Language Log

If you go to the FAQ page for the Bridgeport and Port Jefferson Steamboat Company ferry service between Connecticut and Long Island and click on "How far in advance can I make a reservation?" you will see the following:

How far in advance can I make a reservation?

Reservations can be made up to 2 hours in advance of the departure (depending on availability).

What a disaster. They've managed to answer the wrong question!

On the heels of the notorious Nooking of War and Peace, Shane Horan sends along "a priceless search-and-replace error on the rules page of an Irish secondary school." St. Joseph's College in Borrisoleigh, County Tipperary has an entire section on "personal electronic deDeputys": though "mobile phones and other electronic deDeputys can be very useful and helpful," the school's rules say "these deDeputys may not be powered on while the student is on the school grounds, including before classes begins or at break or lunch time."

Last year, Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin published a book under the title Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus. The background of the book was a course on "The Poverty of the Stimulus, Machine Learning, and Language Acquisition", which the authors gave at the LSA Summer Institute at Stanford in 2007. In the preface, the authors thank an impressive collection of linguists, computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers "for helpful discussion of many of the issues that we address in this monograph".

An hour-long discussion between the authors and Chris Cummins was just released as a podcast in the New Books in Language section of the New Books Network. Cummins' online intro to the podcast opens with this bit of snark:

In linguistics, if a book is ever described as a “must read for X”, it generally means that (i) it is trenchantly opposed to whatever X does and (ii) X will completely ignore it. Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin, Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) is described, on its dust-jacket, as a “must read for generative linguists”.  Apparently generative linguists have so far taken the hint.  This is a great pity, as this book is not only very pertinent, but also succeeds in eschewing most of the polemical excess that tends to engulf us all in this field.

Richard Sproat, who contributed the cited jacket blurb, quipped in an email that "Apparently I did you a disservice by saying it was a must read".

While shopping for a card for my dad the other day (he will be 90 on August 7) I noticed a sign of the times: a birthday card with a big silver "100" on it — one of quite a few, in fact, manufactured specifically for birthdays of people who reach that age. The extreme longevity made possible by modern medicine, nutrition, and social care may be a disaster for pension plans and health insurance companies, but it has inspired a new niche product for card manufacturers. They didn't make Happy 100th Birthday cards fifty years ago. I was puzzled, though, when I looked inside. The inscription was distinctly peculiar.

Tom Roeper sent the following "Summer question" around to the UMass Linguistics Department the other day, and I offered to put it onto Language Log as a guest post. What follows is all Tom's. (I've never worked on this topic myself).

For anybody who is intrigued: This is a summer question because you might have time in the summer to devote 10 minutes to it — if it captures your fancy. For several years [too many actually] in my various explorations of recursion, I have looked at cases like: hero after hero after dead hero => all the heroes are dead.

Today in the NYT, I read this quote from Ray Bradbury who just died: "it was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another" My question is: what does this sentence mean?  Is it a set of frenzies followed by a set of elations followed by a set of enthusiasms or are they systematically interspersed, or randomly interspersed? Any comments welcome– Tom

Brendan O'Kane received this image posted to Facebook from a friend of a friend, and he kindly passed it on to me:

Simon Hunter spotted the following on a student's desk:

Toni Tan spotted he following warning on a door in Toronto on Memorial Day weekend:

Reader K.D., who earlier alerted us to a case of hieroglyphic prescriptivism, has sent in this fascinating note:

In the recent Ridley Scott Alien-prequel Prometheus Proto-Indo-European plays a small but significant role.  I won't go into too much detail in case you don't want it spoiled for you, but in an early scene one character is learning the language via a high-tech language tape, and recites part of Schleicher's fable.  Much later, in a pivotal scene, the same character speaks a language which is not named, and for which no translation is given; I'm fairly certain based on the earlier set-up and the actor's intonation and accent in the two scenes that it is intended to be PIE.

Another example of e-publishing string-replacement gone wrong, from the Kindle edition of Ed McBain's Blood Relatives, originally published in 1975:

Reader JB described a visit to the Peabody Museum in New Haven, "where in addition to the classic dinosaur bones and so on they had a temporary exhibit aimed at educating kids about the nation’s burgeoning obesity problem and its (per sort of unreflective conventional wisdom) causes". One feature of this exhibit was "a set of wooden doors concealing popular snack foods where you could read a blowup of the ingredients list from the package and then open the door to see what it described".

The associated legend explained:

Remember: snacks with few ingredients that you can pronounce are usually the best choices.

The Queen's English Society (QES), mentioned only a couple of times here on Language Log over the past few years, is no more. It has ceased to be. On the last day of this month they will ring down the curtain and it will join the choir invisible. It will be an ex-society. Said Rhea Williams, chairman of QES, in a letter to the membership of which I have seen a facsimile copy:

At yesterday's SGM there were 22 people present, including the 10 members of your committee. Three members had sent their apologies. Not a very good showing out of a membership of 560 plus!

Time was spent discussing what to do about QES given the forthcoming resignations of so many committee members. Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role. So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30th June 2012

(Quest is the society's magazine.) Is this a sad day for defenders of English? Not in my view. I don't think it was a serious enterprise at all. I don't think the members cared about what they said they cared about. And I will present linguistic evidence for this thesis.

Preet Bharara, "Asleep at the Laptop", NYT 6/3/2012:

THE alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime — and they’re not understating the threat.