Language Log

"Dead mouse in protein supplement claimant admits lying", BBC News 2/7/2018:

A man has admitted to lying about buying a pack of protein powder containing a dead mouse.

Adam Brenton tweeted criticism of Myprotein Impact Diet Whey seller The Hut.com Ltd and contacted local press with his claims.

The story was widely republished but "unequivocal" evidence proved the mouse was not present at delivery.

We are thoroughly familiar with the use of puns to foil and irritate the censors in China:

"Punning banned in China" (11/29/14)

"It's not just puns that are being banned in China" (12/7/14) — with links to earlier posts on puns in China

"Fun bun pun" (4/9/17)

And many others, including the most recent post on puns and censorship, which focused squarely on the heated controversy over the abolition of term limits for the presidency:

"The letter * has bee* ba**ed in Chi*a" (2/26/18 — the day after the announcement of the constitutional change)

Another means of evading the censors, and more difficult to detect than puns because they speak through indirection (the answers are not given), are riddles.

"Lantern Festival riddles outwit and enrage Chinese censors", by Oiwan Lam, Hong Kong Free Press (3/6/18)

Thomas Carlyle, "Sir Walter Scott":

There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. Nay, in sober truth, is not this actually the rule in all writing; and, moreover, in all conduct and acting? Not what stands above ground, but what lies unseen under it, as the root and subterrene element it sprang from and emblemed forth, determines the value. Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity: speech is shallow as Time. Paradoxical does it seem? Woe for the age, woe for the man, quack-ridden, bespeeched, bespouted, blown about like barren Sahara, to whom this world-old truth were altogether strange!

In MS Word, buried deep in File|Options|Advanced|Compatibility Options|Layout is the option to check 'Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does'". If you use full justification, your document will look ugly unless you check that box.

Does that qualify as a form of nerdview?

You may have thought that idea of rhinoceroses peeving about semicolons (when they're not snorting and snuffing) was silly. But the comments on Mark's post Peeving and breeding have devolved to a level of even greater silliness: the pressing question of whether to type one space after a period or two.

Rhona Fenwick has put up a GoFundMe for the Ubykh Dictionary Project:

My name’s Dr Rhona Fenwick. I’m an archaeologist and linguist who’s spent sixteen years working to document and begin reviving the beautiful, rich, and dying language of the Ubykh people, and I’m humbly asking for your assistance to support me financially while I finish writing the first truly comprehensive Ubykh dictionary.

Today's SMBC explores an important issue:

There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995:

One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When one word erroneously replaces another, most of the time the target and substituting word are of the same syntactic category. Nouns slip with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.

In other words, we're NOT likely to say something like "When one word erroneously replacement another, …" or "exchanges, anticipation, perseverations, and noncontextual substituted […] obey a syntactic category rule".

But errors of this type are fairly common in typing. They seem to be cases where we've started to type the right thing, but as our attention shifts to the following material, our fingers follow a familiar but incorrect path.

The title of this post combines two topics that are popular with the Language Log audience, and that are not usually discussed together. It is also the title of a LAWnLinguistics post from 2012, shortly after the publication of Reading Law, a book about legal interpretation that was co-authored by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. It was one of a series of posts that I did about the book—a series of which the last installment has not yet been written.

The post was about whether prescriptivism has any role to play in statutory interpretation (no inside jokes in this title, I'm afraid), and it occurs to me that since many people here will be interested in the topic, it might be a good idea to bring the post back for a return engagement in a larger venue. And because the topic is one that I recently returned to at LAWnLing, I'm going to include the relevant part of that post as well.

Yesterday in Philadelphia we had very strong winds and what the weather people call a "wintry mix", so (along with some big downed trees) there were lots of people holding on to umbrellas turned inside out and partly stripped of their fabric, and lots of wrecked umbrellas discarded along the sidewalks and stuffed into trash cans.

This naturally raises the question: Is there a word for an umbrella in this condition?

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "[They do not move.]"

A few days ago, I posted a post consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a Language Log post (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet by Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor, quote-tweeting* an earlier tweet by Benjamin Dreyer, who is (although I didn’t know it at the time) a vice president, Executive Managing Editor, and Copy Chief at Random House.
* retweeting and adding a comment

The post was titled, "There's a fine line between recursion and intertextuality."

A screenshot of the post is provided below the fold—but I hasten to add that I am providing the screenshot solely as a convenience to the reader, to save them the trouble of having to leave this post in order to look at that one, should they be so inclined.