Language Log

Rob Cox and Anthony Currie, "Glencore I.P.O. Mimics Blackstone and Draws Skeptics", NYT 5/3/2011:

Is Glencore the new Blackstone? It has become a theme from Wall Street to the City and beyond that the commodity trader’s planned $12 billion stock offering signals the top of its industry’s cycle, just as Blackstone’s did for private equity. But investors should watch for other similarities when scrubbing Glencore’s prospectus, due out Wednesday.

Say what?

By now the whole world knows that Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad.  When I first saw this place name, I thought that it was curious in being composed of a British surname followed by a Hindi-Urdu-Persian ending.  We may dispense with the English part of the name through a bit of historical research:  the town was founded by Major James Abbott in 1853.  As for the ending, I was familiar with it from many other South Asian city names, e.g., Allahabad, Hyderabad, and Ahmadabad.

A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages)  often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place".  I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The sun melted the snow versus The snow melted), but denominal locative verbs typically don't.

Thus we have transitive causatives like She floored the accelerator and We tabled the motion, but not the corresponding intransitive/inchoative versions *The accelerator floored and *The motion tabled.

On April 3, the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei was arrested In Beijing as he was about to board a plane for Hong Kong. And according to Natalie Wong, "Mark of defiance as cops chase Ai artist", The Standard 4/20/2011:

A young woman going by the moniker Chin Tangerine claims she is responsible for spray-painting images of arrested mainland artist Ai Weiwei on Hong Kong streets and buildings, as the police zero in on possible suspects.

The woman sent pictures of herself purportedly spray-painting the artwork to a Chinese-language newspaper. They have also been posted on the internet. […]

The manhunt by Yau Tsim Mong District Regional Crime Unit and Central District Criminal Investigation Team began after the Ai-inspired graffiti were discovered by patrol officers last week.

Fev at headsup: the blog on "I"-wash.

Seriously — how long did you figure it would take for the "narcissist" theme to surface in (ahem) some commentary on the recent events in Pakistan? […]

Ben Smith and Glenn Thrush, Osama bin Laden's death brings celebration, unity – and questions", Politico 5/2/11 (emphasis added):

Two years ago, Obama tasked CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind, a response to the perception that the Bush administration had allowed the hunt for bin Laden to back-burner.

The bold-face usage struck me as unexpected.

We've just had a national election here in Canada, the overall result of which is that the Conservatives, who had formed a minority government, finally secured a majority. Another interesting result was the collapse of the Bloc Québécois, the Québec separatist party, which lost most of its seats to the New Democrats, the social democratic party, which now forms the Official Opposition. Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, who resigned as a result of his party's poor performance, went into the election thinking that language was still an issue. Yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail gave a brief quotation from each party leader on the front page. Duceppe's was: "How can we accept putting our confidence in people who don't even speak our language?".

One can only imagine that he, like many others, was stunned by the result in the Québec riding of Berthier–Maskinongé, where the NDP ran a young woman, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who lives 400km from the riding, went to Las Vegas for a vacation at the peak of the campaign, and for practical purposes does not speak French. She won, with a margin of 10 percentage points over the runner up, the incumbent Bloc candidate. We're not in Kansas anymore…

Like almost everyone else, I was happy to learn that Osama bin Laden is now an ex-terrorist; and I was mildly surprised to learn that he had been holed up in a large and luxurious compound located less than a mile by road from PMA Kakul, Pakistan's equivalent of West Point.

Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function (or the appearance of its sacred function) of neutrally and modestly recording events, not judging them" — it struggles so hard to be neutral that it becomes vapid. He is incensed that the phrase "showed just how broadly" in the print edition was replaced in a later online edition by "raised new questions about how broadly", in this passage about the reported deaths of Gaddafi's son and grandsons in Tripoli:

And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Scocca's bitterly scornful remark about the language involved is this:

There: in the disembodied implied passive, questions were raised. About the interpretation of the mandate. And just like that, we have bounced gently away from the bomb crater to a discussion about the understanding of a policy.

The disembodied implied passive? What is this, exactly?

I've blogged about this before, most recently in "Pragmatics as comedy", 1/28/2010 — I cited four examples, and commenters noted eight or ten others.

What is "this"? Well, that's exactly my question.

I'm in Minneapolis for a meeting of the LSA executive committee, and yesterday afternoon, on the plane from Philadelphia, I listened all the way through to Lee Atwater's extraordinary 1990 album, "Red, Hot and Blue". At the time these tracks were recorded, Atwater was chairman of the Republican National Committee, fresh from his successful role managing George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. And as you can hear if you listen to the guitar and vocal stylings on his signature tune Bad Boy, Atwater was also a pretty fair R&B musician:

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In "The Case for Cursive," (NYT [April 28, 2011]), Katie Zezima states that:

For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

Language Log did of course have correspondents at the royal wedding of Prince William (now also the Duke of Cambridge) and Catherine Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge). And linguistically, our judgment is that all went well. Or at least, well enough.

One point to be made is that all the songs that use "when we say 'I do'" as a metonymy for "when we marry" (and that phrase even appears in some UK newspapers this afternoon) are plainly not in conformity with the language of the wedding service in the Church of England. There may be forms of the service where "I do" is said, but nobody said "I do" at this ceremony, and nobody was supposed to. When Prince William was asked the long question beginning "Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife…", his answer was of course, "I will". Or to be more phonetically precise, a very quiet and swift gulp from somewhat dry and nervous lips that sounded something like "Uh-wull".