Language Log

It's the beginning of a new year, so Lake Superior State University has come out with its annual list of words (well, expressions) to be banished from English. (We've had brief Language Log postings on earlier LSSU lists — at least, here, here, and here.) Yes, it's a publicity stunt, and yes, it's a steaming pile of intemperate peeving (on the evidence of the comments selected for the entries on the site), and yes, the hyperbolic conceit of the site is that not only are the compilers declaring that they despise these expressions but they are proposing that everyone should be prohibited from ever using them (not that such opinions could have any real effect on what people do; the site is all show and no consequence.)

Reader IL writes:

A former Prime Minister here (John Major) has just criticised another one (Tony Blair) in the following terms:

"(Major) said: 'I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf War, and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew. I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war.'"

Myself, I've always been sceptical of the popular point of view that Blair "lied" or was dishonest about the case for war (I tend to think he was guilty of bad judgement). I'm interested in Major's criticism because it suggests that he and other MPs were (quite reasonably) supposing that Blair was playing some kind of conventional language game in his public statements that he wasn't, in fact, playing, and that this led to a massive misunderstanding. That is, they were supposing that he was lying by omission (saying "less than he knew"). In fact, he was – you might say – misleading by telling them what he thought was the truth.

Crash blossom of the week: Andrew Morse, "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event", Total Telecom 1/4/2010.

A sequence from Pat Brady and Don Wimmer's Rose Is Rose, January 4 and 5:

(Hat tip to JC Dill.)

Ismael Tohari emailed me from Saudi Arabia to ask this:

Sorry to bother you but… I really find it very hard to pinpoint any difference between the two sentences below:

[1]   He was playing a violin when the visitor arrived.

[2]   He was playing the violin when the visitor arrived.

A fascinating question. I wonder if you can see what the difference in meaning is, and why it is so tricky to specify?

Jack Lynch's recent book The Lexicographer's Dilemma was featured last week in the New York Times' Books section, in a review by Neil Genzlinger under the headline "This is English, Rules are Optional".  Arnold Zwicky recommended Lynch's book enthusiastically, back in December, and I agree with his opinion. Genzlinger also liked the book, and his review should be worth a well-deserved boost in sales. But there was something about Genzlinger's perspective that struck me as odd.

I just watched The Man Who Would be King for the Nth time. For those who don't know it, this is the film version of a short story by Rudyard Kipling about two Englishmen retired from the Indian Army who set off to become kings of the mythical Kafiristan. Along the way they acquire the services of a Gurkha called Billyfish, who among other things, serves as their interpreter.

If I have identified the languages correctly, Billyfish addresses the natives of Kafiristan in Urdu, but they reply in Arabic. Neither is really appropriate for the area, which is presumably intended to be in the general area of Afghanistan or the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan (though the people are depicted as non-Muslim). A guess is that linguistic authenticity was not a priority and that the film makers simply had the actors speak languages that they knew. The actor who played Billyfish, Saeed Jaffrey, is an Indian Muslim who speaks Urdu and Punjabi. The Kafiristanis were presumably played by local actors, which means they knew Arabic since the film was actually made in Morocco. But before I go too far with this speculation, perhaps someone more competent in Urdu and Arabic than I am can confirm or deny that these are indeed the languages spoken.

Zipper has found his vocation:

And after he graduates, he can get a job in journalism.

Today's Pearls Before Swine:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The Sugar Bowl, where the Florida Gators shellacked the Cincinnati Bearcats 51-24, was a disappointment to me as a football game. But there was some added value linguistically. Pete Thamel's NYT article ("Sweet Finish for Tebow and Gators", 1/2/2010) quotes Tim Tebow: “I dreamed about being a Gators since I was 6 years old and it was better than I could have dreamed.”

Most American college sports teams have plural nicknames: in addition to the Gators and the Bearcats, this year's bowl games featured the Bruins, the Owls, the Hurricanes, the Badgers, the Falcons, the Vandals, the Wildcats, the Cornhuskers, and so on. And the names of professional football teams are also often plural: the NFC East, for example, comprises the Eagles, the Cowboys, the Giants, and the Redskins. But in all my experience of sports talk, I can't recall ever having seen a case where the singular form of a plural name or nickname retained plural morphology.

The December 17th Economist contains an article entitled "In Search of the World's Hardest Language". Such things usually make me groan, but this one is actually pretty good. At the level of detail one can reasonably expect in such a context, the facts seem to be correct, the range of languages considered is broader than usual, and it recognizes that there are multiple factors involved. There are, however, a few points worth making about this article, as well as inferior examples of the genre.

In the current (Jan 4, 2010) issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a comment that is partly about what to call the previous decade:

Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade "the aughts," but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of "aught" to mean "nothing," "zero," or "cipher" is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word "naught," which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase "all for naught," is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of "the aughts" as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word "aught," a concise and poetic near-synonym for "anything" that has for centuries well served writers, including Shakespeare ("I never gave you aught," Hamlet says to Ophelia, in an especially ungenerous moment, before she goes off and drowns) and Milton ("To do aught good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight," Satan declares near the beginning of "Paradise Lost," before slinking up to tempt Eve).

I don't know whether Mead is right that we've settled on the aughts, and I won't comment directly on whether anyone has committed any errors. Instead, I'll try to explicate why a word like aught might take on senses close to that of nothing.

All around the English-speaking world, pundits are wondering in print about how to pronounce the year 2010. Is it "twenty ten", or "two thousand ten", or "two thousand and ten", or what?