Language Log

Today's xkcd:

Jen Olenizcak, "Are Spanx Causing Vocal Fry?", Huffington Post 6/17/2014:

New Yorkers are incredibly tense. Articles have been written about our anxiety issues — most adults are incredibly tense.

And the butt tension! I hear so many pinched, throaty Kardashian voices, and when lamenting about the correlation I saw between this body image pulling-it-all-in problem and fry, before a class, a woman suggested the Spanx connection. Now I really don't think one product caused it all, but the act of "pulling-it-all-in" certainly does.

So try it, clench your butt, suck it all in and say hello. Now let it go and say hello. That drop in your voice that probably happened? The clench contributes to shallow breathing and a throaty voice. So loosen up!

Scott Cacciola, "The United Nations of the Hardwood: San Antonio Spurs Use Language Barriers to Their Advantage", NYT 6/15/2014:

The Spurs, as has been well established, have developed an international flair under Coach Gregg Popovich. Eight players on the current roster were born outside the United States. Loosely translated, that means the Spurs use at least four languages — English, Spanish, French and Italian — to communicate among themselves.

Charles McFarlane, "A Dog’s Life: A Brief History of the Turnspit Dog", Modern Farmer 6/13/2014:

Today we think of working dogs as intelligent and loving creatures that are capable of amazing things — like detecting the presence of cancer through smell — but this is only a recent development in the human relationship with dogs. Little more than 150 years ago, dogs were hardly considered anything more than a power source.  

At the center of this was the turnspit dog. […]

Today's Zits:

Ken Mallott found a Chinese use of a Japanese word in a way that surprised him.  He explains that he's an Orioles fan, and in 2012 they signed Taiwanese pitcher Wei-Yin Chen (陳偉殷), who apparently has quite the following back in Taiwan. His fans have taken to posting Chinese messages in traditional script on Facebook before 殷仔's starts, encouraging their fellow supporters to get up early to watch him pitch.

Christopher Ketcham ("The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.", TNR 6/12/2014) documents several cases of sentences and even paragraphs copied verbatim, as well as other cases of "patchwriting":

Robert Drechsel, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the use of material from Klein, Postman, and Hemingway “could be characterized as something that has come to be called ‘patchwriting.’ English and writing professors Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard have defined it as ‘restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source.’ Whether it happens intentionally, carelessly, or as an oversight, it’s a very serious matter.”

Just in case you're not already a fan of Arika Okrent's columns at mental_floss, here are the last few:

11 Tragic Emotions and How to Properly Act Them on Stage (6/11/2014)
The 5 Different Linguistic Styles of Exciting Goal Calls 6/10/2014)
Why Have Baby Names Become Increasingly Female-Sounding? 6/9/2014)
5 Boring Subjects Translated Into Clickbait Headlines (5/30/2014)
Where Do U.S. Coin Names Come From? (5/30/2014)
18 Fancy Words for Specific Shapes (5/28/2014)

Steven Marzuola writes:

I am a technical translator and amateur linguist, and Language Log is part of my regular reading.
So is reddit, and tonight it led me to this link, which is a set of pictures taken by a young couple living in China.
They're all interesting, but the one I wanted you to see is the last one:

Today's PhD Comics:

As in the recently-celebrated case of an alleged 13-year-old Ukrainian, there are circumstances in which the humanity of correspondents may be somewhat obscured.

Following up on two earlier Breakfast Experiments™ ("Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", 6/5/2014; "Consonant effects on F0 are multiplicative", 6/6/2014), here are some semi-comparable measurements of consonant effects on fundamental frequency (F0) in Mandarin Chinese broadcast news speech.

[As I warned potential readers of those earlier posts, this is considerably more wonkish than most LLOG offerings.]

Why do people care about the effects of consonant features on F0? The main reason is that tonogenesis — the historical development of lexical tones — often arises from re-interpretation of "micromelodies" of this kind, typically driven by laryngeal features of consonants such as voiceless vs. voiced (e.g. p,t,k,s vs. b,d,g,z). So it's natural to wonder whether languages where this has already happened, like Mandarin Chinese, retain or suppress such effects.

Josh Marshall, "Did Dave Brat Fib About Princeton?", TPM 6/11/2014:

The Post suggests that Brat was trying to give would-be supporters the sense he locked horns with the elites on an Ivy League campus. And if that was the plan or the impression. That's really not right. But picture, I don't think there's much to see here. As a gotcha, it's an extremely weak one.

"Picture"?

Here's a doubly embarrassing confession. First it involves my use of a construction that I love to make fun of. Secondly my spontaneously generated example is unfortunately also a true sentence.
I was trying on four dresses that have been stored in the attic for a while to see if I could avoid having to shop for a formal dress in Chicago on Friday for the Friday black tie dinner that precedes the Saturday honorary doctorate. I didn't think I was going to be able to fit into any of them, since I've gained back all the weight I lost around 2008-9 and am now close to an all-time maximum. But to my in some ways happy surprise, I found that I could sort of fit into two of them, including the best one. And my surprise was expressed (just talking silently to myself, but obviously in real sentences, since this sentence immediately caught my attention as soon as I "said" it) as "Gosh, I've been fatter for longer than I thought". (The happy part is I may not have to go shopping on Friday, or at least it won't be obligatory to buy a new dress, which takes off the pressure that accompanies last-minute obligatory shopping.)
I still reject that sentence, even though I said it .