Language Log

I'm always happy to learn new things about playground culture. Like language, it's somehow completely consistent and endlessly variable across time and space. And now that my main source for contemporary playground lore (e.g. "Pickle jinx", 12/16/2003; "High jinx", 12/17/2003) has graduated to new sorts of games, I have to rely on internet clues like this:

The phrase "no tagbacks" is familiar from my childhood — and the concept presumably goes back to paleolithic times — but the use of "blackjack" in this context is new to me. And in this particular case, the internet has so far failed to provide the answer. [Update: but Ray Girvan came through].

Each year the United Nations declares that the next year will be an International Year of X, for several Xs; 2008 is the UN Year of Sanitation, the Reef, Planet Earth, the Potato, and… Languages. Heidi Harley reported on Language Log, in May 2007, on the UN declaration of IYL, but we haven't taken up the question of what you might DO for the occasion. (Heidi's posting was mainly taken up with the split focus of the official statements about the occasion — lauding multilingualism and linguistic diversity; and also urging that endangered and minority languages be protected and preserved.*)

Now, in a letter in the most recent issue (June 2008) of Language, David Crystal exhorts members of the Linguistic Society of America to find ways to promote IYL (even though it's more than half over). (Crystal's letter is an abridged version of a paper available here.)

nascardaughter makes an interesting point in the comments section of my Dare to be bilingual post. Taking her lead, I'll divide what were (in my mind) previously two questions into four:

1. Why would making English official be bad?
2. Why would making English official be good?
3. Why is having no official language good?
4. Why is having no official language bad?

Question 1 is what Timothy M asked of me and other Language Loggers, and Question 2 is what I asked readers to ponder in my Language devaluation post. Question 3 is what nascardaughter asks us all to consider, and Question 4 rounds out the logical possibilities.

On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan:

"Perhaps it'll be available last year," Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes. Commenters chime in with their own time-travel jokes, and a couple point out the added typo of "out stock" for "out of stock." One commenter wonders if the photo's a fake, but I'm quite sure it isn't. Substituting temporally for temporarily is a common error, perhaps due to the phonological process of haplology (the omission of one of a pair of similar sounding syllables, like saying lib'ry for library). [Or, as Andrea conjectures in the comments, it could be yet another result of the Cupertino effect.] It's so common that a quick search on Google Images and Flickr turned up a dozen more photos of signs with temporally. There are so many that it's probably just a matter of time before there's a whole blog dedicated to such signs, in the style of other peeveblogging we've seen (apostrophe abuse, unnecessary quotation marks, lowercase L, etc.). A gallery follows below.

Sara Scharf sent in a link to a Chinese menu picture from the Bad Translations group on flickr:

Some time ago, we had a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access. (DSL is just part of a larger set of resources, the Scottish Language Dictionaries, or SLD.)

I was astounded, and said so to the list. How was this managed, when parallel resources in English (for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) had scant prospect of getting a similar treatment within the foreseeable future? (The monumental English Dialect Dictionary is apparently being digitized — at the University of Innsbruck!) I exchanged e-mail with DSL staff and discovered just how fragile the whole business was: a subvention from the Scottish Arts Council provided the backbone of the support, and private donors supplied some support, but the enterprise seemed to survive on a phalanx of (unpaid) volunteers (and I suspected that the staff was not very well paid).

I intended to post to Language Log at the time, just to alert people that DSL was available on-line, but the posting fell behind other things and I never got back to it. Now, it turns out, the dictionaries are threatened.

I'm not sure whether David Brooks has changed his mind about nature and nurture, or just has a short attention span. It wasn't long ago that he told us ("David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) that

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

But in his most recent column (David Brooks, "The Luxurious Growth", 7/15/2008), he's singing a different song:

It wasn’t long ago that headlines were blaring about the discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene or a depression gene. The implication was obvious: We’re beginning to understand the wellsprings of human behavior, and it won’t be long before we can begin to intervene to enhance or transform human life.

Few talk that way now. There seems to be a general feeling, as a Hastings Center working group put it, that “behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised.”

Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associations. It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait. Instead, a specific trait may be the result of the interplay of hundreds of different genes interacting with an infinitude of environmental factors.

From Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology:

His analysis:  "Sometimes I think that academics have a kind of mental operating procedure designed to insulate them from having to consider anyone else's ideas at all."

The prime minister of Belgium, Yves Leterme, has tendered his resignation after his government failed in its attempt to grant greater autonomy to the country's Dutch- and French-speaking regions. Belgium's linguistic quandary is an issue of enormous consequence (and one on which Language Log has been peculiarly silent), but I'll let more informed voices chime in on the collapse of the Leterme government. Instead, as is my wont, I'm going to sidestep the weighty geopolitical repercussions and focus on a small but interesting typo in the Associated Press article, "Belgian premier offers resignation amid deadlock":

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California appeared on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, and he got some press attention for his stated willingness to serve as an energy and environment czar in a hypothetical Obama adminstration, even though he has endorsed his fellow Republican John McCain. In the recaps of his interview, I was struck by one sentence in particular: "I'd take his call now, and I'd take his call when he's president — any time." This use of when instead of if struck me as unfortunate, and my first thought was that it might be the result of interference from Schwarzenegger's native German, where wenn can serve as the equivalent of English if or when. To check up on my hunch, I emailed the perspicacious polyglot Chris Waigl (who has bailed me out before on German-English translation conundrums), and she replied in her typically thoughtful and nuanced manner. Her response follows below as a guest post.

This is a follow-up on my Language devaluation and Pushing buttons posts from last Monday, and coincidentally also a follow-up on (the first comment on) Bill Poser's Obama's Indonesian post from Friday.

I had promised in the Language devaluation post that I would (when I found the time) collect arguments for why English should not be the official language of the United States. I haven't really found the time yet, but several LL readers were kind enough to take the time to offer their help in the comments section of that post. See the first comment in particular (from Ryan Rosso), chock-full of useful links.

As several commenters point out, a lot depends on what it means to designate an official language — that is, what the practical effects of that designation are. Some think that it would be no more than a symbolic gesture here in the U.S., a formal recognition of an obvious reality: English is by far the dominant language of the nation. Others think (and I agree) that a piece of legislation is a piece of legislation: the original intent may be symbolic, but once it's there it can be used as a tool for less-than-symbolic (shall we say) purposes.

[ Incidentally: recall the calculated shifting around among "official", "national", and "common and unifying" in the House and Senate two years ago, as Ben Zimmer discusses in an LL Classic Post ("English: official, national, common, unifying, or other?"); see also Bill Poser's two posts flanking Ben's ("Senate votes for official English", "What does 'official' mean?"). ]

Letter to the editor in the July/August STANFORD magazine (from alumnus Bill O'Beirne '56), p. 6:

I am sorry to see STANFORD beginning the slide into the lowest-denomination morass of the common press and television. I do not appreciate the publication of Brian Inouye's article with the expletive undeleted. Sad to see the previously well-done magazine choosing to go down the tubes.

Here's the offending expletive in context, from senior Inouye's "Student Voice" column (May/June issue, p. 38, available on-line here) about being a B student in a demanding premed program:

Recently, over a beer-drenched table, some fraternity brothers and I discussed a biology exam. One guy was complaining about his A-minus after he had studied "so hard" for the test. Another was stressing out that he wouldn't get into med school because of his B-plus. When I tried to get some sympathy for my B, these two just scoffed, signified I had no hope, and returned to their whining. That's the problem with premeds: they make you feel like shit when you already feel like crap.

As reported in the New York Times and Time Magazine, Yale law librarian and quotation-hunter extraordinaire Fred Shapiro has uncovered evidence undermining the long-held attribution of "The Serenity Prayer" to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr's family originally claimed that he composed the prayer in the summer of 1943, but Shapiro has uncovered variations on the theme going back to 1936 in various American publications. (The first printed attribution to Niebuhr is actually from 1942.) Shapiro lays out his evidence in the Yale Alumni Magazine, followed by a rebuttal by Niebuhr's daughter Elisabeth Sifton.

What's particularly fascinating about Shapiro's documentary evidence is how the early citations all fit a general formula and yet show a divergence in phrasing reminiscent of the Telephone game. Regardless of how much claim her father ultimately has to originating the prayer, Sifton is correct to point out that "prayers are presented orally, circulate orally, and become famous orally long before they are put on paper." It's clear that by the time the prayer found its way into print in the '30s and '40s, the oral transmission of the meme was already well under way, as illustrated by the mutations it underwent in the retelling.