Language Log

A note from Bob Ladd:

I just picked up and put away a book I'd bought in a second-hand bookstore before going to Romania in 1978, called "The Balkans in our Time", by Robert Lee Wolff, a mid-century Harvard historian.  I realized that he's yet another example of a generalization that must somehow tell us something about how language works: Anglo-elite American academic historians often use their full middle name.  Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager come readily to mind, but Robert Lee Wolff fits the pattern, as does another more recent writer, Walter Russell Mead.  And Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, was a historian. It's hard to search for these on Google, but I'm pretty sure I've noticed others, and I can't think of people who use their middle name and *aren't* American academic historians, except for good ol' boys like Billy Bob Thornton and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Nobody does sarcastic invective like the English, and Steve Connor, the science editor of The Independent, recently demonstrated his command of the form. But he started out in a shaky moral position, and he got his facts wrong, so it didn't turn out well for him.

Here at Language Log Plaza, we've been following the linguistic angles of the Gov. Mark Sanford story ever since he mysteriously went "out of pocket." (See: "Out of pocket," "The biggest self of self is indeed self," "Doing stupid," and "If I wanted to know that I knew that I knew.") But the lasting contribution of the Sanford saga to the English language may very well be the sudden spawning of a political euphemism: "hiking the Appalachian trail."

Mark Peters is the resident euphemism expert on the Visual Thesaurus website, rounding up circumlocutions old and new for his monthly column, Evasive Maneuvers. His latest column, "Hiking the Euphemistic Trail," is a Sanford special.

Gov. Mark Sanford continues to be a source of statements that are linguistically interesting on a variety of levels.  In the same AP interview where he confessed to having "done stupid",  he explained his value system in terms that raise several significant philosophical issues: "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'll leave to others such theological questions as whether the idea that "everybody's got their own value system" is consistent with whatever brand of Christianity the governor subscribes to. My interest here is what he meant by saying that he trashed his political career because "I wanted to know that I knew that I knew".

It's not quite as ineffably koan-like as "The biggest self of self is self," but Gov. Mark Sanford delivered another parsing puzzler in his latest comments to the Associated Press, in which he admits to additional liaisons with his Argentinian mistress and further unspecified "line-crossing" with other women:

What I would say is that I've never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid? I have.

This (the machine invented by the famous Chinese author, Lin Yutang, and described on the first page [first four paragraphs] of the Wikipedia article here) is probably the closest the Chinese ever got to decomposing their script into an "alphabet" consisting of "letters" (recurrent graphemic elements that can be combined in a principled way to form all of the characters / morphemes in their writing system).  You'll note that it didn't really work during their presentation to the Remington Typewriter Company executives.  The press conference demonstration they had the next day was probably of the carefully rehearsed, staged, orchestrated sort designers of Chinese information processing / technology software and hardware often present (the kind documented by Li-ching Chang in her film made at a vocational high school in Beijing), not one prepared to respond spontaneously to tasks posed by the audience.  Judging from my own experience with Chinese software and information processing / technology developers over more than a quarter of a century, this may have been what went wrong when Lin presented his typewriter to the Remington executives:  they asked him (or his operator) to type something impromptu.  Incidentally, the development of this fatally flawed typing machine left Lin — whose books were bestsellers in America — bankrupt.

Every so often I come across a passive sentence that puzzles me: why did someone write this? Last month I posted about one such case on my blog, but there you could imagine how the sentence arose. My most recent find just looks perverse, and it has an awkward adverb placement as well.

This is the caption to a photograph (of an aged woman smoking a pipe) on a postcard:

Ralston NB: 92-year-old Grandma Hayes attributes her long life and good health to the fact that five pipefuls of tobacco are daily smoked by her! 

(The photograph, dated 1925, is credited to Underwood and Underwood, with copyright by Underwood Photo Archives, Ltd. in San Francisco. The postcard is from Pomegranate Communications, Inc.)

Why this, rather than:

92-year-old Grandma Hayes attributes her long life and good health to the fact that she smokes five pipefuls of tobacco daily.

or

92-year-old Grandma Hayes attributes her long life and good health to smoking five pipefuls of tobacco daily.

Meanwhile, though I have nothing against "split verbs" (see my recent blog posting, with links to earlier Language Log postings), "are daily smoked by her" strikes me as more awkward than "are smoked by her daily".

So it's a thorough puzzle.

Hannah Poturalski, "Basketball legend visits Kenton", Lima News, 6/19/2009:

Thursday evening nearly 70 members of the Ohio State Alumni Club of Hardin County, as well as community members, saw an animated presentation by [Jerry] Lucas on the new way he plans on revolutionizing learning.

Lucas, now 69, said he's been involved in memory training his entire life. As a boy he invented mind games to keep himself entertained.

Through conditioning his mind with new ways to learn and memorize things, Lucas has established the Lucas Learning System. The system focuses on linking visuals with things that don't have an identity, such as pronouns and Arkansas.

To remember a pronoun, Lucas created an image of a Catholic nun with a golf club. She was a professional golf player, hence pro-nun. Lucas ingrains that image in the mind, so every time you hear pronoun, you see the visual.

When the U.S. soccer team plays Brazil this afternoon in the Confederations Cup final,  the stadium will be buzzing with the sound of plastic trumpets called vuvuzelas. (See Delia Robertson "Vuvuzela: Popular Symbol of South African Football", VOA News, 6/25/2009).

Here's an example (with simulated crowd noise) of how a vuvuzela sounds:

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Yesterday, Ben Zimmer traced the nonsense-syllable chant at the end of Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin Somethin back to its roots in Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa, a 1973 Cameroonian hit that played a role in the origins of disco in New York City. The chants in these songs are nice examples of a phenomenon that I discussed a couple of years ago ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007), where linguistic accents and musical beats start off aligned at the beginning of a phrase, and then go out of sync, typically with one or more of the later textual accents shifted "to the left", i.e. ahead in time, relative to the apparent musical beat.

Over on my blog, I've been posting inventories of postings (on Language Log and my blog) on various topics: back on 13 June, an inventory of postings on two-part back-formed verbs and one on split infinitives; today, one on Omit Needless advice and one on conflicts between faithfulness and well-formedness.

More to come.

[Added 6/28: Now an inventory on the usage advice One Right Way.]

Ever since Michael Jackson's unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent. The iTunes sales charts are overwhelmed by Michael Jackson songs: as of this afternoon, New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports, Jackson appears on 41 songs in the iTunes Top 100 singles chart. One of the top songs is "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the infectious opening song from the 1982 album Thriller. The lyrics can be a bit befuddling ("You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable…"), but there's no denying the song's catchiness, especially the chant at the end: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

From Language Hat:

A couple of years ago, lexicographer Erin McKean … gave a TED talk about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries (an hour long, well worth your while). Since then she has been working on an entirely new sort of online dictionary to address some of those shortcomings, and it's now gone live (in beta) as Wordnik (great name). In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, "A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more."

Check it out.