Language Log

One of the items featured in the New York Times Magazine's "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas", under the heading "Literary Alzheimer's", is a summary of Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie’s Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia: A Case Study", presented at the 19th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, Cognitive Aging: Research and Practice, 8–10 March 2009, Toronto.

John McIntyre, "Meep me daddy, eight to the bar":

The principal of a high school in Massachusetts recently banned the word meep in his school, threatening any student who used it, spoken or written, with expulsion. His rationale is that the students were using the word in a disruptive manner.

Of course they were. That is what adolescents do. Few teen pleasures are keener than getting under the skin of officious adults. And the principal, one Thomas Murray, lost composure sufficiently to forward e-mails containing meep to the local police.

Some of this is pretty convincing:

Here's a sign for a McDonald's in the Guangzhou (Canton) Airport:

The English slogan, "i'm lovin' it," is followed by the standard Chinese version:  "WO3 JIU4 XI3HUAN1 我就喜歡 ("I just love [it])."  To the right of the arches and the slogan, the sign gives directions for how to get there:  "Go out at gate 9; walk forward, turn left, 100 meters (not "100 rice" for "100 MI3 米," though I have seen such translations on Chinglish signs), at gate 5 (next to the WC)."

As Stefan Krasowski, a Wharton grad working in China who sent me the message wrote:  "Great marketing: 'Yes, I'd like to eat at the McDonald's next to the public toilet.'"

The comments on my posting on commoner and my follow-up posting on inflected adjectives and adverbs went off in at least four directions beside the ones taken in the postings themselves. I've been trying to cope with this topic sprawl ever since and hope to get eventually to all four of these threads. Today I'm taking on two of them.

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading "the tastiest suffix") an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

At the Atlantic, David Shenk mediates an exchange of letters between Mark Blumberg and Nicholas Wade about the appropriateness of calling FOXP2 a "speech gene",  about "gene for X" thinking in general, and about the nature of science journalism:

Blumberg: Trumping up FOXP2 as yet another star gene in a series of star genes (the "god" gene, the "depression" gene, the "schizophrenia" gene, etc.) not only sets FOXP2 up for a fall; it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about how complex behavior – including the capacity for language – develops and evolves.

Wade: I'm a little puzzled by your complaint, which seems to me to ignore the special dietary needs of a newspaper's readers and to assume they can be served indigestible fare similar to that in academic journals. […]

As for missing an opportunity to educate the public, that, with respect, is your job, not mine.  Education is the business of schools and universities. The business of newspapers is news.

Via Nancy Friedman's Twitter feed comes this lovely eggcorn, in a comment on the New York Times Opinionator blog:

NOW is in the wrong fight. The issues should be about access to affordable healthcare and jobs. Without addressing these issues, NOW and others have nothing to offer the average Jane and in consequence, have allowed Sarah Palin and her elk to define women's issues.

There's nothing in the comment to suggest that this substitution was the result of intentional wordplay, but it's hard not to think that the slip was influenced by Palin's well-documented love of hunting big game in Alaska like moose and caribou. (Not sure about the elk, though. See Bill Poser's post and comments thereon for an explanation of the difference between North American moose and elk.) And perhaps the commenter is from a part of the country where milk is pronounced as [mɛlk] (say, Pittsburgh, Utah, or Washington State), rendering ilk and elk homophonous, or nearly so. Add the fact that ilk is a low-frequency word that lingers in crystallized idiomatic usage ("of X's ilk," "X and his/her/its/their ilk"), and it's clear to see that this is a prime candidate for eggcornization.

Carol Hills, from The World, wrote to ask about historical and cultural differences in the use of religious names. Why, for example, is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal names (Vishnu, Krishna) while others are not (Brahma, Shiva).

I don't know anything about this topic — at best I can add some additional questions, like why some of the gods of European paganism have survived as reasonably common modern names (especially Diana and Brigit, but also e.g.  Apollo, Minerva, Thor) while others apparently haven't (Baldur, Hermes, Hera, Mars, Odin, Poseidon,  Zeus, etc.)

So I'm appealing to readers for (pointers to sources of factual) information on this question.

Email from Eric Baković:

Tom Lehrer once shared this one with me:

I cannot distinguish
some phonemes in Enguish
which causes me anguish
in learning the languish

He said he'd have been a linguist instead of a mathematician if he'd had to do it over again. Now THAT would have been something.

In the context of Mark's latest, I cannot resist telling you about the one moderately successful rhyming of orange by a poet that I know about. The poet was my friend Tom Lehrer, the mathematician / singer / songwriter / satirist / musical theater expert, who has for decades now divided his time between Cambridge MA and Santa Cruz CA. And his poem only works for those American dialects in which the first syllable of corrugated has an unrounded low back vowel (it is basically homophonous with car), and in which the last syllable in I pray to heaven above rhymes the last syllable in you're the one I'm thinking of. Check your dialect to make sure you speak that way (if you don't, then this is all wasted time for you), and if you do, here's the poem (though you'll probably complain that it cheats):

Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.

Yes; I knew you would object to that line break… But be fair. It actually rhymes, if you say it right. Give credit where it's due.

Andrew Gelman is justifiably impressed by Laura Wattenberg's ruminations on rhyme (warning: the second link triggers one of those insufferable ads that starts playing loud sounds as soon as the page comes up, so mute your audio before clicking).  Ms. Wattenberg without the musical background:

Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.

Andrew wrote to ask about this, and so I did a bit of looking around for information about the statistics of rhyme.

Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.