Language Log

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Back on July 14, when Sarah Palin used the blend refudiate in her role as Fox News contributor, I considered posting about it, but decided not to, since I'm not a fan of pouncing on political slips of the tongue.

But today, a week later, she used the same blend in a message on Twitter:

Reader JL sent in a pointer to this wonderful picture from the blog The Thought Experiment:

Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #.  I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I've never actually seen the symbol used that way.

Today, after some further research, I'm still not completely sure. But I've found a new theory, which I think has a better chance to be correct: it's all Emile Baudot's fault.

Under the name "Arnold Zwicky" I have returned to the top of the list of Language Log authors, having spent some time in the guise "Zwicky Arnold" at the very bottom of the list. Let there be wild celebrations! Boundless e-Champagne and i-Bûche de Juillet for everyone!

Amusing inversion of gendered communication stereotypes:

Mark Liberman recently asked, "What was the earliest use of mixed typographical symbols (as opposed to uniform asterisks or underlining) to represent (part or all of) taboo words?" The use of such symbols appears to have originated as a comic-strip convention. Comic strip fans, following Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana, have often called these cursing characters grawlixes, though I prefer the term obscenicons. In Gwillim Law's history of grawlixes, he lists examples of cartoon cursing going back to the Sep. 3, 1911 installment of "The Katzenjammer Kids." Here is the panel in question (which I found in the Washington Post archives):

Along with a sequence of asterisk-dash-exclamation point-dash-exclamation point, the speech balloon also features what appears to be a stick-figure devil firing a cannon, with three more exclamation points for good measure. As delightful as this example is, it's not the earliest use of obscenicons on the comics page. I found another "Katzenjammer Kids" strip using them, from two years earlier.

By Mitchell and Webb:

[Hat tip to Steve Fitzpatrick]

A recent post on Arnold Zwicky's blog features Kevin Fowler's Pound Sign, which brings cartoon cussing to the medium of music for the first time (?):

Just in case there might be little ears around,
I won’t say it, I’ll just spell it out –
I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point,
Don’t give a blank, and a whole lot of other choice words I can’t say –
Today I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point.

The documentary film The Linguists has just received an Emmy® nomination for "Outstanding Science and Technology Programming". The press release can be found ; for those of you who would like a downloadable keepsake, the relevant nomination can be found on p. 25 of the PDF and Word versions of the press release.

In related (and even more awesome) news, the stars of The Linguists — K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson — are also featured members of the Nat Geo E-Team on the National Geographic Kids website. You can spot their cartoon likenesses in the full image fairly quickly: they're the only ones who are talking. But there they are on the right for those who just want a quick peek.

While we're on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list). This morning's USA Today contains the headline:

BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain

Larry writes:

My first thought was that I had watched the news last night and I don't remember seeing anything about the caps rupturing. Then I realized "BP caps" wasn't the subject, "ruptured" wasn't the main verb, and "well" wasn't an adverb. (I suppose if I had thought about it, it would have also occurred to me that it would be harder for a cap to rupture well than for a knee, say, to break cleanly.

We can put "BP caps" in the same file as "SNP signals debate legal threat" and "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event," wherein a noun-verb sequence is easily misparsed as a noun-noun compound ("SNP signals," "Google fans").

A most perfect garden path headline. It’s interesting that this one depends on our automatic processing of headlines with their own syntax.

The classic garden path sentence, “The horse raced past the barn fell”, is a full sentence and not a headline, and in that one the garden path is created by our preference for initially interpreting “raced” as a main verb; only when we hit “fell” do we backtrack and reprocess “raced” as a passive participle and “raced past the barn” as a modifier of “horse”.

In the sea turtles headline (Yahoo Science News, July 16, 2010), “rescued” is a passive participle in both the initial and final parsings – we don’t mistakenly interpret “rescued” as a main verb in the past tense, because we are not inclined to think that the sea turtles rescued anything, and the “from” phrase further makes it clear that the turtles were the rescued ones, not the rescuers. So what’s the garden path about?

An eggcorn that hasn't yet been catalogued: "par none" for "bar none". I've mislaid the link where I first saw this, but there are plenty of examples on the web, from the realtor who advertises herself as providing "Service par none" to the hotel review titled "Excellence par none".

The June 28, 2010 issue of the ACA Compliance Group newsletter, called ACA Insight ("The weekly news source for investment management legal and compliance professionals"), has at the top of its title page the following two sentence quotation:  "There is no word in Japanese for compliance.  That's a problem."  On the following page, there is a brief article entitled "A Few Thoughts on Foreign Offices," the third section of which reads as follows:

Third, local custom can also present barriers to compliance.  "There is no word in Japanese for compliance," said the CCO [VHM:  Chief Compliance Officer], '[t]hat's [VHM:  sic] a problem."  It is very difficult, for example, to get office staff to submit statements for personal trading reviews, and when you do finally get them, they're not in English.  Hire a native speaker for the home office to assist with translations and communication, the CCO advised.  It is absolutely necessary for a good compliance program.