Language Log

In a couple of weeks, Pope Francis will be visiting Philadelphia, and the associated security precautions are basically shutting down the city and the region around it.

Major area roads and bridges will be closed, and a "traffic box" will exclude all incoming vehicles in the central part of the city, with on-street parking banned for up to a week in advance. Most regional rail stations will be closed, and "ONLY customers traveling with either a Special One Day Regional Rail Pass or Special One Day Regional Rail Reduced Fare Pass, with the name of the station stamped on the back, will be eligible to travel" from those stations that are open. Many subway and trolley stations will be closed, and because these will include all of the stations in the central city area, transfer between the major east-west and north-south lines will be impossible.

Steve Benen, "Jeb Bush’s economic plan: ‘Let the big dog eat’", MSNBC 9/11/2015:

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush unveiled his tax-cut plan this week, and when making the pitch to voters, the former governor has said it’s time “to let the big dog eat.” It’s a phrase Bush is apparently quite fond of.  

He told reporters on Wednesday that “let the big dog eat” is a Florida phrase, though I can report that I’m a Florida native – and I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s talking about.

This phrase has been widely interpreted to mean "Greed is good — let rich people take and keep as much money as they want", which seem like a remarkably frank, not to say tone deaf, thing for a presidential candidate to say. So I thought I'd take a closer look, and see if I can figure out what in the world Jeb! actually thought he was saying.

J.C. send a link to Justin Hyde, "Chevy Unveils The Restored 1 Millionth Corvette Pulled From A Kentucky Sinkhole", Yahoo! Autos 9/3/2015, with the comment "This must be some big ass sinkhole".

Today's xkcd starts this way:

Sign outside an apartment in Taipei:

Posted on imgur by Jverne

From time to time, one encounters Japanese names that evoke bygone days.  In Japan, though, things that are archaic somehow manage to stay alive in the present.  Two realms in which that happens fairly often are place names and surnames.

Mary Constance Parks called to my attention a short post about a "virtual assistant" announced on Tuesday by Baidu, China's largest search engine.

Five years ago, we looked into the nuances of the name "Baidu":

"Soon to be lost in translation" (7/11/10).

Now Baidu is expanding its services with the launching of this new assistant, "Duer", and Mary is eager to know more about the name.

So says Donald Trump — and Fut Azteca:

Jeb Bush uses the word rather 6 times in my sample of 14,429 words, for a rate of 416 per million words; Donald Trump doesn't use this word at all in my sample of 14,746 words.

Jeb Bush uses the word formidable 3 times in my sample, for a rate of 208 per million words; Donald Trump doesn't use this word at all.

[See "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words" for details…]

In a comment on "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", D.O. wrote "It seems that we are missing (at least I was missing) a key piece about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Bush's speaking style. Mr. Bush is using significantly more words than Mr. Trump".

What he means is not that Bush talks more than Trump — in fact, the opposite is true. Thus Donald Trump's announcement of his presidential run totaled about 6,400 words, whereas Jeb Bush's announcement racked up less than 2,300. In the first Republican presidential debate, Trump contributed more than 1,800 words, while Bush contributed less than 1,600.

What D.O. means, I think, is that Bush displays his vocabulary at a greater rate; that is, he uses a larger number of distinct word types for a give number of word tokens. A traditional way to look at things of this kind uses a plot of word type count against word token count. And a type-token plot suggests that Mr. Bush's rate of vocabulary display is indeed greater than Mr. Trumps's:

Chris Cillizza, "Donald Trump’s troll game of Jeb Bush: A+", WaPo 9/8/2015:

The second the Internet alerted me to the fact that someone — a woman in a hat to be specific — had nodded off while on camera at a Jeb Bush event last week, the first thing that came to my mind was: Donald Trump is going to have a field day with this.

Obama, gleefully tossing remaining fucks out of window. https://t.co/osH6aCO1bg

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) September 7, 2015

@TimFullerton I will give money especially for that wing. Much prefer it to the "changing the tone" alcove. — Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) September 7, 2015

Stephen Halsey, who is spending the year in Taiwan doing research, observed an interesting linguistic phenomenon that shows the predominance of sound over symbol, even in the writing of Chinese, where the symbols are complex and semantically "heavy" in comparison to phonetic scripts like the Roman alphabet or bopomofo / zhuyin fuhao (Mandarin phonetic symbols), where the symbols are simple and semantically "light".