Language Log

The reason I was in York last night was to attend the 40th birthday celebrations for University Radio York, the UK's oldest student radio station, which began against great odds, only semi-legally, at a time when the government flatly refused to license any broadcasting that would break the BBC's monopoly, and physicists wouldn't assent to the idea that the induction loop technology the students were proposing would restrict the signal to the campus. I had a small role in the founding of the station four decades ago when I was a freshman undergraduate in the Department of Language at the University of York. At last night's reunion dinner I sat with a bunch of guys who started at URY and spent their whole lives in the broadcasting industry. People like and Robin Valk, who worked as a rock DJ in Buffalo, NY, for a few years before returning to Britain to work on software for computer management of radio programming, and Phil Harding, who has spent his career in a succession of different posts at the BBC. Phil taught me a new word that he learned at a seminar on new developments in the cellphone industry: glanceability.

My favorite brand of chili and garlic sauce is 蘭記 (Cantonese: laan⁴ gei³, Mandarin: lan² ji⁴). It's good on just about everything, or straight out of the jar. I've eaten it since I was a child, but I've never figured out the name of the company. It means "annals of orchids" or "annals of elegance". This is not an obvious name to chose for a company that makes sauces. It isn't a family name or the name of a place that I have ever heard of, nor is it descriptive of the product. If it is a literary reference, it isn't one with which either I or my Chinese friends are familiar.

I'm hoping that one of our erudite readers can tell me where the name 蘭記 comes from. Does anybody know?

Update: As a commenter pointed out, I somehow wrote the wrong character in my original post. The second character is 記, Cantonese gei³, Mandarin ji⁴, not 紀, Cantonese gei², Mandarin ji⁴. My mind is really going, or at any rate my Unicode lookup and eyesight.

The Phils are having their best start since 1993. The picture on the right, by the AP's Tom Gannam, accompanies a stories in today's Philadelphia Inquirer by Jim Salisbury, "Phillies pack lots of punch in rout: They scored 20 runs for the second time this season".

The caption below the picture:

Pat Burrell (left) congratulates Ryan Howard on his first-inning home run, one batter after Chase Utley's solo blast. Burrell followed Howard with a homer of his own. Howard hit another shot later in the game in St. Louis.

Fox News has apparently let their semiotic guard down on this one, because a search of their site turned up no evidence of concern that the "terrorist fist jab" may have infiltrated the national pastime.

Caught on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday on 7 June, in a story by Wendy Kaufman on weightlifter Melanie Roach that had a section on the autism of Roach's son Drew:

(1:ex) Roach hopes that by talking about Drew’s autism, it will spur more research and assistance for families affected by it.

I've put the relevant clause in bold face. This clause has the form

(1:form) by VP₁ing, it VP₂

which is characterized by some composition teachers as "wordy". Some would criticize it as "vague" as well, because the anaphoric pronoun it has no noun antecedent (recall our earlier discussion of "vague" pronouns on Language Log, here, here, and here); instead, it refers to the action or event that VP₁ denotes. In any case, using (1:form) to convey this meaning is non-standard.

The usual suggested fix is to compact the clause into a simple subject-predicate clause, of the form

(2:form) VP₁ing VP₂

(with VP₁ing now a "nominal gerund", serving as subject; in (1), it's a predicate in a subjectless predicational adjunct). In the case at hand, the fix for the original would be:

(2:ex) Roach hopes that talking about Drew's autism will spur more research and assistance for families affected by it.

This is entirely standard, but it doesn't, I think, get the effect that people who use the construction in (1) are trying to get with it — which is to mark some discourse referent as topical in the discourse (in the by-adjunct) and then say something about it (in the main clause). That is, this "by-topicalization" construction explicitly separates "discourse topicality" and "sentence topic", while these two statuses are fused in the subject in (2).

Just to make a point about the boundless possibilities of technology, I thought I would publish a Language Log post from a train. I am writing while traveling south by rail from Edinburgh to York. However, I have to admit that the boundless possibilities of technology are being resisted every step of the way by the forces of darkness and entropy. An hour out of Edinburgh we slowed to a crawl because of farm animals on the line. A modern express train can do nothing in the face of an imperturbable heifer, apparently. One minute it was rattle-a-dat, rattle-a-dat, at about ninety miles an hour, and the next minute we were stationary at a herd of cattle like a taxi in rural India. And the other thing is that through some strange interaction of default configurations with the National Express East Coast free wi-fi software, when train passengers call for the Google front page they get the one in Swedish. I am on a train in England looking at Google Sverige, which has buttons labeled Google-sökning and Jag har tur. As a qualified linguist, it shouldn't faze me to use Swedish for once (heck, I once executed an ATM transaction in Hmoob). But I am bit intrigued. I wonder what unintended consequence of what variable setting in which file was responsible for this whole train acting as if it were stuck behind a Swedish cow in Swedish cyberspace.

It's not only in the United States that linguists have failed in their responsibility to educate the public. As Geoff Pullum explained yesterday, the English Teachers Association of Queensland (Australia) recently published a teachers' guide to grammar that was "full of utter howlers". And some of the discussion of the controversy is not much better. For example, Graham Young wrote today in a blog post at the National Forum ("Grammar's taught to grammarians", 6/14/2008):

The Romans, driven I suspect by their infatuation with standardisation (which palls in comparison to ours, but they caught the disease first), invented grammar. It didn't exist before them, people just spoke languages.

This short passage contains several implicit indictments of my profession's educational failures.

A sample of today's biospam:

Mark, get your ducks in a row with Operon…
FREE Operon Op-Animal with ANY oligo order!

Operon and MWG are joining forces to create a new global leader in the oligo market. Operon has created the world's most advanced factory for fully automated solid-phase synthesis of oligonucleotide probes and primers.

And they'll send you ugly plush animals too.  Shockingly, these are apparently popular enough that people try to to merge orders so as to reach the 150€ minimum to get one.

A major grammar brouhaha exploded in Australia today, launched in the country's major newspaper The Australian under the headline Grammar guide for English teachers 'full of basic errors':

A TEACHERS' guide to grammar circulated by the English Teachers Association of Queensland is riddled with basic errors, leading an internationally respected linguistics professor to describe it as "the worst published material on English grammar" he has seen.

A series of articles on grammar published in the ETAQ's journal intended as a teaching resource is striking for its confusion of the parts of speech, incorrectly labelling nouns as adjectives, verbs as adverbs and phrases as verbs.

Here's the rest of the story.

"Purity" at xkcd:

Addendum by Simon Holloway at Davar Akher: "Of course, you can’t see Linguistics because it’s waaaay over to the right."

On 6/10/2008, the Fox & friends crew discussed viewer response to a piece on spelling reform:

Sometimes you get two at once. Here's a double play, from speech quoted by Cornelia Dean in "Physicists in Congress Calculate Their Influence", NYT Science Times, 6/10/08, p. D2:

Problems arise not just in obviously science-related issues, but also, as Mr. Holt [congressman Rush Holt] put it, in "those countless issues, and it really is countless, that have scientific and technological components but the issues are not seen as science issues."

Stripping away some extraneous complexities, we get:

(1) Problems arise in countless issues that have scientific components but the issues are not seen as science issues.

There is a parsing of (1) in which it's unproblematic, but I think the parsing Holt most likely intended has a gapless relative in non-parallel coordination (two phenomena we've written about here before, but not in combination).

A message I recently received from an employee of the BBC ended with this piece of legal boilerplate below the name of the sender (I reproduce it exactly as it appeared in my mailer):

This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

What strikes me about these absurd signoffs that more and more organizations seem to think they need to tack onto the end of every email is not just that they are quixotically absurd as a way of forfending unintended information release (if you are not allowed to read the above message please avert your gaze and do not look at it!) but also that they are often so appallingly written. You would think that if the legal department insists on them being appended for important legal reasons to perhaps millions of messages per day (and I cannot really believe they ever save anyone from anything), the matter would be important enough to occupy a quarter of an hour of someone's time to make them grammatical, coherent, and unambiguous.

P Terry Hunt asked:

I was struck by part of the passage quoted from the Coleridge poem, which I understand dates from 1815:

"All my I! all my I!
He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!"

I'm sure many are familiar with the (now somewhat old-fashioned) British slang expression "All my eye [sic] and Betty Martin" – often reduced to only its first three words – meaning roughly something one believes to be nonsense. I find it surprising (recency illusion?) that this expression might be old enough even to be derived from Coleridge; however, his use of it appears to be an allusion to an already-known expression. Does anyone know the actual provenance of the idiom, and who Betty Martin might have been?