Language Log

[Update 6/20/2010 — The linked CNN story has been extensively modified, for the better. The headline is now "Language mavens exchange words over Obama's Oval Office speech," and the article now highlights Ron Yaros along with Payack, and incorporates some information from this post. Fev at headsuptheblog has some before-and-after analysis.]

It's amazing what a grip Received Perceptions have on what passes for journalism these days.  Today, CNN enlisted Paul Payack to lead us through an unusually contentless version of one of the standard categories of Obama  criticism  ("Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience", 6/17/2010):

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

How can we tell? Well, for a start,

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Wait, what? Text at a ninth-grade reading level is too professorial for the American people to understand? When it's read out loud to them? Color me skeptical. But wait, there's more…

When Carl-Henric Svanberg raised such a fuss yesterday by explaining that at BP "we care about the small people", my first reaction was that he should have known better than to bring up the whole size thing, or for that matter the whole caring thing. But my second reaction was to wonder about contemporary American expressions for ordinary people.

The most obvious phrase, I think, is "ordinary people". It's roughly 25 times more common than "small people" in terms of raw frequency (1475 hits vs. 60 hits in the COCA corpus), and a majority of the instances of "small people" are literal references to people's height, or other irrelevant categories: "Small people can bend easier, with less low-back pain"; "I had a little Lilliputian hallucination. I saw very small people, pink people, before a migraine"; "Ellen, as a petite person herself, felt strongly that small people should avoid perkiness at all costs".

Of course, the phrase "small people" can be used in American Englsih to mean "ordinary people". But to a surprising extent, it seems to be used to refer to such people in other countries, often in quotations from people in other countries. The first five COCA hits (in the relevant meaning) are:

Brecht argues in the play that "everybody is responsible, even the small people."
"…so many of his donors are these small people who are sending checks for $50, $100" [from a story about Obama's 2008 campaign]
"… when you have the government and you have the multinational, it's very hard for small people like us to win." [from a story about farmers in rural Ireland]
"Some of us small people were always tired of the war, " says Bompa-Turay. [from a story about Sierra Leone]
"… involving the masses, the workers, the small people, but the movement was led by the middle class sons and daughters." [from a story about Indonesia]

In the June 16 Doonesbury, Duke makes some additional suggestions about Tony Hayward's accent, adding to the GEICO gecko idea that we discussed yesterday:

BP's chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has been taken to task for a statement he made to reporters after a meeting with President Obama and other White House officials: "I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are really companies that don’t care, but that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people."

The Economist's new language blog Johnson chalks up Svanberg's unfortunate wording to his lack of fluency in English, suggesting that he "may have heard a venerable American phrase, 'the little guy,' and tried to use it, simply misremembering slightly." On Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall speculates that "the small people" was the result of a "phrase in Swedish he might have been carrying over into English."  And indeed, BP spokesman Toby Odone told the Associated Press that "it is clear that what he means is that he cares about local businesses and local people. This was a slip in translation."

Around the blogosphere, Swedish speakers have further explained "the small people" as a translation of the phrase "den lilla människan." There's a bit of disagreement, however, about how condescending that phrase might be in Swedish.

I'm pleased to say that, after considerable delay, Cambridge University Press has now set up on its website some limited electronic access to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Amazon also has some search-inside access too, both at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. The chapter we chose for making searchable online is a particularly useful one, in that it is largely free-standing: it is chapter 2, called "Syntactic overview", in which Rodney Huddleston surveys the structure and terminology of the entire book, giving a capsule version of the analysis that is elaborated in the following chapters.

Yesterday's Doonesbury:

I've added two new sites to our blogroll, both well worth regular visits:

The Economist has launched Johnson:

In this blog, named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, our correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world

And Crikey has launched Fully (sic) — or perhaps I should write .au/fully (sic):

Crikey’s very own language blog for discerning word nerds. Sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Australian linguists getting all hot and bothered about the way we communicate.

I've promoted this from its origin as an update to Sunday's post "Spelling is hard". KF wrote:

My dear husband always corrects my grammar…. Spelling is difficult; walls are hard.
Many people fail to use the word hard correctly….

But KF's husband can be added to the list of those who are ignorant about hard. The OED's entry has:

5. a. Difficult to do or accomplish; not easy; full of obstacles; laborious, fatiguing, troublesome.

a1340 HAMPOLE Psalter vi. 4 Ful hard it is to be turnyd enterly til þe bryghthed and þe pees of godis lyght. c1440 Promp. Parv. 227/1 Harde yn knowynge, or warkynge, difficilis. 1559 W. CUNINGHAM Cosmogr. Glasse 97 It is as harde, and laborus, to get the Longitude. 1611 BIBLE Transl. Pref. 2 So hard a thing it is to please all. 1653 WALTON Angler ii. 60, I see now it is a harder matter to catch a Trout then a Chub. 1711 STEELE Spect. No. 36 {page}8 How hard a thing it is for those to keep Silence who have the Use of Speech. 1876 MOZLEY Univ. Serm. iv. 90 Often..what we must do as simply right..is just the hardest thing to do.

Over at You Don't Say, John McIntyre has been attending to the Queen's English Society (and other "people who set themselves up as morally superior to you"): "Minutes of the Academy"; "A nice mess"; "The self-righteous shall inherit the earth"; "Speak proper, or else". John links to Stan Carey's post at Sentence First, "The Queen's English Society deplores your impurities".

John and Stan — and Graham and Dogberry and Paul — were stimulated by two articles at The Times (of London), "Pedants’ revolt aims to protect English from spell of txt spk", 6/7/2010, and "Do we need an Academy of English? The experts argue for and against", 6/7/2010.

If you follow all those links — and I hope that you do, because every one of them is worth the trouble — you'll learn that the QES is even more illogical, hypocritical and badly informed than you'd expect them to be.  I'll just add three (at best semi-coherent) thoughts, which I'd develop into LL posts if I had the time.

I think I've gotten this one wrong a few times myself:

(The headline was corrected a few minutes ago…)

Over the years, here at Language Log we've examined countless examples of Chinglish, that inimitable brand of English spewed out by bad translation software and incompetent human translators. The mirror of this phenomenon going in the other direction has been referred to as Zhonglish, which is defined in the Urban Dictionary as "The mangled, garbled, butchered, malapropriated or trashed Chinese spoken by native speakers of English."

I touched upon Zhonglish briefly last year ("Xinhua English and Zhonglish", 2/4/2009), but now (on a Chinese social networking site) I've come across a wonderful example of written Zhonglish that merits more extensive discussion — the multilingual warning sign at the entrance to the world-famous roller coaster known as the Coney Island Cyclone:

It may be time for newsreaders worldwide to start polishing up their pre-stopped laterals again. The automatic earthquake-location system at the Iceland Meteorological Office's Department of Geophysics has been starting to show some small earthquakes under Eyjafjallajökull's bigger neighbor, Mýrdalsjökull:

Did you know Zulu has a word for "annoying three-foot-long one-note plastic trumpet"? Isn't that fascinating?

No. Of course it isn't fascinating. It's a wonderful example of why I tend to think the issue of what things different languages have words for (especially, have nouns for) is stupid and trivial.