The Nov. 10 Subnormality , featuring a tour of the Museum of the Theoretical, has a nice example of dude used as an interjection:

The crash blossom of the day comes to us from Rebekah Macdonald via Twitter. This headline appeared on the New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz:

Police chase driver in hospital

Of course, the police didn't chase a driver in a hospital, like some wacky action movie sequence. The subject of the headline is "police chase driver," a compound noun pileup typical of headlinese in the UK and other countries.  The driver had "led police in a 150 kmh chase in Lower Hutt" and landed in the hospital after crashing (!) into a power pole. We await the inevitable followup headline, "Police chase driver out of hospital."

Everybody acquainted with colloquial English knows that Yes has alternations in pronunciation: it may lose its final [s] and add a centralizing offglide to become Yeah, and it may pick up an alternative final consonant, an unreleased [p] (simulating the sudden closure of the lips at the end of the utterance), to make Yep. No also gets a final unreleased [p] sometimes, hence the spelling Nope (notice that in each case there is a conventional spelling of the [p]-final pronunciation for use when direct reporting speech, e.g. in novels). But my colleague Heinz Giegerich just pointed out to me a surprising constraint on the final-[p] pronunciations: for a long time those pronunciations have been current only as single word utterances.

In particular, he noted (on receiving an email from a Chinese student who agreed to a meeting by writing "Oh, yep", and noticing that it seemed odd) that the [p]-final pronunciations don't seem to occur when preceded by the interjection oh.

I recently noticed that the category of English autoantonyms now includes a derivational suffix.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., "New Lines of Attack in H.I.V. Prevention", NYT Science Times today:

Because 95 percent of gay men and 40 percent of heterosexual American women have had anal sex at least once during their lifetimes, according to surveys, rectal versions of the [microbocidal] gel are being developed.

Where to start?

At the end of his abbreviated trip to Indonesia (cut short because of the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Merapi), President Obama gave a half-hour address at the University of Indonesia that finally showed off his skills in the Indonesian language, a subject we've been examining. Granted, it was a prepared speech, but Obama went out of his way to include Indonesian phrases and sentences that would resonate with the crowd (mostly composed of students and staff at UI), and he even worked in at least one ad-lib.

From the official transcript, here are the relevant Indonesian passages from the speech, accompanied by my quick analysis. (Video of the speech is available on C-SPAN here and on the White House site here.)

The word random is being used with a new meaning by young people in Britain (or in Edinburgh, anyway), as Miriam Meyerhoff first pointed out to me. The new meaning is nothing like "distributed according to chance". Young people will see a surprising thing and say, "Wow, that's random!".

In January 2009, soon after President Obama was sworn in, we had our first video evidence of his conversational skills in Indonesian, based on an exchange he had with a State Department staffer. (See "Obama's Indonesian pleasantries: the video.") As I said at the time, his experience of living in Indonesia from age six to ten had left him "if not bilingual, at least bi-courteous." Now Obama is on his long-delayed state visit to Indonesia, and he's been breaking out some more Indonesian pleasantries and showing off basic food-related etiquette.

A correspondent who had better remain nameless tells me that while dining among mostly strangers at the birthday dinner of an old friend he encountered a young woman who had an accent that he absolutely could not place anywhere on the globe. It seemed almost British, and yet not really. Eventually he just asked. She was from Northern California, but had been born in the Midwest, and she acknowledged, "Everyone always assumes I'm British or something just because I'm more careful to pronounce words properly. It only sounds unusual because everyone simply ignores how words are spelled anymore." Everyone else at the table simply nodded as though that made all the sense in the world.

Ian Preston, a London economist, did a bit of research of his own into the issue of the police officer who has been accused of having a little passive-aggressive fun by peppering his inquest evidence with song titles. "It seems to me," Ian remarks in a classically British understated way, "that the evidence cited on this in newspaper discussion is a little underwhelming."

It sure is. Ian not only found yet more song titles in the same police testimony; he then undertook the experiment of checking another random text for comparison, and found song titles there too. What's more, the second text he took was an email on an entirely non-song-related topic from a professional grammarian. What's more, the professional grammarian was me.

Reader JM wrote to draw our attention to the slogan "Nowhere is safe" on the posters for the new Harry Potter movie:

Reader RP sent along a link to a recent story in the Washington Post (Marjorie Censer, "CACI says it's buying Fairfax tech firm as it announces record earnings", 11/1/2010):

Paul M. Cofoni, CACI's president and chief executive, praised the company's strong quarter as well as its newest acquisitions. In contrast with other defense chief executives who in earnings announcements last week warned of tightening budgets, he was bullish on CACI's future performance.

"The opportunity pipeline is as robust as it's ever been," Cofoni said. "It's almost semi-infinite."

Over at the Economist's Johnson blog, R.L.G. has launched a quixotic bid to rescue malamanteau, which Randall Munroe coined as part of a joke about what R.L.G. calls Wikipedia's "over serious tone when discussing goofy topics." (The rest of Munroe's joke struck a little closer to home: the strip's mouseover title was "The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.")

After a suitably lengthy and serious debate, malamanteau lost the fight for an actual Wikipedia listing. But on November 4, R.L.G. found an ingenious argument for resuming the battle.