Language Log

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer writes:

Is there going to be a language log comment on the article "The English Wars"  in the current issue of the New Yorker?  I find it completely shocking to see that an author who purports to be writing about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism has so little understanding of the subject, and that the editor (presuming that such a position still exists at the New Yorker) would not catch the absurd claim that John Rickford is a prescriptivist.

In the comments on my post "Another Lie from George Will" (5/7/2012), GeorgeW asked

I think I hear Obama use 'extraordinary' and 'extraordinarily' a lot (an 'extraordinary' amount). Is there a way to check this in your data?

I responded

In 127 speech transcripts, in a total of 110,100 words, Obama uses extraordinary 17 times and extraordinarily once. That's a combined rate of 1000000*18/110100 = 163 per million words. In the 425-million-word COCA corpus, extraordinary occurs 13,360 times and extraordinarily 2,701 times, for a combined rate of 1000000*(13360+2701)/425000000 = 38 per million words.

So relative to the language at large, he (or his speech-writers) do use extraordinary a lot.

How this compares to political oratory from other sources is a different question.

Eugene followed up:

[W]ouldn't a president talk about extraordinary things from time to time?

From Lauri Karttunen (via Arnold Zwicky):

I have come to realize that there are a lot of examples on the web of the type "not want to not X" that seem to say the opposite of what they mean. Here are a few:

She failed to give the patient CPR and turned an ambulance away in the mistaken belief that the elderly woman’s had said she did not want not to be resuscitated. (Cambridge, UK, newspaper article)

If a guest does not want not to be disturbed they need only to place the 'Do Not Disturb" sign on the door and their wishes will be respected. (Florida motel)

In the first case, the mistaken belief was that the elderly woman did not want to be resuscitated. In the second case it should say "If a guest does not want to be disturbed …"

Earlier today, AFP photographer Alex Ogle posted on Twitter what looked like an outrageous typo in a column by Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post: the name of Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC/PBS show Sherlock, got transmogrified into "Bandersnatch Cummerbund" on second mention.

Today's SMBC starts with a little lesson in phonetic dialectology:

In a comment on yesterday's post, "Ask Language Log: '… would like to have VERBed'?", John Lawler quoted the phrase "I would of like to of seen it in person", as used in student papers.

Such things are certainly all over the internet, often in the writings of people who are clearly well past their student days:

Would of like to of come, but I'll still be in West Palm Beach.
Just would of like to of seen the World of Tanks and the Museum get a little more exposure.
I would of like to of seen a playmaker in there at least somewhere in midfield,

But the fact is, traditional spelling aside, "I would of like to of seen it" is exactly how I pronounce the phrase myself.

Or rather, a tired old lie repeated yet again: "Will: Without First-Person Pronouns, Obama 'Would Fall Silent'", Real Clear Politics, 5/6/2012 (reproducing part of a panel discussion on ABC's This Week).

If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and a service to him, actually.

Posted on my blog last month, an inventory of postings (on LLog and my blog) on the way the New York Times deals with taboo vocabulary, here.

Three items since then:

BZ, 4/16/12: The first “asshole” in the Times? (link)

AZBlog, 4/29/12: Annals of French taboo avoidance (link)

and today: AZBlog, 5/7/12: Reporting the profane (link)

Bob Ladd asked:

Is there any discussion anywhere of the multiple tense-marking (if that's what it is) in constructions like "We would have liked to have stayed longer" (as opposed to just "We would have liked to stay longer")?  And is it just my impression, or has this become more common?

For what it's worth, there's a very clear discussion of what the difference theoretically could be here.

Web search turns  up the original lyrics to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's song Candle in the Wind, which includes the line "I would have liked to have known you". You would think some Telegraph reader might have made the connection between the song's popularity and the decline of the English language, but if that happened I can't find any evidence of it.

On my blog, here, a survey of the descendants of All your base are belong to us, with a section on the 2004-06 heyday of the snowclone on Language Log.

Those who feel strongly about the issue of (not?) allowing comments should read Julian Sanchez, "The Psychological Prerequisites of Punditry", 5/3/2012, and Andrew Sullivan's comment, "The Feedback Firehose", 5/4/2012.

Yesterday evening at dinner, some members of the LSA Publications Committee were idly discussing the changes over time in fashions for given names.  It's obvious that things change — but it's less obvious whether these changes are cyclic. It makes sense that out-of-fashion names might come back after a generation or two — but does this really happen on a regular basis?

Alan Greenblatt of NPR wonders why news outlets insist on continuing to draw attention to the blindness of Chen Guangchen, the Chinese activist who recently escaped house arrest and who has been at the center of international attention this past week.

Greenblatt writes (NPR online; 5/4/2012):

Chen has been repeatedly referred to as "the blind activist" or "the blind activist lawyer" by news outlets such as The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Washington Post. The Economist's current cover story is headlined "Blind Justice."

On Wednesday, NPR decided not to label Chen a "blind activist"….

Descriptions of Chen as blind may have stuck in part because of the way he burst into broad Western consciousness last week—not through his longstanding campaign against China's one-child policy, but by escaping house arrest and trekking 300 miles to Beijing. The fact that he is blind made the story that much more dramatic.

"We're sticking with 'blind' because Chen's name might not be familiar to readers, but they may be aware that there's a 'blind activist' in trouble," says Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy.

But it doesn't seem like a useful shorthand to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and regular contributor to NPR's Fresh Air.

"It was relevant, obviously, in reference to his escape," Nunberg says, "but the continued use implies a relevance that just isn't there. I don't think it's a 'PC' thing – the point would be the same if he were, for example, 6′7″."