Language Log

Recently on the Fox News program The Five, one of the participants came out with an expression that illustrates the forces behind the kinds of errors that we've called misnegations — even though the errant phrase lacks any overt negation at all!

Bemoaning "this fractured strife among the Republican party", Greg Gutfeld  said

And I just remember the good old days, where we could all unite against the hatred for Obama.

Presumably he meant "unite behind the hatred for Obama" or "unite in hatred against Obama" or  something like that, but got the polarity reversed on the combination of against, hatred, and for.

Jessica Banov, "‘Bless your heart,’ unfiltered, in the national spotlight", Raleigh News & Observer 3/31/2016:

The phrase is served as the “icing” of Southern politeness, a subtle way to insult someone but without coming straight out and calling someone an idiot to his or her face.

“Bless your heart,” read the tweet that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had just zinged at Donald Trump in response to an insult directed at her, creating a widespread reaction on Twitter.

As a linguist who revels in the nuances of language, Wolfram was thrilled with the three little words Haley used to answer the GOP presidential candidate’s bluster.

“It’s the perfect comeback,” Wolfram, a professor at N.C. State University, immediately told his wife. “In a sense, it shut Donald Trump off. How do you respond when someone says, ‘Bless your heart?’ It could be a sincere thing. But it’s not, of course.”

Or, as Wilmington-based columnist Celia Rivenbark sized up that particular Trump Twitter feud, Haley won that round.

“Perfectly executed,” Rivenbark said. “She can drop the mic and move on.”

There's an announcement here for CPFEST, the  first speech corpus produced by the joint US-EU funded LinDOLL program (Linguistic Documentation of Over-Looked Languages). I have only a few minutes between a student meeting and a presentation on "Simplified Matching Methods for Causal Inference in Nonexperimental Data" at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, plus there's simultaneously the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL), so I don't have time for more than a link here, but I'm sure that there will be useful discussion in the comments.

Joe Pater's Brain Wars project "is intended to support the preparation of a book directed at the general public, and also as a resource for other scholars":

The title is intentionally ambiguous: “wars about the brain” and “wars between brains”. As well conveying the some of the ideas being debated, their history, and their importance, I plan to talk a bit about the nature of intellectual wars: Why do they happen? What are their costs and benefits?  I hope that I’ll finish it by 2021, the 50th anniversary of Frank Rosenblatt’s death.

The planned book is about debates in cognitive science, and Joe is currently focusing on Frank Rosenblatt.  The most recent addition describes Tobermory, a 1963 hardware multi-layer neural network for speech recognition:

Nagy, George. 1963. System and circuit designs for the Tobermory perceptron. Technical report number 5, Cognitive Systems Research Program, Cornell University, Ithaca New York.

Photograph of a sign in Hangzhou:

Stan Carey, "Sweary maps 2: Swear harder", Strong Language (A Sweary Blog About Swearing), 3/22/2016:

You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps.

Being a mature grown-up, I put on my @stronglang hat and went searching for swears and euphemisms. What emerged were some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse.

Alon Lichinsky sent in a link to this P.C. Hipsta comic:

And a reminder of another attachment ambiguity joke:

From Jack Grieve, in response to "Up (for) and down (with)", 3/17/2016:

By request for Mark Liberman @LanguageLog: "Down with" vs. "Up for"…a rough North vs. South pattern pic.twitter.com/t4kfZLpi3v

— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) March 29, 2016

Today's xkcd illustrates a technique pioneered by Bill Labov:

Mouseover title: "BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base."

Previous posts in the series:

• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/8/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (3/12/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3" (3/16/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4" (3/24/16)

As mentioned before, the following post is not about a sword or other type of weapon per se, but in terms of its ancient Eurasian outlook, it arguably belongs in the series:

• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)

Today's post is also not about a sword, but it is about a weapon, namely an arrow.

Victor Steinbok sent in the following photograph:

(Source)

Now that there are effectively just two Republican and two Democratic presidential candidates left, I'm starting to get questions about comparing speaking styles across party boundaries. One simple approach is a type-token plot — this is a measure of the rate of vocabulary display, where the horizontal axis is the sequentially increasing number of words ("tokens"), and the vertical axis is the total number of distinct words ("types") at each step.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

I live in the central Japanese industrial hub of Nagoya, the city that Toyota (re)built. Despite the greater Nagoya metro area's twelve million inhabitants and a GDP trailing Switzerland for #20 on the world country rankings, the locals in particular refer to the city as inaka, the boonies. Nagoya is a city almost universally described as, "not much to visit, but a nice place to live."