Language Log

After I saw a Youtube clip of British comedian and quiz show host Stephen Fry pedantically insisting that none requires a singular verb, I was sincerely disappointed that this intelligent man evinced exactly the kind of "linguistic martyrdom" that Thomas Lounsbury ridiculed a century ago in The Standard of Usage in English.

My spirits lifted when I saw another Youtube clip (via the Tensor) wherein Fry and his comedic partner Hugh Laurie hilariously hold forth on language:

For my money, "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" trumps colorless green ideas sleeping furiously any day. And now comes more heartening evidence that Fry is a true language lover and no prescriptivist stick-in-the-mud. On his newly redesigned blog, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry, he kicks things off with a wonderfully rambling post entitled "Don't Mind Your Language…". A choice excerpt follows below.

It's time once again for our semi-regular feature, "Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media." Paul J.J. Payack, as Language Log readers know, is the assiduously self-promoting president of the Global Language Monitor who has managed to hoodwink unsuspecting journalists on a range of pseudoscientific claims, most notably the number of words in the English language. (He now claims we're 2,248 words away from the millionth word, a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.) During the U.S. presidential election season, he's attracted media attention for "linguistic analysis" of key debates and speeches. Last month, CNN trumpeted his findings about the Biden/Palin vice-presidential debate: Palin spoke at a tenth-grade level and Biden at an eighth-grade level, and Palin used passives to deflect responsibility. That nonsense went unremarked here (except briefly in the comments), but Payack's latest round of flapdoodle, pegged to Barack Obama's victory speech on election night, is deserving of mention, even if it helps to fuel his cynical promotional machine.

I didn't make it to ACL2008 back in June, but Ani Nenkova, who was the tutorials chair, recently sent me a link to some really terrific slides from a tutorial by Christopher Collins, Gerald Penn and Sheelagh Carpendale on "Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics". (Warning: it's a 13.8 MB .pdf file).

People have had a lot of fun with FCC chairman Kevin Martin's claim that "the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" whenever it's used. Daniel Drezner asked, "If I say 'F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,' am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?" And as Chris Potts makes clear, if you measure a word's connotations by the items it co-occurs with, fucking doesn't seem to keep particularly salacious company. So it's simply wrong to claim that these emphatic, expletive, and figurative uses of the word (e.g., as in fuck up etc.) fall afoul of the FCC's rules, which define indecency as language that  “depicts or describes… sexual or excretory activities or organs.” 

But hang on. Emphatic fucking may not depict or refer to sex, and may not even bring it explicitly to mind. But the link is still there. Why would these uses of the word be considered "dirty"  if they weren't polluted by its primary literal use? And what could be the original source of that taint if not the word's literal denotation (or at least, of its denotation relative to the attitudes that obscene words presuppose about sex and the body)? In fact if fuck and fucking weren't connected to sex in all their secondary uses, they would serve no purpose at all. 

As recently noted, people often get confused about English phrases involving negatives combined with other negatives, modals, or scalar predicates, and there's a series of Language Log posts that collectively offer several (non-exclusive) hypotheses for why this confusion is so easy to fail to miss:

1. Our poor monkey brains just can't deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators;
2. The connection between English and modal logic may involve some unexpected ambiguities;
3. Negative concord is alive and well in English (or in UG);
4. Odd things become idioms or at least verbal habits ("could care less"; "fail to miss"; "still unpacked").

Yesterday's post specifically involved expressions like "cannot underestimate X" or "X cannot be underestimated", as a way of saying that "X is very large or important"; and I followed Lila Gleitman and many others in assuming that these phrases are examples of the class of common logical errors involving negation, modality, and scalar predication. We seem to be saying that X is so large that it's impossible for us to underestimate it — that is, our estimate of X will always be greater than X, no matter how large our estimate is. And this will be true if X is rather small, which is not what we're trying to say.

In this earlier post, I was critical of the FCC's claim that the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" no matter what the context. (The Supreme Court took up this question yesterday.) However, my post doesn't offer any suggestions for how to get a clear look at what the F-word does contribute to a discourse. Though I don't have results for the F-word in particular, I do have results for more mildly-taboo items, including English damn and the Chinese intensive tama(de). (I'm hoping that this follow-up post allays any fears Geoff Pullum might have that I now see language as a big bag of words…)

If you were a foreigner walking down the street in a Chinese city and you passed the restaurant below, you would do a double-take, because the familiar KFC has morphed into KFG, and Colonel Sanders doesn't look quite right. But if you were a Chinese walking down the street and passed by the same restaurant, you would do a triple-take, because the familiar 肯德基 (KEN3 ["consent; agree; be willing"]DE2 ["virtue"]JI1["foundation; base"]), which is simply a phonetic transcription of "Kentucky," has become 啃他雞 (KEN3 ["nibble; gnaw"] TA1 ["he, him, his"] JI1 ["chicken"]), with a blatant double entendre on the last syllable (referring to the male of the species).

(Click the image to enlarge.)

This post from Amy Hamblin's Community Blog was on the front page of the Obama-Biden web site for a while last night:

We're still awaiting the final results tonight, but one thing is clear — this grassroots movement can never be underestimated. Thank you to everyone who helped us make an astounding 1,053,791 calls today! I know it wasn't easy and many of you kept calling long after you were tired and your voice had grown hoarse, but your calls to get our supporters out the polls helped tip the scales in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. [emphasis added]

We've discussed the general phenomenon of overnegation — semantic problems typically arising from the combination of modals, negatives, and scalar predicates —  many times in the past. The particular case of cannot/must not underestimate/overestimate is discussed here, here, and here.

We've commented several times on the rhetorical template X is the Y of Z ("X as the Y of Z", 7/28/2006; "X as the Y of Z, again", 3/25/2008), and several others have joined us. Following Barack Obama's historic victory in yesterday's election, it occurred to me to wonder which versions of this pattern would be instantiated over the next few news cycles. The first one that I've seen was produced by John F. Harris and Jim Vendehei at 5:28 a.m.("A new world order", Politico, 11/5/2008):

Obama is the Google of politics: He has technological expertise and an audience his political competitors simply cannot match. Looking ahead to 2010, House and Senate Democrats will be jealously eyeing Obama’s e-mail lists and technology secrets — giving him even greater leverage over them. Republicans will be forced to invest serious money and time to narrow the technology gap.

Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote:

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the case of the fleeting expletive. Bono got things going when exclaimed "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards.[*] The FCC first judged such usage non-offensive, then back-tracked in the face of pressure from the Parents Television Council. In this note, the FCC declares that

given the core meaning of the "F-Word," any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation

Language Loggers have commented on this and related topics before, and Arnold recently went meta on the Times coverage of the case. I recently spoke with Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal about the FCC's statement and the coming Supreme Court hearings. (His article with Amy Schatz appeared today, along with a cool wordle-like graphic on the results below.) During out conversation, Jess asked how a linguist might test the FCC's claim about the connotations of the F-word. Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono's "really, really fucking brilliant"?

It didn't make William Safire's list of "'08-isms", but for me, the most prominent phrase of this political campaign has been ground game. Thus Bob Drogin and Robin Abcarian, "In Ohio, Obama's ground game outguns McCain's", LA Times 11/3/2008:

Learning from the Bush effort, Obama has taken his fight directly into suburban and rural GOP strongholds in an effort to curb McCain's potential margins. Obama has 82 offices in the state, nearly twice as many as McCain. Labor unions are backing his effort with more than 12,000 volunteers.

"McCain does not have the kind of ground organization that Obama has, not even close," said Nancy Martorano, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton.

"I've never seen anything like the Obama ground game," agreed Paul Beck, professor of political science at Ohio State University in Columbus. "It is light-years ahead of what the Democrats did four years ago."

Studs Terkel, who died recently, at the age of 96, had a special place in the hearts of some linguists — those who were studying the syntax (and accompanying pragmatics) of colloquial English, back in the old days, before very large corpora and automated search techniques were easily available.