Language Log

While people are discussing the label polymath in another thread (which reports that the polymathic Noam Chomsky has been cited as, in descending order, a philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, and author, but not as a linguist), a letter to the New York Times Magazine (October 18, p. 12, from Andrew Charig of Middlefield, Mass.) laments the death of William Safire, "who most likely was the foremost expert on the American language". Expert?

Paul Krugman, "The Banks Are Not Alright", NYT, 10/18/2009:

Mr. Summers still insists that the administration did the right thing: more government provision of capital, he says, would not “have been an availing strategy for solving problems.”

Use of "availing" in this way struck me as a new linguistic strategy.  But the OED gives availing as a participial adjective meaning "Advantageous, profitable; of beneficial efficiency", with glosses back to the 15th century:

c1420 Pallad. on Husb. I. 562 To faat hem is avayling and plesaunte. 1850 MRS. BROWNING Substitution Poems I. 327 Speak Thou, availing Christ! 1862 RUSKIN Unto this Last 118 A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength.

This GEICO commercial reinforces the general impression that a southern accent is intrinsically amusing:

Recently arrived in the mail: an advance copy of Jan Freeman's

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The celebrated cynic's language peeves deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st-century readers [NY: Walker & Company, publication date November 19]

(The subtitle of Bierce's 1909 booklet is A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, which should give you an idea of the tone of the thing.) Jan takes on WIR, item by item, with extensive annotations for each item, looking at the background for the proscription (in many cases its later history as well), trying to work out Bierce's motivation for it, and assessing the state of actual usage.

Weasel-speak, as featured in today's Tank McNamara:

There's clearly money in it — and quite a bit of training material out there.

The new Freakonomics book is about to come out (called Super Freakonomics, natch), and Marginal Revolution thinks it's great: "a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say." So does Bryan Caplan at econlog: "Overall, it's better than the original." Time Magazine thinks it's "very good — jauntier and more assured than their first".

But not everyone is convinced: negative voices include Ezra Klein, "The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics", WaPo, 10/16/2009; Matt Yglesias, "Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt [sic] and Dubner", 10/16/2009; Bradford Plumer, "Does 'Superfreakonomics' Need A Do-Over?", 10/16/2009; Andrew Sullivan, "Not So Super Freak", 10/17/2009.

Ellis Weiner has a very funny "Shouts and Murmurs" feature in The New Yorker this week (October 19): it's an imagined memo from a marketing assistant at an understaffed publishing company, laying out a marketing plan for a new book. Those who have published books and filled out author's marketing questionnaires will smirk at slight exaggerations of things they actually recall reading ("We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author's Questionnaire"); but there is worse to come.

Michael Quinion reports in his latest World Wide Words (#661, October 17):

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE TWINK  It's amazing what you can learn from e-mail error messages. The issue last week was blocked by one site in the UK because it had a rude word in the message body. Do you recall reading any rude words? I don't remember writing any. It transpired that the offending "word" was in the title of a nursery rhyme I listed: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The filtering system spotted the first five letters of the first word and pounced. I had to look it up: TWINK is gay slang (I quote Wikipedia) for "a young or young-looking gay man (usually white and in his late teens or early twenties) with a slender build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair."

Yesterday in the Journal of Biology, the editor introduced a new series (Miranda Robertson, "Ockham's broom"):

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham's broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

A note from Bob Ladd:

Yesterday I received a complimentary copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's foray into general magazine publishing.  One of the feature articles was entitled "The last days of the polymath?", with profiles of a few people who "know a lot about a lot" and ruminations on the age of specialisation.  The article includes a little box entitled "Living polymaths: who qualifies?", which lists about twenty people who were regarded as qualifying for that title in an informal office poll of staffers at the Economist and Intelligent Life.  The list includes a number of names that LL readers might have been expected to come up with, including Jared Diamond, Douglas Hofstadter, and Noam Chomsky (no Daniel Dennett, though).

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes to me, following up on my Maurice Sendak "half-sentence" posting (which I'll have more to say about in a while):

… if I knew how to encourage sentence fragments, I would go for that. Opal's sentences go on for*ev*er. And if I type them for her, and she's watching, and I try to put a period in, so there's a shorter sentence even though it starts with "And"? She says "No, that's not right, it's part of the same sentence. Didn't you hear the 'and'?" Fortunately she doesn't usually watch me type, allowing me to punctuate things as I see fit.

In a comment on my post "Metapun", John S. Wilkins traced the phrase "missing link" back, conceptually if not literally,  to the  "great chain of being" metaphor featured in Alexander Pope's 1744 Essay on Man:

[…] On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

In response to my recent posts "The United States as a subject" and "When did the Supreme Court make us an 'is'?", Rich Rostrom sent the following essay, reflecting some research he did a few years ago.