Language Log

Lawrence Downes, "How to turn Sean Hannity into food for worms", WaPo 8/6/2020:

I didn’t set out to compost Sean Hannity. It was something I settled on after considering several other options and rejecting them one by one. The first was leaving him in the basement indefinitely. That worked for a while. I could almost forget about him there, but then I would go down with a basket of laundry and see him and think, I have to do something.

I should explain: I don’t mean the man himself, but Hannity the book. It’s called “Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.”

The Zeesea cosmetics company, based in China, is advertising three new sets of products "X the British Museum", in a relationship that they call a "partnership" and a "cobranding  product line": "Mysterious Egypt", "Alice in Wonderland", and "Angel Cupid".

I'm guessing that the British Museum's role in the partnership did not extend to input on the English names of the products. For example, the Alice in Wonderland Mascara collection includes ten colors, one of which is "Rust Red", advertised with the tag line "After coloring the United States to suffocation can be sweet super A strawberry jam":

David Denison writes:

This ludicrous headline in my Feedly feed caught my eye just now: "Learning wild to swim with confidence".

The actual story in The Guardian revealed an alternative version, usable but (to my ears) still in over-anxious thrall to the don't-split-infinitives mantra: "Learning to swim wild with confidence".

I think I'd have naturally said "Learning to wild swim with confidence", though with some hesitation in writing as to whether to hyphenate wild-swim.

If you ask Google (in various ways) how to pronounce pecan, you'll get suggested additional questions like these:

From Annie Gottlieb:

This kind of mistake is becoming a pandemic!
This is a twofer!—misnegation AND the opposite of misnegation, whatever you call that—misaffirmation?

On the rare occasions that his team actually trusts him in front of a camera, the presumptive democratic nominee never ceases to disappoint with his ability to — for lack of a better term — keep his foot out of his mouth. 

[This is a guest post by Ken Hilton]

I came across this Facebook post and I thought it might be worth sharing on Language Log.

Trump mispronounces Thailand as "Thighland" pic.twitter.com/PgTRnHpAA8

— The Recount (@therecount) August 6, 2020

Sean Hannity's new book, Live Free or Die, was released a couple of days ago. The original cover featured a Latin motto, "Vivamus vel libero perit Americae", whose source was apparently Google Translate's version of "Live Free or America Dies":

As Spencer Alexander McDaniel observed, this is gobbledygook — or perhaps we should say "googledygook".

The title of McDaniel's post ("Sean Hannity does not know Latin") is unfair, though probably true, since the cover design was most likely created by the publisher. But a better observation might have been that Google Translate doesn't know Latin. Of course modern machine translation systems don't really "know" any languages, but have just memorized patterns of contextual correspondences. When the available training data is merely a few million words, as in the case of Latin, the results are often bad, as here.

Annie Gottlieb asks:

There's a Reddit page with this title:  "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English".  Feast your eyes:

(source)

Today's adventure in AI brought yet another robocall, which my Google Assistant intercepted since the calling number (probably spoofed) was not in my contacts list. Here's Google Assistant's rendering of the interaction

The title and the following observations come from Rebecca Hamilton:

I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: on Foot to Constantinople, as I convalesce from COVID-19 (I've had a hard time of it), and I stumbled upon an aside he made about the French "hongre," meaning "gelding," as does the German "wallach." He made this comment – without further explication – in the context of a discussion of the ethnographic roots of Hungarians, Wallachians, and Rumanians (in particular, the latter as being descendants of Roman occupation, if not Romans themselves). What all this means, I cannot say. It seemed like a topic you would know something about. Because I am confined to bed for the moment, if you could be so kind as to forward me some reading material, I would be very grateful. Also, anything about "Wales" or "Welsh" sharing etymological roots with "Wallach," and how "wether" fits into all this would be great.

[Update — apparently the data for the graphs presented by Sabeti and Miller came originally (without attribution) from work by David Rozado, who has provided useful information about his sources and methods. I therefore withdraw the suggestion that the counts were wrong, pending further study, though I am still not persuaded by the arguments that Sabeti and Miller used their version of his graphs to make.]

This is the subgraph for "racism" from the display originally presented in John F Miller's 2019 tweet, reproduced a few days ago by Arram Sabeti, and allegedly representing "New York Times Word Usage Frequency (1970 to 2018)":

Earlier today ("Sabeti on NYT bias"), I lodged some objections to Miller's graphs, especially the way that the y-axis scaling misrepresents the relative frequency of the various words and phrases covered. But after looking into things a little further, I find that it's not just a scaling problem — the underlying number sequences in Miller's graphs are substantially different from what I find in a search of the NYT archive, at least in the cases that I've checked. I don't know whether this is because of some issue with Miller's numbers, or with the counts from the NYT archive, or what. But for whatever reason, Miller's numbers are (in all cases where I've checked) seriously at variance with the results of NYT archive search.

And the differences make a difference — Miller's tendentious conclusion that "social liberal media and academia are wilfully gaslighting people" is even less well supported by the Archive's numbers than it was by the original misleadingly-scaled graphs.