Language Log

Language Log readers in London might be interested to know that I'm speaking to the Philological Society at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow (Friday, May 8). The meeting is in room 116 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG. The details are here.

According to the BBC News ("Quarantine for lonely Afghan pig", 5/7/2009)

Afghanistan's only known pig has been quarantined because of fears over swine flu, officials from Kabul Zoo say. […]

The director of the zoo, Aziz Gul Saqib, says the pig, whose name is Khanzir, is strong and healthy.

Stephen Jones, who sent in the link, comments:

Well, there's only one of them in the whole country so he's hardly likely to suffer from identity theft, but you'd think the BBC correspondent would have picked up on the fact that 'khanzir' means pig in Arabic (what it is in Pashto I don't have the least idea).

Anya Lunden wrote me yesterday with an instance of "who or whom", from commenter i_am_right on Jon Carroll's San Francisco Chronicle column:

We still don't know who or whom the Zodiac killer is or was … (link)

Lunden wondered whether the writer was using whom to convey some category distinction, like gender (or, in some of the examples below, number), or whether the writer was just wrestling with the problem of choosing who or whom in this context. I'm inclined to the latter idea. But first a little more data.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

Thought the LangLog would like to hear this week's update on the the Supreme Court case involving adverbial modification argued in February: all nine justices agree with the linguists! The decision is posted, but briefly, the money quote is:

"In ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence."

It is so ordered…

Language Log made the pages of the Seattle Examiner yesterday, in a piece by Benjamin Lukoff, "International District's NP Hotel makes Language Log linguistics blog", about my "The syntacticians' hotel" posting and its follow-up.

Lukoff is no stranger to linguistics: the son of the late distinguished linguist Fred Lukoff (at the University of Washington), he is also an occasional contributor to the American Dialect Society's mailing list.

My waggish friend Steven Levine sent me, a little while back, a page from a grade school workbook on writing (I don't know which one, nor do I much care; this page is a not at all remarkable instance of the workbook genre). Here's the text of exercise 125, "Interesting Sentences":

A good sentence should be interesting.

"I have a dog" is not a good sentence with which to begin a story. [Note the very formal fronted preposition; no stranded prepositions! Possibly the writer of this sentence genuinely believes that "preposition at end" is ungrammatical, or maybe the writer is just trying to model "the best grammar" for the kids.] If you are writing a story about your dog that was lost, it would be better to begin the story, "Last week my dog Shep ran away from home."

Can you change the following sentences into interesting sentences? [Note that this is an instruction to change the sentences, not an actual question.]

The sentences are:

1. I have a bicycle.
2. Charlie has a goat.
3. I have a dress.
4. Brother gave me a wagon.
5. I have a pony.
6. My shoes are new.

(and there's a line at the end labeled: My score……………….)

There's a lot that could be said about this exercise, but here are a few observations.

According to Dan Neil, "Selling coffee becomes diacritical for McDonald's", LA Times, 5/4/2009:

McDonald's — never known for a delicate marketing touch — is about to drop the mother of all campaigns on you, an everywhere-you-look, invade-your-dreams ad campaign in support of its McCafé specialty coffee drinks that will be not so much viral as bubonic. An estimated $100-million mega-buy across TV, Web, radio, print, outdoor and social media, the McCafé push beginning today will be, according to the company, its biggest "menu initiative" since it began serving breakfast in the 1970s.

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.

Here's what I heard today on my local National Public Radio station:  "The first American has died of swine flu." And also, for clarification, "The first American has died of H1N1." But who is or was the first American, I mused, heartlessly, while being an asshole in the defenseless Texan evening traffic. Obama? Benjamin Franklin? Some spear-wielding mastodon hunter? At any rate, not the unfortunate woman who just died.

Today's Get Fuzzy (click on the image for a larger version):

My immediate reaction was that "Wait, what?" is an idiom characteristic of American youth — 20-somethings and teenagers.

OK, so Geoff Nunberg plugged his new book here on Language Log. Shamelessly. But in fact he is shy, very shy. He is one of the quiet National Public Radio superstars who move among us invisibly, dynamic and brilliant and yet never recognized in the streets. He could have plugged the fact that he is teaching a course on Language and Public Discourse this summer at Berkeley, in the Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America. You could register, and take that course at an amazingly low fee. But you simply didn't know about it, because he is too shy to mention it. It's 10:30 to 12:15 Mondays and Wednesdays between July 6 and 23. Of course, you would need a course for the afternoon as well; but then (I point this out with all due modesty) you could have a bite of lunch and then take my course on English Grammar from 1:30 to 3:15 on those days. There is a staggering list of heartbreakingly tempting courses by towering geniuses from all subfields of linguistics, in fact. Nearly all of them too shy to tell you how great they are (though I think George Lakoff would hint at it if you pressed him). Shy linguists teaching brilliant courses all summer at low rates in gorgeous northern California. Language Log personalities you could meet in the flesh. This could be the ultimate most fantastic summer of your life, if you just thought to yourself "Carpe diem!," and signed up. Or you could just hang out at home and watch summer reruns on TV of course.

Google reports about 37,000 hits for "shameless plug of/for my" or "shamelessly plugging my," and the total would be a lot bigger if you allowed for variants like "my shameless self-promotion" and so forth. The phrases are much more common now than they were in the old media, mostly because the new media have dramatically increased the opportunities for self-exposure — Google Blogsearch alone turns up more than 4000 hits for the phrases. The vast majority of these are associated with creative works and activities, in a broad sense of the term: people apologize for shamelessly touting their books, TV appearances, t-shirt designs, videos, high-school band performances, blogs, and new CD's. (Others apologize for shamelessly plugging their hairdresser or a PC they have for sale on Ebay, which seems to me a little unclear on the concept — what's to be ashamed of?)

The modifier accomplishes several things at once: it concedes that the self-promotion is an impropriety, but one venial enough to be joked about; and it averts the reader's censure with preemptive self-reproach. It reminds me of the way H. W. Fowler described the use of apologies like "saving the reader's reverence" and "if we may adopt the current slang":  "A refinement on the institution of the whipping boy, by which [writers] not only have the boy, but do the whipping."

My new collection The Years of Talking Dangerously was published today by PublicAffairs.

Here at Language Log, we have several times discussed Li Yang's Crazy
English: Crazy English, Crazy English again, and A Sane Survey of Crazy English. Now there is an excellent movie from Singapore entitled "Mad about English." Here I provide a trailer for the movie and a clip of a phenomenal policeman featured in the film who not only can say "Welcome to Beijing" in more languages than I can count, but who also can talk like a New York gangster. First the multilingual cop: