Language Log

Griffy and Zippy experience whateverism of an extreme sort:

The Valley in question is the San Fernando Valley of southern California, home of Valspeak, a sociolect made famous by the 1982 Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" (as performed by his daughter Moon Unit Zappa) and the 1983 movie based on it. The song is packed with linguistic features that are (or have become) stereotypes of the variety (especially as used by affluent upper-middle-class young women), but whatever isn't in the song.

Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?"  (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic.  They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by overseas Chinese.)  The article was written by a well-known Singaporean Malay playwright named Alfian Sa'at (he also call himself "Naif" and writes a blog under that name).

Alfian Sa'at's insights on the close relationships between what he correctly terms Southern Chinese languages (such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese) and Malay are very interesting. His observations on how there are almost no similar connections between Mandarin Chinese and Malay are quite thought provoking.  In other words, Alfian Sa'at is saying that Mandarin is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the region and that the inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not have any deep affinity for it.

In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret ("I'm sorry it all happened"), or grudging self-exculpatory conditionals ("If some people think I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry they were upset"), it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

That's how to say it (ignoring the punctuation error — the missing comma after work): not a bunch of evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple "We're sorry."

In the context of concerns about declining civility in American political discourse, Victor Steinbok points to a post at Vukutu on Australian Political Language, which quotes from "Mungo MacCallum’s great book, How to be a Megalomaniac, … a list of the terms of abuse which [former prime minister Paul] Keating  had used against his opponents duing his time in politics":

“harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth.”

"MacCallum notes that this listing is only of terms which Keating used in Federal Parliament, which of course has rules of decorum not applying in the rougher world outside."

Following up on last summer's discussion of Yaourter, Jonathan Rabinowitz sent a pointer to Garance Doré's post "Hello Sunshine" (9/9/2009), which begins

Londres, ville tropicale. Envoyez les ventilos. Il fait un temps splendide. SPLENDIDE !

and ends

Puis je suis montée sur mon échelle avec mes crayons de couleur, j’ai vu mon dessin prendre forme petit à petit, j’ai mis de la musique, et chanté Phoenix en yaourt pendant des heures. Et je n’ai même pas vu la nuit tomber.

Is there any German compound that has motivated more English-language wordplay? Not recently, anyhow. Schadenfreudelicious is not new, but Josh Marshall saw a particularly apt target for it in the misadventures of Michael Duvall ("Late Boffo Scandal Update", 9/9/2009):

The big news of the day was President Obama's address to Congress. But we cannot forget the schadenfreudelicious scandal that got the day off to a roaring start. As you'll remember, California state Rep. Michael Duvall (R-Yorba Linda), a married champion of family values and traditional marriage, was picked up on a live mic at a committee hearing graphically boasting of his sexual encounters with not one but two mistresses (one of whom is a lobbyist with business before his committee).

After first insisting that he thought he was having a "private conversation", which one imagines is true, Duvall resigned his office shortly after noon California time.

The current Questionable Content:

Last week, in the comments to Mark Liberman's post on the mystifying reggae chant at the beginning of Scotty's "Draw Your Brakes," I asked:

Now that we've looked into "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" and this one, what's the next impenetrable pop lyric/chant we should tackle?

KCinDC promptly responded:

How about "goo goo g'joob"? Is it the same as "coo coo ca-choo"?

Ask and ye shall receive. Just in time for the rollout of the Beatles remasters and the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game, my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus takes on "goo goo goo joob" (that's how it appears in the Magical Mystery Tour lyric sheet), "coo coo ca-choo," and, for good measure, "boop-oop-a-doop."

(I'll leave it to Mark to provide the requisite study in syncopation.)

I'm in Brighton for InterSpeech 2009, but unfortunately duties in Philadelphia made it impossible for me to make it here in time to act as a human control in the 2009 Loebner Prize competion, the annual administration of the "Turing Test". As the ISCA Secretariat put it,

We are seeking volunteers to pit themselves against the entries — and prove to the judges just how human they are!

The test involves using a computer interface to chat (type messages) for 5 minutes with a judge, who does the same with the program, not knowing which is which. The judge has to determine which is the true human.

Another Zits cartoon on teenspeak:

And no, I can't make out what he is saying, though I could catch a few words.

[Addendum: Dhananjay Jagannathan writes to say that he has decoded what Jeremy is saying as: "I'm going over to Hector's house and I don't know if I'll be back in time for dinner so start without me." ]

(Part of) today's Non Sequitur:

My post about Google's metadata problems, along with a similar piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, got a lot of people talking about the problem in the press and the blogs. (I even ran into an allusion to it in a La Repubblica piece on the Google Book Settlement when I arrived in Rome yesterday morning.) A number of people passed along their own experiences with flaky metadata. Others criticized me on grounds that could be broadly summed up as "Don't look a gift horse in the server," "It's better than nothing," "Who needs metadata anyway?," "Just give them time," and "Why concentrate on trivialities like metadata while ignoring the real perils of corporate monopoly" (as in "serving as a consultant for monitoring the proper temperatures of the pitchforks in hell").

This is all to the good, if it helps move up the metadata issues in Google's queue. I do think this will get a lot better as Google puts its considerable mind to it. But there was one other aspect of the metadata problem which I hadn't noticed or even thought about, but which in its own small way was unkindest cut of all. It was noticed by the children's book author Ace Bauer, who was prompted by my account of the metadata problems to check his Google Books listing:

Turns out my review rating ranked only one star out of 5. That's dim. But see, the review upon which they based this ranking was Kirkus's. Kirkus loved the book. They gave it a star. One star. That's all they give folks. It's considered a major honor.

Indeed it is, and actually the falling-star glitch affects a number of writers, for example Roy Blount, Jr., the president of the Author's Guild, who is has been an enthusiastic backer of the settlement. Google Books assigns a one-out-of-five star rating to at least two of Blount's books on the basis of their starred Kirkus reviews, Crackers and First Hubby, and visits similar review rating downgrades on books by Guild vice-president Judy Blume and Guild board members Nick Lemann, James Glieck, Oscar Hijuelos, among others.

 I don't know exactly what the Google people will say when they cotton to this one, but it's a good guess the first sentence will begin with "oy."

So Roy Ortega thinks that the Spanish-language media in the U.S. have an obligation to become "more proactive in encouraging [their] audience to seek full fluency in the English language". (Immediate side note: why do people seem to tend to write "the English language" instead of just "English" when making pronouncements like this?)