Language Log

Jesse Sheidlower, who as editor-at-large of the Oxford dictionary has a special right to an opinion about such things, emails:

Please, please, someone write about this. I especially love the mouseover text.

"This" is a recent xkcd strip:

The mouseover text is "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

From Ben Smith's blog on the 2008 presidential campaign (from 6 October):

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks.

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

The notable feature here is the use of two different avoidance characters: asterisks in "f***ing", hyphens in "n—-r". I don't recall having seen this sort of typographical differentiation before.

In a comment on my post about relative word frequencies in the vice-presidential debate, Roo suggested that there's "a difference in mindset/strategy between conservative and liberal politicians", where conservatives tend to use "America" while liberals use "United States". While this was true in that debate, I'm not sure whether it's true in general. As a start towards addressing the question, I took a quick look at the frequency of words based on the morpheme America (e.g. America, American, Americans) in the repository of inaugural addresses at the American Presidency Project.

The results show an overall rising trend, but no clear conservative/liberal division (at least none that's clear to me):

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The East Asians have an ongoing contest propelled by dictionary size envy. Everybody wants to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries. The Koreans at Dankook University have just pulled off the amazing feat of compiling a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31,000,000,000 KRW (equal to more than 25 million USD), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters. You can read more about the Dankook dictionary and its bested competitors here and here.

Michael Erard, who wrote the book about speech errors ("Um"), discusses the latest slip of the tongue to make political news. We've previously commented on John McCain's substitution of Iraq for Iran, Barack Obama's substitution of president for vice-president, David Kurtz's substitution of Republican for Democratic, and Jo Ann Davidson's substitution of Sarah Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

Two recent sightings of superlative swingest 'most powerful in swinging an election'. From The Field on 3 October, about the state of Ohio:

And so it is a turnout war, plain and simple, in this swingest of swing states with a whopping 20 Electoral Votes.

And from the Daily Show on 7 October, in a report by "senior polling analyst" John Oliver (described here) on

the swingest of the swing voters

namely the stupid. There are also some instances of the alternative most swing, as in this story about the Not-So-Straight Talk Express (going from Massachusetts to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama), quoting one of the organizers, Marc Solomon:

"It was the make-or-break state, and we lost Ohio last time. It’s the chance to go to the quintessential, most swing state and make a difference," said Solomon.

I lived in Maryland many years ago and it’s a good thing I’m not living there now. Why? Because yesterday I attended a church meeting about Montana’s efforts to rid this state of its death penalty. If I still had been living in Maryland in 2005 and 2006, simply attending a meeting like this would have landed me on the state and federal terrorist watch lists. This Washington Post article tells me I could be in a heap of trouble for my Biblically supported views against capital punishment. The Maryland Judicial Proceedings Committee is now studying the matter and there is at least some hope that sanity will soon return to Maryland.

The complexity of the English vowel system, specifically the tense/lax distinction, in nefarious conspiracy with our phonemic word-initial glottal fricatives, strikes again: France's foreign minister was quoted as saying that he wasn't too worried about Iran potentially developing nulcear weapons, because Israel would eat them before that could happen.

Perhaps M. Kouchner might consider a quick burst of training in the HPVT method.

Hat tip to Andrew Carnie.

In a recent post on "Affective demonstratives", I quoted the curious codicil to the OED's entry on that:

"Also that one, used disparagingly of a woman."

and I wondered whether this disparaging demonstrative really always has a female referent. And sure enough, this evening's presidential debate provided a counterexample.

Below is a list of the hundred most frequent bisyllabic terms in Modern Standard Mandarin. The list is based on a recent frequency study of material from wire feeds taken off several of the main Chinese language news services. Ultimately, I think that the data were provided by LDC.

My purpose in sharing this list is not for purely analytical reasons, but more to give an idea of how, through an examination of relative word frequencies, we can get a sense of what is important for contemporary China. Focusing on bisyllabic terms is more revealing in this regard than if we were to include monosyllabic terms, since the latter tend to be particles or function words of very high frequency (e.g., DE的, DE地, DE得, ZHE4這, NA3/4那, SHI4是, and so forth).

"It's essential that we take action to both support the banking system as a whole — as well as being ready to intervene in particular cases when it's necessary to do so", said the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to reporters yesterday. Ungrammatically, I think.

Forget the fact that to both support is an instance of the so-called "split infinitive": modifiers have been placed between to and the verb in an infinitival clause, by good writers, throughout the history of English. (Those who jump on them as "errors" don't know as much about English grammar as they would like you to think they do.) No, it's the fact that the both never gets its correlated and. For me, the construction both X as well as Y (for any phrases X and Y), though common in unplanned speech, is not syntactically well formed. Particularly not when X is a plain-form (bare infinitive) verb phrase and Y is a gerund-participial verb phrase. That is (to invent a shorter case of the same sort), *to both survive as well as flourishing seems to me like an error of sentence planning, where what was intended was to both survive and flourish.

Of course, there could be people who differ, and see no slip in the Chancellor's remark. (Recall the surprising number of commenters on this post of mine who judged my ungrammatical example to be grammatical — though in that case I was able to determined that the original writer of the sentence agreed with me.) Not every expert user of Standard English has exactly the same judgments of grammaticality as every other user. But even a man who finds both support … as well as being ready ungrammatical may blurt it out when speaking under conditions of extreme stress.

One of the several controversies that have recently arisen over voting procedures in Ohio concerns applications for absentee ballots. Although an official Absentee Ballot Request Form is available from the office of the Ohio Secretary of State, the law does not require this form to be used. For some reason, the McCain campaign created its own inferior form, which among other things omits instructions, the warning that false statements are a felony, and space for the requestor's telephone number and email address. The McCain campaign form has a checkbox next to the statement: "I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election". Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, ruled that applications in which the checkbox was not checked would be rejected. In spite of her offer to allow rejected applicants to correct the omission, a lawsuit was filed, resulting in a decision by the Ohio Supreme Court, which ordered [pdf] that absentee ballot requests should be honored even if the checkbox was not checked. (The Court's order contains a photograph of the form in question.)

While I'm saying nice things about general-audience books on linguistic matters, I'll add a mention of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (Perigree), which came out in August. Shea, who describes himself as a collector of words, did indeed read the OED (the second edition, from 1989), from beginning to end, over the period of a year, and tells us about the experience in this off-beat but charming book. (Shea tells me he was aiming for dyspeptic, but it doesn't come off that way to me.)