Language Log

Over the past few months, U.S. political events have given Ben Zimmer opportunity for some fun etymologies in his WSJ column: mug shot, racketeering, listless. There are plenty more targets Out There — like candidate, from Latin candidus (“dazzling white, shining, clear”); or debate, originally from Latin dis- (“apart, in different directions”) + battuere (“to beat, to fence”).

"Chinese slogans on London wall hold mirror to society: artist"

Zhejiang-born Yique tries to find his place in UK after Brick Lane work

TAY HAN NEE, Nikkei Asia

I recently learned about the lexical blend calimony, which refers to a planned multi-million-dollar annual payment from UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles) to Berkeley (the University of California, Berkeley, known in athletic contexts as "California" or "Cal"). Why will this payment exist? And why is it a metaphorical form of alimony?

Short form: As of next year, UCLA is leaving the Pac-12 for the Big 10, and 7 others of the 12 schools that gave the Pac-12 its name are also leaving. As a result, the Pac-12 will probably vanish, at least as a source of broadcast revenue. Because UCLA and Berkeley are both part of the state of California university system, the budgetary consequences… …don't matter in detail to the history of the lexical blend, but help to explain why the alimony metaphor makes sense.

In a comment on yesterday's "Debate words" post, I noted that Donald Trump's ratio of I-words to we-words was "off the charts" compared the other eight candidates, and several people have asked me to give all the numbers.

There's an idea Out There that such numbers are related to issues of personality and mood. This is true, but the relationships are complicated — see Jamie Pennebaker's 2009 guest post "What is 'I' saying?". So we really should classify first-person singular pronouns into what Pennebaker calls "graceful-I" vs. "sledgehammer-I" categories. And of course, various pronoun-usage rates also depend on details of topic and interactional context, as noted in yesterday's exchange of comments.

Still, let's look at the numbers.

The Transcript Library at rev.com is a great resource — within 24 hours, they had transcripts of Wednesday's Fox News Republican presidential debate, and also of Tucker Carlson's debate night interview with Donald Trump on X.

So this morning I downloaded the transcripts, and ran the code that I've used several times over the years to identify the characteristic word-choices of an individual or of a group.

Shaing tai asked whether I recognized these characters:

This curious Cantonese couplet appeared on Weibo today:

Todd Wilbur shared this menu item on Facebook:

Yesterday, Randoh Sallihall from unscramblerer.com sent this note:

(see in particular the second item)

If this isn't dictator status, I don't know what ishttps://t.co/A4guMzG4m1

— Bumboclott (@Bumboclott) June 29, 2023

Sunday's post on "Listless vessels" opened with this clip:

And in the 30th comment, Yuval wrote

FWIW, both utterances of "principle" sound like 'princible' to me.

He's absolutely right — but what those two words "sound like" leaves an important theoretical (and practical) question open.