Language Log

Steve Pinker swung by Edinburgh yesterday to deliver a masterful Enlightenment Lecture to a crowd of roughly a thousand, and to sign copies of The Stuff of Thought for eager fans. As usual, both on the stage and off, Steve had a fund of funny anecdotes, surprising facts, and new ideas about language; and he pointed out to me that Language Log had not yet noted a new and quite astonishing political appeal to semantics in the news, by John McCain's campaign spinners.

At a Town Hall meeting on May 28, McCain expressed confidence in the "Surge" policy on Iraq troop levels (which started in February 2007): "I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels." The actual facts are that the present troop levels in Iraq are around 155,000, while the January 2007 numbers were 128,569. That is a 26,000 increase from pre-Surge levels. McCain made a flatly untrue statement. So what did his staff do? McCain's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann dismissed it as mere linguistic nitpicking on the part of the journalists: "It's the essence of semantics," he claimed. "If you're going to start fact-checking verb tenses, we're going to make sure we start monitoring verb tenses a lot more closely than we have in this campaign." He apparently meant that troop levels will come down to below 2006 levels in the future, and that is what his boss should be understood to have meant. This is unbelievable mendacity, even by the standard of presidential campaign politics.

Alex Baumans sent in this quote from a press release about a Chinese Exhibition on solar energy:

3rd 2008 Asia Solar PV Exhibition attracted many companies come from more than 20 countries and regions, such as Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, Hungary, with their ears, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea,China Taiwan,and so on. [emphasis added]

My fellow phonologist Geoff Nathan recently contributed a post to phonoloblog on the pronunciation of "Myanmar" by news readers. Another fellow phonologist, Darin Flynn, added a comment with a link to this post on TidBITS ("Your source for indispensable Apple and Macintosh news, reviews, tips, and commentary since 1990"), pointing out that Mac OS X's Dictionary program (featuring the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists the pronunciation of "Myanmar" as "Burma":

Incidentally: all images in this post are from my own copy of Dictionary, version 1.02 (© 2005), running on Mac OS X "Tiger" (version 10.4.11). The TidBITS sources are from a newer version of Mac OS X ("Leopard", version 10.5.2), which appears to include a newer version of Dictionary (but possibly with the same New Oxford American content).

… if you can't read the word California?

And how can you (despite the above) read the word California anyway, when you're expecting to see instances of it?

I'm reporting here on a real case, that of my late partner Jacques Transue, who exhibited just this configuration of (in)abilities. Such extremely selective ability constitutes a paradox of neurology (neurolinguistic division), of the sort that Oliver Sacks delights in. The key idea is some sort of cognitive split between what we know, or are able to do, EXPLICITLY, and what's there IMPLICITLY.

The links below will allow you to listen to a brief clip from each of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. But there's a trick — it's not actually their voices. Instead, I've tracked the pitch and amplitude of a short passage from the speech that each of them gave on Tuesday night, and then "played" that melody on a simple synthetic instrument (just five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes, not that it matters). It seems to me that you can tell who's who pretty easily — but my opinion doesn't matter, because I've heard the originals. So listen and see what you think:

A friend of mine recently noticed a sign in a washroom saying

and wondered for a few moments just how many people had ever wrenched one of the sturdy hot-air hand-drying machines off the wall and hurled it into a toilet bowl in a fit of rage — before realizing that "hand dryers" was merely an unaccountably weird lexical replacement for "paper towels". Is "towel" a dirty word now? What on earth gets into some people when they are told to write a sign that addresses the public?

Flash! From the Toronto Star on 2 June: "Language test spells trouble for newcomers", in which Lesley Ciarula Taylor (the Star's immigration reporter) tells us that all immigrants to Canada would soon be required to take a specific "rigorous language test", the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, widely used in Britain and Australia and already used in Canada for foreign students seeking to go to Canadian universities.

This much is accurate. But the story leads off with an especially tricky grammar question:

Think you speak English? Try this test.

Find the grammatical (or syntactic) error in this sentence: The standard of living has increased.

Stumped? Soon, that will count against you if you're hoping to immigrate to Canada. The rigorous language test that will be a requirement is vital to be fair to the influx of newcomers or vastly discriminatory and fatally flawed, depending on whom you talk to.

The correct answer is: The standard of living has risen.

