Language Log

They're getting to be routine, Mark's virtuoso skewerings of those who Google widely but not well — in the post below, taking on James Delingpole's effort to demonstrate that the Climategate story is undercovered by the MSM by showing that the number of Google hits for the phrase is disproportionate to the news stories about it. If I have one reservation — which doesn't affect his conclusions — it's that Mark lets Google off too lightly when he says that its hit-count algorithm "might over-estimate the total number of pages for a term that has increased very rapidly in the recent past," and goes on to allow that "if we take the counts at face value, then apparently there are a lot of people generating a lot of pages about climategate." Might overestimate? Too kind. When Google reports hit count estimates over a few hundred, the results should never be taken at face value, or any value at all — they're not only too inaccurate for serious research, but demonstrably flaky.

James Delingpole, "Climategate goes uber-viral, Gore flees leaving evil henchmen to defend crumbling citadel", The Telegraph, 12/4/2009:

Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

Peter Baker, "How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan", New York Times, 12/5/2009:

The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.

The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.

"Military slang for an expression of shock". Right.

Readers of Chris Potts' post on "David Foster Wallace Grammar Challenge Challenged" may be interested in a list of previous LL posts that discuss DFW:

"Snoot? Bluck" (11/8/2004)
"Enforcer Syndrome (pre-adolescent phase)" (6/22/2005)
"The Grammar Vandal strikes in Boston" (7/16/2007)
"Are any of those things even things?" (9/18/2008)
"'Descriptivism's five basic edicts'" (7/7/2009)

Jason Kottke links to a "Grammar Challenge" devised by David Foster Wallace and posted by a student of Wallace's, Amy McDaniel. What's noteworthy is that Kottke reports getting 0/10. Kottke is a thoughtful, creative English prose stylist, and Wallace thought that these questions were basic ones that should be taught in any undergraduate class. Kottke seems to think the problem lies with him. I take a different view: this test is useless. Just imagine a chemistry quiz that accomplished working chemists could not pass. What would you make of such a quiz? I myself would question its author's competence at devising chemistry quizzes.

It's been a while since we had a Noam Chomsky posting. Now, via the Stanford Linguistics Department's newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, a bit of silliness:

There's a "Meet the Real Professor Chomsky" site.

Comments on my "What is this question about?" posting have drifted off into a separate (and rather confused) thread about orange as referring to a fruit or a color and about orange juice. This is a case where the facts are well known and easily discoverable, but instead people have chosen to speculate and invent. So to set things straight …

Yesterday and today, I'm at Washington University in St. Louis at a meeting on open infrastructure for studies of the U.S. Supreme Court, organized by Andrew Martin at the Center for Empirical Research in the Law.  (That sentence sets some kind of local record for prepositional phrase density, but a couple of quick attempts to fix it made things worse.  Just to start with, you've got CERL, which has two, and WUSL, which adds one more…)

Chris at The Lousy Linguist takes up an implicit challenge due to Edward Skidelsky, "Words that think for us", Prospect Magazine, 11/18/2009, who wrote:

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

Letter to the New York Times on November 30, about a November 21 article on admissions tests for kindergarten in Manhattan (from Willow Partington of Cambridge NY):

I hope that the trainers and administrators who do the testing for kindergarten admissions are aware of the possible alternative answers to their questions, and if they are not, that children will speak up.

When my son was tested for a coveted spot in a private prekindergarten [note: prekindergarten], he was asked, "What color is a banana?"

"White," he answered.

A banana isn't white!" he was told.

Fortunately, my son was not intimidated. He replied: "Yes, it is. The peel is yellow, but the banana is white."

He was accepted.

James Taranto starts out his latest Best of the Web column with some clever wordplay, based on the status of English as a semi-negative-concord language ("He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing", 12/1/2009):

Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"–to wit, that he "hasn't done anything yet." This, he claims, "isn't just premature–it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20."

The ambiguity of negative concord vs. negative cancellation is a linguistic commonplace, but this is the first example that I can recall of it being used in a headline and lede. (I'm not complaining — Taranto's use is rhetorically clever, and appropriate in an opinion piece.)

In "On beyond personal datives" (11/5/2009), we discussed examples like "I nearly stepped on me a dog", which can be construed with the "personal dative" me following what Larry Horn plausibly describes as a "complex transitive verb". This analysis doesn't work quite as gracefully for some of the other examples from the same post, such as  "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress".

But still, you can (sort of) passivize the object of "shop for", as in the following web examples: "Is there a switch to more goods that are shopped for and purchased in a more price-conscious manner?"; "Clothing was shopped for out of catalogs, people rode on trains instead of in cars, and letters were written instead of text messages sent". And thus you can assimilate examples like "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress" to the canonical pattern of "I bought me a truck", where a personal pronoun in the ditransitive structure VERB PRONOUN NOUNPHRASE is interpreted as something in the affinity-group of constructions known as "datives of interest"; "personal", “ethical”, “free”, or “affected” datives; and so on.

But this morning's mail brings another report from Daniel Mahaffey, this time from a gathering over Thanksgiving. As with his earlier examples, the speaker is from Georgia:

When someone went to get a glass of water for another, they set them at ease with the sentence, "I'll be back with you some water."