Language Log

My credit-card company has developed a new scheme for trying to trick me with speech-acts. It's likely that you've heard roughly this pitch before, especially if you are lucky enough to work at home sometimes and trusting enough to answer the phone before ring #3.

A new paper on language and number cognition is in press: Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, & Edward Gibson, "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition", Cognition (in press 2008). Michael put the paper on his web site, and so you can easily get and read the whole thing.

At lunch on Saturday, Paul Armstrong asked me about my ask 'my request'. A mutual friend (Tom Limoncelli, who I'll quote in a moment) had peeved on his blog the day before about this usage, and Paul was somewhat taken aback by Tom's rancor; Paul himself didn't find the usage so bad.

At the time, I didn't recall having heard things like my ask before, though it turns out I had — memory is a VERY tricky thing — but I opined that the noun ask was likely to be venerable, probably going back to Old English. And so it is and does, but the full story is more interesting than a simple survival of a lexical item from a millennium ago.

Everybody seems to be talking about Jesse Jackson's whispered expression of annoyance with Barack Obama.  And I have something to say about it too. I'm not going to comment on the strange choices that editors and broadcasters have made in bowdlerizing Jackson's phrase "I want to cut his nuts off", though that's an interesting topic in itself.  Instead, I want to express puzzlement about the phrase itself.

I've heard men and boys from all sorts of geographical, social and ethnic backgrounds express anger and threaten violence, in thousands of different ways, literal and metaphorical, direct and indirect. But I can't remember every having heard this particular way of expressing anger towards a specific third party who isn't present in the conversation.

You wouldn't think you could get sued over a Bible translation, but one Bradley LaShawn Fowler has filed lawsuits against two publishers demanding a total of $70 million in damages. He claims that their versions of the Bible, which condemn homosexuality, violate his rights as a homosexual man. He is representing himself, and his handwritten complaints (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan) are difficult to understand, but that seems to be the gist of it.

On his "Freakonomics" blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error). In a July 8th post entitled "Dept. of Oops," he notes this lead sentence in a recent article in The Economist:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

Dubner writes:

They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.

Those who are following the attempts to give English legal status as the official language of the U.S. may be interested in the analogous debate going on about the role of French in France. One difference: French already has a special official status, guaranteed not only by French law but by the French constitution itself, which asserts in Article 2 that "La langue de la République est le français" ("the language of the Republic is French").

Last Sunday's Foxtrot tries to explain the popularity of texting among teens:

It's a cute theory, but it's almost certainly false.

Rudis Muiznieks, a skeptical cartoonist whose work appears at cectic.com, posted this strip on May 30:

The backstory:

"Parrot telepathy at the BBC", 1/28/2004;
"BBC's duplicity stuns Language Loggers", 1/15/2007;
"Invisible telepathic parrots", 6/30/2007.

Not long after posting my "Pushing buttons" post, I turned on NPR to listen to some of All Things Considered. There happened to be a somewhat relevant story on ("N.C. Sees Push To Register Young Latino Voters") — relevant because, as some commenters on my post pointed out (and as I also noted late last year), "It is not language per se, but its power to function as a 'proxy' for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language." (Sally Johnson, "Who's misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media", Journal of Sociolinguistics 5.4 (2001), p. 599).

Here's the most relevant bit of the ATC story:

Dale Folwell was among several Republican state legislators up for re-election who spoke at a small rally in June, declaring illegal immigration a "major crisis."

"I can tell you that there are two things that civilizations never survive," Folwell says in a campaign ad. "That's a devaluation of their currency or a devaluation of their language. And these are two things that Americans are facing."

Putting aside the debatable presumption that English is the language of American civilization, I'm struggling to see how the use of other languages "devalues" English in any way. What exactly does Folwell mean by "language devaluation", anyway? Interestingly, the current top Google hit for {"language devaluation"} is a 1975 Time Magazine article ("CAN'T ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?"), which is all about how English is being corrupted by its own speakers (in the classic but "turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless" Orwellian sense — there's even an Orwell quote toward the end of the article) and makes no particular mention of immigration, languages other than English, and so forth. Thirty-three years later, we appear to be less worried about how language is twisted by our leaders to push people into conformity with certain political ideals (some progressives even think we should follow the lead of conservatives in doing more such "framing") and more concerned with … well, I'm not quite sure what.

While driving somewhere in the North County of San Diego this past holiday weekend, I found myself behind a large Ford Extravaganza (or Excursion, Expedition, Explorer, whatever) with a bumper sticker proclaiming:

BOYCOTT ANY COMPANY

THAT REQUIRES YOU TO

PRESS `1' FOR ENGLISH!!

I couldn't (easily) find an image of this bumper sticker on the Interwebs, but in the brief process of searching for it I found many other images with messages along the same lines. The t-shirt image on the right (from a website selling "John McCain […] Anti-Obama Political Conservative Republican" t-shirts and other such paraphernalia) is by far one of the tamer ones; next in line is this one (WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?), then this one (Aren't YOU tired of "PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?"), then this one (Why in the hell should I have to press "1" for English?), and it takes a nose-dive into outright offensiveness here (Press #1 for English, Press #2 for Go Home!; part of the sickening "Save California" collection — personally, I'd like to save California from these kinds of ignorant nutjobs).

Overheard yesterday afternoon, from a woman on the street talking on a cellphone and looking down the street:

Oh, there you are! I'll talk to you when you get here.

Two different senses of talk here. The woman was already talking to her friend, in the sense of talk defined by the OED as 'exercise the faculty of speech', and was meanwhile preparing to talk to her, in the sense 'convey or exchange ideas, thoughts, information, etc. by means of speech'. No actual paradox, but it did catch my ear.

A couple of days ago, I took Roy Peter Clark to task for claiming that phrases like "a million dollars" show that the indefinite article a can be used with a plural head ("Slippery glamour", 7/4/2008). I observed that the structure is clearly [[a million] dollars], not [a [million dollars]]; that expressions like "a million" are just numbers, fitting into the normal syntactic slot where numbers go; and that million in this case is morphosyntactically singular.

In the comments, Russell Lee-Goldman pointed out that

There are, however, a few cases where it really looks like "a" is acting funky:

– He was there for a good seven years.
– An additional three people are required.
– A mere four nations recognize that standard.
– She collected an amazing and heretofore unprecedented forty million dollars.