Language Log

From this blog post:

ICU beds are filled to capacity with unvaccinated COVID patients who are not vaccinated because they didn’t have access to immunization. They chose to be unvaccinated.

A.L., who sent in the link, observes that "this seems like a particularly striking example, because the misnegated phrase ('not vaccinated because they didn’t have access to immunization' instead of 'not unvaccinated because they didn’t have access to immunization') is the focus of an explicit contrast with one that's appropriately negated."

As often in cases where the problem is extra or missing characters, rather than a whole-word substitution, it's hard to tell whether this is a slip of the fingers or a slip of the brain. Or maybe a bit of both.

Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale.  Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year.  Valerie writes:

After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she had never written a single character and she wondered if her teacher would expect her to know how to write characters.