Language Log

One of the strangest stories gets one of the strangest headlines in a strange, strange August. The headline is from CBC in Canada, and the story is from the strange state of Florida:

Days from death, Fla. wildlife officials free plastic jar that was stuck on bear cub's head

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty that plastic jar is free at last! Though the news about the Florida wildlife officials being close to death is alarming, of course. You may find you need some explanations. If you don't, my compliments. But read on if you do.

A few days ago, mild-mannered editor John E. McIntyre let out his inner @GRAMMARHULK ("Chairman Wednesday", You Don't Say 8/8/2010):

Must stay calm. Must not let little things get under one’s skin. Must keep a sense of proportion.

And yet, day after day, journalists everywhere keep turning out sentences in which, in defiance of English syntax, they insist on inserting the day of the week between the subject and the verb. Who tells them to write like this? Yesterday, from Reuters:

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro Wednesday listed some technical areas that
 might yet need rule changes, including the use of market orders, “stub quotes,” price
 collars, and self-help rules used by the dozen U.S. exchanges where today’s high-speed trading is done.

And searching the COCA corpus for the sequence weekday-name past-tense-verb reveals that this is indeed a journalismism:

From xkcd a little while ago:

Suzanne Kemmer sent along this example from a web forum:

I read on the internet that this means he mightened get along with another rabbit. [emphasis added]

I don't think that I've seen this before.

Nicholas Wade, "In Harvard Lab Inquiry, a Raid and a 3-Year Wait", NYT 8/13/2010, gives some additional information about the Marc Hauser scandal.  The new information is still basically rumor — the result of interviews with sources both anonymous and not, with the non-anonymous information being largely second hand. But it all suggests that whatever happened is more serious than just a bit of careless record-keeping.

Could that famously well-edited publication be the source of one of those sporadic folk-etymologies that we call eggcorns? Sure: see "And every lion tongue cast down", 8/1/2005. The mistake discussed there is more of a mondegreen, but it involves the same sort of creative mis-hearing.  However, the example that Ian Leslie sent in this morning, taken from Anthony Lane's review of The Expendables, is more ambiguous:

Stallone, who co-wrote the movie with Dave Callaham, is also listed as the director, but since he appears to be having trouble, in the autumn of his years, getting his eyelids and lower lip to act in consort with the rest of him, I’m hardly surprised that he had no energy left over to command the film. [emphasis added]

"Shouldn't that be 'in concert with'?", Ian asked. The answer, it appears, is "Well,  yes, in a statistical sense, at least since the end of the 18th century".

Kevin L. has sighted a lovely specimen (Neave Barker, "Heatwave may rekindle Chernobyl's curse", Aljazeera.net 8/11/2010):

Today the winds have changed and the skies over the capital have cleared, a welcome rest bite for thousands of people doomed to spend sweltering nights in overheated apartments with the windows firmly closed.

A couple of days ago, Gary Marcus told me about the Beatles Complete on Ukulele project, and introduced me to its creator, David Barratt.

Gary got involved because he's working on a book about "learning to become musical at the age of 40", and so he's joining a roster of performers that includes the Fort Greene Childrens Choir (Age 7 and Under Section), Samantha Fox, and many others (82 so far), recording voice-and-ukulele versions of all 185 songs in the Beatles catalog. Gary is of course singing With a Little Help from My Friends (because, he explains, "otherwise I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket"), and his contribution is scheduled to be released on July 19, 2011.

So how does Language Log come into this? Well, David wants to recruit Barack Obama to sing Let it Be, and Gary thought that I could help. In turn, I believe that YOU can help.

The Guardian has an article today entitled, "Linguist on mission to save Inuit 'fossil language' disappearing with the ice," about a forthcoming research trip by University of Cambridge linguist Stephen Pax Leonard to study Inuktun, an endangered Polar Inuit language spoken by the Inughuit community of northwest Greenland.

It's always great to see this kind of coverage for anthropological linguistics, and the article is worth a read — though I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that Inuktun "is regarded as something of a linguistic 'fossil' and one of the oldest and most 'pure' Inuit dialects." Regarded by whom? The scare quotes (or claim quotes) around "fossil" and "pure" fail to indicate whose notion of ethnolinguistic purity is at play here. (The "language" vs. "dialect" confusion throughout the article doesn't help, either.)

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the news article is what it doesn't include. From the Guardian Style Guide's Twitter feed:

We have managed to carry a story on Inuit language without the cliche "number of words for snow". Well done Mark Brown.

Well done, indeed. Once again, it's good to know that our perpetual gripes about the snow-word myth are not just empty howls echoing across the tundra.

An anonymous informant deep within corporate America ("I work at a large financial institution", he says guardedly) has seen the corporation's style guide for communications with customers, and its advice includes (guess what) this gem of cluelessness:

Use active voice rather than passive voice. Active voice is easier to read. Instead of "we have decided," write "we decided." Instead of "we will be implementing a program," write "we are implementing."

They think these are passives! And people disagree with me when I point out such things (over and over again, like a CD that has gotten stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuck), and ask rhetorically where on God's green earth knowledge of elementary English grammar terminology disappeared to in the late 20th century. People — writing advisers, in fact — are scoring zero on identifying a grammatical construction they feel a need to warn other people not to use. I know I have already pointed this out a time or two, but really, this is an utterly insane situation.

Cute illustrations of chains of English word-sense ambiguities:

This morning's Non Sequitur is not, as far as I know, a comment on my previous post:

Carolyn Y. Johnson, "Author on leave after Harvard inquiry", Boston Globe 8/10'/2010:

Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser — a well-known scientist and author of the book “Moral Minds’’ — is taking a year-long leave after a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct in his laboratory.

The findings have resulted in the retraction of an influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’ says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.

Two other journals say they have been notified of concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors.

It is unusual for a scientist as prominent as Hauser — a popular professor and eloquent communicator of science whose work has often been featured on television and in newspapers — to be named in an investigation of scientific misconduct. His research focuses on the evolutionary roots of the human mind.