Language Log

A few weeks ago, Maureen Dowd fantasized about a secret Google team trying to simulate her in software ("Dinosaur at the Gate", 4/14/2009):

When I ask [Eric Schmidt] if human editorial judgment still matters, he tries to reassure me: “We learned in working with newspapers that this balance between the newspaper writers and their editors is more subtle than we thought. It’s not reproducible by computers very easily.”

I feel better for a minute, until I realize that the only reason he knew that I wasn’t so easily replaceable is that Google had been looking into how to replace me.

There's a lot of far-out stuff over at Google Labs. But I'd be surprised to find that designing an army of Robot Maureens is in the mix, even though digital Dowd design poses some interesting challenges.

Or fathoms per hogshead, as in this Language Log posting from last month. Here's Zippy's take:

[Addendum: Richard Pérez writes to say that Zippy's "eighteenth of an inch" answer is way off, at least if if you understand the length of a nanosecond to be the distance light travels in a nanosecond (which is close to 30 centimeters, or between 11 and 12 inches). Grace Hopper (of computer fame) used to illustrate this fact in her public lectures with lengths of wire of the appropriate size — a demonstration that Pérez remembers from his high school days.]

In the coverage of the civil war in Sri Lanka, I haven't seen much discussion of its linguistic aspects. In particular, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 was a key event, whose causes and consequences are worth considering.

According to Jorge Cham at PhD Comics (click on the image for a larger version):

Language Log readers who have been following our recent posts on word aversion and word attraction will want to check out Kristi Gustafson's article in the Albany Times Union, "Words we love, words we hate," which quotes Barbara Wallraff and me on the subject. As evidence for lexical likes and dislikes, I discuss some of the favorite and least favorite words that have been selected by subscribers to the Visual Thesaurus. And over on the VT website, I follow up on the Times Union article in my latest Word Routes column. As you might expect, the oh-so-vile word moist figures prominently.

[Update: And now BoingBoing has picked up the story.]

Let's try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long, expressing a cogent and interesting point about an important issue — say this one from a story in today's New York Times: "But the billions in new proposed American aid, officials acknowledge, could free other money for Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure, at a time when Pakistani officials have expressed concern that their nuclear program is facing a budget crunch for the first time, worsened by the global economic downturn."

Now call your friend up on the phone, and have a discussion about the topic of the article. In the course of this conversation, slip in a verbatim performance of the selected sentence. Then ask your friend to write an essay on the topic of the discussion. (OK, this is a thought experiment, right?)

How likely is it that the selected sentence will find its way, word for word, into your friend's essay?

It is by no means easy to understand headlines in your native language if you cross into a new cultural area, e.g. by crossing the Atlantic. And as headlines go, this one does fairly well at illustrating utter unintelligibility:

GERS’ KIRK IN EGG BLAST

It took up nearly half of the front page of The Scottish Sun on May 15 (the right hand side of the page being reserved for a photo of the upper body of the newly crowned and daringly dressed Miss Scotland).

Now, Gers looks like it could be short for "Germans", right? And kirk is an old Scots word for a church. If religion is involved, the egg is probably a human one. Blast is often used in newspaper headlines for a furious denunciation or excoriating memo. So… an old Scottish church taken over by a congregation of pro-choice German Protestant immigrants has been the target for an angry newsletter article by a Catholic archbishop over the question of whether a newly fertilized ovum counts for moral purposes as a human being. That could be it, right? But perhaps you don't want me to tell you. Perhaps you'd rather guess.

I last posted about spam comments on New Language Log in September, when the spam queue was nearing 9,000 items. Now it's over 77,000, and there have been waves of spam of many different types. We do get spam comments that take a moment's thought to discard. To start with, they're grammatical (while in the old days, many of the spam comments were entertainingly ungrammatical), but then they betray their spamminess by a cluster of properties: they are comments on postings from some time before; they have no real content, but merely say something congratulatory (like "Great site!"); and the URI they provide is to a commercial site (sometimes this is immediately obvious, but sometimes it takes some checking).

There are four parts to this very long post:  1. a message from a Shanghainese mother explaining her attitude toward the language she speaks with her little daughter, 2. the use of Shanghainese in the poster that I discussed in my previous post, 3. non-Mandarin college entrance exams, 4. an important resource for those interested in Wu topolects.

In writing a few days ago about "Word Attraction" — the irrational exuberance that particular words sometimes inspire — I failed to note the possibility that emotion might be associated with the pronunciation of particular words by particular people. This morning, I'll try to track down a specific example that I've wondered about for some time.

The specific speaker in question is the Reverend George Whitefield (1714-1770), whose statue is visible from my dining-room window. (The sculptor, R. Tait McKenzie, was a physician, a Penn professor, and a boyhood friend of James Naismith, the inventor of the game of basketball.)

Whitefield was a much-traveled evangelical preacher, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, who played an indirect part in the beginnings of the University of Pennsylvania.  In implementing his 1749 Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, Benjamin Franklin made use of a partly finished "New Building" that had been put up in 1740 to give Whitefield a place to preach.

Whitefield's published sermons seem rather ordinary — the printed texts don't convey, at least to me, what Benjamin Franklin called "the extraordinary influence of his oratory". Specifically, I recall reading somewhere that Whitefield could make audience-members faint merely by saying the word 'Mesopotamia'; and so today I thought I'd try to track down this story to its source.

Barbara and I, having both seen so many Star Trek episodes, both from the first (Shatner) series and the second (Stewart) series, couldn't resist going to see the new prequel movie Star Trek at a huge cinema in London's Leicester Square the other day. (My god, is THX sound loud these days. Take earplugs unless you are fully accustomed to the sound of a full-scale artillery bombardment. We forgot to.) Of course, this is Language Log, not Science Fiction Movie Log, so to even mention it here I need a linguistic hook. And I don't have a really good one: there are no alien tongues like Klingon in this film (unless you count the young Chekhov's sometimes rather heavy Russian accent), and although I spotted some discreet rewording of the famous "seek out new life" prologue, recited before the closing credits, there's nothing very interesting. But I did notice one tiny thing: a sign on a big assembly of tubes and tanks in the bowels of the Enterprise that said "INERT REACTANT". I hate to be a pedant here (that's my day job), but really, was there no one on the set who could point out that a chemical substance is inert if and only if it cannot be a reactant? Am I wrong, chemists?

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to a topic last aired there in 2007: the alternation between and and zero in numerical expressions like "two hundred (and) six" (in speech and in writing), in particular when they are used as determiners, as in "two hundred (and) six elephants". These discussions quickly range over a variety of types of numerical expressions, uses of them, and contexts for these uses. Plus a lot of back-and-forth about the acceptability of the variants.

Several sorts of numerical expressions recur in these discussions, among them those expressing a whole number plus a fraction, and those in the related case of a dollar amount plus a cent amount. Until this morning, I'd attributed the appearance of these cases (which seemed to me to be irrelevant to case above) to simple thread drift, one phenomenon reminding people of phenomena that are similar to it in some respect. But then Russ McClay posted a collection of net discussions that suggested to me that something much more interesting — something familiar to me from discussions of other alternations — is going on.

Sally Thomason's puzzling comma-spotting reminds me of Louis Aragon's ambiguous invitation to his readers:

Je demande à ce que mes livres soient critiqués avec la dernière rigueur, par des gens qui s'y connaissent, et qui sachant la grammaire et la logique, chercheront sous le pas de mes virgules les poux de ma pensée dans la tête de mon style.

Or as translated in the Columbia dictionary of quotations:

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.