Language Log

The latest xkcd:

The mouseover title: "Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you."

Rush Limbaugh takes up where Rosie O'Donnell left off:

Sometimes two fairly ordinary things combine to create something bizarre. Karen Davis writes:

It seems to me that there is something deeply strange in this quote, from a 1922 novel by Joseph S. Fletcher called The Middle of Things:

"Robbery wasn't the motive. Murder was the thing in view! And why? It may have been revenge. It may have been that Ashton had to be got out of the way. And I shouldn't wonder a bit if that wasn't at the bottom of it, which is at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything!"

"And that, ma'am?" asked Mr. Pawle, who evidently admired Miss Penkridge's shrewd observations, "that is what, now?"

"Money!"

Lameen Souag has posted a detailed analysis of "the language being used by the newly significant figures jockeying for power" in Tunisia ("Language Use in Tunisian Politics",  Jabal al-Lughat, 1/17/2011).

My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out.  In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis.

The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) is this brief news item that occurred in the Beijing Morning Post on January 13 (pardon the somewhat peculiar English of the following paraphrase, which is taken from a daily Chinese newspaper digest [so far as I know, the BMP is published only in Chinese]; it conveys the sense and tenor of the original in a serviceable, though abridged, fashion):

Murray Smith asks about a phrase in Joe Drape, "Looking for Zenyatta's Mr. Right", NYT 1/13/2011:

How Zenyatta will fare in her new career as a broodmare at Lane's End Farm is anyone's guess. She was a once-in-a-generation princess on the racetrack, winning 19 of 20 starts […]

Breeding, however, is more magic than math. […]

The Mosses and the people they have entrusted Zenyatta to know that the odds of coming up with another horse like her are long.

Murray observes that "The context makes clear that it is considered somewhat unlikely that Zenyatta will produce offspring of her calibre (the odds are against it), but the quote seems to say that it is likely (the odds of it are long)". Any idea what's happening? Any way to tell whether 'odds of' has always been ambiguous between "'for' and 'against'?"

A new online venture has just been launched: Popular Linguistics Magazine. From editor DS Bigham's welcome message to Volume 1, Issue 1:

After seven rounds of balloting, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee is Reince Priebus (Jeff Zeleny, "G.O.P. Elects a New Chairman as Steele Drops Out", NYT 1/14/2011). My reaction is a parochial one: as a linguist interested in prosody, I'm looking forward to Mr. Preibus's contributions to the study of English intonation.

Earlier today, Mark Liberman discussed the abortive attempt by Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to phase in Tunisian Arabic.

Now, in a report circulated by China Daily / ANN and carried in The Straits Times, we learn:  "Dialects to be phased out of China's prime time TV"

According to an email from Youssef Gaigi posted by Gillian York:

Today’s speech shows definitely a major shift in Tunisia’s history.
[Tunisian president Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali talked for the third time in the past month to the people. Something unprecedented, we barely knew this guy. Ben Ali talked in the Tunisian dialect instead of Arabic for the first time ever.

A story in today's New York Times will give you some background on the serious and astonishing situation in Tunisia: David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, "Crisis Deepens in Tunisia as President’s Offer Falls Flat", 1/14/2011. [Update — Since I posted this, Ben Ali has resigned and fled the country, as the linked story indicates.]

Today's Zits:

The image on the right reproduces a brief passage from a letter that Robert Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor C. Bedford, on October 1, 1795. (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

Read it, and see if you can figure out what aspect of it Richard Grant White in 1869 called the worst of "those intruders in language … which, about seventy or eighty years ago, began to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English".

There's been quite a bit of discussion about Sarah Palin's commentary on the Tucson shootings, and most of it has been about the segment where she characterizes criticism of her gunsight map as "a blood libel":

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If you don't like their ideas
you're free to propose better ideas
but
especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding
journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel
that serves only to incite
the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.
That is reprehensible.