Language Log

R.L. writes to ask whether the phrase "a life-threatening diagnosis" is unfairly blaming the messenger.

From Victor Steinbok:

From Megan Stone, via Heidi Harley:

A friend of mine, who was an English major with me in undergrad, runs the Twitter account for MBTA, the Boston public transportation system.  This morning, she posted the following:  “#MBTA #OrangeLine Svc is suspended at DTX due to a Medical Emergency. For Green Line Svc, please board at Park St. http://bit.ly/1c6GJEk”.  And a follower replied: “@MBTA BECAUSE OF a medical emergency NOT due to one! The use of due to REQUIRES a fiduciary (that means $$) responsibility. #GrammarMatters”.  Now, I know my ridiculous prescriptivist rules pretty well, between being one (a prescriptivist, not a rule) for most of my life and following LLog, but I’d never heard this one.  So, I did what any responsible language scientist would do; I googled diligently to see what might be underlying this guy’s claim.  What I found were several people railing about the differences between “due to” and “because of” in a different sense:  apparently “due to” is supposed to head an adjectival phrase, while “because of” heads an adverbial one.  As such, @MBTA’s use of “due to” was technically incorrect, but for a totally different reason.  (See, for example, this page.)  What I did NOT find was anyone who even mentioned this “fiduciary” business.

It's been a while since I posted a Breakfast Experiment™ — things have been hectic here — but yesterday in a discussion with some phonetics students, I learned that certain old ideas about (linguistic) intonation have passed out of memory. And in trying to explain these ideas, I posed a problem for myself that is a suitable subject a little hacking during this morning's breakfast hour.  Attention Conservation Notice: We're going to wander in the history-of-phonetics weeds for a while here.

Fearful that the languages of their countries are becoming mutually unintelligible, linguists from North Korea and South Korea are joining forces to create a common dictionary, as described in this article from the South China Morning Post:  "Academics try to get North and South Korea to speak same language" (11/3/14)

In a comment on a recent Language Log post concerning another subject, ThomasH opined that he'd like to see a discussion concerning the prescriptiveness/descriptiveness of the article just cited:  "Personally it seems both futile — without more actual language transactions between the two countries — and pointless, with bonus points for the complaint about English loan words being part of the 'problem'."

Geoff Pullum wrote ("Adverbing, verbing, and adjectiving", 11/5/2014):

… for the most part what you get in the go all ____ on you [frame] is adjective-headed phrases …

While I hardly ever disagree with Geoff, my intuition said otherwise in this case, so I checked.

I just moved house this week. (Had to. Lease unexpectedly terminated on the second day of classes in the new academic year. Gaaahh!) Colleagues and friends keep asking me how it went. I've decided that the right thing to say is: "It all went like a military operation."

"I don't want to go all language nerd on you," says the female character in today's xkcd cartoon, "but I just legit adverbed 'legit', verbed 'adverb', and adjectived 'language nerd'." Is she correct?

In recent years, The New Yorker's coverage of the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" divide in English usage has been, shall we say, problematic. In 2012, we had Joan Acocella's "The English Wars," critiqued by Mark Liberman here and here. That was followed up by Ryan Bloom's Page-Turner piece, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which I tackled in "The New Yorker vs. the descriptivist specter."

In Acocella's piece, Steven Pinker is set up as a descriptivist strawman on the basis of a wildly off-the-mark reading of an essay he contributed to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. (Pinker serves as chair of the AHD Usage Panel.) He ably defended himself in a subsequent letter to the editor and at more length in a piece for Slate, "False Fronts in the Language Wars." Now another New Yorker critic, Nathan Heller, makes a mess of things in his review of Pinker's book The Sense of Style.

Or something else:

On December 15, 2012, Jakob Leimgruber sent in the following photograph of an unusual sign in Montreal:

Today's PhD Comics:

Last week, China was gaga over Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg for gamely, if somewhat lamely, speaking Mandarin before an audience of Tsinghua University students:

"Zuckerberg's Mandarin" (10/23/14)

In the days following his sensational performance at Tsinghua, while not universally showered with adulation (and Facebook is still blocked in China), Zuckerberg was generally acclaimed for his gutsy, good-natured effort to speak to Chinese people in their own language.

In stark contrast, poor Tim Cook (Apple CEO) was mocked by the Chinese netizenry for his declaration in Bloomberg Businessweek:  "So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay…."

"Tim Cook Speaks Up" (10/30/14)

The resultant hullabaloo on the Chinese internet was instantaneous:

"Tim Cook Coming Out Has Turned China Into a Nation of 5th-Graders:  Despite the Apple CEO's good intentions, Chinese netizens can't seem to stop mocking iPhones for being gay. " (10/30/2014)