Language Log

Sarah Palin's Twitter feed continues to attract a mind-boggling amount of international media attention, most recently for the act of "favoriting" a tweet from Ann Coulter, which contained a photograph of a church sign with inflammatory things to say about President Obama. Palin, or whoever runs her Twitter account, subsequently "unfavorited" the tweet, and Palin told ABC News that she had no knowledge of the original favoriting. The Telegraph reported:

The fact that she uses a hand-held device to write her Twitter messages without checking by her staff has led to errors before, such as calling on moderate Muslims to “repudiate” plans for a mosque near ground zero in New York.

…except, as we all know, the word that Palin used was refudiate. Mostly likely what we have here is a Cupertino-style miscorrection, in which a copy editor has allowed a spellchecker to substitute the "correct" word repudiate, thus missing the entire point. (This despite the fact that a sidebar of related articles links to the Telegraph's own recent discussion of Palinesque refudiation.)

Tim Leonard sent along the Nov. 2 User Friendly strip, with a question:

A rather extraordinary language story broke in the UK yesterday when a police officer was put on suspension for allegedly peppering his testimony at an inquest with phrases taken from song titles, as a prank. One of the fuller news stories is the one in the tabloid newspaper The Sun (read it here). The question is not, of course, about whether it would be professionally improper to play jokes on a coroner by finding excuses to insert song titles into sworn testimony at an inquest involving the shooting of a civilian by a police marksman; it would be grossly offensive. The question is how an offense of this sort could ever be proved given that song titles are, as everyone must surely know, so frequently taken from everyday phrases and clichés that are extremely frequent in everyone's speech.

I realize this is Language Log, not Gender and Sexuality Blog, but these are topics we've often taken up, under the heading of how science is pursued and reported on. An announcement for a provocative Stanford talk coming up soon:

This is a sign from Hong Kong:

Lady Bracknell, in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, is one of the most terrifyingly pedantic and correctly spoken characters in all of English theater ("a monster," Jack Worthing says of her, "without being a myth, which is rather unfair"). And I have mentioned her usage in lectures on numerous occasions to point out, when talking about preposition stranding, that she does strand prepositions. But as I watched Mark Thomson's wonderful production of the play at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre last Friday night (get tickets now, readers in eastern Scotland), I suddenly noticed something new about what she says when Jack Worthing gives his age:

LADY BRACKNELL: … How old are you?
JACK: Twenty-nine.
LADY BRACKNELL: A very good age to be married at.

A preposition phrase (PP) like at the age of 29 is very clearly an temporal adjunct, not a complement. So Lady Bracknell is prepared to strand a preposition even in a temporal adjunct PP!

Every once in a while, it strikes me as odd that "red" has come to mean "right wing" in U.S. politics. From this morning's headlines: "Election 2010: Things are starting to look red";"Republicans make it a red November"; "River of Red Buries the Blue"; "Hoosier State Turns Red"; "Republican red tide seeps into Maryland"; "California Voters Turn Back the Angry Red Tide".

A "short imagined monologue" by Ben Greenman at McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "I am the invisible thing that holds together the two halves of a compound word":

When I first came to town, they were all around me, the words. They waved at one another in the street and chatted at parties. I was careful then because I was a newcomer and it is not my personality to stride right into the center of things and announce myself, especially since I am invisible. But I noticed it at once: some words looked good together.

In a few rare cases, like with "sword" and "play" and "rain" and "storm," they found their way to each other, but most words didn't really know what was good for them. "Trouble" liked "coat," and "sweet" liked "bone," and "air" spent years pining for "pickle." Can you imagine?

Jan Freeman, "I could care less: A loathed phrase turns 50", The Boston Globe, 10/24/2010:

It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’

Ann voted with her reader — “the expression as I understand it is ‘I couldn’t care less’ ” — but she thought the question was trivial. “To be honest,” she concluded, “this is a waste of valuable newspaper space and I couldn’t care less.”

She couldn’t have known it at the time, but her reader’s trivial question would be wasting newspaper space (and bandwidth, too) for decades, as it blossomed into one of the great language peeves of our time.