Language Log

In the spirit of Geoff Pullum's lyrical prescriptive poppycock offering, I can offer some Raymond Chandler in verse and letter. And this being Language Log, I will follow it with a light dessert of cheap science. Here's a small sample of Chandler's 1947 poem Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive for your edification:

There ain't no grammar that equals a hammer
To nail down a cut-rate wit.

And the verb 'to be' as employed by me
Is often and lightly split.

A lot of my style (so-called) is vile
For I learned to write in a bar.

The marriage of thought to words was wrought
With many a strong sidecar.

Language Log readers who have not seen The Very Model of an Amateur Grammarian on "The Stroppy Editor" should check it out. Sing it (or imagine it sung), fairly fast, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I am the very model of a modern major-general" from The Pirates of Penzance — the same tune that Tom Lehrer used for his astonishing accomplishment in performing to music the entire list of elements in the periodic table of the elements.

Kevin Cirilli, "TV pundits split on Obama's convention speech", Politico 9/6/2012, quotes James Carville discussing Obama's speech:

“This was probably not the best speech of the convention,” he said on CNN. “But what I’m struck by is the muscular tone and attitude in both the vice president and president tonight. This is not the mommy party on show here. This is the daddy party.”

In several recent posts (and in many earlier posts as well), we have discussed some of the ways in which English has had an impact upon Chinese:

• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin"
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese"
• "New radicals in an old writing system"

But the Westernization of Chinese reaches far beyond the types of influences and borrowings described in previous Language Log posts.  Testimony of the extent to which this goes comes from a Chinese friend:

My mother, as I've mentioned before, said to me about ten years ago: "I often have difficulty understanding the Chinese in the newspapers," even though Chinese is her mother tongue and her only language, and she is well educated. I find it's because the Chinese newspaper's sentences are now a direct translation from English, with English, not traditional Chinese, grammar and vocabulary. The Chinese language is becoming inexorably westernized.

You know, people keep telling me that I shouldn't blame Strunk & White for the way so many Americans are clueless about identifying passive clauses. Others tell me I'm being prescriptive: I should let people use the word 'passive' however they want. (And you can, of course; you can use it to mean "box containing electrical equipment" if you want.) But I'm unrepentant in my conviction that page 18 of The Elements of Style has been confusing people for decades. Let me give you (if you can bear it) another example of why.

According to Laura Shack, "Cirencester teenager breaks jaw in alleged attack by kebab van", Wilts and Gloustershire Standard, 9/4/2012:

The 19-year-old man told police officers he was attacked by the van in Tetbury Road, Cirencester, at around 4am on Sunday, August 26.

The teenager, who suffered a broken jaw, was found to be in an intoxicated state by police officers and he was taken by ambulance to Great Western Hospital in Swindon.

Gloria Bien (who has been teaching Mandarin for more than forty years [she was my first-year teacher]) heard this sentence at lunch yesterday:  Zhù nǐ yīgè hǎo xīnqíng 祝你一个好心情 ("[I] wish you a good mood").  She remarked:

I was stunned.  How can anyone wish a good mood on me?  But our intern, a native Chinese fresh from Beijing in August, declared that this is actually said, as an equivalent to "Have a nice day."

In a comment yesterday, Jonathon Owen pointed us to a fascinating post at Arrant Pedantry on Which Hunting (12/23/2011). You should read the whole thing, but as a teaser, here's the key graph:

Matthew Dowd on ABC News This Week for 9/2/2012:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The truth is a casualty in this. It's as if we're going to make any argument possible that's going to advantageous our side, in order to overcome the other side. The Republicans do it, the Democrats do it.

"State Department: 'Hold down the fort,' other common phrases could be offensive", Fox News 8/31/2012:

Watch your mouth — everyday phrases like "hold down the fort" and "rule of thumb" are potentially offensive bombshells.

At least according to the State Department.

Chief Diversity Officer John Robinson penned a column in the department's latest edition of "State Magazine" advising readers on some rather obscure Ps and Qs.

Here's Mr. Robinson's column, "Wait, What Did You Just Say?", from the July/August 2012 edition of State Magazine.

In 1917, The Nation's book reviewer objected to "the inexcusable irregularity of the style" in Helen Marie Bennett's Women and work: the economic value of college training, listing a number of specific "blunders" as evidence. One of these "blunders" can be found in the following passage:

College girls may not realize why it is that many of them are so anxious to secure at once a position that will "pay a good salary" without taking further training. Their brothers do not expect it, for they are choosing their profession, because it is the one of all others which they desire and because they expect to follow it all their lives. But because the girl expects to marry, she does not choose her occupation with the care which a man bestows upon his. Unless she is a genius or has within her an intensely strong urge towards some form of self-expression, she lapses into the easy choice by means of which she can lope along until her wedding day. She does not phrase it thus ignobly; but such is the status of her choice.

Can you identify the problem?

A couple of years ago, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, and news announcers all over the world began tripping over their tongues. Now  JJ DOOM uses the name in the first verse of the track GUV'NOR from their new album KEYS TO THE CUFFS:

Catch a throatful from the fire vocal
Ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull
Volcano out of Iceland
Go conquer and destroy the rap world like the white men

A year ago, I noted that Language Log was getting about 4000 spam comments per day ("A million (spam) comments", 9/2/2011). Recently, this number has been substantially lower — just 771 in the past 24 hours, for example.

But during the past year, the spam tide rose before it fell. We logged our millionth spam comment at some point early in the morning of September 1, 2011; today, a year later, our spam filters have caught 3,277,574, or an average of (3277574-1000000)/365 = 6240 per day over the intervening time.

Whether the spam filter's daily harvest is 500 or 10,000, it's too many for me to check the whole list for false positives. So if your comment doesn't appear, and it wasn't offensive and/or devoid of relevant content, there's a good chance that you somehow got caught in the spam filter.