Language Log

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876.  In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a comic sketch about how strange it is to overhear one end of a telephone conversation.  A century and a quarter later, people have gotten used to the experience with landlines — or at least stopped complaining about it — but we still tend to perceive overheard cell phone conversations in public places as more distracting and annoying than real-life conversations, even when the real-life conversations are just as loud or even louder.

Now there's increasing experimental evidence that phone conversations are not only cognitively more troublesome than in-person conversations for outsiders, they're more difficult for participants as well. One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown. In comparison, the unicycling clown was reported by 12 out of 21 people involved in real-life conversations as they walked the same path.

[This is a guest post by Neal Goldfarb.]

While the Linguistic Society of America was holding its annual meeting last weekend in Baltimore, the nation’s law professors assembled in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. We know that some of the linguists talked about law; did any of law professors talk about linguistics?

That's the title of a recent book by science fiction writer John Scalzi (hardcover 2008, paperback 2010). The subtitle — A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 — refers to the fact that the book is a selection of essays from Scalzi's blog Whatever, which he's been writing since 1998, on a wide range of topics, including current affairs, politics, entertainment, parenting, and some goofy stuff. Every so often Scalzi responds to some of the voluminous hate mail his opinionated essays provoke, by critiquing the form and content of the mail (hence the title of this book). (Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, I've learned that a company called Sarcasm, Inc., is marketing a "Sarcasm punctuation mark" called SarcMark, which people are supposed to use to "emphasize a sarcastic phrase, sentence or message". John Gruber's pitch-perfect assessment:

What a great idea. I'm sure it'll be a huge hit.

Submited by reader DC: John Marzulli, "Infant sealed in concrete by a Brooklyn couple charged with enslaving hooker mom was beaten to death", NY Daily News, 1/15/2010.

Massimo Poesio writes:

Phrase Detectives is a game-with-a-purpose designed to gather data about anaphora. We put online about 1.2 million words – half Wikipedia, half fiction from the Project Gutenberg (the plan is to make all the data freely available through LDC and the Anaphoric Bank), and ask our players to tell us what an anaphoric expression refers to, or to check what other 'detectives' have done. The game collects 8 judgments for every anaphoric expression, and each interpretation is validated by 5 other players, so that the data can also be used to study disagreements in anaphoric interpretation. We have collected over 700,000 anaphoric judgments in this first year and around 300,000 validations, and we'd like to complete the annotation of the first 1 million words before moving on to release 2 of the game (as you'll see if you play, there are several limitations), so we started a competition – $500 to whomever gets the most points in January – to double the number of players (we have around 1500, it would be nice to get to at least 3000).

At the end of a recent post ("Opening up the Google-China mailbag", 1/14/2010), James Fallows adds this "language note":

Usually when quoting reader responses, I leave them just as they are, warts and all. But if I am sure that the note is from a non-native speaker of English, I will sometimes correct small mistakes of spelling, grammar, or usage — "have" for "has," "hypocracy" for "hypocrisy," — that would unduly draw attention to themselves. In this note I made three or four of these tiny copy clean-ups while leaving the rest of the phrasing and word choice unchanged. Writing in a second or third language is one of the harder intellectual challenges that exist. (Hey, writing in a first language is not always that easy!) Even though English has a larger share of non-native speakers and writers than any other language and therefore a greater tolerance for "diversity," I think it's justified to remove minor brambles from the writer's path.

I admit that this practice leaves a logical gray zone. If somebody seems to be a native speaker who just writes sloppily, I don't bother trying to save that person from himself. But if I quickly get the sense that this is not a native speaker — and within a sentence or two I think I can always tell — I may do a little cleanup. The gray zone is when the command of grammar is shaky enough to raise questions, but not unusual enough to suggest that the writer grew up with a different language and therefore deserves affirmative-action help. This is all part of the endless saga of language being one of the most absorbing aspects of dealing with different cultures.

Bill Labov's 2009 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture, “A Life of Learning: Six People I Have Learned From", is now available in a new form, as a text with embedded audio highlights.

[Note 12/20/2024: the link given above has succumbed to bitrot, but you listen to the audio of his speech here, or in a more accessible form below:

]

The Haskins Prize Lecture is named for the first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies. Each year's winner is asked "to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar and an institution builder, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one’s own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship".

Because of the awful disaster in Haiti, that country's name has been in the news, and this prompted reader RH to wonder about its English pronunciation.

I am currently watching the CNN coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and without exception the name of the country is pronounced "hatey". Surely "Hayiti", or even "Ayiti" would be better, and just as easy for the reporters to learn?

A comment on my post "No understandings not specified here" points us to an article (Jef Feeley and Jason Kelly, "United Rentals Can't Force $4 Billion Cerberus Buyout", Bloomberg, 12/21/2009) about a case where "some of the best lawyers in the world, and the Delaware courts, couldn't work out the meaning of what they had written". A bit of internet search turns up a link to the opinion in that case, in a post by Peter Lattman at the WSJ Law Blog, "Chancellor Chandler Hands Cerberus a Big Win", 12/21/2007, which quote the first two paragraphs of the opinion's opening:

The list of selections for Open Lab 2009 ("a printed annual anthology of science blogging", edited this year by Scicurious) was posted this morning.  According to Open Lab's judges, the "50 best science blogging posts of the year" included my post "Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009.

Fans of Conan O'Brien, who announced he wouldn't accept NBC's plan to move "The Tonight Show" to midnight, have flooded Twitter with the #TeamConan hashtag. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I trace the evolution of the "Team X" meme (what Arnold Zwicky would call a snowclonelet composite) — from Team Xerox to Team Aniston to Team Edward. An excerpt:

"Team X" didn't cross over into pop-cultural usage until the summer of 2005, when Brad Pitt began appearing in public with Angelina Jolie, soon after his divorce from Jennifer Aniston. Ah, the mid-aughts, when the "Brangelina" portmanteau was inescapable. This celebrity coupling generated huge amounts of fodder for the tabloids and the budding blogosphere. On June 14, 2005, the New York Daily News reported that T-shirts reading "Team Aniston" or "Team Jolie" were all the rage in Los Angeles. There was even a three-month waiting list for the shirts (with Team Aniston "overwhelmingly" outselling Team Jolie, according to manufacturer White Trash Charms).

Read the rest here. (And compare the similar snowclonelet "X Nation," discussed a few years ago on the American Dialect Society mailing list here and here.)

Several readers have written to wonder why no one at Language Log has written about the recent Harry Reid controversy.  In fact, one of us has, but in a different forum — John McWhorter, "Reid's Three Little Words: The Log In Our Own Eye", TNR, 1/9/2010. You should read John's article, if you haven't already.