Language Log

Bob Moore:

Did you hear the piece on NPR this morning about sleep walking? They interviewed a teenage girl who at one point uttered the sentence "I slept walked." I don't think I have ever heard anything like that before. She not only analyzed "sleep walk" as a verb-verb compound (where I would have called it a noun-verb compound), but she inflected both verbs to make it past tense. Is this a complete one-off, or is this pattern that is more common than I am aware of?

Bob is referring to a quote in "Lack Of Sleep, Genes Can Get Sleepwalkers Up And About", Morning Edition 8/27/2012, where Miranda Kelly says

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I usually don't realize when I do it. Like every couple months I'll wake up in an odd place, and realize "Oh, I slept walked."

John McCormick and Lisa Lerer. "Romney Sraddles Warmer Pitch With Obama Attacks in Tampa", Bloomberg Businessweek 8//27/2012:

This is a typo worthy of the legendary Grauniad, all too rare in these days of rampant spelling correction.

"The beautiful white dialect", Les blanches exotiques 8/22/2012:

I love how beautiful and simple the exotic white dialect is. Because it has less words and lacks any logical grammar, it just sounds so peaceful, calming, and real. You can just feel the emotion when you listen to them speak. It varies from tribe to tribe, but throughout the white motherland is basically the same. I took a two-week service trip to build a McDonalds with authentic white food and lived with an authentic white family, so I know. It’s so sad that they’ve started using civilized words from modern languages, “cash” and “pajama.” It must be because there’s no concept of cash in white culture. Did you know they have twenty different words for “coffee” but no word for “self-aware?”

Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon. From Ian Crouch on The New Yorker's News Desk blog:

When the lunar module, named the Eagle, touched down, following moments of radio silence that terrified the folks back in mission control, he relayed: “Houston: Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Later, as he made his way out of the lunar module (or LM), he described his progress in banal terms that, because of where they were coming from and what they conveyed, rose to the level of magic: “I’m going to step off the LM now.” And then he issued what is among the most famous proclamations of the last century—a jubilant counterbalance to F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a capstone to J.F.K.’s declaration that “we choose to go to the moon”—a statement that Armstrong had composed and prepared just hours earlier, in between the more pressing business of operating space equipment, according to Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

In "Believed ham", I asked

When did French-language menus start using possessive pronouns, in constructions like et ses/son/sa X "and its/their X", to describe secondary or accompanying ingredients? When did English-language menus start copying this construction? And is it as awkward and odd in French as it is (restaurant tradition aside) in English?

The picture, from a restaurant-reviewing blog, illustrates an "Onglet de black Angus avec ses frites" ("Black Angus hanger steak with its fries"). The only connection that the fries have with the steak is that they're served together — so in what sense are they "its" fries?

A note yesterday from Russell Gray:

Hi Mark, we have a paper out in Science today.  I've attached a copy plus a link to a website where we give a more accessible account of the paper.  I expect this will be rather controversial again but we have been very thorough both with improving the quality of the data and with testing the robustness of our geographic inferences.

The link is http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz

That link goes to an excellent and freely-available site, which contains essentially all of the information in the Science paper, presented in a more accessible way with additional background. There are even animated maps!

In a comment on "'Over the pail'", Ken Brown asked

Is "pail"/ bucket more common in US English than in British? It seems a bit quaint to me. Neither it nor "pale"/fence are a productive part of my use vocabulary I think.

And Brett responded:

"Pail" also sounds a bit quaint (or perhaps "cutesy") to my American ear. There are contexts in which use of "pail" would be completely unremarkable, but they are contexts that are generally quaint or cutesy already—for example: milking a cow by hand, shoveling sand at the beach, or picking blueberries.

Here's a map of the traditional pail/bucket isogloss, from Hans Kurath, "A word geography of the eastern United States", 1949  (via William A. Kretzschmar Jr., "Quantitative areal analysis of dialect features", Language Variation and Change 1996):

PMW writes:

The recent menu posts on LL reminded me of a photo I took circa 2003 in a busy tourist spot on the Cote d’Azur, France. I’m not sure I’ve seen a sign in Europe with such a diversity of translation errors.

The menu describes a set of prix fixe alternatives, including for the first course

Several people have written to note the odd phrase used by Paul Ryan in answering questions about Todd Akin's "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" remarks ("In Exclusive Interview, Paul Ryan Distances Self From Todd Akin", KDKA CBS 2, 8/21/2012):

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“His statements were outrageous, over the pail. I don’t know anybody who would agree with that. Rape is rape period, end of story,” Ryan told KDKA Political Editor Jon Delano.

I suspect that Mr. Ryan aimed at the familiar expression "beyond the pale" and missed, maybe due to blending it with "over the line". Perhaps he himself thinks that the expression is a metaphor for trying to put six gallons of milk into a five gallon pail, or perhaps the eggcorn-suggesting spelling was due to the transcriber at KDKA. (I note that the original article has now substituted "pale" for "pail".)

That's the headline of an article in today's shanghaiist.

What is the greatest Japanese export to China?  Language!

As anti-Japanese protests and riots swirl across China (over some tiny, rocky, contested islands in the middle of the sea between Taiwan and Okinawa), Xu Wenguang, program director of CCTV 1, made this remarkable statement:

Martyn Cornell sent in these entries of a menu from a cheap-and-cheerful “Italian” restaurant in North Point, Hong Kong run by local Chinese:

Todd Akin, nominee of the Republican party for a Senate seat in the fairly conservative state of Missouri, was being asked on TV about his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape, and was trying to clarify why he does not want to make rape grounds for an exception to his no-abortion stance. He said:

It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

It's perfectly clear that by "if it's a legitimate rape" he meant "if it's genuinely a case of rape, legitimately classified as such." But what he said was a telescoping of that: "legitimate rape." And that one little ill-considered nominal — that attributive adjective paired with that noun — has caused a political firestorm. His candidacy may well go up in smoke as a result.

The cover of the August 18 print edition of The Economist: