Language Log

Laura Bailey sent in this Chinglish specimen from Jingzhou, China which was spotted by John Hotchkiss and published as sign of the week no. 181 in the travel section of the Telegraph:

BBC News is a reliable source for the misleading headlines we know as crash blossoms (e.g., here, here, here). The latest comes to us via a Twitter tip from Ben Lillie, who retweeted Mikko Hypponen's double-take: "What took down the US drone? Iranian TV shows did! Or maybe I'm misreading this." Here's the headline:

Iranian TV shows downed US drone

And here's the full story, in case you're still stumped. [Update: Judging from the comments, it's not much of a stumper.]

Jon Miles sent a link to a slashdot comment on Russian scientists' plans to clone a mammoth:

All this in the mist of global warming.

"Mist" for midst is in the Eggcorn Database, submitted in 2005 by Arnold Zwicky based on a sighting reported on ADS-L by Larry Horn:

“well, in the mist of all of this with [name of spouse with cancer] I had fell and hit my head…”

On my blog, here, some commentary on Geoff Pullum's recent posting on life's twists and turns, putting a name (sentential overlap portmanteaus) to the phenomena he talked about, and giving an updated inventory of postings on phrasal overlap portmanteaus.

About a week ago, the National Science Foundation released "Rebuilding the Mosaic: Fostering Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation in the Next Decade".  You can get some of the background from the press release, or read the whole report; but I want to quote three of the bullet points from the Executive Summary:

• Future research will be interdisciplinary, data-intensive, and  collaborative. That vision rests on thorough grounding in the  core SBE sciences that continue to present important, discipline-based research and methodological challenges.
• The research community looks to NSF/SBE to provide leadership  and direction in building capacity and infrastructure, most notably in interdisciplinary training (capacity-building) and infrastructure  (data and facilities to support analysis, simulation, tools, and  training in new research methods, including integration and  synthesis across data, methods, and disciplines).
• Four major topic areas have been identified within the wealth  of ideas received: population change; sources of disparities; communication, language, and linguistics; and technology, new  media, and social networks.

Today's Non Sequitur:

Swiss Life, the insurance company, has a series of advertisements (see them here) in which the punchline is always "For all life's twists and turns: flexible financial plans", and the main text, in large print to catch your attention, is a non-sentence with weird structure. For example:

A reader named Shreevatsa wrote to ask me what kind of structure these lines have. Well, no structure that English syntax permits. But I've seen this kind of thing before, and I'll tell you where.

In "Reputable linguistic "lie detection"?", 12/5/2011, I promised to scrutinize some of the research on linguistic deception detection, focusing especially on the work cited in Anne Eisenberg's 12/3/2011 NYT article "Software that listens for lies".  This post is a first installment, looking at the work of David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina ("Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Corporate Conference Calls", Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Working Paper No. 83, July 2010).

[Update: as of 6/5/2019, the working papers version no longer exists, but a version under the same title was published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 2012.]

The misconception that language and culture march in lockstep fashion is so prevalent that pronouncements about grammar can often be used as a sort of Rorschach test to reveal how people really feel about a particular culture. I suspect it's more socially acceptable to vent indirectly about a culture by denouncing its grammar than it is to comment bluntly on the culture itself. Ergo, innocent grammar ends up shouldering the blame for the sins of its speakers.

Journalist Christie Blatchford indulged recently in a bit of linguistic finger-pointing while covering the trial of Mohammad Shafia, an Afghan-born Montreal resident. Shafia, together with his wife (Tooba Mohammad Yahya) and son (Hamed Shafia), has been charged with murdering his three daughters and first wife in an alleged "honor" killing. Blatchford reports the following from the testimony of a relative of the slain wife (Ms. Amir):

Several readers have noted the article by Anne Eisenberg in Saturday's New York Times, "Software that listens for lies":

SHE looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.

But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars.

That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie.

Dr. Hirschberg is not the only researcher using algorithms to trawl our utterances for evidence of our inner lives. A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.

Winter has definitely come to Scotland. It is cold, and when light first returns to the sky around 9 a.m. I can see snow on the cars outside my apartment that have driven in from out of town. The winter silly season in the UK newspapers has begun. Here is Charles Nevin in a putatively quite serious newspaper, The Independent:

Minor British Institutions: The white hell

The most unexpected regular event in Britain is on its way, if it hasn't already arrived.

The Inuit may have more than a few words for snow, but so do we: transport chaos, hundreds stranded in sub-zero misery, grounds to a halt, disrupted flights, mass cancellations, forced to spend another night, enjoying another day off school, clear or don't clear the pavement outside your house if you don't want to be sued, it doesn't happen in Norway.

UK broadcasting personality Jeremy Clarkson is paid millions of dollars a year out of the BBC's revenue, which is raised by means of a tax that all owners of TV equipment are required to pay. Wouldn't you agree that he should be fired from his job if he used his privileged position to advocate on nationwide public TV that nurses and teachers on strike should be rounded up and shot in front of their families?

I think I'd be happy to see him fired for that. If he had done it. Over this weekend an extraordinarily stupid manufactured news brouhaha led to a large proportion of the British public believing that he had. But he hadn't. Journalists either don't know how to report speech acts accurately or they aren't trying.

In the most recent Penny & Aggie, needing an apparently random choice of college class to play a role in an undergraduate interaction, the author chose "Linguistics":

This presupposes that linguistics courses are a normal part of the college landscape, which would certainly be a step forward.