Language Log

After several days, I'm still thinking about the very funny Dilbert strip of September 1, at http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2011-09-01/, which made me laugh out loud. Alice is asked by her boss to simplify the wording on a slide so that it can be explained to the company's executives. She does not suffer fools gladly and her immediate suggestion for the simplified wording is: "MONEY BE GOOD. THIS MAKE MORE. OOGAH!". What I'm thinking about is the nature of the stereotype Alice has concerning the sort of language that would be understandable to people like company executives who are (in Alice's jaundiced opinion) virtually brainless.

There's an unusual event this week: Mark Liberman and I will both be present at the same conference, the annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain at the University of Manchester (UK, not NH). We plan to have a session (between 1pm to 2pm on Thursday 8 September, in the St Gabriel's Dining Hall in Oxford Place) devoted to Language Log and linguistic blogging. I think it's true to say that in the whole of the eight years since Language Log was founded, despite our having produced a book of Language Log posts together, Mark and I have never previously shared a platform — this will be the first time. But the real biggie is bigger than that: Mark has been invited to the LAGB meeting to give the prestigious Henry Sweet Lecture for 2011 on Wednesday night (September 7).

For years, the extraordinary ability of parrots to mimic sounds has raised an intriguing but largely unanswered question: what role does this ability play in the wild? This question has been difficult or impossible to study, because most parrots live in dense vegetation and move around a lot, so that no one has been able to get good records of who chirped what to whom, when and under which conditions.

Some recent work makes a start on this problem, as explained by Virginia Morrell, "Why Do Parrots Talk? Venezuelan Site Offers Clues", Science (News Focus) 7/22/2011:

I received a few days ago a questionnaire from the League of Women Voters, which contained the following question:

In your view, what is the single biggest problem with elected officials in Washington, D.C., today?

__ They are out of touch with regular Americans.

__ They are under the influence of special interests.

__ They only care about their political careers.

__ They are too partisan and unwilling to compromise.

__  All of the above.

Unlike the fly-genetics text for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) and other amusing by-products of algorithmic trading run amok, this amazon.com page features a real price that some people apparently pay for a real product:

Reader GL was amused by this label on a package of garden stakes:

(Click on the image for a more complete picture of the package.)

Ever wish you could participate in a little linguistics experiment? Neither have I. But anyway, now you can! I have set up two very easy surveys, one question each. (Well, it's not technically a question, but that's a word-sense issue for another day.) Pick one survey (either one, but please not both), read the question, and select one of the three possible answers. I'll wait about a week month, and then post a discussion of the results.

[Update, Sept. 5: there has been an overwhelming response to both surveys, but a slight preference for #2 (1500+ responses thus far vs. 1100+ for #1). So I've closed #2 but kept #1 open to encourage another 400 or so responses to that one. — EB]

[Update, Sept. 7: both surveys are now closed, as they've both reached about the same overwhelming number of responses (1500+). Now I have to analyze the results, which may take longer than I originally thought so it may take another week or so. Speaking of which: anyone have access to a paid SurveyMonkey account? If so, please let me know…]

When you're done, you are allowed to do either of the following (again, not both): (a) take a peek at the other survey (but don't answer the question!), or (b) let us know that you've completed the survey and you'll be entered into a drawing for a free one-year subscription to Language Log! Don't say we don't take care of our readers.

And, for those observing it: have a great Labor Day weekend.

At some point early in the morning of September 1, 2011, we logged our millionth spam comment:

Unfortunately, I didn't get a screen shot until this morning, so the counter is up to 1,008,782, and I similarly failed to put procedures in place to determine which spam site actually placed the millionth feeble attempt.

Under the above rubric, my friend Apollo Wu sent around a note (copied below) about the economic impact of the use of Chinese characters in the operation of his business.  Since Apollo was for many years (from 1973 to 1998) a top translator in the Chinese Translation Service at United Nations headquarters in New York, he knows whereof he speaks.  Among other interesting tidbits that I heard from Apollo over the decades was that, of the official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Castilian Spanish) Chinese was by far the least efficient and most expensive to process.

Yesterday, P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula posted some thoughts on education under the title "A goal to strive for". A zombie commenter promptly reached up through the soil of his gravesite to ask

is this where we snarkily mock PZ for ending the title of this post on education with a preposition?