Language Log

Yesterday on the public radio program Marketplace, Sarah Gardner interviewed Ben Zimmer about the Obama campaign's "Betting on America" theme ("The president is a 'betting' man", 7/5/2012):

Gardner: Now as you just heard, the president was talking a lot about betting today. He's betting on the American worker, he's betting on Ohio, he's betting on America. What's with all the betting?

Zimmer: Well it reminds me of the whole tradition of gambling metaphors in American politics where you talk about the odds, the whole language of gambling, of bluffing, tipping your hand, raising the stakes. So it draws on that, at the same time is draws on a sense of confidence, the ability to take risks, which is perhaps an image that Obama would like to portray. At the same time, he doesn't want to be seen as a foolish risk taker. He says that he is going to bet on the American worker, and so that is giving you the sense that it's a sure bet, it's a bet that's going to pay off.

In the spring of 1995, I was serving on an academic "Planning and Priorities" committee, and some of my fellow committee-members became concerned that there were too many graduate courses, and that this was a symptom of inadequate focus on undergraduate education. I agreed on both counts, though I also felt that an excessive number of grad courses was — and is — generally a bad thing for graduate programs as well.

Anyhow, I became curious about what the distribution of course registrations was actually like. The following note, unearthed after 17 years and recycled as a Language Log post, was the result.  I fished it out of the midden-heap of old email because of its marginal relevance to the July 4 announcement from CERN. It turns out that graduate students, like the Higgs particle, are bosons — or at least, their course-registration choices obey Bose-Einstein statistics…

As background, we had been given some historical data that included a disturbing table showing the distribution of student enrollments over graduate courses. Expressed as a percentage of all graduate courses offered during the time-period in question, the numbers were:

In the bathroom at a friend's house tonight I saw, on the underside of the toilet lid, firmly affixed with adhesive, a printed paper sign that I truly do not understand. That is, although I comprehend it (it is in six languages, all of which I read well enough to be able to follow the legend in question), I don't follow what its purpose could possibly be. I am truly baffled. Let me show you what it said. Keep in mind that the following is all of what it says. Nothing is missing from the label, and there is no other wording at all (and incidentally, the various accent mistakes are not mine, they are copied from the original). See if you are as baffled as I am:

I previously described the evolution of the Higgs Boson from Leon Lederman's "wraithlike presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter", perhaps bowdlerized by his editors from "the goddamn particle" to "the God particle", and onwards to Dennis Overbye's "kind of cosmic molasses […] that would impart mass to formerly massless particles trying to move through it like a celebrity trying to get to the bar".

Yesterday, the high-energy euphoria at CERN seems to have excited some really exotic metaphorical resonances, combining the elementary building-blocks of cultural cognition in ways not normally seen on earth.

On the blog "Mama's Got Wanderlust", the following sign appears without adequate explanation:

Before turning to the next page, Language Log readers are encouraged to try their hand at an explanation. Write down on a piece of paper what you think the sign means BEFORE you turn the page. Scout's honor!

Mexico Election: Mexican Immigrants Shocked, Weary of PRI Victory

The word weary in this Latino Fox News headline should have been wary, shouldn't it? There hasn't been time yet for anyone to be weary of the PRI this time around.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi), The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, 1993:

What, or who, is standing in our way, obstructing our search for the perfect T-shirt? […] Before we can complete the task begun by the ancient Greeks, we must consider the possibility that our quarry is laying false clues to confuse us. Sometimes, like a spy in a John le Carre novel, the experimenter must set a trap. He must force the culprit to expose himself.

Particle physicists are currently setting just such a trap. We're building a tunnel fifty-four miles in circumference that will contain the twin beam tubes of the Superconducting Super Collider, in which we hope to trap our villain.

And what a villain! The biggest of all time! There is, we believe, a wraithlike presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. It's as if something, or someone, wants to prevent us from attaining the ultimate knowledge.

Pastry shops are very popular in Beijing and other Chinese cities. One chain is called Wèiduōměi 味多美 ("flavor-much-beautiful"). On the company website, they call themselves Wedomé, but the workers' uniforms sport the name Weiduomei.

Julien Paulhan sent in the following photographs taken at a Weiduomei bakery in Beijing:

In what I think is a fairly recent development, North American universities and other non-profit entities are using using the word advancement for fundraising, public relations, and related activities:

The Office of Advancement supports the mission of Georgetown University and its faculty and students through developing relationships with key constituencies.

Staff who work in the Office of Advancement have one mission: to move people to extraordinary levels of support for Queen's University.

The Office of Advancement is dedicated to supporting the mission of The University of Alberta by fostering relationships that result in continuing goodwill and financial support from alumni, parents, friends, and organizations.

The Office of Advancement will generate and develop the best relationships and resources to achieve Michigan Engineering objectives.

Jeff Tomczek has an article in the Huffington Post on the things people didn't tell him about getting cancer and undergoing the treatment. It's very good (those who have been through it or are very close to people who did will find much that resonates). But his title is a botch that I think must be due to the myth that English has a "past subjunctive" (which it does not). Here is the title under which his article was published:

The Things I Wish I Were Told When I Was Diagnosed With Cancer

That isn't well-formed English as I understand it. And I have used this language for quite a few years; I'm kind of used to it. I realize that your mileage may differ, but I would judge the above to be actually disallowed by the grammar.

In "Anti-fascist impact" (6/25/2012), I briefly took up the question of where William Strunk might have gotten his 1918 prescription about the use of however:

In the meaning nevertheless, not to come first in its sentence or clause.

When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent.

I'm in Groningen, where I participated in Martijn Wieling's PhD thesis defense and a workshop. Earlier in the week, I gave three talks at a workshop organized by DGA on "Traitement de l'information multimédia" at ENSTA in Paris. Between the various events and the travel I haven't had time to post anything for a few days, so when one of Martijn's paranymphs showed me this SMS message, it struck a chord:

mi no camin tumoro no andesten go x bas ni for tren you no camin for mi tumoro monin ansori

I was first struck by the expression "parade of horribles" back in April 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama used it to describe testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about what might happen if U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq too hastily. I wrote a Language Log post about it, tying it to another expression that was in the news at the time: "false terribles," used by Rob Lowe to describe things that his nanny accused him of doing. "False terribles" turned out to be pretty much a one-off, but "horribles," usually of the parading variety, have shown up again and again in legal discussions, most recently in the Supreme Court's health care decision on Thursday — which featured, in Justice Ginsberg's pungent opinion, a "broccoli horrible" (referring to the slippery-slope argument that if government can make you buy health insurance, they might someday make you buy broccoli, too).

For a full explanation of how the legal putdown took shape, read my latest Boston Globe column (online now, in print on Sunday). I trace how "the parade of horribles" emerged as a satirical Independence Day tradition in mid-19th century New England, then made the metaphorical jump into discussions of judicial argumentation c. 1921, thanks to the legal scholar Thomas Reed Powell. Since then, the expression has lived a double life: with various shore towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island keeping the actual "parades of horribles" going, and lawyers and judges debating over figurative ones. Fortunately, I was able to get The Broccoli Horrible into the column under the wire, noting that it would make a pretty awesome band name.

[Update, 7/4: For further documentation, see my followup Word Routes column.]