Language Log

On her blog, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reports an encounter between her daughter Opal (now 5) and the passive voice:

Jun 23, 2009 Our worst moments today came with the best language. This morning Opal did not get to open the garage door, after an interaction she found unfair, and while she howled with fury I said to her "You feel cheated." She said, outraged, "I was NOT cheated. YOU cheated me." Ah, the importance of indicating agency.

OK, I give up. I admit that I was wrong. I thought that the grammatical term passive had developed a spectrum of everyday meanings like "vague about agency", "listless writing, lacking in vigor", and "failure to take sides in a conflict". But I've now reluctantly concluded that for some members of the chattering classes, it now means nothing at all, except maybe "I dislike this person".

The evidence that drove me over the edge? Hank Stuever and Wil Haygood, "Parsing The Book Of Mark", Washington Post, 6/25/2009:

Wow. Was that a press conference or was that a press conference? That genteel lilt of hubris, sorrow, guilt! But other than a very slow, meandering build to I just needed a little strange, what did it all mean? What language was South Carolina's Republican governor speaking yesterday as he forlornly told the world of his travels and travails, of how sorry he is to his wife, to his sons, to his staff, to "the Tom Davises of the world" (not the Virginia one, all the other ones)? Is it a new Pat Conroy novel? Is it a megachurch sermon? Is it the language of couples therapy? The metaphysics of Oprah? Shakespeare? The psychobabble of cheating husbands? (Note all the passive constructions, the avoidance of first person.) [emphasis added]

If you haven't picked up a copy of Michael Adams' new book, Slang: The People's Poetry, well, what are you waiting for? For starters, it's a lively and engaging look at English slang and its multitudinous forms. At the same time, it's a thoughtful interrogation of what "slang" actually is, and how we might determine its boundaries. One way that Michael expands traditional notions of slang is in his treatment of affixation, or what he amusingly calls "unorthodox lexifabricology." I talked to Michael about slangy affixation in the second part of my two-part interview with him for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt follows below.

Gov. Mark Sanford, back in pocket, explained himself (from the NYT transcript of his statement):

I'm here because if you were to look at God's laws, they're in every instance designed to protect people from themselves. I think that that is the bottom line of God's law, that it's not a moral, rigid list of do's and don'ts just for the heck of do's and don'ts. It is indeed to protect us from ourselves. And the biggest self of self is, indeed, self; that sin is, in fact, grounded in this notion of what is it that I want as opposed to somebody else?

In a recent IMF report on Ireland, point 47 of the "Staff Appraisal" (p. 28), dealing with a proposed "National Asset Management Agency" (aka "Bad Bank"), reads:

47. With regard to NAMA, risk-sharing structures should be considered to address the well-known pricing problem. The pricing of distressed assets is complex and can slow down the transfer of assets from the troubled bank. Risk-sharing can potentially create better incentives for managing the bad assets. And they also guard against the risk that the taxpayer does not bear a disproportionate burden of the costs cleaning up the banks. [emphasis added]

Breffni O'Rourke, who sent in this example of overnegation, comments that "My fear is that they actually mean exactly what they say."

Tomorrow is the U.S. release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. (Warning: clicking on that link will cause Linkin Park to start playing the chorus of New Divide through your computer's sound system, which may not be what you want…)

Some parts of the movie were shot here at Penn — including one scene in the Quad, where I live:

In this screenshot from the trailer, the (added by me) red ellipse marks my dining room window, next to which I generally sit while blogging at breakfast. The trailer suggests that I can expect to get cinematically blown to CGI bits along with pretty much every everything else in the movie.

I'm sitting at San Francsico Airport waiting for my ride (my plane came in half an hour early from London — take that, air travel grumblers!), and beside me is a British Airways cabin crew member waiting for a friend. He just told me about a flight he was once on where an overhead bin opened accidentally and a didgeridoo fell out and hit a passenger on the head so hard that medics on the flight recommended he be taken off the flight at the first opportunity to land. It's hard to believe people would take seriously the idea that you were just sitting reading when you suffered a head wound from a falling didgeridoo. On the same flight there had been a case of vomiting, and a passenger who had fouled his pants. At the end of the whole flight the pilot said to the crew, "Let's take stock. We've had a spew, a poo, and a didgeridoo. You couldn't make it up, could you?" And I swear I didn't. Poetry in real life. My flight to California, I'm so glad to say, was much less eventful; nothing to write poetry about.

