Language Log

While we're on the subject of maybe-meaningful data-mining output, let me share with you some semi-refined ore from the dataset of real-estate listings that I mentioned the other day.

Caleb Everett, "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives", PLoS ONE, 2013:

We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high.

From Bert Vaux:

I was just preparing a facebook post on the use of "luck out" when I came across your nice entry on the very same passage on the Language Log! ["Lucking out", 10/8/2011; "More lucking out", 10/11/2011]

Anyway, a propos of your (in my opinion correct) observation that Lee Child generally does American English quite well, I thought you might appreciate the following examples (also from The Affair) where I think he slips up:

"hosepipe" for "hose" (p. 230 in my edition)

"not by a long chalk" for "not by a long shot" (238)

"drinks well" with the infamous British regular-plural-inside-compound (245)

[I'm not sure what we call this in American English; I know that some parts of the country call cheap/generic drinks in a bar "well drinks", from which I'd infer that the thing in question is called a well, but I don't actually know.]

These come with the caveat that I haven't actually researched their American vs. British distribution; I'm just going by my personal exposure to the two varieties.

Recommended reading: Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley, "Culture, Genes, and the Human Revolution", Science 24 May 2013. (Another version is here.)

A common assumption is that the emergence of behaviorally modern humans after 200,000 years ago required—and followed—a specific biological change triggered by one or more genetic mutations. […]

This prevailing logic in the field may put the cart before the horse. The discovery of any genetic mutation that coincided with the “human revolution” (6) must take care to distinguish cause from effect. Supposedly momentous changes in our genome may sometimes be a consequence of cultural innovation.

In certain cases this is obvious. Lactase-persistence mutations did not trigger dairy farming; they spread as an evolutionary response to dairy consumption. The higher alcohol tolerance of Europeans relative to Asians did not prompt, but followed, greater alcohol consumption in Europe. […]

Under the culture-driven view, many critical genomic alterations that facilitated spoken language, for example, might have spread through our ancestors after this trait emerged. That is, prior behavioral changes of the species provide a permissive environment in which the functionally relevant genomic changes accumulate. The selective advantage of a genetic change that increased language proficiency would likely be greatest in a population that was already using language.

Sanette Tanaka, "Fancy Real-Estate Listing, Fancier Verbiage", WSJ 6/6/2013:

Savvy real-estate agents know it's not just what you say. It's how long it takes you to say it.

More-expensive homes go hand-in-hand with longer real-estate agents' remarks—the language written by the agent that supplements the house description and photos in a listing. Agents use a median 250 characters for homes listed under $100,000, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by real-estate listings company Zillow. For homes priced over $1 million, they go nearly twice as long, with a median 487 characters. (That's about the length of this paragraph.)

"Generally, what you find is that regardless of the region, the more expensive the home is, the more characters are used to describe that home," says Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow.

The following photograph was taken at a Springfield, Massachusetts restaurant named “Nippon Grill and Seafood Buffet”:

I have commented elsewhere on the fact that writers in The Economist are required to write unnatural or even ungrammatical sentences rather than risk the wrath of the semi-educated public by "splitting an infinitive" (putting a preverbal modifier immediately before the verb in a to-infinitival complement clause). The magazine published a sentence containing the phrase publicly to label itself a foreign agent where clarity demanded to publicly label itself a foreign agent.

It wasn't a one-off occurrence. Look at this sentence (issue of June 1, 2013, p. 57):

The main umbrella organisation, the Syrian National Coalition, was supposed to do three things: expand its membership, elect a new leader and decide whether unconditionally to attend the Geneva talks.

What an appalling decision about modifier placement!

Trevor Butterworth, "Top Science Journal Rebukes Harvard's Top Nutritionist", Forbes 5/27/2013:

In an extraordinary editorial and feature article, Nature, one of the world’s pre-eminent scientific journals, has effectively admonished the chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, for promoting over-simplification of scientific results in the name of public health and engaging in unseemly behavior towards those who venture conclusions that differ to his.

Barry R. asks:

"… that differ to his?"  Is this a common usage? Or is it as wrong as it sounds to me?

As spectacularly demonstrated by this YouTube video, it is amazing how much one can say in Mandarin simply by punning with numbers alone:

As is often the case, the opinion in a recently-decided legal case (Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Phillip Abawa) turned on the meaning of a word:

“Inflict” is a narrower term than “cause.” Here, while in federal custody, Phillip Zabawa assaulted a federal law enforcement officer. The officer responded by headbutting Zabawa, which left the officer with a cut over his eye. A federal grand jury later indicted Zabawa for assaulting a federal officer in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111(a)(1) and (b). Zabawa was convicted of both offenses. But § 111(b) specifies that the defendant must “inflict[]” the predicate injury to the officer, rather than just proximately cause it; and here, the officer himself admitted that his injury might have resulted from his application of force (i.e., the headbutt) to Zabawa, rather than from any force Zabawa applied to him. The district court found this distinction irrelevant, construing “inflict” to mean “cause.” We respectfully disagree, and reverse Zabawa’s conviction under § 111(b).

Reader S.L. pointed to this opinion's "selective use of dictionary definitions, as well as literary and other references", and wondered "if anyone at Language Log might have any observations".

Parse it if you can:

The right, by contrast, wants to provide those cross subsidies via marriage with single women who have sex (and their children) simply left to suffer pour encourager les autres.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably already seen Business Insider's "22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other." (Or, as it was originally titled, "22 Maps That Show the Deepest Linguistic Conflicts in America.") The piece has truly gone viral, garnering more than 21 million views, according to Business Insider. But there's been some confusion about the origins of the dialect survey data.

"Red-blue divisions start with newborns’ names; parents show partisan tendencies", Washington Times 6/5/2013:

Names with the soft consonant “l” or that end in a long “a” — for example, President Obama’s daughter Malia — are more likely to be found in Democratic neighborhoods, while names with hard vowel sounds such as K, G or B — think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s sons Track and Trig — are more popular in Republican communities.

I've pretty much given up on the idea that literate people can be expected to know the difference between voice and tense, or passive and active, or even nouns and verbs. But I thought that consonants and vowels were pretty safe, at least as a taxonomy of orthographic categories. I mean, "AEIOU and sometimes Y", right?