Language Log

I've pretty much given up criticizing the BBC's reporting on science and technology, since this is Language Log, not BBC-Science-Reporting-Is-Broken Log, and documenting every breathless misunderstanding or credulous reprint of a misleading public-relations handout would take more time than I have available for blogging.  So for the past few years, I've examined an occasional bit of BBC-mediated neuro-nonsense, historical hooey or dialectal drivel as if it came from the Daily Mail or the Guardian or any other media outlet from which nothing better should be expected.

But today there's something new: the BBC actually announced, in public, the fact that it had been taken in by a (public-relations?) hoax masquerading as rational inquiry: "Internet Explorer story was bogus", 8/3/2011:

A story which suggested that users of Internet Explorer have a lower IQ than people who chose other browsers appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

A number of media organisations, including the BBC, reported on the research, put out by Canadian firm ApTiquant.

(That should actually be "AptiQuant", if you're keeping score at home.)

Eric Kleefeld, "Wis. Dems: Internal Polls Show Us Winning The State Senate", TPM 8/2/2011:

TPM asked a follow-up regarding internal polls for the two extra races for August 16.

"Our two Democratic incumbents, Bob Wirch and Jim Holperin, are in very, very strong shape," said Tate. "They are better well known than our opponents, they are better liked than their opponents." [emphasis added]

Yesterday, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described her colleagues' attitude towards the then-pending debt limit bill this way:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We have a very democratic caucus,
and we come to our own consensus.
In this caucus today we have a divided consensus.

Yesterday morning, U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D Missouri) tweeted:

And a bit later, in an ABC News interview, Nancy Pelosi added to the menu:

There is a widespread misconception that Chinese languages are monosyllabic.  That is purely an artifact of the writing system, since most Chinese words average out at about two syllables in length.  Typical examples:  zhuōzi 桌子 ("table"), fēijī 飛機 ("airplane"), péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend"), qìchē ("car"), huǒchē 火車 ("train"), fángzi 房子 ("house"), and so on.  Even in Classical Chinese (or Literary Sinitic), there were many words that were greater than one syllable in length, e.g., húdié 蝴蝶 ("butterfly"), fènghuáng 鳳凰 ("phoenix"), shānhú 珊瑚 ("coral"), wēiyí 委蛇 / 逶迤 ("sinuous; winding; meandering"), jūnzǐ 君子 ("gentleman; superior man; person of noble character; sovereign; ruler; lord; m'lord"), and so on.

It will probably come as a shock to most readers of Language Log that not even all Chinese characters are monosyllabic.

Wikipedia's article on the Cornish language (the Brythonic Celtic language once spoken in the county of Cornwall, England) quotes this sentence (twice, in fact) from Henry Jenner, author of Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904):

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

Oh, what a mess we do create when first we practice to negate! Let's just think that sentence through, counting up the negations carefully.

In the NYT this weekend, Ben Zimmer has a great piece on new horizons in humanities computing:  "The Jargon of the Novel, Computed", 7/29/2011. The article is illustrated with a bar chart of the frequency in COCA of "bolt upright" in various genres:

Among the nuggets you can find in Ben's article is an allusion to David Bamman and Gregory Crane, "The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion", LaTeCH2008, which alone is worth the price of admission. But the thing that mainly struck me was the possibility that I'd gotten "bolt upright" wrong, all these years.

Another example of extreme singular their, this one from Google+:

Having discovered that Rick Perry is a right-leaning hedger, if you will, while Mitt Romney is, if you will, a leftish hedger, I wondered what the distribution of these alternatives might be in general American usage.

A recent Reuters headline made Jeffrey Kallberg wonder "What is a 'desk hemorrhage' and why would GS want to rate one?":

Geoff Pullum, "It's like so unfair", 11/22/2003:

Why are the old fogeys and usage whiners of the world so upset about the epistemic-hedging use of like, as in She's, like, so cool? The old fogeys use equivalent devices themselves, all the time. An extremely common one is "if you will". […]

Like functions in younger speakers' English as something perfectly ordinary: a way to signal hedging about vocabulary choice — a momentary uncertainty about whether the adjacent expression is exactly the right form of words or not. If the English language didn't implode when if you will took on this kind of role among the baby boomers, it will survive having like take on an extremely similar role for their kids.

I responded  that "Like is, like, not really like if you will" (11/22/2003), mostly on the basis of a difference in maximum frequency of usage. I was reminded of this argument, and tempted to take it back, when I read "Texas Gov. Rick Perry: 'Obviously gay marriage is not fine with me…'", FRCBlog 7/28/2011.

Yesterday I noticed for the first time the "Music" feature of Neil J.A. Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, which connects the OEIS's number sequences with Jonathan Middleton's Musical Algorithms site.

So, of course, I immediately listened to sequence A000108, the Catalan numbers, which (among many other things) count the number of ways to arrange n matching pairs of parentheses, or the number of full binary trees with n+1 leaves, or the number of Dyck words of length 2n:

1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, 1430, 4862, 16796, 58786, 208012, 742900, 2674440, …

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today's Sheldon takes Contrastive Focus Reduplication up a notch:

[Tip of the hat to David Craig]