Language Log

Over the years, we've discussed many cross-cultural comparisons based on the "No Word for X" meme. In the most recent LL post on the subject ("No word for integrity?", 12/31/2008), I asserted that

[W]hen someone makes a sociological point by saying that language L has no word for concept C, you'll rarely lose by betting that they're wrong.

But a recent assertion by Bart Wilson seems more promising — the linguistic part is supported by reference to a chapter in a recent book by an actual (and eminent) linguist, and the socio-cultural part is supported by reference to a large body of empirical research, some of which was done by Wilson himself.

We’ve had more than enough bad news lately about the economy, loss of jobs, fraud in the marketplace, and our various wars, so maybe talking about how to give bad news seems timely. Now CNN.com has published an article about the problems that law enforcement officers experience when it’s their job to give the bad news to relatives about murder victims and other tragedies. Giving the bad news is hard on the police. Some do it well; others don’t. But giving the ultimate bad news is necessary, no matter how hard we stuggle to do it.

Most of us have to communicate bad news to suffering people at some time in our lives, whether it’s the type that police have to announce, the type that financial advisors have to give clients who have just lost their life savings in a stockmarket dive, or the type that physicians sadly have to give their patients. No bad news giving is easy.

In the lecture room where I will be giving a talk later today at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the audiovisual equipment is controlled by a small touch-screen unit. Right now, the part of the display that controls the ceiling-mounted projector looks like this:

That is almost exactly what it looks like. Now, you tell me: would that mean that the projector is on, or that it is off? Is the blue button the operative one, showing the name of the current state? Or is it the white button beside it that we should pay attention to? (I should make it clear that the PAUSE across below them is not a button: only the ON and the OFF buttons change color when touched.) And then once we have decided whether we should see this as saying "ON" or as saying "OFF", do you think it means that the pausing function is on, which would mean that the projector is off? Or that the pausing function is off, which would mean that the projector is on?

My old friend and comrade-in-arms, John DeFrancis, died at the age of 97 on January 2, 2009. The cause of his death was a bizarre, tragic accident, yet one that is supremely ironic for someone who devoted his entire adult life to the study, teaching, and explication of Chinese language: John choked on a piece of Peking Duck at a Christmas dinner in a Honolulu restaurant.

John with some of the books he published, in 1996 by John DeFrancis

Chris's post on the job market for linguists circulated instantly here at the University of Arizona, and one of our enterprising recent grads, Shannon Bischoff, thought of comparing Chris's job posting numbers, sorted by area, to numbers of dissertations produced in each area. I post his revised table of figures including the diss numbers below the jump.

Speeding east out of the Amsterdam area along dead straight train tracks beside a broad canal, I saw a huge cargo barge loaded up with giant shipping containers. It had several of the crew's automobiles parked on an upper deck. As the train whizzed past it and I could see the name on the bow, I saw that it was called the Omerta. Omertà? The brutal Sicilian mafia's fiercely enforced code of silence? I really wanted to hop off the train and ask the captain what on earth had led to the boat being thus named. But perhaps he would have turned out to be a Sicilian with an illicit cargo and would have refused to talk to me about it…

Over on the Crooked Timber site (where a group of political scientists hang out), Henry Farrell reports in a 1/22/09 piece entitled "Hotties and Notties":

In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson conducted research that sought to establish, inter alia how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Yesterday's Zits:

I'm on a train in Holland, travelling from Amsterdam to Nijmegen for a lecture I have to give at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Arriving at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport is wonderful, not just because you can walk in a few minutes from the gate along the concourse to your train, but because you can actually buy the train tickets from a flawlessly interfaced automatic machine located inside the baggage hall. I strolled over to buy my ticket to Nijmegen while waiting for the bags off my flight from Edinburgh to show up. However, when I got back to carousel number 9, the area around it was deserted. Everyone had gone. The conveyor belt was still going round, but it was empty. And on the screen above it was a sign that appeared to convey the most disappointing news imaginable:

Oh, no! All of it, lost and gone to who knows where! For a few seconds I felt that this visit was going to start with a major disappointment, and a highly inconvenient hour of claiming for mislaid baggage.

Which employers are looking for linguists these days, and what kinds of linguist are they after? The usual assumption is that linguists are employed almost exclusively in academia, and that they are generally engaged in esoteric theoretical work. I've long suspected that this is not completely true, but I'd never really looked into it. Facing two long plane rides this past week, I decided to get the data and wade through them. This post reports some initial findings about 2008.

It isn't often that I learn a new English word while reading the newspaper, but today's New York Times contains one: snarge. It means "the residue of birds that have struck an airplane" and is used by, and apparently was coined by, the people at the National Museum of Natural History who try to identify the birds that have had fatal encounters with airplanes. I leave to the imagination what future anthropologists will make of the existence of this term. They'll probably decide that 21st century Americans practiced a peculiar high-tech form of divination.

One idea that might solve our current economic woes appears to be for advertisers to erect huge signs that will motivate reluctant consumers to empty their wallets and buy stuff again. These signs go by the name of “supergraphics.” Actually, this word doesn’t add much to the lexical inventory of English. If you look it up, you’ll learn, not surprisingly, that it means really, really, really big signs — ones that are much bigger than billboards, some of them even two stories tall.

The problem with this advertising solution, reported in The Los Angeles Times (although it's prevalent other cities as well), is that supergraphic signs irritate the commercial and professional businesses that suddenly find their office windows covered by large vinyl or plastic sheets hawking advertising services and products that are very different from their own businesses and are not at all helpful for attracting their own customers. Instead of stimulating business, they complain that it drives their customers away, thereby negating any stimulus to the economy that might be wrought by supergraphics.

Headlined as a list of "Top 10 translation fails of 2008", this post at the company blog of Alta Language Services is a mixed bag. There are amusing solutions to translation difficulties (the Arabic, French, and Italian for Maverick), subtle choices with serious consequences (whether Russian troops provide security "for" South Ossetia and Abkhazia or security "in" South Ossetia and Abkhazia), unsubtle choices with funny consequences ("state regulation of bowels use" rather than "state regulation of underground natural resources use"), and so on. Regular LL readers will recognize several of them.