Language Log

Has there ever been a less effective spam email than this?

This must be part of a psychometric experiment meant to calibrate the features that predict response rates, with this version being way out on the low-predicted-response end of all the dimensions…

. . . but not being yourself just might.

There's been a lot of media interest recently in a new study of "vocal fry", sparked in part by an unusually detailed magazine article — Olga Khazan, "Vocal Fry May Hurt Women's Job Prospects", The Atlantic 5/29/2014. Other coverage: Gail Sullivan, "Study: Women with creaky voices — also known as ‘vocal fry’ — deemed less hireable", Washington Post 6/2/2014; "Is vocal fry hurting women's job prospects?", NPR Marketplace 6/5/2014; Maya Rhodan, "3 Speech Habits That Are Worse Than Vocal Fry in Job Interviews", Time Magazine 6/4/2014; and so on.

The original study is  Rindy C. Anderson et al., "Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market", PLOSOne 5/28/2014. Below is a guest post by Christian DiCanio, offering a more skeptical take.

Gloria Bien sent in this scan of an airsickness bag that she found on Air New Zealand:

[Warning: an unusually nerdy follow-up to an unusually nerdy post…] In the comments on yesterday's post "Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", the question came up whether the effect of consonant voicing on vowel pitch is additive (e.g. plus or minus N Hz) or multiplicative (up or down by M percent). The fact that I calculated the effects in proportional terms indicates that I assumed, without checking, that the effects are multiplicative.

One easy way to check this assumption is to redo the calculations for female vs. male speakers independently, since we expect the overall F0 patterns of female speakers to be about 65-70% higher on average. So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I did just that — it required changing just two characters in the scripts I wrote yesterday, so this was the easiest experiment ever…

I spent the past couple of days at a workshop on lexical tone, organized by Kristine Yu at UMass. A topic that came up several times was the question of whether "segmental" influences on pitch — for instance, the fact that voiceless consonants are typically associated with a higher pitch in the first part of a following vowel — might be diminished or even eliminated in languages with lexical tone. Several participants observed that the evidence for this is not very strong: the classical paper on the subject studied a small number of utterances from one speaker in Thai, for example.

So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I wrote a little script that calculates and displays (one way of looking at) these effects in the TIMIT dataset, which includes 10 English sentences spoken by each of 630 speakers. (Specifically, there are two sentences spoken by all 630 speakers;  450 sentences spoken by 7 speakers each; and 1890 sentences spoken by a single speaker.)

I had to go to a meeting before I had a chance to write up the results, but the meeting ended early enough for me to find 15 minutes before lunch, so:

Everyone knows that the Chinese government goes to extraordinary lengths to police the internet (see: "Blocked on Weibo").

And most sentient beings are aware of the awesome fame of the Grass-Mud Horse, the notorious Franco-Croatian Squid, and and the mysterious River Crab.  You can find all of them in "Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon Classics".

Sometimes, the censors begin to look pretty ridiculous, as when they outlawed the word "jasmine" in 2011, particularly since it refers not just to the Jasmine Revolution, but also to a favorite flower, tea, and folk song.

mòlì 茉莉 ("jasmine")

mòlì chá 茉莉茶 ("jasmine tea") OR mòlìhuā chá 茉莉花茶 ("jasmine tea") OR xiāngpiàn 香片 ("scented [usually with jasmine] tea")

mòlìhuā 茉莉花 ("jasmine flower", name of a popular folk song; presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were both excessively fond of this song, and there are videos of them singing it, so it becomes especially awkward to try to forbid citizens to use the word mòlì 茉莉 ("jasmine")

Biking home listening to an old Fresh Air podcast from my backlog, I was amused to hear the story of Frank Sinatra giving a grammaticality judgment. Sammy Cahn describes how Sinatra objected to his lyric for the song "The Last Dance."

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Here's the relevant bit of the transcript from the Fresh Air site:

CAHN: So when you speak, you would say they're wondering just when we will leave. You wouldn't say, they're wondering just when will we leave. So he said that one, just when we will leave. I said no, it isn't – hold it. I said they're wondering just when will we leave. But till we leave. He said what kind of cockamamie word is…

(LAUGHTER)

CAHN: I said no one speaks like that. I said no. I said no one speaks like that, but we aren't speaking, Frank, are we? We're singing, aren't we, Frank? And that's the only time we ever kind of good-naturedly quarreled about a line.

Apparently Cahn shared the judgment but justified the inversion on artistic grounds. Sinatra subsequently did it Cahn's way, not his way.

I also love Cahn's bisyllabic pronunciation of "aren't" here.

"Peak peak reached", The Daily Mash 6/2/2014:

THE world is on the cusp of peak exhaustion after hitting peaks in every possible field.  

The simultaneous achievement of peak beard, peak box-set, peak 90s reunion nostalgia tour, peak gourmet burger and peak superhero film means that it is downhill from here.

See also: "Peak friend", 5/26/2014; "'Peak X' abides", 5/12/2014; "Peak X", 10/14/2008.

Libin Zhang sent in the following photograph of a restaurant in Datong, Shanxi Province:

In Politico's Playbook, Mike Allen notes that the slogan "Don't Do Stupid Shit" has worked its way into numerous journalistic descriptions of the "Obama Doctrine." "Playbook rarely prints a four-letter word — our nephews are loyal readers," Allen writes. "But we are, in this case, because that is the precise phrase President Obama and his aides are using in their off-the-record chats with journalists."

The New York Times, on the other hand, has only printed the slogan in expurgated fashion — this despite the fact that late Times editor Abe Rosenthal created a presidential exemption from the ban on printing "shit" in the Nixon era. As Rosenthal reportedly said after including "shit" in quotes of Watergate tape transcripts, "We'll only take shit from the President."

We have often discussed spelling bees and related phenomena on Language Log, e.g.:

"Spelling bees and character amnesia"

"Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia"

"Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters"

Especially in the first post cited above, we have noticed the amazing domination of students of Indian descent in spelling bees.  Even though we had a very lively, lengthy exchange on this subject, with many different hypotheses being put forward, no consensus was reached for why Indian students are so overwhelmingly successful in spelling bees.

Lauren Collins, "Haiku Herman", New Yorker 3/31/2014:

When asked later about the role that poetry had played in Kiev's Independence Square — protesters waved portraits of the nineteenth-century poet Taras Shevchenko —  Van Rompuy said, "I wouldn't be surprised if this struggle and this tragedy had not inspired people there."

Sometimes, as in that example, the construction "I wouldn't be surprised if X had not Y'ed" means something like "I believe that X probably Y'ed", with the extra not presumably due to some combination of negative concord and the difficulty of keeping track of multiple negations. But about equally often, it means roughly the opposite: "I believe that X probably didn't Y". For instance, "Cup final booklet sold for £3,000", BBC News 9/26/2008:

Auctioneer Andrew Bullock said: "The amazing thing about this programme is its condition.

"It was tucked inside a book published in 1906 and I wouldn't be surprised if it had not seen the light of day since the game was played almost 100 years ago.

The versions with negative concord are quite idiomatic, and are used by some excellent writers — thus Graham Greene, The Third Man:

"She claims to be Austrian, but I suspect she's Hungarian. She works at the Josefstadt. I wouldn't be surprised if Lime had not helped her with her papers. She calls herself Schmidt. Anna Schmidt. You can't imagine a young English actress calling herself Smith, can you? And a pretty one, too. It always struck me as a bit too anonymous to be true."