Language Log

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:

Sameer ud Dowla Khan, a phonetician at Reed College, has written an open letter to Terry Gross, which starts like this:

While I am a loyal fan of your program, I’m very disappointed in your interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin from 7 July 2015. As both a phonetician who specializes in intonation, stress patterns, and voice quality, as well as a gay man, I found the opinions expressed in the interview to be not only inaccurate, but also offensive and damaging.

You can listen to that interview, and read the transcript, on the Fresh Air web site — "Filmmaker And Speech Pathologist Weigh In On What It Means To 'Sound Gay'":

Is there such a thing as a "gay voice"? For gay filmmaker David Thorpe, the answer to that question is complicated. "There is no such thing as a fundamentally gay voice," Thorpe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. But, he adds, "there is a stereotype and there are men, to a greater or lesser extent, who embody that stereotype."

In his new film, Do I Sound Gay?, Thorpe searches for the origin of that stereotype and documents his own attempts to sound "less gay" by working with speech pathologist Susan Sankin.

I love dictionaries as much as anyone, but I'm not sure that I'd ever advocate making a film about any of my favorite dictionaries.  Yet this has now been suggested for the Xīnhuá zìdiǎn 新华字典 (trad. 新華字典) (New China character dictionary):

"Will You Watch a Movie Based on Dictionary?" (Anhui News 7/8/15)

At first, one might think this is satire, but when you read this Chinese article about it, you realize they're serious.

Sasha Harris-Lovett, "Meet Wendiceratops, a horned dinosaur unlike any other", LA Times 7/8/2015:

Move over Indominus Rex – scientists have discovered a previously unknown dinosaur in Canada that's cooler than any “Jurassic World” creation. And it’s real.

The creature, a member of the family of horned dinosaurs, was an older cousin of Triceratops that lived about 79 million years ago. Like Triceratops, it had horns emanating from its face and head, along with a bony beak that it used to shred plants before eating them. […]

The story begins with professional fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda, who spotted something that appeared to be a dinosaur bone sticking out of a steep hill in southern Alberta, Canada, in 2010.

Deborah Cameron, "Just don't do it", language: a feminist guide 7/5/2015:

This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.

OK, people haven’t been talking about that article—mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence. This post was inspired by a case in point: a piece published last month in Business Insider, in which a former Google executive named Ellen Petry Leanse claimed that women overuse the word ‘just’.

I want to dedicate a book to a female editor and decided to refer to her in French as "éditeur extraordinaire",  but then had second thoughts because I was afraid I might have the gender wrong.  On the other hand, I was concerned that "éditrice" might have the same sort of connotations as "poetess" or "authoress" in English.   So I asked a number of French friends and American colleagues with native French fluency who have lived in France for many years what they thought it should be.  Here are the results: