Language Log

Adam Cohen wrote a piece in the 1 June NYT (on the editorial page) that is both delightful and thought-provoking: "The Lord Justice Hath Ruled: Pringles Are Potato Chips", about a series of British legal decisions.

The question: is a Pringle a potato chip (crisp, in British usage) or (as Procter & Gamble, which makes Pringles, maintained) a "savoury snack". [Cohen reported that P&G claimed that Pringles was a "savory snack", but of course the case was heard in British courts, and the dispute in those courts was about crisps vs. "savoury snacks" — as in SNACMA (the Snack Nut & Crisp Manufacturers Association), which "represents the interest of the savoury snack industry in the UK". Note that in this usage "savoury snack" is the higher-order category; crisps are savoury snacks, but so are other things.]

There was real money on the line, about $160 million, as Cohen notes:

In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, but potato … crisps … and "similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour," are taxable.

Shalom Lappin has pointed out to me that an authoritative, accessible, and eloquent account of genotype-phenotype relations in general, and the case of FOXP2 in particular, can be found in Simon Fisher, "Tangled webs: Tracing the connections between genes and cognition", Cognition 101(2): 270-297, September 2006.

Or rather,

The BBC has reported on a linguistic study that claims to have settled the issue of whether Neil Armstrong said "a man" as part of the first utterance from the moon: he didn't. He did intend the contrast (a small step for one individual man versus a giant leap for mankind as a species), but his speech rhythms show that he didn't pronounce the indefinite article in the first noun phrase. That's the claim. Click here for the BBC link.

Hat tip to Sam Tucker.

Now they've done it — spliced human FOXP2, often called the "language gene", into some mice in Leipzig.  This won't give the mice anything new to say, but many people were certainly expecting them to start producing and analyzing more complex sound patterns.  Thus Juan Uriagereka ("The Evolution of Language", Seed Magazine, 9/25/2007):

Chimps, and our other close relatives the apes, certainly have the hardware for some basic forms of meaning […]. What they don’t have is a way to externalize their thoughts. I’d wager that chimps just lack the parser that FoxP2 regulates.

Uriagereka suggested that "Because of the similarities in brain structure and in the syntax of their song, finches must also have this parser", created by the songbird version of Foxp2. If this bold conjecture were true — that certain alleles of this particular gene create a "parser" in the brain — then the mice recently gifted with a "humanized" form of foxp2 should exhibit some striking abilities, such as recursively-structured squeaks.

President Obama's speech at Cairo University today included this important passage:

[F]reedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.

So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America.

Unfortunately, what he actually said (about 11 minutes into the speech) was a bit different.

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Nicola at The Snark Ascending observes:

The other day at the library, I watched with horror as the kid next to me, doing his Chinese homework online, looked up the word “sheng,” yielding a list something like the following:

SHENG (n.) – river
SHENG (n.) – stoat
SHENG (v.) – to need
SHENG (v.) – to follow
SHENG (v.) – to develop glaucoma
SHENG (v.) – to give a mouse a cookie
SHENG (p.) – buttercup seen on a Tuesday at 5:08 (Celsius)
SHENG (b.) – sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness)
SHENG (x.) – forgotten actor Jeff Conaway
SHENG (n.b.c.) – E-Z-Bake Oven
SHENG (b.y.o.b.) – junk mail, especially certain ads for carpet cleaners, but NOT other certain ads for carpet cleaners, and you should know which ones are which, ass-face
SHENG (a.a.r.p.) – A little to the left
SHENG (i.h.o.p.) – Ooh, that’s good

And that’s just a small sampling. I haven’t even gotten into urinary-tract connotations, sporting-event cheers, dog breeds, etc.

Amusing — but this is one of the many cases where scholarship is at least as funny as fiction.

The OED glosses dongle as "A software protection device which must be plugged into a computer to enable the protected software to be used on it", and gives the earliest citation as

1982 MicroComputer Printout Jan. 19/2 The word ‘dongle’ has been appearing in many articles with reference to security systems for computer software [refers to alleged coinage in 1980].

(The etymology is given as [Arbitrary], which seems a bit harsh.)

But Suzanne Kemmer recently observed in an email to me that "people are using  "dongle" to mean anything that can plug into a USB port, and since for most users that is a flash drive, 'dongle' can now be used for a garden-variety flash drive".

According to the first sentence of an AP story dated 5/28/2009:

Craigslist has withdrawn its request to block South Carolina's attorney general from pursuing prostitution-related charges against the company, following the prosecutor's agreement to do just that.

Do just what?

You've probably heard about Microsoft's new search site bing. I don't know much about it yet, but I did observe a couple of things that may be of interest to those of us who try to use web-search counts as data.

From Rob Balder's Partially Clips, a new take on talking animals:

A letter to the public editor of the NYT, in the "Week in Review" section yesterday, from Dave Bruce of Hoboken, began:

Crediting two bloggers doesn't justify copying and pasting the words of a third. The words were clearly not Maureen Dowd's, and even the punctuation was the same as Josh Marshall's. [Language Log discussion of the affair here.] Mr. Marshall isn't pressing the issue and considers the matter closed, but that doesn't justify letting Ms. Dowd off the hook with just a correction. The passive-voice note that she "failed to attribute a paragraph" seems to play down what actually occurred.

The correction in question, published in the NYT on 18 May:

Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

But passive voice? Both failed and attribute are active-voice verbs (the first in the past tense, the second in the base form; the first with an infinitival complement, the second with a direct object; but both active voice). Once again (as observed many times here on Language Log), someone has criticized a clause by identifying it as "in the passive voice", meaning by that that it is low in the expression of (human) agency or low in the expression of activity. I'm guessing that it's activity that's at the root of Bruce's complaint: failing to attribute is not an activity. Maybe Bruce would have preferred a correction that said, flat out, that Dowd plagiarized a paragraph from Marshall; plagiarizing is an activity.

… in Sotomayor, blogged about by Mr. Verb, Language Hat, and Motivated Grammar.