Language Log

We've often discussed the stylistic choice between hypotaxis, where semantic and pragmatic relations are signaled with explicit connectives and syntactic embedding, and parataxis, which relies more heavily on context and common sense to communicate the same relationships, using phrases strung together like beads on a string.

The paratactic style is more modern, more demotic, and usually shorter. But sometimes, as in the case of this flashing highway sign, it's also harder to interpret:

Most Americans visiting the Netherlands feel pretty much at home, I think, although there are a few oddities, like the large number of bicyclists and the fact that the trains run on time. But at a deeper level, the Netherlands is really a very foreign country.

Last fall, the editors of Onze Taal ("Our Language") asked readers for their favorite German word. They got 3,358 responses, with a suprisingly clear winner, as they explained in an article earlier this year:

(The English translations are mine, and therefore not to be relied on, since I know little German and less Dutch.)

According to Michael Grynbaum, "When Passengers Spit, Bus Drivers Take Months Off", NYT 5/24/2010:

It could be the cutbacks to the city’s transportation system, or a general decline in urban civility. Perhaps people are just in a collective bad mood.

What else could explain why New Yorkers — notoriously hardened to the slings and arrows of everyday life here — are spitting on bus drivers?

Of all the assaults that prompted a bus operator to take paid leave in 2009, a third of them, 51 in total, “involved a spat upon,” according to statistics the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released on Monday.

That apparent use of "spat upon" as a noun wasn't a mistake, as confirmed by another example later in the same article:

Almost no arrests have been reported for spitting on a driver, said Mr. Smith, who noted that a police officer “must witness the spat upon to give a summons.”

Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95.

His interest in language included unusual skill in manipulating the use-mention distinction, as in this spectacular example:

One that's less impressive, but a little easier to process:

Q: What 11-letter word do all Yale graduates spell incorrectly?

In our numerous posts on Chinglish here at Language Log, we have shown how unintentional errors of translation from Chinese result in ludicrous or impenetrable English.  In this post, I shall demonstrate how translations from English into Chinese can (and often do) intentionally differ from the original.

On March 15, 2010, Nicholas Wade published a long article entitled "A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets" in the Science section of The New York Times.  Mr. Wade interviewed me extensively during the course of preparing the article, so I am intimately familiar with the issues he raised in it and am, in fact, quoted several times by him.

Shortly thereafter, one of China’s most widely read weeklies, Southern Metropolis Weekly (Nándū zhōukān 南都周刊), published a Chinese "translation" of the NYT article entitled "Invisible Cemetery" (Kànbùjiàn de mùdì 看不见的墓地).  It is now available online here.

David Russinoff suggests to me that I should think again about the following two sentences, which featured in this recent post of mine on an apparent writing error by Megan McArdle:

1. Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an entry on performance reviews, which suggests that they're probably a bad idea.
2. Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an entry on performance reviews that suggests that they're probably a bad idea.

Russinoff draws attention to the initial adjunct oddly enough, which I had been ignoring. He remarks:

You say that the second is correct and the first is not; I say you're wrong on both counts. Don't you see? It's the "oddly enough" that does you in. The intention of the first sentence is first to report that a health blog has an entry on performance reviews, a circumstance that the reporter thinks odd. The content of the entry is then included as additional information. It's true that the sentence is ambiguous, i.e., it can be interpreted as intended or otherwise (only bacause we can't agree that a relative pronoun should have an antecedent), but that doesn't make it ungrammatical. The second sentence is unambigous but incorrect insofar as it can't possibly be interpreted as intended, unless you really want to insist that it is not merely the appearance of an entry on this subject on a health blog that is considered odd, but rather the position taken in that entry.

And you know, oddly enough, having ruminated on the data again, I've decided he is right.

Via David Mitchell's soap box, an excellent explanation, with inhabitable graphics, of why "could care less" seems illogical to those who haven't accepted it as an idiom:

The official name of Facebook in China, as it appears on the Chinese version of its Website, is simply "Facebook."  It is unofficially, but commonly, referred to as Liǎnshū 臉書 (lit., "face book").

Lately, however, Fēisǐbùkě 非死不可 has become a popular way of transcribing the name "Facebook."

The latest PhD comic:

As John McIntyre explains, "You've got to be carefully taught", citing Stan Carey's "Mind your peeves and cures".

A recent xkcd, under the heading "The Tell-Tale Beat":

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

Hangzhou seems to be blessed with an abundance of droll Chinglish signs, as we've seen recently on Language Log.

However, if you find yourself in Hangzhou and you keep your eyes open, you'll discover that there are also some unintentionally humorous Chinese signs, such as this one:

Earlier I posted a video of UK football commentator (and former Hull striker) Dean Windass recapping some play in a Premier League match between Everton and Portsmouth. It had been posted on Today's Big Thing under the headline "Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English," and I referred to Windass as "wildly disfluent." But a few of our British commenters said that beyond some comic stumbling over the name of presenter Jeff Stelling, Windass was speaking in a manner that would be perfectly comprehensible to a listener familiar with the Hull dialect of Yorkshire and with the relevant footballer lingo. Ian Preston provided a very helpful transcript, the highlight of which is the colorful expression, "He sends Jagielka for a pie" — glossed by Ian as "he jinks so as to send [Everton player Phil Jagielka] the wrong way."

I noted in the comments that "for me, 'He sends Jagielka for a pie' has all the magic and mystery that 'Terwilliger bunts one' had for Annie Dillard's mother." I was referring to a passage in Dillard's memoir An American Childhood, which is worth reproducing here as a reminder of the opacity of sports-talk to non-initiates on both sides of the pond.

Jonathan Falk did a double-take, and quite rightly, when he saw this opening sentence in a recent article by Megan McArdle in the Business section of The Atlantic:

Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an item on performance reviews, which suggests that they're probably a bad idea.

Unh? They're saying that the mere fact of the New York Times health blog having an item on performance reviews makes performance reviews ipso facto a bad idea? Could they possibly think that?

Finally the penny dropped, and he realized he was supposed to take the relative clause as restrictive. Under the intended sense, what suggests performance reviews are a bad idea is not the fact of the New York Times health blog having published the item; it is the content of the item.

What has gone wrong with McArdle's writing here? Could the initial misunderstanding be some kind of vindication of the purported that/which rule so beloved of the Fowler brothers?