Language Log

The following article by Danny Mok appeared in today's South China Morning Post:

"Police? Jing Cha? Altered helmet may spell 'trouble' for city policeman" (5/19/15)

The article commenced with this photograph:

Today's "Dilbert" (5/18/15):

A headline writer is apparently economizing on punctuation: Nomaan Merchant, "Police: 9 dead in Texas shooting all members of biker gangs", MyFoxDetroit (AP).

John Gertner, "‘Elon Musk,’ by Ashlee Vance", NYT /17/2015:

He is now, quite arguably, the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.

Matt Hutson writes:

“Arguably” is often used to temper an argument, so “quite arguably” should temper it even more. But here “quite” has the effect of strengthening the argument  rather than strengthening the tempering of the argument. Seemingly paradoxically, “quite arguably” approaches the meaning of “inarguably.” In essence, by adding “quite,” we suddenly see a proposition’s being arguable in contrast to its being untenable, rather than in contrast to its being undeniable. A neat sleight of word!

Guy Freeman sent in this photograph of a beer advertisement in Hong Kong:

Multilingual sign near the entrance to a toilet at the Cologne Main train station, posted by Simon on douban, via Joel Martinsen:

[TRIGGER WARNING: Harsh Quantitative Evaluation of a Facile Generalization]

Posted in front of a government building in Sheffield, UK:

A recent conversation with Didier Demolin about animal vocalizations motivated me to return to a an issue discussed in "Finch linguistics", 7/15/2011. (See also "Markov's heart of darkness", 7/18/2011, "Non-Markovian yawp", 9/18/2011, and "The long get longer", 12/4/2013.)

The point is this: In modeling the structure of simple repetitive behavior, considerations from (traditional) formal language theory can obscure rather than clarify the issues. These threats to insight include the levels of the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, the "recursion" controversy, and so on.

What follows is an attempt at a simple illustrated explanation.

From David Moser:

7.5 mil. #China netizens don't recognize character in Taiwanese actress' name, signed petition to make her change it pic.twitter.com/3KodhcHG2i

— Chris Derps (@ChrisDerps) May 11, 2015

David Rowe took this photo of a sign on a market stall in Sydney Chinatown:

Today's SMBC:

We've been highly skeptical, in general, of usage mavens' often-mistaken disdain for what they call "passive voice". The objects of their animus are often not grammatically passive at all, but merely vague about agency — or sometimes just weakly phrased in some not-very-clear way.

But Jerry Friedman points out a case where vagueness about agency poses real-world problems — and here it really is a passive-voice construction that is at fault.