Language Log

The American Dialect Society (meeting in Portland in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has selected nominees in the various categories for the 2011 Word of the Year. You can check out the full list here (PDF) or here (HTML).

[Update: The winner of the ADS Word of the Year is occupy. The press release, with the winners in the different categories, is here (PDF). My own wrap-up is here (with video), and Geoff Pullum's is here.]

Justin Sink, "Santorum denies making a racial comment on welfare", The Hill 1/5/12:

Iowa runner-up Rick Santorum said Thursday that he would be "a much bigger player" than expected in the New Hampshire primary and denied saying that he didn't want "to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News, but he maintained that people misheard the word "black" when he stumbled on a word.

“I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out.  And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn't," Santorum said.

I'm in Portland for the 2012 edition of the annual secret cabal.  This is what I had for lunch today:

Before reading further, consider the following newspaper headline, and make a mental note of what you think the article is about:

After so many posts by Geoff Pullum (ok, rants, but I agree with him!) about journalists who use the word "passive" without knowing what it means, it actually caught my eye just now to see "passive" used perfectly correctly! Has it come to this? Should I say "Congratulations to Nate Silver!"? Here it is:

First, Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.

My daughter-in-law, Lacey Hammond, is from Willis, Texas, not too far from Houston (46 miles / 74.01 kilometers).  Her family on both sides has been living in that area for generations.  They are mostly Irish, I believe, but with a bit of German and American Indian (Native American) blood too.

Anyway, Lacey calls salad dressing "sauce".  I was gobsmacked when I heard her say this several times, and wondered whether it's dialectal or she herself simply doesn't make a distinction between "sauce" and "salad dressing".  Anybody have any idea about that?

And the referent is Newt Gingrich! Mitt Romney, on Fox and Friends today, in response to Newt calling him a liar:

Well um uh I- I understand Newt must be very angry
and I- I don’t exactly understand why, but uh
look, I wish him well, it’s a long road ahead,
i- he's a good guy, I like he and Callista, and uh-
uh we got many months ahead of us, so
uh I’ll leave it at that [laugh].

There's a new sighting of the  well-worn "There's no word for accountability in X" snowclone, which we first noticed back in 2006 ("Solving the World's Problems with Linguistics"), and picked up again just about a year ago ("Annals of 'No word for X'"). The usual function of this rhetorical trope, as documented in those posts, is to explain why bankers/business-executives/bureaucrats from a wide range of non-Anglophone counties, from Angola to Iceland, are so feckless — they simply can't understand the concept of accountability, poor things, since their language lacks the word.  The cultural assumptions are probably no more true than the linguistic ones,  of course — my impression is that in actual fact, Anglophone bankers etc. can give the rest of the world a substantial fecklessness handicap and still win going away. I mean, did Silvio Berlusconi ever misplace 1.2 billion dollars of someone else's money, as a certain American ex-Senator recently did? But I digress.

Anyhow, the latest example turns the trope on its head, and uses it to explain why Finnish schools are so well managed.

One of the random things I happened to notice yesterday, in a list of people who passed away in 2011, was the name of Leonard Stern, co-creator of Mad Libs. (Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky marked the game's 50th anniversary here on Language Log.) For those who've never seen it, Mad Libs is a word game in which one player prompts a second player for a list of words — give me a noun; ok, now an adjective; ok, now another noun, etc. — where the kinds of words needed are determined by labeled blanks that are situated in a little story that only the first player can see. In the second step of the game, the two players read the story together with the words inserted in their proper positions. The very first Mad Libs gave the following as an example:

 "_____________! he said ________ as he jumped into his convertible
exclamation              adverb
______ and drove off with his __________ wife."
 noun                            adjective

(Footnote: I've borrowed the example from the game's Wikipedia entry.)

Thinking about Mad Libs last night after a bedtime conversation with my six year old, I've concluded that someone really needs to design a linguistics course entirely around Mad Libs.

Having just returned from a month of living and teaching (in Chinese) on the Mainland (in other words, receiving an intensive dose of Putonghua), I was struck by how different Taiwan Guoyu *sounds* in this video.  It's about a subject that is dear to my heart:  the medieval caves at the Central Asian site of Dunhuang with their magnificent wall-paintings and multitudinous medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Taiwan Guoyu (National Language, i.e., Mandarin) is still basically the same language as Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) on the mainland, but the sounds and a lot of the words and typical expressions are somewhat different (judging not merely from this one short video, but from other samples, both written and spoken, as well).  And, of course, the script has radically diverged.