Language Log

Back in July, the New Scientist's Feedback page reported that

THE powers that be at Guy Robinson's place of work insist that employees tell the office if they're "working from home". Human laziness being what it is – sorry, we meant to say "the employees being committed to maximising productivity in a forward-looking sense" – the welter of emails on Monday mornings got shortened to the three letters "WFH". Then someone was stuck working at an airport and sent the message "WFA".

Then, given the insistence by the virus that is language on mutating whenever possible, the changes poured in and escaped the limitations of the alphabet: "WFT" working on a train, "WF\__" working from a sunlounger (not being smug or anything) and "WF\_O__/" working from a plane (ditto).

Guy's colleagues suggest "WF#" for "working from prison", but they have not needed to use this, yet. Feedback suggests a few others: "WF=====" for working at a linear accelerator and "WF() – -()" for working in a laser lab (with lenses).

According to today's Cathy, men now have to worry about this too:

Steffi Lewis asked whether this sentence (which, as she says, is attributed to Chico Marx) is well analyzed: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

I answered as follows (with apologies to syntacticians for the casual low-class nontechnical description):

In the sensical version of the sentence, "time" is a noun phrase and "flies like an arrow" is a verb phrase (with "like an arrow" an adverbial modifier of the verb "flies"), while "fruit flies" is a noun phrase and "like a banana" is a verb phrase (with "a banana" as the object of the verb "like").  In the nonsensical version of the sentence, you just reverse those two analyses.

Linguists around the world right now are packing for a trip to Scotland to attend the 50th Anniversary Golden Jubilee meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain here in Edinburgh (it starts on Sunday). And those listening to the BBC's Radio 4 this Friday morning may have been a little discomfited to hear the weather man, in his official capacity, use the adjective atrocious to describe the weather in Scotland over the past few days. Really! Adjective control is getting lax at Broadcasting House. The word choice should be interpreted, however, in a cultural context. Not to put too fine a point on it, a linguistic context of whingeing, moaning, snivelling, grumbling, and overstatement about the weather that probably goes back to the first settlement by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The fact is that no one whose experience has been limited to the British Isles has any idea what would be an appropriate meteorological use of the adjective atrocious.

Leena Rao at TechCrunch points out a case where semantic search turned into anti-semitic search.

At some time approximately 30 to 35 years ago — that is, in the 1970s, back when disco had a future — I received a letter from my friend Jim Hurford. We were young lecturers then, me in London and him in Lancaster, though he was later to become Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Here is what his letter asked me:

"Can you construct a grammatical and meaningful English sentence that ends with the words and vice versa, respectively ?"

Jim is now Professor Emeritus, and I now hold the Chair that he held for so many years, and I still have not succeeded in constructing an example of the mind-twistingly difficult sort he requested.

According to Abigail Norfleet James, Teaching the Male Brain: How Boys Think, Feel, and Learn in School (2007), p 37:

The shape of the inner ear is not the same for boys and girls. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the female cochlea responds more quickly to sound than does the male cochlea (Don et al., 1993) That means that boys are likely to respond to aural information of questions just a bit slower than girls will. Because boys don't hear soft or high sounds very well and because they don't respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls, boys may have trouble with auditory sources of information.

What language is this?

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Hint: it's one that you know.

… or if you prefer, some aspects of relevance theory, the next-to-latest xkcd:

At Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales, an irrepressible (and no doubt true) tale of Prof. Whatmough's Linguistics 120 at Harvard in 1962. If you read to the end, you'll find out about the donkey.

I’m sad to report that phonologist Nick Clements passed away in Chatham, Massachusetts, on August 30. There is an obituary by Beth Hume on LINGUIST List. Beth co-organized a symposium on tones and features in honor of Nick in June; the speaker list was a veritable who’s who of phonology, of which Nick was also of course a prominent member. He will be missed.

Whenever I fly on non-Indian carriers to India or there are Indians (South Asians) on non-Indian carriers flying elsewhere, I often encounter individuals who complain that they cannot eat the special meals that they ordered.

Steward(ess):  But, sir, you ordered a vegetarian meal, didn't you?

Passenger:  Yes, but I cannot eat this kind of vegetarian meal.

Steward(ess):  I can assure you, sir / ma'am, that our vegetarian meals have no meat or meat products in them.

Passenger:  But what you have given me has X, Y, Z in it.  I cannot eat it.  Please get me something else.

Steward(ess):  I am sorry, we do not have any other kinds of vegetarian meals.

Whereupon the passenger pulls out some biscuits from his / her carry-on bag and survives on them and whatever else he / she can scrounge up for the duration of the flight.

Stefan Krasowski recently booked a flight on India's Jet Airways.  Here are the choices he was offered for meals:

Although I share Geoff Nunberg's disappointment in some aspects of Google's metadata for books,  I've noticed a significant — though apparently unheralded — recent improvement.  So I decided to check this out by following up Bill Poser's post yesterday about insect species, which I thought was likely to turn up an example of the right sort. And in fact, the third hit in a search for {hemipteran} is a relevant one: Irene McCulloch, "A comparison of the life cycle of Crithidia with that of Trypanosoma in the invertebrate host", University of California Publications in Zoology, 19(4) 135-190, October 4, 1919.

This paper appears in a volume that is part of a serial publication. And until recently, Google Books  routinely gave all such publications the date of the first in the series, even if the result was a decade or a century out of whack.