Language Log

Watching the new DVD release of the patriotic World War II musical This is the Army recently, when listening to champion boxer Joe Louis in a cameo delivering his one line, I found myself thinking of, of all people, Tina Fey.

Specifically, what came to mind was her movie of earlier this year, Baby Mama, whose title was one of assorted indications of late that baby mama, the black American inner-city term referring to a woman one has had children with but is not married to, has become mainstream. Further evidence was when Fox News used the term in a teaser graphic last summer in reference to Michelle Obama ("Outraged liberals: stop picking on Obama’s baby mama"). Graceless, but in its assumption that viewers were familiar with the term, indicative.

Hunt up the derivation of the term these days and even the OED has fallen for a tasty but mistaken idea that the source is Jamaican Creole ("patois"), in which there is a term "baby-mother". However, the chance that a random locution from Jamaican Creole becomes common coin across all of black America is small—a fluent speaker of Black English could go several years without uttering a single word born in Jamaican Creole. Plus, usually the Jamaican term doesn’t really mean what baby mama does, referring more generally to a pregnant woman.

Anyone following the national news in the US yesterday — and perhaps many of you following international news elsewhere — has undoubtedly heard about the tragic crash of an F/A-18D fighter jet in San Diego yesterday morning. (The pilot managed to eject safely, but the plane crashed into a house, killing "[a] mother, her young child and the child's grandmother".) The fighter was on a training mission over the Pacific Ocean, and according to reports had already lost an engine over the ocean. Nevertheless, the pilot was apparently instructed to fly the jet to the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, which requires flying over residential and business areas just south of UC San Diego (where my basement office in Language Log Plaza is located). This is where the plane crashed.

Can you translate games, in the sense that you can translate languages? More precisely, can you translate an instance of one game — a match or a round or whatever — into an instance of another game, as you can translate a sentence or a paragraph of Chinese into a sentence or a paragraph of English?

Helen DeWitt sensibly says that you can't. But I think that there's more to the story.

Today I was chatting with three of our visiting graduate students from the PRC.  Thinking that I was being au courant, I mentioned the expression DUI4XIANG4 對象 ("boy/girl friend" < "target; object"); I knew very well that no one would say something so creepy and out-of-date as NAN2PENG2YOU and NÜ3PENG2YOU.  But all three of them (two women and one man) simultaneously laughed and said, "That's so old-fashioned, Professor Mair!"  So I asked them, "What do you say now?"  I was amazed when they told me, "We just say 'BF' and 'GF'."  Of course, I knew right away that they meant "boy friend" and "girl friend," but I thought such usages were confined to short text messaging, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and so forth, where they are indeed extremely widespread.  What struck me is that "BF" and "GF" are part of their spoken Chinese vocabulary as well.

TA1 SHI4 WO3DE BF 他是我的bf ("He's my boy friend") is a perfectly good Mandarin sentence.  I suppose that one could refer to this as a kind of code-switching, but I suspect that BF and similar expressions function as assimilated Chinese terms.  Acronymic loan words?  I'm really not sure what to call them, but they certainly are prevalent in the language as spoken and written today.

In a series of comments on a recent post, Stephen Jones observed that "The Iranians have a detergent called 'Barf'"; and Language Hat explained that "That would be because barf is the Farsi word for 'snow'"; and Merri added this:

Speaking of modified brand names, this is a good place to recall that the washing stuff "Dreft" -a purely arbitrary name- was at first coined as Drek, until somebody at P&G realized that this is the Yiddish word for s**t.

The trouble is, these stories about cross-language branding disasters generally turn out to be urban legends. I dissected one of them a few months ago, dealing with the alleged fate of the Ford Pinto brand in Brazil ("The Factoid Acquisition Device"). And we've discussed a number of other such legends over the years, with the result so that I've come to wonder whether any of the language-related stories that marketing professors tell their students are ever true.

So this morning, purely as an academic exercise, I decided to spend a few minutes looking into the legend of Dreft and Dreck.

