Language Log

Today's xkcd: slightly unfair, but funny:

Mouseover title: "The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent."

I just asked @DarrellIssa abt the Comey news and he flicked me off — literally gave me the middle finger — and kept walking. Said nothing

— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) May 16, 2017

Sent in with the comment "Who the hell says 'flicked off' instead of 'flipped off'??"

In May of 1859, Charles Sanders Peirce was 19 years old, and graduating from Harvard College. Graduates were invited to describe their life for the "Class-Book" — and what Peirce wrote in response stands as the first entry in Volume 1 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition:

Ferris Jabr recently published in the New York Times Magazine an interesting article about the field research of Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus of biology at Northern Arizona University, on prairie dog alarm calls. The article title is "Can Prairie Dogs Talk?"

It is an interesting question. People who have read my earlier posts on animal communication have been pressing me to say something about my reaction to it. In this post I will do that. I will not be able to cover all the implications and ramifications of the question, of course; for one interesting discussion that has already appeared in the blogosphere, see this piece by Edmund Blair Bolles. But I will try to be careful and scholarly, and in an unusual departure (disappointingly, perhaps, to those who relished my bitterly sarcastic remarks on cow naming behavior), I will attempt to be courteous. Nonetheless, I will provide a clear and explicit answer to Jabr's question.

Today's SMBC:

CNN now stands for Cardiac Care Network because their ppl are having heart attacks over Trump doing what Dems once demanded-fire Comey.

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) May 10, 2017

CNN, CCN, whatever…

More evidence for the Conservation of Gemination.

We have had thousands of students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore enrolled as undergraduates and graduate students at Penn.  To name just a few at random, there are Andromeda, Tess, Sophie, Isis (but she changed it to Iset after finding out about the Islamic terrorist state), Leander, Lovesky, and so on.  I won't speculate on why they choose the names they do (and, of course, there are plenty of students named David, Peter, Henry, Susan, Nancy, Jane, and even an occasional Carlos, etc.), but the fact remains that almost every student from the Sinosphere who applies to Penn has an English name of one sort or another.  Many of them, prodded by their American teachers or friends, give up these foreign names after a while, or they use their Chinese names and English names in different circumstances.

The same is true for Korea, and it seems to an even greater degree, such that in some circles in Korea, having an English name is obligatory:

"Why Korean companies are forcing their workers to go by English names" (WP, 5/12/17)

Today's Pearls Before Swine — "Who's on first" updated:

"Cyberattack thwarted by flipping 'kill switch' but experts fear new blitz", ABC News 5/13/2017

The attack appears to have been thwarted by private cybersecurity researchers who identified and triggered the malware’s "kill switch," which halted the attacks before it spread throughout U.S. networks, a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed, but it is unclear whether, the official said, a modified attack will soon be launched.  

"That is a huge concern right now," said Darien Huss, a senior security research engineer at Proofpoint who was among the researchers who helped disable the virus, called "WannaCry," told ABC News today. "It would not be very difficult at all to re-release this ransomware attack without a kill switch or without an approved kill switch that only they can activate."

That second "without" should be "with", I think. Anyhow we've got most of the usual misnegation suspects — a modal, a scalar predicate, a few negatives — which make sentences semantically difficult. And here the disjunction of prepositional phrases adds to the  difficulty.

At the Valencia Police Station in San Francisco, CA, there is a sign reading "Community Room" in English and Spanish. There is also Chinese on the sign; however, apparently a word or two is not considered adequate to communicate this concept in Chinese.

Until three days ago when I read the following article in the South China Morning Post, I had never heard of this expression:

"Opinion: All you need to know about cheater’s stocks: its lures, its victims and the key opinion leaders" (Shirley Yam, 5/10/17)

She calls these stocks LAO QIAN GU in Chinese, but since I was not familiar with the expression, I was unable to think right away what characters she had in mind.

Jichang Lulu has just posted a very interesting article titled  "the clash of romanisations" (5/12/17).  It begins:

Last month the Ministry of Civil Affairs (民政部) published a list of six ‘standardised’ place names in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, a large part of which the PRC claims as part of South Tibet (藏南). This generated the predictable Indian protests, media brouhaha and mandatory Globule sovereignty-reaffirming blather. Analysis of what’s being called a “renaming” of Arunachal “districts” sees it as retaliation for the Dalai Lama’s recent visit to the region. All these hit-back-at-the-DL-to-“re”affirm-sovereignty readings are surely plausible, but I don’t think it’s very clear in which sense these ministerial coinages are ‘renaming’ or ‘standardising’ anything.

As Mark Liberman noted, Donald Trump seemed to imply in his recent interview with The Economist that he coined the phrase "priming the pump," or at least the financial use of it: "I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good." Was this just some sort of peculiar joke, especially considering that Trump himself has used the phrase several times in the past? We may never know, but I thought it would be worth delving into the history of "priming the pump" in a way that even our reading-averse president might appreciate: through cartoons. The financial metaphor of "priming the pump" was frequently depicted by editorial cartoonists in the 1920s and '30s, so much so that it became something of a visual cliché.