Language Log

Josh Barro, "The Final Word on Mitt Romney's Tax Plan", Bloomberg 10/12/2012:

Rosen also depends on aggressive assumptions about macro-level dynamic effects, where taxes rise not because individual taxpayers report more taxable income but because the economy grows as a whole. In other words, he is depending on rosy — and not necessarily warranted — economic assumptions to make the numbers pencil. [emphasis added]

"To make the numbers pencil"? Economists can certainly make numbers do almost anything, but can they also make numbers crayon, or chalk, or dry-erase marker? And what would it mean if they did?

Here is the name card of one of the officers at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Boston.

Nearly every literate person who receives this card would pronounce her name, 黃薳玉, as Huáng Yuǎnyù, but they would be wrong.

Allan Metcalf chose this fake rule as the winner in his competition to see who could come up with the stupidest fake yet convincing prescriptive rule of English:

Because of should not be used to modify a sentence in the future tense, since it is a logical fallacy to impute a cause to something that is not (yet) true. Rather, a construction such as due to or owing to should be used, or the sentence should be rewritten to be more clear.

From the November issue of Mental Floss (not online yet), under the title "The 25 Most Powerful TV Shows of the Last 25 Years":

You don't need to turn on the TV to hear The Simpsons. Just chat with pretty much anyone. As University of Pennsylvania linguistic professor Mark Liberman wrote in 2005, "The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases, and sundry other textual allusions."

Liberman's assertion sounds crazy — at least until you remember there's a Millhouse quote for every occasion, Even the hulking gatekeeper fo the language, the Oxford English Dictionary, has found a spot fo Homer Simpson's "D'oh!". Mmmmm … linguistic acceptance.

The winner for the 2012 Nobel prize in literature is Mò Yán 莫言 (means roughly "speechless"), pen name of Guǎn Móyè 管谟业.

Currently the most comprehensive exposition of his work is Shelly W. Chan's A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan published by Cambria Press in 2011.

Yesterday, there was talk from the PRC that, if Mo Yan won the prize, this would be the first for China, but that is far from the truth, since Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and Liu Xiaobo — who languishes in prison — won the peace prize in 2010.

Despite the good news for Mo Yan that is being trumpeted around the world, his simple two syllable pen name is being murdered as "Mow Yawn", "Moe Yahng", and so forth. Here is a recording of what it sounds like in Modern Standard Mandarin as pronounced by a native speaker.

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Yesterday's Unstrange Phenomena:

I was surprised, yesterday, to get a thoughtful letter of resignation from a LLOG commenter. To preserve the anonymity of his pseudonymity, I'll call him 'X'. Mr. X's stated reason for leaving was that

LL is becoming far too centered on my babblings.  Defending my own crudity is becoming tiresome, time-consuming, and harmful to others – notably yourself and whoever else's good names are behind the board.  I prefer to do whatever is most helpful and appropriate – in this case I've missed that target pretty goddamned impressively.

People — especially Americans — are ignorant. This is something that Everyone Knows, because we read or hear about it from time to time in the mass media. Thus we can listen to Robin Young tell us on NPR's Here and Now that

A new survey conducted by Chicago's McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which has yet to open, finds that only 28 percent of Americans are able to name one of the constitutional freedoms, yet 52 percent are able to name at least two Simpsons family members.

Or we can read in the New York Times that

Diane Ravitch, an education historian […], said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

In previous posts, I chronicled the bizarre story of how the Hangeul alphabet was chosen to be the "official" script for a language called Cia-Cia spoken by an obscure tribe in Indonesia:

• "The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula"
• "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II"
• "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III"

Because the whole proposition was so iffy (a lost cause from the very beginning), I think I gave up after that.

Today's Dilbert:

Reader PH feels that the meaning of entitlement has changed from "a legitimate claim" to "an illegitimate claim", and wonders when and how and why this happened. As an example of currrent usage, he points to Philip Rucker, “Romney sees choice between ‘entitlement society’ and ‘opportunity society’”, Washington Post 12/20/2011:

Mitt Romney framed the 2012 presidential election in a speech here Tuesday night as a choice between an “entitlement society” dependent on government welfare and an “opportunity society” that enables businesses to flourish.

As I followed last month's big educational scandal in Britain, the story of the teacher who ran away with a young schoolgirl, a song was going round in my head. The obvious one (what else?): Sting's "Don't Stand So Close to Me," the last big hit by The Police back in 1980 (they recorded a moodier reprise of it in 1986). Sting's lyrics ("Young teacher, the subject // Of schoolgirl fantasy…”) are a remarkable piece of writing, telling their story in spare yet evocative phrases. But I've noticed something else: The grammar of the song's chord structure also contributes to the storytelling.

When I went to the Einstein Bros Bagels shop in Houston Hall at 7:39 a.m. this morning to get my usual sausage, egg, and cheese on a ciabatta loaf, I noticed this sign taped to the cash register: