Language Log

Earlier today, AFP photographer Alex Ogle posted on Twitter what looked like an outrageous typo in a column by Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post: the name of Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC/PBS show Sherlock, got transmogrified into "Bandersnatch Cummerbund" on second mention.

Today's SMBC starts with a little lesson in phonetic dialectology:

In a comment on yesterday's post, "Ask Language Log: '… would like to have VERBed'?", John Lawler quoted the phrase "I would of like to of seen it in person", as used in student papers.

Such things are certainly all over the internet, often in the writings of people who are clearly well past their student days:

Would of like to of come, but I'll still be in West Palm Beach.
Just would of like to of seen the World of Tanks and the Museum get a little more exposure.
I would of like to of seen a playmaker in there at least somewhere in midfield,

But the fact is, traditional spelling aside, "I would of like to of seen it" is exactly how I pronounce the phrase myself.

Or rather, a tired old lie repeated yet again: "Will: Without First-Person Pronouns, Obama 'Would Fall Silent'", Real Clear Politics, 5/6/2012 (reproducing part of a panel discussion on ABC's This Week).

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If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and a service to him, actually.

Posted on my blog last month, an inventory of postings (on LLog and my blog) on the way the New York Times deals with taboo vocabulary, here.

Three items since then:

BZ, 4/16/12: The first “asshole” in the Times? (link)

AZBlog, 4/29/12: Annals of French taboo avoidance (link)

and today: AZBlog, 5/7/12: Reporting the profane (link)

Bob Ladd asked:

Is there any discussion anywhere of the multiple tense-marking (if that's what it is) in constructions like "We would have liked to have stayed longer" (as opposed to just "We would have liked to stay longer")?  And is it just my impression, or has this become more common?

For what it's worth, there's a very clear discussion of what the difference theoretically could be here.

Web search turns  up the original lyrics to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's song Candle in the Wind, which includes the line "I would have liked to have known you". You would think some Telegraph reader might have made the connection between the song's popularity and the decline of the English language, but if that happened I can't find any evidence of it.

On my blog, here, a survey of the descendants of All your base are belong to us, with a section on the 2004-06 heyday of the snowclone on Language Log.

Those who feel strongly about the issue of (not?) allowing comments should read Julian Sanchez, "The Psychological Prerequisites of Punditry", 5/3/2012, and Andrew Sullivan's comment, "The Feedback Firehose", 5/4/2012.

Yesterday evening at dinner, some members of the LSA Publications Committee were idly discussing the changes over time in fashions for given names.  It's obvious that things change — but it's less obvious whether these changes are cyclic. It makes sense that out-of-fashion names might come back after a generation or two — but does this really happen on a regular basis?

Alan Greenblatt of NPR wonders why news outlets insist on continuing to draw attention to the blindness of Chen Guangchen, the Chinese activist who recently escaped house arrest and who has been at the center of international attention this past week.

Greenblatt writes (NPR online; 5/4/2012):

Chen has been repeatedly referred to as "the blind activist" or "the blind activist lawyer" by news outlets such as The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Washington Post. The Economist's current cover story is headlined "Blind Justice."

On Wednesday, NPR decided not to label Chen a "blind activist"….

Descriptions of Chen as blind may have stuck in part because of the way he burst into broad Western consciousness last week—not through his longstanding campaign against China's one-child policy, but by escaping house arrest and trekking 300 miles to Beijing. The fact that he is blind made the story that much more dramatic.

"We're sticking with 'blind' because Chen's name might not be familiar to readers, but they may be aware that there's a 'blind activist' in trouble," says Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy.

But it doesn't seem like a useful shorthand to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and regular contributor to NPR's Fresh Air.

"It was relevant, obviously, in reference to his escape," Nunberg says, "but the continued use implies a relevance that just isn't there. I don't think it's a 'PC' thing – the point would be the same if he were, for example, 6′7″."

Noreen Malone ("Grading Obama’s ‘Classic Undergraduate-ese'", New York Magazine 5/2/2012) turned to Matthew Hart to grade a letter that Barack Obama wrote to a girlfriend when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University. Prof. Hart, who "specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone culture, with an emphasis on modernist poetry, contemporary British fiction, political theory, and the visual arts", was not impressed:

Considered as homework, I'd give the future President a B-minus. The reference to "an ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats" (besides confusing that and which) sounds impressive, but it's more than a little opaque.

The following delightful essay, composed with a rich dollop of deliberate eggcorns, is making its way around the web via repostings and emailings (thanks to Brad Daniels for showing it to me). I have no idea where it originally came from. Can anyone identify its origin? (Con mints, be leave it or not, are open billow.)

I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.

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Noam Chomsky in the Guardian uses 'anticipate' to mean 'expect'. I thought language was his thing.

— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) May 1, 2012

Daniel Hannan is both a writer for The Telegraph and also Conservative MEP for South East England; and what he's complaining about is this passage (from "What next for Occupy?", The Guardian 4/30/2012):

But a lot of [the response], again, is just, "Why don't they go away and leave us alone?" That's to be anticipated.