Language Log

Let's try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long, expressing a cogent and interesting point about an important issue — say this one from a story in today's New York Times: "But the billions in new proposed American aid, officials acknowledge, could free other money for Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure, at a time when Pakistani officials have expressed concern that their nuclear program is facing a budget crunch for the first time, worsened by the global economic downturn."

Now call your friend up on the phone, and have a discussion about the topic of the article. In the course of this conversation, slip in a verbatim performance of the selected sentence. Then ask your friend to write an essay on the topic of the discussion. (OK, this is a thought experiment, right?)

How likely is it that the selected sentence will find its way, word for word, into your friend's essay?

It is by no means easy to understand headlines in your native language if you cross into a new cultural area, e.g. by crossing the Atlantic. And as headlines go, this one does fairly well at illustrating utter unintelligibility:

GERS’ KIRK IN EGG BLAST

It took up nearly half of the front page of The Scottish Sun on May 15 (the right hand side of the page being reserved for a photo of the upper body of the newly crowned and daringly dressed Miss Scotland).

Now, Gers looks like it could be short for "Germans", right? And kirk is an old Scots word for a church. If religion is involved, the egg is probably a human one. Blast is often used in newspaper headlines for a furious denunciation or excoriating memo. So… an old Scottish church taken over by a congregation of pro-choice German Protestant immigrants has been the target for an angry newsletter article by a Catholic archbishop over the question of whether a newly fertilized ovum counts for moral purposes as a human being. That could be it, right? But perhaps you don't want me to tell you. Perhaps you'd rather guess.

I last posted about spam comments on New Language Log in September, when the spam queue was nearing 9,000 items. Now it's over 77,000, and there have been waves of spam of many different types. We do get spam comments that take a moment's thought to discard. To start with, they're grammatical (while in the old days, many of the spam comments were entertainingly ungrammatical), but then they betray their spamminess by a cluster of properties: they are comments on postings from some time before; they have no real content, but merely say something congratulatory (like "Great site!"); and the URI they provide is to a commercial site (sometimes this is immediately obvious, but sometimes it takes some checking).

There are four parts to this very long post:  1. a message from a Shanghainese mother explaining her attitude toward the language she speaks with her little daughter, 2. the use of Shanghainese in the poster that I discussed in my previous post, 3. non-Mandarin college entrance exams, 4. an important resource for those interested in Wu topolects.

In writing a few days ago about "Word Attraction" — the irrational exuberance that particular words sometimes inspire — I failed to note the possibility that emotion might be associated with the pronunciation of particular words by particular people. This morning, I'll try to track down a specific example that I've wondered about for some time.

The specific speaker in question is the Reverend George Whitefield (1714-1770), whose statue is visible from my dining-room window. (The sculptor, R. Tait McKenzie, was a physician, a Penn professor, and a boyhood friend of James Naismith, the inventor of the game of basketball.)

Whitefield was a much-traveled evangelical preacher, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, who played an indirect part in the beginnings of the University of Pennsylvania.  In implementing his 1749 Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, Benjamin Franklin made use of a partly finished "New Building" that had been put up in 1740 to give Whitefield a place to preach.

Whitefield's published sermons seem rather ordinary — the printed texts don't convey, at least to me, what Benjamin Franklin called "the extraordinary influence of his oratory". Specifically, I recall reading somewhere that Whitefield could make audience-members faint merely by saying the word 'Mesopotamia'; and so today I thought I'd try to track down this story to its source.

Barbara and I, having both seen so many Star Trek episodes, both from the first (Shatner) series and the second (Stewart) series, couldn't resist going to see the new prequel movie Star Trek at a huge cinema in London's Leicester Square the other day. (My god, is THX sound loud these days. Take earplugs unless you are fully accustomed to the sound of a full-scale artillery bombardment. We forgot to.) Of course, this is Language Log, not Science Fiction Movie Log, so to even mention it here I need a linguistic hook. And I don't have a really good one: there are no alien tongues like Klingon in this film (unless you count the young Chekhov's sometimes rather heavy Russian accent), and although I spotted some discreet rewording of the famous "seek out new life" prologue, recited before the closing credits, there's nothing very interesting. But I did notice one tiny thing: a sign on a big assembly of tubes and tanks in the bowels of the Enterprise that said "INERT REACTANT". I hate to be a pedant here (that's my day job), but really, was there no one on the set who could point out that a chemical substance is inert if and only if it cannot be a reactant? Am I wrong, chemists?

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to a topic last aired there in 2007: the alternation between and and zero in numerical expressions like "two hundred (and) six" (in speech and in writing), in particular when they are used as determiners, as in "two hundred (and) six elephants". These discussions quickly range over a variety of types of numerical expressions, uses of them, and contexts for these uses. Plus a lot of back-and-forth about the acceptability of the variants.

Several sorts of numerical expressions recur in these discussions, among them those expressing a whole number plus a fraction, and those in the related case of a dollar amount plus a cent amount. Until this morning, I'd attributed the appearance of these cases (which seemed to me to be irrelevant to case above) to simple thread drift, one phenomenon reminding people of phenomena that are similar to it in some respect. But then Russ McClay posted a collection of net discussions that suggested to me that something much more interesting — something familiar to me from discussions of other alternations — is going on.

Sally Thomason's puzzling comma-spotting reminds me of Louis Aragon's ambiguous invitation to his readers:

Je demande à ce que mes livres soient critiqués avec la dernière rigueur, par des gens qui s'y connaissent, et qui sachant la grammaire et la logique, chercheront sous le pas de mes virgules les poux de ma pensée dans la tête de mon style.

Or as translated in the Columbia dictionary of quotations:

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Oliver Lutz Radtke is the host of the popular Website called "The Chinglish Files by olr." He has a brand new book out that is entitled More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues.  Aside from the fact that it offers an entertaining compilation of photographs, the reason I'm calling More Chinglish:  Speaking in Tongues to your attention is that it includes (pp. 9-11) an interview of me by Oliver.  The interview spells out clearly why I believe that the collection and explication of Chinglish specimens is a worthy endeavor.  Although I haven't made many recent posts about Chinglish, especially not those of the more outlandish and challenging sort, I intend to do so in the coming weeks and months, and the interview provides the justification for not avoiding the study of Chinglish altogether.

Over the years, several LL posts have documented the irrational aversion that people sometimes feel to certain words — a strong negative reation that is apparently not related to the meaning, or to any alleged fault in grammar or usage, but to the sound or feel of the word itself. (See the links in "Moist aversion: the cartoon version", 8/27/2008, for a review of this strange phenomenon.)

I've been meaning for some time to take up the question of whether there's a positive counterpart to word aversion, an irrational lexical exuberance that we might call "word attraction". To that end, I've been saving up Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur for 11/28/2005, where Danae & Joe exhibit a candidate behavior:

I may have imagined it, but this is what I thought I saw yesterday morning at about 6:15, written as graffiti on a wall in Washington, DC (unless the Metro train was still zipping through Silver Spring at the time):

MORE MORE MORE MORE COMMA COMMA COMMA COMMA MORE MORE MORE MORE

The reason I think I might have misread it is that it seems so unlikely that a graffiti artist would be inspired to paint an apparent plea for more punctuation.

An article today’s NY Times and another in WalesOnline tell us about a linguist in Wales who was praised for discovering that a murderer — who had been having an affair with his victim — unconsciously revealed his identity as the writer of a fake text message that included either the phrases, “need to sort my head out” and “sorting my life out” (according to WalesOnline) or “sorted her life out” and “head sorted out” (according  to the NY Times). Regardless of which quotation is accurate (assuming that one of them got it right), this can sound like something from an ill-conceived TV cop show and hardly something that would cause the linguist to “jump out of” his skin.

Obituary in the New York Times, Monday 11 May:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto

She died on 30 April at her home in Banstead, Surrey.