Language Log

The millionth-word saga, speaking of bogosity, continues.

Whatever would we do without the hardworking investigative journalists employed by major newspapers like the Telegraph? Or the "100 years of journalistic excellence" at UPI?

Last week, at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding the syntactic and semantic scope of knowingly in 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), the English High Court decided, in effect, to insert wide-scope knowingly into a newspaper Op-Ed piece.

A couple of weeks ago, the Schott's Vocab column in the NYT featured a request for "Family Phrases". This reminded me of a work that I recently read about (along with many other interesting things) in Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science.   It's a shame that Prof. Merton is not alive to see that Contributions towards a glossary of the Glynne language, by a student", privately printed in 1851, is now available on line (along with many other interesting things) through Google Books.  

Last month the phrase potty parity appeared on the front page of the New York Times (13 April), in connection with laws designed to provide (roughly) equal treatment for women and men in the provision of toilets in public places (arenas, concert halls, and the like). The substantive issue is interesting in itself, and complex: merely supplying the same number of toilet stalls for women and men won't do for obvious reasons, so the question is how to balance things out, and doing that in a reasonable way will depend on the ratios of women and men in various venues. (There's a brief Wikipedia page.)

But I'm talking here in my linguist voice, and what attracted me about the story was the everyday poetry of potty parity.

For the upcoming 2009 Book Expo in New York, the Perseus Book Group (of which my publisher PublicAffairs is a member), has organized a project to collaboratively create and publish a book in as many formats as possible within 48 hours. The text of the book will consist of submissions from the public of the first sentence of a yet-to-be published sequel of some well known book — A Tale of Three Cities, To Fricassee a Mockingbird; you get the picture. Submissions are welcome.

Since I sort of suggested this idea to them, I got roped into writing the introduction to the book, and also felt obliged to make a contribution. Inasmuch as The Elements of Style has been on the minds of everybody around here recently, I had the idea of imagining how Pope would have dealt with the work in a sequel to the Essay on Criticism. I had intended to write just a few introductory couplets, but at a certain point the whole world started speaking in iambic pentameter, and the thing just growed.

An Essay on Criticism II

By Alexander Pope

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do’t.
The Author of a Thriller or Romance
Envisions Strings of Noughts in his Advance,
A Shot on Oprah, front-page Times Review,
Three-movie Deal, and Pad in Malibu.

The Language Critick must console himself
With Dreams of lasting Life upon the Shelf;
For Fame, tho’ most inconstant in her Favor
To USAGE BOOKS, routinely grants a Waiver.
Few Men the slightest Memory retain
Of Edna Ferber, Thomas B. Costain,
Ernest K. Gann, or others once the Rage
With Readers in the Eisenhower Age.
Yet Fortune even now bestows her Smile
On Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style,
Still teaching to new Dogs its antique Tricks,
At Amazon.com Rank 206.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

You'd think it was the end of the world. Apparently, the Nuance Communications-powered text-to-speech system on the new Amazon Kindle mispronounces Barack Obama's name, saying something like "buh-RACK oh-BAM-uh" instead of "buh-ROCK oh-BAH-muh". Why is this little tidbit worth a piece in the business/media section of The New York Times? The answer is, it's not. It could have been an OK lead-in to a technology piece about how text-to-speech systems work, and how they can fail — often spectacularly — on unknown words, especially names. Granted, adding the (pronunciation of the) name of a political figure such as Barack Obama to the system's dictionary is a simple enough thing to do (which is how Nuance will in fact fix the problem, if it hasn't already), and it was clearly an oversight worth pointing out to the company. But then again, the version of Firefox I'm using right now (3.0.4 for the Mac) has been underlining both of the President's names in what I have been typing thus far, incorrectly guessing that I'm misspelling something, and I'll bet you won't see some NYT reporter wasting their time on such a triviality.

In spite of President Obama's stated opposition to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, the Army has fired another gay "linguist", Lieutenant Dan Choi, an openly gay infantry patrol leader fluent in Arabic. No doubt the resulting surge in morale in his unit will overcome the loss of its ability to communicate with the local population. :)

I send daily cards (by snail mail) to a small number of friends. Mostly I just write about what I've been doing, which these days means a kind of log of my postings (Language Log, my blog, ADS-L, mostly). I realized a few weeks ago that I sometimes said

I posted yesterday to X

(where X is the place the posting appeared, not the topic of the posting), sometimes

I posted yesterday on X

and sometimes

I posted yesterday in X

and that my choices seemed essentially whimsical. There were to cards and in cards and on cards, but I was certainly not making some distinction in truth-functional meaning; in my cards I wrote the three variants pretty much interchangeably (though I tended to be consistent on any particular card).

Language Log readers in London might be interested to know that I'm speaking to the Philological Society at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow (Friday, May 8). The meeting is in room 116 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG. The details are here.

According to the BBC News ("Quarantine for lonely Afghan pig", 5/7/2009)

Afghanistan's only known pig has been quarantined because of fears over swine flu, officials from Kabul Zoo say. […]

The director of the zoo, Aziz Gul Saqib, says the pig, whose name is Khanzir, is strong and healthy.

Stephen Jones, who sent in the link, comments:

Well, there's only one of them in the whole country so he's hardly likely to suffer from identity theft, but you'd think the BBC correspondent would have picked up on the fact that 'khanzir' means pig in Arabic (what it is in Pashto I don't have the least idea).

Anya Lunden wrote me yesterday with an instance of "who or whom", from commenter i_am_right on Jon Carroll's San Francisco Chronicle column:

We still don't know who or whom the Zodiac killer is or was … (link)

Lunden wondered whether the writer was using whom to convey some category distinction, like gender (or, in some of the examples below, number), or whether the writer was just wrestling with the problem of choosing who or whom in this context. I'm inclined to the latter idea. But first a little more data.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

Thought the LangLog would like to hear this week's update on the the Supreme Court case involving adverbial modification argued in February: all nine justices agree with the linguists! The decision is posted, but briefly, the money quote is:

"In ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence."

It is so ordered…