Language Log

As has been widely reported, the text released to the press of Sarah Palin's speech, and the version that appeared on the teleprompters for her to read, contained a quasi-phonetic spelling that signals a striking departure from the policy of the Bush administration:

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines … build more new-clear plants … create jobs with clean coal … and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.

The dangers of TV-studio live mics were demonstrated again yesterday, this time by Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy after an interview by Chuck Todd on MSNBC. Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse. The relevant segment:

Mike Murphy: They're all bummed out.
Chuck Todd: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I would think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives, and ((unintelligible)) picture …
Chuck Todd: Yeah they went to narrative.
Mike Murphy: I totally agree.
Peggy Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that — because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at — they blow it.

What with all the controversy over Sarah Palin's views and (lack of) qualifications to be President, as far as I can tell thus far no one has claimed that she is prone to linguistic errors. That's really too bad. If only she would make the right sort of error, rather than the mundane bushisms we could be discussing palindromes.

A recent XKCD:

The "Russell and Whitehead" reference is to Russell's paradox, which raised a problem for naive set theory by bringing up the set of all sets that don't include themselves. The "Katherine Gates" reference is to the book Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, 2000.

The image's title attribute has the value "They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea." This seems to be a evocation of another problem of self-reference, one leading to infinite recursion with an exponential explosion of fetishes at every step, rather than an endorsement of the maxim that "Once is cool, twice is queer".

According to Matthew Moore in the Daily Telegraph:

Google searches turn up 3,810 results for "clbuttic", 5,120 for "consbreastution", and 1,450 for "Buttociated Press".

Well, Language Log readers who had already read about the athletic feats of Olympic star Tyson Homosexual will immediately recognize the clbuttic symptoms, and will know what has gone on here. Surely, I was moved to think (but see the update below), surely someone who is being paid for writing filtering software should be able to distinguish instances of ass preceded and followed by other letters from instances flanked by non-letters such as spaces or punctuation. Not to get too nerdy about it, but for those acquainted with Unix editors like vi or sed, shouldn't a programmer know the difference between the s/ass/butt/g command (wrong) and the perhaps slightly more reasonable s/\([^a-z]\)ass\([^a-z]\)/\1butt\2/g instruction? This much was within the competence of even rank beginners by the sixth week of the linguistically-based freshman course on Unix that I used to teach at UC Santa Cruz.

Yet Moore mentions sites on which you can see discussions of embbutties dealing with pbuttport holders and even unconsbreastutional laws pbutted by a Congress butterting powers to buttbuttinate foreign leaders.

According to Bruce Bower, "Evolution's Ear", ScienceNews, 8/30/2008

In a new study, anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison finds that eight hearing-related genes show signs of having evolved systematically in human populations over the past 40,000 years. Some alterations on these genes took root as recently as 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

“Hawks makes a compelling case that not only is human evolution ongoing in the past 10,000 years, but it has sped up,” says anthropologist Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus.

Seven genes identified by Hawks produce proteins that make stereocilia and the membrane that coats them. The eighth gene assists in building middle ear structures that transmit sound frequencies to the inner ear.

As far as I can tell, this work hasn't come out in written form yet. John Hawks has a terrific weblog ("John Hawks weblog: Paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution") and he mentions the Bower article in a brief note ("Hawks featured in Science News"), but all he says about it is "This is a really nice article, and I wasn't expecting it to come out, so please go read it!"  Which you should do.

Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: "I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that." (Audio and discussion here.) Tonight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann interviewed Gary Miller, National Disaster Relief Operations Director for the American Red Cross, about the current situation with Gustav. Miller said:

And by people adheeding [əd'hidɪŋ] the warning and paying attention to the officials and leaving town and getting to safe areas, this makes all the difference in the world.

Politicians, baseball stars, and other celebrities don't need this training. Nor do regular readers of Language Log. But for others, yesterday's Basic Instructions may be useful:

(Click on image for larger version.)