Language Log

As Arnold Zwicky has reported (here) the movement to get rid of possessive apostrophes has reached a crescendo among place-name language planners like the Birmingham city council, who have stopped using them on street signs. Feeding the fire a bit, Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, also cited by Arnold (here), then reported how other language planners, including the US Board on Geographic Names and the Committee for Geographic Names in Australia, are also making the world safe from possessive apostrophes.

These actions leave many wondering whether this forebodes an impending egalitarian march against not only the possessive apostrophe, but also against other possessive indicators and perhaps even against the human frailty of unbridled possessiveness.

The UK is not the only secular democracy where freedom of speech is now under attack.

Johann Hari's essay, "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?", originally published in The Independent on 1/28/2009, was republished on 2/5/2009 by The Statesman, a leading English-language periodical based in in Kolkata.

This led to several days of protests, eventually violent, by Muslims who felt that the essay insulted their religion; and on Wednesday, 2/11/2009, Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of The Statesman, were arrested and charged under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code which forbids "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings". (See Jerome Taylor, "Editor arrested for 'outraging Muslims'", The Independent, 2/12/2009.)

Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage:

The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it suits him. The snobbish pronunciation of his name may sound like a British synonym for derrière, but it helps him finagle his way into the gala opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. On the other hand, he makes sure to Americanize the R in “Ayres” and go native when crashing a movie-business party.

There's really no way to figure out what Maslin means here without consulting the book itself, and even then things are a bit murky.

March approaches, and just before the Ides of March (on the 13th and 14th, specifically) comes the Stanford Semantics Festival. This is the 10th; a program, with abstracts, will soon be up on the Stanford Linguistics site.  As usual, I'm giving a paper (I'm not actually a semanticist, but I play one annually at SemFest), this year on verbs taking either direct or oblique objects — with extensive references to postings on Language Log and ADS-L. The paper is a follow-up to my paper from last year's SemFest, on "diathesis alternations".

The abstract is below. (Remember that this is just an abstract, not the whole paper. It's much compressed and also lacks most of the references.)

A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English. What on earth is the function of this police jargon? Are we supposed to be comforted or protected by this talk of subjects suffering fatal incidents in residences? We know that people often die when planes crash right into their houses. Why does the police style of speaking to the media not allow us to be told about it in such simple terms? I'm not just pretending to be puzzled here; I truly do not understand this linguistic phenomenon.

MSNBC headline: "Songbirds migrate faster than thought".

In case some alert editor modifies it:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

A guest post by W. Tecumseh Fitch, on the Occasion of Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.

Ten days ago I was returning to the US from Europe, and the first and main leg of the trip was a flight from Amsterdam to Houston. After passing through customs and immigration in Houston, I was stripping off shoes, belt, wallet, fillings, etc. to walk through the security scanners and re-enter the gate areas for my connecting flight. The scanners were being worked by a few twenty-somethings, and one of them was enthusiastically telling the others, "You know, today's Darwin's 200th birthday! High five for science!"

He was given a slightly bemused high-five by one of his coworkers, and then he turned to another with the same celebratory request, but sadly the other coworker, conforming more to my mental Texan stereotype, wouldn't meet his eyes and wouldn't high five him.

"I'll give you a high five for science!" I called out happily. "That's what I'm talkin' about!" he said, and so after exchanging a high five for science with a perfect, if slightly goofy, stranger, I trotted off to my next five hours of travel feeling all warm and fuzzy. I didn't have the heart to tell him he was off on the birthday by ten days; hopefully he's exchanging high-fives today as well. Maybe he's exchanging high-fives for emancipation today instead.

