Language Log

Ten days ago I was returning to the US from Europe, and the first and main leg of the trip was a flight from Amsterdam to Houston. After passing through customs and immigration in Houston, I was stripping off shoes, belt, wallet, fillings, etc. to walk through the security scanners and re-enter the gate areas for my connecting flight. The scanners were being worked by a few twenty-somethings, and one of them was enthusiastically telling the others, "You know, today's Darwin's 200th birthday! High five for science!"

He was given a slightly bemused high-five by one of his coworkers, and then he turned to another with the same celebratory request, but sadly the other coworker, conforming more to my mental Texan stereotype, wouldn't meet his eyes and wouldn't high five him.

"I'll give you a high five for science!" I called out happily. "That's what I'm talkin' about!" he said, and so after exchanging a high five for science with a perfect, if slightly goofy, stranger, I trotted off to my next five hours of travel feeling all warm and fuzzy. I didn't have the heart to tell him he was off on the birthday by ten days; hopefully he's exchanging high-fives today as well. Maybe he's exchanging high-fives for emancipation today instead.

To give this post some mildly linguistic content, I refer you back to its header, which I assert would be a perfectly grammatical headline in any of its permutations: with or without the -s, and with or without the apostrophe…

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let's stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

Read more about it in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

One other free speech note from Britain. Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, probably the greatest of all the scientists that the UK ever produced. (I know, it depends a lot on how you rank Newton.) Here at Edinburgh we celebrate Darwin as one of our own, and there will be several different events this afternoon. Darwin started as an undergraduate here. (Hated it — said his geology lectures were deeply boring. Whenever I go off to teach a class here, I keep that in mind. Don't be boring. You don't know who's out there among the undergraduates.) He was getting nowhere with the plan to get a degree in medicine, and went away to Cambridge to study theology (astonishingly, he was going to become a country vicar in the Church of England!). But he had joined a student natural history society at Edinburgh, and did other biological work as well, and when he eventually became a full-time (though unpaid and non-professorial) biologist in later life, and developed the radical idea of the gradual evolution of species through natural selection, his devout wife was a bit shocked, but told him he should not suppress his scientific ideas because of her faith. Now that is my ideal of the right attitude toward free speech. Respect me, and whatever religious faith I may have; but know that my beliefs don't override your right to hold and express your opinions, no matter what they are. Darwin's wife Emma truly heard the music. She understood what linguistic, intellectual, and religious freedom should really mean in a diverse and democratic society. And whatever the polemics Darwin was exposed to, despite the formally theocratic nature of the British state (where the monarch also leads the established church), he was never exposed to legal threat for his expression of his ideas.

Three freedom-of-speech updates on various language-related shock- horror- scandal- probe episodes in the UK this morning.

(1) Prince Harry is being sent away to an equality and diversity training course where perhaps he will at last learn that the royal family should avoid any use of offensive epithets for ethnic minority groups in the population over which they have hereditary rule.

(2) The Dutch far-right-wing politician Geert Wilders has been denied the right to enter Britain to attend a screening of his anti-Muslim film Fitna (it reportedly juxtaposes shots of the 9/11 attacks with quotations from the Qur'an), which a member of the House of Lords wants to screen for parliamentarians. The refusal of entry is said to be because Wilders poses a danger to the public through the ferocity of his extreme anti-Islamic views (at least 79 preachers deemed to preach "hate" have also been denied entry to the UK under the same European Union law). Wilders plans to fly in anyway, daring the authorities to "put me in handcuffs".

(3) The twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning novelist Salman Rushdie to death for disrespecting Islam is causing some renewed discussion of the case. At the University of Bristol broadcaster Kenan Malik and Professor Tariq Modood will debate limits on free speech in a multicultural society — both attacking the liberal left, but for different reasons (Malik thinks liberals have been complicit in gagging free speech; Modood them liberals of inconsistency and double-standards for not extending protection from offensive speech to religious minorities).

Life struggles on in this peaceful but frozen country. Rowan Laxton is on bail. Here in Edinburgh a light snow is falling outside, and as I sit at the laptop over breakfast in my kitchen posting about possible threats to linguistic liberty, so far the heavy footfall of police has not been heard on the stairs outside our apartment. Wait a minute, there's someone at the door…

In the February 9, 2009, broadcast of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart presents a well-argued Optimality Theory analysis of part of Bill O'Reilly's journalistic standards. Stewart and his research team do a good job of gathering and presenting empirical support for a theory involving ranked, violable constraints. Here's a screenshot that links to the full episode:

If the stars are in the right alignment and if you live long enough, you too can become a victim of stereotype and prejudice. I’ve been a semi-privileged, middle class, male Caucasian all of my life, but now, thanks to The New Old Age I’ve discovered that I too am a card-carrying member of a group that is besieged by politically incorrect language.

A stylebook for the media now shows how writers and broadcasters can avoid being sued for discrimination by, uh, well, er, whatever we’d rather be called (hint: it isn’t the e word). I’ll bet that this book will be cited in a slew of forthcoming lawsuits on age discrimination. Elderly is out, along with senior citizen, golden years, feisty, spry, senile, and grandfatherly.

As I understand ageism these days, I’m even supposed to be offended if someone says that I’m seventy-eight years young. Okay, I know about the more obvious ageist words, like codger, old fart, geezer, old goat, and fossil, but the insult of adding years young to my age mystifies me. For some reason I kinda like it. Maybe I need to get out more.

The Newsweek story begins:

How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809.

(Similar stories can be found all over the place.) And that day is tomorrow, Thursday 12 February.

But wait! It already is Thursday 12 February some places — much of Australia, for instance. "Same day" here means 'same date, as determined locally'. Dates and times are reckoned locally; they are relative to a location and depend on conventions for labeling spans of time (via time zones and the like). These conventions allow us to say that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, 12 February, meaning that it was 12 February in Shropshire when Darwin was born there and 12 February in Kentucky when Lincoln was born there.

And now it's Thursday 12 February throughout Australia, though it wasn't when I started writing this posting. But it won't be Darwin/Lincoln Day here in California until tomorrow.

Here's the old Pepsi logo and the new (recently redesigned) one. Not an enormous change, you might think, but these things don't happen without a Design Process.

Bruce Webster has posted on the Pepsi Logo change:

according to this document from the Arnell Group, the product design firm involved, the new Pepsi logo is based on extensive analysis not just of all previous Pepsi logos and trade dress, but also of fundamental design principles and the creation of the universe itself.

At first I thought that the design document was a parody of advertising talk (a very elaborate parody, granted, with lots of complex graphics), but the Arnell Group's webpage has more of the same, so the design document might well be genuine.

TerMine is a system for recognizing multiword terms. The algorithm was originally presented in Katerina Frantzi, Sophia Ananiadou, and Hideki Mima, Automatic recognition of multi-word terms, International Journal of Digital Libraries 3(2): 117-132, 2000. You can try it out on a site at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester in the UK, where they have a web demonstration that will analyze short (<2 MB) texts or URLs for you.

As you'll find if you try, the results are not always perfect, but I think that the algorithm is remarkably good at guessing multi-word terms from small amounts of text. For example, if I try it out on a page (~2000 words) of lecture notes about "Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events", it comes up with a large number of sensible things like good-turing estimate, maximum likelihood, population frequency, belief tax, and negative binomial distribution — along with a few clunkers like cnew = cnew./token and some other fragments of Matlab code. (Maybe it was unfair to give it a sample that included such things…)

Jock McNaught recently reminded me of this service by trying it out on President Obama's inaugural address.

American readers are likely to be truly amazed to learn what has just happened to a senior British diplomat, Mr Rowan Laxton. He was on an exercise bike at a gym in the Regent's Park area of London, and he got angry as he watched film of the destruction in Gaza, and shouted: "Fucking Israelis! Fucking Jews!" — adding that they should be "wiped off the face of the earth."

Mr Laxton is head of diplomatic policy in South Asia at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government. He reports directly to brief the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. (In one of those twists that fiction has to avoid on grounds of implausibility but real life allows, Mr Miliband is Jewish.) But he was not merely reprimanded, or sent for anger management, or removed from his post, or dropped from a BBC talk program over this. The police came and arrested him. He faces a criminal charge of inciting religious hatred, which can carry a seven-year prison term. (For a newspaper account, see this report in The Times.)

This morning's NY Times science section is devoted to memorializing Charles Darwin, and the title of one of the featured articles is: "He was prescient in 1859, and is still ahead of his time." My first reaction to this headline was an unreflecting interpretation of it as simply meaning, 'Darwin was ahead of his time and his ideas are still on the cutting edge.'

But my second reaction was quite conscious: Wait a minute; this is an error — perhaps akin to those frequently noted confusions like "falling between the cracks" or "No brain damage is too minor to be ignored."  (If indeed they are properly considered confusions, see below.)

Following up on the discussion of "Actually" as a discourse marker, let me direct you to Rebecca Clift, "Meaning in interaction: the case of actually", Language 772(2): 245-291, 2001. Her abstract:

One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The temporally situated, contingent accomplishment of utterances in turns and their component turn-constructional units shows the emergence of meaning across a conversational sequence; it reveals syntactic flexibility as both a resource to be exploited for interactional ends and a constraint on that interaction.

She cites a detailed subdivision of possible positions, from Karin Aijmer's 1986 paper "Why is actually so popular in spoken English?" (Tottie and Backlund, eds., English in speech and writing):

A headline in today's Metro (a UK free newspaper) looks like this:

I was taken aback: it looked decidedly ungrammatical for quite a few seconds. And another reader, from Glasgow, has already mailed me to say the same thing. What is wrong with the headline? Or can it be parsed as grammatical?