossip target, uses a striking series of singular they forms. In my judgment it goes outside the bounds of ordinary Standard English: the piece is basically ungrammatical for me.

Which paranoid celebrity has become so obsessed with their portrayal in the media they are going to extreme lengths to control their perception? The increasingly reclusive singer now personally rummages through their own bins in case they've thrown out anything that would give an insight into their private life…

Something that we don't always think about is that names don't come by themselves but are part of a system with a certain structure. This is brought out by instances in which the names and the system of which they are a part come to be separated.

Carrier people used to have names that were wholly or partly meaningful in the Carrier language, but these died out very quickly once a resident priest arrived in 1865. The church gave people French saints' names on baptism, and these names immediately replaced the original Carrier names. Children ceased to receive a Carrier name.

A few days ago Geoff Pullum reviewed an Economist article that relied heavily on the recent work of Naomi Baron. The article cited her as saying that cell phones, pagers, laptops, and wireless devices are the weapons of mass language destruction that we see everywhere around us. But those of us who read newspapers these days know better. The real cause of linguistic chaos is right under our noses. It's the New York Times crossword puzzles, that's what it is! In terms of language correctness, almost anything goes there.

Yesterday's post on analogical substitution of names has brought in quite a bit of email, but no information about an existing term for this phenomenon, and so I'm beginning to think that there isn't one. At least not a scientific name, and not a common name in English either. This is yet another demonstration that people can have thoughts for which they don't have (single) words. However, it's inconvenient to have conversations about things that you don't have terms for. Therefore, pending a better suggestion, I'll call these things "name chains".

The morning's email did bring several variations on the phenomenological theme.

It wasn't very long ago that an important part of a field linguist's armamentarium was his or her stock of cassette tapes. One didn't want to run out, so one was always trying to find good quality tapes at a good price and kept stashes of them in cool, dry places.

Barbara Phillips Long writes:

I am on vacation with all but one of my siblings, some of their children and both of mine, my parents and some other relatives in a beach house in North Carolina.

I've already called my sister by my daughter's name and my daughter by my sister's name. Other people at the house have had similar problems. We were talking about it today and I suggested it was a problem based on categories — perhaps we think "nearest female relative" and the name of sister comes out instead of daughter.

Then my brother pointed out that there have been times he's gone to yell at his son for making mischief, only to hear the dog's name come out instead. That made me wonder if recently used names are in some sort of buffer that is more muscle memory than brain memory — something like playing piano or typing. In our family, at least, the name confusion happens when both names have been used recently — if I haven't talked to my sister for two months, I don't use her name accidentally when I refer to my daughter.

So I ran a couple of searches on Language Log and the archive to see if there was a term for this particular confusion and if there is a simple explanation, but I didn't find an answer.

I imagine that everyone has had this experience. Certainly, at least, it rings a bell with me.

Overheard on Locust Walk: "What you need to do is call him up and be like, 'why are you doing this to me?'"

Something about this struck me — maybe it's because I'm old enough that I still think of be like as a description of behavior associated with speaking, rather than a simple synonym for say. But I should have know better — {"call him up and be like"} gets 7,590 web hits on Google, which is a lot for a six-word sequence.

A few weeks ago, Seth Roberts visited Penn to give a talk about self-experimentation, and I took advantage of the opportunity to invite him to dinner with 15 or 20 students in Ware College House, where I'm Faculty Master. There was a lively discussion, mostly about Seth's "Shangri-La Diet" ideas.

Seth turned the tables before dinner by interviewing me about blogging. He took notes on his laptop, and sent me a draft the next day, and I promised to look at it and get back to him with corrections — and then I forgot about it until he reminded me yesterday. As it turned out, it didn't really need any changes, but I adjusted a few words here and there, and he's published it on his blog: "Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging", 4/16/2008.

The late David Mellinkoff, in his much venerated The Language of the Law (Little Brown1963), traces and/or back to scholarly concerns about the correct translation of some famous words in the Magna Carta:

…nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae.

"Except by lawful judgment of his peers vel by the law of the land."

The debate over the meaning of vel raged. Does it mean and or or?