Mark Liberman’s post about the phone call that has caused people to try to determine who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks highlights a problem in the current practice of forensic linguists who do authorship analysis these days. His post was about speaker identification (or nationality/ethnicity of speaker), so I’m stretching things a bit here, but whether the evidence is spoken or written, the process of narrowing down a list of suspects, much less finding the right one, has many of the same problems.

Always on the lookout for catch phrases to play with, Zippy looks into the world of electronics, with little success:

Bill Griffith rarely makes things up, and he's mostly on the mark here: "iTunes user interface", "Thrustmaster glow-saber duo pack", "full voice chat", and "open-world gaming" are all attested. Only "branched venue progression" fails — but Griffith clearly meant "BRANCHING venue progression", which is attested.

A few days ago, I cited the discussion in the Indian press about the nature and source of misspellings in the document claiming responsibility for the recent attacks in Mumbai ("Terrorist speech recognition?", 12/1/2008). Yesterday, I saw some discussion of pronunciation and word choice in what is said to be a recorded telephone conversation between one of the terrorists and TV journalists. Thus Yogi Sikand, "Lies of the Lashkar", Rediff, 12/4/2008:

Not possessing a television set myself, it was only just now that was I able to listen to the recording, hosted on the Internet, of a conversation which took place some days ago between a terrorist holed up at Nariman House in Mumbai and calling himself 'Imran Babar' and reporters of the India TV channel.

It is plainly evident from the conversation that the terrorist was a Pakistani, most likely a Punjabi. This is obvious from his accent and the sort of Urdu he speaks. One can easily make out that he had been carefully tutored by his mentors who masterminded the deadly terror assault on Mumbai to intersperse his hate-driven harangue with some Hindi words (shanti, parivar etc) and to use Urdu words in the typical Hindi way (jabardasti instead of zabardasti etc.) so as to give the misleading impression that he and the other terrorists with him were Indian Muslims, not Pakistanis. The terrorists claimed to belong to the 'Deccan' in India, but it is obvious that this was not at all the case.

On Dec. 1, ABC News published the "excerpted transcript of Charlie Gibson's interview with President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush at Camp David", along with some video clips of parts of the interview. The "transcript" is here, and the video clip containing the passage discussed below is here.

Here's the audio of one linguistically fascinating Q&A, along with my transcription:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Gibson: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?
Bush: You know, I'm in president during this period of time but I think
uh when the history of this period is written people will realize
a lot of the decisions
uh that were made on Wall Street
took place over
you know a- a decade or so, before I arrived in president, during I arrived in president.
I'm sorry it's happening of course, obviously
I don't like the idea of people
losing jobs or being worried about their 401Ks.
On the other hand, the American people got to know that-
that uh we will safeguard the system, I mean
we're in, and if we need to be in more, we will.

What I want to focus on here is the expression "in president", which occurs three times in this answer.

The latest episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles. Here's the blurb:

In this week's episode, "Kangamangus," Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, "Ozay." While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, "Dot-nose." Also, British actor, Matt Berry, ("The IT Crowd") makes a guest appearance.

Matt Berry, awesomely enough, plays the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who arrives to tell Brian that dot-nose is entering the dictionary, complete with a Word Induction Ceremony. Video clips after the jump.

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall titled a post "Neo-Hooverite Republicans". About an hour later, Matt Yglesias posted a sort of snide blogospheric RIAA letter:

A clever coinage from Josh Marshall. Why didn’t I think of that sooner (or this)?

Matt's point, apparently, was that he used the words neo-Hooverite and neo-Hooverism back in October, and so Josh should have credited him for the invention.

The latest issue of MaxPlanckForschung, the flagship journal of the Max Planck Institute, has China as its focus. To honor the theme of the issue, the editors asked one of the journalists who worked for the magazine to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover. This was the result:

No sooner had the journal fallen into the hands of Chinese readers than it set off a frenzy of indignation, uproarious laughter, and animated discussion.

The latest xkcd: