Language Log

The OED has not yet held a Word Induction Ceremony for derp, nor has that word risen above the noise floor in the Google Books ngram viewer. But the current Google News index estimates 36,200 results for derp, and only a few of them are references to the California Independent System Operators' Distributed Energy Resource Provider (DERP) initiative.

An AP story a few days ago publicized work by Kirk Hazen to document and de-stigmatize Appalachian varieties of English. From the version published on the Fox News web site:

In a county beyond the reach of any four-lane highway, a young couple chuckles and swivels in their chairs as they start telling for posterity the story of how they met.

"You want me to tell the story, or you tell the story?" asks Pete Culicerto, 20, who's seated next to his girlfriend before a pair of black microphones.

"I'll tell it, because you'd make it all cheesy," says 17-year-old Ginger Smyth, each of her syllables snaking through a black cable into a high-end audio recorder ticking the time off on a green digital screen.

"Cheesy's good," says West Virginia University linguist Kirk Hazen, encouraging a relaxed conversation that allows the accents and speech patterns of their mountain community to flow unhindered by the self-consciousness that sometimes keeps them in check.

Today's Pearls Before Swine:

Headline from the China Daily:

"China reigns in brutal police tactics" (9/9/03)

This hilarious misspelling causes China's widest circulating English-language newspaper accidentally to have a true headline.

Some time ago I obtained a used copy of Martin Joos, Notes on the Development of the Linguistic Society of America, 1924 to 1950. I've now scanned it and made it available for anyone to read (warning: 6.5 MB .pdf).

For me, the most interesting parts are chapter V "Improvising" and chapter VI "Reconverting", which discuss the period of WWII and its immediate aftermath. I've made those two chapters available separately here (1.6 MB .pdf).

From Larry Horn —

Eliza Kennedy, I Take You, 2015 (p. 69):

[narrator has just been asked by wedding planner to choose one of six identical-looking swatches]

I look at her, then at Rose. “Ladies? To say that I do not give two shits about this vastly overestimates the value I place on shits.”

They puzzle that one out for a while. So do I. Those Bloody Marys must have been pretty strong.

Trollthumper, in the context of an online discussion of TV shows:

Yeah, and while I'm not one to uphold a show as "the documentary experience," having such inaccuracies can just leave this ringing sense of disconnect with those who know the language. And I know that sometimes, that's just me – I've gotten into fights with friends over blatant inaccuracies in media, because in their eyes, such things only matter to a few people – and I don't believe you need to give a fuck about EVERYTHING. But there does come a point where a viewer's "lack-of-fucks-ometer" is going to tick over the red line, and when it does, they'll start to wonder if the scriptwriter gave a fuck about ANYTHING.

Dave Itzkoff, "Berkeley Breathed Publishes First New ‘Bloom County’ Strip Since 1989", 7/13/2015:

[I]t was a surprise for comics fans to wake up on Monday and discover that Berkeley Breathed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator and artist of “Bloom County,” had revived that vintage 1980s strip on his Facebook page after a hiatus of more than 25 years (depending on how one measures) and with almost no advance notice.

The advance notice consisted of a post  on July 12, showing a picture of the cartoonist working on a strip labelled "BLOOM COUNTY 2015" and showing Opus the penguin in the first panel, with the text "A return after 25 years. Feels like going home."

This dialogue followed:

A recent NYT editorial described the immigration/citizenship/deportation crisis on the divided island of Hispaniola ("Stateless in the Dominican Republic", 7/11/2015):

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s highest court issued an unconscionable ruling that rendered tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent effectively stateless. Last year, the Dominican government, responding to international criticism, established a process that ostensibly offered them a path to be recognized as citizens. But because the application process was so onerous and poorly administered, tens of thousands of people remain in limbo, shunned in their homeland and unwelcome in neighboring Haiti.

Almost 80 years ago, the Dominicans were more overtly brutal — Abby Phillip, "The bloody origins of the Dominican Republic’s ethnic ‘cleansing’ of Haitians", WaPo 6/17/2015:

[T]he 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations. The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian — or whose inability to roll the "r" in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away. 

As a tie-in with Minions the movie, McDonald's is giving out a dozen different Minions toys with Happy Meals. Like the Minions in the movie, the toys speak the invented language "Minionese" — though you have to bump or hit the toys to get them to respond. The response to this marketing initiative has been dominated by the fact that one of them, the caveman Minion, seems to many people to be saying "What the fuck" and "Well I'll be damned":

(Audio from here.)

Those who want a clear example of truly dreadful prose, dreadful in large part because of the use of the much-loathed agentless passive, should look at examples like this, from the UK Daily Mail website on Sunday, July 12:

The medical director of NHS England has disclosed that up to one in seven hospital procedures are unnecessary, it has been reported.

Sir Bruce Keogh is said to have described waste in the health service as "profligate" and called for it to be reduced.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, the former heart surgeon estimated that up to 15% of the NHS budget is spent on treatments that should not take place.

No, not Atticus — this is Zebra Finch #2702, courtesy of Ofer Tchernichovski.

He sounds like this:

Or, slowed down by a factor of four:

This came up because I'm working on a project with Ofer and Didier Demolin, and in the course of figuring out how to parse zebra finch recordings, I thought it might help to listen to slowed-down versions. It wasn't all that helpful in the end — it's actually easier to hear the structure in the original version, I think.

But the slowed-down version has some unexpectedly half-humanoid bits mixed in with the barks and squeaks, like maybe an alien singing to itself in a Charles Stross story.

Any self-respecting copywriter has a decent mastery of ambiguity. It’s a staple of advertising, but it takes some skill. It’s not that ambiguous language is difficult to find or construct—on the contrary, it would be no easy task to avoid using language that contains potential ambiguity. The trick is to use ambiguous language in such a way that a) the audience becomes aware of the ambiguity, perhaps at a specific, crucial moment in viewing the ad, and b) the two meanings rub against each other in a stimulating manner.

Today's Frazz: