Language Log

On a Chinese site selling paint, pharmaceutical products, paper industry additives and so forth, we find the colorful Chinglish phrase "fuck the empress."  Although the "f" word occurs fairly frequently on this site, the exact citation for the sensational "fuck the empress" is the 14th bulleted item about three quarters of the way down on this page:  "Spray to inunction the partition slightly treat to fuck the empress to with the Beat to whet."

A truly strange piece of euphemism came up in a UK newspaper interview with Justin Halpern, the creator of the hit Twitter page Shit My Dad Says:

One day we took the dog for a walk. My dad said: "Look at the dog's asshole — you can tell from the dilation that the dog is about to shit" and the dog went to the bathroom. He was incredibly impressed by his prediction.

The dog went to the bathroom? Not exactly a case of like father like son, linguistically.

For those of us in the unpleasant position of policing student essays for plagiarism, there's a familiar odor wafting off of the unfolding scandal involving Scott McGinnis, a former congressman and current candidate for governor in Colorado ("McInnis’ water writings mirror works published years ago by Justice Hobbs", Denver Post 7/12/2010):

Portions of essays on water submitted for publication by gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis are identical or nearly identical to work published years earlier by now-State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs. […]

In a memo accompanying the work when it was turned in to the Hasan Foundation for publication, McInnis wrote that it was all original work and in its final form.

McInnis refused to comment for this story. His campaign’s spokesman, Sean Duffy, acknowledged the similarities between the work of Hobbs and McInnis, and blamed a researcher who worked with McInnis on the articles.

Rolly Fischer, an engineer who worked at the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Duffy said, was the one who handled the portions that used Hobbs’ work without attribution.

“It should’ve been attributed properly and it was not,” Duffy said. “(McInnis) relied on the research and expertise” of Fischer.

Fischer did not immediately return a message for comment. His name appears nowhere on the work McInnis submitted as his own for publication by the Hasan Foundation.

Last Friday, I took a quick look at recent work by James Street and Ewa Dabrowska that shows a striking difference between grad students and people of "low academic attainment" ("LAA") on an apparently simple sentence-interpretation task ("'Unable to understand basic sentences?'", 7/9/2010). I had to cut my investigation short in order to take the RER-B to Charles de Gaulle airport for a flight back to Philadelphia, and so I didn't have a chance to take up (what I thought was) the most striking aspect of these experiments: the fact that the LAA subjects did so much better on sentences of the form "Every X is in a Y" than on sentences of the form "Every Y has an X in it".

Latest xkcd:

Shorter Louann Brizendine, from today's Non Sequitur:

In an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times published on May 14 ("Search Engine of the Song Dynasty"), Ruiyan Xu laments that Baidu (Roman letter name of the popular Chinese search engine ["the Chinese Google"]) is not as meaningful as 百度 ("hundred times," pronounced Bǎidù), which was taken from a poem written more than eight centuries ago about persistent searching amidst chaos ("Search Engine of the Song Dynasty", 5/14/2010):

BAIDU.COM, the popular search engine often called the Chinese Google, got its name from a poem written during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”

Baidu, rendered in Chinese, is rich with linguistic, aesthetic and historical meaning. But written phonetically in Latin letters (as I must do here because of the constraints of the newspaper medium and so that more American readers can understand), it is barely anchored to the two original characters; along the way, it has lost its precision and its poetry.

Charles Krauthammer has joined the chorus of pundits using presidential first-person pronouns to test the theory that a lie told often enough becomes the truth ("The selective modesty of Barack Obama", WaPo, 7/9/2010):

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

When we last posted about Tyson Gay, he'd been entertainingly cupertinoed. And now, from Reuters on July 3, this:

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters

According to a recent press release, "Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar":

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.

The findings — which undermine the assumption that all speakers have a core ability to use grammatical cues — could have significant implications for education, communication and linguistic theory.

In the July 12 & 19 issue of The New Yorker, there’s a nice little piece by Ben McGrath called “Spy vs. Spy: Say What?” that starts out, “Count linguists and phonologists among those bewildered by last week’s Russian spying scandal, in which the F.B.I. arrested a network of presumed Muscovite spooks who appeared to be living ordinary American lives, gardening and Facebooking and selling real estate under assumed identities.” (Never mind the problematic presupposition signaled by the conjunction ‘linguists and phonologists’.) Only an abstract of the article is in the accessible online issue, here. For the full article you need hard copy or a subscription to the digital online version.

The linguistic issue is that one of the spies explained her accent by saying she was Belgian, and another by declaring herself to be Québécois. Maria Gouskova, a UMass Ph.D. now an assistant professor at NYU and a specialist in Russian phonology, gets extensively quoted and does the profession proud, including showing that linguists and phonologists can have a sense of humor; and Ben McGrath seems to have done a fine job of writing it up, also with good quotes from Stephanie Harves and Joshua Fishman.

I'm a fan of David Pogue's tech reviews in the NYT, but his recent review of David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World has me wondering whether I care much for his book reviews. For example, Pogue writes:

Kirkpatrick's writing is low-key but also workmanlike, and punctuated by jarring grammatical constructions ("Everybody carried their stuff themselves"; "every Thefacebook user had their own public bulletin board"). Ouch.

Two examples, and both involve singular they? Not much variety there, which indicates to me that there's probably not much variety in the constructions Pogue finds jarring in the book. So why even mention this? It's clear that Pogue has plenty of other justifiable reasons to dislike the book; this comment about grammar seems entirely unnecessary — and, as has been discussed here on Language Log so many times that it's not worth trying to compile a list of links (but see the Wikipedia page on the subject), singular they is just not that big of a deal.

Here at DGA's annual Séminaire on "Traitement de la parole, du langage et des documents multimédias", I've learned a new phrase: Document dematerialization.