Language Log

Byron York, "What Sank McCain", NRO 11/5/2008:

In January, a few days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, I went to a Barack Obama rally in Columbia with a Republican friend who had never before seen Obama in action. This friend’s reaction: “Oh, s**t.” The super-enthusiastic crowd was about 3,000 strong — no big deal compared to the audiences Obama would later draw in the general election, but several times what John McCain was attracting in South Carolina at the time. My friend said the scene reminded him of the old clip from Jaws, in which the small-town sheriff, seeing how big the shark really is, says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

"Mark Levin Gives 'Unvarnished Truth' On Romney Loss", Real Clear Politics 11/7/2012:

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We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our children to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country.

Rick Rashid, "Microsoft Research shows a promising new breakthrough in speech translation technology", 118/2012:

A demonstration I gave in Tianjin, China at Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event has started to generate a bit of attention, and so I wanted to share a little background on the history of speech-to-speech technology and the advances we’re seeing today.

In the realm of natural user interfaces, the single most important one – yet also one of the most difficult for computers – is that of human speech.

Gene Buckley sent this photograph of a sign in Los Angeles:

Writing recently for the online Ideas section of Time, Jeffrey Kluger took on the "We are all X (now)" trope, or as it's called in these parts, a snowclone. "This increasingly common trope has an easy, fill-in-the-blank quality to it that allows us to affect a bit of purloined heroism, put it on the credit card of someone else, and feel pretty darned good about ourselves in the bargain," he writes. Kluger quotes me on the history of the snowclone (which I looked into for a 2006 LL post), and its ready adaptability to various expressions of empathy and solidarity. Now, in a thinkpiece about Obama's re-election, David Simon (creator of the HBO shows "The Wire" and "Treme") takes the snowclone to its logical conclusion: "We are all the other now."

Within the last ten years or so, the concept of "Sinophone" (obviously modeled on "Francophone," "Anglophone", etc.) has come to be very much in vogue.  To the best of my knowledge, the term was coined by UCLA professor Shu-mei Shih, but it was soon picked up by many other scholars and quickly became one of the hottest topics of discussion in Chinese studies.

I've been in the thick of the Sinophone revolution and have mentioned it several times on Language Log (e.g., here), but now I've become acquainted with another new term, "Sinosphere," and wonder how they are related.

Zits for 11/7/2012:

But it's not just land lines — "In Constant Digital Contact, We Feel Alone Together", Fresh Air 10/18/2012:

Terry Gross: You had said before a lot of parents complain that their children will accept the parents' text message and respond to that, but they won't pick up the phone, they won't answer the cell phone.

Sherry Turkle: Yes.

Terry Gross: I'm sure you've spoken to children and teenagers about that. What's the explanation?

For the linguistically sensitive, one of the burning questions stemming from last night's election-night coverage was, "When did vote become a mass noun?" Several observers picked up on the usage: Monica Macaulay on the Mr. Verb blog, Nancy Friedman on the Fritinancy blog, and Josef Fruehwald, Jonah Ostroff, Dane Pritchard, Kate Stafford, and Elizabeth Preston on Twitter. If you missed the mass-nounification of vote, you can hear several examples in this clip documenting the remarkable moment on Fox News when Megyn Kelly confronts her number-crunching Decision Desk colleagues after Karl Rove questioned their call of Ohio for Obama:

A few weeks ago, the same teen language consultant who warned me that abbreviating words in texting (e.g. "u" = "you", "4" = "for") is something that only old people do anymore, pointed out that my habit of ending statement-style texts with a period communicates an affect that I probably don't intend.

I was skeptical, but this morning's PhD Comics confirms the generalization (although it's about email, which obviously skews the sample to an older demographic)…

On the Muskegon Opinion page at m live in Michigan, Paula Holmes-Greeley posed a Question of the Day: After this election, what will pull our country together. Among the clowns who answered the call for comments (people saying that we should start an impeachment movement, or that all the Republicans should jump into the sea), Harry Masters posted this comment:

What will pull the country together?

The question should be "What/Whom has so divided our country?"

My question is different: What or who is responsible for teaching Americans grammar so badly that when commenting online, i.e. communicating publicly rather than conversing, they will change who to whom just as a shot in the dark, to cover themselves against the vague fear that who might be incorrect? What or who is the source of the nervous cluelessness that leads to this sort of panic-attack accusative?

Also, the sky turns out to have been blue much of the time, and early returns are strongly suggesting that water is often wet. John Sides, "2012 Was the Moneyball Election", The Monkey Cage 11/7/2012:

Barack Obama’s victory tonight is also a victory for the Moneyball approach to politics.  It shows us that we can use systematic data—economic data, polling data—to separate momentum from no-mentum, to dispense with the gaseous emanations of pundits’ “guts,” and ultimately to forecast the winner.

Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR's "Morning Edition" earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting. After explaining that Obama was leading in early voting in Nevada, McDonald said, "I don't want to discourage people from not voting today."

My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).