Language Log

The links below will allow you to listen to a brief clip from each of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. But there's a trick — it's not actually their voices. Instead, I've tracked the pitch and amplitude of a short passage from the speech that each of them gave on Tuesday night, and then "played" that melody on a simple synthetic instrument (just five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes, not that it matters). It seems to me that you can tell who's who pretty easily — but my opinion doesn't matter, because I've heard the originals. So listen and see what you think:

A friend of mine recently noticed a sign in a washroom saying

and wondered for a few moments just how many people had ever wrenched one of the sturdy hot-air hand-drying machines off the wall and hurled it into a toilet bowl in a fit of rage — before realizing that "hand dryers" was merely an unaccountably weird lexical replacement for "paper towels". Is "towel" a dirty word now? What on earth gets into some people when they are told to write a sign that addresses the public?

Flash! From the Toronto Star on 2 June: "Language test spells trouble for newcomers", in which Lesley Ciarula Taylor (the Star's immigration reporter) tells us that all immigrants to Canada would soon be required to take a specific "rigorous language test", the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, widely used in Britain and Australia and already used in Canada for foreign students seeking to go to Canadian universities.

This much is accurate. But the story leads off with an especially tricky grammar question:

Think you speak English? Try this test.

Find the grammatical (or syntactic) error in this sentence: The standard of living has increased.

Stumped? Soon, that will count against you if you're hoping to immigrate to Canada. The rigorous language test that will be a requirement is vital to be fair to the influx of newcomers or vastly discriminatory and fatally flawed, depending on whom you talk to.

The correct answer is: The standard of living has risen.

And that, as it turns out, is just wrong. I wasted considerable time trying to find this sample question on the IELTS site, until I realized that there weren't any grammar questions at all on the exam. Then, illumination from Brett Reynolds (Professor of English for Academic Purposes at Humber College) on his English, Jack blog the same day, under the heading

Language tests for immigrants & Honesty tests for newspapers

Yes, more reportorial mischief.

Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today's "Washington Wire" blog on the online Wall Street Journal. The piece describes an anti-Obama Youtube video from the Republican National Committee that uses clips of other Democrats talking negatively about Obama in the past:

Clips of former President Bill Clinton and former candidate John Edwards are also used. “Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough,” says Edwards from a debate appearance.

As linguistic metaphors go, I thought Surya Prakash chose very well for the title of his op-ed piece in The Daily Pioneer in India, which concerned the way in which bygone sins of American politicians rise up to blight their hopes and make them anxious about their prospects. He called it "Past imperfect, future tense." Nicely suited to its topic. But of course the tempting juxtaposition of grammatical terms with a double meaning is too nice not too have been used before, as I'm sure Surya knew. There are 560 Google hits for the phrase, and they range from a museum exhibit to journal articles to an article about the U.N. to articles about libraries… It seems almost a cliché if you start browsing around looking for it.

But that's the way language use is: we do not constantly create brilliant jewels of originality in every few words we string together in speech or writing. We mouth clichés, we borrow snowclones, we cite famous phrases and sayings intending them to be recognized. George Orwell seemed to think this was disastrous, a terrible sign of corruption in thought. I think Orwell was utterly misguided on almost everything he said about language. But in any case, I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.) Surya's use (or the headline-writer's use) exhibits only the first element: he doesn't try to attribute the phrase to anyone (you can't, in a headline).

Sure, the line between phrase-borrowing and plagiarism is perhaps subtle and fluid in some cases. But then the boundary of the ocean and the beach at Santa Cruz is likewise subtle and fluid. That doesn't mean you can't still tell when you're walking on the sand and when you're ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean.

This morning, Arnold Zwicky took a look at the general question of whether language mavens' advice to "Avoid Potential Ambiguity" is actually helpful in avoiding ambiguity. He focused on the particular case of sentence-adverbial hopefully, and part of his argument was that if you're fluent in English,

you have to know that lots of people use hopefully as a sentence adverbial; it's all over the place. (I haven't run the numbers, but I'm sure that these days sentence-adverbial hopefully vastly dwarfs nominal-modifying hopefully in both colloquial and more elevated English.)

Well, here at Language Log, we aim to leave no number unrun. So I went to Mark Davies' lovely "Corpus of American English" search page at BYU, and checked a sample of 100 instances of hopefully from each of the five genres that he offers: spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic. I assigned each example to one of the two categories "speaker-oriented" (i.e. sentence adverb meaning "it is to be hoped") and "subject-oriented" (i.e. verbal adverb of manner, meaning "in a hopeful manner").

