Language Log

They say that any noun can be verbed, but some transformations are more surprising than others. Here's one that Bryan Van de Ven spotted earlier today on the road in Austin. (Click on the image for a larger and more complete picture.)

The sub-head ("HANG THE PERSON WHOM HIRES THEM) attests fact that whom is treated on the right just as it is on the left: All across the political spectrum, slogan-daubers use whom when "a note of dignity and austerity is desired".

There's an excellent discussion of some methodological issues behind the Marc Hauser scandal at Neuron Culture, "Updated: This Hauser thing is getting hard to watch". The post points out that the information released so far leaves many questions unanswered about what the lab's official methodology was, and what Hauser and other lab members really did.

The popular sports blog Deadspin isn't the first place you'd expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post "Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way," featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook:

Reader HS asks about

…the extremely common construction 'these difficult economic times,' which strikes me as an awkwardly ordered way of saying 'these times of economic difficulty.' I wonder what is so attractive about something so awkward. It gets nearly 10 million Google hits.

A COCA search for / these [jj] [jj] times / turns up 20 instances of these tough economic times, 11 of these difficult economic times, six of these hard economic times, four each of these uncertain, rough, and dire economic times, two each of these lean, perilous, bad, tight, turbulent and troubled economic times, and one each of these parlous, miserable, sour, poor, uncertain, harsh, and challenging economic times.

Tom Bartlett, "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard", Chronicle of Higher Education 8/19/2010:

Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do? […]

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how research assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification.

A copy of the document was provided to The Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left psychology. The document is the statement he gave to Harvard investigators in 2007.

From Tom Scott, a set of useful warning labels to stick on newspaper articles.

Now, to be fair, we need a set of similar warning labels for scientific papers and their presentation to the press.

I'll suggest a few after the jump. I'm sure that you'll be able to think of others, or better wording for mine.

FMA writes (from zip code 02138):

My roommate [MS] told me Christopher Hitchens is a wonderful prose stylist. I was skeptical, so I opened Hitch 22 at random. The first sentence reads:

"My mother having decided that Tonbridge was out of the question for her sensitive Christopher, some swift work had to be done to reposition me in the struggle—the whole aim and object of the five years at Mount House—to make me into a proper public-school boy [sic]."

I have put in bold the part of the sentence that bothers me. Essentially, there is a fragment next to a sentence; there is no predicate for "my mother." I noted that Mr. Hitchens is also missing a comma after "mother," but my roommate believes that's just the thing that would make the sentence wrong. According to him, "My mother having decided that Tonbridge was out of the question for her sensitive Christopher," is a modifier of "some swift work," so he believes there is no problem with the sentence. He also believes there is no problem sentences like

"My mother being very old, I walked in quietly [sic]."

Will you tell the world he's wrong? I tried to come up with analogous examples, but he thinks there's something about the present perfect tense that makes these constructions unique. He claims authority because he is a native English speaker—I, while not a native speaker, do claim native competence.

Undeterred by their conviction in Federal court, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson of the Typo Vigilantes Typo Eradication Advancement League are in Philly.

They're on tour to promote their book, The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, which chronicles their epic saga of peevish vandalism heroic resistance to "the creeping menace of carelessness".

Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89", by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of grammar, usage, and stye:

Mr. Kilpatrick railed against turgid prose in "The Writer's Art" (Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1984). In his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics."

When Paul Grice drafted his maxims for cooperative conversation, he didn't have in mind that we should get upset when people violate them. On the contrary, the whole idea was to use apparent violations as the basis for reasoning about conversational implicatures, the things that people obviously mean but don't literally say.

Still, people do get upset about all aspects of other people's language use, and it's common to object to redundancy, as in "ATM machine" — though members of what William Safire used to call the Squad Squad rarely get as upset as the anonymous "pilotless drone" man did ("Is it sinking into your thick skull, you high school drop-out?", 2/7/2007).

It's even rarer for usage disputes to escalate to the point where police intervention is required. But I've now gotten a dozen emails drawing my attention to a recent linguistic fracas where the cops were asked to rule on a matter involving conversational implicature.

James McElvenney comes to the defense of Andrew Herrick ("Linguistic border security", Fully (sic) 8/16/2010).

Shorter version: Herrick argued that Americanisms are polluting the clear pool of Australian English, and bringing social ills like mugging in their wake ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age, 8/6/2010); I suggested that Herrick was prejudiced, illogical, and deluded ("'America's toxic culture' invaded Oz — in words?", 8/6/2010); McElvenney presents evidence that Herrick was not entirely deluded.

To follow up on Mark's post, below, on the bottomless fatuity of Robert Fisk: we gave a bunch of these items in –ess to the members of the American Heritage Usage Panel some years ago; Kristen Hanson and I reported some of the results in an LSA paper in 1988. What we found is that even then, the generally conservative and venerable writers and editors on the panel were bailing out on the suffix, retaining it only where it had a certain historical signficance.

Robert Fisk, the well-known linguistic paleoconservative,  has been reduced to playing little games with his copy editors in order to create material for his columns ("Our language has a way of turning women into men", The Independent, 8/14/2010):

A week ago, in my front-page story on the Hiroshima commemoration, I planted a little trap for our sub-editors.

I referred to Vita Sackville-West as a "poetess". And sure enough, the sub (or "subess") changed it – as I knew he or she would – to "poet". Aha! Soon as I saw it, I knew I could write this week about the mysterious – not to say mystical – grammar of feminism and political correctness. At least, I guess feminism was the start of it all, for was it not in the Eighties and early Nineties that newspapers started turning feminine nouns into male nouns? This was the age, was it not, when an "actress" became an "actor", when a "priestess" became a "priest" – which does sound more sensible – and when a "conductress" became a "conductor". A policeman and policewoman have turned into "police officers" (even if they are constables).