Language Log

Derrick Bird, a divorced man living with his mother in a small town in northwest England, was said to have been having a row with his brother about a will, and had mentioned to his workmates that he was worried about a possible $100,000 tax bill or even a jail sentence for tax evasion. His workmates teased him about being a loser with women. Then the day came when he told a friend darkly, "You won't be seeing me again". He said his last words to fellow taxi drivers: "There's going to be a rampage tomorrow." And although they knew Mr Bird owned a collection of guns, his friends and workmates did nothing about what he said. They told no one. The next day he shot and killed his twin brother, and the family solicitor, and two of his fellow cabbies, and then drove around several small towns for three hours shooting people at random. He killed eight more innocent strangers: a realtor, a farmer, a retired couple, a mole catcher, a woman shopping, an unmarried senior citizen delivering leaflets, a couple of retired workers… He wounded a dozen more. Blood ran in the streets of tiny rural towns where everyone knew everyone. Finally he drove to some woodland and (you can feel the usual journalistic cliché coming up) he turned the gun on himself. He had actually used the stock word rampage in his warning to his workmates; but they didn't listen, and didn't tell the police. We should pay much closer attention to the words people actually use.

It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", Fox News 5/22/2010, wrote:

After passing the nation's toughest state immigration enforcement law, Arizona's school officials are now cracking down on teachers with heavy accents.

The Arizona Department of Education is sending evaluators to audit teachers and their English speaking skills to make sure districts are complying with state and federal laws.

Teachers who are not fluent in English, who make grammatical errors while speaking or who have heavy accents will be temporarily reassigned.

"As you expect science teachers to know science, math teachers to know math, you expect a teacher who is teaching the kids English to know English," said Tom Home, state superintendent of public instruction.

If you read German or Dutch, you may be interested in the recent spate of articles about the newly-compiled Cow/German Dictionary.  I'll wait to comment until after the BBC has scrutinized the story.

No, really, I'll wait until after today's meetings are over, and I've caught up with a few chores after taking the red-eye home last night from Albuquerque via Phoenix. Anyhow, I'm guessing that the dictionary's author, Gerhard Jahns, didn't get a press release into the channels that the BBC reprints…

In fact, Dr. Jahns' research seems to be a serious and long-established project that has reached a new stage, rather than the cheese-company PR stunt behind the BBC's previous cowlingual scoop. At an earlier stage, Jahns' work got extensive coverage back in 2002.

Greg Laden has recently posted an entertaining screed, "Minifalsehood: We can't tell what a word is!?!?", 5/31/2010. I don't have time this morning for a a serious discussion, but I can point to some relevant stuff here, here, here, here, here, here, …

On Saturday, I went to another performance of the Chekhov play that I discussed a couple of days ago. And this time, I was struck by something that was neither in the play's text nor in the performers' interpretation, but rather in the audience's reaction.

"NY man seeking help for stray dog arrested for DWI", AP, 5/30/2010.

A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page:

Missing women police find remains

Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are not a gerund-participial predicative adjunct. Could missing be a modifier of women police, then? The remains were found in a remote area by some female police officers who had been reported as missing? A bit implausible. What about find? Is that really a tensed verb with plural agreement? Could it be a noun instead (as in a new find), with remains being the main clause verb, as in Paul Simon's line the roots of rhythm remain? No; it's not making any sense at all. You just can't figure out a plausible story.

Last night, I saw an excellent performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque. I had never seen this play before, and based on descriptions of the plot, I didn't really expect to like it very much, but in fact I thought it was brilliant, in ways that are not captured by a plot summary. It's surprising that this suprised me, since I like Chekhov's short stories very much, and for the same reasons.

Two small linguistic footnotes follow, one intrinsic to the text, and the other related to last night's performance.

From Toothpaste for Dinner, 5/27/2010:

Sex and the City 2 premiered in London last night. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a black strapless dress from the house of her favorite British designer, and what she told her fans provided another interesting example of what Mark Liberman noted in a recent post on fashion talk:

There's only one person I could have worn tonight and that was Alexander McQueen.

Ms Parker didn't just say she was wearing Alexander McQueen; she actually used an expression quantifying over persons (only one person) as the understood object of wear (in the sense that she modified person with the relative clause I could have worn ___), and then clarified that the person was Alexander McQueen; and still the metonymic reading survived and was understood by fans and journalists alike.

SMBC from a few weeks ago:

It's bad enough to have to weather a disastrous economic crisis, but now the Greeks are faced with a frog crisis.  Millions of migrating frogs — a veritable carpet of the slippery, slimy fellows — have closed down a major Greek highway near Thessaloniki.

I believe that the usual word for "frog" in modern Greek is batrachos, but all of Greece is referring to the current batrachian horde with the Biblical word tzfardei'a.  In so doing, I suppose they wish to recall the Biblical plague of frogs that God inflicted on Egypt (the second of ten plagues that he sent against the Egyptians).  In fact, the plague of frogs was meant as an attack on the Egyptian frog goddess Heqt, whose job it was to assist women in labor.

From Don Snow:

====

This from a sign in a Nanjing subway station directing people to important places:

中共省委党校
Commie Academy of Provinial (sic) Committe of Chinese Communist Party

I can see why they wanted to shorten the English translation a bit, but still….Commie?

====