Language Log

One of the most successful weekly essays I wrote in an early sixties college class on modern English poetry was about T. S. Eliot's "The Hippopotamus", the first two (out of nine) stanzas of which read thus:

THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,            5
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!"

See "Modification as social anxiety", 5/16/2004.

From Nikola Gotovac:

Today I was introduced to the web page "The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility".  

There is one quite common misconception about Croatian language on that graph (and similar languages – Slovenian, Serbian, and Bosnian). To be more precise, the expression "it is all spanish village to me" is actually mis-translated to english, since the saying is "to su meni španska sela". In Croatian language the adjective for spanish is "španjolska", not "Španska". "Španska" means – one owned by "špan", or in today-croatian, "župan".

Please check Wikipedia for meaning of the term Župan. As the župan is part of governing establishment, the expression means "it is all strange to me" or "it does not belong to me, so I do not know" or "it is somebody else's (thing)".  Therefore, although it is tempting to direct this expression on Spain, the meaning is quite different.

Although I know next to nothing about Croatian, a bit of web search suggests that Dr. Gotovac is wrong, and that the župan idea is a philological eggcorn.

In "Last new term of the year in China" (12/16/16), we encountered a very recent neologism in Chinese: hánzhàoliàng 含赵量 ("Zhaoness") (220,000 ghits).  The expression we examine in this post — zhínán ái 直男癌 ("straight man cancer") — has been around a bit longer, for at least a couple of years, and circulates even more widely, with 1,830,000 ghits.

The following passage from an article in Chinese about this new term explains what it means:

This sentence is from a report in The Guardian, a UK paper, but I suspect it was written in the USA, where the (fictive) rule that a pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent noun is often taken very seriously:

One person was killed and five others were injured when a large eucalyptus tree fell on a wedding party while it took photographs at a southern California park on Saturday, authorities said.

I have seldom seen a case where a noun denoting a collection of people acting jointly felt so much in need of being allowed to be the antecedent of the plural pronoun they. But under the strict syntactic rule that some people wrongly imagine they should apply, they needs a plural antecedent, and party is singular (and non-human).

It's good to find a prominently displayed list of local bus routes that you can consult when you arrive at the train station in a big city that perhaps you do not know.

And Sydney Central station in New South Wales, Australia, has exactly that. There is a big board headed "Find your way" at the station. But let's take a closer look at it. See if you can spot the nerdview (pointed out to me by Language Log reader Geoff Dawson).

This post intends to take a deep look at the words for "dog" in Japanese, "inu" and "ken", both written with the same kanji (sinogram; Chinese character): 犬.

I will begin with some basic phonological and etymological information, then move to an elaboration of the immediate cause for the writing of this post, observations from colleagues, and a brief conclusion.

Huawei Technologies is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company.  Mark Metcalf sent in this photograph of a scene at their corporate headquarters in Shenzhen:

Michelle Kosinski and Kevin Liptak, "Gloves-off White House creates rift between Obama and Trump teams", CNN 12/16/2016:

Donald Trump's dismissal of US intelligence about Russian election meddling has deeply alarmed the White House, prompting a new and combative approach to the President-elect that's caused rifts between the incoming and outgoing administrations. […]

In his briefings, [White House Press Secretary Josh] Earnest has resumed tying Trump to Russia, a staple of Obama's own campaign stump speech.

"It was the President-elect who, over the course of the campaign, indicated that he thought that President Putin was a strong leader," he said on Monday, continuing with a litany of examples meant to demonstrate a tight alliance with Moscow. "His campaign didn't make any effort to obscure this."

Despite an initial reluctance to withhold comment on Trump's cabinet picks, he's tied the President-elect's selection as secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, to Trump's approach to Russia. [emphasis added]

Sarah Halzack, "The shipping industry is poised for massive upheaval. Can FedEx weather the storm?", Washington Post 12/15/2016:

“Amazon is the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Dick Metzler, a former FedEx executive who now oversees marketing at uShip, an online freight marketplace.

Starting around a year or two ago, the expression "Zhào jiārén 赵家人" ("Zhao family member") emerged as a coded reference for politically powerful and wealthy elites in contemporary Chinese society.  See Kiki Zhao's penetrating post on the NYT Sinosphere blog:

"Leveling Criticism at China’s Elite, Some Borrow Words From the Past" (1/4/16)

For the literary background of "Zhào jiārén 赵家人" ("Zhao family member"), see this post:

"Lu Xun and the Zhao family" (1/5/16)

At the beginning of 2016, Jack Grieve shared the first iteration of the Word Mapper app he had developed with Andrea Nini and Diansheng Guo, which let users map the relative frequencies of the 10,000 most common words in a big Twitter-based corpus covering the contiguous United States. (See: "Geolexicography," "Totally Word Mapper.") Now as the year comes to a close, Quartz is hosting a bigger, better version of the app, now including 97,246 words (all occurring at least 500 times in the corpus). It's appropriately dubbed "The great American word mapper," and it's hella fun (or wicked fun, if you prefer).

Some misc word maps made with the word mapper https://t.co/R2wCfnsegx pic.twitter.com/6jiDdJN5QL

— nikhil sonnad (@nkl) December 15, 2016

The "No Word For X" trope is a favorite item in the inventory of pop-culture rhetorical moves — the Irish have no word for "sex", the Germans have no word for "mess", the Japanese have no word for "compliance", the Bulgarians have no word for "integrity", none of the Romance languages have a word for "accountability", and so on …

In today's New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal presents an unusual variant: "Two Words For X". Specifically, he advises us "To Understand Trump, Learn Russian":

The Russian language has two words for truth — a linguistic quirk that seems relevant to our current political climate, especially because of all the disturbing ties between the newly elected president and the Kremlin.  

The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is “pravda” — the truth that seems evident on the surface. It’s subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called their party newspaper “Pravda.” Despots, autocrats and other cynical politicians are adept at manipulating pravda to their own ends.  

But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called “istina” in Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can’t change the istina.