Language Log

AN EXTRAORDINARY SERIES of news revelations about "hacking" scandal in the Murdoch-owned tabloid press continues to amaze the UK public. There are bombshells exploding here in Britain every eight hours or so: an ex-editor and former government aide arrested; a whole newspaper permanently closed down on 48 hours' notice; news that CEO Rebekah Brooks' resignation had been refused by Rupert Murdoch, followed by news that she had indeed resigned, and then by her interrogation at a police station, and finally by her arrest; the resignation (because they had received favors from the newspaper and done favors for it) of the head of London's Metropolitan Police and a former assistant commissioner . . . I have never seen anything like this in the turbulent history of Britain's feisty press. But none of it has been mentioned here on Language Log, because linguistic issues are simply not coming up. The issue is crime, not grammar. In fact, I noticed in one recent case that you could see grammar being quite decisively not the issue. People keep accusing the English passive construction of evils like concealment of agency and evasion of responsibility (and you can see the trope coming up in the context of this story in this post by Adrian Short), but it is a bum rap; the passive is ultimately irrelevant. Take a look at the truly staggering piece of misdirection concerning agency to which Erik Wemple and subsequently James Fallows have drawn our attention. They note that the Fox News program "Fox and Friends" recently raised the topic of "hacking" and then brought on an expert in corporate public relations, Bob Dilenschneider, to talk about how people shouldn't be "piling on" The News of the World or its parent company News International because there's hacking all over the place and we need to focus on that . . .

Robert Coren, in a comment on "X là là", 7/7/2011:

Surely the various shades of meaning of such exclamations are conveyed as much or more by tone of voice than by choice of vowel. I can certainly imagine saying "wow" to mean "That's really amazingly beautiful", and also saying "wow" to mean "Oh, that sounds really bad, I hope it gets better soon", and there being no doubt in my hearers' minds which one I meant.

A couple of months ago, I learned about a new social-media sensation by reading a series of exchanges  on the Facebook walls of teen friends, e.g.:

A: Hey do you know about this? You should join. NOW. DO IT.
B: Ahahahahahahahahahaha C showed me this. It ruined my sleep habits.
A: i know i went on a few weeks ago and now I CANT SLEEP
A: EVER
C: I saw you on it this morning and I'm like whoa
A: you should drop in at my room [URL]
C: I did and I said hi P:
A: huh i didn't see you
A:but HI!
C: yeah you weren't responding
C: I dropped in and awesomed a Deerhunter track some other dude was playing
A: oh okay i think i was derping around on gizmodo for a while so you probably came in then.

That sleep-ruining site is turntable.fm.

Mai Kuha's new gardening gloves contain a large nylon ship, at least in Spanish:

Matthew Engel ("Why do some Americanisms irritate people?", BBC News 7/13/2011) starts out by describing the phenomenon of American lexical influence on British English. His description is even partly accurate:

I have had a lengthy career in journalism. I hope that's because editors have found me reliable. I have worked with many talented colleagues. Sometimes I get invited to parties and meet influential people. Overall, I've had a tremendous time.

Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.

All of these words we use without a second thought were never part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.

It's not easy to boast, when you're a politician. Take for example Bill Clinton, who'd had a pretty good first term. But when it came time to campaign for his second term on the strength of his record, assertions about his accomplishments didn't get much traction. According to his advisor Dick Morris,

Clinton's achievements were a problem. In strategy meetings, he often complained that he had created seven million jobs and cut the deficit but no one seemed to notice. In speeches, he referred to the achievements awkwardly. Our polls showed audiences already knew about them or didn't believe they were true.

The solution, apparently, was a re-jiggering of language. Morris relates that communications strategist Bob Squier had the following bright idea:

The key…was to cite the achievement while talking about something he was going to do. For example: "The hundred thousand extra police we put on the street can't solve the crime problem by themselves; we need to keep anti-drug funding in the budget and stop Republicans from cutting it." Or: "The seven million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find education people to fill them. That's why I want a tax deduction for college tuition to help kids go on to college to take those jobs."

Have you ever wondered why "tasty" means that something tastes good while "smelly" means that it doesn't smell so good? What's up with that?

Manfred Krifka, eminent semanticist in Berlin, Germany, has a solution, explained in his article "A Note on an Asymmetry in the Hedonic Implicatures of Olfactory and Gustatory Terms" (2010. In Susanne Fuchs, Philip Hoole, Christine Mooshammer & Marzena Zygis (eds.), Between the regular and the particular in speech and language, 235–245. Frankfurt: Peter Lang), an impressive sounding title for a delightful little paper. It was published last year but Manfred just made it available on his website, hence this post now. Do give his paper a read!

Krifka starts his paper with a famous anecdote about Samuel Johnson:

As Samuel Johnson paused to rest on a London park bench one hot summer's day, his profusely sweating bulk caused a young woman sitting next to him to accuse him of smelling. “No, Madam,” he replied. “You smell, I stink.”

Here is a mystifying sign directing passengers in a new Chiayi (Jiayi, in southwestern Taiwan) building that links a bus terminal with a railroad terminal:

Andy Coughlan, "First evidence that birds tweet using grammar", New Scientist 6/26/2011:

They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules.

Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says.

To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls.

The basic article is Kentaro Abe & Dai Watanabe, "Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules", Nature Neuroscience 6/26/2011. And like the coverage in New Scientist, it's both true and misleading.

A comic-strip question from Rooster Teeth, relayed by reader AB:

The most recent xkcd offers some sound editorial guidance:

Dilbert continues to make progress in learning about conversational implicature and what you can do with it:

On Friday I visited Le Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and among other things, I learned that there will be opportunities for marketing the iPeeve™ in France as well. In particular, for the past few decades, French speakers have been using genre ("sort, kind, type") as an approximative discourse particle similar to English like. An example from the web:

… apres moultes problemes pour se lever on est parti genre 4 heures en retard sur le pouce.
"after many problems getting up, we got underway like 4 hours late"