Language Log

Michael passed away at the age of 77 on May 26, 2025 in Kapa'a, Hawai'i, but I just learned of this great loss two days ago.  Since we usually corresponded about two to three times a month, when I hadn't heard from Michael for several months, I suspected that he was having health problems.

Michael was born on June 2, 1947 in Palo Alto, California to Dr. Edward and Ruth Carr. Michael grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, graduating from Shawnee Mission West High School. He completed his undergraduate work at The University of Colorado and The University of Kansas. Michael married the love of his life, Terry Reardon, in 1972 after meeting on a blind date, and thereafter the two never spent a single day apart. 

From Barbara Phillips Long, in reference to yesterday's Guardian story "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues review – rockers return for mockusequel of pin-sharp laughs and melancholy" ("Enter the Tapocalypse as Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner return in a still-funny, cameo-studded telling of the hapless band’s final gig"):

The word videotaping is still often used to mean "video recording", even though what's meant is recording digital video to a  solid-state storage device, most often on a phone — video recording to tape has gone the way of buggy whips.

The word "exceedances" occurs 7 times in this relatively short article:

"Lead in water at Perth Children's Hospital no risk to patient safety, WA health minister says"
Mya Kordic, ABC News (Australia), 9/10/25

Here are two examples:

"Exceedances are decommissioned while they undergo remediation," Ms Hammat said.

"I have been advised by the Chief Health Officer that there is no risk to the safety of patients or staff as a result of these exceedances."

There's a restaurant in the western suburbs of Philadelphia called "Rosa Mexicano", one of one of a chain by that name. Since the first time I saw it, I've known enough Spanish to wonder why Mexicano is a masculine adjective, given that the noun rosa "rose" is feminine. But thanks to a Spanish friend, I've recently learned that the noun rosa has another sense, referring to the color "pink" — and in that sense the noun is masculine.

Today's xkcd:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-seventh issue:

“Bai Xingjian and His Dream World of Sex and Love,” by Qianheng Jiang. 

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp367_Bai_Xingjian_Sex_Love.pdf

"Linguistic Mechanisms of Knowledge-Exchange in a Dark-Web Money Laundering Forum." Chiang, Emily. PLOS ONE 20, no. 8 (August 5, 2025): e0329777

Abstract

Money laundering facilitates serious crime, enables the expansion of criminal operations, and destabilises economies. Extant scholarship is largely concerned with anti-money laundering approaches, with far less attention being paid to the language and behaviours of the individuals who engage in money laundering. ‘Dark-web’ discussion fora are prime loci for illicit knowledge exchange and key enablers of money laundering, yet, are underexplored as sites for understanding the online activities and behaviours of users. 

Apple's been promoting their September iPhone event as "awe-dropping", which is an obvious mixture of "jaw-dropping" and "awe".

But they're not the first to make the mixture.

At least, I've found plenty of earlier examples, though it's hard to tell if they were prior portmanteaux or eggcorns or just typos:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth issue:

“Horses and Humans: A Consequential Symbiosis,” edited by Victor H. Mair.

Julesy tells it like it is: "The Impossible Chinese Typewriter"

At least sometimes…

Philip Taylor sent a link to this Guardian article "West Point cancels ceremony to honor Tom Hanks as ‘outstanding US citizen’", with the comment

It was only on reading the article that I realised that West Point was/were not cancelling the ceremony in order to honour Tom Hanks (as I had originally thought/believed) but were in fact cancelling a ceremony intended to honour Tom Hanks …

I've been meaning to test GPT-5's parsing ability, ever since I discovered its surprising ability to represent semantic scope ambiguities in correct predicate logic (see "No X is better than Y", 8/13/2025, and the details of its analyses).

No. At least, there've been plenty of dumb articles over past decades and centuries, and plenty of smart ones recently. But I have some complaints about one particular recent article in The Economist, "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear", 9/4/2025.