Language Log

This sign appears on a door of the National Museum of China in Beijing:

Alexander Bazes sent in the following photograph of a sign taken at a monkey park in Arashiyama (western Kyoto), Japan:

On November 7, publishers Reed Elsevier announced the passing of Pierre Vinken, former Reed Elsevier CEO and Chairman, at age 83. But to those of us in natural language processing, Mr. Vinken is 61 years old, now and forever.

Though I expect it was unknown to him, Mr. Vinken has been the most familiar of names in natural language processing circles for years, because he is the subject (in both senses, not to mention the inaugural bigram) of the very first sentence of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus:

Pierre Vinken, 61 years old, will join the board as a nonexecutive director Nov. 29.

But there's a fascinating little twist that most NLPers are probably not aware of. I certainly wasn't.

Today's Zits:

Jeremy expresses indfference, lack of interest, apathy, boredom via the interjection meh, breaking out briefly to use it sarcastically (or cynically) to express enthusiasm.

I am quite certain that the reviewer kiwi78 was trying to do good things for the Nahm restaurant in Knightsbridge, a district of south-west London. But the comment left at the Bookatable.com site's page about Nahm actually said that the restaurant "never fails to disappoint."

Think about it for a moment. For the restaurant, that's not good, is it? Disappointing. It couldn't fail to disappoint.

But look at the full context of kiwi78's remarks:

Nahm never fails to disappoint on flavour & service. Dishes are complex yet superbly balanced & always beautifully presented. If you're new or not confident with Thai food the staff are very attentive & knowledgeable.

It's supposed to be a great review. And the restaurant took it for that: the management has started including kiwi78's comment in its advertising material!

Yesterday's Tank McNamara:

Or maybe it should be "Pantaloons in the Plasma State". Anyhow, we need a category of reckless mendacity beyond PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" stage, to deal with Jim Meyers and Ashley Martella, "George Marlin: Obama Is ‘Narcissist, Classic Elitist’", NewsMax 9/14/2011. More specifically, to deal with their interviewee, George Marlin, who asserts that

Obama … uses the I word more than I think all presidents have used it collectively in the two hundred and some odd years of our nation.

There's a free web-based tool for IPA entry at i2speak.com:

A few weeks ago I stayed in the Xiányáng hángkōng dà jiǔdiàn / Xianyang Aviation Hotel (a more idiomatic English translation of that would be Xianyang Airport Hotel) 咸阳航空大酒店 near Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. When I went to the bathroom, I was much intrigued to see this sign over the sink:

and this sign on the wall above the bathtub:

A partial inventory of postings on language rage, language peeving, word aversion, and word attraction on Language Log and AZBlog, here. I ran out of steam early this year, so the inventory is reasonably complete only to that point.

Those who enjoyed the "semantically unpredictable sentences" in the S3-WG91 Standards Working Group's test of TTS intelligibility will appreciate the latest SMBC:

"‘Kolaveri Di’ Goes Viral. But Why?", WSJ 11/22/2011; "Kolaveri di next big thing in popular culture", DNA 11/25/2011; "With millions of hits, 'Kolaveri Di' on song", The Times of India 11/25/2011; and so on:

Why can't we all get along? Let's end the argument about whether the Word Of The Year should sometimes be a phrase by having a separate competition for Phrase Of The Year.

And we can divide the POTY prize further into two categories: one category for phrases that remain entirely compositional in meaning, but are newly-common terms for newly-popular concepts; and another category for newly-popular phrases whose common usage is an opaque metaphorical or metonymic extension of its basic compositional meaning.

This doesn't end all possible arguments — the boundary between words and phrases is historically as contested as the boundary between Germany and Poland or Armenia and Azerbaijan. But it should restore relative peace to the Language Log Senior Common Room, as well as giving lexicographers more journalistic shelf space by multiplying the number of linguistic X-OTY items to display. (Next: Catch-phrase Of The Year; Genericide Of The Year; … We can use all 26 letters of the alphabet, from Allomorph Of The Year to Zeugma of the Year, and then we can start on the likely initial clusters, like Structural Metaphor Of The Year. )