And that, as it turns out, is just wrong. I wasted considerable time trying to find this sample question on the IELTS site, until I realized that there weren't any grammar questions at all on the exam. Then, illumination from Brett Reynolds (Professor of English for Academic Purposes at Humber College) on his English, Jack blog the same day, under the heading

Language tests for immigrants & Honesty tests for newspapers

Yes, more reportorial mischief.

Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today's "Washington Wire" blog on the online Wall Street Journal. The piece describes an anti-Obama Youtube video from the Republican National Committee that uses clips of other Democrats talking negatively about Obama in the past:

Clips of former President Bill Clinton and former candidate John Edwards are also used. “Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough,” says Edwards from a debate appearance.

As linguistic metaphors go, I thought Surya Prakash chose very well for the title of his op-ed piece in The Daily Pioneer in India, which concerned the way in which bygone sins of American politicians rise up to blight their hopes and make them anxious about their prospects. He called it "Past imperfect, future tense." Nicely suited to its topic. But of course the tempting juxtaposition of grammatical terms with a double meaning is too nice not too have been used before, as I'm sure Surya knew. There are 560 Google hits for the phrase, and they range from a museum exhibit to journal articles to an article about the U.N. to articles about libraries… It seems almost a cliché if you start browsing around looking for it.

But that's the way language use is: we do not constantly create brilliant jewels of originality in every few words we string together in speech or writing. We mouth clichés, we borrow snowclones, we cite famous phrases and sayings intending them to be recognized. George Orwell seemed to think this was disastrous, a terrible sign of corruption in thought. I think Orwell was utterly misguided on almost everything he said about language. But in any case, I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.) Surya's use (or the headline-writer's use) exhibits only the first element: he doesn't try to attribute the phrase to anyone (you can't, in a headline).

Sure, the line between phrase-borrowing and plagiarism is perhaps subtle and fluid in some cases. But then the boundary of the ocean and the beach at Santa Cruz is likewise subtle and fluid. That doesn't mean you can't still tell when you're walking on the sand and when you're ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean.

This morning, Arnold Zwicky took a look at the general question of whether language mavens' advice to "Avoid Potential Ambiguity" is actually helpful in avoiding ambiguity. He focused on the particular case of sentence-adverbial hopefully, and part of his argument was that if you're fluent in English,

you have to know that lots of people use hopefully as a sentence adverbial; it's all over the place. (I haven't run the numbers, but I'm sure that these days sentence-adverbial hopefully vastly dwarfs nominal-modifying hopefully in both colloquial and more elevated English.)

Well, here at Language Log, we aim to leave no number unrun. So I went to Mark Davies' lovely "Corpus of American English" search page at BYU, and checked a sample of 100 instances of hopefully from each of the five genres that he offers: spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic. I assigned each example to one of the two categories "speaker-oriented" (i.e. sentence adverb meaning "it is to be hoped") and "subject-oriented" (i.e. verbal adverb of manner, meaning "in a hopeful manner").

The results, expressed as percentage of subject-oriented examples… the envelope please…

Will nothing stop the wanton destruction of the Cupertino Effect? The latest victims of exuberant spellchecking are high school students in Middletown, Pennsylvania. According to reports by the Newhouse News Service and the Associated Press, the newly published yearbook of Middletown Area High School contains the following student names:

• Max Supernova
• Kathy Airbag
• Alexandria Impolite
• William and Elizabeth Giver
• Cameron Bandage
• Courtney and Kayla Throwback

This is chapter 2 in the story of APA (Avoid Potential Ambiguity). Here I'm going to look at whether the advice is useful. Suppose you convince J. Doe that some usage is to be avoided because it "could lead to ambiguity". Will Doe's speech and writing now be clearer?

Well, no. (They could even be a little bit harder to understand.)

The usage manuals are full of condemnations of forms and constructions on the grounds that they could lead to ambiguity, and many of the disputed usages in English that I post on here bring me e-mail (usually with awful examples) about how they should be banned because they could lead to ambiguity. Almost without exception, these protestations are without merit; the usages in question are innocuous, and the awful examples are deeply decontextualized — with no linguistic context, and usually with cues to the social and cultural context removed, so that readers or hearers have to understand things "entirely by the words" (which tends to convert potential ambiguity into effective ambiguity).

Eventually, I saw that there was a pattern here. The first piece of the pattern is that the accusations of pernicious ambiguity are directed at DISPUTED USAGES (usages that at least some people dispute). That's what this posting is about. I'm intending to post more, because I think there's a deeper reason for the pattern, but this is a beginning.