Language Log

Alan Rappeport, "From the Right, a New Slur for G.O.P. Candidates", NYT 8/13/2015:

As Republican presidential candidates offered careful answers to questions about education, immigration and foreign policy at last week’s debate, streams of tweets panned their responses as too soft or disingenuous. Senator Marco Rubio is beholden to corporate interests, one said. Former Gov. Jeb Bush is weak on immigration, crowed another. Many of them were adorned with a cryptic hashtag bearing a new word: “cuckservative.”

Yesterday, Alan Rappeport wrote to me to ask "how and why such language gets popular".

A week or so ago, I wrote a post about the notion of "mother" in Indian phonology (with a link to an earlier post written over a year ago about the concept of "mother" in linguistics more generally):

"More on mother' (focus on India) " (8/5/15)

Ben Buckner has called additional information to my attention.  Because the new material is fairly substantial, I did not want it to get buried as a comment to the previous post, which is no longer active.  Consequently, I am presenting this additional material from Ben as a separate post of its own.

The pun goes back at least to 1986 and probably beyond. [See below for antedating to 1940…] I'm not sure who first applied it to Mr. Trump's campaign, or who created the logo.

Helen DeWitt's wonderful novel The Last Samurai has unfortunately gone out of print, so I was happy to learn from her yesterday that a new edition is planned.

What follows is an epistolary post, consisting of her note to me, her letter to Kenn Harper, and his response to her.

Today's Questionable Content:

What auto-replace — in a messaging app or your mind — do you need to turn off or turn on?

The following photograph has been in my draft folder for about five years:

This is "Konglish", not "Kongish".  We just finished studying the latter, which is Hong Kong style English, in this post, and surveyed other varieties of Asian English in this post, including Konglish,which is the subject of the present post.

Konglish is Korean-style English, and it seems to be thriving.

Rebecca Kaplan, "Donald Trump: 'I will be phenomenal to the women'", CBS Face the Nation 8/9/2015:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump sought to redirect incoming fire at rival Republican Jeb Bush, saying that Bush has a "huge" problem with women and he is by far the better candidate with that demographic. […]

"I'm exactly the opposite. I will be phenomenal to the women."

In the online newspaper, Politico, Jules Johnston has an article about new German words coined by youth:

"In the words of young Germans, just ‘merkeln’ " (8/3/15)

The German dictionary manufacturer Langenscheidt came up with the idea seven years ago to create a list of new words and expressions invented by teens by selecting the “Jugendwort” (Youth Word of the Year). And since then, young Germans have been invited to submit terms to an online board.

Julian Harrison, "Help Us Decipher This Inscription", British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog, 8/3/2015:

Visitors to Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy may have noticed that we have one or two objects on display, in addition to the many manuscripts and documents telling Magna Carta's 800-year-old story. One of those objects is a double-edged sword, found in the first section of the exhibition, on loan to the British Library from our friends at the British Museum. The item in question was found in the River Witham, Lincolnshire, in July 1825, and was presented to the Royal Archaeological Institute by the registrar to the Bishop of Lincoln. […]

An intriguing feature of this sword is an as yet indecipherable inscription, found along one of its edges and inlaid in gold wire. It has been speculated that this is a religious invocation, since the language is unknown. Can you have a go at trying to decipher it for us? Here's what the inscription seems to read:

+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+

Today's PhD Comics:

Interesting that we haven't seen "datums", like "spectrums" and so on.

Today's xkcd:

The following photograph shows a chalkboard sign inside of a Kobe cafe that is entirely written in rōmaji (Roman letters), with superscript 2s representing reduplication: