Language Log

Katie Roiphe (in the NYT Book Review, 8 March, p. 16) reviews Elaine Showalter's synoptic A Jury of Her Peers: American Woman Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and along the way notes that

Showalter's wide net draws in writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose novel, "The Home Maker," written in 1924, includes the abysmally written passage: "What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another full of drudgery." Very few people, I imagine, would argue for the elegance of the prose, but the passage is undoubtedly interesting from a feminist point of view.

I am often baffled by a critic who merely quotes a passage while sniffily dismissing its writing style — without a word about the defects the critic sees in the passage. (I won't comment here on Roiphe's indirect swipe at feminism.)

Passive voice is a grammatical term whose first use in English, according to the OED, was about 600 years ago:

a1450 (a1397) Prol. Old Test. in Bible (Wycliffite, L.V.) (Cambr. Mm. II. 15) xv. 57 A participle of a present tens either preterit, of actif vois eithir passif, mai be resoluid into a verbe of the same tens and a coniunccioun copulatif.

Spiegel Online, Germany's biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections. (See my primer on OUPblog as well as our ongoing coverage on both the old and new Language Log.) I was interviewed for the piece, which was written by Konrad Lischka for his column on everyday things that do not work (Fehlfunktion, or 'malfunction'). Though I don't read German, the article looks pretty solid. I especially like the German Cupertinos that are provided, based on spellchecker suggestions in German Mac Word 2008. For instance, Barack Obama prompts the suggestion Barock Obama (barock means 'baroque'), while Stinger-Rakete ('Stinger missile') prompts Stinker-Rakte ('stinker missile'). Looks like a job for the intrepid Microsoft Office Natural Language Team, Teutonic division.

It's really hard to write a story about an obscene pun in a foreign language, when your publication won't let you say anything about the pun except to give the English translation of its innocuous side. That's the unenviable task attempted by Michael Wines in today's NYT ("A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors", 3/12/2009):

Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon. A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

Yesterday I had the opportunity for an eye-opening talk with a man who for 20 years has been the director of a world-renowned biochemistry and physiology research institute.  His job frequently takes him to key labs in China and Japan, and he always has scores of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean staff scientists and postdocs working in his own labs.  Here are some of the mind-boggling things the director told me:

My wife Karen and I just spent a long weekend with her family in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. As I've mentioned before, there are some noteworthy (though not necessarily unique) properties of the local Louisville accent. One of these is a property shared among many Southern dialects of American English in some form or another: the lack of a (clear) distinction between [ɪ] and [ɛ] before [n] (and sometimes other nasal consonants as well), such that e.g. pin and pen are (nearly) homophonous. To my ear, the result of this merger for natives of Louisville sounds closer to the [ɪ] vowel that I myself produce in pin, but I have not done any serious analysis to confirm or disconfirm this impression.

Here is one of the saddest facts about language and culture that I have noticed in quite a while: the search pattern "before turning * gun on himself" gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.

The following photograph was taken by Matt Marcucci in the throne room of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The two large characters on the plaque over the throne constitute the famous dictum of the Taoists: WU2WEI2. This is usually translated as "inaction" or "non-action," but more highly nuanced and fanciful translations such as "nonpurposeful action," "effortless doing," etc. are also to be found.

Reported last week in the NYT: an advertising campaign by the Mars company for its best-selling candy bar, Snickers, centered on a made-up "language" called Snacklish. Yes, it's not an actual language, but just some playful vocabulary.

From Dinosaur Comics, DIRECTION IS A BUCKET THAT PEOPLE KEEP SNEAKING INTO (with no apologies to George Lakoff):

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

The other day on NPR's "Marketplace," Robert Hass tells me, a Wall Street analyst said that Obama "has to show Americans that he is making strident progress toward stabilizing the credit crisis." A new one on me, but Google turns up about 100 hits for strident progress, 50 or so for strident advances, and almost 400 for strident growth, the great majority of them suggesting simply "great" or "impressive," with no intimation of shrillness or unpleasantness:

Today, some of the most strident advances in technology overall have been in the arena of forecasting… (CBS3, Springfield, Mass.)

Sizzler made strident progress throughout the 1980s, blossoming into a vibrant enterprise. (Worldwide Restaurant Concepts, Inc.)

The failure of real gains to trickle down the income scale has been mitigated by… a strident expansion of public sector activities and the public funding of employment within the public and private sectors. (Economic Research Council, UK)

The shares are trading on about 23 times forecast 2007 earnings, but there is no sign that Capita's strident growth is likely to slow. (The Telegraph)

Quite a few of the hits seem to be from Asian English-language  sources, but as the examples above show, the phenomenon is pretty widespread. And it goes back quite a while: a 1922 collection of items by the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor includes the item

"SINCE her tour of the Pacific Coast," declares a Berkeley bulletin, "Miss Case has made strident advances in her art." The lady, it appears, sings.

Is this just the influence of "making strides," or is there some way to get here from the literal meaning of strident?

Today's F-minus:

[Hat tip: Josh Rosenberg]

Part of your first sense of what a country is like comes from what is said to you by the first person you meet as you cross the border and present yourself to passport control. I wonder if immigration officers realize just how large the effects of their speech acts (or lack thereof) can be. When my friend Polly and I crossed from Finland into Russia by train a few years ago, the skinny young men in military uniforms who boarded the train looked fierce and suspicious. They demanded our passports and took them away with unpleasant scowls. Returning them silently twenty minutes later, they wore expressions that seemed to say, "We found nothing, but you look undesirable, and it makes us angry that we have to admit scum like you to defile our great country." Russia seems like a truly unwelcoming place. By contrast, coming back into Finland from Russia a few days later we were met by relaxed and friendly passport officials who took a quick glance at our passports, handed them back with a warm smile, and said: "Welcome to Finland!" A small courtesy, costing nothing, but after Russia it made Finland seem a totally wonderful place. Even Finland, however, was topped by Scotland this morning, when I returned bleary-eyed to the Edinburgh airport having flown straight through from Taiwan via Bangkok and Amsterdam. I handed over my passport, open at the page with the photo and date of birth, and the woman behind the desk glanced at it very quickly and slapped it down on the glass of the scanner. And while she waited a couple of seconds for the machine to read the data, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, "Happy birthday."