Language Log

A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009):

So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t.

Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” is not the perfect choice of words for a guy with Rush’s background.

Ms. Collins' source for the Rush Limbaugh quote is Jonathan Martin, "Rush Job: Inside Dems' Limbaugh Plan", 3/4/2009:

Limbaugh is embracing the line of attack, suggesting a certain symbiosis between him and his political adversaries.

"The administration is enabling me,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence.

I agree that enabling is an odd word for El Rushbo to choose, given his well-publicized struggles with drug addiction. The new negative sense of enable and its derivatives has so nearly overwhelmed the older positive or neutral meanings, at least in the construction he used,  that Ms. Collins doesn't even need to remind her readers about it.

It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity" (sometimes stated as a proverbial equivalence: "The Chinese say that crisis is opportunity" or "…in crisis lies opportunity").

With or without the "danger" element, the trope is a favored rhetorical gesture by politicians and other public figures looking to pivot from pessimism to optimism. The roster of prominent American trope-users includes John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Condoleezza Rice, and Al Gore (a repeat offender). Now President Obama joins the list, but thankfully he omits the largely bogus framing device about Chinese hanzi (along with the "danger").

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a paper on terminological difficulties surrounding the classification of Sinitic languages entitled "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect'?  Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms," Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 1991), 1-31.  (Available online at http://www.sino-platonic.org/)  In that paper, I did not go deeply into the question of the utility of mutual intelligibility for determining the difference between a language and a dialect, mainly because it is a red hot can of worms, but also because people say such nonsensical things as that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  Now, in preparation for updating my 1991 paper, I would like to revisit the matter of mutual intelligibility to see whether it can somehow be salvaged for purposes of taxonomic classification.

Amazingly, the US Secretary of State could not locate anyone on her staff capable of finding out the Russian word that appears on reset buttons. Mrs Clinton offered Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, a gift-wrapped red button bearing the legend "Reset" in English and "Peregruzka" in Russian. Fox News reports it here under a "Clinton Goofs" headline, because peregruzka doesn't mean "reset": it means "overcharged" or "overloaded". The word they were supposed to have printed on the device was "perezagruzka". (Slavicists in Language Log's East European and Eurasian department are checking this out now; I offer this hasty note from my hotel room in the SCTTPKMCT, where I have no Russian reference materials.) Mr Lavrov did not let the slip lie; he pointed it out in public. Even more amazingly, the Clinton adviser Philippe Reines is reported to have protested that the word they printed "is only a couple letters off." Not much of a linguistic story, really, but Mr Lavrov did make one linguistic point out of it, commenting (according to The New York Times) that it illustrated the need to teach Russian in the United States and English in Russia.

Eric Bakovic reports that an obituary for Yuki Kuroda "will soon appear on LINGUIST List, but it is already on our department website along with some remembrances (still being updated), a bibliography, and other things": here.

Several people have drawn my attention to a harmonic convergence of LL topics on CNN.com today: social media, gender-neutral pronouns, and linguistic time machines. The article is Elizabeth Landau, "On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?", and Ms. Landau is worried that English will be unable to reach the epicene ideal, due to fundamental principles of linguistics:

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "they" is grammatically incorrect. […]

It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.

Last night, Li-ching asked me to correct an English story that she had written.  When I got to the part about "a hunter and his laifor," I was stumped.  Did Li-ching know some obscure English word that I had never heard of?

After thinking about "laifor" for a brief moment, I had a vague recollection that she had used the same expression many years ago, so she was at least being consistent.  But I still couldn't figure out what she meant by "laifor."  His "wife"?  His "life(r)"?

Before you turn the page and I tell you what "laifor" means, please try to guess.  Mind you, you actually have a bit of context — "the hunter."

Fev at Headsup: The Blog has followed up his post on Britosphere headline culture ("Hed noun pileup of the morning", 2/24/2009), and my comments ("UK death crash fetish?", 3/1/2009), with "Nude pic row vicar resigns", which features great noun strings like "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a brain surgeon who tried to get the dying George Harrison to sign a guitar), and "Kid porn shame councillor".

My current trip to the Far East has now brought me to… well, the question is how to name the country for you and preserve strict political correctness. We could perhaps call it the SCTTPKMCT for short. I pointed out once before on Language Log that one of the many versions of its name is the longest official country name in the world. Since I've already identified the general region of the world that I'm in, you should be able to guess it without even clicking that link.

Tim Footman in the Guardian offers us a routine of standard-issue over-the-top retching about pronunciations other than his own. He pretends to get so overwrought on hearing someone saying mis-chiev-i-ous on BBC Radio 4 that he shouts at the radio (while temporarily so deranged that he is unable to tell that he was the person shouting), and needs a cup of orange verbena tea to calm him down. He purports to go to the toilet and retch into the bowl when he hears someone say schedule with initial [sk-]. It's interesting that he is so linguistically unsophisticated that he doesn't know the difference between what is standard American (as opposed to British) and what is non-standard. It's the same with his commenters. It applies both to pronunciations (like schedule with [sk-]) and spellings (a commenter objects to program). The mis-chiev-i-ous pronunciation is non-standard (see the Merriam-Webster dictionary). So is somethink for "something", which he also objects to. But that is not the case with schedule (or the spelling program). Tim Footman would have us believe that he experiences actual nausea when listening to someone who does not have shed as the first syllable of the word schedule. He doesn't seem to realize that it's not just an idiosyncrasy of a class of people who don't talk right (which I suppose you could say about mis-chiev-i-ous, if you are feeling uppity and intolerant). The [sk-] is standard for American pronunciations of schedule, and common among Canadians; it's only British speakers who mostly favour the shed version of that first syllable. The [sk-] speakers must number in the hundreds of millions. Tim Footman is going to spend a lot of time on the floor of the bathroom talking to Ralph on the big white phone.

The New York Times is maintaining the policy criticized a few months ago by Clark Hoyt ("Separating the Terror and the Terrorists", 12/13/2008). Hoyt, the NYT's  "Public Editor", said that

My own broad guideline: If it looks as if it was intended to sow terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl’s bedroom, I’d call it terrorism — by terrorists.

His paper, he says, is "more conservative in their use [of these terms] than I would be".  This  conservatism continues in the coverage of Tuesday's attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team — the NYT story ("8 Die as Gunmen in Pakistan Attack Cricket Team", 3/3/2009) uses "gunmen", "attackers", and "assailants", and refers to the November attackers in Mumbai as "militants".

Two little notes about Obama’s name and morphology:

1). In an article in the NYT yesterday I came across the verb form ‘Obama-tizing’ (hyphen in the original), and realized that because his name ends with a vowel, you can’t just add –ize. But why the choice of ‘t’ as epenthetic consonant? It doesn’t sound totally natural to me, but I don’t know any other consonant that would sound better. Is it just because there are various Latinate groups of words with a ‘t’ in some of their forms like ‘sane – sanity – sanitize’? I found the neologism overcommatize on this fun page from Rice University, so maybe –tize is the accepted allomorph of –ize for vowel-final words?

2).  What happens you decline the name “Barack Obama” in Russian?
My ears perked up when they put “Barack Obama” in the instrumental case (as object of ‘with’) on the radio in Moscow yesterday: Barakom Obamoj – and I realized that morphologically, Barak becomes a first-declension noun – native Russian nouns that end in a hard consonant are all first-declension masculine –, while Obama, ending as it does in –a, becomes a second-declension noun, and the great majority of those are feminine. And I wasn’t sure whether that was “peculiar” or not – I noticed it, but would a Russian? The situation with prototypical Russian names is that for men both names are first-declension consonant-final masculine (Mikhail Gorbachev), and for women both are second-declension –a final feminine (Raisa Gorbacheva).

John McIntyre's grammatical noir, serialized in his Baltimore Sun blog You Don't Say in preparation for National Grammar Day tomorrow, is now complete:

"Down these mean sentences I walk alone", 2/14/2009
"'What are we going to do now?' she asked", 2/18/2009
"The Fat Man chuckles", 2/23/2009
"The rule you don't break", 3/2/2009