Language Log

At one point toward the end of my post (here) on the Blagojevich affair, I made a bad linguistic mistake. And on a cute and moderately interesting point. In brief (I have little time this morning), for unknown reasons but in a fairly well studied way, expletive insertion inside words in English works prosodically only when there is a weak stress somewhere before the insertion point and a strong stress immediately after it: I'm not going to KALama-fuckin'-ZOO!. It doesn't work when there is only an unstressed syllable before (so ^?I'm not going to Chi-fuckin'-CAgo is nowhere near as good, because Chi- is too light), and it is hopeless when the stress (say, because it is on the first syllable) has to precede the insertion (*I'm not going to ABi-fuckin'-lene). The remaining details will quite probably be explained here by one of the Language Log phonologists (you could even read quite a bit about the details in a paper by Arnold Zwicky and me, item no. 124 here). Here's my mistake: I don't know Serbian, and I get my news mainly from print. And at the point when I wrote, I thought the name was Blago-JE-vich. It isn't. It's Bla-GO-jevich. The readers who have objected in comments on Ben's latest post are correct: I put the insultingly inserted expletive into his name in the wrong place.

Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness: "somehow you don't get the measure of Rod Blagofuckinjevich's coarseness and contempt for the public by merely learning that he regarded his gubernatorial privilege as valuable; 'a fuckin' valuable thing' gets across more of the flavor of the man." Quite true. On the other hand, Americans have gotten so used to reading between the bleeps that it's still possible to appreciate (and satirize) Blago's coarseness in censored mode. Nightly satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have already taken their shots, and now Saturday Night Live plays on his bleepability. [We had a link to the video here, but it has been killed off by an NBC copyright claim.]

According to a recently-released glossary, that's the official Yoruba translation of "notification area", which is "the area on the right side of the Windows taskbar [that] contains shortcuts to programs and important status information".

About four years ago, I discussed an article in the NYT that dealt (in a confused and confusing way) with issues of endangered language preservation, mother-tongue literacy, and computer access in Africa ("African language computer farrago", 11/13/2004). The featured project was Tunde Adegbola's work with the African Languages Technology Initiative (ALT-i).

A post on the Yoruba Affairs newsgroup, which I subscribe to, recently announced that (a draft of?) the Yoruba Glossary for Microsoft's Language Interface Pack has just been released, as a partnership between ALT-i and Microsoft Unlimited Potential (whose acronym is, of course, "UP", not "MUP"). At 196 pages and 2000-3000 terms, this is a substantial document.

An article in The Economist's latest issue is a bit more revealing about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's corrupt private chats than the more prudish print and broadcast media have been so far.

"Fire those fuckers," he said of those who wrote critical editorials about him at the Chicago Tribune, and threatened to hurt the paper financially if it did not oblige. "If they don't perform, fuck 'em", he said of an effort to squeeze contributions from a state contractor. But the most stunning charge is that Mr Blagojevich, who can appoint a nominee to hold Mr Obama's seat in the Senate until the scheduled election is held in 2010, wanted to sell the seat to the highest bidder. (The governor called the seat "a fucking valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing" and is alleged to have sought to get a big job in return for it.) . . . The complaint also alleges that Mr Blagojevich knew whom Mr Obama wanted to see in the seat, apparently his close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, and was less than happy ("fuck them") that all he would get in return for giving her the seat would be "appreciation".

Americans don't think well of people who talk like this when they have important roles in public life. That means that a small additional offense by such individuals may go unnoticed: their hypocrisy in being elected on fair words and clean talk and then relaxing into a very different foul-mouthed persona once in the job. By censoring even mentions of the taboo vocabulary of such hypocrites, the mainstream press helps to protect them. Less of the evidence of what they're like gets out there.

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

Kathryn Burlingham wrote a few days ago:

I'm thinking "withe" should be a recognized contraction [of "with the"]. Happens to me all the time. 

adding, in mail yesterday:

I can tell you it isn't just a typing phenomenon. I find it in my handwritten things all the time.

This is a type of error in writing/typing known as telescoping: a sequence of two words with some common material at their juncture (TH in this case) is produced as a single word with only one instance of the shared material. (There are more complex cases of telescoping, but this type is especially easy to understand.) And the error is indeed frequent. Searching on "withe" gets over a million raw hits, but most of them are irrelevant. Still, there are plenty of telescoped examples in there.

A few days ago I posted about (among other things) the snowclonelet "X virgin", conveying (roughly) 'someone who hasn't experienced X'. I reported there on two instances with sexual content: "oral virgin" and "anal virgin". There are others, including the fuller versions "oral sex virgin" and "anal sex virgin", the variants "blowjob virgin" and "butt-sex virgin", the pair "gay-sex virgin" and "straight sex virgin", the electronic "phone sex virgin", "cyber-sex virgin", and "Skype sex virgin", plus "pornography virgin" and "porn virgin". No doubt there are more.

Then W Shore wrote to say:

I hope it won't be long before, just as the "electric guitar" created the "acoustic guitar", we begin to hear about "sex virgins." Much like, "I'm a chocoholic, but for alcohol".

The suggestion is that the widespread use of "X virgin" will incline people to create the retronym "sex virgin" (similar to "acoustic guitar" and "analog watch"). And it's happened; here's a clear example:

I'm 15 years old and i am a sex virgin. i get vaginal flatulance … (link)

There are probably more to be found, but they're very hard to search for; "sex virgin" pulls up vast amounts of irrelevant stuff (plus some of the "X virgin" examples above).

Listening to Weekend America on my way back from a holiday party on Saturday, I heard one of the best noun phrases I think I've ever heard (uttered by WA host John Moe). Coincidentally, it's in this short segment on holiday parties and cocktails, very near the beginning in fact, so take a listen if you care to. Here's the noun phrase in context:

This time of year weekends are a time for holiday parties, and all the traditions that go along with holiday parties. You know, the sweaters that you only wear just that one time of year, the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through but you kinda smile and fake your way through…

For some time now I have been in syntactic pain over what appeared to be a TV show in the UK with a completely ungrammatical title. It's a competitive ballroom dancing show on BBC TV, compered by the octogenarian Bruce Forsyth (who after what must be half a century on TV is still using his catchphrase greeting "Nice to see you, to see you, nice" every single time he confronts a camera). The name of the show is Strictly Come Dancing.

I was baffled by it. It doesn't seem to have a parse at all. You simply can't use a manner adverb like strictly to modify an invitation like "Come dancing". What on earth was going on? It was many months before I realized that almost certainly Wikipedia would reveal all for me, if I just swallowed my foolish pride and looked the show up. Wikipedia — always great on showbiz topics — did not let me down. And I could have kicked myself.

Yesterday, I took a quick poll of a few small English-language texts, to see how often future-time meanings were expressed in various tensed-verb forms ("Alternative futures", 12/11/2008). My conclusion was that by far the commonest method in written American English is to use forms of the modal auxiliary will; but that in spoken American English, other alternatives are closer to even with it. However, my sample was too small to draw any very reliable quantitative conclusions.

So this morning, I'm doing another Breakfast Experiment™ to try to get better numbers, at least for some of the alternatives in the spoken language.

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

Just in time for the holiday season: The Linguists educational DVD! According to the announcement on the LINGUIST List, it "includes 30 minutes of DVD extras profiling endangered languages around the world and efforts to archive and revive them; and a discussion guide created by Dr. K. David Harrison and the Center for Applied Linguistics."

The catch, of course, is that this DVD was produced for educational purposes, which somehow makes the price a whopping $300. But c'mon, you know you want one.

PC and Pixel for 12/11/2008 (link sent in by Michael Erlewine) :