Language Log

Catherine Saint Louis, "Dessert, Laid-Back and Legal", NYT 5/14/2011:

Remember melatonin? In the 1990s, this over-the-counter dietary supplement was all the rage among frequent fliers, promoted as the miracle cure for jet lag. Now it is back in vogue, this time as a prominent ingredient in at least a half-dozen baked goods that flagrantly mimic the soothing effects of hash brownies — and do so legally. At least for now. […]

“A hangover effect has been reported” with large doses, said Anna Rouse Dulaney, a toxicologist with the Carolinas Poison Center. But she added, “I don’t want to go on the record saying this drug ‘can’ cause respiratory issues, that should be a ‘may.’ ”

Sometimes life is bitter, and the heart is grieving, and the onward path is stony, and a person needs an opportunity to giggle at something really silly; and I want to recommend a glance at the Wikipedia article on toilets. It begins by patiently explaining that a toilet is "a plumbing fixture primarily intended for the disposal of human excreta: urine and fecal matter", and noting that in addition "vomit and menstrual waste are sometimes disposed of in toilets in some societies". And at present there is a box at the top of the article containing the following message:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

In the comments on various recent LL posts, someone using various names has been complaining repeatedly and at length about "Linguistic Post-Modernists" who allegedly believe that "there is no such thing as a 'wrong' usage, only nonstandard ones", and so on.

Since the associated set of confusions is all too common, I've collected below a list of some past posts that address it. I also recommend Geoff Pullum's 2004 address to the MLA, "Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory".

Yesterday's SAT "question of the day":

On my own blog, a (lightly annotated) inventory of linguablogs and other web resources on linguistics (very far from exhaustive), here. Much of it based on LLog's blogroll.

The first sentence of this news report is perfectly fine, but it presents a linguistic puzzle:

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from an airplane moments before it was to depart for Paris, police said.

The puzzle is how such a conjunction can denote a single person, as it clearly does in this sentence. It could even more easily denote two, but then we’d see “were arrested”, not “was arrested”.

First a descriptive query: do all languages allow such a conjunction of a definite and an indefinite singular noun phrase in subject position, interpreted as referring to a single person? And does English allow it quite generally, or is this a special newspaper style?

Iowa is home to the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is located at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Over the years, many aspiring Chinese writers who later became outstanding poets and authors have enjoyed residencies there, and many of China's and Taiwan's most distinguished authors have come to the Writers' Workshop for shorter stays, to attend conferences, and to give lectures.

Here is a 1993 account of "Chinese Writers in Iowa" by Peter Xinping Zhou that gives a good idea of the importance of the Writers' Workshop for the Sinophone literary realm.  This essay mentions only a fraction of the Chinese writers who had come to the Workshop by 1993, and, needless to say, the number who have passed through the Workshop since 1993 is even greater.  As Peter Xinping Zhou begins his essay, it is no exaggeration to say that "To many people in China, the name of the University of Iowa is just as familiar as that of Harvard or Oxford."

According to Stan Carey at Sentence First:

λ♥[love] is written and sung by Christine Collins, a writer and self-described time traveller [Doctor Who fan] from the U.S. She describes it as “a convenient, terminology-dropping, non-gender-specific love song for all your linguist-seducing needs”.

According to Dave McMillion, "Republican W.Va. gubernatorial candidate gets in hot water over 'joke'", Herald Mail 5/12/2011:

Former Berkeley County delegate and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Faircloth said Thursday that a joke he told referring to President Obama as "Sambo" and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a "bimbo" was simply an attempt to "bring a little humor" to the campaign. […]

"There's nothing racist or feminist about me," Faircloth said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon.

It's been a while since I've posted on Chinglish. In truth, I have an enormous backlog of precious items, some stretching back for years, but I just haven't been able to get to them because I've been trying to concentrate on more substantial topics lately. Today's example, however, is so amazing that I feel inspired to address it immediately.

Consider the photograph on the right, showing a notice on the door of a hotel room's shower stall.

What in the world is going on here? One big Chinese character and all those Roman letters beneath it:

拉

Latin
America

Dahlia Lithwick, "It's Good for You", Slate 5/10/2011:

The appeal doesn't all come down to judicial politics, either, although everyone is already atwitter about the fact that the random, computer-selected, three-judge panel was comprised of three judges appointed by Democratic presidents: Diana Gribbon Motz, nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994, and Andre M. Davis and Wynn, both nominated by Obama in 2009.
[…]
It's not clear to me that a panel comprised of two African-Americans and a woman, sitting in Richmond no less, will be all that receptive to arguments about the wonders of nullification.

In the comments section, "Angela Stockton" takes Ms. Lithwick to task:

Dahlia, the panel was not COMPRISED of three judges–it was COMPOSED of three judges. "Compose" and "comprise" do not mean the same thing. Parts compose a whole, while a whole comprises its parts. "Comprise" comes from the same root as "comprehensive," which means all-inclusive.

Today's Zits:

Matthew Edney, who describes himself as "a British-born academic who now, 27 years after first arrival, is linguistically located somewhere in the general confusion of the mid-Atlantic", sent me an interesting query about the history of English spelling. Since I know almost nothing about this subject, I'm forwarding the question to LL readers, who are likely among them to have the answers, or at least some useful observations.