Language Log

During the Arab Spring earlier this year, we noticed some demonstrators holding signs in Chinese that were not always idiomatic or were written incorrectly ("Maybe Mubarak understands Chinese", 2/10/2011; "Chinese sign in Benghazi", 3/21/2011; "Roll out of here, Mubarak", 4/3/2011). In the recent "Occupy Wall Street" actions, one marcher was likewise seen with a Chinese sign of dubious credentials:

Non-linguists frequently ask me whether I am avidly watching "Fry's Planet Word", the new five-part BBC television series on language written and presented by Stephen Fry. (A bit of googling will probably find it for those outside the UK who can't access the BBC iPlayer; there are various illicit copies around, including some on YouTube.) The answer is no; I simply cannot bear Fry on the topic of language. Such a fine actor (the quintessential Jeeves); such an insufferable twit on linguistic topics. So I know barely anything of this series except that even the radio trailers for it make my teeth itch. However, Edinburgh syntactician Manuela Rocchi is made of sterner stuff, and has watched some. She kindly contributes this guest post to inform you (and me) about it.

Yesterday in the New York Times, Dwight Garner took on two revisions of classic books of advice (by Dale Carnegie and Emily Post) — updated for the digital age. "Classic Advice: Please, Leave Well Enough Alone" starts by placing the Carnegie book in its cultural context:

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” which turns 75 this year, has sold more than 30 million copies and continues to be a best seller. The book, a paean to integrity, good humor and warmth in the name of amicable capitalism, is as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting. It exists alongside Dr. Spock’s child-rearing guide, Strunk and White’s volume on literary style and Fannie Farmer’s cookbook as a classic expression of the American impulse toward self-improvement and reinvention.

Yes, Strunk & White, which comes up here with some regularity, and not in a good way.

Today's Non Sequitur:

We've had a bumper crop of recent electoral events where I live, and given that I write a good deal about language and persuasion, at regular intervals I get asked to advise on political campaigns. I always decline.

I have no trouble advocating publicly and with feeling for my own political beliefs. I also have no trouble accepting money from commercial entities (well, not usually, anyway) who want to hire me to consult on the technical aspects of their persuasion strategies. But I do get squeamish when it comes to drawing on my knowledge of language and psychology in order to tinker directly with the machinery of political messaging. It basically comes down to the fact that, in order to do so effectively, I would inevitably have to recommend—at least some of the time—the use of techniques that I would ultimately prefer not to play a prominent role in our political discourse. If you read much about political psychology and persuasion, it's hard to miss the growing pile of studies that reveal the various levers and buttons that reside in the less deliberative rooms of our minds and that can set in motion behaviors and choices all while leaving the persuadee convinced that it's his rational, thoughtful self that's been at the control panel all along. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think that the wholesale exploitation of shallow cognitive processes for political ends accomplishes no good thing for the overall health of civic life, and that thoughtful deliberation and evaluation of candidates and their ideas should drive our democratic impulses.

A cool demo video from the MAGE pHTS project:

MAGE/pHTS, a real-time speech synthesis library from NUMEDIART on Vimeo.

"It's a mare's nest of vipers," said a colleague of mine today, hopelessly entangling two nest-related idioms (intentionally, for the humor, I think). But it was no higher in rank than number 2 in the contest for worst idiom entanglement of the day, because this morning I heard on the radio a Conservative Party politician saying perfectly seriously that "the dénouement is about to hit the fan". (At least, it was either an idiom entanglement or the strangest excremental euphemism I ever heard. And yet I realize, even as I write this, that almost immediately I have begun to think it's rather cute, and I might adopt it: "I had to use the plunger this morning — had a dénouement that wouldn't go down.")

From HappySad at Kartoen.be:

According to John R. Hanson ("'Talking Texan' could mean trouble for Perry", The Houston Chronicle 9/29/2011):

Gov. Rick Perry's performances in the three recently televised debates of the candidates for the Republican nomination for president have prompted much criticism and in some cases alarm from national pundits, not only for their content but also for their lack of verbal fluency.

Prof. Hanson attributes this to a regional difference, which first struck him when he moved to Texas in 1973:

I appreciated the plain-spokeness, but noticed that, typically, utterances were not only simple and straightforward, but also strikingly spare and uncomplex compared with what I had known before. Linguistic flair and embellishment, highly valued elsewhere, were normally and notably absent. […]

Rick Perry [is] talking Texan to pundits who have much different attitudes and abilities with respect to the use of language.

Juanita Jean, writing from Richmond TX at The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., took these as fighting words:

Professor John R. Hanson II can kiss my butt.  I am a fifth generation Texan, totally educated in Texas public schools and universities, and I’ll take on all comers with Shakespeare or Aristophanes.  I know the poetry of Dante and Willie Nelson.   We are not some hick outpost.  Nor have we developed some kind of language that only twins understand.

Language Log readers may be wondering why there has been no coverage of the achievement of Jesse Anderson, who has managed to get millions of monkeys, as computationally simulated on Amazon servers, to reproduce 99.9 percent of the works of Shakespeare (his own account is here on his blog, and various journalistic sheep have obediently reproduced his account in the newspapers). I'll tell you why.

The entry for me in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes that:

Everyone expects me to turn up as the object of a preposition or a verb […] But me also turns up in a number of place where traditional grammarians and commentators prescribe I. […]

While traditional opinion prescribes someone and I for subject use — I and someone seems a bit impolite — in actual practice we also find me and someone and someone and me […]

Both are speech forms, often associated with the speech of children, and likely to be unfavorably noticed in the speech and writing of adults except when used facetiously.

I just now stepped out of a Singapore cab.  There are many different ethnic groups in this cosmopolitan city, including Chinese (Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.), Indian, Malay, and so on.  The driver of this particular taxi was Chinese.  He was slight of build and very high strung.  He asked me what I was doing on the campus of the National University of Singapore.  "Were you here to give a lecture?"

After almost a month, I'm finally following up on the results of the single-question surveys that I asked Language Log readers to participate in. Each survey received an overwhelming 1500+ responses, and I didn't realize that I needed a "pro" (= "paid") account on SurveyMonkey in order to view more than the first 100. I owe special thanks to Mohammad Mehdi Etedali, to whom I transfered the surveys and who kindly sent me the overall percentages.