Language Log

Keith Ablow, "We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists", Fox News 1/8/2013:

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years. This data is not unexpected.  I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

Coincidentally, two syndicated comic strips running today riff off of the old "Eskimo words for snow" canard. In Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy," Satchel the dog discovers that "cats are like the Eskimos of laziness":

And in Jef Mallett's "Frazz," one of the "really really false" statements on Mr. Burke's quiz is "The Inuit have 100 words for snow and one of them is 'humptydiddy'":

(Hat tip, Nancy Friedman and Ed Cormany.)

Carley De Rosa sent in the following photograph taken at the Niujie (Ox Street) Mosque (Niújiē lǐbàisì; simplified 牛街礼拜寺, traditional 牛街禮拜寺) in Beijing:

I recently became interested in patterns of speech and silence. People divide their discourse into phrases for many reasons: syntax, meaning, rhetoric; thinking about what to say next; running out of breath. But for current purposes, we're ignoring the content of what's said, and we're also ignoring the process of saying it. We're even ignoring the language being spoken. All we're looking at is the partition of the stream of talk into speech segments and silence segments.

Why?

Earlier today, "Patriot Voices" (Rick Santorum's PAC) sent out an email containing the following paragraph:

I strongly oppose President Obama's nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense because his confirmation would send a dangerous signal to Iran and other radical Islamic elements which would make our country and our allies less secure. Not only did Senator Hagel tip off the Iranians that he would not use strength to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, he disrespects our strongest ally in the middle east, Israel. Time after time, Sen. Hagel has sought to distance the United States from Israel and refused to stop efforts to end terrorist attacks on Israel. [emphasis added]

This is my nomination for misnegation of the month.

This post hits a trifecta of LLOG themes: the troublesome interaction of multiple negations with scalar predicates that we call "misnegation"; the flexible phrasal or conceptual templates we call "snowclones"; and the multiplication of careless variant quotations.

It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."

Miranda Leitsinger, "11 killer whales free after being 'locked' in ice, mayor says", NBC News 1/10/2013:

Twenty of the Inukjuak villagers were tasked with doing much the same: they were going to remove the broken ice around the area and use chainsaws to enlargen the hole, which was getting increasingly smaller.

Adam Czarnota, who sent in the link, noted that "'Enlargen' put me in such a good mood that I got a chuckle out of 'increasingly smaller', too".

Following up on the recent post about ASR error rates, here's Mary Robinette Kowal doing a dramatic reading of the Google Voice transcript of three phone calls (voicemail messages?) from John Scalzi:

One theory, anyhow:

This is an old SMBC comic, now available as a poster.

Regular readers of LL know that I've always been a partisan of automatic speech recognition technology, defending it against unfair attacks on its performance, as in the case of "ASR Elevator" (11/14/2010). But Chin-Hui Lee recently showed me the results of an interesting little experiment that he did with his student I-Fan Chen, which suggests a fair (or at least plausible) critique of the currently-dominant ASR paradigm. His interpretation, as I understand it, is that ASR technology has taken a wrong turn, or more precisely, has failed to explore adequately some important paths that it bypassed on the way to its current success.

The American Dialect Society (meeting in Boston in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has chosen its Word of the Year for 2012: hashtag. The Twitter term, which has become a pervasive metalinguistic marker, beat out such contenders as YOLO, fiscal cliff, marriage equality, 47 percent, and Gangnam style. The official announcement is here, and you can read my recap of the voting here.

According to David Freedlander, "Anger Over Fiscal-Cliff Deal Fires Up Tea Party", The Daily Beast 1/3/2012:

[A]fter 85 House Republicans joined Boehner in raising taxes without spending reductions during the end game of Monday night’s fiscal-cliff negotiations, Tea Party leaders and conservative activists from around the country are dusting off their tri-corner hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” signs, and now say that their members are as energized as they have ever been since the first Tax Day protests in 2009. And the Republican Party, they add, had better beware.

“We now have 85 members of the House who have shunned their noses at us,” said Dustin Stockton, a Texas- and Nevada-based operative and the chief strategist of The Tea Party.net. [emphasis added]