Language Log

Adam Gopnik, "Word Magic", The New Yorker 5/26/2014:

These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another.

Thomas Friedman, who has run out of cab drivers to talk with, is turning to lexicography — "Four Words Going Bye-Bye", 5/20/2014:

The more I read the news, the more it looks to me that four words are becoming obsolete and destined to be dropped from our vocabulary. And those words are “privacy,” “local,” “average” and “later.” A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over, average is over and later is over.

Back in July of 2006, Geoff Pullum coined the word linguify: "To linguify a claim about things in the world is to take that claim and construct from it an entirely different claim that makes reference to the words or other linguistic items used to talk about those things, and then use the latter claim in a context where the former would be appropriate."

Subeditor Humphrey Evans points out to me that the grammar of phishing spam emails is getting worse and worse, rather than better. He recently saw one that contained this text:

The sum of (6.5M Euros only will be transfer into your account after the processing of all relevant legal documents with your name as the bonfire beneficiary, the transfer will be made by Draft or telegraphic Transfer (T/T), conformable in 3 working days as soon as you apply to the bank director.

That "bonfire beneficiary" bit is an eyebrow-raiser, isn't it? It seems to be an error for the Latin phrase bona fide "good faith".

Reader Janet sent in this photograph of a food stall in Taiwan (source):

Commenting on Victor Mair's reference to Xi Jinping's statement that "There is no gene for invasion in our blood", Bob Ladd wrote

Surely what Xi meant was simply "It's not in our DNA to invade others and seek hegemony over the world". People say things like that in English all the time without being genetic determinists (or indeed, without even having much of a clue what DNA is).

I agree with Bob that people do say things like that in English all the time these days. The Oxford Dictionaries (American English) entry gives the gloss "The fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable", and the examples

diversity is part of the company’s DNA
men just don’t get shopping—it’s not in our DNA

But that's not the whole story. A bit of web search revealed that the interpretation given to "DNA" in such statements is a strange blend of ideas about essential character, effortful transformation, and contagious inspiration. This popular adaptation of the term "DNA" is simultaneously essentialist, Lamarckian, and not only seen as determinative of culture but as essentially equivalent to it.

In an article entitled "‘Idiotic’ Name for Dementia Sparks China Doctors’ Protest" that appeared in today's Bloomberg News, the question of the appropriateness of the names for various diseases is raised.  The article begins:

The Chinese name diseases based on symptoms, so diabetes is known as “sugary pee,” while a dyslexic “has trouble reading.” Dementia derives from two Chinese characters meaning “insane” and “idiotic.”

"Data is" or "data are"? "That data" or "those data"? Michael Calia, "EBay asks users to change passwords after cyberattack", WSJ 5/21/2014 [emphasis added]:

EBay Inc. on Wednesday asked the nearly 150 million active users of its namesake marketplace to change their passwords following a cyberattack that compromised a database containing encrypted passwords and other data.  

The database didn't include financial data, said the company, which owns its namesake marketplace business as well as online payments operation PayPal.  

The company said it had no evidence that personal or financial information for PayPal users was compromised. That data are stored on a separate, secure network.

The obligatory screenshot is here.

[Tip of the hat to Will Leben]

Victor Steinbok sent in this photograph of a dim sum restaurant in Boston:

Mariska Mantione, Martijn Figee, and Damiaan Denys, "A case of musical preference for Johnny Cash following deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens", Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 5/6/2014.

Mr. B., a 59-year old married man, was referred to the department of Anxiety disorders, suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) for 46 years. He reported obsessions about fear for uncertainty and illogical things, and compulsions about seeking reassurance and hoarding. At the moment of referral, Mr. B. scored a total of 33 points on the Yale-Brown obsessive-compulsive scale (Y-BOCS; Goodman et al., 1989a,b), corresponding with extremely severe OCD. He scored 18 points on the Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAM-A; Hamilton, 1959), corresponding with moderate anxiety and 14 points on the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D; Hamilton, 1960), corresponding with mild depression. In spite of extensive treatment with pharmacotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, symptoms were still overpowering and Mr. B. remained extremely hindered in daily living.  

Suffering from treatment-refractory OCD, Mr. B., was included for treatment with deep brain stimulation (DBS) targeted at the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). After signing informed consent, Mr. B., was implanted in December 2006 with two four-contact electrodes (Model 3389, Medtronics, Minneapolis). The electrodes were connected via subcutaneous extensions to Soletra stimulators (Medtronic, Minneapolis) placed bilaterally in an infraclavicular pocket under general anesthesia. The center of the deepest contacts was positioned 3 mm in front of the anterior border of the anterior commissure (AC), 7 mm lateral and 4 mm below the line connecting the anterior and posterior commissure (PC). This was verified by post-operative CT, fused with preoperative MR.

Nicholas Wade never met a genetic just-so story that he didn't like. For a partial survey, see "The hunt for the Hat Gene", 11/15/2009, where I observed that he pivots smoothly from mere over-interpretation to complete fabrication:

Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.

Now Mr. Wade has packaged a large-scale version of this move as a book, where a somewhat tendentious account of human genetic diversity transitions into a fictional narrative proposing genetic explanations for essentially every aspect of human cultural, social, and economic history: A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, 2014.

The Twitter API, beyond its great utility for corpus linguistics (see "On the front lines of Twitter linguistics," "The he's and she's of Twitter"), has made possible a lot of fun automated text-mining projects. One fertile area is algorithmic found poetry: there have been Twitter bots designed to find accidental haikus, and even more impressively, a bot named @Pentametron that finds rhyming tweets in iambic pentameter and fashions sonnets out of them.

And then there is found wordplay, which is its own kind of found poetry. I'm a big fan of @Anagramatron, which discovers paired tweets that form serendipitous anagrams of each other. (Example: "Last time I do anything" ⇔ "That's it. I'm dying alone.") Now, courtesy of Jesse Sheidlower, comes @PangramTweets, in which each tweet contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Hiroshi Kumamoto received this envelope, where someone tried to translate "Herr" into Japanese and went wrong:

Leonard Klie, "Momentum Builds for Voice Stress Analysis in Law Enforcement", Speech Technology Magazine, Summer 2014:

Nearly 1,800 U.S. law enforcement agencies have dropped the polygraph in favor of newer computer voice stress analyzer (CVSA) technology to detect when suspects being questioned are not being honest, according to a report from the National Association of Computer Voice Stress Analysts.

Among those that have already made the switch are police departments in Atlanta, Baltimore, San Francisco, New Orleans, Nashville, and Miami, FL, as well as the California Highway Patrol and many other state and local law enforcement agencies.

The technology is also gaining momentum overseas. "The CVSA has gained international acceptance, and our foreign sales are steadily growing," reports Jim Kane, executive director of the National Institute for Truth Verification Federal Services, a West Palm Beach, FL, company that has been producing CVSA systems since 1988.