The results, expressed as percentage of subject-oriented examples… the envelope please…

Will nothing stop the wanton destruction of the Cupertino Effect? The latest victims of exuberant spellchecking are high school students in Middletown, Pennsylvania. According to reports by the Newhouse News Service and the Associated Press, the newly published yearbook of Middletown Area High School contains the following student names:

• Max Supernova
• Kathy Airbag
• Alexandria Impolite
• William and Elizabeth Giver
• Cameron Bandage
• Courtney and Kayla Throwback

This is chapter 2 in the story of APA (Avoid Potential Ambiguity). Here I'm going to look at whether the advice is useful. Suppose you convince J. Doe that some usage is to be avoided because it "could lead to ambiguity". Will Doe's speech and writing now be clearer?

Well, no. (They could even be a little bit harder to understand.)

The usage manuals are full of condemnations of forms and constructions on the grounds that they could lead to ambiguity, and many of the disputed usages in English that I post on here bring me e-mail (usually with awful examples) about how they should be banned because they could lead to ambiguity. Almost without exception, these protestations are without merit; the usages in question are innocuous, and the awful examples are deeply decontextualized — with no linguistic context, and usually with cues to the social and cultural context removed, so that readers or hearers have to understand things "entirely by the words" (which tends to convert potential ambiguity into effective ambiguity).

Eventually, I saw that there was a pattern here. The first piece of the pattern is that the accusations of pernicious ambiguity are directed at DISPUTED USAGES (usages that at least some people dispute). That's what this posting is about. I'm intending to post more, because I think there's a deeper reason for the pattern, but this is a beginning.

I CAN'T TALK ENGLISH PROPER SAYS PREZZA

Thus trumpeted a headline in last Wednesday's issue of The Sun (the UK's trashiest tabloid; Scottish edition, page 6). Prezza is John Prescott, a burly politician in the UK Parliament (at one time deputy prime minister), much loved for his newsworthiness. He makes amusing gaffes in his public pronouncements, and he had an affair with his secretary, giving him a mockability index something like Bill Clinton and George Bush combined as far as the UK tabloids are concerned. The story begins: Former Deputy PM John Prescott finally admitted it yesterday — he has trouble speaking English. He simply had not mastered the grammar of the English language, for reasons going back to his non-academic public secondary school. Plenty of quotes follow to illustrate what The Sun calls "his often-garbled ramblings".

Well, let's just get an expert diagnosis before we buy the story, shall we? Language Log has examined the evidence. And — perhaps you can guess if you remember such previous posts of mine as Does Julia Gillard know subjects from objects? back in 2006 and Arnold Zwicky's It's all grammar in 2004 — the evidence shows not a single trace of what it is supposed to show.

The sad fact is that when accusations of not being able to speak the language are tossed around, it is common — such is the level of public ignorance about grammar — for neither the accusers nor the accused to know what they are talking about, or to be able to tell whether the accusations are true or not.

I stress again, this is not a defense of bad grammar, or a defense of John Prescott. It is a sociological remark, a metacomment about the degree to which my profession has failed to instill in the typical politician, journalist, or (presumably) newspaper reader any real idea of what the notion "grammatical" might mean.

(Click for a larger version)

This morning, from the airport in Brussels, I want to following up on our discussion of discourse anaphora ("Why are some summatives labeled 'vague'?", 5/21/2008; "More theory trumping practice", 5/22/2008; "Poor pitiful which", 5/23/2008; "Clarity, choice, and evidence", 5/23/2008), in the spirit of Friday's post about "Prescriptivist science".

Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad — taking us back to the innocent days when the word was a novelty even to experienced political operatives.

Here's the key exchange between two Gore staffers, Ron Klain (played by Kevin Spacey) and Michael Whouley (played by Denis Leary):

Klain: How does a thing like that even happen?
Whouley: Because punch card ballots are primitive. You get cardboard chad that get punched, but don't go all the way through the holes so they're hanging off the edge of the ballot.
Klain: Hanging chads.
Whouley: Chad.
Klain: What?
Whouley: There's no S.
Klain: The plural of chad is chad?
Whouley: That's great democracy.
Klain: Jesus.