Language Log

Reader MD sent in another contribution to the misnegation archives — Lydia Polgreen, "A Murder Sentence Underlines South African Inequality", New York Times, 8/22/2012:

The death of Eugène Terre’Blanche, the leader of the militant white separatist group known as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, seemed an ominous sign that the era of racial harmony that began in 1994 with the end of apartheid and the beginning of nonracial democracy was in peril. […]

The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any notion that it took lightly the killing of one of its citizens, even one opposed to majority rule.

MD notes that "the international print edition must have been printed before an error was noticed. I read it a few times after my initial interpretation seemed wrong." The version that he read had this in place of the last sentence quoted above:

The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any appearance that it did not take the murder of one of its citizens lightly, even one opposed to majority rule.

Lately, we have discussed the Westernization of Chinese languages in several posts, but now, midst the nationalistic fervor of widespread anti-Japanese demonstrations and movements of ships around the Senkakus, comes news of government-sponsored de-Westernization.

A new book by Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, is published today. It opens with a prologue telling the story of the Obama inaugural oath flub, first told on Language Log in Ben Zimmer's piece "Adverbial placement in the oath flub" and the follow-up a day later in "Rectifying the oath flub." Toobin reveals two bits of information that I was not aware of. First, a complete script of the oath, showing exactly where the breaks would come so that Obama would know when to do his repetitions, was sent to Obama's staff as a PDF but never reached the president or anyone close to him, so when Chief Justice Roberts stood facing him to administer the oath, there was a script that Obama had not seen, but neither of the two men knew that. Second, although Roberts had worked over that script, he chose to rely on his famously prodigious memory: he waved away the card that was offered to him with the script on it, and the chance to do a rehearsal: "That's OK, I know the oath," he said. And thus it was that when two men met to perform their extraordinarily important ritual, they were both without scripts and had never rehearsed together. The rest is history.

David Carr, "The Puppetry of Quotation Approval", NYT 9/16/2012:

In July, my colleague Jeremy Peters pulled back the blanket on the growing practice of allowing political sources to read and approve quotations as a precondition for an interview. His story got attention inside and outside the Beltway, in part because the quotation is the last refuge of spontaneity in an age of endlessly managed messages. When quotations can be unilaterally taken back, the Kabuki is all but complete. […]

Good thing those of us who cover business don’t have to deal with the same self-preserving press policies. Except we do. In an anecdotal survey of 20 reporters, it was clear that on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and at some of the big media companies I cover, subjects of coverage are asking for, and sometimes receiving, the kind of consideration that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

Reader DM sends in a link for the for the misnegation archives — Evan Ackerman, "NASA: Warp drive is 'plausible and worth further investigation'", DVice 9/17/2012:

Warp drive, a staple of science-fiction, has just been deemed "plausible and worth further investigation" by the smart and apparently not crazy people over at NASA. And by way of further investigation, they've gone and started trying to create warp bubbles in the lab. […]

All you have to do to travel faster than light is to create a warp field with a ring of exotic matter, encasing your ship in a separate bubble of space, and then get the space to move faster than the speed of light. Technically, since it's the fabric of space that's moving, nothing in space itself is breaking the light speed limit. It's a loophole, yes, but it works. Or at least, we're not sure that it doesn't not work.

Here are two items of ambiguity in advertising, one intentional and one not. First the apparently unintentional ambiguity: a new commercial from the Romney presidential campaign entitled "Failing American Families."

As the terse voiceover puts it, “Barack Obama. More spending. More debt. Failing American Families.”

We are all aware of the horrific violence that is currently being visited upon Japanese people, products, and property in China these days.  Here are some photos to give an example of what's going on. This is the result of anger over Japan's assertion of ownership of some tiny, rocky islands called the Senkakus, which China also claims (in Mandarin they are referred to as Diaoyutai or Diaoyudao).

Since China is threatening to go to war with Japan over the Senkakus, this is very serious business indeed. And yet, a "legendary" art collector, antiquarian, and museum director named Ma Weidu 马未都 has supposedly proclaimed:

Xīcí rù hàndiǎn shì sàngshī wénhuà zūnyán  bǐ Diàoyúdǎo wèntí yánzhòng
西词入汉典是丧失文化尊严 比钓鱼岛问题严重
("The importation of Western words in Chinese texts constitutes a greater loss of cultural dignity than the question of Diaoyutai").

A brief news flash from Edinburgh: at the Winter Graduation Ceremony on Wednesday 28 November the University of Edinburgh will be conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters upon Eric P. Hamp, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, for his contribution to linguistics and in particular to Celtic linguistics and Celtic studies. Hamp has been major figure in etymology and historical linguistics for decades, and is deeply versed in Indo-European languages in a way that few modern linguists are. He has done important work on other language families too, has done fieldwork on Amerindian languages. It is good to see this recognition of his excellence not just by the linguists at Edinburgh but more generally by the university as an institution.

Breffni O'Rourke writes:

Here's one for the 'cannot underestimate' files. The publicity material for the recently published Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (which may coincide with the printed blurb or the preface; I haven't been able to check) starts off with (variants of) this:

The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated.

Doonesbury for Sept. 12:

I'm probably the only Doonesbury reader who saw this strip in terms of variation in future time reference.

Reader MP writes:

A question came up at work about the syntax of something that struck some of us as odd.

The context is fairly technical – it’s one of a series of captions for a diagram. The full set of captions is (approximately) this:

1. System admin creates role
2. System admin sets role permissions
3. Developer requests to assume role
4. [ProductX] returns role session credentials
5. Developer updates folder using role credentials

Reader JTB writes:

Our daughter Sophia just started kindergarten. Last week I asked her to tell me about school. Our conversation went like this:

Me: Tell me something interesting about kindergarten today, honey.
Sophia: Well, there's the pleasant legions.
Me: The pleasant legions?
Sophia: Yeah, it's like a prayer to the flag.

Randall Munroe's latest xkcd strip: