Language Log

I'm spending today at Berkeley, participating in a one-day conference on "The Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access".  I'll live-blog the discussion as the day unfolds, leaving comments off until it's over. I believe that the sessions are being recorded, and the recordings will be available on the web at some time in the near future. [Gary Price at Resource Shelf provides some other links here, and a press round-up here. Another summary by an attendee is here.]

Regular LL readers will know that we've been long-time users and supporters of Google Books, with occasional complaints about the poor quality of its metadata. For a lucid discussion of some issues with the terms of the proposed settlement, read Pamela Samuelson's articles "The Audacity of the Google Books Settlement", Huffington Post, 8/10/2009, and "Why is the Antitrust Division Investigating the Google Books Search Settlement?", Huffington Post, 8/19/2009.

As BBC Radio 4 reported the death of Senator Kennedy on the news, I heard a line about how his career had been blighted by the incident at the bridge at Chappaquiddick where "he failed immediately to report an accident". You can see what has happened: in an inadvisable attempt to avoid a split infinitive, the adverb has been placed before to, but this puts it next to failed, so we get interference from a distracting and unintended meaning that involves immediate failure (whatever that might mean). It was the reporting that should have been immediate. The right word order to pick would have been "he failed to immediately report an accident". But you just can't stop writers of news copy from being worried (falsely) that splitting an infinitive is some kind of mistake.

You just can't stop people putting themselves in harm's way. If they're not walking into the buzzsaw they're crashing like bugs into the windshield… As the previously referenced discussion about usage in The Guardian's online pages developed a bit further, a commenter called scherfig responded to Steve Jones's devastating piece of evidence about Mark Twain not obeying Fowler's which/that rule by saying this:

OK, steve, let's forget Mark Twain and Fowler (old hat) and take a giant leap forward to George Orwell in the 30's and 40's. In my opinion, in his essays, the finest writer of the English language ever . Check out his use of English – it is, after all, several decades after Twain and still 70 years ago, and he has actually written sensibly about language (quite a lot).

What Steve immediately did, of course, was to take a relevant piece of Orwell's work and look at it; scherfig, the Orwell fan, astonishingly, had been too lazy to do this. And again his result was total and almost instant annihilation of the opponent.

The ideal David Bowie song, according to (Nick Troop's interpretation of) the output of Jamie Pennebaker's LIWC program, correlated with sales figures across Bowie's oeuvre:

For the last dozen years, it's been known that young people who follow the stylistic advice of Strunk & White are more likely to get Alzheimer's disease when they get old. Well, at least, in a cohort of nuns,

Low idea density and low grammatical complexity in autobiographies written in early life were associated with low cognitive test scores in late life. Low idea density in early life had stronger and more consistent associations with poor cognitive function than did low grammatical complexity. Among the 14 sisters who died, neuropathologically confirmed Alzheimer's disease was present in all of those with low idea density in early life and in none of those with high idea density.

And if you look into what "idea density" means, you'll see that many aspects of Strunkish writing style, especially avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, are precisely designed to lower it. (For details and links, see "Writing style and dementia", 12/3/2004; and "Miers dementia unlikely", 10/21/2005.)

Now there's a new chapter in the story, based on looking for physical symptoms of Alzheimer's in living nuns using positron emission tomography (PET) brain imaging, rather than relying on post-mortem examination of the brains of dead ones ("Can Language Skills Ward Off Alzheimer's? A Nuns' Study", Time, 7/9/2009).

From John McIntyre:

You've heard about the Cupertino. You have seen the eggcorn. You know about the snowclone. Now — flourish by trumpets and hautboys — we have the crash blossom.

At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline:

Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms

(If this seems a bit opaque, and it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)

A quick response by subtle_body suggested that crash blossom would be an excellent name for headlines done in by some such ambiguity — a word understood in a meaning other than the intended one. The elliptical name of headline writing makes such ambiguities an inevitable hazard.

And danbloom was quick to set up a blog to collect examples of "infelicitously worded headlines."

Chris Waigl, reporting on the same neologism, describes "crash blossoms" as "those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking." Indeed, when such infelicitous headlines have come up here on Language Log, they have typically been discussed as examples of "garden path sentences." After the break, a recent headline of the classic "garden path" variety.

John McIntyre at You Don't Say considers a hypothetical Museé des Peevologies. The curator's job is apparently open, or will be once a founding donor is located.

From the Times Online of August 23, under the head "Quangos blackball … oops, sorry … veto 'racist' everyday phrases", a story that begins:

It could be construed as a black day for the English language — but not if you work in the public sector.

Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a purge of common words and phrases so as not to cause offence.

Among the everyday sayings that have been quietly dropped in a bid to stamp out racism and sexism are “whiter than white”, “gentleman’s agreement”, “black mark” and “right-hand man”.

Details to follow, but first a word about quangos, for readers unfamiliar with the term.

(Hat tip to Danny Bloom.)

Not only are the stereotypical Japanese fastidiously clean,  they are also extraordinarily polite.  They will not just tell you to be careful not to endanger yourself.  They will be sure to preface the warning with a "please" (actually the word for "please" in Japanese, KUDASAI, comes at the end of the sentence).

In today's Japan mail (from Kathryn Hemmann) come two signs, one warning, "Please Be Careful to Strong Sunlight" and the other, "Please be careful to traffic."

Michael Bulley made a profoundly incautious comment in a discussion in the Guardian newspaper's "Comment is free" online section today. He was following up a pathetic column on usage by the paper's style guide editor, David Marsh. Unsurprisingly, Marsh had attempted to defend the totally fake which–that rule for integrated (or ‘defining’) relative clauses, which we have so often critiqued here at Language Log. Wrote Bulley, rather pompously:

No one would deny that there are numerous examples of "which" introducing a relative clause that defines (if they weren't any, no one would object to them as being bad style!), but are you just going to say to someone "This is what lots of people do, so it's OK for you to do it as well"? I'm reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. I haven't checked, but I'd bet he never uses "which" as a defining relative.

Oh, no! It was like watching someone walking backwards toward a buzzsaw. I could hardly bear to look. You don't say things like that in the age of We-Can-Fact-Check-Your-Ass!

A couple of weeks ago, Yale University Press decided to remove the illustrations from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book The Cartoons that Shook the World. (See "Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book", NYT, 8/12/2009). Among the many condemnations of this decision that I've read, Christopher Hitchens' ("Yale Surrenders", Slate, 8/172009) is the only one that makes a lexicographical argument:

[YUP director John] Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

Just a pointer to Jan Freeman's "On Language" column — she was subbing for Bill Safire — in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about Ambrose Bierce's advice on English usage in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), which Jan characterizes as "often mysterious, perverse and bizarre". With examples.

Max Heiman wrote to me with a nice point. I present it here as a guest post.

An ambiguity in a New York Times story caught my eye:

But in the wake of the financial crisis, attendance at the [Museum of American Finance] ― located at 48 Wall Street, near the epicenter of last year’s market collapse ― has risen to about 200 visitors a day, nearly double its tally last summer. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art averages that many visitors almost every 90 seconds.)

Quiz: does the Met average more or less than 200 visitors every 90 seconds?