Language Log

Noun pile? Crash Blossom?  We report, you decide… Rollin Bishop, "Quest for Giant Bomb E3 Set Porn Bears Fruit", 6/24/2013:

The Electronic Entertainment Expo — E3 for short — is held in Los Angeles every year, typically in June, and it means that a lot of journalists descend upon the area in short order. This year was no different, and popular gaming site Giant Bomb rented a “professional studio” for some of their coverage. Things got weird, though, and it quickly became apparent that what they were renting was actually the set for a bunch of pornography. Yeah.

R.L.G., "A language with too many armies and navies?", The Economist 6/21/2013. This post gives a laudably concrete discussion of the differences among contemporary regional varieties of Arabic, with examples taken from the r/Arabs Dialect Project. It also quotes from a 1998 paper by my colleague Mohamed Maamouri, "Language Education and Human Development: Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" (Discussion paper prepared for The World Bank Mediterranean Development Forum, Marrakech, 3-6 September 1998).

The judge in the Zimmerman case has recently decided to let the jury decide for themselves about the source of the screams in the 911 tape ("Jury to decide whose voice on 911 call in Zimmerman case"). This decision is a stinging rebuke to the "expert" testimony of Tom Owen and Alan Reich, and supports the testimony of Peter French, George Doddington, and Hirotaka Nakasone. For a summary of the dueling experts, see Andrew Branca, "Zimmerman Case: Dr. Hirotaka Nakasone, FBI, and the low-quality 3-second audio file", Legal Insurrection 6/7/2013, "Zimmerman Prosecution’s Voice Expert admits: 'This is not really good evidence'", 6/8/2013, and "Zimmerman Case: Experts Call State’s Scream Claims 'Absurd' 'Ridiculous' and 'Imaginary Stuff'", 6/9/2013.

I don't have time this morning to discuss the issues at greater length, but it's clear that the judge's evaluation of the situation was correct.

Sybil Shaver writes:

Reading Stephen White's novel Line of Fire I encountered the following: (in the middle of a discussion of a death which is either accidental or suicide, p. 51 of the hardcover)

"What do you mean 'if she intends to die'? Isn't dying always intent?"

I shook my head. "It helps to think about suicidal behavior having two pairs of defining variables. Picture a simple chi square – a two-by-two graph. On one axis is the dichotomy of intent – the person intends either to die or to survive. On the other axis is the dichotomy of lethality – the person chooses either a method of high lethality or one of low lethality.

"The two-by-two chi square allows for four possible combinations." I turned over our grocery list and sketched a chi-square with four boxes. "People with low intent sometimes choose methods of high lethality. They can end up dying, almost by accident, because death wasn't what they were seeking. The opposite is people who intended to die, but they chose a low-lethality method. They're the ones who believed that five aspirin and two shots of vodka would kill them. But they end up surviving, again, almost by accident."

"You drew four boxes. What are the other two?"

I squeezed water from a rag to use to wipe the counter. "I described low intent/high lethality, and high intent/low lethality. The other two are low intent/low lethality, and high intent/high lethality. People in both those categories get the outcome they intended. Low intent/low lethality is the classic 'cry for help' suicide attempt-someone who intends to survive but is eager for someone else to know about the gesture. That person doesn't wish to die, and she chooses a method that makes death unlikely. High intent/high lethality is the guy who puts a shotgun barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toes. He intends to die and chooses a method that is damn near certain to do it.'

From Roy Peter Clark:

I've been writing a bit lately about famous literary texts and what makes them work.  The beginning of "Lolita," say, or the ending of "The Great Gatsby."

So I've been thinking about "Call me Ishmael," arguably the most famous short sentence in American literature.  Among its charms, I argue, is that it is a short, short first sentence for a long, long book, "Moby Dick."

What stumps me is the syntax.  I get that the subject is understood, that "call" is an imperative verb.  The word "me" feels like an indirect object.  But what the heck is "Ishmael"?  A direct object?  A noun in apposition to "me"?

I asked the question on Twitter, but got no results.

Can you or your Language Log colleagues enlighten me?  I would be grateful.

Lost on the high seas of language — Roy Peter Clark

From Dick Margulis:

The first editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, a Scot named William Smellie, was a distant relative to my wife, whose surname is Smillie, pronounced smiley (the spelling was changed at some point to avoid bad jokes, apparently). I believe William pronounced it smiley as well. John W. Willey (pronounced wily) was the first mayor of Cleveland (the brand new restaurant where my son is a sous chef is named The Willeyville because Willey bought a tract of land on the city's west side and named it that), and there are some towns in England named Willey, although I don't know that they share the same pronunciation. And a shibboleth here in New Haven is the pronunciation of Whalley Avenue, named for the English regicide Edward Whalley and pronounced whale-y, although Our Lady of the Google Navigator, who is Not From Around Here, rhymes it with alley.

I can't blame people who think my wife's name rhymes with Millie or the restaurant is the willie-ville, nor those who have trouble with Whalley, because the way we were all taught to decode a double-ell is that it makes the preceding vowel what we non-linguists call short. But as I find myself at the confluence of these three examples of this unusual (I think) orthographical feature, I'm just curious what the history of it is, if anyone at Language Log Plaza happens to know.

Joe Manfre writes:

I was looking through a Flickr group celebrating the always sensationalist headlines for the Argus newspaper in Brighton and Hove,  and in it I found a few pretty good noun piles:

FIREWORKS BLAZE BOSS VERDICT
HOVE GARDEN POND CLASH – PICTURE
BLAZE DEATH MURDER QUIZ
DOG KNIFE KILLING VERDICT
BRIGHTON COCKROACH CURRY HOUSE FINE
BRIGHTON PHOTO STUDIO JOBS MISERY

We can add:

SURF GIRLS' BEACH BATTLE
WORTHING RUNAWAY ELECTRIC BUGGY CHAOS

(though "electric" is an adjective, really), and

RUBBISH ROW RESIDENTS IN VILE CARDS SHOCK

(though that is two three-element noun piles connected with a preposition).

Another Turkish term is entering the international lexicon: "duran adam", or "standing man".  Andy Carvin, "The 'Standing Man' of Turkey: Act of Quiet Protest Goes Viral", the two-way (NPR) 6/18/2013:

As protests against the Turkish government enter their third week, activists are taking increasingly creative measures to maintain their momentum.

Over the weekend, police removed their tent city and re-opened Istanbul's Taksim Square to traffic, while maintaining a strong presence in the area. This might have seemed like the end of it for many protesters, until a lone man decided to take a stand, literally, against the government. For more than six hours Monday night, Erdem Gunduz stood motionless in Taksim Square, passively ignoring any prodding or harassment from police and people passing by.

His unusual form of protest has inspired activists in Turkey and around the world to assume the same pose. He's even become his own meme, as "standing man" (duran adam, in Turkish) supporters upload their own protest photos to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Lately we've seen a number of hair-tearing Language Log posts (including a couple of mine) about bad linguistic pseudo-hemi-demi-quasi-science getting into major science journals and the popular press.  But sometimes the news media get it right, and here's one example: thanks to effective publicizing by the Linguistic Society of America, a new article by Carmel O'Shannessy, who has been observing the emergence of a new mixed language in Australia for many years, is being widely reported nationally and internationally, for instance here and here.

Back in 2004 I gave a talk on `The birth of bilingual mixed languages' at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  A prominent linguist in the audience protested during the comment period that I had no actual evidence that such languages actually existed and were learnable, since my evidence came from historical situations.   (I still think my evidence was solid, but I'm pretty sure I didn't convince the doubter. )   Carmel's research (which wasn't yet published in 2004) would have been an effective response to that objection: she shows that young children have been participating in the creation of Light Warlpiri, and she shows conclusively that the language is being learned by younger children.

Martyn Cornell:

Check out the comment from sportzzzgirl at the link below, “Strange development in language”, where she is complaining about the use of the verb “spell” to mean “to be relieved at their post”, which has been in the English language, as someone else quickly points out, since the 16th century … surely a record for the recency effect!

The original story is "EMT Stays on Phone With Stroke Victim For 8 Hours Trying to Find Her", Gawker 6/16/2013:

An FDNY EMT dispatcher stayed on the phone with a stroke victim for eight hours as rescuers tried to pinpoint where the distressed and slurring woman had fallen. […]

In a letter or recognition for her actions, Emergency Medical Dispatch Capt. Philip Weiss wrote that "throughout the entirety [Hilman-Payne] worked to keep the patient awake, she never lost her own composure and remained calm while attempting to elicit more information from the patient.”

Weiss continues that Hilman-Payne “remained on the phone with the patient for almost eight hours being spelled only briefly for reasons of personal necessity.”

The Economist has demonstrated several times that it would rather publish ambiguous, awkward, or even ungrammatical sentences than permit a verb-modifying adjunct to intervene between the marker to and the head verb of the infinitival clause it introduces (see here and here for two of my discussions of the topic). Last week I obtained a robustly direct reaction from an influential staff member at the magazine's offices (I've given the details on Lingua Franca today). It stated that they would not be changing their highly conservative policy — it came close to telling me to butt out. But almost immediately thereafter, I came across a sentence that (you might think) looked like counterevidence. It was in an article about computer modeling of tsunami behavior (15 June 2013, p. 82); I underline the crucial part:

To simplify the problem, the researchers looked at what happens when a computerized wave encounters a cone-shaped island on a smoothly sloping seabed in front of a straight cyber-coastline with a beach that continues to rise smoothly as it progresses inland. These approximations allow a computer to cope with the problem, yet are sufficiently similar to many real places for the conclusions drawn from them to, as it were, hold water.

Below is a query from Garrett Wollman, which I'm putting up as a guest post for LL readers to answer. For some background on the (an)arthrous terminology, see e.g.

"Syntax under pressure", 8/28/2007
"(An)arthrous abbreviations", 9/17/2007
"Language Log is strong", 9/16/2007
"Language Log only pretty strong", 9/30/2007
"Anarthrous irony", 3/27/2010
"'The' culture war", 12/16/2010
"BofA goes anarthrous in the Bay Area", 4/27/2011

Recently on alt.usage.english, contributor "Navi" asked:

Which is correct:

1-I saw THE "3:10 to Yuma" with Glenn Ford, not the remake with Christian Bale.
2-I saw "3:10 to Yuma" with Glenn Ford, not the remake with Christian Bale.

(Apologies for being slow in taking account of this important neologism.) Connor Adams Sheets, "What Is Capuling? 'Everyday I'm Çapuling' Turkish Protest Video Goes Viral", International Business Times 6/4/2013:

"Everyday I'm Çapuling!" is quickly becoming a rallying cry of sorts for the so-called "Turkish Spring" protests that have swept across Turkey since police violently broke up a protest camp in Istanbul's Taksim Square on Friday [May 31] with water cannons, tear gas and brutal violence.