Language Log

A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line:

This was, of course, the scond in a series, preceded by Erotic Grammar and followed by Erotic Rhetoric…

Kate Baldanza took this photo in Nanjing:

"Let's have lunch at that café — you know the one . . . Aquamarine," said my friend. And realized immediately, before even getting to the end of the word, that the café was not called anything like that. There is no Aquamarine café in Edinburgh. The one I rapidly guessed my friend was alluding to is a very nice Turkish place on Nicholson Street, and it's called Turquaz (their sign says "TurQuaz"). What the hell was going on with that crazy error? A random brainslip?

Glenn Bingham send in a link to this passage in a recent radio address by Paul LePage, the governor of Maine ("Obamacare is on Hold in Maine", 7/7/2012):

Even more disheartening is that reviving the American dream just became nearly impossible to do. We are now a nation in which supports dependency rather than independence. Instead of encouraging self-reliance we are encouraging people to rely on the government.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Matt Flegenheimer, "A Voice of New York’s Streets, Saying That It’s Safe to Wawk" (New York Times, 7/7/2012):

In a city increasingly conditioned to the automated droning of public address systems, GPS guides and disembodied cellphone sages, Dennis Ferrara stands out, precisely because he seems to fit right in. Mr. Ferrara, 55, the supervisor electrician for the city’s Transportation Department, provides the audio recording at 15 intersections for the department’s so-called accessible pedestrian signals, designed to help people with limited sight cross the street safely.

And for pedestrians at some of New York’s busiest crossings — in Downtown Brooklyn and the Flatiron district of Manhattan, along a main road in Astoria, Queens, and at an oddly shaped junction on Staten Island — he is the distinctly localized soundtrack of the streets.

In Mr. Ferrara’s New York, “Avenue” takes on an “h” or three. The “a” in “Jay Street” is drawn out. And at least one “w” is appended to the first syllable of “Broadway.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” Mr. Ferrara said, in a bit of self-diagnosis. “What can I tell ya?”

Reader GW wrote to ask about a construction in one of Barack Obama's recent speeches:

I was looking at the text of a campaign speech by the President today in Pittsburgh, and noted the following paragraph:

And then I think about Michelle's mom, and the fact that Michelle's mom and dad, they didn't come from a wealthy family. Michelle's dad, he worked a blue-collar job at the sanitary plant in Chicago. And my mother-in-law, she stayed at home until the kids got older. And she ended up becoming a secretary, and that's where she worked at most of her life, was a secretary at a bank.

I don't know if this text is as-delivered or the speechwriters' version, but what stuck out at me was the "NP, pronoun" construction seen here in the first three sentences. I don't think I'd use this construction, at least when speaking in English, but I'm not sure how common it is, or even what it's called. Has LL covered this one before? Does Obama do this a lot? Is it an identifying feature for any particular (sub)dialect?

Yesterday on the public radio program Marketplace, Sarah Gardner interviewed Ben Zimmer about the Obama campaign's "Betting on America" theme ("The president is a 'betting' man", 7/5/2012):

Gardner: Now as you just heard, the president was talking a lot about betting today. He's betting on the American worker, he's betting on Ohio, he's betting on America. What's with all the betting?

Zimmer: Well it reminds me of the whole tradition of gambling metaphors in American politics where you talk about the odds, the whole language of gambling, of bluffing, tipping your hand, raising the stakes. So it draws on that, at the same time is draws on a sense of confidence, the ability to take risks, which is perhaps an image that Obama would like to portray. At the same time, he doesn't want to be seen as a foolish risk taker. He says that he is going to bet on the American worker, and so that is giving you the sense that it's a sure bet, it's a bet that's going to pay off.

In the spring of 1995, I was serving on an academic "Planning and Priorities" committee, and some of my fellow committee-members became concerned that there were too many graduate courses, and that this was a symptom of inadequate focus on undergraduate education. I agreed on both counts, though I also felt that an excessive number of grad courses was — and is — generally a bad thing for graduate programs as well.

Anyhow, I became curious about what the distribution of course registrations was actually like. The following note, unearthed after 17 years and recycled as a Language Log post, was the result.  I fished it out of the midden-heap of old email because of its marginal relevance to the July 4 announcement from CERN. It turns out that graduate students, like the Higgs particle, are bosons — or at least, their course-registration choices obey Bose-Einstein statistics…

As background, we had been given some historical data that included a disturbing table showing the distribution of student enrollments over graduate courses. Expressed as a percentage of all graduate courses offered during the time-period in question, the numbers were:

In the bathroom at a friend's house tonight I saw, on the underside of the toilet lid, firmly affixed with adhesive, a printed paper sign that I truly do not understand. That is, although I comprehend it (it is in six languages, all of which I read well enough to be able to follow the legend in question), I don't follow what its purpose could possibly be. I am truly baffled. Let me show you what it said. Keep in mind that the following is all of what it says. Nothing is missing from the label, and there is no other wording at all (and incidentally, the various accent mistakes are not mine, they are copied from the original). See if you are as baffled as I am:

I previously described the evolution of the Higgs Boson from Leon Lederman's "wraithlike presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter", perhaps bowdlerized by his editors from "the goddamn particle" to "the God particle", and onwards to Dennis Overbye's "kind of cosmic molasses […] that would impart mass to formerly massless particles trying to move through it like a celebrity trying to get to the bar".

Yesterday, the high-energy euphoria at CERN seems to have excited some really exotic metaphorical resonances, combining the elementary building-blocks of cultural cognition in ways not normally seen on earth.

On the blog "Mama's Got Wanderlust", the following sign appears without adequate explanation:

Before turning to the next page, Language Log readers are encouraged to try their hand at an explanation. Write down on a piece of paper what you think the sign means BEFORE you turn the page. Scout's honor!

Mexico Election: Mexican Immigrants Shocked, Weary of PRI Victory

The word weary in this Latino Fox News headline should have been wary, shouldn't it? There hasn't been time yet for anyone to be weary of the PRI this time around.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi), The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, 1993:

What, or who, is standing in our way, obstructing our search for the perfect T-shirt? […] Before we can complete the task begun by the ancient Greeks, we must consider the possibility that our quarry is laying false clues to confuse us. Sometimes, like a spy in a John le Carre novel, the experimenter must set a trap. He must force the culprit to expose himself.

Particle physicists are currently setting just such a trap. We're building a tunnel fifty-four miles in circumference that will contain the twin beam tubes of the Superconducting Super Collider, in which we hope to trap our villain.

And what a villain! The biggest of all time! There is, we believe, a wraithlike presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter. It's as if something, or someone, wants to prevent us from attaining the ultimate knowledge.