Language Log

In the 13 September NewScientist's "Feedback" column: a note beginning "There should be a law against it, we grumble", with a report that back in June Reuters distributed a story on the Japanese company Genepax, which claims to have produced a car that runs on "nothing but water". The magazine noted that the claim has been debunked a number of times over the past few years, but keeps re-surfacing. A possible remedy:

We thought for a moment we had a way of stemming the tide of water stories. Surely those clever people who write word-processor programs that put annoying green wiggles under our sentences with notes like "the grammatical passive voice has been used" [nice deployment of the passive!] could add a feature that crosses sentences out in red with the note "this does not happen in the real world". Shouldn't that feature be made mandatory in news organisations?

But then we remembered that when Microsoft tells us off about our grammar we invariably click on "Ignore rule" and proceeed blithely on. Back to the drawing board…

While I was busy doing various other things (like wasting my time on this post), I missed an e-mail from fellow Language Logger Ben Zimmer kindly tipping me off to the fact that The Linguists (which I've blogged about here, here, and here) was screened last night in Washington, DC, as part of National Geographic's All Roads Film Project. Sorry, readers in DC, for not being more on the ball — but I hope that those of you who read the Post will have seen the piece in yesterday's edition entitled "Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary" (coincidentally also noted by a commenter on one of my recent posts).

That's the bag-of-words summary of last night's vice-presidential debate.

This is a follow-up on a couple of my more recent LL posts on language and politics, and on the discussion that has been generated by one of them in particular.

First, Main Street. Several commenters wrote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not being "unnecessarily redundant" (as I put it) by referring to "Main Street and everyday Americans", asserting that "Main Street" refers exclusively to the commercial/business part of a (small) town/city in America, not to any residential areas nor to the "everyday Americans" who live there. (Interestingly, some of the comments seem to be duplicating themselves over on Mark's post from earlier this morning.)

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, but just barely, so it's time for a note. And for a late notice that Williams (long-time professor of English at the University of Chicago) died in February.

In response to Eric Bakovic's recent Language Log post asserting that he doesn't live on Main Street, Victor Mair sent this recent New Yorker cartoon:

This is a follow-up to my syntax quiz from Sunday. Kai von Fintel was the first to correctly note that it was a trick question: swallow hard is probably intransitive in the relevant McCain quote, and so this is (probably) neither an instance of a parasitic gap nor of "across-the-board movement, coupled with right node raising out of a coordinate structure". There were various good attempts by others to show that it is actually an example of one or the other, though, of course under the assumption that swallow hard is, or at least could be, transitive (one reader even urged me not to concede defeat — even though I hadn't, I had only admitted to planting a trick question). Thanks to those commenters who accepted that the 'intransitive camp' had a point but that they'd like to give the quiz a go on the terms that I laid out.

Ever wonder what Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" would look like overlaid with electronic text markup? Well, wonder no more!

(Source text here.)

Sarah Palin's accent has elicited a great deal of curiosity, and now Slate has posted a well-researched analysis by the OED's Jesse Sheidlower. Here's the first paragraph:

Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for vice president, many people have made comments about her unusual speech, comparing it to accents heard in the movie Fargo, in the states of Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada. Some have even attributed her manner of speaking to her supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has an Alaskan accent, one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region, where Palin's hometown, Wasilla, is located.

A more impressionistic take, with commentary by Rosina Lippi-Green (author of English with an Accent) appeared yesterday on Politico.

"Canada PM faces plagiarism claim", says the BBC. And indeed some copying certainly occurred — in addition to comparing the texts, the story juxtaposes and then overlays video of a speech made by Australian PM John Howard on March 18, 2003, with video of a speech made by Canadian politician (and now PM) Stephen Harper. Here's a bit of the overlaid audio:

But as the story makes clear, the copying was actually done by Harper's then speechwriter, one Owen Lippert:

A Canadian Conservative Party speech-writer has resigned after Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of plagiarism in a speech he made in 2003.

Owen Lippert admitted he had been "overzealous in copying segments" of a speech in support of the invasion of Iraq by then Australian PM John Howard.

Mr Lippert said neither his superiors nor Mr Harper, who was opposition leader at the time, had been aware.