Language Log

Yesterday, a Beijing cabdriver made the following remark to David Moser, who reported it to me:

"A? Ni 50 sui le?  Zao zhidao wo jiu hui 'nin' ni le."

"啊？你50岁了？ 早知道我就会 ‘您’ 你了。“

"Ah?  You're 50 years old?  If I had known I would have 'nin'ed you."

A couple of years ago, Ben Zimmer took a look at Stephen Fry's change of heart on things like  "none of these are of importance to me" ("Fry on the pleasure of language", 11/7/2008). Ben closed by quoting from the inaugural post on Fry's weblog, "Don't Mind Your Language", 11/4/2008. A couple of weeks ago, Matt Rogers created a typographical animation of the same passage, to the accompaniment of audio from Fry's podcast version:

Man shoots dead robber, says a South African headline today. And for an instant one's confused mind asks, "It's hardly necessary to shoot the dead ones, is it?"

Several people called my attention to an article entitled "The Most 'Chinese' Chinese Character," by Josh Chin, in the October 15, 2010 China Real Time Report of the Wall Street Journal.

The latest Cul de Sac:

[Hat tip to Helen Stickney]

Yesterday, Nick Clegg made news in England by announcing a new spending program ("Clegg unveils 'fairness premium'", ePolitix.com 10/15/2010):

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has unveiled a £7bn 'fairness premium' to help disadvantaged children through the education system.

The plan, to be included in the comprehensive spending review, will contain an offer of 15 free hours of pre-school education a week to two year olds from poorer families in England.

In a speech at a junior school in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Clegg also confirmed the Lib Dem pledge of a "pupil premium" while they are at schools, and a new "student premium" to help them through university.

With the coming of email, a vital resource that once had a real cost became essentially free for everyone. Once it used to cost at least a few pennies to send a communication through the mail, but now it is free. And one of the awful results is a new kind of deviant linguistic behavior in our culture: the mass-mailing of unsolicited loony outpourings. It needs a name; I suggest calling it nutspam.

I have been receiving nutspam from several clearly deranged and annoying citizens. Probably none of them are doing anything that's against any law anywhere. They might even be protected by the First Amendment. One guy, in particular (a total stranger to me), seems to be ramping up. He sends out wild political (and occasionally personal) discontented ravings several times a day, from many different and frequently changing free email addresses he has set up. It's just ordinary email to valid email addresses that he has found on websites, and he isn't selling anything. But it's not just a few addresses that he mails to.

EMH sent along a pointer to the 10/14/2010 Yourmometer strip:

To forestall secondary ninja incursions, let me point out that some additional background on the whole Eskimo snow words issue can be found here.  [I also need to point out that this cartoon ninja linguist, though perhaps unexpected and sometimes unwanted, is much less aggressive than the last one we featured, in "How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing", 11/01/2006.]

My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine celebrates the fifth anniversary of Stephen Colbert's (re)invention of "truthiness" — a word we began tracking here on Language Log soon after it appeared on the premiere episode of "The Colbert Report." (See this post and links therein.) I got a chance to interview Colbert himself, and my latest Word Routes column for the Visual Thesaurus features an extended excerpt of the interview. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

BZ: I was a big supporter of "truthiness" from the early days, back when it was selected as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. I was there lobbying for it.

SC: Really? You were there, literally?

BZ: I was on the scene, yes.

SC: You're a member of the American Dialect Society?

BZ: I'm on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.

SC: Holy cow. Well then, thank you for pushing for it, because I married an English major. Getting a Word of the Year is the closest I'll ever come to having six-pack abs. That's maybe the sexiest thing I could do, to have a word recognized.

BZ: Now that it's in the New Oxford American Dictionary, that's got to be even better. You're even mentioned in the entry.

SC: Yeah. That's a real turn-on.

Read the rest here.

Jean Véronis went to see Beatrice Uria-Monzon in Carmen a few days ago, and connects the experience to recent political events in France:

How ironic in these times of French Roma-phobia: the world's most-performed French work tells a gypsy story. Just like the Mérimée short novel from which it originates, the opera reflects the Romantic fascination with Roma […] Following perhaps in the footsteps of Cervantes (Little Gypsy), Bizet, Mérimée, Hugo, Borrow, Liszt and many others were charmed by this people living on the fringes of society, freedom incarnate – free to be on the move, free from work, free from fitting into society; all elements found in Carmen.

If you haven't been following the situation that Jean refers to, you could start here or here or here.

In response to Tom McCarthy's novel C being shortlisted for the Booker prize, abebooks.com has posted "The A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles".  A surprisingly large number of the letters of the alphabet are still available. Even if we ignore punctuation and superscripts, only A, C, E, G, H, K, M, N, O, P, Q, S, V, W, X, Y, and Z are taken — if you get to work quickly, you have a shot at being the first to publish a work with the title B, D, F, I, J, L, R, T, or U.

Warm congratulations to The Independent's columnist Howard Jacobson, who was announced yesterday as the 2010 winner of the much-coveted Man Booker Prize.

Jacobson has had a very rough time on the only three occasions Language Log has mentioned his columns. He was castigated for an alarmist piece of hyperbole attacking "language experts" (in "Preaching the gospel of wrong is right"); for some overblown and under-supported claims about grammatical ignorance (in "Educational sky is falling says blithering windbag"); and for a feeble attempt at a syntactic joke (see the brief remark at the end of "Canoe wives and unnatural semantic relations"). Yet here he is, at 68, winning a £50,000 prize for The Finkler Question, a comic novel about English Jews. It makes me very happy.

"What, then, can be done?"

So asks Stanley Fish in "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives", NYT 10/11/2010, responding to SUNY Albany's decision to close programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater.