Language Log

From the "Press Briefing by Press Secretary Sean Spicer, 2/14/2017, #12" (starting at 15:23 of the ABC News video):

JONATHAN KARL:  Back in January, the President said that nobody in his campaign had been in touch with the Russians. Now, today, can you still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign, not even General Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election?

SEAN SPICER: My understanding is that what General Flynn has now expressed is that during the transition period — well, we were very clear that during the transition period, he did fee- he did speak with the ambassador —

JONATHAN KARL: I’m talking about during the campaign.

MR. SPICER: I don’t have any- I- there’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.

In a comment to this post, "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17), liuyao remarked,

Interesting that 愛 to mean (romantic) love might be a modern invention. A search in Dream of the Red Chamber (which is regarded as Beijing Mandarin in 18th century) reveals that all instances of it are in fact "to like" (something or someone). 愛吃的 = (what he) likes to eat; 不愛唸書 = doesn't like to read books/study.

liuyao's observation is so noteworthy that I promised to write a separate post on ài 愛 — herewith I am delivering on that promise.

The latest from Ben Zimmer — "A New Breakthrough in the History of the “S—gibbon: The Insult’s Originator Steps Forward", Slate 2/13/2017.

Following up on a comment by David Quantick on Ben's Strong Language Blog post, Ben found this passage in the 1/13/1990 issue of the New Musical Express, in which David Quantick and Steven Wells "imagine Morrissey of the Smiths (nickname: the Mozzer) and Mark E. Smith of the Fall in the year 2000":

’Tis the Mozzer and Mark E Smith! Yes, in the year 2000, Sir Morrissey del Manc and Shitgibbon Smith will be tired old buckers, fit for the scrapheap ever since some student NME reader got to see their poetry part of the English GCSE and finished so-called “serious rock” for, in the words of Alice Cooper, “EVAH!”

Apparently the term may have been used in other Quantick & Wells  NME columns as early as 1988, though these have yet to be found.

In his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, President Trump received contradictory instructions about where to look.

Pres. Trump and Japanese PM Abe meet, shake hands in the Oval Office https://t.co/rG1oCqyhkf pic.twitter.com/njJ13Qi3s1

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 10, 2017

Here's another example of Chinese writing frustration:

No, I am not talking about multiple choice questions.  I'm talking about the kind of choice questions that language teachers introduce as one of the many ways to ask a question in Chinese.

This subject has come up in connection with the following post that went up the day before yesterday:

"Yes-no questions in mathematics and in Chinese" (2/10/17)

Yes-no questions are questions that may be answered with a "yes" or a "no" (or their equivalents in Chinese).  That's what the day before yesterday's post was about.  In the discussion, however, the matter of choice-type questions arose, centered on the use of words for "or" in Chinese:  háishì 还是, huò 或, and huòzhě 或者.  For this type of question, the respondent is expected to choose between two alternatives.

Theodore Roosevelt "Ted" Malloch, who is reported to be Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to the EU, has been accused of inflating his resumé in various ways (Henry Mance, "Oxford distances itself from Trump favourite Malloch", Financial Times 2/10/2017; Henry Mance, "Academic touted as Trump's EU envoy embellished autobiography", Financial Times 2/9/2017; Daniel Boffey, "Credibility of Trump's EU ambassador pick called into question by leading MEP", The Guardian 2/9/2017).

If Mr. Malloch is actually appointed, the details (about publications, a knighthood, a lairdship, fellowships, professorships, an Emmy nomination, and so on) may become important, but meanwhile, one minor accusation — the tenth of ten listed in the 2/10/2017 FT article — led me to an amusing bit of lexicographic history.

Jonah Goldberg, "The Trouble with Nationalism", National Review 2/7/20

But I firmly believe that when we call the sacrifices of American patriots no different from the sacrifices of Spartans — ancient or modern — we are giving short shrift to the glory, majesty, and uniqueness of American patriotism and the American experiment. I’m reminded of Martin Diamond’s point that the concepts of “Americanism,” “Americanization,” and “un-American” have no parallel in any other country or language.

Fred Vultee sent in the link, and asked:

My immediate guess is Eskimo snow myth, but that also seems to be the sort of assertion that's addressed with specific examples. Does anything spring to mind, or do you have any suggestions on a chunk of literature that addresses discourses of nationalism?

Somebody posted this in a WeChat group:

The character they were struggling to write is this:

xiāo 宵 ("night; evening; dark")

Here it combines with yuán 元 ("first; primary; chief; principal") to form the word yuánxiāo 元宵 ("Lantern Festival", but in this sentence it means a super delicious kind of sweet dumpling made of glutinous rice flour that people eat on the Lantern Festival).

The Lantern Festival is celebrated on the night of the 15th of the first month of the lunisolar Chinese calendar and marks the last day of the traditional Chinese New Year celebrations.  This year it falls on February 11.

Katherine Rosman, "Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again." NYT 2/11/2017:

Jonathan O'Connell, "Feds, Trump attorneys wrangle over president’s D.C. hotel lease", Washington Post 2/10/2017 [emphasis added:

Chaffetz told reporters this week that he was interested to learn how officials intended to grapple with the potentially awkward situation in which the Trump-led government intended to negotiate with a business controlled by the president’s family.

“His being both the landlord and the tenant is something that we’re curious what the GSA’s opinion of that is,” Chaffetz said.

The earliest version of this quote seems to have come from Kyle Cheney, "Chaffetz has no idea why Trump wants to see him", Politico 2/7/2017, and it's been reproduced in several other stories. But I haven't been able to find a recording, and there's no evidence that reporters' shoddy quotation practices have improved, so despite the quotation marks, we have no way to know whether these are Chaffetz's words or a reporter's  paraphrase.

Whoever created the sentence, however, it offers a nice example of what linguists call a "resumptive pronoun".

I just received an email from a total stranger, a young blonde woman dressed fetchingly in pink (she included two photographs). She may want a romantic relationship with me. But to clarify why I use the modal auxiliary ("may want" rather than "wants"), let me share with you the entire text of the message:

hello how are you doing amd marry from benaughty i will be happy to here from you

One scarcely knows what to say.

From Daniel Sterman:

There’s an old joke about computer programmers (or mathematicians, or logicians). Ask them “Is X right or wrong?” and they’ll answer “Yes”. Because, indeed, either X is right or it is wrong.