Language Log

Andrew Rotherham, "A looming shadow over No Child Left Behind", Time Magazine, 6/16/2011:

The chattering class was even sourer. American Enterprise Institute scholar and pundit Rick Hess accused Duncan of trammeling on the Constitution.

Typo for trampling? Maybe, but this word-confusion  is commoner than I would have expected.

Yesterday's Stone Soup:

We're a bit behind the curve on this one — Verity Stob, "Verity Stob and the super subjunction", The Register, 6/1/2011:

Just downloaded the beta version of English V3.31, and I have to say I am very excited about it. This is definitely going to be a feather in the cap of Anglophones everywhere, and way better than the notorious V2.99 release of French (or the 'deux point neufty-neuf' as it has become known). There's a ton of new features to talk about, so let me dive in right away with some toothsome details.

Jim Reeves' classic country song "Distant Drums" (written by Cindy Walker) expresses a marriage proposal by a young man who wants his true love to marry him right now, before the drums and bugles that he already imagines he hears in the distance arrive and he is conscripted and forced to go off to war. The main part of the young man's argument is expressed in the chorus thus:

So Mary marry me, let's not wait
Let's share all the time we can before it's too late
Love me now, for now is all the time there may be
If you love me Mary, Mary marry me.

I have a question about the underlined part, addressed primarily to professional semanticists. Some of our posts get a bit nerdy on Language Log, and this is one. Skip it if you hate to see a capital A written upside down.

Reader CL writes:

I've been using "lengthly" all this time; my mother used it; I believe her mother, an English teacher at a high school in Brooklyn, used it. Today, at almost 33, I saw a wiggly line from a word processor that was my first clue it's not actually a word. Wiktionary says "misspelled form of lengthy."

How did this happen? Is it widespread though (prescriptively) wrong?

"The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope: A Report by Tom A. Coburn, M.D., U.S. Senator, Oklahoma", April 2011:

This report is the first comprehensive overview of NSF. It examines the management of the agency, recognizes many of its accomplishments and successes, identifies some areas for improvements, and questions some of its priorities and funding decisions.

The good news for taxpayers is there is no question NSF has contributed significantly to scientific discovery.

The bad news is a significant percentage of your money is going to what most Americans will consider fraud, waste and abuse, and there are many areas where NSF could contribute far more with better management and smarter targeting of resources.

This report identifies over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF. This includes tens of millions of dollars spent on questionable studies, excessive amounts of expired funds that have not been returned to the Treasury, inadequate contracting practices that unnecessarily increase costs, and a lack of metrics to demonstrate results. Additionally, a significant portion of the agency’s budget is spent on efforts duplicating missions performed by other government agencies and a number of NSF officials and grantees have been caught engaging in inappropriate behaviors, but face little or no consequences.

A clip from Australian TV is rapidly becoming viral. Karl Stefanovic, a TV journalist on Australia's Today show, running out of topics in an interview with the Dalai Lama, tried to tell him a familiar Buddhism joke — a very good one (he says he had heard it the previous night from his 12-year-old son). The joke is brief and simple: The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza joint and says, "Make me one with everything." What's either uproariously funny or twitchingly embarrassing about the video clip (your mileage may differ) is that the Dalai Lama simply doesn't get the joke at all; he has no idea what's going on.

I've been reading Stanley Fish's recent booklet "How to Write a Sentence: And How To Read One", seduced by passages like this one on page 2:

… just piling up words, one after the other, won't do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nestled in the placed "ordained" for them — "ordained" is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures — they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into a statement about the world, that is, into a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.

I spend a lot of time these days (now that it's June and the long winter is nearly over) walking around Edinburgh alone, letting the architecture of the city and its myriad pleasant surprises inspire and comfort me. (There is pain to be grappled with: my lovely philosopher partner Barbara died of cancer on May 14, exactly a month ago, and the grief will take a long, long time to fade even slightly. Language Log kindly gave me four weeks of compassionate leave.) Sometimes there are little linguistic things to make me smile. There was one today. I had often walked past it but never noticed it before. On St. Stephen Street in the New Town there is a modest little shopfront divided between two businesses, the one on the left a bijou real estate office and the one on the right a boutique selling fancy infusion-beverage products. I don't know if they colluded, or if one chose a name based on the other, but the real estate office is named "The Property Shop" and the adjacent business calls itself "The Proper Tea Shop".

Today's Zits:

Nina Totenberg, "Skip the Legalese And Keep It Short, Justices Say", Morning Edition, 6/12/2011:

Most of the U.S. Supreme Court's work is in writing. The words on the page become the law of the land, but the justices have no uniform approach to the way they do that job. Indeed, each seems to have his or her own inspiration or pet peeve.

Much of this is laid out is a series of interviews conducted with the justices in 2007 and consigned to obscurity on a little-known website. Now those interviews have been published in the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, and they show some of the justices in an unusually revealing light.

Jason Eisner writes:

Language Log readers might enjoy the syllabic /l/ extravaganza from the most recent Prairie Home Companion.

Over at headsup: the blog, fev recently pondered variation in transcription practice ("Annals of g-droppin'", 6/6/2011).  He starts by noting that the same paper edited the same quote, in the same AP story, to have -in' in some but not all gerund-participles in one version, but -ing throughout in another version.  And his main concern is with the socio-political subtext of the choice to use eye-dialect in some cases and not in others:

It's worth puttin' the question to the AP (and/or your own political writers). What exactly are you trying to show about Palin's speech, and how consistent can you credibly claim to be about it — either within a single sentence of hers or among candidates who may have those or other speech features despite their necktie-wearin' formality?