Language Log

Success has many fathers, the old saying has it, and the same goes for a well-turned maxim. We've noted a number of different originators for what Jed Hartman called the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: corrections of linguistic error are themselves inevitably prone to error. Around 1999 this truism was hit upon by no less than three independent sources: Hartman, Erin McKean, and alt.usage.english contributor Skitt. And 90 years before that, Ambrose Bierce expressed much the same sentiment. Now it appears that the law has yet another eponymous author: the mythical Mr. Muphry.

In John McCain's interview with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America this morning, he seemed to want to turn any discussion of "Afghanistan" into a discussion of Iraq, as in this exchange:

DS: Does [Obama] deserve the credit for saying that there should be more troops in Afghanistan, and
now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is saying just the same thing?

JM: Actually the chairman of the Joint Chiefs uh said yesterday
that it'd be very dangerous to do what Senator Obama wants to do in Iraq.

A bit later in the interview, he took this one substitution too far:

DS: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?

JM: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation.

DS: Not precarious and urgent?

JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very-
it's a ((v-)) serious situation,
and- but there's a lot of things we need to do,
we ha- we have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid-
that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border

I.B. writes:

I've noticed recently that motivational slogans have a specific sentence syntax that seems to make them more inspirational. A few examples:

In God We Trust.
United We Stand.
In Valor There Is Hope.

Uninverted, these three phrases seem to lack luster:

We Trust In God.
We Stand United.
There Is Hope In Valor.

Do you think you can shed any light on this?

Here at Language Log we've commented a lot about the media's coverage of animal communication (birds, monkeys, cows, etc.) but, as far as I know, none of this has dealt with animals that actually swear oaths of office. So I'll remedy this omission by referring to a few media articles about police dogs that swear.

From Decatur, Georgia we read that a police dog is a "sworn officer." This article doesn't explain how the dog did the swearing, but the police must believe that he raised his front forepaw and did it somehow. 

I wrote in my posting on "forbidden OSR":

Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like ["the well is forbidden to play near"] — and then our task is to try to decide whether these examples are all inadvertent errors, or whether at least some of the instances represent a non-standard system different from our own. (Not infrequently, the latter turns out to be the case, to our astonishment.)

Call this the Astonishment Effect. You think that something is just flat-out ungrammatical, and then you find piles of examples.

My posting elicited e-mail from Paul Postal, who reported on a couple of Astonishment experiences of his own, having to do with negation.

Last year I commented on

the tendency of representatives of the U.S. government (GWB especially) and supporters of the government's current policies to refer to timetables for leaving Iraq as artificial timetables or arbitrary timetables, collocations that are presumably to be understood as involving appositive rather than intersective modification.

That is, for these speakers, artificial timetable means 'timetable, which is arbitrary' (all timetables are arbitrary) rather than 'timetable which/that is arbitrary' (only some timetables are arbitrary, and the reference is just to these).

George W. Bush, while continuing to vigorously reject "arbitrary timetables", has now shifted his language a bit to adjust to new realities. As Steven Lee Myers wrote in the lead story in the New York Times yesterday,

HOUSTON — President Bush agreed to "a general time horizon" for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.

(I would have recast that last bit as "the depth of political opposition, in Iraq and at home, to an open-ended military presence", so as to avoid a parsing in which "in Iraq and at home" modifies "an open-ended military presence", a parsing that is encouraged by how easy it is to take "an open-ended military presence in Iraq" as a constituent.)

… The White House offered no specifics about how far off any "time horizon" would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis, and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.

"Time horizon" wouldn't have fit into the headline, so the head-writer went for the shorter "timeline" instead:

BUSH, IN A SHIFT,
ACCEPTS CONCEPT
OF IRAQ TIMELINE

In any case, "timetable" (unmodified) is to be avoided, especially since Barack Obama has been calling for a strict phased timetable for withdrawal. The Obama camp's response to the "time horizon" announcement:

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement "a step in the right direction," but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment.

Of course it's vague. That's the point.

Kieran Healy, who will spending a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is looking forward to research at the "Stanford Superconducting Supersocializer, which will … propel local college sophomores at tremendous speeds into unfamiliar groups of people in an effort to plumb the structure of the elementary particles of social interaction", in order to test "the emerging Standard Model of sociophysics":

Nicholas Widdows writes about a clause he found in Toni Morrison's Beloved (p. 259):

(1a) the well is forbidden to play near

("in the free indirect speech of Bodwin, an elderly white man… not filtered through the thoughts or hearing of any of the black characters", according to Widdows). Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like this one — and then our task is to try to decide whether these examples are all inadvertent errors, or whether at least some of the instances represent a non-standard system different from our own. (Not infrequently, the latter turns out to be the case, to our astonishment.)

So Widdows and I spent some time searching for examples similar to (1a), so far without success. While we're waiting for more data (including judgments from people who find things like (1a) ok, if there are any), here are some remarks on the structure in (1), to make it clear just what would constitute a similar example.

Just a pointer to Dennis Baron's report on his Web of Language that

Manuel Castillo, a California trucker with twenty years experience, was stopped and ticketed [the maximum $500] by an Alabama state trooper for failure to speak English well enough.

… Castillo paid the ticket – tickets are part of the cost of doing business for a trucker – and drove on home.

Then there's the question of why Castillo was stopped in the first place. Baron notes that

17% of the nation’s truck drivers, and 11% of its bus drivers, are Hispanic, and authorities gave them 25,230 tickets for insufficient English last year. While government officials insist that they’re not waging a campaign against Mexican truck drivers, these numbers suggest a concerted effort by the Department of Transportation to criminalize driving while Spanish. 

To reinforce this message, the DOT pamphlet on the offense of insufficient English, with a picture of a happy Hispanic posing in front of a big rig, clearly suggests that the department’s English-only policy has quite a lot to do with “a person’s national origin.”

More details on Baron's blog (and comments are enabled there).

After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:

"Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We all sing like fish"; "Spread the word: Fish talk"; "Grunting fish tell of the origins of human speech"; "Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus";  "Study dates origin of vocal sounds"; "Cornell scientists discover how fish 'talk'"; "Talking fish"; "Mud-dwelling Toadfish Give Clues to the Origin of Human Speech"; etc.

The latest xkcd:

Its title tag: "If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction."

One of the oldest and most interesting arguments for evolution is Ernst Haeckel's theory of recapitulation: the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the form that Haeckel proposed — that embryological development progresses though a series of fully-developed ancestral forms — this theory has been refuted many times over the past century. What remains is the idea that "one species changes into another by a sequence of small modifications to its developmental program". This is the basis of modern research in evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo"), and a central theme of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, from which I took that picture of the development of arm bones from fish to humans.

Evo devo is mainly about anatomical development, but sometimes, surprising claims are made in this framework about evolutionary conservation of neurological function. A striking example of this is offered by a paper in the July 18 issue of Science (Andrew H. Bass, Edwin H. Gilland, and Robert Baker, "Evolutionary Origins for Social Vocalization in a Vertebrate Hindbrain–Spinal Compartment", Science 321(5887): 417-421, 2008), which argues that "the vocal basis for acoustic communication among vertebrates evolved from an ancestrally shared developmental compartment already present in the early fishes", namely "a segment-like region that forms a transitional compartment between the caudal hindbrain and rostral spinal cord".

It's a very small point, but it annoys me, this fanaticism on Wikipedia for providing links to every mentioned entity that has a Wikipedia entry of its own. My own Wikipedia page is just a stub of five short sentences, but it has ten links, to:

linguistics, Stanford University, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, Morris Halle, MIT, Edward Sapir, Linguistic Society of America, UIUC, Language Log

(plus an external link to my homepage and a "see also" link to Recency Illusion).

The problem is that these links are visually obtrusive. They scream. And they point you to webpages that you probably don't want to see (because they don't really provide any useful background information about me) and could in any case be accessed by a simple search on an obvious phrase in the text.

Link fanaticism is not some accident. As I discovered some time ago, it is PRESCRIBED Wikipedia style. There are people who view any unlinked reference as a FAULT, and edit pages to insert the (I'm sorry to say this) missing links. What the editors are after is perfect consistency and uniformity. But the point of links is that they should be useful and helpful — which means that the writer of an entry needs to take the readers' likely knowledge and interests into account and use JUDGMENT in inserting links. Skillful linking is, in a way, like the skillful deployment of anaphors in writing or speech.