Language Log

NEW: President Biden calls Texas and Mississippi decisions to end mask mandates “a big mistake" and criticizes what he views as “Neanderthal thinking” after CDC warned against complacency in the face of emerging coronavirus variants on Monday. pic.twitter.com/Mmdln3gNG6

— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 3, 2021

“We are on the cusp of being able to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because of the way in which we’re able to get vaccines in people’s arms […] And the last thing, the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking, that, ‘In the meantime, everything’s fine. Take off your mask. Forget it.’ It still matters.”

Mary Divine, "Plowy McPlowFace plows through the competition to win snowplow naming contest", Pioneer Press 3/2/2021:

After all the votes were tallied, it wasn’t even close. Plowy McPlowFace won the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s inaugural “Name a Snowplow” contest with 65,292 votes. The next-closest vote-getter was Ope, Just Gonna Plow Right Past Ya, which garnered 29,457 votes.

[For those who don't know ope,  Wiktionary glosses it as "(Midwest) an exclamation of surprise; oops", and Tod Van Luling discussed it at length a couple of years ago in the Huffington Post.]

Plowy McPlowFace will soon be plowing streets in the Metro District; Ope, Just Gonna Plow Right Past Ya will make its home in District 4 in west-central Minnesota.

The other winning names, in order of vote totals, and their future homes are: Duck Duck Orange Truck in District 1 (northeastern Minnesota); Plow Bunyan in District 2 (northwestern Minnesota); Snowbi Wan Kenobi in District 6 (southeastern Minnesota); F. Salt Fitzgerald in District 7 (south-central Minnesota); Darth Blader in District 3 (central Minnesota); and The Truck Formerly Known As Plow in District 8 (southwestern Minnesota).

MnDOT officials invited people in mid-December to submit possible names for snowplows. Among the submissions were a number of Minnesota-themed names, including Joe Plow-er, Justin More-snow, Kent Brrr-bek, Raspberry Brrr-et and Purple Snow.

One of the most popular suggestions was the phrase “Abolish ICE,” according to an analysis by the Minnesota Reformer, an independent news website, which obtained the almost 23,000 entries in a public-records request. The name, a play on the rallying cry of critics of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ranked No. 2 among the entries, the Reformer determined.

But MnDOT officials excluded it from its list of 50 finalists.

From a miscellaneous collection of Chinglishisms:

John Atkinsons' Wrong Hands 10/2/2020:

Trump lost the election FYI. Side note this speech is boring. We can’t win the presidency with this boring, low energy, stream of conscience, weak, has been, choke artist. Just my .02

— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) February 28, 2021

"Italia's Got Talent, il fischio polifonico di Avio incanta i giudici: il tributo a Morricone vale il bis", La Repubblica 2/25/2021

A colleague pointed me to Terje Holmlund et al., "Applying speech technologies to assess verbal memory in patients with serious mental illness", NPJ digital medicine 2020:

Verbal memory deficits are some of the most profound neurocognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia and serious mental illness in general. As yet, their measurement in clinical settings is limited to traditional tests that allow for limited administrations and require substantial resources to deploy and score. Therefore, we developed a digital ambulatory verbal memory test with automated scoring, and repeated self-administration via smart devices. One hundred and four adults participated, comprising 25 patients with serious mental illness and 79 healthy volunteers. The study design was successful with high quality speech recordings produced to 92% of prompts (Patients: 86%, Healthy: 96%). The story recalls were both transcribed and scored by humans, and scores generated using natural language processing on transcriptions were comparable to human ratings (R = 0.83, within the range of human-to-human correlations of R = 0.73–0.89). A fully automated approach that scored transcripts generated by automatic speech recognition produced comparable and accurate scores (R = 0.82), with very high correlation to scores derived from human transcripts (R = 0.99). This study demonstrates the viability of leveraging speech technologies to facilitate the frequent assessment of verbal memory for clinical monitoring purposes in psychiatry.

This is great work, but over-interpretation of such results is likely to be a problem. At this stage in the development of the technologies, experimenting with with speech-to-text in such applications is a very good idea, but relying on it without accurate human-corrected transcripts is a very bad idea.

Opinion article in SCMP (2/26/21), by Brian Chan, Kevin Hsu, and Jamie Tam:

Why Stanford University must strengthen, rather than cut, its Cantonese courses
The plan damages the university’s global reputation and undermines its self-professed commitment to diversity
As the most widely-spoken Sinitic language other than Mandarin, Cantonese offers a more pluralistic understanding of China

The article is accompanied by this intriguing photograph (credited to AFP):

At our most recent Penn Phonetic Lab meeting, we heard a (virtual) talk by Marc Garellek on the topic "Reconsidering voicing during glottal sounds". The talk was quite interesting, but more relevant for a general audience was what happened when someone turned on Zoom's "Live Transcription" feature:

The Institut für Deutsche Sprache has been compiling a list of "Neuer Wortschatz rund um die Coronapandemie" (New Vocabulary about the Corona Pandemic). German morphology and orthography being as they are, these are mostly new pandemic-related compounds.

The list and its compilation are documented by Abby Young-Powell, "Coronaangst ridden? Overzoomed? Covid inspires 1,200 new German words", The Guardian 2/23/2021:

From coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to Coronafrisur (corona hairstyle), a German project is documenting the huge number of new words coined in the last year as the language races to keep up with lives radically changed by the pandemic.

Yesterday's SMBC:

A recent post introduced the evocative place name, Kunlun:

"Kunlun: Roman letter phonophores for Chinese characters" (2/16/21)

As we learned from the previous post, Kunlun is known from historical and fictional sources dating to the last two millennia and more to refer to mythological and geographically locatable mountains in Central Asia and in the far west as well as to vague places in Southeast Asia and blacks associated with them.

Simply because of the wide range of referents, one cannot help but be intrigued how it transpired that the same unusual name, which mostly refers to mountains, can be so broadly dispersed.

That's how Google Translate renders "Guō bāo ròu 锅包肉", and it sounds pretty good, though it's wrong, as we will discover below.  Baidu fanyi gives "Soul of shadow", for which I have no idea how they got it or what it means in relation to a pork entree.  Microsoft Bing Translator has "Pots and pans of meat", which leaves me wondering how carefully prepared it might be. 

I got interested in this term, "Guō bāo ròu 锅包肉" (lit., "pot package / bag / bundle meat") because of these remarks by Michael Broughton: