Language Log

For some reason, the current British election campaign has been mercifully free of empty pontificating about first-person pronouns. But Tom Clark, "Barack Obama's travel rhetoric rubs off on Nick Clegg's general election talk", The Guardian, 5/6/2010, did take a shot at reading aspects of political character from candidates' distributions of sentence lengths:

Like the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are laying emphasis on cutting waste. [The speech-writing consultancy] Bespoke reveals both parties demonstrate a striking economy with words when compared with Labour. The average sentence in a Liberal or Tory speech is just 14 words, which is five shorter than Labour. Among the leaders the gap is even bigger, with Gordon Brown's tally of 22 in the average sentence being positively verbose when compared with David Cameron's 13, never mind Clegg's even pithier 12. [Simon] Lancaster [director of the speech-writing consultancy Bespoke] believes the trappings of office can encourage a taste for "lounging in the luxury of super-size statements" when compared with the breathless demands for change that typically characterise opposition.

The Economist had some letters in the last couple of weeks from people ruminating on terrible experiences of bookstore ignorance they had encountered: someone who asked for Dickens's A Christmas Carol and was sent over to the DVDs; someone who asked for Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was told "If it's a book, it'll be over there"; and so on. I have encountered unhelpful bookstore assistants too, but I wasn't too ready to pile on with further stories, because I once (briefly) worked as a bookstore assistant. It was my first regular paying job, before I became a rock musician. And I still remember the day a middle-aged woman customer demanded to know if we had "Kreissoppa Tebberley" in stock.

The first Internet domain names using non-Latin characters are being rolled out, a plan put into motion after approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Arabic-speaking nations are the first to reap the orthographic benefits, with new country codes available for Egypt (مصر), Saudi Arabia (السعودية), and the United Arab Emirates (امارات). The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, previously online at <http://www.mcit.gov.eg/>, is blazing the trail with its new URL:

<وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر>

Not everything is fully worked out with the new system, though. Browsers that aren't caught up to speed on the non-Latin domain names will see the addresses rendered as Latinized gobbledygook. The Egyptian Communication Ministry's Arabic-script URL, for instance, currently resolves to <http://xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/>. That's not very communicative.

[Update: See the very helpful comments below for an explanation of the Latinized encoding.]

In tonight's playoff game with the San Antonio Spurs, the Phoenix Suns will wear jerseys reading "Los Suns", in protest of Arizona's recently-enacted immigration-enforcement law.

The team didn't need to have new uniforms made up for the occasion — they just unpacked the jerseys that they've been using since 2007 for the NBA's Noche Latina.

Randall Munroe has  a great post on the xkcd blog that reports and discusses the results of an online color survey.  With 222,500 user responses, this was almost certainly the largest scientific experiment ever run by a cartoonist.

The most interesting result reported so far is an experimental test of the old stereotype about sex differences in color naming.

So far, it's been overshadowed by the big BP oil spill, the Times Square bomber, Greece's financial crisis, and other hot news items. But quietly developing in the background is what seems to be the best euphemistic explanation for a sexual escapade since "hiking the Appalachian Trail".

According to Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, "Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with 'rent boy'", Miami New Times, 5/4/2010, the anti-gay activist Dr. George Rekers recently took a ten-day European vacation with a young man known as "Lucien", whom he met though a web site called rentboy.com:

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

In the Miami New Times article, Dr. Rekers is quoted as saying ""I had surgery, and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

One of the many difficult things about English spelling is that you can't choose the right letter for an unstressed vowel unless you know the word, or guess its etymology, or get lucky. Everybody gets the wrong end of this one from time to time — certainly I do — and that's why dictionaries and the internet are especially helpful for those of us who occasionally display our orthographic guesses in public. Last week, someone at Fox News got overconfident:

The New York Times reports on efforts by Shanghai officials to crack down on Chinglish, but the prospects are daunting:

For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

Today's Guardian offers Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om. Tantalizing. In turn, this links to Ajay Anil Gurjar and Siddharth A. Ladhak, Time-Frequency Analysis of Chanting Sanskrit Divine Sound "OM" Mantra, International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.8 No.8, August 2008. Even more tantalizing. A new field of theophonetics!

Unfortunately,  the article is not divine.

In reading about the decision at London's Middlesex University to delete its department of philosophy, I came across this video clip, "WBL gives companies the edge", presented by Professor Edward J Esche, Dean of the School of Arts & Education:

In one of the comments on my recent "begging the question" post, Samantha asked:

Could someone give me a concrete example of this fallacy (the simpler, the better?) It would be especially great if it was an example like what Aristotle had in mind, something that showed "how such arguments can be disguised so as to appear persuasive." I've read the Wikipedia articles about the fallacy but I still can't wrap my mind around it.

As far as I know, Aristotle's discussion (e.g. in Part 16 of Book II of the Prior Analytics) is entirely abstract. However, others have supplied plenty of concrete illustrations of the concept over the centuries: here's an example from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics for 1/5/2006:

As a Sinologist, one thing that really annoys me is when someone sanctimoniously invokes phony Orientalism to embellish their speech or writing.  One egregious example is that the Chinese "character / symbol" for "crisis" is made up of "danger" plus "opportunity."

Several days ago, Frank Chance sent me the following note:

Lao Zi Quote:

Hmmm…this doesn't seem to correspond with any part of the Laozi I know…not that it matters.

Labelling it "Lao Zi Apocrypha," I sent the card around to some friends and colleagues.

Macy Halford, of The Book Bench at the New Yorker, wrote to me with a question about "begs the question":

Recently, one of our posts caused quite a stir by misusing the phrase (to mean “raises the question”), and many discussions ensued, the result of which was that we all realized that even though we (kind of) understand the phrase in the Latin, we really don’t understand, etymologically, the English translation—either “begs the question” or “petitions for the principle,” though the latter makes more sense. And we all wondered whether the Latin was used only in the context of formalized debate or argument. It seems like a fairly complex concept, with a complex definition—it makes me wonder why we use or misuse it at all, since the need to use it in everyday speech (or blogging) would seem not very great.

(FWIW, the offending post was apparently this one, with the original "this begs questions like …" quickly amended to "this raises questions like…")