Language Log

"New CDC Data: COVID-19 Vaccination Safe for Pregnant People", CDC Media Statement 8/11/2021:

CDC has released new data on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant people and is recommending all people 12 years of age and older get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“CDC encourages all pregnant people or people who are thinking about becoming pregnant and those breastfeeding to get vaccinated to protect themselves from COVID-19,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “The vaccines are safe and effective, and it has never been more urgent to increase vaccinations as we face the highly transmissible Delta variant and see severe outcomes from COVID-19 among unvaccinated pregnant people.”

Michael Foust, "CDC Director Criticized for Replacing 'Women' with 'Pregnant People': It's 'Dehumanizing' to Women", Christian Headlines 8/13/2021:

The CDC director is receiving pushback from conservatives for repeatedly referring to pregnant women as "pregnant people" in a brief speech Thursday about COVID-19 vaccines. […]

The phrase "pregnant people" is used by some in the LGBT community to include biological women who identify as men. It also can include women who identify as non-binary.

"People don't get pregnant – women do," R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on his podcast The Briefing.

Something seemed amiss from the very first words of this video:

In Massachusetts, booster shot is spelled borcester shot

— Adam Blickstein (@AdamBlickstein) August 17, 2021

A recent xkcd:

I have lived a long time.  When I was in high school (1957-1961), geography was an important subject of the curriculum.  When I went to college (1961-1965), there were still departments of geography in many, if not most, self-respecting colleges and universities, but they were slowly starting to disappear.  Now, I suspect that there are very few, if any, schools, colleges, and universities that teach geography and train professors of that discipline.  Still, there are vestiges of the days in the first half of the twentieth century when geography was upheld as a princely pursuit.

At Penn, there is a building that once housed the geography department and still has markings that bear witness to its pedigree, but has now been swallowed up by the School of Engineering and Applied Science.  At Harvard, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) occupies what used to be the Department of Geography, in a building filled with geographical motifs that has a special history linked to the Widener family (who gave their wealth and their name to Harvard's main library in memory of Philadelphian Harry Elkins Widener (January 3, 1885-April 15, 1912) who went down with the Titanic at the age of 27.  The Widener family also gifted Harvard with the building that presently belongs to EALC, as part of an endowment meant to create a geography professorship for a member of the Widener family.  While I was teaching at Harvard, my office was in the penthouse of that building.  It was an eerie feeling to be situated all alone in that aerie above all my peers and superiors.

Despite the support of the Wideners and its illustrious past, geography did not thrive at Harvard, Penn, and elsewhere.  To me, this is cause for lament, and I have often pondered what forces have been at work that led to this unfortunate result.

"Can the Angels keep Shohei Ohtani? A payroll crisis looms in Los Angeles", 8/12/2021:

Everything Shohei Ohtani has accomplished this summer is unprecedented: the high-end pitching and high-impact hitting, the takeover of the two days of All-Star events, the marketability. With a season résumé that looks like none other, he'll win the American League's Most Valuable Player Award, having fully stretched the imagination of the Los Angeles Angels' staff — and managers' and executives' with other teams, for that matter — about his future capabilities. […]

He could eventually make the same transition that Babe Ruth made, from a two-way player to a full-time outfielder. "That would be tempting," said one AL manager, grinning at the notion of Ohtani devoting all of his acumen and athleticism to run production. "Can you imagine what he could do?" If Ohtani had 700 plate appearances at his 2021 home run rate, he'd hit 60 homers — and it seems very possible he would have more efficiency as a hitter if that were his only responsibility. He's proved to everyone this year: You cannot underestimate Shohei Ohtani. [emphasis added]

Sol Jung, a former Penn undergrad, took this photograph more than a decade ago, but I'm only now getting around to posting on it.

There's quite a story behind the photograph and why it took me so long to write this blog post about it.  I will explain below.

Brian Merriman ran into this article and device when researching electronic typewriters from the 1980s:

Article by Holly Else in Nature (8/5/21):

"‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers

Analysis reveals that strange turns of phrase may indicate foul play in science"

Here are the beginning and a few other selected portions of the article:

In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The researchers could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’.

Further investigation revealed that these strange terms — which they dub “tortured phrases” — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife in computer-science papers.

Research-integrity sleuths say that Cabanac* and his colleagues have uncovered a new type of fabricated research paper, and that their work, posted in a preprint on arXiv on 12 July¹, might expose only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the literature affected.

[*VHM:  Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France]

Submitted by François Lang on behalf of his neighbor:

We join scores of friends and colleagues around the world in mourning the passing of Lila R. Gleitman, Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lila was widely recognized as a brilliant and trailblazing thinker, writer, and teacher, but she was also, famously, a larger than life character with an incomparable wit — “an awful lot of fun to hang around with,” as Ben Zimmer writes. We know how lucky we were to count her as a close family friend, and, in the years since Henry Gleitman’s passing, a regular dinner companion.  We relied on her lifetime of experience and considerable wisdom, and reciprocated any way we could; and we are far from alone in this. She often recounted in her inimitable way aspects of research along with consequential events in the history of linguistics, much of which is included in an article we helped prepare, along with Barbara Partee, for the Annual Review of Linguistics.

She was a student of Zellig Harris and a peer of Noam Chomsky when structuralism was giving way to generative linguistics. From that pivotal moment in history, she became a major catalyst for shifting the study of child language away from its then-stigmatized association with mothers in the private sphere to a place in the academy from which it would illuminate theories of language acquisition, word meaning, and thought itself. Incredibly, she started down the path to this accomplishment in the 1950s as a woman, wife, and mother — one whose determination and confidence were undaunted by obstacles she met along the way. (She would make us strike this paragraph as too much praise if she could.)

Mary Harris, "Newsflash: Coronavirus Ain’t Going Nowhere", Slate 8/9/2021:

I was a little hesitant to speak with Dr. Bernard Ashby. Ashby works in Florida, taking care of COVID patients. He is bearing witness to that state’s record-breaking surge of infections at the moment. It’s not that I didn’t think Ashby would have interesting things to say. It’s just: How many times can you repeat the exact same thing? Wear a mask indoors. Get vaccinated. Support health care workers.

But when we got on the phone, Ashby sounded just as frustrated as I am: “The transmission rate is ridiculous down here. Patients are coming in by the boatload. They’re younger, they’re sicker. And unfortunately, we weren’t really prepared for the surge that we’ve gotten” […]

On Monday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Ashby about what it’s like inside Florida’s surge. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. […]

Ashby: This is indicative of our health care system as a whole. Vaccination rates have always been low in certain demographics prior to the pandemic. Access to care has always been an issue in certain demographics prior to the pandemic. We talk a lot about disparities, and I actually dislike those terms: disparities and inequality, all that, yada, yada.

Harris: Is it the passive voice you don't like?

This morning, I read the following sentence on a large list to which I belong:

"Apparently no one that hasn't been vaccinated doesn't want to live.

I read it over several times and thought about it for quite a while, but am still not sure that I understand what the author of the sentence really meant.  Can anyone state the intent of the sentence more clearly and unambiguously?