Language Log

RR wrote:

I accompanied an elderly parent to a neurologist appointment recently.  As this was at a teaching hospital, the first meeting was with a resident who took a complete history and did an examination.  When the neurologist came in, the resident verbally reported the results of his history-taking as "The patient reports a sense of imbalance on standing.  The patient denies feeling dizzy." etc.  As my parent had few symptoms, the list of denials was quite long.

The use of 'denies' has a clear meaning in this medical context ("On being asked about symptom X, the patient said that they did not experience it"), but for the patient it carries unpleasant overtones (accusation, disbelief).

I tried to think of a more pleasant way that the same thing could be said, but couldn't come up with anything that wasn't cumbersome.  "The patient hasn't experienced…" doesn't make clear that the resident is only reporting what the patient has said, and 'The patient doesn't report…" allows for the possibility that the resident never asked).

When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases of failure to get English syntax right (especially written English, naturally enough), and discuss them here.

A friend (don't make me say who) with a middle-rank managerial position in a large bureaucratic organization (don't make me say which) recently received a memo informing him about which of his recommendations for staff promotions and pay increases had been successful, and part of it said:

…it is strongly recommended that you meet with staff, whom have been unsuccessful, in order to provide support after their receiving the disappointing news.

That's a rather astonishing ungrammatical case of whom, used without a shred of justification as subject of a tensed verb to which it is immediately adjacent; but also a crashingly salient case of punctuating a restrictive relative incorrectly. And the email version of the memo, amazingly, was even worse.

Hearing of my desperate search for useful things to do while I am stranded stranded in the Boston area, some kind people at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory invited me to give a talk there today, and of course I was delighted to accept. Details below the fold.

Back at the beginning of the volcano ash cloud flight chaos news story event sequence, on April 15, Bob Ladd sent me this quote from an item on the BBC News web site:

Philip Avery from the Met Office said: "It is showing up on imagery at the moment, extending down as far as the Pharoahs but it looks as though the wind will drag it a good deal further south.

Bob is a reliable witness, but unfortunately, by the time I found the article in question, the "Pharoahs" had turned into the Faroes.

When I notice a notable typo in a normally well-edited publication, I try to get a screen shot, as I did in the case of this striking New York Times headline:

Some people are apparently still puzzled by the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull. So let's take it a bit at a time. This morning, we'll cover the unexpected (to non-Icelanders) pronunciation of the 'll' at the very end of the word. (I warn you in advance that I don't know anything about Icelandic, I'm just exercising some generic phonetics-fu with a little help from my friends…)

Today Franz Boas invited me to become his Facebook friend. Yes, that Franz Boas, the distinguished anthropologist and linguist. The Facebook profile has the facts right: hometown Minden [in Westphalia], Germany (it doesn't say that he was born there in 1858); current city New York, New York (well, that's where he died, in 1942, in Claude Lévi-Strauss's arms, at the Columbia University Faculty Club); political views socialist.

Boas's many students included anthropologists/linguists Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir and others well-known outside of linguistics (Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Mead among them).

The Facebook account is a little academic joke, which I'm happy to take part in. Among his Facebook friends are Heidi Harley, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Bill Poser, and Ben Zimmer of this parish, plus quite a few others (Brian Joseph, Dennis Preston, Jesse Sheidlower, Tony Woodbury, for instance).

I'd imagine that Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield will soon be getting accounts.

"Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures", BBC News, 4/18/2010.

This is from a little while back (I've been sick — a brief account of the crisis point, back in early February, here, but the condition has continued to dog me and consumes much of my life). It's a Zits combining two of our enduring interests on Language Log, the language of adolescents and language and gender, especially the latter:

Here we see the affectionate couple (with the girl breathlessly telling the story in detail, while the guy interrupts her with an eight-word summary) enacting a gender stereotype that's often been a focus on Language Log: the talkative, emotional female versus the laconic, bare-bones male. Plus another gender stereotype, of the relationship-oriented female versus the fact-oriented male (the hell with the cuddling and all that stuff, let's get on to the important stuff, the making out).

I've been playing with the idea of assembling a gallery of Language Log cartoons (many from Zits) on gender stereotypes, and maybe another one of strips on teenspeak, along the lines of the gallery of my academic "postcard collages", most on language-related themes, linked to here.

I have begun to accept that air travel across the North Atlantic is a thing of the past, at least for now. Europe is as distant a dream as it was a hundred years ago, a trip accomplishable only by a long sea voyage. I need to accept that I live in Boston now. I have been passing my time learning to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull properly, and rediscovering the pleasures of being back in the USA, and profiting from the kindness of strangers toward the bloggers they read. You Language Log readers in the Boston/Cambridge area and further afield: I really am touched by your generosity, thoughtfulness, and friendship. Elizabeth, Murray, Jan, Kathleen, Michael, Carla, Ryan, James, Steve: this means people like you.

The Australian branch of Penguin Books is in a certain amount of trouble for publishing a cookbook containing a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto that includes "salt and freshly ground black people".

We've often observed how fond people are of noting (or rather, claiming) that language L has an interesting number N of words for some concept X. N may be zero, which is taken to mean that the L-ians are unable to grasp the concept X, or at least have some special difficulty with it. Alternatively, N may be unusually large, which is taken as evidence that X has an especially central role in L-ian consciousness. In such cases, the factual claims about the L-ian lexicon are almost always false; and even if the word-count claims were true, the logic of the argument is unsound.

Occasionally, someone makes both sorts of claims about a single language; and there's a fine (though unserious) pair of specimens in Georgia Graham, "What has Iceland done for Britain?", The Telegraph 4/17/2010.

OK, how do YOU pronounce Eyjafjallajökull?

What does a Language Log blogger who currently lives in Edinburgh do when stranded in Boston, the wrong side of a continent-sized plume of volcanic ash? Some would just hang out in bars, sinking beer after beer and boring fellow customers with increasingly self-pitying descriptions of their plight ("D'you know, I'm a famoush Languidsh Log writer; thish shouldn't be happening to me; there should be shpecial arrangementsh; you shee, I have to get back to Ebbingbr… Edimbr… Edingbrg…"). But not me. I like to work. There is no way I can get out of here with the whole of the north Atlantic area and northern Europe in paralysis, so I'm going over to give a lecture on English grammar at Boston College, 3:30 today (Friday). Title: "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style; location: Lyons Hall, room 202. Be there. The lecturing will give me something safe and socially useful for me to do, and it will enable me to continue the campaign.