Language Log

Reader JH's wife texted from the playground

She's so tired though… may come home Zionist

This was not an example of the role of fatigue in political identity formation, but rather a cupertino, created when her iPhone helpfully corrected (some spelling of) "soonest" to "Zionist".

SMS messaging and cellphone email must be a rich source of cupertinos, since autocompletion and spelling correction are always (?) on, and the input methods are very error-prone.

Professor Simon Kirby (the world's only Professor of Language Evolution) regards himself as pretty good at parsing headlines on the whole, but saw one recently that completely stumped him. I agree with him; it's worse than a crash blossom, it's positively a train wreck, a scattered mess of uninterpretable short words almost all capable of more than one interpretation, the whole apparently signifying nothing. See if you can recover any reasonable meaning for this headline without reading the story:

Council hires ban bid taxi firm

The comments on my recent post, "Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)" meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content. The most famous example is of course Noam Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, though many have argued that it's quite possible to assign meaning to the sentence, given the right context (see Wikipedia for more).

But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of "open-class" or "lexical" morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the "Jabberwocky" variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.

David Craig asked whether Anand Giridharadas is suffering from the Recency Illusion in his small piece on "so" (Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, NYT 5/21/2010), which observes that

“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight. […]

They say that any noun can be verbed, but some transformations are more surprising than others. Here's one that Bryan Van de Ven spotted earlier today on the road in Austin. (Click on the image for a larger and more complete picture.)

The sub-head ("HANG THE PERSON WHOM HIRES THEM) attests fact that whom is treated on the right just as it is on the left: All across the political spectrum, slogan-daubers use whom when "a note of dignity and austerity is desired".

There's an excellent discussion of some methodological issues behind the Marc Hauser scandal at Neuron Culture, "Updated: This Hauser thing is getting hard to watch". The post points out that the information released so far leaves many questions unanswered about what the lab's official methodology was, and what Hauser and other lab members really did.

The popular sports blog Deadspin isn't the first place you'd expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post "Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way," featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook:

Reader HS asks about

…the extremely common construction 'these difficult economic times,' which strikes me as an awkwardly ordered way of saying 'these times of economic difficulty.' I wonder what is so attractive about something so awkward. It gets nearly 10 million Google hits.

A COCA search for / these [jj] [jj] times / turns up 20 instances of these tough economic times, 11 of these difficult economic times, six of these hard economic times, four each of these uncertain, rough, and dire economic times, two each of these lean, perilous, bad, tight, turbulent and troubled economic times, and one each of these parlous, miserable, sour, poor, uncertain, harsh, and challenging economic times.

Tom Bartlett, "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard", Chronicle of Higher Education 8/19/2010:

Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do? […]

An internal document, however, sheds light on what was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how research assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification.

A copy of the document was provided to The Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left psychology. The document is the statement he gave to Harvard investigators in 2007.

From Tom Scott, a set of useful warning labels to stick on newspaper articles.

Now, to be fair, we need a set of similar warning labels for scientific papers and their presentation to the press.

I'll suggest a few after the jump. I'm sure that you'll be able to think of others, or better wording for mine.

FMA writes (from zip code 02138):

My roommate [MS] told me Christopher Hitchens is a wonderful prose stylist. I was skeptical, so I opened Hitch 22 at random. The first sentence reads:

"My mother having decided that Tonbridge was out of the question for her sensitive Christopher, some swift work had to be done to reposition me in the struggle—the whole aim and object of the five years at Mount House—to make me into a proper public-school boy [sic]."

I have put in bold the part of the sentence that bothers me. Essentially, there is a fragment next to a sentence; there is no predicate for "my mother." I noted that Mr. Hitchens is also missing a comma after "mother," but my roommate believes that's just the thing that would make the sentence wrong. According to him, "My mother having decided that Tonbridge was out of the question for her sensitive Christopher," is a modifier of "some swift work," so he believes there is no problem with the sentence. He also believes there is no problem sentences like

"My mother being very old, I walked in quietly [sic]."

Will you tell the world he's wrong? I tried to come up with analogous examples, but he thinks there's something about the present perfect tense that makes these constructions unique. He claims authority because he is a native English speaker—I, while not a native speaker, do claim native competence.

Undeterred by their conviction in Federal court, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson of the Typo Vigilantes Typo Eradication Advancement League are in Philly.

They're on tour to promote their book, The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, which chronicles their epic saga of peevish vandalism heroic resistance to "the creeping menace of carelessness".

Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89", by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of grammar, usage, and stye:

Mr. Kilpatrick railed against turgid prose in "The Writer's Art" (Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1984). In his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics."