Language Log

Well, two, anyway. From reader AH, who wrote "Even though I've been following the (deeply disturbing) story, it took me at least three tries before I parsed the headline correctly":

Amount cheerleader who refused to cheer rapist required to pay reduced

And from reader DM:

Snakes in underwear smuggler fined $400

Professor Cameron Johnston was giving the introductory lecture in a social science course at York University, Toronto, and talking about the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable opinions. You can't say something like "All Jews should be sterilized" and represent that as acceptable just because it's your opinion, he explained. And at that, a 22-year-old senior named Sarah Grunfeld got up and walked straight out of the class to report him to Hasbara, a pro-Israel advocacy group on campus, which rapidly put out a statement calling for the professor to be fired for anti-Semitism. It's a dangerous path one treads when one tries to give examples of obnoxious propositions in a classroom where not all the students have a firm grasp of the fundamental distinction between the use and the mention of a linguistic expression.

A few days ago, Ben Goldacre, or someone pretending to be him on twitter, tweeted

dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick.

As Geoff Pullum recently observed

I despair when I see this kind of drivel. What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense.

Mark Knopfler's satirical Money For Nothing, banned in Canada since last January for having the word faggot in it, has now been unbanned. His gentle ribbing of working-class bigotry can once again be played on Canadian radio. (With that extraordinary opening guitar riff. How does he do it? He tries to explain in this YouTube clip, but really it's still magic.) However, meanwhile a South African court has banned a song: the Zulu apartheid-era call-and-response anthem Dubula ibhunu (or Dubul'ibhunu, given that the final vowel of the first word is elided in speech). So it's one song in, one song out. And on balance I think both decisions are exactly right.

From the Guardian's Books Blog ("Shift dropped on author after typo in her romantic novel"):

Bounty hunter Sam McKade is the new breed of hero. Tall? Undoubtedly. Handsome and chiselled? For sure. Incontinent? Erm – possibly. Author Susan Andersen was horrified to discover an unfortunate typo in the ebook edition of her new novel Baby, I'm Yours, which takes the novel out of the romance category and into something rather darker.

"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen. "Shifted – he SHIFTED!

Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, has posted some comments of his own on the linguistic side of a recent British parliamentary controversy ("Nadine Dorries, linguistic pioneer", The Telegraph 9/12/2011). David Cameron said something about Ms. Dorries that some perceived as offensive; he later apologized to her, and she responded:

I don’t for one moment believe Mr Cameron meant to insult me with his “frustrated” remark. […] He has since apologised fulsomely.

Mr. Chivers pounces on that fulsomely — but first, he links to a Language Log take-down of Simon Heffer, who used to write for the Telegraph:

Today's Zits:

Spokespersons for the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) often complain that the words or actions of individuals or groups from other nations "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  This is true even when those individuals or groups are speaking or acting on behalf of some segment of the Chinese population (e.g., political prisoners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, people whose houses have been forcibly demolished, farmers, and so forth).  A typical cause for invoking the "hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people" circumlocution would be for the head of state of a country to meet with the Dalai Lama or Rebiya Kadeer.  A good example is Mexican President Calderon's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, which the PRC government denounced in extremely harsh terms.  The vitriolic rebuke led one commentator to refer to the PRC denunciation of the Mexican President as a kind of "bullying".

Whenever I visit England, I'm struck by the fact that escalators, moving walkways, and other public conveyances commonly have signs requiring users to carry dogs. I also always remember Martin Kay's observation that phrasal stress on the subject ("DOGS must be carried") suggests the absurd interpretation that "you can't use this facility unless you are carrying a dog", whereas stress on the verb remains consistent with the intended meaning "if you have a dog, you must carry it rather than have it go on its own feet".

There are several linguistic puzzles here. The first one is how to represent and explain the ambiguity in interpretation. One possibility is that there's an implicit universally quantified agent, "Dogs must be carried [by everyone]", which in any case needs to be contextually limited to "everyone using this facility", and then may or may not be further restricted to "everyone using this facility who is accompanied by a dog". And those skilled in the art will be able to think of several other semantic or pragmatic treatments, for instance involving the nature and scope of the deontic modal "must".

A second puzzle is why a difference in phrasal stress should apparently affect this ambiguity.

Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has posted a podcast today about the "needs washed" regionalism, which is mostly associated with the North Midland dialect region of the U.S. Though her goal is to provide prescriptive advice about when it's appropriate to use the "need + V-en" construction, she has conducted some nice data collection from her readers and has also consulted such resources as the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project and relevant Language Log posts.

Jonathan Secora Pearl, "Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech", Empirical Musicology Review 2006:

The composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) has been noted for his interest in speech melodies. Little discussion has focused however on the field methods that he used in gathering them, nor on the products themselves. Janáček spent more than three decades, transcribing thousands of what he termed nápěvky mluvy [tunelets of speech] in standard musical notation. The record that remains of these efforts is impressive both for its volume and its quality, as well as for its potential to reveal aspects of the perceptual overlap between music and language.

Here's an edited and typeset example of one of his "tunelets":

Here at Hulme Hall at the University of Manchester the dining hall is adjacent to the Hulme Hall Bar, connected by two sets of double doors about 15 feet apart. During the LAGB meeting, the dining hall is where the book exhibits and coffee breaks are located, and the only convenient way into it goes through the Hulme Hall Bar. Here's what that right-hand pair of doors looks like:

What it says on the license plates of cars registered in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan is more or less indistinguishable from many other provincial or state slogans: Land of the Living Skies. The point here seems to be to give you a succinct summary of the geography of the place so that you have some idea of where you are if you find yourself on an ill-advised cross-country road trip involving too much drinking in the off-driving hours. Hence, you get the rather obvious Grand Canyon State (Arizona), The Ocean State (Rhode Island), The Green Mountain State (Vermont) and Explore Canada's Arctic (Northwest Territories). At least Saskatchewan adds a small pinch of poetry.

Enigma is clearly under-valued in these slogans, with the exception of Quebec's Je Me Souviens ("I remember"), whose meaning is elusive to outsiders or residents with shallow historical roots in the province. Though I lived there from 1971 to 1984, I never did figure out what it's supposed to mean, though I suspect that it means something like I remember how to order hamburgers and fries in French, or I remember when the Habs were the greatest hockey team on the planet. Or perhaps it's shorthand for something slightly more sinister, as in I remember how the English bastards smashed us in battle and oppressed us economically, and I promise to counter their linguistic imperialism using all means necessary, including enforcing legal requirements that English appear on Montreal restaurant menus only in microscopic font guaranteed to make anglo eyeballs bug out. Or something to that effect.

But Saskatchewan's unofficial motto, which you'll see imprinted on T-shirts or tourism signs is: Hard to spell. Easy to draw. This is often accompanied by the following image, registered as a trademark by the Government of Saskatchewan: