Language Log

My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar to readers of Language Log and my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. So here is our nepotistic "diavlog" for your enjoyment. (Diavlog is a second-order blend, by the way: it blends dialog and vlog, with the latter element representing a blend of video and blog. Or make that third-order, since blog blends Web and log.)

Rope 'may have saved girl', said the headline in the Metro alongside a photo of pretty 21-year-old British tourist Emily Jordan, and I felt my heart leap with new optimism. I had read the previous day that Emily had been trapped under water while riverboarding on vacation in New Zealand, and the story had said that although her river guide had been saved, poor Emily had drowned. Now it seemed that was inaccurate: she survived, and it may have been rescue ropes that saved her! But no, reading the full story confirmed again that she was dead. What had gone wrong with my interpretation process?

Half an hour before touchdown at Narita, the pilot turns on the "fasten seat belt" sign.  Because something (or some things) served during the in-flight meals on the 14-hour flight did not quite agree with your alimentary tract, you are already experiencing ominous rumblings down in your bowels.

You do your best to ignore the bouncing and jolting of the huge 747 as it descends through the various layers of stormy clouds.  Breathing deeply and slowly, you focus all of your thoughts on the first toilet you will encounter when you enter the terminal.

Finally, the plane screeches to a halt, then slowly, ever so slowly and with many pauses and turns, it taxis to the gate.  Since you know that you will have a major evacuation and it may take some time,  you  deplane along with everyone else.  But, horrors!  You are guided down lengthy hallways and escalators, then stand in line to wait for a bus that will take you to another part of the terminal to go through immigration.  After arriving at the immigration hall, you stand in line, alternating between doing a jig and exercising maximum sphincter control.  At last you pass through immigration and customs, then race to the nearest toilet you can find, open the door, dash to he only unoccupied stall you can find, enter, and come face to face with THIS.

From yesterday's mail:

An idle question from a big Language Log fan:  Do you have any idea if the nice folks in, say Germany or Italy or Spain, go as nuts as Americans seem to when native speakers make "fundamental" grammar errors?

It appears that the strong form of "going nuts" that we've called word rage is mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, with the British as the originators and still the champions. But the sociolinguistic settings in Germany, Italy, and Spain are very different from the situation in the U.S. — and as a result, they have their own kinds of language wars over there.

If you want to see all the illogic and angst of the prescriptive poppycock merchants on display, Howard Jacobson provides one-stop shopping. I don't think the UK has a more unprepossessing columnist of the foaming-at-the-mouth language-is-going-to-the-dogs persuasion. Oddly, he is not in the Telegraph but in the relatively liberal Independent. You might (or you might not) want to look at the way his last piece of rambling, ranting, frothing bitterness ends. It is entitled "In the face of overwhelming ignorance, it is the pedant's duty to keep battling on". Read on if that title holds any appeal…

The most recent xkcd:

(The original has the title tag "You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.")

Fail Blog has a picture of a panel with two switches labeled as follows:

天花燈                  夜燈
SMALLPOX        NIGHT LIGHT

This photograph elicited considerable discussion at Fail Blog, but — despite well over 150 comments — there was much consternation and little comprehension of why or how the confusion occurred.  The quality of the discussion at ADS-L was much higher (though far more limited), yet still left a number of questions unresolved.

Since, in the past, many Chinese friends (and even many Chinese teachers) have asked me why the Mandarin words for "smallpox" and "ceiling" share the same two characters, I've decided to make a fairly determined effort to explain how it happened.  Here's the etiology, not of smallpox, but of the failure.

In response to my question here, an authoritative answer from Alana Johns, who was asked by Ewan Dunbar, who was asked by Bill Idsardi:

iquq means stuff hanging down around the anus (dingleberries?).  S___ says when they were kids they would tease each other by calling each other "iquq" (in English we also say "you dirty bum!")

Adding -aluk would intensify the noun 'large, impressive' and then of course it is pluralized with -it:

iqu(q )+ alu(k) _it  'many large dirty bums'  →  iqualuit

BUT iqaluit (the name of the capital of Nunavut) is

iqalu(k) 'fish, normally char' + it plural → iqaluit

Those who enjoyed Penny Arcade's take on ghey may also like Jay Smooth's "Old Person's Guide to 'No Homo'":

According to Terry Pedwell, "PMO Iqaluit bumble draws smiles, frowns", The Canadian Press, 8/18/2009:

A bumble by the Prime Minister's Office has residents of Nunavut alternately chuckling and cringing.

A news release sent out Monday outlined Prime Minister Stephen Harper's itinerary as he began a five-day Arctic tour.

The release repeatedly spelled the capital of Nunavut as Iqualuit – rather than Iqaluit, which means "many fish" in the Inuktitut language.

The extra "u" makes a big difference.

"It means people with unwiped bums," said Sandra Inutiq of the office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut.

Sarah Lyall's piece "An Expat Goes for a Checkup" (front page of the NYT Week in Review, August 16) disusses American attacks on Britain's National Health Service (and affronted British responses, and her own experiences with the NHS), leading with the Investor's Business Daily invoking the physicist Stephen Hawking in an August 3 editorial opposing Barack Obama's health care proposals. As Geoff Pullum posted here last week, IBD (an American enterprise) barreled into the matter with the (utterly mistaken) assumption that Hawking is an American. The question Geoff asked was where IBD got this idea.

According to Tycho at Penny Arcade ("The True Face of Our Enemy", 8/17/2009)

The Think B4 You Speak campaign is basically incoherent, and operates from some deep misconceptions about how and why people communicate. These assertions have been collated and placed sequentially in today's comic offering

The strip in question:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

I was just looking for something in international mail regulations and stumbled on something curious. Among the items that it is prohibited to send to Brazil are: "Primary educational books not written in Portuguese". I have no desire to send any such textbooks to Brazil – in fact I'm not planning on sending anything to Brazil – I noticed this while looking for something else – but I'm curious as to the reason for this prohibition. It stands to reason that in a country whose primary language is Portuguese most primary textbooks will be in Portuguese, but I should think that there would be some schools in which some textbooks are not, such as international schools. And even if no schools use such textbooks, I can imagine foreign residents importing books in their own language for the use of their children, or teachers and educationists who want to examine textbooks from other countries. Against these legimitate uses for non-Portuguese textbooks, it is hard to imagine the threat posed by non-Portuguese textbooks. Do any of our readers know what this is about?