Language Log

A correspondent from Singapore saw the following photograph in his Facebook feed:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'"

… radiating stupidity isotropically.  Today's SMBC presents a variation on the traditional "perfectly spherical cow" joke:

Yesterday I linked to a couple of Lindsey Graham's jokes at celebratory dinner ("Fecal compounds", 3/5/2016). But the journalists and politicians who spoke at last night's annual Gridiron Club dinner outdid him.

Today's Tank McNamara:

"How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word", BBC Trending 2/24/2016

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.

Matteo described a flower as "petaloso" ("full of petals"). The word doesn't officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of "petalo" ("petal") and the suffix "-oso" ("full of").

The assignment got Aurora thinking – could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher's help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca – the institution that oversees the use of the Italian language – to ask for their opinion.

To their surprise, the pair got an encouraging reply. "The word you invented is well formed and could be used in the Italian language," one of the Crusca's top linguistic experts wrote. "It is beautiful and clear."

But, the linguist added, for a word to officially be part of the Italian language, a large number of people need to use it and understand its meaning. "If you manage to spread your word among many people who start saying 'What a petaloso flower this is!', then petaloso will have become a word in Italian."

Matteo's teacher was touched by the reply – "this is worth more than a thousand Italian lessons" she wrote on her Facebook account on Monday – and shared pictures of the letter. Inadvertently, she triggered a movement to do exactly what the Crusca had asked: make "petaloso" a widely known and used word.

Joseph Manning kindly called my attention to this post by Kathleen Coleman on the blog of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS):  "Nondum Arabes Seresque rogant: Classics Looks East" (2/2/16).  The Latin quotation is from a poem written by Statius to mark the inauguration of Domitian’s seventeenth consulship in AD 95.  It means "nor yet do the Arabs and Chinese file petitions", something that the Romans hoped they would one day submit.

Donna Cassata, "Lindsey Graham: 'My Party Has Gone Batshit Crazy'", USN 2/26/2016:

Sen. Lindsey Graham is disgusted with the GOP's embrace of Donald Trump: "My party has gone batshit crazy."

In no-holds-barred remarks at a celebratory dinner Thursday night, the South Carolina senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate said the GOP has lost all semblance of sanity and predicted the party will suffer irrevocable losses in November if it backs Trump.

A set of video clips can be found here. The critical passage — which includes a dig at Hillary Clinton:

Well look how far you've come.
The most dishonest person in America's a woman.
Who's about to be president.
How could that be?
My party has gone batshit crazy.

Article in ScienceAlert today (3/4/16):

The article in ScienceAlert begins:

Twitter exploded today with the news that a peer-reviewed scientific paper about the human hand credits its design to "the Creator", and scientists around the world are so furious, they called for an official retraction.

The paper, which mentions a "Creator" several times throughout, was published by the journal PLOS ONE back in January, but went largely unnoticed until James McInerney, a researcher in computational molecular evolution at the University of Manchester in UK, used twitter to call the journal "a joke".

To say that the paper has generated an enormous amount of controversy would be an understatement.

[fbvideo link="https://www.facebook.com/bgzimmer/videos/10153449291273506/" width="500" height="400" onlyvideo="0"]

We seem to be entering new lexico-political territory, which is increasingly challenging the publications guidelines of the mainstream media:

Andrew Rosenthal, "Donald Trump defends his hands", NYT 3/3/2016
Gregory King, "Donald Trump defends size of his penis", CNN 3/4/2016
"Mitt Romney Aims at Donald Trump, Hits G.O.P.", NYT Editorial 3/3/2016:

    Holy Mitt, what a meltdown.

James Poniewozik, "A National Descent Into Trump's Pants", NYT 3/4/2016

Or  maybe this is just part of the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres? See e.g. "Taking shit from the president", LLOG 7/19/2006.

After last night's doozy of a Republican debate, Meghan McCain tweeted the following this morning:

Every negative stereotype I have tried to combat for the last 8 years about republicans has been utterly destroyed in the past 9 months.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) March 4, 2016

McCain's dim view of the current crop of presidential candidates doesn't support the notion that they are "utterly destroying" negative stereotypes about Republicans, as several people pointed out. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Towards the end of January, there were three editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine with somewhat overlapping authors and somewhat conflicting messages. The first editorial was D.B. Taichman et al., "Sharing clinical trial data — a proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors", published online 1/20/2016:

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) believes that there is an ethical obligation to responsibly share data generated by interventional clinical trials because participants have put themselves at risk. In a growing consensus, many funders around the world — foundations, government agencies, and industry — now mandate data sharing.