Language Log

[Guest post by Richard Sproat]

I was spending a pleasant portion of a Sunday morning reading a shocking article in The Economist on The Worldwide War on Baby Girls. One of the sad conclusions of that article is that the preference for male babies, which in some parts of the world is driving the ratio of male to female births to as high as 130 male births per 100 female, is actually getting worse as education gets better in some parts of the world. One of the points made is that "[i]n China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio."

I was curious to see how this trend fared worldwide. I have data on literacy and other socioeconomic factors that I collected from the  United Nations Human Development Programme's set of economic indicators, which I had collected for my forthcoming Oxford University Press book Language, Technology, and Society.  Data on sex ratios is available from the CIA World Factbook.

Matthias Mehl et al., "Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations", Psychological Science, published online 18 February 2010:

Is the happy life characterized by shallow, happy-go-lucky moments and trivial small talk, or by reflection and profound social encounters? Both notions—the happy ignoramus and the fulfilled deep thinker—exist, but little is known about which interaction style is actually associated with greater happiness. In this article, we report findings from a naturalistic observation study that investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the amount of small talk and substantive conversations they have.

It's been a while since I complained about the way that some journalists use real people as if they were hand puppets. (See here, here, here and here for a sample, from the good old days before bashing the Main Stream Media became one of the favorite rhetorical strategies of dishonest people.)

So it's a pleasure to link to this elegant rant by Jerry Coyne, "Ken Miller can’t win? P.Z. and me gets pwned". The offending journalist, one David Sharfenberg, published the offending piece in the Boston Phoenix, which is not exactly the New York Times or the Washington Post. But the theory is the same, however main the stream.

A New York Times Room for Debate piece on "Killing Pythons, and Regulating Them" (3/5/2010) supplies another piece of anecdata for my on-going quest to document the North American varieties of uptalk. This one is from the sound track of a YouTube video about a python wrangler in central Florida.

John McIntyre has once again wandered off into that parodic fantasy land where usage writers and linguists disport themselves as characters in hard-boiled detective fiction. This time, on the occasion of National Grammar Day, it's "Pulp Diction"; the complete serial is here. The climax of the tale comes in installment 4 ("The dark tower"), when Language Log saves the day:

With the thunder of many boots, a battering ram burst open the door. In strode Mark Liberman of Penn at the head of Language Log’s Modal Auxiliary Corps.

The four installments were posted separately, and you can add comments on McIntyre's blog.

I have seen repellently bad poetry on various subjects (mortgage services and sewage disposal, to name but two); but my horror at the poem publicized by National Grammar Day was not evoked solely by the poetic standard, low though it is:

I love the King of Ing
He makes me want to sing
Add him to an action word
And it's a gerund… now a thing!

Nor was it that the poet, Nancy Wright, won a prize for it. What makes me shudder is that it does that noun/thing confusion again (the one that underlies Jon Stewart's terror error). Even under the traditional (but incorrect) notion that if you add -ing to a verb stem you get a "gerund" or verbal noun, it is not claimed that you get a thing. What is claimed is that you get a word of the syntactic category Noun, the category that includes (among other words) all of our most basic one-word ways of making reference to things. National Grammar Day is celebrating, rather than condemning, one of the worst and most elementary popular confusions about grammar.

At this page in the Daily WTF you may find a verbatim reproduction of an email in which an office worker told her colleagues:

Please be advised- I will be bouncing Nude in 5 minutes. Please let me know if this presents an issue.

Presents an issue? It sure does! Does this woman have no conception of workplace manners? I find it hard enough to concentrate when co-workers are just sitting around nude in the common room. When they start bouncing around, I really feel I have to draw the line.

One minute later, however, came a second email explaining that the word "Nude" had been — can you guess? — a cupertino. OK, everybody, false alarm. Debbie will not be bouncing nude after all. It's just some server called NewDev that will be bounced (i.e., taken down and quickly rebooted). Nothing to see here, folks; back to your desks.

[Thanks to: Jens Fiederer and Urban Garlic.]

Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film's central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver's bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can't speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly hollow. The Detroit News reports:

Sarver said the very title of the movie was a phrase he coined in Iraq, and that Boal asked its meaning after hearing him use it. Boal has since copyrighted the phrase, Fieger said.
Sarver explained today that the term is akin to Davy Jones Locker, where legend says drowned sailors are kept.
"It's just a horrible place you go when you mess up," Sarver said. "It's a mental state. A place that's full of pain and hurt."

Unfortunately for Sarver, (in the) hurt locker is military slang dating back to 1966, as a quick trip to Google News Archive readily shows. I give the full history of the expression in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. Check it out.

[Update: For more on the supposed "copyright" of the phrase, see Dave Wilton's post on Wordorigins.org.]

[What follows is a guest post from Robin Cooper, Professor of Computational Linguistics, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, and Director of the Graduate School of Language Technology, University of Gothenburg. He reports on the ill-considered and appallingly executed destruction of the Computational Linguistics group at King's College London. — David Beaver]

The crisis at King's College, London and in particular the targeting for redundancy of its computational linguists and logicians has stirred significant international protest (see http://sites.google.com/site/kclgllcmeltdown/). Many hundreds of highly distinguished scholars from around the world have organized letters of protest querying the rationale behind these moves, which have happened at the same time as the College invested more than £20 million in acquiring Somerset House, a prime piece of central London real estate. Moreover, in contrast to universities that have undergone similar budgetary pressures in the US (e.g. in the UC system where senior faculty have been asked to take pay cuts in order to preserve jobs), at KCL moves towards firing permanent staff has been the first resort.

It's March 4, or Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky's birthday (now we are six) — and also National Grammar Day, which I've posted about in the past (in 2008 here, in 2009 here). Those of us who think of ourselves as grammarians — studying the syntax and morphology of languages and the accompanying facts of usage — tend to take a dim view of NGD, which has been framed as a festival of peeving and stern mocking of "incorrect" language.

For some views this year, see Dennis Baron here, Gabe Doyle here, and Neal Whitman here. Gabe and Neal go to some lengths to try to reclaim the occasion for some actual celebration of cool facts about English syntax and usage (plus the usual attempts at debunking persistent, and apparently ineradicable, myths about these matters).

I've grown deeply pessimistic about NGD as a vehicle for such reclamatory efforts. It seems to me that the day is especially unlikely to provide a receptive audience for what linguists have to say. Instead, I'll go on talking, every day, about [real] grammar and usage (with excursions into informal, conversational, dialectal, and frankly non-standard usages, plus explorations of innovative usages, plus investigations of actual mistakes of many different kinds).

The crash blossom of the day, at least here in the part of Scotland known as the Lothians, must surely be "Number of Lothian patients made ill by drinking rockets", in the Edinburgh Evening News today. Would you drink a rocket? I'm sure you would sensibly say it depends what the ingredients are. You wouldn't just down a rocket if I fixed one for you in the cocktail shaker, would you?

Only slowly, as one ploughs through the article looking for more details of these rocket beverages that have wrecked the health of so many in the Lothians, does it dawn on you that you have made a major mistake in syntactic analysis. Try making rocket the main verb instead.

[Hat tip: sharp-eyed Language Log reader Kenneth MacKenzie.]

My preliminary experiments with dictionary searching suggest that English has absolutely no words with roots of forms like *bobbib, *papoop, *tettit, *doded, *keckick, *gaggig, *mimmom, *naneen, *faffiff, *sussis, etc. These are simple CVCVC shapes that do not seem to contain any un-English sequence. They aren't hard to say. In fact there is an example of a verb with the shape dVd that has a regular preterite tense: deed has the preterite deeded (as in The farmer deeded back his farm to the bank [WSJ w7_016]). But the pronounceability of deeded only makes the puzzle more acute: why are there no roots with the phonological form C_iVC_iVC_i (where C_i is some specific consononant sounds and the V positions are filled with vowel sounds). Why? Or is the generalization perhaps wrong? Have I missed some words of the shape in question?

Today's Sally Forth: