Language Log

Last night, I got back from England in time to be faced with a dilemma: the third presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, starting at 9:00 p.m., conflicted with the fifth game of the National League championship series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers, starting around 8:30.

Based on past performances, I expected the NLCS to be more exciting than the debate. And there's this nifty method for summarizing debates: for each participant P, rank the words that P uses more than 10 times according to the ratio of P's count to the opponent's count. And CNN publishes an instant debate transcript…

Still, I felt that I should pay at least some attention to what was going on at Hofstra University. So my solution involved a couple of radios, a TV with picture-in-picture, and several sites that were live-blogging one or the other event. In the end, the Phillies won the game 5-1, and will be going to the World Series. What about the debate?

This guy Bob Schieffer did a nice little webcast tonight with a couple of friends, and I think it was covered on tv too. Maybe you watched? Or read a transcript, even? Anyhow, Bob, he says:

… we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil. When Nixon said it, we imported from 17 to 34 percent of our foreign oil. Now, we're importing more than 60 percent.

And I'm like, yeah, I can accept that last claim. An understatement, if anything. But what I can't figure out is what he says about Nixon. Foreign oil is one of those things that's sort of like didgeridoos, communism, and extraterrestrials, at least in this respect: they come from somewhere else.

So where the hell did Tricky Dicky find between 66 and 83 percent of his nation's foreign oil if he didn't import it?

In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate: "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears…" My initial assessment was that Obama had created an idiom blend, combining the more established expression "wet behind the ears" with the metaphorical extension of green implying immaturity. But as it turns out, the story of "green behind the ears" has some unexpected intricacies, including a surprising parallel in German.

Following some of the news yesterday, on the radio and in print, I was struck by a quote from U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that was repeated several times:

Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans — me included.

(The quote can be found several places, such as near the end of this WSJ blog post.)

Another one from the news yesterday: at 6pm every weekday, my local public radio station broadcasts one of the three daily editions of the BBC's The World Today. In one of the interviews (at around 20 mins. after the hour, if anyone finds the audio), an American whose name I unfortunately didn't catch was comparing the U.S. bank bailout plan with the corresponding plan in the U.K., and he was attempting to argue that the U.S. plan was somehow "less socialist" than the U.K. plan because (for various reasons I'm ill-equipped to understand or critique) the U.S. plan is deliberately temporary in a way that the U.K. plan is supposedly not. Anyway, he summed up his argument like this:

This is a temporary situation and we'd like to keep it that way.

And I suppose that the British are in a permanent situation that they'd like to change at some point?

In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue 1, page 99), and again made it clear that for him it was a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items. Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University, an expert on the history of the OED (author of Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED and creator of the marvellous Examining the OED website), mentioned in a paper presented at the ISLE-1 conference in Freiburg last week that she was baffled by the word mumfordish. So am I. Can any Language Log reader shed serious (rather than speculative) light on its etymology? Comments are open.

Those who follow LL's posts on the public presentation of science may be interested in a recent essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli , discussed in the Economist under the title "Publish and be wrong".

The original essay is Neal S. Young, John Ioannidis, Omar Al-Ubaydli, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science", PLoS Medicine.

In the past, Ioannidis has explained "Why most published research findings are false". And that's before the press gets hold of them.

Will Pavia at the Times, discussing the recent Loebner Prize event ("Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test", 10/13/2008), explains how he figured out which of his two interlocutors was human:

The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ No sentient being could possibly answer in this way.

That's harsh. A more difficult test of politico-linguistic currency would be commenting on John Cole's recent coinage "Peak Wingnut" (Balloon Juice, 10/13/2008):

As I look around the blogosphere, and view memeorandum, it occurred to me that we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut. Don’t get me wrong, this election is still not over and by no means in the bag, but as I read things, the hey day of modern wingnuttia may have passed.

Visiting the New York Times homepage has become rather predictable over the last few weeks. The only question: will the headline scream that the markets are soaring or plummeting?

With the anniversary of Black Monday near (and the prospect of another such Monday looming), I got curious about what financial headlines have been like over the past few decades. The Times search links are amenable to reverse engineering, so I was able to get 23,372 headlines mentioning stocks, markets, dow, nasdaq, from October 13, 1981 to October 13, 2008. This seems like a large enough data set to explore the question, What have the markets been doing since 1981 — or, more accurately, what has the Times been saying that the markets have been doing?

I was delighted to see this article at the NYT profiling a friend and colleague of mine, Jamie Pennebaker. You might also like to check out this website where he and his students analyze language use in a little preznitential contest thing that appears to happen for about two years of every four in the country I call home. (In return, it calls me a resident alien.)

If you're a linguist, I'm guessing you'll either love Pennebaker's work or hate it. Why might you hate it? Because he's a social psychologist who looks at at language in the most superficial way possible, eschewing all the tools of modern linguistic theory in favor of word counts. Not a tree in sight.

Today I had both lunch and dinner at the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford. And on both occasions, I was puzzled by a couplet printed on the menu:

Famous for the
scribes who wrote
on leaving left
a kindly note

(At least according to the scrawl on the scrap of paper in my pocket, that's exactly how it reads, with no additional punctuation or other clues to construal.)

Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon in the New Yorker of 22 September, p. 61: woman speaking on the phone, saying

You never write, you never call, you never fax, you never e-mail, you never text, you never page.

Six verbs here, all referring to means of communication. Such verbs have a certain amount of fame for English syntacticians, because some of them represent a clear island of regularity in what looks at first glance to be a sea of idiosyncrasy.

I'm in Oxford for one of the events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the release of the Oxford English Dictionary, and one of the things that I've learned is an amusing anecdote about the work's title.