Language Log

What is the connection between (a) successfully executing something tricky that not everyone could get away with, like an escape or an acrobatic maneuver or a daring sartorial fashion statement, and (b) removing by tugging, stripping, or peeling?

The cover of Louann Brizendine's new book The Male Brain is puzzling.

Louann's Brizendine's The Male Brain has just come out.  I haven't read it yet — for some reason, the publisher didn't send me a review copy — and so I'll reserve judgment until my copy arrives. But Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks has an evaluation ("Brizendine, true to stereotype", 3/24/2010) based on an Opinion piece by Brizendine on CNN 's web site ("Love, sex, and the male brain", 3/24/2010).

You've met the femivores, now "Meet the Hegans".

Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame.  Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors.

Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another way to express ideas that are not permitted under the harsh social controls imposed by the government.  This is evident from the fact that the "character of the year" in China for 2009 is bèi 被.

Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages, has a new article on Slate about the burgeoning community of Avatar fans who have become obsessed with the movie's alien language, Na'vi. Before the movie was released, I had gotten to know the creator of the language, Paul Frommer, for a New York Times Magazine column I wrote about Na'vi and other cinematic sci-fi languages. At my request, Paul was then kind enough to write up a Language Log guest post, "Some highlights of Na’vi," just in time for Avatar's opening weekend. As Arika tells it in the Slate piece, that guest post and its comments section played a key role in the emergent subculture of linguistically engaged Na'vi-philes.

According to Elif Batuman, "Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar", The Chronicle Review, 2/12/2010:

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years—it took the experience of lived time—to realize that they really are the same thing.

In the meantime, I became a linguistics major. I wanted to learn the raw mechanism of language, the pure form itself. For the foreign-language requirement, I enrolled in beginning Russian: Maybe someday I could answer my mother's question about what Tolstoy was really trying to say in Anna Karenina.

The nail in the coffin of my brief career as a linguist was probably a seminar I took that winter about the philosophy of language. The aim of this seminar was to formulate a theory that would explain to a Martian "what it is that we know when we know a language." I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project. The solution turned out to consist of a series of propositions having the form "'Snow is white' is true if snow is white." The professor, a gaunt logician with a wild mane of red hair, wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class, and we would discuss why it wasn't trivial. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.

By contrast with the philosophy of language and my other classes in psycholinguistics, syntax, and phonetics, beginning Russian struck me as profoundly human. I had expected linguistics (the general study of language) to resemble a story, and Russian (the study of a particular language) to resemble a set of rules, but the reality was just the opposite.

Apparently Batuman was an undergraduate at Harvard, so some people whose 02138-ology is more current than mine should be able to decode the identity of that gaunt logician.  Good academic gossip, I guess, but I don't care much (although I do wonder what department (s)he was in).  Rather, I'm interested in the idea that Tarski's theory of truth should be the critical factor in a young woman's decision to abandon linguistics.

An interesting discussion by Ryan Red Corn about efforts to revive the Osage language:

No longer than a short while after the program got up and running did the tribe watch its last first language Osage speaker pass away, Lucille Roubedeaux.

As Uncle Mogre explained, “This is the last train out. If we can’t get it done this time around, then that’s it. There is no more after this. That’s it.” Everyone who ever heard those words fully understood the gravity of the situation, and decided that they did not want the language dying on their watch, including myself. […]

With the introduction of the language department, dedicated students and teachers started to create new speakers for the first time in only God knows how many years. It’s quite literally been close to 200 years since the last time the number of Osage speakers INCREASED. It’s difficult to take into account what this scrappy bunch of Osages has done until you put it into perspective. The Vatican even called to verify the miracle (Ok I made that last part up).

Is there one? Chris asks the question, citing a collection of LL posts.

Though George W. Bush certainly took his share of (in my opinion) unfair criticism on this issue, I should point out that Howie Carr's long-running Wizard of Uhs feature was focused on Ted Kennedy, and there's been a fairly large-scale attempt to transfer this epithet to Barack Obama, which hasn't really caught on, except in a diluted form as the Teleprompter Meme.

Keith Allan has bravely outed himself as editor of the journal from which I recently received a thoroughly discourteous message sequence. I thank him for responding to the discussion, and for confirming that it was not about him pressing the buttons in the wrong order. The reason his fine journal (the Australian Journal of Linguistics) sent me a message sequence I found annoying and presumptuous is the design of the stupid ScholarOne Manuscript software. Let me explain a little more about the nature of my life (perhaps my experiences will find an echo in yours), the part that involves those arbitrary strings of letters and digits we are all supposed to carry around in our heads like mental sets of keys.

Erin McKean, "Hey guys! Yes, ladies, this means you", Boston Globe, 3/21/2010:

In the study of peevology, language subdivision, one of the more fertile areas of inquiry is the long list of things that people are annoyed to be called. Not the truly offensive terms — none of which can be printed here, and all of which have a level of discomfort far higher than “pet peeve’’ — but the more general terms, whose offense is often magnified when they’re used by strangers involved in a commercial transaction.

Some people hate to be called “honey,’’ or “sugar.’’ A few feel that any use of “hey’’ as an attention-getter is rude (with the classic retort being “Hey is for horses’’). Others believe that being called “ma’am’’ ages them 10 years. But one of the more widespread vocative peeves, at least for women, is being addressed as “you guys.’’

Whether it’s the group e-mail that opens “Hi Guys!’’ or the waiter who says “OK, guys, your table is ready,’’ the use of “you guys’’ for groups of mixed gender (and even for all-female groups) can send the needle on many peeve-ometers into the red.

Sandra Wilde writes:

The National Governors' Association has just published a draft version of new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Sciences, which are open for public comment. I'm an education professor in the area of literacy with a special interest in grammar and related topics, and was wondering if you or other authors of Language Log would be interested in creating a post about them, since I know there have often been comments on the blog about published grammar advice for teachers. These standards are a big deal, since 48 states have agreed to adopt them. They're likely to have a big impact on curriculum for the foreseeable future.

SW suggests that LL readers may want to read the draft and submit comments, and that some discussion in LL posts and comments may be useful. According to the commoncore.org web site, "These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2".

I haven't had a chance to do more than skim the draft, but meanwhile, the comments section on this post is open.

Said the story in the Ottawa Citizen:

The woman was trapped in her car unconscious for about 20 minutes while firefighters performed an extraction, he said.

And alert Language Log reader Diane commented: "I had no idea our firefighters were also trained at dentistry!" She also asked me whether the misleading phrase an extraction was a dangler (an analog of the dangling modifier that prescriptivists warn against).