Language Log

A nice example of the way singular they works was overlooked (like health care, the economy, and everything else in the past week of "racial politics") during the brouhaha over President Obama's press conference remarks about the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama said:

. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Why would he use they and their, when the antecedent, somebody, is syntactically singular, and we actually know that the somebody he is talking about in this case was Professor Henry Louis Gates, who is male? Why did he not say proof that he was in his own home?

Jonathan Coulton, "Soft Rocked By Me", 11/21/2008:

(The relevant part of the song starts about 1:00 in, or use this link, since time offsets don't work in YouTube embedding. But Coulton's pre-song explanation is also part of the package: "… ladies like a sensitive man — a little bit — but you don't want to go too far…")

Language Log is loading slowly today, due to heavy traffic from a digg.com link. Our normal weekday load is about 500-600 visits per hour (1,000-1,200 page views); apparently our current server saturates at around 2,000-2,200 visits per hour, which is what it's managing this morning. I expect that the crowds will be gone by tomorrow, and probably sooner.

Ben Schott cites some amusing items from the 1891 Ango-American Telegraphic Code ("Twittergraphy", 8/2/2009):

(Click on the image for a larger sample.)

For people interested in language, linguistically-interesting bits grow on  pretty much all of the trees in the forest of communicative interaction. In order to get on with life, we let most of the specimens pass without comment. But the first two segments of this week's Car Talk radio show, which I listened to with half an ear while I waited for a computer program to finish running, rose to the threshold of bloggability: the first segment because it offered a nice exchange on what an "accent" is, suitable for use in my new lecture notes for this year's Linguistics 001;  and the second segment bcause it relates to a recent and celebrated British libel case.

In the past week my new credit card had been sent by courier service to someone called "Pullem"; a student paper had cited a linguist named "Pollum" for work of mine; and a kindly administrator had sent out an email to a large list in Edinburgh congratulating "our own Geoff Pullman" on being elected to the British Academy. Things had not been going well. But now the general quality of life was improving. United Airlines had asked me to switch to a later (and delayed) flight via London Heathrow on my way back from San Francisco, and for this had given me an upgrade to business class. Definitely a mood-changer. No longer the 247th economy-class passenger from the left in the departure lounge: I'm an F.B.A., and I'm sitting in business class sipping free champagne over the Rocky Mountains. Dinner is coming up soon, with a smoked salmon starter and real metal cutlery. Life is sweet. The long, long wait to board is forgotten, and I'm actually mellow. And now the purser was coming down the aisle with a seating plan on a clipboard so he could ask each passenger by name about their menu choices ("Mr. Fortescue, Mrs. Fortescue: can I ask you about your main course preferences tonight?"). He arrived at my seat and checked his clipboard. "Mr… Pullman?"

Another opinion piece for our passive voice file: Marie Murray, "The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial", The Irish Times, 7/31/2009:

The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say, “I’m sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit to say “It is regrettable”. Instead of saying “I made a mistake” the abstract term “mistakes happened” can be evoked.

From Iceland, via Thor Lawrence, a Zits cartoon (from a free daily newspaper) with Eskimo snow words in it:

As I reported here earlier this week, I used my most recent Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus to debunk a widely circulated myth about Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden (or Holland) news anchors are known as "Cronkiters" (or "Kronkiters"). I got the opportunity to talk about this linguistic legend on the NPR show "On the Media," airing this weekend and available online here. I also address the shaky claim that the word "anchorman" was coined for Cronkite in 1952, the topic of a recent piece I wrote for Slate. I'm starting to worry that I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of nitpicking Cronkite-hater, but I'd like to think Uncle Walter would appreciate my fact-checking of his mythos.

Mae Sander has passed on this fascinating story from the joint website of the Ghana Institute of Architects and the Architects Registration Council of Ghana. According to the story (attributed to Prof. Ablade Glover of the College of Arts of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi), every Ghanaian chief

has a linguist. He goes on errands to convey his master's ideas, or appears in public with him.

A publication agreement that was just presented to me for signature takes minimization of typographical clutter to a new extreme:

No rights shall revert if it is not possible to reprint or reissue the Work for reasons connected with any war strikes lockouts or circumstances beyond the Publisher's reasonable control.

The underlined part, clearly intended as a 4-member nominal coordination, is not a grammatical phrase at all.

For an update on the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, see Ben Goldacre, "We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine", Bad Science, 7/29/2009.  After noting the general freedom-of-speech issue, and the specific public interest in open debate about medical claims, Ben adds:

But beyond whether it is right, there is the more entertaining issue of whether it was wise, and here it is hard to contain a sense of schadenfreude as the chiropractors’ world unravels.

A recent "joke of the day" from Comedy Central:

A crowded flight is cancelled, and a frazzled agent must rebook a long line of inconvenienced travelers by herself. Suddenly, an angry passenger pushes to the front and demands to be on the next flight, first class.

The agent replies, "I'm sorry, sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first."

The passenger screams, "Do you have ANY idea who I am?"