To give this post some mildly linguistic content, I refer you back to its header, which I assert would be a perfectly grammatical headline in any of its permutations: with or without the -s, and with or without the apostrophe…

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let's stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

Read more about it in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

One other free speech note from Britain. Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, probably the greatest of all the scientists that the UK ever produced. (I know, it depends a lot on how you rank Newton.) Here at Edinburgh we celebrate Darwin as one of our own, and there will be several different events this afternoon. Darwin started as an undergraduate here. (Hated it — said his geology lectures were deeply boring. Whenever I go off to teach a class here, I keep that in mind. Don't be boring. You don't know who's out there among the undergraduates.) He was getting nowhere with the plan to get a degree in medicine, and went away to Cambridge to study theology (astonishingly, he was going to become a country vicar in the Church of England!). But he had joined a student natural history society at Edinburgh, and did other biological work as well, and when he eventually became a full-time (though unpaid and non-professorial) biologist in later life, and developed the radical idea of the gradual evolution of species through natural selection, his devout wife was a bit shocked, but told him he should not suppress his scientific ideas because of her faith. Now that is my ideal of the right attitude toward free speech. Respect me, and whatever religious faith I may have; but know that my beliefs don't override your right to hold and express your opinions, no matter what they are. Darwin's wife Emma truly heard the music. She understood what linguistic, intellectual, and religious freedom should really mean in a diverse and democratic society. And whatever the polemics Darwin was exposed to, despite the formally theocratic nature of the British state (where the monarch also leads the established church), he was never exposed to legal threat for his expression of his ideas.

Three freedom-of-speech updates on various language-related shock- horror- scandal- probe episodes in the UK this morning.

(1) Prince Harry is being sent away to an equality and diversity training course where perhaps he will at last learn that the royal family should avoid any use of offensive epithets for ethnic minority groups in the population over which they have hereditary rule.

(2) The Dutch far-right-wing politician Geert Wilders has been denied the right to enter Britain to attend a screening of his anti-Muslim film Fitna (it reportedly juxtaposes shots of the 9/11 attacks with quotations from the Qur'an), which a member of the House of Lords wants to screen for parliamentarians. The refusal of entry is said to be because Wilders poses a danger to the public through the ferocity of his extreme anti-Islamic views (at least 79 preachers deemed to preach "hate" have also been denied entry to the UK under the same European Union law). Wilders plans to fly in anyway, daring the authorities to "put me in handcuffs".

(3) The twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning novelist Salman Rushdie to death for disrespecting Islam is causing some renewed discussion of the case. At the University of Bristol broadcaster Kenan Malik and Professor Tariq Modood will debate limits on free speech in a multicultural society — both attacking the liberal left, but for different reasons (Malik thinks liberals have been complicit in gagging free speech; Modood them liberals of inconsistency and double-standards for not extending protection from offensive speech to religious minorities).

Life struggles on in this peaceful but frozen country. Rowan Laxton is on bail. Here in Edinburgh a light snow is falling outside, and as I sit at the laptop over breakfast in my kitchen posting about possible threats to linguistic liberty, so far the heavy footfall of police has not been heard on the stairs outside our apartment. Wait a minute, there's someone at the door…

In the February 9, 2009, broadcast of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart presents a well-argued Optimality Theory analysis of part of Bill O'Reilly's journalistic standards. Stewart and his research team do a good job of gathering and presenting empirical support for a theory involving ranked, violable constraints. Here's a screenshot that links to the full episode:

If the stars are in the right alignment and if you live long enough, you too can become a victim of stereotype and prejudice. I’ve been a semi-privileged, middle class, male Caucasian all of my life, but now, thanks to The New Old Age I’ve discovered that I too am a card-carrying member of a group that is besieged by politically incorrect language.

A stylebook for the media now shows how writers and broadcasters can avoid being sued for discrimination by, uh, well, er, whatever we’d rather be called (hint: it isn’t the e word). I’ll bet that this book will be cited in a slew of forthcoming lawsuits on age discrimination. Elderly is out, along with senior citizen, golden years, feisty, spry, senile, and grandfatherly.

As I understand ageism these days, I’m even supposed to be offended if someone says that I’m seventy-eight years young. Okay, I know about the more obvious ageist words, like codger, old fart, geezer, old goat, and fossil, but the insult of adding years young to my age mystifies me. For some reason I kinda like it. Maybe I need to get out more.