Language Log

Levi Montgomery writes to me:

I have read the question in this report (TSA Let 25 Illegal Aliens Attend Flight School Owned by Illegal Alien, CNS News, 18 July 2012) at least a dozen times now, and I'm not sure which answer means what (although I freely admit the intent is clear, both from the questioner and from the answerer). I thought you'd like to see it.

Stephen Lord, who is the GAO's director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers' subcommittee. Rogers asked him: "Isn't it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?"

Mr Lord responded: "At this time, no."

Ye gods, that sort of crazy multiple negation makes me afraid, very afraid, of having to take the witness stand.

There was a cute "Things Kids Write" piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago (James Courter, "Teaching Taco Bell's Canon", 7/9/2012), with the subhead "Today's students don't read. As a result, they have sometimes hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear."

Is it true that college students today are unprepared and unmotivated? That generalization does injustice to the numerous bright exceptions I saw in my 25 years of teaching composition to university freshmen. But in other cases the characterization is all too accurate.

One big problem is that so few students are readers. As an unfortunate result, they have erroneous, and sometimes hilarious, notions of how the written language represents what they hear. What emerged in their papers and emails was a sort of literary subgenre that I've come to think of as stream of unconsciousness.

In a couple of earlier posts, I noted a gradual change in the tendency of American newspapers and U.S. Supreme Court opinions to use the phrase "the United States" as a syntactic subject  ("The United States as a subject", 10/6/2009; "'The United States' as a subject at the Supreme Court", 10/20/2009). Thus in a small sample of instances of "the United States" in SCOTUS opinions from each of 6 years from 1800 to 2000, the percentage of instances in subject position increased from 1.8% to 19%:

It's now possible to parse unrestricted text automatically but fairly accurately, and I expect to see large collections of automatically-parsed text become generally available soon (see e.g. Courtney Napoles, Matthew Gormley, and Benjamin Van Durme, "Annotated Gigaword",  Proc. of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction & Web-scale Knowledge Extraction, ACL-HLT 2012).  And I was recently trying to persuade some colleagues that parsing a large historical books collection would be a Good Thing, even for people who aren't interested in syntactic structure per se. So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I decided to take a look at the proportion of subject positioning for three country names in three geographically diverse news sources.

The words and phrases that annoy people are typically criticized as over-used, illogical, fashionable among a disliked group, or shifted in a confusing way from an earlier meaning.  It's often true that such irksome usages have indeed increased in frequency — thus "at the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's choice for "most irritating phrase" in 2004, was then towards the end of a rapid rise in relative frequency ("Memetic dynamics of summative clichés", 9/26/2009):

The path of those who fail to follow the example of scripture is often dark indeed. In particular, in referring to singular quantified entities of indefinite gender,  the King James bible and William Shakespeare agree in recommending the pronouns they, them, themselves ("Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents so there", 1/5/2006; "Is 'singular they' verbally and plenarily inspired of God?", 8/21/2006; "'Singular they': God said it, I believe it, that settles it", 9/13/2006; etc.). But many people have become convinced that this is wrong; and as Horace put it, in vitium ducit culpae fuga ("avoidance of error leads to fault").

D.D., who previously contributed some observations on Caribbean "What!!??", sends more:

After a general staff meeting concluded this a.m. at work, I was sitting with a few co-workers and for some reason the conversation turned to 'strange critters' that people of different cultures eat. ('Koreans eat dogs'… 'Some Africans & Chinese eat insects'… etc etc.)

Our workplace is currently being painted/renovated by 3 Caribbean men who have been there for a week or so–one of whom I've had a couple of chats & shared a few jokes with in passing.  Hearing our conversation, that one man (from St. Vincent) stepped away from his painting on the other side of the conference room and addressed me, "Did you ever eat POSSUM?"

I laughed aloud, wondering if he was serious. He seemed to be, so I asked, "Uh… is it good?"  His loud reply, "WHAT!!??" (Read: 'OMG it is friggin' delicious!')

Elliot Sperling took the following photograph a couple of days ago (July 16) in Reb-gong or Rebkong (Tib.: རེབ་གོང /reb gong / Repkong / Ch.: Tongren 同仁). Reb-gong (Tongren) is about 150 km south of Xining, the capital of Qinghai (Kokonor) Province, and around 200 km to the southwest of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, in the northwestern part of the People's Republic of China.

Andrew Spitz and Momo Miyazaki, students at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, posted this charming video of their cross-linguistic art project:

WTPh? (What the Phonics) is an interactive installation set in the touristic areas of Copenhagen. Street names in Denmark are close to impossible for foreigners to pronounce, so we did a little intervention :-)

Today's xkcd:

"KOMO headline editor, your phrasing needs work," tweeted CJ Alexander regarding this deeply regrettable crash blossom (KOMO North Seattle News, July 11, 2012):

[Background: in inventorying postings with linguistically interesting cartoons, for a Language of Comics project at Stanford (directed by Elizabeth Traugott and me), the project intern has been unearthing postings from Language Log Classic whose image links no longer work. Here's one of Mark Liberman's from 2005 — "Illustrations" of 8/2/05, with two Get Fuzzy strips. I'm reproducing the posting here, with fresh, working links.

Back in 2005, we didn't have comments open on postings. But I've opened them now. Just remember: This posting is by Mark, not me. I'm just a typist.]

… at least about the use of  "summative that" in certain contexts. Thus one of Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage is "Vague Reference":

Vague reference is a common problem in sentences where “this,” “it,” “which” or other such words don’t refer back to any one specific word or phrase, but a whole situation.

Arnold Zwicky calls these things "summatives" ("Why are some summatives labeled 'vague'?", 5/21/2008), and I've been publicly skeptical of blanket prohibitions against their use, since it's often clear in context what the referent is meant to be, and excellent writers from the authors of the King James Bible to Bertrand Russell have been fond of them ("Poor pitiful which", 5/23/2008;  "Clarity, choice, and evidence", 5/23/2008).

But a recent political development has led me to re-evaluate my position.

"Seriously," said Bruce Springsteen's guitarist Steven Van Zandt, "When did England become a police state?"