Language Log

Two recent sightings of superlative swingest 'most powerful in swinging an election'. From The Field on 3 October, about the state of Ohio:

And so it is a turnout war, plain and simple, in this swingest of swing states with a whopping 20 Electoral Votes.

And from the Daily Show on 7 October, in a report by "senior polling analyst" John Oliver (described here) on

the swingest of the swing voters

namely the stupid. There are also some instances of the alternative most swing, as in this story about the Not-So-Straight Talk Express (going from Massachusetts to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama), quoting one of the organizers, Marc Solomon:

"It was the make-or-break state, and we lost Ohio last time. It’s the chance to go to the quintessential, most swing state and make a difference," said Solomon.

I lived in Maryland many years ago and it’s a good thing I’m not living there now. Why? Because yesterday I attended a church meeting about Montana’s efforts to rid this state of its death penalty. If I still had been living in Maryland in 2005 and 2006, simply attending a meeting like this would have landed me on the state and federal terrorist watch lists. This Washington Post article tells me I could be in a heap of trouble for my Biblically supported views against capital punishment. The Maryland Judicial Proceedings Committee is now studying the matter and there is at least some hope that sanity will soon return to Maryland.

The complexity of the English vowel system, specifically the tense/lax distinction, in nefarious conspiracy with our phonemic word-initial glottal fricatives, strikes again: France's foreign minister was quoted as saying that he wasn't too worried about Iran potentially developing nulcear weapons, because Israel would eat them before that could happen.

Perhaps M. Kouchner might consider a quick burst of training in the HPVT method.

Hat tip to Andrew Carnie.

In a recent post on "Affective demonstratives", I quoted the curious codicil to the OED's entry on that:

"Also that one, used disparagingly of a woman."

and I wondered whether this disparaging demonstrative really always has a female referent. And sure enough, this evening's presidential debate provided a counterexample.

Below is a list of the hundred most frequent bisyllabic terms in Modern Standard Mandarin. The list is based on a recent frequency study of material from wire feeds taken off several of the main Chinese language news services. Ultimately, I think that the data were provided by LDC.

My purpose in sharing this list is not for purely analytical reasons, but more to give an idea of how, through an examination of relative word frequencies, we can get a sense of what is important for contemporary China. Focusing on bisyllabic terms is more revealing in this regard than if we were to include monosyllabic terms, since the latter tend to be particles or function words of very high frequency (e.g., DE的, DE地, DE得, ZHE4這, NA3/4那, SHI4是, and so forth).

"It's essential that we take action to both support the banking system as a whole — as well as being ready to intervene in particular cases when it's necessary to do so", said the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to reporters yesterday. Ungrammatically, I think.

Forget the fact that to both support is an instance of the so-called "split infinitive": modifiers have been placed between to and the verb in an infinitival clause, by good writers, throughout the history of English. (Those who jump on them as "errors" don't know as much about English grammar as they would like you to think they do.) No, it's the fact that the both never gets its correlated and. For me, the construction both X as well as Y (for any phrases X and Y), though common in unplanned speech, is not syntactically well formed. Particularly not when X is a plain-form (bare infinitive) verb phrase and Y is a gerund-participial verb phrase. That is (to invent a shorter case of the same sort), *to both survive as well as flourishing seems to me like an error of sentence planning, where what was intended was to both survive and flourish.

Of course, there could be people who differ, and see no slip in the Chancellor's remark. (Recall the surprising number of commenters on this post of mine who judged my ungrammatical example to be grammatical — though in that case I was able to determined that the original writer of the sentence agreed with me.) Not every expert user of Standard English has exactly the same judgments of grammaticality as every other user. But even a man who finds both support … as well as being ready ungrammatical may blurt it out when speaking under conditions of extreme stress.

One of the several controversies that have recently arisen over voting procedures in Ohio concerns applications for absentee ballots. Although an official Absentee Ballot Request Form is available from the office of the Ohio Secretary of State, the law does not require this form to be used. For some reason, the McCain campaign created its own inferior form, which among other things omits instructions, the warning that false statements are a felony, and space for the requestor's telephone number and email address. The McCain campaign form has a checkbox next to the statement: "I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election". Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, ruled that applications in which the checkbox was not checked would be rejected. In spite of her offer to allow rejected applicants to correct the omission, a lawsuit was filed, resulting in a decision by the Ohio Supreme Court, which ordered [pdf] that absentee ballot requests should be honored even if the checkbox was not checked. (The Court's order contains a photograph of the form in question.)

While I'm saying nice things about general-audience books on linguistic matters, I'll add a mention of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (Perigree), which came out in August. Shea, who describes himself as a collector of words, did indeed read the OED (the second edition, from 1989), from beginning to end, over the period of a year, and tells us about the experience in this off-beat but charming book. (Shea tells me he was aiming for dyspeptic, but it doesn't come off that way to me.)

Earlier this year, we had some fun with a quirk of web-trained statistical MT that sometimes causes odd mistranslations of country names. This happens because information in parallel web pages is often localized rather than translated; some of the posts are "Made in USA == Made in Austria|France|Italy", 3/23/2008; "Austria == Ireland?", 3/24/2008;  "Why Austria is Ireland", 3/24/2008; "The (probable) truth about Austria and Ireland", 3/24/2008.

Most if not all of the examples we discussed then have been fixed, but a new case has turned up in Google Translate's mapping from Norwegian to English. The source is an interesting story in a Norwegian newspaper (Siril Herseth, "Obama «reddet» Mary – betalte reisen til Norge", 10/4/2008), which describes how, twenty years ago, Barack Obama acted as a good Samaritan in helping a stranger who was short of money in the Miami airport.

The article's title, put through Google Translate's Nowegian to English system, comes out as Obama "rescued" Mary – paid trip to Ireland.

For some weeks now I have been assigned to the Financial Good News Desk here at Language Log Plaza. It took me longer than it should have done for me to realize that this was just some sort of practical joke aimed at making sure I did not write anything, apparently because of pressure from the office of the Vice President of the United States (because of posts like this one, I suppose). I eventually applied for a transfer, and have now been assigned to the Research Survey Department. So I have to send out surveys. Please answer the questions below in your own time despite the considerable difficulties with format and the obscurity of the questions, and return by email at our convenience to surveys@research.languagelog.com, where an automatic system will use it to generate data entirely for our benefit rather than yours.

Eager as always to score high-school snark points, Maureen Dowd wrote today about Sarah Palin ("Sarah's Pompom Palaver", 10/5/2008):

Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”

"Defies diagramming"? Sorry, that sentence may not embody the most cogent foreign-policy argument ever made, and it's so awkward that it might have come from a non-native speaker —  but it seems syntactically straightforward to me.

This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey that impression), whereas those NOUN sends quite a different signal. Our data are from upwards of 50,000 speakers.

This is a bit late for National Punctuation Day (September 24), but the book wasn't published until October 2: On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World, by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez (Oxford University Press). It's a celebration of the dot ("the smallest meaningful symbol that one can make with ink from a pen or a press, a stylus on wax or clay, or a hammer and chisel on stone") — a charming romp through the many uses of this symbol, with a very substantial (49-page) section of notes following the main text.

A warning: the Humez brothers' style is associative, with one topic leading loosely to another, and with digressions and divagations to all sorts of side topics: lots of etymologies, plus discussions of footnotes, euphemisms, censorship, acronyms, emoticons, instant messaging, uses of the word half, and much more. Many people enjoy this sort of writing — they are entertained by coming across odd bits of information — but some just find it annoyingly discursive. If you're familiar with James Burke's Connections (the column in Scientific American, the television show, or the book), you might use your reaction to it as a gauge of how you'll probably feel about On the Dot. I found it delightful, though best read a bit at a time.