Language Log

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading "the tastiest suffix") an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

At the Atlantic, David Shenk mediates an exchange of letters between Mark Blumberg and Nicholas Wade about the appropriateness of calling FOXP2 a "speech gene",  about "gene for X" thinking in general, and about the nature of science journalism:

Blumberg: Trumping up FOXP2 as yet another star gene in a series of star genes (the "god" gene, the "depression" gene, the "schizophrenia" gene, etc.) not only sets FOXP2 up for a fall; it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about how complex behavior – including the capacity for language – develops and evolves.

Wade: I'm a little puzzled by your complaint, which seems to me to ignore the special dietary needs of a newspaper's readers and to assume they can be served indigestible fare similar to that in academic journals. […]

As for missing an opportunity to educate the public, that, with respect, is your job, not mine.  Education is the business of schools and universities. The business of newspapers is news.

Via Nancy Friedman's Twitter feed comes this lovely eggcorn, in a comment on the New York Times Opinionator blog:

NOW is in the wrong fight. The issues should be about access to affordable healthcare and jobs. Without addressing these issues, NOW and others have nothing to offer the average Jane and in consequence, have allowed Sarah Palin and her elk to define women's issues.

There's nothing in the comment to suggest that this substitution was the result of intentional wordplay, but it's hard not to think that the slip was influenced by Palin's well-documented love of hunting big game in Alaska like moose and caribou. (Not sure about the elk, though. See Bill Poser's post and comments thereon for an explanation of the difference between North American moose and elk.) And perhaps the commenter is from a part of the country where milk is pronounced as [mɛlk] (say, Pittsburgh, Utah, or Washington State), rendering ilk and elk homophonous, or nearly so. Add the fact that ilk is a low-frequency word that lingers in crystallized idiomatic usage ("of X's ilk," "X and his/her/its/their ilk"), and it's clear to see that this is a prime candidate for eggcornization.

Carol Hills, from The World, wrote to ask about historical and cultural differences in the use of religious names. Why, for example, is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal names (Vishnu, Krishna) while others are not (Brahma, Shiva).

I don't know anything about this topic — at best I can add some additional questions, like why some of the gods of European paganism have survived as reasonably common modern names (especially Diana and Brigit, but also e.g.  Apollo, Minerva, Thor) while others apparently haven't (Baldur, Hermes, Hera, Mars, Odin, Poseidon,  Zeus, etc.)

So I'm appealing to readers for (pointers to sources of factual) information on this question.

Email from Eric Baković:

Tom Lehrer once shared this one with me:

I cannot distinguish
some phonemes in Enguish
which causes me anguish
in learning the languish

He said he'd have been a linguist instead of a mathematician if he'd had to do it over again. Now THAT would have been something.

In the context of Mark's latest, I cannot resist telling you about the one moderately successful rhyming of orange by a poet that I know about. The poet was my friend Tom Lehrer, the mathematician / singer / songwriter / satirist / musical theater expert, who has for decades now divided his time between Cambridge MA and Santa Cruz CA. And his poem only works for those American dialects in which the first syllable of corrugated has an unrounded low back vowel (it is basically homophonous with car), and in which the last syllable in I pray to heaven above rhymes the last syllable in you're the one I'm thinking of. Check your dialect to make sure you speak that way (if you don't, then this is all wasted time for you), and if you do, here's the poem (though you'll probably complain that it cheats):

Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.

Yes; I knew you would object to that line break… But be fair. It actually rhymes, if you say it right. Give credit where it's due.

Andrew Gelman is justifiably impressed by Laura Wattenberg's ruminations on rhyme (warning: the second link triggers one of those insufferable ads that starts playing loud sounds as soon as the page comes up, so mute your audio before clicking).  Ms. Wattenberg without the musical background:

Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.

Andrew wrote to ask about this, and so I did a bit of looking around for information about the statistics of rhyme.

Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.

Top story of the morning in the UK for the serious language scientist must surely be the report in The Sun concerning a children's toy mouse that is supposed to sing "Jingle bells, jingle bells" but instead sings "Pedophile, pedophile". Said one appalled mother who squeezed the mouse, "Luckily my children are too young to understand." The distributors, a company called Humatt, of Ferndown in Dorset, claims that the man in China who recorded the voice for the toy "could not pronounce certain sounds." And the singing that he recorded "was then speeded up to make it higher-pitched — distorting the result further." (A good MP3 of the result can be found here.) They have recalled the toy.

Shocked listeners to BBC Radio 4 this morning heard the presenters read this story out while collapsing with laughter. Language Log is not amused. If there was ever a more serious confluence of issues in speech technology, the Chinese language, freedom of speech, taboo language, and the protection of children, I don't know when.

They're getting to be routine, Mark's virtuoso skewerings of those who Google widely but not well — in the post below, taking on James Delingpole's effort to demonstrate that the Climategate story is undercovered by the MSM by showing that the number of Google hits for the phrase is disproportionate to the news stories about it. If I have one reservation — which doesn't affect his conclusions — it's that Mark lets Google off too lightly when he says that its hit-count algorithm "might over-estimate the total number of pages for a term that has increased very rapidly in the recent past," and goes on to allow that "if we take the counts at face value, then apparently there are a lot of people generating a lot of pages about climategate." Might overestimate? Too kind. When Google reports hit count estimates over a few hundred, the results should never be taken at face value, or any value at all — they're not only too inaccurate for serious research, but demonstrably flaky.

James Delingpole, "Climategate goes uber-viral, Gore flees leaving evil henchmen to defend crumbling citadel", The Telegraph, 12/4/2009:

Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

Peter Baker, "How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan", New York Times, 12/5/2009:

The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.

The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.

"Military slang for an expression of shock". Right.

Readers of Chris Potts' post on "David Foster Wallace Grammar Challenge Challenged" may be interested in a list of previous LL posts that discuss DFW:

"Snoot? Bluck" (11/8/2004)
"Enforcer Syndrome (pre-adolescent phase)" (6/22/2005)
"The Grammar Vandal strikes in Boston" (7/16/2007)
"Are any of those things even things?" (9/18/2008)
"'Descriptivism's five basic edicts'" (7/7/2009)