Language Log

Alex Baumans sent in this photograph of the logo of a Korean food truck in Belgium, run by one San-Ho Park Correwyn:

"Corpse sex kill threat prisoner gets 45 year sentence", BBC 12/14/2016.

This is a case where even after reading the story, the structure is unclear.

Is it [[[corpse sex] [kill threat]] prisoner] ?

Or [[[corpse [sex kill]] threat]] prisoner] ?

Or has the BBC decided, in this post-truth era, to go post-syntax as well?

Philip Cummings, who sent in the link, commented that

I call these ‘noun car crashes’ particularly when I have to attempt to translate them into Irish and work out the appropriate case relationships between the various nouns.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "It me, your father."

Ken Adams, "Courtesy of the High Court of England and Wales, A Reminder that Ambiguity Is Best Left to Experts", Adams on Contract Drafting 12/11/2016:

Here’s the language at issue (emphasis added):  

Without prejudice to the provisions of paragraph 3 if all of the Conditions have not been discharged in accordance with this Schedule by the Longstop Date, then either Asda or Dooba may rescind this Agreement by giving to the other not less than ten working days written notice to that effect.

So can the Agreement be rescinded if "all of the Conditions have not been discharged" with broad scope of negation, meaning that "it's not the case that all of the Conditions have been discharged", i.e. at least one Condition has not been discharged? Or should we construe the clause with narrow scope of negation, requiring that every one of the Conditions must have failed? The deputy judge reasoned as follows:

The subject of the clause is “all of the Conditions”; the characteristic which the subject is required to have is “have not been discharged”. As a matter of strict Boolean logic, the relevant characteristic is a negative one, which must affect all of the Conditions in order to fall within the clause. […]

I agree with Asda that the formula “if all … have not …” is sometimes used to mean “if not all … have”, but I do not accept that this has become its primary meaning.

Some evidence that we might be drifting back towards Elizabethan spelling rules (i.e. "whatever, dude"):

[link] More raw and grizzly testimony expected in Dylann Roof case

[link] Just before Snyder held her news conference, Oakland police and fire chaplain Jayson Landeza took several family members to the grizzly site.

[link] A grizzly piece of evidence has been returned to the family whose loved one died in an officer-involved shooting in Wauwatosa in June.

Last month, in "Apostrophe in Hebrew" (11/22/16), we saw an "s" and an apostrophe incorporated in Hebrew writing.  Here, on top of a taxi, from left to right it says "taxi", and from right to left it says מוֹנִית ("taxi").

Larry Horn, following up on "Hyperbolic scalar indifference" (7/14/2015) and "Expletive deficits" (7/18/2015), points to the following passage from Augusten Burrough's 2003 memoir Dry:

Background: Augusten, 90 days sober after a stay in PRIDE, a gay rehab facility in Duluth, followed by group and one-on-one sessions and AA meetings back in Manhattan, has fallen for Foster, a guy from group who's incredibly hot but also problematic—off-limits not only because you’re not allowed to get involved with someone else from group but because he’s just relapsed and is smoking crack again. Augusten and his British recovering-crack-addict-temporary-roommate Hayden are discussing the perils of Foster over an Indian dinner.    

"At least I can understand your attraction to him, after seeing him”, Hayden says, breaking off a piece of papadum.

“He is possibly the most attractive man I have ever seen in my life. He’s quite literally breathtaking. I no longer blame you at all for your shallowness and lack of judgment.” […]  

 “I don’t know, my obsession with Foster is kind of fading. It’s like he’s severed my give-a-shit nerve. I’m over him.”  [Emphasis added]

Larry adds: "Unclear where this particular nerve is located."

There was quite a stir this week surrounding a high profile court case in China over Michael Jordan's suit to control the branding rights to his name.  The controversy is described in this NYT article by Sui-wee Lee:

"Michael Jordan Owns Right to His Name in Chinese Characters, Too, Court Rules" (12/7/16)

After reading the article, Ethan Merritt sent in some pertinent observations and questions:

Many's the time that we have encountered biscriptalism in the Sinosphere and elsewhere (see here, here, here, and here).

Now Jenny Chu has sent in this photograph of an interesting ad, currently in Hong Kong's MTR, which fuses Japanese- and Korean-appearing lettering with English, presumably in order to seem in touch with the latest trends.

Somebody asked Mark Swofford to help her devise a speedy, easy way to locate all the Chinese characters in a book-length manuscript that she was working on.  Mark set to work on the problem, and this is what he came up with:

"How to find Chinese characters in an MS Word document" (12/10/16)

Tecumseh Fitch et al., "Monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready", Science Advances 12/9/2016:

For four decades, the inability of nonhuman primates to produce human speech sounds has been claimed to stem from limitations in their vocal tract anatomy, a conclusion based on plaster casts made from the vocal tract of a monkey cadaver. We used x-ray videos to quantify vocal tract dynamics in living macaques during vocalization, facial displays, and feeding. We demonstrate that the macaque vocal tract could easily produce an adequate range of speech sounds to support spoken language, showing that previous techniques based on postmortem samples drastically underestimated primate vocal capabilities. Our findings imply that the evolution of human speech capabilities required neural changes rather than modifications of vocal anatomy. Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it.

From a reader:

I just noticed this headline in our local news (which I read on line…):

"Seahawks QB Russell Wilson pens letter on behalf of Sonics arena project."

Does anyone pen a letter these days, or dial a phone number?  I am sure this raises issues that have come up in your blog. Maybe though there is still room to explore how obsolete expressions continue to be used.

My son sent me this wonderful, learned post called "The best bits" from the "Old European culture" blog (12/7/2015).  It begins:

Offal, also called variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by culture and region, but includes most internal organs excluding muscle and bone.

The word shares its etymology with several Germanic words: Frisian ôffal, German Abfall (offall in some Western German dialects), afval in Dutch and Afrikaans, avfall in Norwegian and Swedish, and affald in Danish. These Germanic words all mean "garbage", or —literally— "off-fall", referring to that which has fallen off during butchering. However, these words are not often used to refer to food with the exception of Afrikaans in the agglutination afvalvleis (lit. "off-fall-meat") which does indeed mean offal. For instance, the German word for offal is Innereien meaning innards. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word entered Middle English from Middle Dutch in the form afval, derived from af (off) and vallen (fall).