Language Log

A web page about songs referring to God, pointed out to me by James Kabala, makes a critical remark about the grammar or style of one of the song titles:

11. New Order – 'Touched by the Hand of God'
Though it's guilty of one of the most heinous journalistic crimes – that of 'passive voice' (it should technically be "Touched by God's Hand," although it wouldn't be nearly as catchy) – this song is one of New Order's finest.

I have been collecting boneheaded usage advice on passives for a long time, but I am truly staggered at this one. The writer thinks touched by the hand of God is a passive clause, and is correct about that, but also thinks that "technically" it should be changed to touched by God's hand, which is not!

Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt, "Pakistan's spies tied to slaying of a journalist", NYT 7/4/2011:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Obama administration officials believe that Pakistan’s powerful spy agency ordered the killing of a Pakistani journalist who had written scathing reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military, according to American officials. […]

The disclosure of the intelligence was made in answer to questions about the possibility of its existence, and was reluctantly confirmed by the two officials. “There is a lot of high-level concern about the murder; no one is too busy not to look at this,” said one.

I did the stupidest thing in Bulgaria. I bought a new wallet. Never do that on a foreign trip. See if you can figure out why before you read on. (And yes, of course there's a linguistic angle.)

In the most recent SMBC, a clever teacher outsmarts herself:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference renamed itself "The Organization of the Islamic Cooperation" on June 28th at its meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan according to this press release. As I write, the English version of their web site reflects the new name, but the French version does not, although the French version of the press release gives it the same name in French: "Organisation de la Coopération islamique".

Today's "Candorville," by Darrin Bell:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

The awful thing about the documentation policy adopted by Amber, who has clearly started a campaign to get Dilbert fired for bullying, is that her idea of taking down what is said at a meeting is to record illocutionary rather than locutionary acts.

The most recent xkcd distills a concentrated essence of word rage and word aversion triggers:

The 2004 remake of The Flight of the Phoenix is on TV here right now. According to the Wikipedia article it wasn't all that well received, with many critics of the opinion that it didn't improve on the original. However, there is one point that they seem to have missed: this version is set in Mongolia, and the unfortunately brief conversation with the bandits is in comprehensible Mongolian! I don't think I've ever encountered Mongolian before in an American film.

The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics took place last week in Portland OR, and one of the papers presented there has gotten some (well deserved) press coverage: Moshe Koppel, Navot Akiva, Idan Dershowitz and Nachum Dershowitz, "Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components", ACL2011.

Well, at least the AP covered it: Matti Friedman, "An Israeli algorithm sheds light on the Bible", AP 6/29/2011 (as usual published under different headlines in various publications, e.g. "Algorithm developed by Israeli scholars sheds light on the Bible’s authorship" (WaPo), "Software deciphers authorship of the Bible" (CathNews), etc.).

Luke Yeomans (pictured) had a king cobra sanctuary in Nottingham, England, and planned to open it to the public this weekend, but instead one of his cobras killed him on Wednesday with a single bite, a hefty injection of neurotoxic and cardiotoxic venom that gave him a heart attack. Sadly, the linguistic signs that he would be killed this way were already present in the record, quite clear in something he had said. I wish someone could have warned him.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Yeomans as saying this about why the snakes offered no threat to him:

These king cobras know I provide them with food and fresh water so they're not going to go out of their way to do harm to me when I do no harm to them whatsoever. People say I’m mad but it’s better than saying that you’re bad and everything I do is good. My life is about the conservation of the king cobra.