Language Log

Randall Munroe has  a great post on the xkcd blog that reports and discusses the results of an online color survey.  With 222,500 user responses, this was almost certainly the largest scientific experiment ever run by a cartoonist.

The most interesting result reported so far is an experimental test of the old stereotype about sex differences in color naming.

So far, it's been overshadowed by the big BP oil spill, the Times Square bomber, Greece's financial crisis, and other hot news items. But quietly developing in the background is what seems to be the best euphemistic explanation for a sexual escapade since "hiking the Appalachian Trail".

According to Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, "Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with 'rent boy'", Miami New Times, 5/4/2010, the anti-gay activist Dr. George Rekers recently took a ten-day European vacation with a young man known as "Lucien", whom he met though a web site called rentboy.com:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

In the Miami New Times article, Dr. Rekers is quoted as saying ""I had surgery, and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

One of the many difficult things about English spelling is that you can't choose the right letter for an unstressed vowel unless you know the word, or guess its etymology, or get lucky. Everybody gets the wrong end of this one from time to time — certainly I do — and that's why dictionaries and the internet are especially helpful for those of us who occasionally display our orthographic guesses in public. Last week, someone at Fox News got overconfident:

The New York Times reports on efforts by Shanghai officials to crack down on Chinglish, but the prospects are daunting:

For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

Today's Guardian offers Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om. Tantalizing. In turn, this links to Ajay Anil Gurjar and Siddharth A. Ladhak, Time-Frequency Analysis of Chanting Sanskrit Divine Sound "OM" Mantra, International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.8 No.8, August 2008. Even more tantalizing. A new field of theophonetics!

Unfortunately,  the article is not divine.

In reading about the decision at London's Middlesex University to delete its department of philosophy, I came across this video clip, "WBL gives companies the edge", presented by Professor Edward J Esche, Dean of the School of Arts & Education:

In one of the comments on my recent "begging the question" post, Samantha asked:

Could someone give me a concrete example of this fallacy (the simpler, the better?) It would be especially great if it was an example like what Aristotle had in mind, something that showed "how such arguments can be disguised so as to appear persuasive." I've read the Wikipedia articles about the fallacy but I still can't wrap my mind around it.

As far as I know, Aristotle's discussion (e.g. in Part 16 of Book II of the Prior Analytics) is entirely abstract. However, others have supplied plenty of concrete illustrations of the concept over the centuries: here's an example from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics for 1/5/2006:

As a Sinologist, one thing that really annoys me is when someone sanctimoniously invokes phony Orientalism to embellish their speech or writing.  One egregious example is that the Chinese "character / symbol" for "crisis" is made up of "danger" plus "opportunity."

Several days ago, Frank Chance sent me the following note:

Lao Zi Quote:

Hmmm…this doesn't seem to correspond with any part of the Laozi I know…not that it matters.

Labelling it "Lao Zi Apocrypha," I sent the card around to some friends and colleagues.

Macy Halford, of The Book Bench at the New Yorker, wrote to me with a question about "begs the question":

Recently, one of our posts caused quite a stir by misusing the phrase (to mean “raises the question”), and many discussions ensued, the result of which was that we all realized that even though we (kind of) understand the phrase in the Latin, we really don’t understand, etymologically, the English translation—either “begs the question” or “petitions for the principle,” though the latter makes more sense. And we all wondered whether the Latin was used only in the context of formalized debate or argument. It seems like a fairly complex concept, with a complex definition—it makes me wonder why we use or misuse it at all, since the need to use it in everyday speech (or blogging) would seem not very great.

(FWIW, the offending post was apparently this one, with the original "this begs questions like …" quickly amended to "this raises questions like…")

[ Note: the San Diego wing of Language Log Plaza is about as far from NYC as you can get in the continental U.S.; I just couldn't resist the title. ]

Surely, most if not all of our devoted Language Log readers have by now noticed the recent NYT story "Listening to (and Saving) the World's Languages", about some of the work being done by the Endangered Language Alliance to document and preserve endangered languages spoken in New York City. (And in case you hadn't noticed it, there it is. Check it out.)

Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor, maintains a blog for undergraduate economics students. On it, back in 2006, he placed a guide to good economics writing. And I fear that you may already have guessed what, with sinking heart, I correctly foresaw that I would find therein.

According to John Metcalfe, "The Self-appointed Twitter Scolds", NYT 4/29/2010:

A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.

What's the word this came from?

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