Language Log

Yesterday I got this note from a reader:

I seem to remember a Language Log post about the construction "I appreciate you coming over to help me" as opposed to the prescriptively approved "I appreciate your coming over to help me." I am in a discussion with a prescriptivist about the validity of the former but I can't find the relevant post on LL. Can you help?

There have been a couple of relevant posts over the years, but what this reader really needed was a reminder to check his copy of the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (or the concise edition of the same work).

OK, the whole time machine thing is over (for now), but along the way, I unaccountably neglected to link to a lovely explanation by Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval of why Mark Pagel's choice of historical examples was unwise, and why the BBC's elaboration and illustration raised unwisdom to levels of hilarious incongruity rarely seen outside of The Onion: "Tips for Time Traveling William the Conqueror Fanboys". Carl discusses the rest of the British media's response in a later post, "Further Thoughts on Time Traveling".

Saturday's Cathy:

Mark Pagel can take comfort in the fact that his remarks about phrase-books for time-travelers were far from the dumbest stuff from a famous scientist to be featured in the mass media last week. As Ben Goldacre explained on badscience.net:

Professor Susan Greenfield is the head of the Royal Institution and the person behind the Daily Mail headline "Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist”, which has spread around the world (like the last time she said it, and the time before that).

It is my view that Professor Greenfield has been abusing her position as a professor, and head of the Royal Institution, for many years now, using these roles to give weight to her speculations and prejudices in a way that is entirely inappropriate. […]

We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim, however, is to improve the public’s understanding of science: and yet repeatedly she appears in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, without evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that she is a scientist. By doing this, the head of the RI grossly misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a claim. It makes me quite sad, when the public’s understanding of science is in such a terrible state, that this is one of our most prominent and well funded champions.

I read the headline

William J. Jorden, Reporter and Envoy, Dies at 85

(NYT, 28 February, p. A20) and paused a moment: why was this name so familiar?

Then, later in the obit, came

Mr. Jorden's first marriage, to Eleanor Harz, a professor of Japanese at Cornell University and elsewhere, ended in divorce.

Ah! Eleanor Harz Jorden, author of the very influential textbooks Reading Japanese and Japanese: The Spoken Language (and a member of the Linguistic Society of America). And there she was in a photo (with her husband and son) from 1956.

Sadly, it turns out that she too died recently, on 11 February (William J. Jorden died on 20 February). A brief obituary (reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle), citing her as "a linguist and world leader in language pedagogy and language teacher training", appeared yesterday on the Linguist List.

A few days ago, Fev at Headsup: The Blog posted about the "Hed noun pileup of the morning", namely "Texting death crash peer jailed". His link actually points to a BBC News story whose headline now reads "Peer jailed for motorway texting". All the same, Fev's larger point seems to be exactly right: "American hed dialect just doesn't do this".

Language Log readers seldom have the opportunity to read The Billlings Gazette. So now’s your big chance. A recent article will tell you the way things are out here in the rugged mountain west. We don’t use weak, wimpy words in this part of the country. No, siree. We drink strong coffee, we drive power vehicles, and we don’t use weak, wimpy language.

Those who remember the fallen Montana war hero, Lt. Col. Gary Derby, recently killed in one of the many wars going on these days, have only good things to say about him, including the fact that he insisted that the troops under his command avoid weak, wimpy words, like “I think,” “I might,” and “maybe.” You have to be strong, firm, and optimistic if you’re going to command your troops. Lt.Col. Derby did this very well. But this got me thinking about what happens when academic linguists testify in lawsuits.

With great sadness I report the death, on the 25th, of Yuki (Sige-Yuki, Shige-Yuki) Kuroda of the University of California at San Diego. His department is preparing an obituary, which I will link to when it becomes available. Here I report only my personal sense of loss: Yuki and I went to graduate school together (along with my Stanford colleagues Paul Kiparsky and Stanley Peters), and we were friends ever since. Yuki was a formidable linguist, and also one of the world's nicest people.

Does the network of journalistic credulousness still follow the connections established during the glory days of the British empire? I'm not sure how else to explain the diffusion pattern of Mark Pagel's little jokes about his estimates of cognate-replacement rates in language change.

In my post a couple of days ago ("Scrabble tips for time travelers"), I linked to a calvalcade of foolishness that included coverage in the Times ("A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age"), the BBC ("Oldest English words' identified"), the Guardian ("Word facing extinction: 'Dirty' will be scrubbed from the English dictionary"), and the Daily Mail ("Revealed: The world's oldest words… and the ones that will disappear"). And a Google News search yields a cornucopia of other giddy idiocies in British-empire media.

The Dutch pilot landed KLM flight 887 at the Hong Kong airport so smoothly that if I had been in a conversation I would not have noticed that there had been a landing. My suitcase made the carousel before I did. The uniformed airport greeter inside the terminal held a card saying "Prof Pullum" — not Pullam or Pullman or Pullen or any of the scores of other spellings I get on my mail labels and invoices and name badges: this seems to be a culture that cares enough to get things right. The greeter took me to my driver. As the sleek black car pulled away the driver said, "Sir, seatbelt please."

"Is it the law?", I asked idly, wondering if seatbelt wearing was legally enforced even for back seat passengers in limousines.

"Half hour," said the driver smartly.

Mickey Noonan, of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who died a few days ago, is movingly memorialized by Carol Genetti in a posting originally to the Linguistic Typology mailing list and now available on-line via the Linguist List, here.

Mark Swofford, Steve Hansen, and Anne Henochowicz have just called my attention to a wonderful post by Joel Martinsen over at Danwei which tells about a man named Zhao C who was informed by the Public Security Bureau of the People's Republic of China that he can no longer call himself "C," something that he has been doing his entire life. Mr. Zhao and his father, a lawyer, brought suit against the Public Security Bureau. Last June, a district court in Yingtan, Jiangxi Province, found in Zhao C's favor, but the Public Security Bureau appealed. As one might have expected, Mr. Zhao was ultimately forced to "voluntarily" change his name.

This morning's BBC's News Hour program featured one of the most densely nonsensical three-minute sequences that I can ever recall having heard from a respectable media outlet: