Archive for December, 2012

We're all Lake Woebegonians now.

From this morning's New York Times:

"Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex."

There must be some explanation for this.  Comments definitely open.

Comments (26)

Cantonese resurgent

I've often felt that the percentage of loanwords in a language is one index of the strength and resilience of that language (witness English and Japanese, each of which has an enormous number of borrowings).  An abundance of loanwords in a language makes it lively, colorful, and au courant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (16)

Accuracy versus consistency

Let me reveal to you a fiddly and rather strange detail about my latest piece on Lingua Franca, which concerns the misquotation "shaken but not stirred". In the post I crucially needed to quote a phrase from an obituary in The Economist where James Bond's favorite aperitif was mentioned. The Economist called it a Martini. But it is New York Times style to call the drink in question a martini, not a Martini, and The Chronicle of Higher Education follows New York Times style, and they own the Lingua Franca blog, and there are other occurrences of martini in my post. So a question arose between me and the editors of The Chronicle: whether to be accurate and quote the word as The Economist actually typeset it under their style, making it look as if I've been inconsistent within my post (because the Times-compliant occurrences in the text would look different), or to quote The Economist inaccurately by coercing them into Times style, making it look as if I can't even type stuff out from a magazine accurately. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place!

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments off

Regardless whether Prudes will sneer

On both sides of the War of the Iptivists, many people seem to believe that opinions about linguistic usage reflect attitudes towards innovation.  The story goes like this: A new word, a new form, or a new construction is invented; at first, most people reject the innovation and deprecate the innovators; but the innovation spreads all the same; eventually it becomes normal and accepted, and no one even remembers that there was a problem. While this process is underway, one side supports tradition, insists on standards, and mutters about Kids Today; the other side supports innovation, points out that many of the Best People Are Doing It, and mutters about peevish old snoots.

Historical processes of that kind certainly do happen — see "In this day of slack style…", 9/2/2012, for a couple of examples. But overall, as an explanation of attitudes towards linguistic variation, this story is a failure. Usage peeving, though usually claiming to protect traditional usage, in fact aims to eliminate older forms at least as often as it tries to hold the line against newer ones. We've documented many examples of this over the years — see "At a loss for lexicons" (2/9/2004), "'Singular they': God said it, I believe it, that settles it" (9/13/2006), "Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action" (5/1/2007), "Preaching the incontrovertible to the unconvertible" (12/6/2012).

In the third edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner has adopted a form of the linguistic rags-to-riches story as the basis of his five-step "Language-Change Index", whose "purpose is to measure how widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become". And unfortunately, he sometimes applies this scale to characterize the status of cases where the innovation-to-acceptance history just doesn't apply.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (22)

The readers are worse than the writers

… at least judging by the readers' comments on Stephanie Banchero, "Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test", Wall Street Journal 12/6/2012.  Banchero's article seriously misunderstands and misrepresents an already-misleading account of American schoolchildrens' knowledge of vocabulary — see "Journalist Falls Flat in Comprehension Test", 12/8/2012, for details. But the 127 readers' comments suggest that the paper knows its readers, and enjoys a comfortable symbiosis with them, feeding them confirmation of the attitudes that it helps to create and maintain.

I mean, can you believe the uncritical credulity of adults today? The knee-jerk reactive interpretation of everything in terms of cherished and irrelevant prejudices? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (14)

Journalist Falls Flat in Comprehension Test

Or, as Kevin Drum put it, "New Test Shows Severe Shortcomings in Nation's Press Corps". Or maybe the headline should be "Onion Takes Over WSJ Education Beat".

According to Stephanie Banchero, "Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test", Wall Street Journal 12/6/2012:

U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation's reading education.

Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.

The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn't know that "permeates" means to "spread all the way through," and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn't know that "puzzled" means confused—words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (25)

Regardless (of) whether

Reader ST writes to draw our attention to Bryan Garner's 1/2/2012 note on  "regardless whether":

Language-Change Index — “regardless whether”* for “regardless of whether”: Stage 2.

*Invariably inferior forms.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (12)

Preaching the incontrovertible to the unconvertible

I guess that if doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, it is insane for me to imagine that I could do any good by telling the readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education that the rule banning which from restrictive relative clauses is "a time-wasting early-20th-century fetish, a bogeyman rule undeserving of the attention of intelligent grownups." But that's what I do in the post published at one minute past midnight on the 71st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. "A Rule Which Will Live in Infamy," I called it. I blame Stan Carey for infecting me with my false optimism about changing people's minds: on his blog "Sentence first" last year he actually reported getting some traction: according to a Twitter message he saw, he actually converted an editor.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments off

Let it Schnee??

With no comment from me, I'll let Peter Lewis on "Our Mechanical Brain" tell you about how Rosetta Stone tried to create a festive advertisement for their language-learning software and managed to get a three-word sentence wrong in each of three different languages, and two out of the three wrong even on the second try. Read Peter's account here. And remember, when it's language, people never check. They never call a linguist. They just make stuff up.

Update: Rosetta Stone got in touch with Language Log and asked for space to respond. We're happy to provide that, of course. Here is what they said:

In a word, we’re ashamed. We tried to capture the spirit and meter of a popular Christmas tune and, regrettably, our enthusiasm for spreading marketing cheer outpaced our respect for linguistic accuracy. We green-lighted an ad before its time. The fact is, we have a stringent pedagogical approval process at Rosetta Stone, and we missed an important check-point here. There’s no excuse. The ads have been recalled. We assure you that from here on out, no one at Rosetta Stone–including marketing–will be taking shortcuts. We’re sure that this post will invite more thoughtful (even heated) criticism, and we hope you’ll understand if we don’t engage further in the dialogue for the moment—we have important work to do on the home-front. Thank you for keeping us in check and have a great holiday. (Hey, maybe we’ll try ‘Silent nuit, holy Nacht’….)

Comments off

Scandinavian influence on English syntax

Comments (3)

How the first letter was written

Those who are interested in pictographic and ideographic writing systems should take careful note of Rudyard Kipling's 1902 Just So Story "How the first letter was written". It starts like this:

ONCE upon a most early time was a Neolithic man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few clothes, and he couldn't read and he couldn't write and he didn't want to, and except when he was hungry he was quite happy. His name was Tegumai Bopsulai, and that means, 'Man-who-does-not-put-his-foot- forward-in-a-hurry'; but we, O Best Beloved, will call him Tegumai, for short. And his wife's name was Teshumai Tewindrow, and that means, 'Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions'; but we, O Best Beloved, will call her Teshumai, for short. And his little girl-daughter's name was Taffimai Metallumai, and that means, 'Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked'; but I'm going to call her Taffy. And she was Tegumai Bopsulai's Best Beloved and her own Mummy's Best Beloved, and she was not spanked half as much as was good for her; and they were all three very happy. As soon as Taffy could run about she went everywhere with her Daddy Tegumai, and sometimes they would not come home to the Cave till they were hungry, and then Teshumai Tewindrow would say, 'Where in the world have you two been to, to get so shocking dirty? Really, my Tegumai, you're no better than my Taffy.'

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (10)

"Book from the Ground"

Earlier this year, I wrote about "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation". In that post, I had a long section on the artist Xu Bing's "Book from the Sky".

Now the artist has created a parallel "Book from the Ground". Here's what it looks like:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (15)

Perhaps now more than ever, ain't nobody got time fo that

Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination
by E. Lepore & M. Stone, 2012

Perhaps now
More than
Ever
We spend our days
Immersed in
Language

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (18)