Language Log

So says Die Welt. But this Teutonic  lexicographical event has gotten an unusual amount of  press coverage in other languages: "English profanity earns place in standard German dictionary", Reuters; "English rude word enters German language", BBC News; "'S***storm' adopted into German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary", The Independent;  "Shitstorm. Němčina má nové slovo, kvůli krizi zdomácnělo", iDNES.cz; "Duitsers omarmen Engelse shitstorm", NOS OP 3; "H αγγλική βρισιά shitstorm μπήκε στα λεξικά της γερμανικής γλώσσας -Τη χρησιμοποιεί και η Μέρκελ", iefimerida; "Shitstorm entra no diccionário alemão depois de usada por Merkel na crise", Diário Digital; "La langue allemande officialise l ' anglicisme ' shitstorm '", ActualLitté; etc.

No doubt this is mostly due to the fact that Angela Merkel was a prominent early adopter. As Metro explains (""‘Shitstorm’ enters German dictionary after becoming popular during eurozone crisis", 7/3/2013):

After being used by Angela Merkel to describe the eurozone crisis, the word shitstorm has now made it officially into German dictionaries.

Duden, the German standard lexicon and the country’s equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, has now recognised the word.

But in German it has a slightly different meaning and has come to define a controversy on the internet rather than the general calamity it is in English.

Duden defines shitstorm as: ‘Noun, masculine – a storm of protest in a communications medium of the internet, which is associated in part with insulting remarks.’

This is something that you don't see every day. It works pretty well in this case, considering… David Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard and Alan Cowell, "Army Ousts Egypt’s President", NYT 7/3/2013:

The general, who had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Mr. Morsi on Monday to respond to what he called widespread anger over his administration’s troubled one-year-old tenure, said the president’s defiant response in a televised address on Tuesday had failed “to meet the demands of the masses of the people.”

Tyler Schnoebelen, "The Weirdest Languages", Idibon blog 6/21/2013:

The World Atlas of Language Structures evaluates 2,676 different languages in terms of a bunch of different language features. These features include word order, types of sounds, ways of doing negation, and a lot of other things—192 different language features in total. […]

The data in WALS is fairly sparse, so we restrict ourselves to the 165 features that have at least 100 languages in them (at this stage we also knock out languages that have fewer than 10 of these—dropping us down to 1,693 languages).

Now, one problem is that if you just stop there you have a huge amount of collinearity. Part of this is just the nature of the features listed in WALS—there’s one for overall subject/object/verb order and then separate ones for object/verb and subject/verb. Ideally, we’d like to judge weirdness based on unrelated features. We can focus in on features that aren’t strongly correlated with each other (between two correlated features, we pick the one that has more languages coded for it). We end up with 21 features in total.

A rare seven word BBC News headline noun pile sighting: "Emma West Croydon tram race rant woman sentenced", BBC News 7/1/2013:

A woman who was filmed shouting racist abuse on a London tram in a video watched by 11 million people has been given a community sentence.

Emma West, 36, of New Addington, admitted racially-aggravated disorderly behaviour likely to cause harassment or distress at Croydon Crown Court.

The Taipei Times for June 27 carried the following article: "Debate rages over currency ‘misprint'".

It is a question of whether the upper part of the long form of the character for the word yī ("one"), i.e., 壹, should be written as 士 ("scholar"), the "correct" configuration, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke extending beyond those of the lower horizontal stroke, or 土 ("land; earth"), as it appears on certain banknotes, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke being shorter than those of the lower horizontal stroke. Fortunately, yī ("one") is usually written as 一, the simplest of all Chinese characters, consisting of only a single horizontal stroke. The complicated form 壹, with twelve strokes, is used in banking, business, and so forth, to avoid mistakes and forgery.

Today Wikileaks posted a statement from Edward Snowden, time-stamped Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC. As originally posted, the first sentence of the fourth paragraph reads as follows:

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot (click to embiggen):

But mysteriously, at around 22:30 UTC (6:30 pm Eastern Time), the sentence was edited to read:

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot:

In response to James Forsyth, "The Gove guide to composition", The Spectator 6/30/2013, Tom Chivers notes that "Michael Gove doesn't know what the passive voice is", The Telegraph 7/1/2013. If you read the exchange, you'll see that Tom Chivers is right: Michael Gove advises against use of the "passive voice", citing an example that is in fact not passive at all — while using the passive voice frequently, correctly, and appropriately, including in the first sentence of the letter introducing his guide to composing letters.

This example certainly belongs in Geoff Pullum's collection. And someone should recommend Geoff's tutorial on "The passive in English" to Mr. Gove.

Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist, "From the mouth of babes and birds", NYT 6/29/2013:

Researchers who focus on infant language and those who specialize in birdsong have teamed up in a new study suggesting that learning the transitions between syllables — from “da” to “do” and “do” to “da” — is the crucial bottleneck between babbling and speaking.

“We’ve discovered a previously unidentified component of vocal development,” said the lead author, Dina Lipkind, a psychology researcher at Hunter College in Manhattan. “What we’re showing is that babbling is not only to learn sounds, but also to learn transitions between sounds.”

Continuing in another connection with the exploration of real-estate listings that I discussed earlier ("Long is good, good is bad, nice is worse, and ! is questionable", 6/12/2013; "Significant (?) relationships everywhere", 6/14/2013), I stumbled on this curious factoid about the use of and and or in trulia.com's listings for the ten cities I've harvested so far:

For the past couple of years I've been writing a language column for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now I'm starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal, called "Word on the Street." Each week I'll be focusing on a word in the news and examining its history. First up, cyber, which is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun.

Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the DOMA decision had some harsh words, to say the least, for the majority opinion. But the word everyone has been fixated on is rather light-hearted: argle-bargle.

As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by '"bare . . . desire to harm"' couples in same-sex marriages.

From reader V.D.:

Justice Kennedy got himself tangled in a quasi-double negative in today's DOMA decision:

Windsor suffered a redressable injury when she was required to pay a tax from which, in her view, she was exempt but for the alleged invalidity of § 3 of DOMA.

Either "but for" or "invalidity" is wrong.  If DOMA is invalid, she is exempt from the tax.

I'm in Ann Arbor for the 2013 LSA Institute, where I'm teaching a course on Corpus-Based Linguistic Research, and this evening the Institute organizers showed "If These Knishes Could Talk: A Film About the New York Accent". It was quite a lot of fun, and I certainly recommend it to all LL readers — though unfortunately it has not previously been shown outside of the NYC area, and the only way to buy a DVD is apparently to contact the filmmaker Heather Quinlan directly.