Language Log

The Newsweek story begins:

How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809.

(Similar stories can be found all over the place.) And that day is tomorrow, Thursday 12 February.

But wait! It already is Thursday 12 February some places — much of Australia, for instance. "Same day" here means 'same date, as determined locally'. Dates and times are reckoned locally; they are relative to a location and depend on conventions for labeling spans of time (via time zones and the like). These conventions allow us to say that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, 12 February, meaning that it was 12 February in Shropshire when Darwin was born there and 12 February in Kentucky when Lincoln was born there.

And now it's Thursday 12 February throughout Australia, though it wasn't when I started writing this posting. But it won't be Darwin/Lincoln Day here in California until tomorrow.

Here's the old Pepsi logo and the new (recently redesigned) one. Not an enormous change, you might think, but these things don't happen without a Design Process.

Bruce Webster has posted on the Pepsi Logo change:

according to this document from the Arnell Group, the product design firm involved, the new Pepsi logo is based on extensive analysis not just of all previous Pepsi logos and trade dress, but also of fundamental design principles and the creation of the universe itself.

At first I thought that the design document was a parody of advertising talk (a very elaborate parody, granted, with lots of complex graphics), but the Arnell Group's webpage has more of the same, so the design document might well be genuine.

TerMine is a system for recognizing multiword terms. The algorithm was originally presented in Katerina Frantzi, Sophia Ananiadou, and Hideki Mima, Automatic recognition of multi-word terms, International Journal of Digital Libraries 3(2): 117-132, 2000. You can try it out on a site at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester in the UK, where they have a web demonstration that will analyze short (<2 MB) texts or URLs for you.

As you'll find if you try, the results are not always perfect, but I think that the algorithm is remarkably good at guessing multi-word terms from small amounts of text. For example, if I try it out on a page (~2000 words) of lecture notes about "Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events", it comes up with a large number of sensible things like good-turing estimate, maximum likelihood, population frequency, belief tax, and negative binomial distribution — along with a few clunkers like cnew = cnew./token and some other fragments of Matlab code. (Maybe it was unfair to give it a sample that included such things…)

Jock McNaught recently reminded me of this service by trying it out on President Obama's inaugural address.

American readers are likely to be truly amazed to learn what has just happened to a senior British diplomat, Mr Rowan Laxton. He was on an exercise bike at a gym in the Regent's Park area of London, and he got angry as he watched film of the destruction in Gaza, and shouted: "Fucking Israelis! Fucking Jews!" — adding that they should be "wiped off the face of the earth."

Mr Laxton is head of diplomatic policy in South Asia at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government. He reports directly to brief the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. (In one of those twists that fiction has to avoid on grounds of implausibility but real life allows, Mr Miliband is Jewish.) But he was not merely reprimanded, or sent for anger management, or removed from his post, or dropped from a BBC talk program over this. The police came and arrested him. He faces a criminal charge of inciting religious hatred, which can carry a seven-year prison term. (For a newspaper account, see this report in The Times.)

This morning's NY Times science section is devoted to memorializing Charles Darwin, and the title of one of the featured articles is: "He was prescient in 1859, and is still ahead of his time." My first reaction to this headline was an unreflecting interpretation of it as simply meaning, 'Darwin was ahead of his time and his ideas are still on the cutting edge.'

But my second reaction was quite conscious: Wait a minute; this is an error — perhaps akin to those frequently noted confusions like "falling between the cracks" or "No brain damage is too minor to be ignored."  (If indeed they are properly considered confusions, see below.)

Following up on the discussion of "Actually" as a discourse marker, let me direct you to Rebecca Clift, "Meaning in interaction: the case of actually", Language 772(2): 245-291, 2001. Her abstract:

One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The temporally situated, contingent accomplishment of utterances in turns and their component turn-constructional units shows the emergence of meaning across a conversational sequence; it reveals syntactic flexibility as both a resource to be exploited for interactional ends and a constraint on that interaction.

She cites a detailed subdivision of possible positions, from Karin Aijmer's 1986 paper "Why is actually so popular in spoken English?" (Tottie and Backlund, eds., English in speech and writing):

A headline in today's Metro (a UK free newspaper) looks like this:

I was taken aback: it looked decidedly ungrammatical for quite a few seconds. And another reader, from Glasgow, has already mailed me to say the same thing. What is wrong with the headline? Or can it be parsed as grammatical?

Those seriously interested in the meaning and the politics of racial epithets (as some of the commenters on Pakigate, Sootygate, Gollygate seem to be) should take a look at a paper called "The semantics of racial epithets", published by Christopher Hom in The Journal of Philosophy CV [= 105], no. 8 (August 2008), pp. 416-440. This is a technical paper in philosophical semantics (it's philosophy, not linguistics; and let me say that I do not necessarily endorse the view that it defends). Hom outlines its aim on his website thus:

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE). CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

Thus Hom is offering a reasoned case that it is best to see the denigratory character of racial epithets as built into their actual conventional meanings, and not just as a possible concomitant of some of their occasional uses. (Many of commenters seem to align with this view, though they tend to just assert it and call any other views absurd, rather than present arguments.)

We are still encountering cases of people who leap to attack uses of particular word-senses without carefully checking the dictionaries and usage books first. Several emailers and commenters (some comments are now deleted) saw that I had repeated the BBC's claims that it had sought a "sincere and fulsome" apology from Carol Thatcher, and instantly wrote comments insisting that this was a gross mistake (on my part, some thought; I have now put in the quotation marks that I should not have risked leaving out), since fulsome doesn't mean anything like "full" but is in fact close to being an antonym of sincere.

People don't seem to look anything up before they leap to the comments box. (See Mark Liberman's documentations of astonishing earlier cases of ill-informed objections here and here, and similar remarks of mine on grammatical usage here and here.) The original senses of fulsome are, according to Webster (which is a constantly updated and extremely reliable dictionary of American English available online):

1 a copious or abundant;
1 b generous in amount or spirit;
1 c full and well developed.

Clearly the BBC intended one or more of these senses.

I've recently read David W. Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and I especially appreciated his clear explanation of the complex world of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology. There's a lot of new and relevant information, but you really do need a good guide — the facts and conjectures are complex enough, but the difficulty is multiplied many fold by the evolved disciplinary nomenclature, which is sometimes so baroque as to defy parody.

I've been reading Stanley Fish's 1989 collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. It's not yet clear to me what he's for, exactly — I'm reminded of the old joke about the post-modern gang leader who makes you an offer that you can't understand — but it's clear what he's against, namely the idea that texts have meanings:

The objective facts and rules of calculation that are to ground interpretation and render it principled are themselves interpretive products: they are, therefore, always and already contaminated by the interested judgments they claim to transcend. [Consequences]

This is not a small point, in his view:

It might seem that the thesis that there is no such thing as literal meaning is a limited one, of interest mainly to linguists and philosophers of language; but in fact it is thesis whose implications are almost boundless, for they extend to the very underpinnings of the universe as it is understood by persons of a certain cast of mind. [Introduction: Going Down The Anti-Formalist Road]

The "cast of mind" in question is, roughly, science and the idea that rational inquiry can lead towards truth — the whole Enlightenment project. But in the passage just quoted, he's discussing a much more specific argument, made by Ruth Kempson in her 1975 book Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics.

Fish uses an argument from this book as the rhetorical backbone of his 33-page lead-off essay "Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road". And it's therefore embarrassing (for him) that he's misunderstood the context (and thus the content) of her work, in a way that makes her argument at best irrelevant to the point that he wants to use it to make.

Michael Quinion's latest World Wide Words newsletter (#625, 2/7/09) has an informative follow-up on the Birmingham apostrophe flap (discussed on Language Log here), which I'm reproducing below.

There's a usage manual for comic book lettering: "Comics Grammar and Tradition", by Nate Piekos, on the Blambot: Comic Fonts and Lettering site. Note that Piekos talks about these bits of advice as, in part, a matter of grammar, using "grammar" to refer to any system of conventions regulating form. In the introduction to the manual, Piekos describes it as a mixture of "established tradition" (as he perceives it; it's unlikely that he did any actual research) and personal aesthetic preferences — not unlike usage manuals for English and other languages: