Language Log

This morning on the train ride in from Swarthmore, I stumbled upon this quotation in today's Metro:  "Philadelphia Magazine published the article to 'illicit reactionary responses,' he said. 'We must be more proactive.'”

The "he" is national race relations specialist Chad Dion Lassiter, and he is referring to a piece in the March issue of Philadelphia Magazine titled, “Being white in Philly,” by Robert Huber.

The following sign was posted on Weibo (China's Twitter clone):

Steven Bird, "Cyberlinguistics: recording the world's vanishing voices", 3/11/2013:

Of the 7,000 languages spoken on the planet, Tembé is at the small end with just 150 speakers left. In a few days, I will head into the Brazilian Amazon to record Tembé – via specially-designed technology – for posterity. Welcome to the world of cyberlinguistics.

Our new Android app Aikuma is still in the prototype stage. But it will dramatically speed up the process of collecting and preserving oral literature from endangered languages, if last year’s field trip to Papua New Guinea is anything to go by.

Read the whole thing.

This example of hypernegation (it that's what it is) was sent to me by Karl Zimmer:

From a review by Hilton Als of the play "The Madrid" in The New Yorker (3/11/2013; p. 76):
In a recent interview, Falco pointed out how infrequently she's offered "first dibs" on new plays. She explained, "I get offered them, but only after other people turn them down." Given that Falco is, artistically speaking, the heir to the late Maureen Stapleton–another toweringly talented actress who insisted on bare truth, not truthiness, in her performances– it's no small wonder that producers consider her a commercial risk…

This looks more to me like a blend of no wonder and small wonder than it does of negation-gone-wild. But of course that's just a guess.

From E.L. at The Guardian:

I saw this sign (photo attached) at the Guardian offices in London and, as a frequent (albeit non-linguist) reader of the site, I thought Language Log might be able to assist. I'm genuinely baffled as to its meaning. It may be something to do with being careful about walking into see-through barriers – our building is a very modern steel-and-glass affair, but the big windows are all safely marked with visibility flashes or logos, and there hasn't been a problem in the four years since it opened, as far as I know. The best we could come up with on the subs' desk was that it might mean something like 'Caution: this sign has a glass panel on the front that is hard to see if there is no poster behind it'.

Our lengthy discussion of Chinese word(s) for nerd has suffered from some lack of clarity about the English word, which has a variety of senses, referring to various aspects of complex social and psychological phenomena. And both the word-meanings and the social realities have changed over time.

In the Op-Ed that started us off — "The Learning Virtues" — David Brooks returned to one of his favored themes, the cultural differences between "Westerners" and "Asians":

Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.

Among the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual spiritual division, Brooks lists a lexicographic factoid:

Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.

Brooks is summarizing his understanding of Jin Li's recent book, Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West. What does he mean by nerd in this context?

Chinese speakers have phonetically transcribed the word "geek" as jíkè 极客, qíkè 奇客, etc., and these transcriptions are fairly widely used and recognized, even among Mandarin speakers (the initials would be velars in many non-Mandarin topolects, so they would sound more like "geek" than do the Mandarin pronunciations). So far, I don't know of any Chinese character transcription for "nerd", certainly none that is broadly circulating.

I've recently encountered several people in their teens or early twenties who ask, as individuals, to be referred to as  they/them/their/themself. Looking around to see how common this might be, I found an undated (?) survey reporting the following results:

All in all, over eight hundred people responded, the majority from the US and other English-dominant countries. A few were binary- or cisgendered individuals who left hostile comments (i.e., stating that there was no such thing as gender outside the binary) or answers that indicated confusion as to the purpose of the survey (i.e., identifying themselves as binary-/cisgendered and remarking that they would always accommodate the pronouns requested by another person). Others, despite describing their gender only as one of the binary genders without further comment, also indicated nontraditional pronoun preferences.  […]

“They” was the most preferred pronoun-set for 62.39% of respondents; the second and third were “he” and “she” at 31.39% and 29.73% respectively. (These numbers are not contradictory; about 48% of respondents indicated preference for multiple pronoun-sets).

The question of whether or not there's a word for "nerd" in Chinese has recently come up, in Mark Liberman's "'Your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit'".

Mark quotes Tom Scocca, who cites three terms:  fáwèi de rén 乏味的人 ("a dull and tasteless person"), diànnǎomí 电脑迷 ("someone excessively enthusiastic about computers"), and shūdāizi 书呆子 ("bookworm; pedant").

But none of these expressions comes close to functioning the way "nerd" does in contemporary American society.  The first, fáwèi de rén, is a makeshift, ad hoc dictionary definition that explains a small part of what "nerd" signifies, but is not a set term that has the social-intellectual resonance and reach of "nerd".  The second, diànnǎomí, is simply incorrect as even a translation of "nerd", since some people have called me a nerd, but I am absolutely terrified of computers (all of my good friends know that very well), though it might serve as a partial definition-explanation of "geek" (more about that below).  The third, shūdāizi, is often invoked as a Chinese functional equivalent of "nerd", but even many of the people who mention it do so a bit sheepishly and admit that it's not really the same thing as "nerd", whereas most people (myself included) will say that it's not even remotely equivalent to "nerd".

Annie Lowrey, "As Automatic Budget Cuts Go Into Effect, Poor May Be Hit Particularly Hard", NYT 3/3/2013:

“President Obama proclaimed that the sequester’s ‘brutal’ and ‘severe’ cuts will ‘eviscerate’ America’s domestic spending,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote in a recent article published by Investors.com. “But ‘eviscerate’ is not the adjective I would use; in fact, I believe the sequester is a pittance.”

The cited article is Rand Paul, "Rand Paul Says Sequester is the First Step to Solving Spending Problem", Investors' Business Daily 2/28/2013.

A couple of years ago, Geoff Pullum put it this way:

Long-time Language Log readers will recall that we have often said here before that whenever someone says that the X people have no word for Y in their language you should put your hand on your wallet — to make sure it's still there. The people who witter on about who has a word for what hardly ever even know the languages they are talking about, and in the vast majority of cases (check out some of the cases on this list) their claim is false.

Yesterday, Tom Scocca was even more acerbic:

Whenever you hear someone explain that a concept is so foreign to this or that culture that people cannot even use their language to describe it, it is safe to assume your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit.

We at Language Log are already quite familiar with Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. That's where the completely fake Apple store was discovered by a blogger named BirdAbroad (see "Your friendly fake Apple Stoer in Kunming"). It's also where we located some of our most amazing airport Chinglish.

Now, in the same airport, a Chinese Communist official went on a rampage after missing his flight and thoroughly trashed a check-in station. First, a silent video which is fairly well known:

Yunong Zhou sent me the following signs from China: