Language Log

The other day on NPR's "Marketplace," Robert Hass tells me, a Wall Street analyst said that Obama "has to show Americans that he is making strident progress toward stabilizing the credit crisis." A new one on me, but Google turns up about 100 hits for strident progress, 50 or so for strident advances, and almost 400 for strident growth, the great majority of them suggesting simply "great" or "impressive," with no intimation of shrillness or unpleasantness:

Today, some of the most strident advances in technology overall have been in the arena of forecasting… (CBS3, Springfield, Mass.)

Sizzler made strident progress throughout the 1980s, blossoming into a vibrant enterprise. (Worldwide Restaurant Concepts, Inc.)

The failure of real gains to trickle down the income scale has been mitigated by… a strident expansion of public sector activities and the public funding of employment within the public and private sectors. (Economic Research Council, UK)

The shares are trading on about 23 times forecast 2007 earnings, but there is no sign that Capita's strident growth is likely to slow. (The Telegraph)

Quite a few of the hits seem to be from Asian English-language  sources, but as the examples above show, the phenomenon is pretty widespread. And it goes back quite a while: a 1922 collection of items by the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor includes the item

"SINCE her tour of the Pacific Coast," declares a Berkeley bulletin, "Miss Case has made strident advances in her art." The lady, it appears, sings.

Is this just the influence of "making strides," or is there some way to get here from the literal meaning of strident?

Today's F-minus:

[Hat tip: Josh Rosenberg]

Part of your first sense of what a country is like comes from what is said to you by the first person you meet as you cross the border and present yourself to passport control. I wonder if immigration officers realize just how large the effects of their speech acts (or lack thereof) can be. When my friend Polly and I crossed from Finland into Russia by train a few years ago, the skinny young men in military uniforms who boarded the train looked fierce and suspicious. They demanded our passports and took them away with unpleasant scowls. Returning them silently twenty minutes later, they wore expressions that seemed to say, "We found nothing, but you look undesirable, and it makes us angry that we have to admit scum like you to defile our great country." Russia seems like a truly unwelcoming place. By contrast, coming back into Finland from Russia a few days later we were met by relaxed and friendly passport officials who took a quick glance at our passports, handed them back with a warm smile, and said: "Welcome to Finland!" A small courtesy, costing nothing, but after Russia it made Finland seem a totally wonderful place. Even Finland, however, was topped by Scotland this morning, when I returned bleary-eyed to the Edinburgh airport having flown straight through from Taiwan via Bangkok and Amsterdam. I handed over my passport, open at the page with the photo and date of birth, and the woman behind the desk glanced at it very quickly and slapped it down on the glass of the scanner. And while she waited a couple of seconds for the machine to read the data, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, "Happy birthday."

A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009):

So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t.

Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” is not the perfect choice of words for a guy with Rush’s background.

Ms. Collins' source for the Rush Limbaugh quote is Jonathan Martin, "Rush Job: Inside Dems' Limbaugh Plan", 3/4/2009:

Limbaugh is embracing the line of attack, suggesting a certain symbiosis between him and his political adversaries.

"The administration is enabling me,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence.

I agree that enabling is an odd word for El Rushbo to choose, given his well-publicized struggles with drug addiction. The new negative sense of enable and its derivatives has so nearly overwhelmed the older positive or neutral meanings, at least in the construction he used,  that Ms. Collins doesn't even need to remind her readers about it.

It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity" (sometimes stated as a proverbial equivalence: "The Chinese say that crisis is opportunity" or "…in crisis lies opportunity").

With or without the "danger" element, the trope is a favored rhetorical gesture by politicians and other public figures looking to pivot from pessimism to optimism. The roster of prominent American trope-users includes John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Condoleezza Rice, and Al Gore (a repeat offender). Now President Obama joins the list, but thankfully he omits the largely bogus framing device about Chinese hanzi (along with the "danger").

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a paper on terminological difficulties surrounding the classification of Sinitic languages entitled "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect'?  Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms," Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 1991), 1-31.  (Available online at http://www.sino-platonic.org/)  In that paper, I did not go deeply into the question of the utility of mutual intelligibility for determining the difference between a language and a dialect, mainly because it is a red hot can of worms, but also because people say such nonsensical things as that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  Now, in preparation for updating my 1991 paper, I would like to revisit the matter of mutual intelligibility to see whether it can somehow be salvaged for purposes of taxonomic classification.

Amazingly, the US Secretary of State could not locate anyone on her staff capable of finding out the Russian word that appears on reset buttons. Mrs Clinton offered Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, a gift-wrapped red button bearing the legend "Reset" in English and "Peregruzka" in Russian. Fox News reports it here under a "Clinton Goofs" headline, because peregruzka doesn't mean "reset": it means "overcharged" or "overloaded". The word they were supposed to have printed on the device was "perezagruzka". (Slavicists in Language Log's East European and Eurasian department are checking this out now; I offer this hasty note from my hotel room in the SCTTPKMCT, where I have no Russian reference materials.) Mr Lavrov did not let the slip lie; he pointed it out in public. Even more amazingly, the Clinton adviser Philippe Reines is reported to have protested that the word they printed "is only a couple letters off." Not much of a linguistic story, really, but Mr Lavrov did make one linguistic point out of it, commenting (according to The New York Times) that it illustrated the need to teach Russian in the United States and English in Russia.

Eric Bakovic reports that an obituary for Yuki Kuroda "will soon appear on LINGUIST List, but it is already on our department website along with some remembrances (still being updated), a bibliography, and other things": here.

Several people have drawn my attention to a harmonic convergence of LL topics on CNN.com today: social media, gender-neutral pronouns, and linguistic time machines. The article is Elizabeth Landau, "On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?", and Ms. Landau is worried that English will be unable to reach the epicene ideal, due to fundamental principles of linguistics:

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "they" is grammatically incorrect. […]

It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.

Last night, Li-ching asked me to correct an English story that she had written.  When I got to the part about "a hunter and his laifor," I was stumped.  Did Li-ching know some obscure English word that I had never heard of?

After thinking about "laifor" for a brief moment, I had a vague recollection that she had used the same expression many years ago, so she was at least being consistent.  But I still couldn't figure out what she meant by "laifor."  His "wife"?  His "life(r)"?

Before you turn the page and I tell you what "laifor" means, please try to guess.  Mind you, you actually have a bit of context — "the hunter."

Fev at Headsup: The Blog has followed up his post on Britosphere headline culture ("Hed noun pileup of the morning", 2/24/2009), and my comments ("UK death crash fetish?", 3/1/2009), with "Nude pic row vicar resigns", which features great noun strings like "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a brain surgeon who tried to get the dying George Harrison to sign a guitar), and "Kid porn shame councillor".

My current trip to the Far East has now brought me to… well, the question is how to name the country for you and preserve strict political correctness. We could perhaps call it the SCTTPKMCT for short. I pointed out once before on Language Log that one of the many versions of its name is the longest official country name in the world. Since I've already identified the general region of the world that I'm in, you should be able to guess it without even clicking that link.

Tim Footman in the Guardian offers us a routine of standard-issue over-the-top retching about pronunciations other than his own. He pretends to get so overwrought on hearing someone saying mis-chiev-i-ous on BBC Radio 4 that he shouts at the radio (while temporarily so deranged that he is unable to tell that he was the person shouting), and needs a cup of orange verbena tea to calm him down. He purports to go to the toilet and retch into the bowl when he hears someone say schedule with initial [sk-]. It's interesting that he is so linguistically unsophisticated that he doesn't know the difference between what is standard American (as opposed to British) and what is non-standard. It's the same with his commenters. It applies both to pronunciations (like schedule with [sk-]) and spellings (a commenter objects to program). The mis-chiev-i-ous pronunciation is non-standard (see the Merriam-Webster dictionary). So is somethink for "something", which he also objects to. But that is not the case with schedule (or the spelling program). Tim Footman would have us believe that he experiences actual nausea when listening to someone who does not have shed as the first syllable of the word schedule. He doesn't seem to realize that it's not just an idiosyncrasy of a class of people who don't talk right (which I suppose you could say about mis-chiev-i-ous, if you are feeling uppity and intolerant). The [sk-] is standard for American pronunciations of schedule, and common among Canadians; it's only British speakers who mostly favour the shed version of that first syllable. The [sk-] speakers must number in the hundreds of millions. Tim Footman is going to spend a lot of time on the floor of the bathroom talking to Ralph on the big white phone.