Language Log

A cute ad:

Mark Twain, from his recently-published Autobiography:

As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

Thanks to Sean H, Mike Fourman, Ian Leslie, Eddie, Electric Dragon, Lizzie, Jayarava, KGR, Will Watts, Alex, DW, Sean Case, (and probably many others still typing their comments) who commented on my earlier version of this post, for confirming that around 8 a.m. this morning James Naughtie of the BBC Radio 4 news magazine program "Today" suffered (or very nearly suffered) a catastrophic obscene spoonerism followed by an obliterative ill-muffled giggling fit. What a pity a coughing fit didn't halt the dumb discussion of nouns and verbs elsewhere in the program.

According to Ellie Levitt, "Psychiatry chairman faces ghostwriting accusations", The Daily Pennsylvanian 12/2/2010:

Recently discovered e-mails reveal that a document published in 2003 by Psychiatry Department Chairman Dwight Evans may not have been honest work.

Project on Government Oversight — a nonpartisan watchdog organization that unearths corruption and promotes an ethical federal government — posted on its website Monday that Evans and Dean of Research at New York University’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine Dennis Charney claimed authorship for an editorial they did not write.

Evans, however, has said that POGO’s accusations are not true. […]

An employee of Scientific Therapeutics Information — the marketing firm that helped promote the drug beginning in the early 1990s — is the suspected actual author of the document, POGO claimed. At the end of the editorial, Evans and Charney acknowledge the writer for “editorial support.”

Looking over the comments on Geoff Pullum's recent post "Stupid less/fewer automatism at the WSJ", I see one point — implicit in many contributions, and explicit in a few — that deserves to be underlined with some empirical evidence. When a numerically-quantified plural noun phrase refers to an amount that may be fractionally divided (grams, seconds, meters, dollars, etc.), it's generally incorrect to follow it with or fewer rather than or less. And even when the counted units are not normally divisible, but are being considered as a mass-like quantity (points, votes, cents, items, soldiers), less may also be permitted or even preferred in formal writing.

Paul Devlin has a fascinating series of articles at Slate on transcription errors in the recently-published Anthology of Rap.  Well, the first one starts out as a review of the book, but after the first paragraph or so, it's all about the Mondegreens: "Fact-Check the Rhyme (The Anthology of Rap is rife with transcription errors. Why is it so hard to get rap lyrics right?)", 11/4/2010; "It Was Written (Why are there so many errors in The Anthology of Rap? The editors respond)", 11/10/2010; "Stakes Is High (Members of the Anthology of Rap's advisory board speak out about the book's errors. Plus: Grandmaster Caz lists the mistakes in his lyrics.)", 10/19/2010.

Microsoft Word has really done it to me this time. I need some expert help, Language Log readers. I have a perfectly ordinary file (a simple letter template showing my home address), created in Word on an American Macintosh Powerbook using an American-purchased copy of Word, and when I open it as a copy on my UK-purchased MacBook Pro (though not when I open it as the original) almost everything works except that the file is deranged, and thinks it is supposed to be in French.

Editing the file provokes enforcement of French spacing conventions (colons and semicolons are preceded by an extra inserted space that I do not type); the double quotation symbols (‘‘like this’’) appear as those funny French marks that look a bit like pairs of less-thans and greater-thans (sort of <<like this>>); and, weirdest of all, the spelling and checking of "grammaire et style" turn into French. Word works through the file checking every significant English word and rejecting it for insufficient francophonicity (with no suggestions for respelling), underlining them all in red, though most French words are accepted. The grammar check not only assumes that French is being checked but also reports its results and queries in French. Saving the file preserves the pseudo-Frenchness.

We've had Gnome Chomsky ("Just say gnome", here), and the puns continue with Gnomeland Security, available in several forms (posters, t-shirts, magnets) from several sources (Northern Sun is where I first saw it). Here's the magnet from Northern Sun:

Other sites offer actual advice about gnomeland security: schemes for protecting your garden gnomes from theft.

And then there's something about body scanners:

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, spent the day before yesterday in Zurich with two high-power celebs, Prince William and the soccer star David Beckham, lobbying to get the World Cup soccer tournament hosted in Britain in 2018. Said Cameron: "We have got the stadia, we have got the facilities…", and I guess I was thinking, "You can take the boy out of Eton but you can't take the Eton out of the boy." I wondered how his Latinism would go down with the officials of the famously corrupt International Federation of Association Football (FIFA).

Spot the horrible effect introduced here by an over-picky Wall Street Journal subeditor:

Quite often, these games don't even turn out to be good: Fewer than half of them have been decided by 10 points or fewer.

That "10 points or fewer" phrase on the end is a desperate and quite ridiculous effort at obeying the prescriptive rule that you should use fewer for all things that can be counted, and less only for mass quantities.

To mark 20 years of the Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, our friends there celebrated with remarkable panache:

Today's Dilbert (12/01/10):