Language Log

A couple of days ago I reported on an article in last week's New Scientist, "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The New Scientist article reports on some neat experiments in an article in PNAS involving how people represent events non-linguistically, e.g. when miming. The main result, as the New Scientist reporter saw it, is that people mime in the order Subject, Object, then Verb, regardless of the word order of their native language, and that this provides evidence that this word order is "etched into our brains".

The PNAS article is "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. Unfortunately you or your institution needs a subscription (or $10) to see it. Fortunately, I've read the PNAS article on your behalf. And here I say "fortunately" only in the sense that I might have saved you money, and not with the intention of discouraging anyone from reading the original article: it's a clearly written and thought provoking scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results. (Have I mentioned before that there's no good reason why every clearly written and thought provoking  scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results is not free for everyone?)

So anyway, as I say, I looked at the PNAS article, and, well, I dunno. I'm glad New Scientist covered the story, and they got the main results factually correct, which is a good start, but it still looks to me like misleading reporting in New Scientist, though far from being the most egregious example we've seen here at Language Log.

Did you know that Language Log has a comments policy? Have you read it? If not, go and read it now, and if so, refresh your memory; look at the bar at the top of the main page, where it says

Home   About   Comments policy

and click on "Comments policy". There you will find the instruction

Be relevant. As bloggers, we write about whatever we want to. As a commenter, you should comment on the contents of the post you're commenting on. If you want to write about something else, do it on your own blog.

Commenters have violated this injunction again and again (for reasons I think I understand). The comments policy goes on to say

Comments that violate these guidelines will be deleted. Repeat offenders may be banned.

but in fact we've been extraordinarily tolerant of errant comments, even allowing comments that explicitly introduce topics that have nothing to do with the topic of the original posting. These are the most flagrant violations, but there are more subtle ones.

Last December I commented on the case of Christine Castillo-Comer, the former director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency who was forced out of her job for allegedly opposing the teaching of creationism. The basis for her removal was that she had forwarded an email announcement of a talk by an opponent of the teaching of "intelligent design". Texas Education Agency officials claimed that

Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.

At the recent Acoustics 2008 meeting, I heard a presentation that reminded me of a mystery that I've been wondering about for nearly two decades. The paper presented was Maria Uther et al., "Training of English vowel perception by Finnish speakers to focus on spectral rather than durational cues", JASA 123(5):3566, 2008. And the mystery is why HVPT — a simple, quick, and inexpensive technique for helping adults to learn the sounds of new languages — is not widely used.

When it comes to taboo mystification, sometimes the New York Times is just too damn coy. Last November, the name of the punk band "Fucked Up" ended up rendered in a Times concert review as a string of eight asterisks, with some oblique talk about how the name wasn't fit to print in the Times, "unless an American president, or someone similar, says it by mistake." And here they go again: in a July 3 review of a concert by rapper 50 Cent and his crew G-Unit, critic Jon Caramanica writes:

One of the few bright spots in the later part of the show was the belligerent 2002 single with the unprintable title about fake gangsters that saved 50 Cent from becoming just a mixtape-slinging obscurity.

Where might we find out the mysterious title of 50 Cent's "belligerent 2002 single"? Well, one place to look is the Times' own coverage of the rapper.

Errors in punctuation sometimes result in misinterpretation, but they usually don't arouse the moral outrage that plagiarism does. Some should.

On June 24, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Roger C. Weightman:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history:

In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing and reading, the conventions that allow us to create a standard written English, the technical term for which, according to critic John Simon, is "grapholect."

This view of grammar is sometimes called "prescriptive," which is how I came to understand in 1959 (at the age of 11) that, when the Big Bopper sang "… but baby I ain't go no money, honey," he was using language in a way that would have gotten his ass kicked by Sister Catherine William. […]

Then, of course, along came "descriptive grammar," a movement that had the unmitigated gall (why is gall always unmitigated?) to sneak "ain't" in the dictionary, a discipline of language that could take into account the Big Bopper's nonstandard usage, including that surely double negative.

Underpinning this rebellion against Emily Post conformity was something called "transformational" or "generative" grammar, described by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, before he became a political critic and darling of the left.

This explanation evokes another common collocate for unmitigated, namely nonsense.

Roy Peter Clark is composing a new grammar book, to be called "The Glamour of Grammar". For the past couple of months, he's been posting selections on the web site of the Poynter Institute, where he's "director of the writing center, dean of the faculty, senior scholar and vice president". Each post has an email link asking readers to "Help Roy write his next book".

Yesterday, Linda Seebach sent me a link to one of these posts, "Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot" (5/28/2008), drawing attention to a passage where Prof. Clark's call for help was well advised:

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read "A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world."

Here on Language Log we have recently been twitted by readers who believe we have been insufficiently attentive to celebrity linguists, in particular Noam Chomsky (I find the idea that we should choose topics for our postings using personal fame as a guiding metric bizarre, but there it is). Mark Liberman has now responded, linking to a frivolous Facebook group pitting Chomsky against Labov. We've been frivolous about Chomsky before, in a posting about Ali G's interview of him; in two postings about Chomsky as the object of sexual arousal; and in a posting quoting Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

But (as Bruce Webster suggested to me) we seem not to have discussed the famous Chomskybot, which has been around in one version or another for about twenty years.

I suppose sometimes it's only natural for us to use words or phrases even when we're not quite sure what they mean. Or maybe we have our own individual notion of their meanings. But one might expect law enforcement to use words that have some clearly agreed upon meaning when they talk openly in criminal investigations about the people who are their suspects, targets or even possible witnesses. In recent years, person of interest seems to have been added to this list of descriptors. But what, you may ask, is a person of interest?

Google provides 412,000 hits, so the phrase is not exactly a new kid on the street. We don't know exactly when person of interest elbowed its way into use by law enforcement but it's likely to have shown up sometime in the 1970s, and then it really got noticed about the time of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. You may recall that at that time the FBI leaked the name of Richard A. Jewell as a person of interest. Jewel was  eventually exonerated, sued the media rather successfully for tainting his reputation, and got a public apology from the then Attorney General, Janet Reno. 

The latest issue of the New Yorker (July 7 & 14) has a Roz Chast cartoon (p. 75), "seven words you can't say in a cartoon", that's a tribute to the late George Carlin and his famous "Filthy Words" routine, "seven words you can't say on television". All the "words" are strings of obscenicons (credit to Ben Zimmer for the coinage, an alternative to the blander cursing characters), those punctuation marks, stars, spirals, and the like that are used to compose representations of cursewords in cartoons. (We've posted here many times on obscenicons.)

The United States Mint has announced the release of its first coin with readable Braille on it, a commemorative silver dollar in honor of Louis Braille, the creator of Braille, to be released next year. The Braille is on the reverse.

Yesterday evening, I watched the TF1 reality show (or émission, as the French so appropriately say) Secret Story. My purpose was to revive my knowledge of French, and perhaps to learn a few new words. I was pleased that I could understand most of the dialogue, if not the decor; but one thing that I didn't understand was why a French reality show has an English name.