Language Log

We've often commented on the foolishness of the US policy of discharging badly needed Arabic interpreters and other soldiers who reveal that they are gay. It looks like this won't be coming up again. President-elect Obama has now definitively stated that he will eliminate the current "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It won't happen immediately though as a change in legislation is required.

The latest xkcd:

(Click for a larger version.)

The mouseover title is "Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command."

I’ve been attending annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America for over 50 years now, and this now stands out for me: either linguists are getting younger or most of the linguists I know are no longer around. One of my major reasons for attending these meetings is to visit and hang around with old friends, which is becoming less and less possible. Last year, at the Chicago meeting, I ran into one of the icons of our field, Eric Hamp, and had a great conversation with him. But there weren’t many old-timers at this year’s meeting. Yes, I meet a lot of younger linguists but that’s not quite the same thing for the elderly, like me. Of the 1,500 registered participants there, I knew only a handful, and most of them were a generation younger than me but still near or over the usual retirement age. LSA meetings are geared to young people trying to make their mark in the field, so that should be expected, I suppose.

Quotation marks (typically the single ones ‘ ’) that are used to mark the use of a word as not necessarily one that the present writer would endorse (The so-called ‘universal grammar ’ that linguists talk about) are standardly known as scare quotes. Those used (illiterately, it is often thought) simply to emphasize or call attention to a word (‘FRESH’ TOMATOES!) are sometimes, less standardly, called greengrocer's quotes. I think we need a third and separate name for the increasingly common journalistic use seen in this national science news story taken from a British newspaper today (I quote it in full, so nothing is being suppressed):

Hormone ‘makes women unfaithful’
WOMEN with high levels of one sex hormone are more likely to have affairs — and are considered more attractive by themselves and others. Those with the most oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, are less satisfied with their lovers and more likely to have a roving eye, a study suggests today. ‘Attractive women may not only have more alternatives but also high standards that are difficult to satisfy,’ said US psychologist Dr Katrina Durante, whose study is published by the Royal Society. ‘They may have fewer reasons to be committed to any partner if higher-quality potential mates are available.’

I am not commenting on the fact that the report says not a single word about the hormone causing infidelity. This is Language Log, not Endocrinology Log. What I'm pointing to is that the quoted words are not a quote: they never appear in the article at all.

Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article. (The description of cardiologist Hina Chaudhry as "a lab-worn doctor-lady" is just the tip of the iceberg.) In the comments, David Fishman left the cryptic remark, "Consider the armadillo." Carl revealed that this was an in-joke dating back to 1989, when the two of them were budding science reporters at Discover Magazine:

Our editors always warned us against writing openings and transitions with words no sane person would ever utter. Which we epitomized as, "Consider the armadillo."

"Consider the armadillo" does indeed sound like journalistic hackwork, all the more because it's in the form of a snowclone. In one early formulation, Geoff Pullum defined snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." In this case, the crutch for lazy (science) writers goes all the way back to the New Testament.

In connection with my difficult work on Language Log's "Financial Good News" desk, where things have been arduous and slow, I was looking something up in the American Heritage Dictionary earlier today (possibly liberalism, possible lien; to tell you the truth, I have forgotten what — something beginning with L, but I got sidetracked), when I noticed something. In between libretto and lice it has a definition for Libyan Desert. The definition reports (and I just know you are going to get there ahead of me) that it is a desert, and it mainly is in (I know, I know, you are jostling me aside in your eagerness to predict it without having looked) Libya. Parts of it are in Egypt and parts of Sudan, actually; and no doubt there are areas that could be argued to be outlying regions of it that are in Chad (the dictionary did not deny it), but the Libyan Desert really is mostly a Libyan desert. The question that struck me was: wherever the hell it is, what the hell is it doing in a dictionary?

Arnold's post on linguistic(s) put me in mind of something I never got around to blogging last year. The hook was Richard Zoglin's appreciation of George Carlin in Time:

Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the scrupulousness of a social linguist.

"Social linguist" — I had an image of Geoff Pullum at a cocktail party, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other wrapped around a martini glass. But on reflection I figured the phrase was what the writer had made of hearing sociolinguist. In fact social linguist gets 700+ Google hits, most of them almost certainly the products of mishearings:

"Language is never about language," said social linguist Walt Wolfram. (Associated Press)

Barbara Kannapell, a social linguist based in Washington, said the shortage of sign-language interpreters is a national problem. (New York Times)

In a popular book of that name, social linguist Deborah Tannen has documented just how much our culture is dominated by an "adversarial frame of mind." Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship (U of Washington Press)

You'd have to say, then, that these are eggcorns in the technical sense. But does it really matter? I mean, "social linguist" could have been the standard term, right?

This started with Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". He followed up with a more detailed account of "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", and an answer to some questions under the title "More on IE wheels and horses", and then this morning's post "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence".

Readers have added a large number of interesting and provocative comments and questions (110 on the original post alone). As usual, responses are often too long to fit comfortably in the comment format, and our traditional practice has been  to respond in follow-up posts where interest and time permit.

Continuing that tradition, I've posted below Don's response to a comment by Etienne on Don's follow-up post on the history of the word for horse. Though the background is complex, this fragment of the conversation is quite coherent on its own.

There has been quite a bit of interest in a series of guest posts by Don Ringe on the early linguistic history of Europe. Yesterday, he sent along another installment, which I've posted below on his behalf, as well as an answer to a question from the comments on an earlier post, which I'll post separately.

This series is more technical than usual for Language Log, but enough readers have responded in a positive way that it's clearly a good idea to continue. Those who are not familiar with the methods of historical linguistics, or with the languages discussed, should still be able to get a sense of the structure of the argument, and the nature of the research process. (As before, a pdf version is here — if some forms or formatting look odd, check the pdf.)

From Andrew Garrett, a shameless plug for this summer's Linguistic Institute:

Language Log readers may be interested to know that four LL authors — Adam Albright, Geoff Nunberg, Geoff Pullum, and Sally Thomason — will be teaching courses at the 2009 Linguistic Institute. Every other summer the Linguistic Society of America and a US linguistics department sponsor a Linguistic Institute. This year the host is the University of California, Berkeley; the dates are July 6 through August 13; and there are 92 scheduled courses in all, as well as special lectures and six major conferences that take place during the Institute. Students can apply for fellowship support from the LSA (the deadline is February 17), and non-students are welcome to attend as "affiliates" (the affiliate charge pays for fellowships). We encourage anyone interested in language and linguistics to attend.

Uri Tadmor has been kind enough to respond to some of the comments on yesterday's post "Borrowability", which described the Loanword Typology project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

In the comments to my post Orwell's Liar, Beth posted a link to Joseph William's article The Phenomonology of Error, and Mark reposted the link in a follow-up post here.

Well, I just finished reading the Williams article, and what I want to know is how the fuck an article riddled with errors could ever be published in a respectable journal…

In their new book Sense and Sensitivity, Brady Clark and LL's own David Beaver identify and discuss a class of intensives. The items they name are (most) importantly, significantly, especially, really, truly, fucking, damn, well, and totally. Here's one of their examples:

MTV like totally gave us TWO episodes back to back. It was like so random. The more the merrier, but it's like waay too much for one recap.

I'm intrigued by the classification and independently interested in some of words and phrases involved, so I went looking in a large weblog corpus I recently collected, to see if I could gain some new insights into where and why people use these things. This post describes a first experiment along these lines.