Language Log

In a November 14 comment on Mark Liberman's "Going rogue" posting, David Gustav Anderson says:

In many parts of the English speaking world (UK and Commonwealth), "going rogue" is a euphemism for heterosexual women engaging in anal intercourse.

(I was at first suspicious, since the comment appeared over a year after the original posting, and many such long-delayed comments are spam, but this one looks legit.)

[Added 11/18: As I say in a follow-up posting, DGA is legit, and so is the comment, in the sense that he did post the comment and did so earnestly. But it turns out that his sources were playing a prank on him.]

Such a euphemistic use of going rogue was news to me, but then there are lots of usages I haven't noticed. Anderson didn't give any cites, and I haven't been able to find any, so that for the moment I suspect that euphemistic uses are neither widespread nor frequent, but I'm open for evidence (beyond some individual readers saying that they're familiar with the use).

[Added 11/18: I'm now convinced that claims about this use are sheer invention.]

Steve Pinker's recent NYT review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book suggests a valuable coinage ("Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective", 11/7/2009; emphasis added) :

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

In support of creative lexicography, I plan to be on the look-out for future opportunities to refer to the Igon Value Problem.

Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.

Ethan Forman broke the Danvers High School meep-ban story in the Salem News on 11/10/2009 (See "Meep: Truth or Onion?").   Over the past few days, the story has been picked up by several wire services and other outlets, none of whom provided any information beyond what was in Forman's original story.

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered looked into it, and actually added something to the story by interviewing a student, Mike Spiewak ("Principal Tells Students 'Meep' Is Off-Limits"):

The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York Times on November 14, a story ("It Turns Out You Can Say That On Television, Over and Over", by Edward Wyatt) about expressions that don't reach the level of obscenity or profanity but are offensive to many people — and have now been appearing with increasing frequency on television (in prime-time network series), where they can serve as approximations to even stronger stuff.

In this morning's Stone Soup, another take on that highly efficient language, Dude:

This morning we're continuing to explore the difference between somebody and someone, which all started on 11/10/2009, when David Landfair wrote to Arnold Zwicky ("Ask Language Log: someone, somebody") to ask for protection against the bizarre idea that someone is nominative (like he/she/who) while somebody is accusative (like him/her/whom).

This morning, I appealed the somebody-vs.-someone story to the Supreme Court of the United States. The decision came quickly — details are below.

In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I consider the enormous linguistic impact of an internal memorandum published at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on November 12, 1990. The memo, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, was entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," and needless to say, we've all been webified ever since. Read all about it here.

Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):

A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon was an American one too. Of course in the bigger scheme of things, even in the smaller scheme, this was an insignificant spat. The war was fought at 140 characters at a time.

It was between South African blacks and African Americans.

From Joel Stickley at how to write badly well:

Thanks to Andrew Freer for pointing out to me that the BBC has published an article in connection with its Horizon documentary about "unlocking the mysteries of speech" (they have the usual tendency to confuse talk about language and talk about speech). Simon Kirby remarked to me this morning about the documentary (which I have not seen: Barbara and I do not have TV set):

Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):

I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.

In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.