Language Log

Lately I've been trying to explain to my friends who don't know Chinese what fèihuà 废话 means.  Basically it is composed of the two morphemes "waste / useless / abandoned / ruined / maimed" and "talk", i.e., "nonsense".  To give a sense of its implications, here is a longer list of English definitions:  nonsense, rubbish, garbage, bullshit, bunkum, buncombe, claptrap, blah, stuff, bunk, trash, guff, twaddle, tripe, bull, poppycock, inanity, piffle, yap, absurdity, empty talk, balderdash, yackety-yak, yak, yack, tootle, blab, haver, codswallop, prattle, gab, blabber, fiddlestick, fiddle-faddle, overtalk, babble, blather.

Ferris Jabr reports on a press conference where neuroscientists try to come to terms with some of the problems in their discipline that we've covered over the past few years ("Neuroscientists: We Don’t Really Know What We Are Talking About, Either", Scientific American 4/1/2012):

The folks at Google Labs pulled out all the stops to show off some of the Really Advanced Search capabilities that we can look forward to in coming months…

Farhad Manjoo, "Apple Doesn’t Need To Make the TV of the Future: The revolution is already here—and it’s called the Xbox", Slate 3/27/2012.

If the rumors are true, Apple will release a television set later this year that it will tout as the most amazing boob tube ever invented.

The biggest selling point will be Apple’s promise to make navigating our viewing choices easier. Say you want to watch Tower Heist on a Saturday night. You’d first check Netflix, because if it’s there, it’ll be streamed free for members. If it’s not, and if you subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service, you ought to check there, because you might get a discount. If that fails, you’ll look for the movie on iTunes, Hulu Plus, or Comcast in whatever order is most convenient for you. The whole process is a frustrating mess, one that Apple will likely try to solve by building a cross-platform search engine into its TV. Instead of going to every service separately, you’ll just say, “Hey TV, I’d like to watch Tower Heist!” and the screen will show you where the flick is playing, and for how much. You’ll just have to choose one and press Play.

When CEO Tim Cook shows off Apple’s TV set this fall, I bet he’ll call voice-activated universal search a revolutionary way to interact with your television. What Cook probably won’t mention is that it already exists. Indeed, much of what Apple is likely to build into its TV is available today on a gadget whose interface is just as easy to use as anything Apple will cook up. The device is called the Xbox 360.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has turned its video-game console into your TV’s best friend.

In yesterday's South China Morning Post (Saturday, March 31, 2012), Education section, there is an article by Raymond Li entitled "US136b — Cost of Illiteracy on Mainland". Here's the link (sorry I can't send a link that provides full access for non-subscribers).

Jean Véronis ("Sarkozy: Je revient", Le Monde 3/23/2012) traces the rate of je usage in 728 speeches by Nicolas Sarkozy, delivered over a period of nearly six years:

(French je is the first-person singular pronoun as used in subject position, approximately comparable to English I).

Sarkozy's variable use of je (between roughly 0.4% and 1.8%) exhibits long-term trends that plausibly track the political calendar.

Our posts about political language are usually reactions to things that politicians say, or things that pundits say about politicians. But this one is about something that mainstream pundits are not saying. Or more precisely, no longer saying very often.

The "President Me, Myself and I" meme — the false idea that Barack Obama uses first-person singular pronouns unusually, even unprecedentedly, often — seems to have slithered back into the swamp grass and gone dormant. It continues to infest the American Thinker (e.g. recently here), and it occasionally scurries out of the website weeds in places like Forbes, where one John Mariotti recently made a casual reference to the conventional falsehood in promoting his forthcoming book:

No other presidents in history have made so many speeches, appeared on television so many times, and used the pronouns “I” and “my” so many times.

But this sort of thing is not now regularly featured in the Op-Ed pieces of mainstream gasbags like George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Stanley Fish, as it was a few years ago.

Matt Cherett on Buzzfeed said: "Tonight, my friend Frank sent me a link to the Wikipedia entry for RHOBH star Kim Richards, which he'd just rewritten entirely in the passive voice, making it nearly unreadable and, at the same time, infinitely better." He supplied a screenshot.

But the spoof rewriting, supposed to be in the passive voice throughout, instead provides a fascinating a corpus of new evidence concerning the complete inability of educated Americans to understand the concept of passive voice. The attempts to create passive versions of the original fail as often as they succeed:

• An American actress, former child actress, and television personality is (born September 19, 1964) Kimberly "Kim" Richards. [Merely reverses subject and complement of an ascriptive copular clause, changing A is an F to An F is A.]

A half a dozen people have sent me versions of this clip of Rick Santorum giving a campaign speech on March 27 in Wisconsin:

(The relevant passage starts at 34:24 of the recording.)

Banner headline in this morning's Daily Pennsylvanian:

The most recent Scenes From a Multiverse cleverly combines the intelligent design controversy with (an indirect form of) the Cretan liar's paradox:

Under the rubric "Kerning 101: I rest my case on the importance of spacing", Toni Tan, Director of Cambria Press, sent me this photograph:

Last week, I came across what I thought was an artful headline in my local paper (Calgary Herald; 03/21/1012):

Police looking into death by Balzac

What reader wouldn't be lured into dipping further into this article, into wondering what human tragedy or comedy awaits in the finer print? Are we to be treated to the investigation of a lurid, long-unsolved murder committed by one of the fathers of literary realism? A horrible accident involving a tome flung from a high-rise balcony? Someone suffering an asthma attack after reading a suffocating passage of nineteenth-century French prose?