Language Log

Two years ago, the favored lunar New Year's greeting in China was "Happy 牛 Year!" where 牛 ("bovine") is pronounced niú in Mandarin and is standing in for "New" in the Year of the Ox / Bull / Cow.

Last year, the Year of the Tiger, "I 老虎 U", where lǎohǔ 老虎 (which means "tiger") sounds like "love" to some Chinese speakers, was conveniently and concurrently being used to celebrate the New Year, Valentine's Day, and a famous golfer's amorous escapades.

Well, this is the year of the rabbit, so you can be sure the Chinese would come up with a clever way to incorporate their word for rabbit (or hare) in this year's favored New Year's greeting, and indeed they have.

Stanley Fish, discussing John Paul Stevens' reasoning about the value of anonymous speech ("Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet", NYT 1/3/2011):

… it is not true that a text’s meaning is the same whether or not its source is known. Suppose I receive an anonymous note asserting that I have been betrayed by a friend. I will not know what to make of it — is it a cruel joke, a slander, a warning, a test? But if I manage to identify the note’s author — it’s a friend or an enemy or a known gossip — I will be able to reason about its meaning because I will know what kind of person composed it and what motives that person might have had.

Antonin Scalia, arguing for a textualist rather than intentionalist theory of legal interpretation ("Law and Language", First Things 11/2005; discussed here; a pirated version appears to be here):

Two persons who speak only English see sculpted in the desert sand the words “LEAVE HERE OR DIE.” It may well be that the words were the fortuitous effect of wind, but the message they convey is clear, and I think our subjects would not gamble on the fortuity. […]

If the ringing of an alarm bell has been established, in a particular building, as the conventional signal that the building must be evacuated, it will convey that meaning even if it is activated by a monkey. […]

What is needed for a symbol to convey meaning is not an intelligent author, but a conventional understanding on the part of the readers or hearers that certain signs or certain sounds represent certain concepts. In the case of legal texts, we do not always know the authors, and when we do the authors are often numerous and may intend to attach various meanings to their composite handiwork. But we know when and where the words were promulgated, and thus we can ordinarily tell without the slightest difficulty what they meant to those who read or heard them.

From Erick Erickson, "A Concern About Reince Priebus", RedState 1/3/2010:

Back in January of 2009, I raised the concern that Michael Steele was using Blaise Hazelwood to run his campaign for the RNC. The concern related to the willingness and ability of the Republican consultant class to glum on to their preferred RNC Chairman and bilk the GOP of gobs of cash.

On a flight from Australia to Scotland, Bob Ladd bought "a packet of very tasty dried strawberries, packed in Thailand for the airline market". He writes:

On the back of the packet we were informed of the benefits of the contents, which were:

– Contains high Vitamin C which acts as antioxidants.
– Contains dietary fibres which facilitate defecation.

Will Brockman of Google explains that

There was a problem with apostrophes in the Ngram viewer front end – my fault, and I corrected it yesterday (1/1/2011).

In yesterday's "auldies but guidies" post, Geoff Nunberg observed that in "the unparsable 'Star-Spangled Banner' … not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse". As the subsequent discussion demonstrated, this is roughly as true of LL commenters as it is of the public at large.

(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")

We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.

A Carrier friend recently told me, somewhat to my surprise, that his father, who passed away in 1995 at the age of 95 and never went to school, had liked opera. He called it "shun be lhehudulh" ᙖᐣ ᗫ ᘱᐳᑐᒡ [ʃʌn be ɬehʌdʌɬ] = "they fight each other with songs". I'm not sure how much Italian he understood, but he seems to have understood opera pretty well.

It is well known that the same organism may be known by different common names in different areas (e.g. "cougar", "panther", "puma", and "mountain lion") and that the same common name may be used for different organisms in different areas (e.g. "blackberry"), but the assumption is that (pseudo-)Latin scientific names like Achillea millefolium "yarrow" are unique. Recent work by Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Garden, with numerous collaborators, has revealed that this is not quite true: of 1.04 million species-level names, they classified only about 300,00 (29%) as accepted names. They classified 480,000 names (46%) as synonyms for accepted names and 260,000 (25%) as unresolved, meaning that the available data is not sufficient to determine whether or not they designate distinct species. By way of example, a query for Achillea millefolium reveals that it has synonyms such as Achillea ambigua, Achillea angustissima, Achillea borealis, and even some in other genera, such as Chamaemelum tanacetifolium. You can look things up yourself at The Plant List.

No word yet on beetles.

Miguel Helft, "Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On", NYT 12/30/2010 (emphasis added):

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection.

In discussing the relatively low rate of contraction in Charles Portis's novel True Grit, I suggested several different explanations. It might be false archaism, or it might be a way to bring out the personality of the narrator, Mattie Ross. Another option, of course, would be that it's a quirk of the author's style. We can eliminate this last possibility by checking another of his novels, Norwood, which (according to Wikipedia)

… follows its namesake protagonist on a misadventurous road trip from his hometown of Ralph, Texas, to New York City and back. During the trip, Norwood is exposed to a comic array of personalities and lifestyles. The novel is a noteworthy example of Portis' particular skill rendering Southern dialect and conversation.

Comment spam isn't getting any better, but it's certainly getting more frequent. Akismet is now catching more than a thousand LL spam comments (or what it identifies as spam comments) every day.

Some very small but non-zero percentage of this is not in fact spam. So I used to scan everything in Akismet's grease trap, in order to rescue the real stuff. In the past, I've salvaged worthwhile contributions from John Cowan, Language Hat, and others. However, the volume is now so great that I usually don't have time to do this.  If your genuine contribution is trapped and flushed, I apologize in advance — let me know by email if you think this has happened.

It isn't linguistically true, at least. David Fried writes:

What’s with the movie convention of representing 19th century American speech as lacking contractions? I was just enjoying the new version of “True Grit” by the Coen brothers—in fact it’s been a long time since I had so much fun at a movie. As I figure it the action is set in 1878. Much of the pleasure of the movie is the oddly formal and elaborate diction of the characters, taken straight from the Charles Portis novel. I actually find a lot of it true to my conception of the period, if rather stylized, except for the absurdity of pronouncing all contracted auxiliaries in full. Ethan Coen was specifically asked about this in a Newsweek review, and replied rather ambiguously “We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period.”