Language Log

There's an old headline-parody that involves posing a disjunctive question between two functionally equivalent alternatives, and "X: Threat or Menace?" is the most familiar form of this joke. We've used it more than once here on Language Log, for example in Geoff Nunberg's post "'Still unpacked': Threat or Menace?", 5/17/2005.

Sasha Aikhenvald on the Linguistic Typology mailing list, April 13:

Ernie Grant, a notable elder of the Jirrbal [earlier known as Dyirbal] tribe, will be honoured by an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from James Cook University on 17 April 2010.

Attached is the statement of his achievements leading to this award. [click here; then, to see the statement, double-click on the filename in the download box]

It is worth noting that Ernie is the son of Chloe Grant, Bob Dixon's first and great teacher of Dyirbal. He is one of the last remaining speakers of the language.

In the history of (native-speaker) language consultants (also known as informants), they have been treated as everything along the scale from experimental subjects to language teachers to research collaborators. In Grant's case, it was his mother who primarily served as a language consultant, while Grant himself grew to perform a wide range of significant services to his community — for which he's now being given this honor.

From Kenneth P. Vogel, "GOP operatives crash the tea party", Politico 4/14/2010:

As for the bus tours, [Sal] Russo said “they work for us. It’s a great vehicle to go to a lot of places and get a lot of people involved and engaged. I am proud of what we do. Who else goes out there and motivates people and insinuates involvement and activity and actually is making a difference in what is going on?”

A few days ago at the Guardian, David Marsh brought out the stuffed body of George Orwell and propped it up in the pulpit ("Election 2010 – vote for the cliche you hate the most", 4/9/2010):

George Orwell, in his brilliant 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: "When one watches some tired [political] hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy." He memorably argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can often corrupt thought" and proposed six rules of good writing:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The result was shocking.

Dan Bilefsky, "Hungarian Right, Center and Far, Make Gains", New York Times 4/11/2010:

Hungary’s center-right opposition party won first-round parliamentary elections here on Sunday, while a far-right party, whose black-clad paramilitary extremists evoke the Nazi era, made significant gains.

Following on Barbara Partee's posting on vwllssnss, here's today's Zits:

Nice conceit about dispensing with vowels in speech (as well as vowel letters in writing).

According to Andreas Ulrich and Alfred Weinzierl, "German Trainers Describe Pitiful State of Afghan Police", Der Spiegel, 4/7/2010:

A functioning police force is seen as a prerequisite for a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan. German trainers, however, paint a disastrous picture of the quality of Afghan security forces. Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or take bribes.

This morning's Get Fuzzy featured a Bulgarian stereotype that seemed slightly, well, random:

Bucky Katt's assumption seems to be that the dress code at a Bulgarian nightclub would be ragged and strange, thus (at least partly) explaining Rob Wilco's pre-torn and pre-soiled shirt.

Six of us — three philosophers, two linguists, and a mathematician — were having dinner the Café Noir in Providence last Thursday night, and when three of us decided on the excellent boeuf bourguignon, someone at the table told a story of a colleague who tried to include the phrase boeuf bourguignon in a word-processed file and found that the spell-checker recommended correcting the spelling to Beowulf Burlington.

Here at Language Log, we've been known to complain from time to time about language-related reporting in the popular press.  But a couple of days ago, when I clicked on a link in the science section of Google News and hit John Brandon's "Freaky Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist", Fox News, 4/5/2010, I was reminded that things could be worse.

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists — that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye — and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud.

The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe — a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

I'm going to venture to disagree with my colleague and friend John McWhorter's diagnosis of "What does Palinspeak mean?" (TNR, 4/6/2010).

Of course, I don't disagree with John's observation that Sarah Palin's speech style is folksy and informal. As for his comment that "Palin […] has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete", we could quibble over details — how much of the difference is in what public figures say, as opposed to what gets transmitted and reported? — but let's grant that John is right about this as well.

Where I think that John may go wrong is in his analysis of that and there.

The latest xkcd:

(For more on non-literal literally, see here, here, and here.)

Yesterday's Zits:

Then there was the whole Facebook wall rape episode, and…