Language Log

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled "Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance."

This construction is still flourishing in China.  Indeed, it is so ubiquitous nowadays as to have lost some of its edge.  While not entirely banal, the frequent usage of the adversative passive has caused much of the raw, critical force that it once possessed to be dissipated through overfamiliarity.  However, when the object of derision or dissatisfaction is one that people are really upset about, the adversative passive can still pack a potent punch.

The U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks offer an unflattering picture of Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, who is now the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and thus the de facto ruler of Egypt. The most widely cited passage, dating from 2008, noted that

__ __ __ described the mid-level officer corps as generally disgruntled, and said that one can hear mid-level officers at MOD clubs around Cairo openly expressing disdain for Tantawi. These officers refer to Tantawi as "Mubarak's poodle," he said, and complain that "this incompetent Defense Minister" who reached his position only because of unwavering loyalty to Mubarak is "running the military into the ground."

This being Language Log rather than International Politics Log, I'm not going to try to evaluate the validity of this perspective, or its implications for the future of Mr. Tantawi or of Egypt. Instead, I'd like to take up some linguistic questions: Did those mid-level officers really call Mr. Tantawi an Arabic version of "Mubarak's poodle", or is this the source's English-language characterization of their attitudes? And where does the whole "X's poodle" business come from, anyhow? When did it start, and who started it? And why "poodle" rather than "yorkie", "beagle", "cocker spaniel", or whatever?

Language Log has not yet commented on the most stupid recent case of censorship in the arts motivated by vocabulary taboos. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), an independent broadcasting agency charged with overseeing private radio stations in Canada, has banned Mark Knopfler's wonderful 1985 Dire Straits rock anthem "Money For Nothing" from the airwaves. The reason? The word faggot appears in three of the song's lines (as originally written), and the CBSC believes that this lexical item should never again sully Canadian air.

Following up on his tip about  "bomb-diffusing" at the Telegraph, Robert Ayers sent me a link to an unexpected verbal inflection from the same source ("Icelandic volcano 'set to erupt''", 2/8/2011):

By comparison, Bárdarbunga dwarves the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which shutdown most of Europe's airspace last year after its ash cloud drifted across the continent's skies.

A few years ago ("Dwarfs vs. dwarves", 1/3/2004), a small amount of research convinced me that the plural noun "dwarves" is mainly used for members of the fantasy race, partly but not exclusively due to the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, with "dwarfs" being the standard plural form (it's the only one that the OED gives), and therefore the one used in standard English for real-world referents, whether human or astronomical.

It never even occurred to me that anyone would use "dwarves" as the third singular form of the verb dwarf "To cause to be or seem small". So much for confident assumptions.

It has just become a whole lot easier to search the world's language archives.  The new OLAC Language Resource Catalog contains descriptions of over 100,000 language resources from over 40 language archives worldwide.

This catalog, developed by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), provides access to a wealth of information about thousands of languages, including details of text collections, audio recordings, dictionaries, and software, sourced from dozens of digital and traditional archives.

OLAC is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.  The OLAC Language Resource Catalog was developed by staff at the Linguistic Data Consortium, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and the University of Melbourne.  The primary sponsor is the National Science Foundation.

Coby Lubliner was puzzled by this passage in Ginia Bellafante's review of Jennifer Beals in Chicago Code ("Stirring Chicago's Corruption Stockpot", NYT 2/6/2011):

On cable we might also have received a police superintendent with the creased skin and poor muscle-to-fat ratio to actually look like a bureaucrat. At 47 Ms. Beals remains ageless and stunning, but her placid beauty could not suit the character, Teresa Colvin, any less than if producers had scoured juice bars looking for a pretty server of antioxidant smoothies. It is hard to endure as Ms. Beals tough-talks her way to the appearance of managerial self-confidence and harder still to bear witness to a Chicago accent she can neither master nor even momentarily sustain.

Did she grow up in Dallas? No, Ms. Beals, alas, is from Chicago. Whether she once spoke with flat A’s and ditched them at Yale, where she studied in the ’80s, is hard to know, but there seems little hope of her ever authentically retrieving them.

Coby asked "Can you explain what is meant by ditching flat A's at Yale?"

Signs with Chinese on them have begun to appear in the Cairo demonstrations. Here is a protester whose sign combines Chinese and two varieties of Arabic:

Victor Steinbok has called my attention to "halogen taste-flavor dried tofu" made in China.

This sounds really strange,  since the halogens (fluorine [F], chlorine [Cl], bromine [Br], iodine [I], and astatine [At]) are toxic when used improperly. In any event, they do not seem to be the sort of thing that one would want to flavor one's bean curd with.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish a spelling mistake from an eggcorn.  Either way, I've always been impressed by the possibilities for analytic creativity afforded by the English orthographic system. And somehow these little morpho-analogical poems are more impressive when they appears in serious publications.

Two interesting popular articles on linguistic aspects of artificial intelligence have recently appeared in the popular press.

The first one is by Richard Powers ("What is Artifical Intelligence?", NYT 2/6/2011):

IN the category “What Do You Know?”, for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest humans a run for their money at their own game.

The question: What is Watson?

I.B.M.’s groundbreaking question-answering system, running on roughly 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second, is playing a pair of “Jeopardy!” matches against the show’s top two living players, to be aired on Feb. 14, 15 and 16.

From a recent Sore Thumbs:

"How the heck will Kinect swimming even work?" is a nice example of a use of even that I think is genuinely new. At  least, certain expressions like "what does that even mean?" and "how does that even work?"  have recently become common, and I can't find clear examples of them that are more than about 15 years old. But perhaps we should see this as rolling the clock back to the 16th century, and taking things up where they left off when even began a five-century detour as a scalar particle.

This is almost too good to be true. Via The Media Blog, here's a correction that ran in Rockhampton, Australia's Morning Bulletin:

Daniel Mahaffy points out an interesting phrase in President Obama's pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O'Reilly:

At about 7:21, the president says:

That's saying to Americans, we're gonna each of us be responsible for our own health care.

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