Language Log

Earlier today, a journalist wrote to ask me about "the way 'nonplussed' gets mistaken for 'unfazed'" . In accordance with my recent policy of turning public service into blog fodder, my answers to her questions are posted below the jump.

According to the USPTO web site, the "Notice of Allowance" for Dell's attempt to trademark Cloud Computing has been cancelled.

If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women's 400m race (she's currently the World Champion in the event). In 2005, Ohuruogu graduated with a degree in linguistics from University College London, and her thesis was all about taboo vocabulary, a popular topic on Language Log.

James Fallows has a nice post today on the puzzling proliferation of bizarre mistranslations in English versions of Chinese signs, menus and so on ("Uncle! Or let's make that, 叔叔!", 8/5/2008). He illustrates the post with the "Translate server error" sign that he found in a LL post ("Honest but unhelpful", 7/1/2008), due originally (as far as I know) to Samuel Osouf.

Fallows starts this way: "In response to widespread popular demand, I will admit: screwed-up translations of Chinese into English can be very funny!"

I didn't intend an orgy of posts on English First, but one of the commenters on my previous post followed the link I gave to the English First site and in their issues section came upon H.R. 768, a bill "To provide that Executive Order 13166 shall have no force or effect, and to prohibit the use of funds for certain purposes", sponsored by no less than 55 Congresscritters. According to English First, "E.O. 13166 created an unlimited entitlement to services provided in a language other than English from all recipients of federal funds." This is simply not true.

In my post Trademark Insanity I came close to advocating the abolition of non-arbitrary trademarks. It turns out this proposal has been made in all seriousness by Lisa P. Ramsey in her paper Descriptive Trademarks and the First Amendment. Check it out.

The linguistic claims on which the arguments of the "English Only" movement are based are generally so ill-founded that one is hard put not to suspect that the underlying agenda is something else. A nice bit of evidence just surfaced.

Here are two snippets from news items about the actor Shia LaBeouf, who was recently involved in a car accident:

Shia LaBeouf has been released from hospital in Los Angeles, five days after he crushed his hand in a car crash. (Contact Music, Aug. 2)

The "Transformers" star didn't just injure, but crushed his hand in the crash last Sunday that flipped his truck, reports The Associated Press. (Metro NY, Aug. 4)

I'm not happy with either of these sentences. My internal verb-ometer tells me that crush just doesn't work that way.

The July/August issue of the APA's journal, Monitor, contains a report about that organization's amicus brief to the California Supreme Court concerning that state's ban on same-sex marriage. Citing this brief, the Court has now ruled 4 to 3 that restricting marriage to opposite sex couples violates California's constitution. The word, "marriage," formerly banned from use by a selected group of couples, is now unbanned.

James Fallows took this picture on a China Air flight from Chengdu to Beijing, and posted about it on his Olympics blog at The Atlantic (click on the image for a larger version).

No, not the one in Beijing — the 6th International Olympiad in Linguistics is underway this week in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria (yes, really).  The Head Coach is Dragomir Radev, and the other coaches are Lori Levin, Amy Troyani, and Adam Hesterberg (who was last year's international winner).

The White Dog Cafe, a restaurant in West Philadelphia near the University of Pennsylvania, has a pervasive doggy theme, from the numerous dog pictures on the walls to their famous "Leg Lifter Lager". This theme extends to two of the four individual-sized restrooms, which are labelled "Pointers" and "Setters". The remaining two toilets are denominated as "Democrats" and "Republicans". I always use the Republicans, myself, because it's the least used, and therefore the cleanest and the most likely to be free.

Although I'm actually a registered independent, someone has apparently outed my restroom activities to the Republican National Committee, which has begun sending me email. I wrote about one of these notes last week ("It shall be our unity that overcomes", 8/27/2008). This morning's note, said to be from John McCain himself, invites me to take part in the "first McCain Nation national event day" by "host[ing] an event on the evening of August 14th". Senator McCain has offered me several inducements to participate, including one that seems genuinely spectacular:

If you host an event on this day, my staff will send you a host package with special materials for you and your guests. You will also have an exclusive opportunity to be on a conference call and get a strategic briefing and ask questions to one of my top advisors. And while I'd love to be there to talk to you as well, I'm going to send someone even better – my wife Cindy.

During my many years serving as an expert witness I learned, among other things, that lawyers in one part of the US pronounce certain legal terms in ways that lawyers in other parts  of the country do not. My favorite is their variation in pronouncing voir dire. In most of the country I hear them say vwahr deer, more or less the French way, although some drop the "r" on the end of  voir. But in parts of the South this comes out more like vohr dyer, although sometimes you can hear a third syllable in the second word, making it sound like a private journal, a diary. 

Until recently, I hadn't thought much about the possibility that professionals, like doctors and lawyers, might have professional regional dialects. By this I don't mean the general regional dialects of their areas. Even US presidents speak some version of those. And I  don't mean saying "nucular" for "nuclear" or "gummit" for "government." Neither of these pronunciations seems to be regionally distributed. What I've begun to wonder is if there might be such things as Northern, North Midland, South Midland, and Southern versions of the legal expressions commonly used by lawyers.