Language Log

It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden and Holland, news anchors are (or were) called "Cronkiters." I investigated the claim in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which led to an appearance on the NPR show "On the Media" over the weekend.

Earlier today, in an admirable display of media self-criticism, the Associated Press set the record straight in an article by the very same reporter who filed the Cronkite obituary. (The AP also issued a formal correction.) And from all this, I've somehow ended up as Keith Olbermann's second best person in the world today — just edged out by some entertaining crackpot whose faulty Bible translation "proves" that Obama is the Antichrist. It's been a fun ride, but I think the debunkorama is finally drawing to a close.

Yesterday, in a post about a traffic sign, I momentarily mistook the phonophore YOU3 酉 (calendrical symbol) for QIU2 酋 ("chief") in the character JIU3 酒 ("beer").  It turns out that YOU3 and QIU2 are both semantically, graphically, and phonetically related to JIU3 ("beer, alcohol").

YOU3 酉 is actually the original form of JIU3 酒; it depicted a jar full of beer (imagine the bottom as tapered rather than squared).  YOU3 酉 was subsequently borrowed to indicate the 10th of the 12 Earthly Branches (DI4ZHI1 地支, calendrical symbols), with the bleaching of the original meaning ("jar [full of beer]").  But as late as the Shuihudi manuscripts (late 3rd c. BC), the pictograph YOU3 酉 by itself could still signify JIU3 ("beer").  In these recently discovered manuscripts, which include laws of the Qin Dynasty, there are prohibitions against the brewing of beer by peasants.

From Monday's NYT (Neil Amdur, "Asperger's Syndrome, on Screen and in Life", 8/3/2009):

“I wanted to tell a film about my friend,” Mr. Elliot, now 37 and an award-winning writer and director, said in a phone interview from Australia, where “Mary and Max” has grossed more than $1 million since its opening in April. “Asperger’s is a part of him; it’s the way he’s hot-wired. If I had ignored him, it would have offended him.”

Adam Elliot is Australian, and thus r-less. Neil Amdur is "a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.", and thus r-ful. "Strine" also has other phonetic differences from American English. So it's likely that the Australian filmmaker said "hard-wired" into the phone in Melbourne, and the American journalist heard and transcribed "hot-wired" at the other end of the line in New York.

Every so often, here at Language Log Plaza we come across usage advice that's new to us. Today's find comes from Tim Moon, who's working on my OI! project at Stanford this summer. It's from Robert Burchfield's The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), on the expression by the hundreds and the like:

the unidiomatic with plural; either by the hundred or by hundreds (p. 775)

Notice the usage label: "unidiomatic". Where does this come from? Not from a search of texts, to see which variant is most used, especially by "good writers". Instead, this is an expression of Burchfield's personal taste in the matter (a lot of usage advice is expressions of personal taste). As it happens, this is not Tim Moon's taste, or mine; both of us judge by the hundreds to be the most natural of the three, though all of them are acceptable. We now have some evidence that there are others agree with us, and have so far been unable to find any other handbook that takes a position — any position — on the matter.

"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.

A couple of days ago, I posted about a problematic modified rebus, in the form of a heart with a skull and crossbones superimposed ("Love to Die / Death", 7/31/2009).  Now we have yet another complicated graphic combination consisting of a pictograph plus a sinographic semantic key / classifier (or radical) plus a slash over the pictograph.

Today's Strange Brew:

I recently stumbled upon the following sentence (here, for the curious):

After Windows 7 comes out in October, will Microsoft somehow force us XP users to stop using it?

I am able to figure out from context that the "it" at the end of this sentence is supposed to refer to "(Windows) XP", but no matter how many times I read the sentence, I stumble on that intention. The problem, as I see it, is that there's no noun phrase in this sentence that refers solely to "XP", and the pronoun "it" must be coreferent with a noun phrase. I explain a little more below the fold.

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.