Language Log

From Jeffrey Shalit, "Funny Word Order in a Poster Advertising a Study on Word Order", 12/11/2011:

ABC is proving itself to be the Newt not network. Earlier this month, Newt Gingrich provided a puzzling (but technically correct) instance of negation in an interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News: "It's very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I'm going to be the nominee." Last night, after the Republican presidential debate in Iowa sponsored by ABC News, political analyst Matthew Dowd made a surprising observation on Gingrich's performance:

There was not a single attack tonight that he did not not engage on.

Paul Sleigh writes about a headline from the Scientific American website:

I actually felt my brain stretching as I read this one: "Doorway to Blame for Room Amnesia".  Is it a report on the opportunity for recrimination for some kind of space-related memory loss?

<doorway to <blame for <room amnesia>>

Or the loss of memory about a wall entrance leading to guilt regarding part of a house?

<<doorway to <blame for room>> amnesia>

I briefly flirted with the idea that someone with the surname Room was suffering brain injury after hitting his head on a lintel:

<doorway to blame for <[Mr or Ms] Room['s] amnesia>>

… but that seemed unlikely.

David Bloom writes to point out that Wiktionary has adopted eggcorn as a technical term, at least in the etymology for helpmate:

Originally an eggcorn of helpmeet, but now standard English.

The OED's etymology for helpmate is a bit more circumspect:

< help n. or help v. + mate adj.; probably influenced in origin by helpmeet n.

According to Reid J. Epstein, "Republican debate: 7 attacks on Newt Gingrich to watch", 1210/2011:

“Gov. Romney is much more disciplined in his approach and much more thoughtful about what he says and how he says them,” Iowa state Rep. Renee Schulte said in a Romney campaign press call Friday.

Ms. Schulte may very well have been misquoted or quoted without essential context, but it's not surprising for someone to use a  plural pronoun that co-refers with the referent of a fused relative clause introduced by what. Although "what he says" is morphosyntactically singular, a paraphrase with an overt head is likely to be plural: "the things (that) he says", etc.

According to recent Penny & Aggie strips (here and here), this can be the effect of a single linguistics-class lecture:

BEFORE	AFTER

AAAS 2012 (the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) will take place February 16-20 in Vancouver. The business meeting of Section Z, Linguistics and Language Science, will be on Friday, February 17, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. in MacKenzie Room 1 of the Fairmont Waterfront.

The best part of AAAS annual meetings, in my opinion, is the extraordinary selection of symposia. At the 2012 meeting, there will be four symposia of particular interest to readers of this blog.

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: