Language Log

Somewhat to my surprise, the Wall Street Journal didn't merely report that "Donald Trump wants a say in who gets the nomination, so he's hosting a presidential debate, holding out the prospect of his endorsement and threatening an independent run" (i.e., behaving like a kingmaker who expects to be honored and courted by the rival candidates); it even quoted candidate Jon Huntsman's remarkably lewd comment about why he's not going to attend the Trump "debate": Huntsman said, "I'm not going to kiss his ring, and I'm not going to kiss any other part of his anatomy."

That vivid and rather gross remark reminded me of how right my extremely cool son Calvin is about the word he wants to see win the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year contest. I had been talking to Calvin one day about the ghastly crew of obnoxious multi-millionaires who dominate the newspapers, and how they keep threatening to achieve success even in the political arena. Calvin pointed out to me both that we need a new political term for the concept of being ruled by such men, and that there already is such a term. We are living, he observed, in the age of the assholocracy.

According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011:

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

This story has been picked up elsewhere, e.g. Cory Doctorow, "Deep-voiced 'vocal fry' thought to be creeping into American women's speech", BoingBoing 12/11/2011; Ben Flanagan, "Vocal Fry a new language fad mainly among college females", AI.com 12/12/2011; Meredith Engel, "Vocal fry: Your creaky throat noises are now an actual scientific trend", Jezebel 12/12/2011; "‘Vocal Fry’ Is the Hot New Linguistic Fad Among Women", Gawker 12/12/2011; Melissa Dahl, "More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars", MSNBC 12/12/2011.

It's nice to see a piece of phonetics research getting this kind of play. But Fessenden's take on this story will be surprising to those who have looked at a few pitch contours — these "low creaky vibrations" have been  common since forever. And moderate use, especially at the ends of phrases, has never been considered a speech disorder.

Puzzlement increases after reading the cited paper.

"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife."

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn't count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

In the current Penny & Aggie strip, Lisa continues to enjoy her first linguistics lecture. She's entranced by the International Phonetic Alphabet, which hits her like the green-screen "digital rain" from The Matrix:

Once again on the Newt negation watch… In last night's Republican debate in Iowa, Gingrich defended his previous support of an individual mandate for health care insurance. He explained that he held this stance back in 1993, when he was combating so-called "Hillarycare":

I frankly was floundering, trying to find a way to make sure that people who could afford it were paying their hospital bills, while still leaving an out for libertarians to not buy insurance. (video)

Throughout my whole life it has been the standard British English metaphor for Sisyphean tasks, the jobs that are endless because by the time you get to the end you need to start over: It's like painting the Forth Bridge.

It is legendary that after finishing the magnificent rail bridge over the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh in 1890 they started repainting it, and a hundred years later they were still at it. Every time they painted their way to the far end, which took years, the paint had worn off where they had started, and they had to go back over there and begin again immediately.

But there was a new development this week: they finally finished the job, and stopped. Now the simile's future looks bleak.

From Jeffrey Shalit, "Funny Word Order in a Poster Advertising a Study on Word Order", 12/11/2011:

ABC is proving itself to be the Newt not network. Earlier this month, Newt Gingrich provided a puzzling (but technically correct) instance of negation in an interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News: "It's very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I'm going to be the nominee." Last night, after the Republican presidential debate in Iowa sponsored by ABC News, political analyst Matthew Dowd made a surprising observation on Gingrich's performance:

There was not a single attack tonight that he did not not engage on.

Paul Sleigh writes about a headline from the Scientific American website:

I actually felt my brain stretching as I read this one: "Doorway to Blame for Room Amnesia".  Is it a report on the opportunity for recrimination for some kind of space-related memory loss?

<doorway to <blame for <room amnesia>>

Or the loss of memory about a wall entrance leading to guilt regarding part of a house?

<<doorway to <blame for room>> amnesia>

I briefly flirted with the idea that someone with the surname Room was suffering brain injury after hitting his head on a lintel:

<doorway to blame for <[Mr or Ms] Room['s] amnesia>>

… but that seemed unlikely.

David Bloom writes to point out that Wiktionary has adopted eggcorn as a technical term, at least in the etymology for helpmate:

Originally an eggcorn of helpmeet, but now standard English.

The OED's etymology for helpmate is a bit more circumspect:

< help n. or help v. + mate adj.; probably influenced in origin by helpmeet n.

According to Reid J. Epstein, "Republican debate: 7 attacks on Newt Gingrich to watch", 1210/2011:

“Gov. Romney is much more disciplined in his approach and much more thoughtful about what he says and how he says them,” Iowa state Rep. Renee Schulte said in a Romney campaign press call Friday.

Ms. Schulte may very well have been misquoted or quoted without essential context, but it's not surprising for someone to use a  plural pronoun that co-refers with the referent of a fused relative clause introduced by what. Although "what he says" is morphosyntactically singular, a paraphrase with an overt head is likely to be plural: "the things (that) he says", etc.

According to recent Penny & Aggie strips (here and here), this can be the effect of a single linguistics-class lecture:

BEFORE	AFTER

AAAS 2012 (the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) will take place February 16-20 in Vancouver. The business meeting of Section Z, Linguistics and Language Science, will be on Friday, February 17, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. in MacKenzie Room 1 of the Fairmont Waterfront.

The best part of AAAS annual meetings, in my opinion, is the extraordinary selection of symposia. At the 2012 meeting, there will be four symposia of particular interest to readers of this blog.