Language Log

Do not prop open this door for security reasons, says a sign on the inside of the side door to a garage full of delivery trucks on Haste Street in Berkeley. (Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the door was propped open with a traffic cone.) And then it goes on:

Failure to do so will result in disciplinary actions.

But… failure to do what? What has gone wrong here?

One thing on which I would appreciate help from a copy editor, if there is a single one still prepared to talk to me after my latest dumb copy editor story, is how to write the name of the worthy profession that I have so cruelly mocked for just occasionally displaying pointless tone-deaf bossiness. I currently write "copy editor". But I notice that some of my commenters (even those claiming to be or to have been copy editors) write "copyeditor", and others "copy-editor". I wouldn't want to be out of step with the literate world. This is basically a spelling convention, and I have no axe to grind, and I'm perfectly prepared to go along with current literate practice, once I know what it is. I did just one quick experiment to see if I was way off base: I searched the familiar 44 million words of 1987-1989 Wall Street Journal files (they have become much beloved of computational linguists for testing parsers and so on since Mark Liberman on behalf of the Association for Computational Linguistics obtained them for scientific use in 1993), and simply counted the hits. The modest results of this 60-second survey work with grep are as follows:

So that looks like an overwhelming, knock-down, drag-out victory for my present policy. (A couple of the 12 hits supporting me seem to be repetitions; but even so, it's a win.) However, perhaps someone has some good, clear evidence that this is misleading data and my spelling should be revised. I am fully prepared to accept guidance.

Given the importance of religion in Sarah Palin's life, it's not surprising that her ways of talking are full of echoes or allusions that others may not understand or even notice. Earlier today I discussed her phrase "I know that I know that I know this is the right thing for Alaska".  The same interview contained a phrase that may well allude to the book of Esther.

A few days ago, I was puzzled by the triple know in one of Gov. Mark Sanford's interviews:

Everybody's got their own value system, but to me, even if it's a place that I could never go, if I wanted to know that I knew that I knew, if that's more important to me than running for president, that's my prerogative as a human being.

I wondered whether he might be exhibiting an unexpected run of multiple-target speech errors (compare "the biggest self of self is self" from his earlier press conference). But a commenter, William Ockham, set me straight:

"To know that you know that you know" is a stock phrase in fundamentalist evangelical speech that's used to make an experiential claim about a supernatural reality. "To know" something is to have learned about it. "To know that you know" is to be certain of something you've learned. "To know that you know that you know" is to be certain of something because you learned it by experiencing it directly.

I think Sanford is saying that he went to Argentina because he believed that he had discovered true love and wanted to be certain of that, even if it went against his own moral code.

Today's news brings another example of the same construction, this time from Sarah Palin.

According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009:

In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making.

That would be \$4,623.51 per editor-year,  if none of the \$3.5M went for typesetters, pencils, rent, or other expenses.  And if I'm reading this CPI table right, the ratio of today's prices to those of 1960 is around 213.856/29.5, or about 7.25 to 1; so in today's dollars, the yearly per-editor costs would be around \$33,520. Apparently lexicographers worked cheap in those days.

The new dictionary in question was Webster's Third New International (Unabridged), and as Skinner explains,

It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals.

The party to have been at last night, I mean the place for a linguist to be seen, was Larry Hyman's house in Berkeley for the gathering that welcomed the faculty of the Linguistic Institute that the Linguistic Society of America is running on the Berkeley campus of the University of California for the next six weeks. Mingling in this star-studded cast of what seemed like hundreds and was certainly scores of the finest linguists in the world, I ran across George Lakoff, who told me the best Dumb Copy Editor story I have ever heard. I like Dumb Copy Editor stories, as you know; but this one is so good I think it takes the prize. I will reveal all below the jump.

Last Thursday morning's little project was tracing the word linguablog ('blog about matters related to language and linguistics') and the related nouns linguablogger and linguablogging. As so often happens with such projects, it turned out to be fairly challenging and developed an offshoot, on innovative ling– vocabulary.

The ordinary-language meaning of technical terms often wanders far from home, following paths of connotative association and denotative opportunity. We've followed the semantic travels of "passive voice" through meanings like "vague about agency", "stylistically listless", and "failure to take sides". I recently read that writers should "Use an active voice (putting things in present/future) instead of a passive voice (putting things in the past)".

The terminology of the "autism spectrum" seems to have started a similar journey through successive steps of family resemblance.

Somehow a discussion of language universals ends up with fart noises:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

In today's Doonesbury, Zonker riffs on the "no word for X" meme:

Near the end of 1801, his first year as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, containing a page encrypted according to a new method. Patterson described his cryptosystem in detail, and boasted that without the key — which he didn't provide — decryption of his message would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race".

After more than 200 years, the code was finally broken by Dr. Lawren Smithline, a mathematician at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., using a technique originally developed for biological sequence comparison.

This could be the premise for a new Dan Brown novel, if Patterson's message were sufficiently bizarre and consequential.

The NLTK book, Natural Language Processing with Python, went on sale yesterday:

"This book is here to help you get your job done." I love that line (from the preface). It captures the spirit of the book. Right from the start, readers/users get to do advanced things with large corpora, including information-rich visualizations and sophisticated theory implementation. If you've started to see that your research would benefit from some computational power, but you have limited (or no) programming experience, don't despair — install NLTK and its data sets (it's a snap), then work through this book.

This is a long-overdue follow-up to my post (from April 26), announcing the availability of the film The Linguists on Babelgum.com. A couple things that I failed to point out in that post: first, the version of the film on Babelgum is the DVD version, not the slightly shorter cut that has aired on PBS; second, there are several additional clips that you can watch separately on Babelgum that are on the DVD. Search for "the linguists" on Babelgum and you'll find links to the trailer, the film, and the additional clips. These are all available for some unspecified limited period, so watch 'em now if you're interested.

What I'm really following up on here, though, is this comment by Jesse Tseng.

I was struck by this sentence [in the film, spoken by David Harrison–eb]:

I don't see how you can justify devoting your research career to the syntax of French (a language with millions of speakers), when the skills that you possess could help document a language that is going to go extinct within your lifetime.

Hmm. The fieldwork skills I possess would make me go extinct long before any tribal language I helped to document. And good luck doing any syntax at all with your 15 sentences of Kallawaya…

Seriously, I was disappointed to hear this gratuitous swipe at the colleagues down the hall. I would like to believe that we are all engaged in a common endeavor, with the same justifications. And when linguistics departments get cut, all the sub-fields of linguistics go down together. Or are they hoping that the money then gets funneled into Anthropology?