Language Log

In the old days, when a proposal was ready to go out from my university to NSF or NIH or whatever, a pile of paperwork was circulated around so as to get the needed cascade of signatures: principal investigator, department head, budget office, and so on. A couple of years ago, the office of research administration replaced this inefficient process with a new web-based system.

Such systems can be a great thing. Several years earlier, NSF automated its submission procedures via a system called "FastLane", and in my opinion, it's been a big success. Submission, reviewing, and reporting have become much easier. The system is pretty much self-explanatory, and there are good help pages for aspects that may be confusing.

But our new internal review software was different.

Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics explores the far reaches of verbal morphosyntax in English:

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

Carl Zimmer, among other readers, has pointed me to the latest outbreak of bio-political punditry. This time it isn't David Brooks, but rather Nicholas Kristof, "Our Politics May Be All in Our Head", 2/13/2010:

We all know that liberals and conservatives are far apart on health care. But in the way their brains work? Even in automatic reflexes, like blinking? Or the way their glands secrete moisture?

That’s the suggestion of some recent research. It hints that the roots of political judgments may lie partly in fundamental personality types and even in the hard-wiring of our brains.

Researchers have found, for example, that some humans are particularly alert to threats, particularly primed to feel vulnerable and perceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.

A footnote in Steven Strogatz's NYT opinion piece on negative numbers (he's in favor of them, I think) is a good excuse to revisit my inadequate (but apparently canonical) collection of the witticisms of Sidney Morgenbesser ("If P, so why not Q?", 8/5/2004), and to ask if anyone has more to add to the list.

From reader GK:

One of your recent LL postings jogged an old memory. In the early 70s I sometimes hung out at Brown's college radio station, and one evening I was working on creating an ad in the production studio there. Somehow I managed (by accident) to set up the following situation: I was speaking into a microphone whose input fed into the record head of a reel-to-reel tape player, while listening to the output from the play head. I wore thickly padded earphones. The tape first passed the record head, then — after a fractional-second delay — the play head, so that I was hearing my own voice on that delay. Despite my best efforts, I could not utter an entire sentence, but would grind to a halt almost immediately. I wonder whether this effect has been observed in experiments (I would guess so). It's not surprising, of course, but I found it to be a powerful demonstration.

This effect is indeed well studied experimentally. It now goes by the name "delayed auditory feedback" (often abbreviated DAF).

Last year the most popular new New Year's greeting in China was "Happy NIU2 Year!" where NIU2 ("cow") supposedly sounds like "new."

This year, the most popular new Valentine's greeting in China is "I LAO3HU3 老虎 U," where LAO3HU3 (which means "tiger") allegedly sounds like "love" to Chinese speakers.

Of course, this cute slogan, "I LAO3HU3 / Tiger U," which was probably dreamed up by an advertising firm, reminds one of (and may well have been inspired by) the wildly famous "I Chocolate You" campaign for the LG Chocolate cellphone, in which one of the most memorable images was this voluptuous photograph of the Korean actress, Kim Tai-hee.

From Paul Kay, this passage from an email recently sent by the Chair of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate:

As background, the state continues to anticipate a very large deficit this year.  While the Governor's budget did call for restoring approximately $300M in funds cut last year from the UC budget, it would probably not be prudent – in my view – to assume that our budgetary situation for 2010-11 will be better than 2009-10.  In addition, the Governor's proposed constitutional amendment, which called for shifting money to higher education by privatizing the state prison system, has attracted no political support (and a great deal of criticism as a policy proposal).  While UCOP has been apparently working with to develop alternative constitutional amendments, it would again be imprudent not to expect a silver bullet.

From a reader:

I dreamt that I some cars were racing back and forth in front of my house with lights and speakers all over them. Someone asked me what it was all about and I said "It's Liberman and the Language Log folks checking out the doppler effect"

This woke me up and as I thought about it, I realized  that Language Log would make a great television program.

Sort of a mixture of Mythbusters, NCIS, and Sesame Street? Or maybe a cross between 60 Minutes and Glenn Beck? I guess I don't want to know.

One of Language Log's early posts linked to Daniel Zettwoch's Deadlock, which illustrates in cartoon form Jason Shiga's application of game theory to the dynamics of relationship formation. But Shiga's research represented only an individual-investigator approach to the problem. Now, just in time for Valentine's day, The Onion shows us what Big Science can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNZ-yN3XIw

It's a commonplace observation that survey results depend on how questions are worded.  But I don't think I've ever seen a larger effect of synonym-substitution than the one reported by a recent CBS News/New York Times poll about the U.S. military's DADT ("Don't Ask Don't Tell") policy.

Question: Do you favor or oppose ___ serving in the military?

It's no longer just imperial pontificators like George F. Will and Stanley Fish. The Obama-is-a-narcissist-and-his-use-of-I-proves-it meme has spread like kudzu, wrapping itself around the brainstem of every Fox News sub-editor and provincial pundit in the land. You couldn't kill it with a blowtorch.

Fox News, specifically, has decided to count first-person pronouns in every speech Obama gives. Thus "The I's Have It: Obama Hits 34 I's in Washington D.C.", FOXNews.com, 2/7/2010:

Much attention has been given to President Obama's persistent use of "I" when giving speeches to sell his administration's agenda. Is he taking responsibility — or, as his critics say, is he still in campaign mode? FoxNews.com is tracking the president's speeches all this month and will report back after each to see whether The "I's" Have It.

Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Maybe the L.A. Times editors could have spared themselves some confusion by paying more attention to the American Dialect Society voting for Word of the Year. For 2008, I included hopey changey in my list of nominations, defining it as follows:

hopey changey: Derisive epithet incorporating Obama’s two main buzzwords (also dopey hopey changey).

In the '08 WOTY voting, hopey changey (hyphenated as hopey-changey) ended up in a special category of election-related terms, finishing a distant third behind maverick and lipstick on a pig (but ahead of hockey mom).

My education in the rhetoric of press relations continues. On February 8, the BioMed Central Press Office sent out an email to registered readers with the Subject line "Chocoholic mice fear no pain". On February 9, a press release under the same title appeared on Eureka Science News wire, which began

Ever get a buzz from eating chocolate? A study published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience has shown that chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix.