Language Log

I was surprised when the mail brought me my October issue of Harper's, where on page 43 was Harper's full-page ad, defining the word, "content," in what seemed to me to be an unusual and counterproductive way.

The ad says:

WARNING! Harper's Magazine is 100% Content Free! Everybody gives you "content." But you'll never find that in Harper's Magazine. Instead, you'll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper's Magazine can tell it. Subscribe today and join the thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content.

Sarah Currier asked:

Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am 43, grew up in New Zealand, but now live in Scotland.

This passage is set in 1960 and is between the narrator and his then elderly mother:

"She is too sincere for you," she said after a short pause.
"Sincere?"
"You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father".

The woman using "bored of" is also an Austrian Jew who escaped to England during WWII. So English is her second language.

I just found that really jarring, especially in such a beautifully written literary novel. My partner thinks I am mad.

A couple of days ago, Olivia Judson discussed the effects on science writing of the execrable state of English libel law, with some details of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against Simon Singh, and a bit about Mattias Rath's case against Ben Goldacre: "Cracking the Spine of Libel", NYT, 9/15/2009. There's an excellent list of links at the end of her post.

We discussed a central linguistic aspect of the case against Singh here a few months ago ("Knowing bogosity", 4/11/2009).

Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.

Here's the first sentence of William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve":

Taking on the issue of the cost of health care, a Washington Post editorialist intoned recently that “knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential” — knowing about when to use a plural verb is tough, too — “but, without a mechanism to put that knowledge into action, it won’t be enough to bend the cost curve.”

The phrase in boldface blue was too much for reader Anthony Ambrosini:

Am I missing something?  Which with a plural verb just implies a plural response to the question, and I doubt he thinks that knowing should take a plural verb.  What's he on about?

The Jamaican Creole phrase often spelled batty man, pronounced ['bati'man] (also botty boy ['bati'bwai]), would be more easily interpreted by other English speakers if it were spelled botty man, since the first element is botty, a familiar British hypocorism for bottom. (My point about the spelling is not a prescriptive one; I'm merely pointing out that the first syllable sounds like Standard English bot, not bat.) The literal meaning of the phrase into American English would be "butt man" or "ass man", and the free translation is "homosexual" (trading, of course, on the juvenile assumption that all gays are ever interested in is bottoms). The phrase appeared in a note near the naked corpse of John Terry, found at his home in Montego Bay last week. It saddened me to see, in a week when one country atoned just a little for its homophobic past with a genuine apology from its government, another country continuing to forge a place for itself in the annals of intolerance and moral backwardness.

To a lot of people, Joe Wilson deserves credit not just for speaking his mind, but for speaking theirs. "He blurted out what many other Republicans probably were thinking,"  one commentator put it, while Rush Limbaugh said: "I was shouting, "You're lying," throughout the speech at the television.  You're lying!  It's a lie!  Joe Wilson simply articulated what millions of Americans were saying." 

Well, not quite. However many Americans were moved to tax the President with dishonesty as they listend to the speech, it's a safe bet they expressed themselves the way Limbaugh did, in the present progressive — "You're lying." Whereas what Wilson said was "you lie," revisting a use of the simple present that parted ways with ordinary conversational English a couple of centuries ago. "You lie" — it's a sentence you expect to hear finished with "sirrah," and not the sort of thing that anyone says in a moment of spontaneous anger. (–"I really meant to put the money back." –"You lie!")

Neurocriminology is a hot topic. From Isabella Bannerman, recently published in the Six Chix series:

From Peter Nichols, "Body of Evidence: Neurocriminologist Probes the Biology of Crime", recently published in Penn Arts & Sciences magazine:

In the mid-19th century, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso was doing an autopsy on Giuseppe Villella, a notorious brigand who’d spent years in the prisons of Pavia. Peering into the dead criminal’s skull case, Lombroso thought it resembled the crania of “inferior animals,” particularly rodents. “At the sight of that skull,” he wrote, “I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal.”

Griffy and Zippy experience whateverism of an extreme sort:

The Valley in question is the San Fernando Valley of southern California, home of Valspeak, a sociolect made famous by the 1982 Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" (as performed by his daughter Moon Unit Zappa) and the 1983 movie based on it. The song is packed with linguistic features that are (or have become) stereotypes of the variety (especially as used by affluent upper-middle-class young women), but whatever isn't in the song.

Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?"  (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic.  They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by overseas Chinese.)  The article was written by a well-known Singaporean Malay playwright named Alfian Sa'at (he also call himself "Naif" and writes a blog under that name).

Alfian Sa'at's insights on the close relationships between what he correctly terms Southern Chinese languages (such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese) and Malay are very interesting. His observations on how there are almost no similar connections between Mandarin Chinese and Malay are quite thought provoking.  In other words, Alfian Sa'at is saying that Mandarin is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the region and that the inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not have any deep affinity for it.

In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret ("I'm sorry it all happened"), or grudging self-exculpatory conditionals ("If some people think I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry they were upset"), it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

That's how to say it (ignoring the punctuation error — the missing comma after work): not a bunch of evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple "We're sorry."

In the context of concerns about declining civility in American political discourse, Victor Steinbok points to a post at Vukutu on Australian Political Language, which quotes from "Mungo MacCallum’s great book, How to be a Megalomaniac, … a list of the terms of abuse which [former prime minister Paul] Keating  had used against his opponents duing his time in politics":

“harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth.”

"MacCallum notes that this listing is only of terms which Keating used in Federal Parliament, which of course has rules of decorum not applying in the rougher world outside."

Following up on last summer's discussion of Yaourter, Jonathan Rabinowitz sent a pointer to Garance Doré's post "Hello Sunshine" (9/9/2009), which begins

Londres, ville tropicale. Envoyez les ventilos. Il fait un temps splendide. SPLENDIDE !

and ends

Puis je suis montée sur mon échelle avec mes crayons de couleur, j’ai vu mon dessin prendre forme petit à petit, j’ai mis de la musique, et chanté Phoenix en yaourt pendant des heures. Et je n’ai même pas vu la nuit tomber.