[This post is uncategorized, and I really think it has to be. If our system of categories allowed it, I would mark it "uncategorizable".]

It's been a long time coming, but I'm happy to report on an important linguistic discovery: the earliest known proposal for Ms. as a title for a woman regardless of her marital status. The suggestion for filling "a void in the English language" appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican on November 10, 1901, and was reprinted and discussed by other newspapers around the country. I had been on the trail of this item for a few years, and plumbing digitized newspaper databases finally revealed the original use.

You can read all about it in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

Quoting from the new blog The Translation and Interpretation Intitiative for Iranian Protesters:

The Translation and Interpretation Initiative for Iranian Protesters (TIIIP) is an ad hoc initiative to produce free, publication-ready translations and high-quality interpretations of the written and spoken communication streaming out of Iran in the Farsi (Persian) language in the form of e-mails, YouTube videos, Facebook entries, press releases, etc.

The work is being done at the translate4iran wiki. The biggest need is for people who can translate from Persian into English, but they add that

Please recall that you don’t have to be a Farsi translator or even a Farsi bilingual to help! We desperately need help from English writers, editors, proofreaders, publication relations professionals, techies, geeks, and administrative personnel. There is a role for everyone!

From a conference on the theme "Building the New Majority", sponsored by Pat Buchanan's organization The American Cause, and featuring a panel discussion on English-only initiatives:

Usarufa is a language of Papua New Guinea with just 1200 speakers (ISO-639 code "usa").  There's no fluent speakers under the age of 25, so the language must be considered moribund.  Before posting recordings of this language online, I needed to get informed consent, so I introduced some speakers to the World Wide Web.  We poked around for a while, finding useful sites about about insecticides for dealing with the taro beetle.  Then we turned our attention to audio.

I played them a recording of the "last words" of the Jiwarli language of Western Australia.  After some questioning looks I explained that this language is now dead, and we were listening to its last speaker before he died.  As one they all looked down, shaking their heads in disbelief and saying sorry, sorry, sorry….  It was as if I told them a mutual friend had died.  They urged me to put that recording on a cassette tape so they could take it back to their village.  That way, everyone would surely understand what will happen to the Usarufa language unless there are serious attempts to revitalize it.

I wasn't prepared for the intensity of their response.  Now I'm wondering if a collection of such recordings might be a useful tool in promoting language revitalization, and also in explaining the concept of language archiving.  (Thanks to Ima'o Ta'asata, James Warebu, Sivini Ikilele, and Waks Mark for their dedication to the preservation of Usarufa oral culture, and to Aaron Willems and SIL-PNG for facilitating this work.)

We've noted, more than once, that the grammatical meaning of "passive voice" is pretty much dead in popular usage, while the ordinary-language meaning, struggling to be born, remains inchoate, a sludgy mixture of dessicated grammatical residues and vaguely sexualized associative goo. Sometimes passive voice is used to mean "vague about who's at fault", which seems to be the grammatical sense gone adrift; sometimes it means "listless, energyless, lacking in vigor", which is one of the more general, non-grammatical senses of passive; sometimes it seems to mean "on the fence, not taking sides", which is a sort of transmuted combination of the two.

Recently, I've come across several additional pieces for the collection.

A political reporter remarked on BBC Radio 4 this morning that the 157th speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, elected last night, is much hated by many members of his own party (the Conservatives). Among other things, when they are giving speeches he sometimes mutters under his breath and "corrects their grammar." Not a good sign. Nobody likes a grumpy grammar pedant.

(Except that just about all American intellectuals all seem to be in love with Strunk and White, of course; but set that aside — I believe I may have mentioned them in one or two previous Language Log posts.)

[Update: Bercow's grammatical interventions have in fact not been merely sotto voce mutterings. An excellent post at Joel Segal Books gives evidence that he has been recorded in Hansard as taking up the time of the House with grammatical peevery. More public money being wasted as paid members pontificate about supposed grammatical slips in the speeches of other paid members. Parliament is in a worse state than I thought.]