Language Log

J.M. wrote to alert me to a frightening prospect for hunters and bears in Maryland, revealed by the Washington Post's Afternoon Buzz email newsletter:

The new hunting season opens today, with more hunters and more bears allowed to be killed.

Today marks the beginning of Open Access Week, and last week's announcement about changes to the Linguistic Society of America's publications program was like an early OA Week present. Some highlights:

• All content published in Language will be made freely available on the new LSA website after a one-year embargo period.
• Authors who wish to have their content available immediately, either on the Language site or on other websites, may pay a $400 article processing fee to do so.
• The contents of Language will continue to be immediately available to LSA members and to other subscribers of Project MUSE.

Information about more Open Access goodness to come at the LSA's Annual Meeting in January here.

A strange piece of headline-ese: "Castro dismisses rumors that he at death's door", Reuters 10/22/2012.

Typo? Poor command of English? Couldn't fit the 's (but had room for "that")? Normal Reuters headline language? We report, you decide.

In a message about the "excruciatingly slow internet speed in China" that I privately circulated to some friends, students, and colleagues, I made the statement that "in many cases that I have personally experienced, the internet speed in China is actually hundreds of times slower than it is in the United States and elsewhere in the world."  Geoff Wade wrote back to me:  "Grammatical question: can something be hundreds of times slower than anything else?"

John Wells, "with, regretful", 10/19/2012:

I found myself being just a tiny bit querulous when commenting on a posting in Language Log. […]

"President Strikes Blow for Finalize as English", NYT 11/30/1961:

In the course of his highly articulate new conference today, President Kennedy struck one grating note for lovers of the English language. He used that bureaucratic favorite "finalize."

"We have not finalized any plans," Mr. Kennedy said when asked about a possible trip overseas.

The new edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines finalize as "to put in final or finished form." It gives as an example the use of the word by former President Eisenhower.

A grieving linguist commented today that "Eisenhower began the process, and Kennedy is finalizing it."

And not satisfied with one little joke, the editors followed up with another — "Finalized?", 11/30/1961:

Mr. President, are you sure you gave the old place a thorough housecleaning after you moved in? It seems that your predecessor left a few loose words behind that you have inadvertently picked up. When you said yesterday, "We have not finalized any plans," it sounded for all the world like a previous occupant who once said, as quoted in Webster's Third (or Bolshevik) International: "Soon my conclusions will be finalized." In any case, please be careful where you walk, because there may be some loose syntax lying about. Meanwhile, let's invite the clearners in. They'll have the know-how to get the job finishized.

Amy Reynaldo spotted this crash blossom currently featured on the home page of the Chicago Tribune:

Among the "10 best things Jean Claude van Damme has ever said", according to BuzzFeed, #2 is this:

It struck me that there might be an interesting linguistic angle on one of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your view) of the second presidential debate last Monday night: Candy Crowley fact checking Mitt Romney on the fly and telling him "He [Obama] did in fact, sir," refer to the embassy attack in Libya as an act of "terror" in a Rose Garden speech the day after the event. A brief, non-partisan description of the exchange, and the controversy about it, can be found in this video from comparative journalism site Newsy.com. Conservatives were furious, liberals delighted.

Looking around at the lively blogosphere discussion, I've found two potentially interesting linguistic aspects here:

• There is a difference between "terror" and "terrorism" (in the diplomatic/international relations world) and Obama did not say "terrorism".
• Obama used the words "acts of terror" but he was referring to the 9/11 attacks or acts of terror in general, not the Benghazi attack.

On the "terror" vs. "terrorism" distinction, see this 2004 piece by Geoff Nunberg for a fascinating discussion of the shift from the latter to the former in the language of the Bush administration. The Newsy story above also mentions legal implications of the word "terrorism".

The second angle, and the crux of the matter, has to do with what Obama might or might not have been referring to when he used the phrase "acts of terror", and this seems like something about which linguists might have something useful to say. So here's a stab at it.

When Google's Ngram Viewer was launched in December 2010 it encouraged everyone to be an amateur computational linguist, an amateur historical lexicographer, or a little of both. Today, the public interface that allows users to plumb the Google Books megacorpus has been relaunched, and the new version makes it even more enticing to researchers, both scholarly and nonscholarly. You can read all about it in my online piece for The Atlantic, as well as Jon Orwant's official introduction on the Google Research blog.

Reader Jacob Baskin wrote with an interesting ambiguity that he was reminded of reading my recent post about "the wife and mother of two men killed in a fire". He writes

In the context of third-world development, I recently heard the factoid that "$1 in the hands of a woman is, on average, worth $10 in the hands of a man" (here, for instance).

Does this mean, "Each dollar that a woman has is worth, to her, what ten dollars would be to a man"? Or, "Each dollar that a woman has would be worth, if it were in the hands of a man, ten dollars"? Clearly the former meaning is intended, but as with that "duck/rabbit" optical illusion, I can make myself see the sentence in either way.

I'm hard pressed to think of other sentences with two possible meanings in direct opposition to each other. I also can't quite figure out what's going on with the sentence to create this ambiguity. Just thought this might be interesting to you.

Yes, it’s interesting! Here are my first thoughts, for what they’re worth. I also easily hear both meanings, (plus a third, I discovered as I wrote this) and I think both (maybe all three) patterns are probably common.

An interesting query from reader M.Y.:

I read your article on the alphabet olympics yesterday and followed one of the links, and then one of its links, and so on.  I was merrily traipsing thru the internet when I came upon a page that threw me: "The Rules and Misrules of English Spelling".

The note on "th" (note (f)) gives a list of words with the "this" sound (what I'd call "voiced th" — ð rather than θ) that includes the word "with".  I was surprised — I have always used unvoiced as the pronunciation of that word, and had never noticed anyone doing otherwise.  Sure, voicing gets *added* sometimes due to context, but surely unvoiced is the target — right?  Apparently wrong.  My Pocket Oxford gives only the voiced pronunciation, and my Houghton Mifflin Canadian gives the voiced version first, as does my New Lexicon Websters.  The two pronunciation sites I found online also gave voiced pronunciations.

Local radio station WFCR on Thursday, October 11 started a report with a sentence that gave me a big double-take:

“The wife and mother of two men killed in a fire in Northampton has filed suit …”

And the next morning, October 12, I saw almost the same words in the local paper, the Hampshire Gazette:

Photo caption:

Alleged arsonist Anthony Baye has been sued by Elaine Yeskie, the widow and mother of the two men killed in a Northampton house fire he allegedly set.

Beginning of story:

The widow and mother of men killed in a house fire in 2009 filed a wrongful death lawsuit Wednesday against alleged fire-starter Anthony P. Baye. Elaine Yeskie, 77, is seeking monetary and punitive damages against Baye, …

The version under the photo caption makes the description an appositive phrase, so we already know that it’s a description of one person. But the beginning of the radio story really took me by surprise and made me grab my pen. I feel subjectively sure, though I could of course be wrong, that I could never say that that way. All the ways I could express it take more words; about the shortest acceptable version I can find is “The wife of one and mother of the other of two men killed in a fire …”