Language Log

Language Log made the pages of the Seattle Examiner yesterday, in a piece by Benjamin Lukoff, "International District's NP Hotel makes Language Log linguistics blog", about my "The syntacticians' hotel" posting and its follow-up.

Lukoff is no stranger to linguistics: the son of the late distinguished linguist Fred Lukoff (at the University of Washington), he is also an occasional contributor to the American Dialect Society's mailing list.

My waggish friend Steven Levine sent me, a little while back, a page from a grade school workbook on writing (I don't know which one, nor do I much care; this page is a not at all remarkable instance of the workbook genre). Here's the text of exercise 125, "Interesting Sentences":

A good sentence should be interesting.

"I have a dog" is not a good sentence with which to begin a story. [Note the very formal fronted preposition; no stranded prepositions! Possibly the writer of this sentence genuinely believes that "preposition at end" is ungrammatical, or maybe the writer is just trying to model "the best grammar" for the kids.] If you are writing a story about your dog that was lost, it would be better to begin the story, "Last week my dog Shep ran away from home."

Can you change the following sentences into interesting sentences? [Note that this is an instruction to change the sentences, not an actual question.]

The sentences are:

1. I have a bicycle.
2. Charlie has a goat.
3. I have a dress.
4. Brother gave me a wagon.
5. I have a pony.
6. My shoes are new.

(and there's a line at the end labeled: My score……………….)

There's a lot that could be said about this exercise, but here are a few observations.

According to Dan Neil, "Selling coffee becomes diacritical for McDonald's", LA Times, 5/4/2009:

McDonald's — never known for a delicate marketing touch — is about to drop the mother of all campaigns on you, an everywhere-you-look, invade-your-dreams ad campaign in support of its McCafé specialty coffee drinks that will be not so much viral as bubonic. An estimated $100-million mega-buy across TV, Web, radio, print, outdoor and social media, the McCafé push beginning today will be, according to the company, its biggest "menu initiative" since it began serving breakfast in the 1970s.

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.

Here's what I heard today on my local National Public Radio station:  "The first American has died of swine flu." And also, for clarification, "The first American has died of H1N1." But who is or was the first American, I mused, heartlessly, while being an asshole in the defenseless Texan evening traffic. Obama? Benjamin Franklin? Some spear-wielding mastodon hunter? At any rate, not the unfortunate woman who just died.

Today's Get Fuzzy (click on the image for a larger version):

My immediate reaction was that "Wait, what?" is an idiom characteristic of American youth — 20-somethings and teenagers.

OK, so Geoff Nunberg plugged his new book here on Language Log. Shamelessly. But in fact he is shy, very shy. He is one of the quiet National Public Radio superstars who move among us invisibly, dynamic and brilliant and yet never recognized in the streets. He could have plugged the fact that he is teaching a course on Language and Public Discourse this summer at Berkeley, in the Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America. You could register, and take that course at an amazingly low fee. But you simply didn't know about it, because he is too shy to mention it. It's 10:30 to 12:15 Mondays and Wednesdays between July 6 and 23. Of course, you would need a course for the afternoon as well; but then (I point this out with all due modesty) you could have a bite of lunch and then take my course on English Grammar from 1:30 to 3:15 on those days. There is a staggering list of heartbreakingly tempting courses by towering geniuses from all subfields of linguistics, in fact. Nearly all of them too shy to tell you how great they are (though I think George Lakoff would hint at it if you pressed him). Shy linguists teaching brilliant courses all summer at low rates in gorgeous northern California. Language Log personalities you could meet in the flesh. This could be the ultimate most fantastic summer of your life, if you just thought to yourself "Carpe diem!," and signed up. Or you could just hang out at home and watch summer reruns on TV of course.

Google reports about 37,000 hits for "shameless plug of/for my" or "shamelessly plugging my," and the total would be a lot bigger if you allowed for variants like "my shameless self-promotion" and so forth. The phrases are much more common now than they were in the old media, mostly because the new media have dramatically increased the opportunities for self-exposure — Google Blogsearch alone turns up more than 4000 hits for the phrases. The vast majority of these are associated with creative works and activities, in a broad sense of the term: people apologize for shamelessly touting their books, TV appearances, t-shirt designs, videos, high-school band performances, blogs, and new CD's. (Others apologize for shamelessly plugging their hairdresser or a PC they have for sale on Ebay, which seems to me a little unclear on the concept — what's to be ashamed of?)

The modifier accomplishes several things at once: it concedes that the self-promotion is an impropriety, but one venial enough to be joked about; and it averts the reader's censure with preemptive self-reproach. It reminds me of the way H. W. Fowler described the use of apologies like "saving the reader's reverence" and "if we may adopt the current slang":  "A refinement on the institution of the whipping boy, by which [writers] not only have the boy, but do the whipping."

My new collection The Years of Talking Dangerously was published today by PublicAffairs.

Here at Language Log, we have several times discussed Li Yang's Crazy
English: Crazy English, Crazy English again, and A Sane Survey of Crazy English. Now there is an excellent movie from Singapore entitled "Mad about English." Here I provide a trailer for the movie and a clip of a phenomenal policeman featured in the film who not only can say "Welcome to Beijing" in more languages than I can count, but who also can talk like a New York gangster. First the multilingual cop:

Fifty years ago, my job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in the rural part of the state of Illinois as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.  The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciation patterns of older residents who had lived in the same general area all their lives. This proved to be  a fascinating experience for a young man who had lived in large cities all his life. But it actually made me a good field interviewer because I knew nothing about farming and other aspects of rural life and this ignorance actually legitimized my rather mundane questions about such things as what the farmers called the utensil they use to fry eggs with, the machinery they use  to reap their harvests, and what  they call their animals. I haven’t done linguistic geography since those halcyon days, but this New York Times article about the controversy over FCC’s crackdown (the Bono Rule) on the use of dirty words brought back some fond memories.

Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones.

I've cited many examples involving journalists or popular authors, most recently with respect to the effects of poverty on working memory ("Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009). But in fact, this is a problem that afflicts everyone, even prize-winning behavioral economists.

A little while ago I posted here about the NP Hotel in Seattle, which inspired readers to suggest other syntactic establishments.

When it comes to matters of the toilet, translators in China seem to reach for the old and arcane.  Perhaps you may recall our "Closestool Encounters" back in March.  And now witness the sign in the following photograph: