Language Log

Should publishing a cartoon representation of the prophet Mohammed be punishable by death?

After the massacre of magazine staff by lunatic Islamist murderers that took place in Paris two days ago, many who think the answer is "No" have begun displaying buttons or placards saying Je suis Charlie. I'd wear one myself if I could get one.

I ended yesterday's post ("Decreasing Definiteness") with a promise to say more about why the frequency of the has decreased so much over the past century or so, and this morning's post will start to redeem that promise.

As several commenters observed, there are probably several different things going on here. But I think that one relevant factor is decreasing formality of style.

I'll leave for another day the question of what formality really is, and why a decrease in formality correlates with a decrease in the frequency of the. In this post, I'll try to establish two simpler points:

1. In English text that's more formal, in common-sense terms, the is more common;
2. The formality of (various genres of) English writing has been decreasing over the past century or so.

During the course of the 20th century, the frequency of the English definite article the decreased gradually and radically. I first noticed this effect about a year ago, in a post about the history of State of the Union addresses ("SOTU evolution", 1/26/2014), where I observed, in reference to the graph on the right, that

The average frequency of the in the most recent 10 SOTU addresses (2004-2013) was 47,458 per million words; in the first 10 addresses (1790-1799, all delivered as speeches to Congress) it was 93,201 per million words, almost double the frequency.  And the decline during the 20th-century era of oral addresses seems to have been a gradual one.

I speculated that

Maybe the style of speeches has been getting gradually less formal, and therefore gradually less like written style. Or maybe even formal styles have been changing.

And I noted that a corresponding effect can be seen in two other sources, the BYU Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Google Books N-Gram viewer (GNG), though it is considerably smaller in magnitude:

COHA and the Google Books data pretty much agree, which is reassuring; and they both suggest a slight decline in the frequency of the; but the change that they show is very modest compared to the change in SOTU frequencies. So I feel that the explanation for the SOTU change remains to be found.

At that point, I turned my attention to other aspects of SOTU evolution. But a student paper recently reminded me of this issue.

I'm pretty sure this will push some wet buttons among Language Log readers and authors.  Kira Simon-Kennedy found this stellar specimen of Chinglish in a press release from the China-sponsored section of the LA Art Show.

Having immersed myself in Korean gizzard terminology for the past week, I now turn to Chinese gizzard terms, which are every bit as curious and varied, if not so intermittently scatalogical.  Whereas the problems with Korean terms for gizzard centered primarily on their imprecision and vulgarity, the difficulties with Chinese terms for gizzard have more to do with pronunciation, topolectal variation, and the characters used for writing the various terms.

With respect to to a headline in the Washington Post yesterday (Jason Samenow, "Weather Service forecasting computers to become 10 times more powerful in 2015", Washington Post 1/5/2015), Eugene Volokh writes:

My first thought:  Come now – how would computers generally become 10 times more powerful just in the span of a year?  (In the span of five years, according to Moore’s law, maybe).  

My second thought:  Since when is the Weather Service forecasting trends in computing technology?  

My third thought, shamefully after I clicked on the link:  Ah, it’s the Service’s computers used for forecasting that are going to be upgraded to top-of-the-line models.

In "Wantan soup for überman hubby" (3/15/14), we discussed the miswriting of húntún tāng 餛飩湯 ("wonton soup") as kūnzhūn tāng 䐊肫湯 (which I playfully rendered as "wantan soup"), using the "flesh" radical instead of the "food" radical for both characters. Several of the commenters to that earlier post suggested that "wanton" would have been an appropriate mistranslation to match the miswriting.

Jonathan Falk writes:

I rarely get an email where my first two interpretations of the subject line [in this case, "AYA Burns Supper at Mory's"] are wrong.  The first, obvious interpretation is that the Association of Yale Alumni for some reason was cooking the meal at Mory’s and they weren’t very good at it.  My second interpretation was that they had a charity supper supporting burn victims.  Neither seemed plausible, forcing me to actually read the email, which may have been what they had in mind all along.

Sue Dunum, "Canadians Using 'Harper' as a Swear Word — 'Go Harper Yourself'", The Lapine 7/1/2014:

MONTREAL — The CBC is reporting today on a growing social media trend for Canadians to use Prime Minister Harper’s name as a cuss word.  

“Harper is being used as the new F Bomb,” CBC analyst Claude Perrault told news anchor Peter Mansbridge this morning.  

“‘Harper off’ is a big one we’re seeing used alot on Facebook and Twitter. Often in all caps when someone’s really angry…as in ‘HARPER OFF!’”

“Calling someone a ‘Harpering Harper’ to mean either ‘f****** b****’ or ‘f****** c***sucker’ is also trending big for new slang.”

Eugene Volokh ("What does 'exposes' in '[a]ny person who abuses, exposes, tortures, torments, or cruelly punishes a minor' mean to you?", Washington Post 1/2/2015) considers the case of Douglas James Myers, who was clocked driving at 112 mph, "weaving all over the road and going into the ditch or median with all four tires", with a blood alcohol level of 0.131 and four small children in the car:

Myers pleaded guilty to driving under the influence (his third offense); but he was also charged for violating S.D. Codified Laws 26-10-1, which provides that “[a]ny person who abuses, exposes, tortures, torments, or cruelly punishes a minor” is guilty of a felony. He argued that the term “expose” in the law was unconstitutionally vague, but the trial court rejected the argument and found him guilty, sentencing him to five years in prison on the “expose” charge.  

Myers appealed to the South Dakota Supreme Court, which rejected his argument […]

Tim Leonard sent in this photograph of a sign for a Korean restaurant:

Yesterday's SMBC:

In his novel Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon seems to be advocating a small, specific piece of English spelling reform, exemplified in these quotations:

“Center of the cop universe for sure,” Doc nodding sympathetically, “but we can’t all be Bigfoot Bjornsen can we— ups I mean who’d want to be him anyway?” hoping this wasn’t pushing things, given Pat’s mental health, frail on the best of days.

“It’s bound to be a Movie for TV, ain’t it, whatever happens. Bigfoot can end up with script and production credits, even play himself, the asshole, but ups, eleventh-commandment issues, ignore that I said that.”

“What? You forgot to put it in something waterproof again?” “Ups.”

“One that didn’t get him hassled into a fatal heart attack.  .  .  . Ups, but there I go, being bitter again.”