Language Log

From David Denison — Hard working ISA [contrasted with] not hardly working ISA:

David's comment:

This is an ad for an ISA (Individual Savings Account – tax-free for UK taxpayers), pushing the advertiser's Stocks & Shares offering against some other ISA that (presumably) merely pays interest. For me, not and hardly are alternatives before an -ing and incompatible with each other in the sense intended ('hardly at all'), though it's easy enough to find other web examples like it, as well as examples in COCA etc. where not hardly means 'hardly at all'.

Jeff DeMarco sent in this Hong Kong sign:

On Twitter, Katherine Connor Martin (Head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press) writes:

In the latest @oed update, dozens of entries relating to sexual and gender identity were revised, the first phase of a project to revisit this rapidly changing segment of the English lexicon.

She links to the lengthy Release Notes, of which the following is just the introduction:

Read the rest of this entry »

In an evening session on March 24, at the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington DC, there was a surprise announcement: publication of Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, edited by Haun Saussy.

At least the announcement was a surprise to Victor. According to this blog post at Cambria Press,

The evening began with short speeches about new books by Shen Jiawei and Mabel Lee, Albert Welter, Jonathan Stalling, Megan M. Ferry, Christopher Rea, Liu Jianmei (and Mabel Lee), and Carolyn T. Brown.

Then Professor Haun Saussy was asked by Toni Tan, director of Cambria Press, to come up to speak. While Professor Mair was aware that Professor Saussy was working on an edited volume, he had no idea that this was a festschrift being put together in his honor and that it would be unveiled that very night. So when Toni Tan asked Professor Saussy to take the stage, Professor Mair was under the impression that Professor Saussy was coming up just to say a few words about the forthcoming book. Little did he know that he would be presented with the highly anticipated top-secret volume that was the talk of the AAS.

From Grice v. City of St. Robert (Mo. Ct. Ap. 1992) (citations omitted):

This court should not create an exception where none is present. Where a statute has no exception courts should not engraft one by judicial legislation. Words used in the statute must be accorded their plain and ordinary meaning. When language is plain and admits to but one meaning, there is no room for construction.

Morris Halle passed away early this morning: born 7/23/1923, died 4/2/2018.

The abstract from "Morris Halle: An Appreciation", Annual Review of Linguistics 2015, describes his influence on the field:

Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics. This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights into the sound patterns of English and Russian, ideas about the nature of metered verse, ways of thinking about phonological features and rules, and models for argumentation about phonological description and phonological theory. But he has had an equally profound influence through his role as a teacher and mentor, and this personal influence has not been limited to students who follow closely in his intellectual and methodological footsteps. It has been just as strong—or stronger—among researchers who disagree with his specific ideas and even his general approach, or who work in entirely different subfields. This appreciation is a synthesis of reflections from colleagues and former students whom he has formed, informed, and inspired.

If you don't have an institutional or individual subscription, a .pdf version of that article is here.

When I read Chris Christie quoted as saying "[I]f Mr. Pruitt is going to go, it’s because he should have never been there in the first place" (e.g. in this article and in this picture caption), the wording "should have never been" struck me as somewhat awkward compared to  "should never have been". The third option "never should have been" also seems somewhat better to me. And general usage patterns seem to agree  — the COCA corpus has 244 hits for "should never have been"  and 125 for "never should have been" vs. 51 for "should have never been", and the Google Ngram viewer shows the same order, with an even larger advantage for "should never have been":

So all three orders are Out There, but "should never have been" is the most common, while Mr. Christie's reported choice "should have never been" is in last place.

While Chinese characters are inimical to the full writing of the topolects, they occasionally can be used to convey a sense of certain aspects of various local or regional forms of speech.

Here are some examples from the Northeast / Dongbei:

From Josh Penney:

In "Advances in birdsong modeling", 4/1/2017, I discussed Eve Armstrong's brilliant research report "A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997". Now, a year later, Dr. Armstrong has followed up with "Colonel Mustard in the Aviary with the Candlestick: a limit cycle attractor transitions to a stable focus via supercriticalAndronov-Hopf bifurcation".

Undernegation of the week, from a reader down under — Jack Waterford, "AFP bloodhounds still just sniffing about", The Canberra Times 3/31/2018:

The AFP raids were at the behest of the Registered Organisations Commission, which claims to have feared that the AWU might be in the process of destroying documents relevant to a civil investigation. The AWU claims, not with at least superficial plausibility, that the raids were politically motivated and for improper purposes.

Ursula K.Le Guin died a couple of months ago, and since then I've been re-reading some of her works that I've enjoyed over the years. Yesterday I was struck by the epigraph to her 2004 collection The Wave in the Mind, which apparently I missed when I read the book a decade ago.  It's part of a letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 16 March 1926:

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.