Language Log

Last week, I exchanged a few emails with a journalist about "flash mobs",  a phrase that is now widely used in reference to impromptu gangs of teens who converge suddenly to rob stores or attack passers-by. My correspondent felt that this is a misuse based on a misunderstanding. For her,  what the kids are doing should properly be called "wilding". And "flash mob", in her view, ought to be reserved for the groups of hipsters who (used to?) use social media to arrange impromptu public gatherings with frivolous goals: imitating bird calls, having pillow fights, inspecting couches, striking disco poses. It struck my correspondent as Wrong to shift the reference of "flash mob" from this Surrealism Lite to random collective assault and pillage.

We neglected to mention this while the relevant cartoon was the current one at xkcd, but a couple of days ago there was a nice analysis of why through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember but easy for computers to guess. Check it out. The observation seems correct: if you try it out on one of the web interfaces that assess the strength of your password as you choose it, you'll find that a word with a few letters replaced by miscellaneous digits and so on, like Ne8r@$k@, gets high marks but grizzle snip grunt mackerel doesn't (and probably won't be accepted beyond the first 8 to 12 characters). Yet if you mutter "grizzle snip grunt mackerel" under your breath once, you'll find you remember it all day, even without using it. And length is your main security. The example the cartoon gives contrasts a 3-day brute-force cracking time (for about 28 bits of entropy) with a 550-year time (for about 44).

Listening to this recent Freakonomics podcast episode, I heard a word variant that I'd never heard before: longetivity, being used to mean longevity. You can hear it at about the 8:35 mark of the podcast — I was listening on Stitcher, in case that matters. Coincidentally, the relevant portion of the podcast (from an interview with Dick Yuengling, beer lovers!) is transcribed on the episode's webpage, with the word "corrected" to longevity.

I got a royalty check from Chicago today, and I stared in astonishment at the home address on the payment advice. It was roughly correct in the first four lines, but the last line, after "EDINBURGH EH3 6RY", where the country name "United Kingdom" should have come, said "TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA".

Back in June, I posted briefly about an April 2011 report "The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope: A Report by Tom A. Coburn, M.D., U.S. Senator, Oklahoma".  The Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has recently released a response to Sen. Coburn's report, "Out of Focus: A Critical Assessment of the Senate Report 'The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope'".

The Senate report claims that there are three areas of significant wasted funds at NSF. First, the report claims that NSF is sitting on a large sum — $1.7 billion – of unexpended funds that should be returned to the Treasury. Second, the report claims that duplications between NSF funding and that of other agencies represent another $1.2 billion in wasteful spending. Third, the report asserts that Senate staff identified some $65 million in questionable projects funded by NSF.

Committee staff can assure you that NSF is not sitting on $1.7 billion in uncommitted dollars that should be returned to the Treasury. The $1.7 billion represents undisbursed funds obligated for multi-year grants which are legally retained by NSF to meet those obligations. The $1.2 billion in duplication also represents an assertion that comes with no proof. Finally, the $65 million in questionable projects is built on very superficial press reports of various research efforts.

From Down Under, Valerie Syverson sent in the following photograph taken at a storefront in Sydney's Chinatown:

As she notes, the sign is advertising what appear to be leek turnovers as "Bradysia homozygous". Bradysia is the scientific name of a genus of fungus gnats; a homozygous individual has identical alleles of a given gene on both homologous chromosomes.  How did we get from leek turnovers to the genetics of insects?

Once again, Dan Jurafsky has been too modest to post a link to his wonderful Language of Food blog. From last month (July 11), on "Ice Cream":

The San Francisco midsummer fog was late in coming this year, which means Janet and I got a fantastic view of the July 4th fireworks (legal and not-strictly-legal) from the top of Bernal Hill. Hot days are rare in San Francisco, so random strangers have been smiling at each other on Mission Street and the lines are extra-long on the sidewalks in front of the ice creameries.

You may not be aware of the close relationships among these summer phenomena. Ice cream was invented by modifying a technology originally discovered for fireworks. And the way ice cream flavors are named turns out to have a surprising relationship with the evolutionary origin of the human smile. (link)

That's the beginning. Check it out.

Connoisseurs of misnegation will not be surprised by cases where an author who uses three or four negatives in one proposition finishes up with one too many. Thus Jessica McGregor Johnson, Remembering Perfection – Everyday Inspiration for Living Your Spirituality, 2008:

It is also true that we are afraid of our emotions. Part of us believes that if we allow our sad emotions free reign then maybe we will never stop crying. I have news for you — no-one has never not been able to stop crying.

Ricardo Piglia, "Artificial Respiration", translated by Daniel Balderston:

The facts and evidence were so clear that it seems impossible that nobody has never noticed.

"Sussex or Sussex-Devons?", The Farmer's Magazine, Jan. 1870

I do not say for one moment that no one has not for the sake of an experiment crossed Sussex with Devon ; but that the improvement in the Sussex stock of late years is in consequence of crossing with the Devon, or any other breed, I entirely deny.

The U.S. Civil Service Commission's Manual of Examinations for the Spring of 1916 contains on pp. 44-45 an example of an exercise in "report writing". The task is described as a "Test in writing in letter form, not more than 200 words in length, an orderly, concise, and grammatical statement of the essential facts included in a given statement of 400 or 500 words". The specific instructions read:

Condense the printed exercise into not more than 200 words, retaining all the facts. No effort should be made to follow the language of the text. In rating this exercise the arrangement, completeness, exactness, and conciseness of the statement, its adherence to the subject matter, its style, and freedom from errors in grammar, etc., will be considered.

The following sign is posted in the Sanqing Shan district of Shangrao prefectural city (northeast Jiangxi province in southeast central China):

Since a monlingual English speaker in distress who reads this sign will only end up deeper in despair, we need to unpack the Chinese and English to see what went wrong.

Reader KR asks:

How can I prove to an acquaintance that the word "truck" in English is standardly pronounced with an intial "ch" sound?

KR presupposes a conclusion that's a bit over-simplified. There's some variation here, and I don't think we have very good evidence about the distribution and relative frequency of the variants. But he's basically right: the initial consonant of "truck" in American English is often (usually?) palatal or at least post-alveolar rather than alveolar, and its release is often (usually?) strongly affricated.  And in some pronunciations at least, the /t/ and the /r/ are completely co-articulated as a sort of labialized retroflex affricate.

Now playing at Pier 17 in New York, "Bodies… The Exhibition".

Visitors literate in Chinese were welcomed to the exhibit in a particularly ghoulish way:

It is traditional for readers of The Daily Telegraph to write letters to their editor saying how "appalled" they are by the terrible abuse the English language suffers daily. One little neologism, one split infinitive or other such stupid shibboleth that's easy to spot, and they're on it like wolves, excoriating the usage and protesting that the syntactic sky is falling. Well, earlier browsers of the photo gallery that the Telegraph has put up on its website concerning the riots and looting in Tottenham (north London) over the weekend will be shocked not only by the scenes of masked looters, buildings ablaze, police cars torched, and a double-decker bus going up like a roman candle, but also by the caption under a photo of a trashed and gutted ATM lying on its side round the corner from a bank:

A looted cash machine lays down an alley

(Added a day later: I've been surprised that the Telegraph hasn't yet changed the caption. When CNN wrote that clues to the earth's future may lay in the past, they changed it soon after Language Log commented on it. The Daily Telegraph's people clearly don't read Language Log.)