Language Log

An anonymous correspondent sent in this photograph of a food package from New Taipei City, Taiwan:

Below is a guest post by Yuval Pinter.

Reading Mark Liberman's analysis of Obama's SOTU addresses versus other presidents', my thirst remained unquenched. Word-counts are fun, sure, but the real fun comes in when looking at longer phrases – two (bigrams) or three (trigrams) words long.

After waiting for it to be breakfast time in Philadelphia, I engaged in an experiment (Legal has advised me against explicit use of MYL's trademark phrase) to analyze the 228 addresses (found here) and see what Obama's favorite (and least-favorite) phrases are.

Jeep's Superbowl commercial:

[No longer available at YouTube]

According to Metro, the UK free newspaper that I pick up each morning from a stack just inside the door as I get on a double-decker bus, Steve Coogan said this about the excellent film actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who sadly was found dead with a hypodermic in his arm yesterday:

Everything he was in he raised the quality of his film just by his presence.

Quite so. Or at least, sort of so. If I defocus my syntactic eyes a lot, I can sort of get a glimpse of what Coogan meant.

The Super Bowl may have been a lackluster blowout this year, but the commercials provided an opportunity to inflame the passions of some viewers. Coca-Cola ran a commercial with a multilingual rendition of "America the Beautiful," with languages including English, Spanish, Keres Pueblo, Tagalog, Hindi, Senegalese French, and Hebrew.

Michael Rank sent me the following photograph:

At the advent of the lunar New Year, I usually try to come up with something clever to celebrate the occasion. (See here, here, and here.) Perhaps because I was preoccupied with other things, I hadn't yet thought of anything suitable for the Year of the Horse. Fortunately, at the last minute, BBC came to the rescue and gifted me with this spectacular subtitle blunder:

In Rex Stout's "It's Science That Counts" (All-Story Weekly, 1916), Jonas Simmons is a small-town hardware store owner, who has acquired the reputation of being a skilled boxer due to his practice of working out on a light punching-bag in the back of his store. For years, the Annual Picnic of the Holtville Merchants' Association has featured an open challenge for an exhibition bout with Simmons — a challenge which no one has ever taken up. Then a new young clerk in Bill Ogilvy's store, Mr. Notter, starts boasting about having been the boxing champion of Columbus, and a planned bout between Simmons and Notter is the talk of the picnic.

But Simmons was never all that much of a boxer, in fact, and so as the time for the bout approaches, he panics and runs away.