Language Log

A graduate student in classics expresses appreciation for the new norm of academic staff announcing their pronoun preferences, but wonders why everyone gives their preferences as three-element paradigm: she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/their. It's not like anyone is going to mix and match, she/him/their or whatever.

Sign at a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, spotted by Marc Sarrel:

Jenny Chu spotted this ad from a campaign for Nescafe currently being shown in the Hong Kong MTR:

From Dana Loesch, Relentless, NRATV 8/22/2018:

Last week ("Joos jokes", 8/14/2018) I linked to the "Proceedings of the Speech Communication Conference at M.I.T.", published in 1950 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  and I promised to revisit "this window into a bygone age" in a later post. So today I present to you the following passage from "Introduction: A Definition of Communication" by S. S. Stevens:

Although no phenomenon is more familiar to us than communication, the fact of the matter is that this magic word means many things to many people. A definition broad enough to encompass all these meanings may risk finding itself dissipated in generalities, but for the purposes of this conference a broad operational definition of communication is, I believe, both appropriate and possible. I should like, therefore, to venture the following: Communication is the discriminatory response  of an organism to a stimulus.

He goes on to confirm that this perspective is indeed as weird as it seems:

This definition says that communication occurs when some environmental disturbance {the stimulus) impinges on an organism — and the organism does something about it (makes a discriminatory response). If the stimulus is ignored by the organism, there has been no communication. The test is differential reaction of some sort. The message that gets no response is not a communication.

This definition is broad, operational, and behavioristic. It includes the anxious clucking of the mother hen, which brings the chicks scurrying to shelter. At a different extreme it includes the modem treatise on information theory, which some people seem to read and respond to with a glow of understanding. By appealing to behavioral operations as the test for the presence or absence of communication, we explicitly forsake all concern with abstracted meanings, significations, and the like, unless, of course, these words are in turn defined in terms of discriminatory responses. In short, we stick to observable phenomena.

Are we really supposed to believe that some people's "glow of understanding" on reading about information theory is an "observable phenomenon", sufficient to characterize what has been communicated? This strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum of Stevens' behavioristic prejudices — as effective an argument as Noam Chomsky's 1959 Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.

This is from an ad for a new apartment building in University City next to Penn:

Wèi nín xià gè rénshēng jiēduàn ér zuò de gōngyù

为您下个人生阶段而作的公寓

"Apartments made for the next stage of your (honorific) life"

Here's the English version from the same website:

Apartments for the next phase in life

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "If you study graphs in which edges can link more than two nodes, you're more properly called a hyperedgelord."

Matthew Haag, "Company Is Offering ‘Fur-ternity Leave’ for New Pet Owners", NYT 8/20/2018:

A Minneapolis marketing company recently made tweaks to its employee benefits this summer, ranging from conventional to unusual. It gave workers a larger commuter stipend, as well as a reason to avoid the office altogether: “fur-ternity leave,” or the ability to work from home for a week to welcome new dogs or cats.

“This is kind of a no-brainer,” said Allison McMenimen, a vice president at the company, Nina Hale, who helped devise the new policy. “The idea of offering benefits that just help keep employees at the office, that’s over.”

Let's plunge right in:

"How ‘Skr’ Took Over the Chinese Internet:  A brief history of the meaningless hip-hop term that inspired countless viral memes", by Yin Yijun, Sixth Tone (8/7/18)

Jichang Lulu reports that an eating establishment in London has chosen the name qī wèi 柒味 ("seven flavors").  This comes via Yuan Chan on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/xinwenxiaojie/status/1029832787032006663

Two days ago, I was sitting in a Panera around lunch time.  Next to me was a mother with two young daughters.  One of them looked to be about four years old, and the other about one and a half year old.

The girls were both well behaved, and I enjoyed their company for more than an hour.  Without intentionally eavesdropping, I could not but overhear what they were talking about.  After half an hour, I started to become amused by the younger daughter's speech, because it consisted entirely of the following three words:

1. no! — falling intonation

2. what? — rising intonation

3. why!? — half-falling then half-rising, sounding somewhat plaintive and querulous

[Below is a guest post by Matt Goldrick on behalf of the Linguistic Society of America]

Over the past decade the lack of transparency in research – and its implications for the reproducibility of research findings – has been a major focus of scientists and funding agencies (see previous discussions on LanguageLog here, here, here). This has led to many exciting developments in the social sciences including the founding of no-fee platforms for sharing and pre-registering studies (e.g., the Center for Open Science, AsPredicted) and new professional sciences promoting transparent, open research practices (e.g., the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science). These positive developments have, unfortunately, lead to an overzealous reaction from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) which is likely to hamper basic science (more info below). The LSA, in partnership with other research organizations, is asking for your help in pushing back against policies that could hamper the work of NIH-funded linguists.

Karl Smith saw this sign in Taichung, Taiwan: