Language Log

There's been a certain amount of media coverage of President Trump's difficulties in pronouncing the word "anonymous" at a rally on Friday in Billings, Montana:

Donald Trump struggles with the word 'anonymous' during Montana rally pic.twitter.com/iIALVSHbSM

— The Independent (@Independent) September 7, 2018

But this was the only example of a similarly extreme tongue-tangle in this speech, which lasted over an hour — so I feel that the attempts to depict this in clinical terms (e.g.Jack Holmes, "The President's Broken Brain Was on Full Display in Montana", Esquire 9/7/2018) are unwarranted.

Then why did the phrase "an anonymous coward" hit Trump like a tongue twister? Try saying "an anonymous" three times fast, and I think you'll start to understand.

In a production of Hapgood last night at the Lantern Theater, I was struck by a phrase that the character Elizabeth Hapgood uses four times. In fact, it caught my attention the first time she used it — as I've noted, a word or short phrase can be contextually salient even at a frequency of one (See e.g. "And yet", 3/28/2004).

Hapgood is the complex, not to say baffling, story of double (and triple and quadruple) agents, in which literal and fictional twins play a key role in complex espionage and counter-espionage operations. If  you're interested, you can find a plot summary here.

The phrase in question is "I'm here to be told", meaning something like "There's some information that I'm expecting from you, but not immediately, so I'm here standing by until you can tell me". The first three times that Hapgood uses it are in the context of radio communication with field agents during an operation, where it's clear to them what she wants to know or what she wants done, and "I'm here to be told" is essentially an instruction to them to do their job and report back. Her final use of the phrase is in a telephone conversation with her son, in which he's due to give her details about a rugby match that he'll be playing in. McKenna Kerrigan, the actor playing Elizabeth Hapgood, produced all four examples crisply, seriously, and without hesitation.

Although it's obvious in context what the phrase means, I don't recall ever having heard it before.  A search in Google Books comes up empty. A general web search turns up a few example with a complement to told and a rather different sort of meaning, for example "I’m not here to be told my pictures aren’t good. I’m here to be told why they weren’t good so I can improve."

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing game, you're in your phonecar using your carphone to drive a different phonecar. I'm still not sure about bananaphones."

See Mark Liberman and Richard Sproat, "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English," in Lexical Matters, Sag and Szabolcsi, Eds., 1990.

Update — How about other XY/YX English compound pairs, written with or without internal space? There's cat house and housecat; fish-bone and bonefish; index-card and card index; ball game and game ball; dozens if not hundreds of others; how many can you think of within a minute or so?

The first thing we have to take into consideration is that Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) is a dead language, i.e., a book / written language (shūmiànyǔ 書面語).  Nobody has spoken it for the purpose of spontaneous, unrehearsed conversation for thousands of years.  So we cannot and should not use pedagogical methods designed for living languages to teach LS/CC.

The next question is whether we should require a Mandarin prerequisite to take LS/CC.  I am strongly opposed to requiring Mandarin as a precondition for the study of LS/CC.  I know of many schools that require two, three, or even four years of Mandarin for students who wish to enroll in an introductory LS/CC course.  I think that is absolutely ridiculous.  I don't even think that we should require one year of Mandarin for students to take LS/CC.  I may be the only professor in the USA, perhaps in the whole world, with this outlook.  If there are others, they would only amount to a tiny handful of iconoclastic rebels.  I often have engaged in strenuous argle-bargle with colleagues who demand years of Mandarin before allowing students into their LS/CC courses.

Following up on the idea that the use of the word lodestar is evidence of Mike Pence's authorship —

From the anonymous NYT editorial, describing McCain: "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life".

From Kissinger at McCain's funeral: "Honor was John's Lodestar".

From Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman, commonlie called the Conqueror; and descending by degrees of yeeres to all the kings and queenes of England in their orderlie successions  (1586), a description of Henry the Fifth at his death in 1422:

Knowen be it therefore, of person and forme was this prince rightlie representing his heroicall affects, of stature and proportion tall and manlie, rather leane than grose, somewhat long necked and blacke haired, of countenance amiable, eloquent and graue was his spéech, and of great grace and power to persuade: for conclusion, a maiestie was he that both liued & died a paterne in princehood, a lode-starre in honour, and mirrour of magnificence: the more highlie exalted in his life, the more déepelie lamented at his death, and famous to the world alwaie.

Adrian Thieret spotted this poster in downtown Xi'an this summer:

Photograph of a high-backed chair that has gone viral on Chinese social media (as reported in this Taiwan newspaper):

One corner of a gigantic public toilet at the Yangren Street theme park in Chongqing, Southwest China:

Anonymous, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", NYT 9/5/2018:

Subhed: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.

Gabriele de Seta has a serious, scholarly article on "Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms" in First Monday, Volume 23, Number 9 – 3 September 2018.  Here's the abstract:

The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative play with typographical compositions, the affective repurposing of graphical emoticons, the platformed monetization of proprietary stickers, and the user-driven proliferation of custom images. Drawing on this typology, I argue for the need to recognize the circulation of biaoqing as an emergent and malleable category of semiotic resources profoundly shaped by two decades of development of the Internet in China.

Yesterday, before Jacqueline Vaissière's invited talk at Interspeech 2018, the session chair showed this video about the meaning of Indian head nods:

Here on Language Log, we have often encountered the problem of stroke order and total number of strokes used in writing Sinographs (see the section on "Readings" below).  In this post, I would like to approach this problem from a discussion of how to write two seemingly simple characters:

tū 凸 ("convex; protude; bulge out")

āo 凹 ("concave; hollow; sunken")    

Although I don't like to use the expression "ideograph" or "ideogram" for Chinese characters in general, since only a tiny proportion of them are actually ideographic in nature, these two really are ideographs.  I find these two characters cute, and actually have long harbored a secret affection for 凸 and 凹.  They are amusing and attractive — until you try to write them according to the rules of Chinese brush strokes and stroke order.  Then all hell breaks loose.

Today's SMBC: