Language Log

It's a trend: comix-ironic Whorfianism. Several readers have drawn my attention to the latest Diesel Sweeties:

Boko Haram has been in the news recently, e.g. Joe Boyle, "Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma", BBC News, 7/28/2009:

They have launched co-ordinated attacks across northern Nigeria, threatening to overthrow the government and impose strict Islamic law – but who exactly are the Nigerian Taliban?

Since the group emerged in 2004 they have become known as "Taliban", although they appear to have no links to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some analysts believe they took inspiration from the radical Afghans, others say the name is more a term of ridicule used by people in Maiduguri, the area where they were founded.

The group's other name, Boko Haram, means "Western education is a sin" and is another title used by local people to refer to the group.

Isa Sanusi, from the BBC's Hausa service, says the group has no specific name for itself, just many names attributed to it by local people.

If their name is uncertain, however, their mission appears clear enough: to overthrow the Nigerian state, impose an extreme interpretation of Islamic law and abolish what they term "Western-style education".

In "Xinhua English and Zhonglish," I discussed the phenomenon of a peculiar style of English that has developed in China.  Since it is not outrageously incorrect in terms of grammar or grossly unidiomatic, this type of English cannot be labeled Chinglish.  On the other hand, this particular style of English, which we may call Xinhua English or New China News English, is distinctive enough to be recognizable as an emerging dialect.

The latest instance (like the previous one) was brought to my attention by Victor Steinbok, who keeps a keen eye out for pertinent examples.  It is in today's headline from China View, an organ of Xinhuanet:  "China lodges solemn representation over Japan's permission for Rebiya Kadeer's visit."

Alex Baumans and Eric Lechner independently sent in copies of today's Speed Bump, for our "Words for X" file:

The Irish singer Van Morrison was well into his set at a concert in his native isle before a crowd in high spirits. Enthusiastic applause followed every song. At one point in the excited hubbub as Van tried to signal the band to start a new song, a voice yelled out over the crowd, "We love you, Van!". This moved the dour and laconic performer to make his only remark of the evening to his audience. Said Van emphatically to his adoringly ebullient fan: "Fucking shut the fuck up."

Can you tell a lie nonlinguistically? That is, is it reasonable that certain actions or even physical objects should be regarded as embodying lies? A couple of clearly somewhat dishonest examples:

• In the Best Western El Rancho Inn on El Camino Real in Millbrae (Millbrae sounds Scottish but it is near the San Francisco International Airport; I am waiting for a flight to take me back to Edinburgh) the Colombian-made cotton towels and facecloths bear a label stating the brand name "Five Star". El Rancho is nice, but it is a standard-grade California motel, not five star. Could the towel company be trying to misinform me about the quality I am enjoying?
• In the Office Depot store across the street from the El Rancho there is a demo of wireless printing from an HP laptop to an HP All-In-One printer / scanner / fax / copier / toaster. The sign brags about the built-in wireless networking and says you should open WordPad on the laptop and type something and then click "File | Print", and what you typed will magically appear on the nearby printer. But I checked the laptop more closely. Discreetly plugged into the side of it is a USB cable. I traced the cable. It runs to the printer. There is no wireless connection at all. Could they be trying to mislead me about how well wireless printer networking works?

For the better part of the past two years, I've resisted the temptation to run out and buy a Kindle. (Well, OK, I wouldn't have to "run out" to do it, nor could I; as far as I can tell, the Kindle can only be ordered on Amazon. But whatever, it's still an appropriate figure of speech.) The Kindle just seems made for me. I love books and I love to read, and I'm also a ridiculously huge fan of electronic publishing of all kinds, and (especially) of the idea of carrying a library worth of books with me wherever I go, because hey, you never know when you might want to read any one of them. (This also explains why my iPod touch overfloweth with just-in-case music.) The Kindle seems like it should be the best of both worlds: it's all there but the actual page-turning.

But still, I've resisted. I suppose I've been waiting for a sign, or at the very least for a definitive review of the Kindle — something other than the lap-doggish panting that was all I'd seen thus far. And in the space of the past two weeks, I've had both.

The entry on like as a conjunction in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes Shakespeare as using "conjunctive like" in this line:

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
Romeo and Juliet, 1595

The "show open topic" for this week's Car Talk, according to the show's web page, is "Tom and Ray translate the grunts of mechanics".

It starts like this:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In fact, Alexandra Sellers' Spoken Cat was published a dozen years ago, and similarly, the Newsweek article about it (Lucy Howard and Carla Koehl, "Talk The Talk"), ran on May 5, 1997. But Tom and Ray are not broadcasting from a parallel space-time continuum. Rather, this is an "encore edition", which apparently means that the jokes — and the automobile repair advice? — are 12 years old.

It was widely reported in Walter Cronkite's obituaries that "Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters." Or by some accounts it's the Swedes who use "Cronkiters." This too-good-to-check linguafactoid came up in the comments on my post "Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite," and commenter Lugubert swiftly dismissed the Swedish claim:

Google "cronkiter" and you'll find all hits are in English. Smells of myth. I, Swede, 66, multilingual professional translator, have never seen or heard that word in any language. I'm afraid (read: convinced) that Mr. C is totally unknown by an overwhelming majority of Swedes.

If, never the less, a similar word would have been adopted into Swedish by the cognoscenti, I'm at least fairly sure that the for Swedish very odd -er would immediately have been replaced by a more normal nomen agentis ending like -erare.

There's no reason to believe the Dutch part of the story, either. Read all about it in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

Emily Finn, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics", in the most recent NYT Education News:

My college admissions essay said it all — if only I had stopped and listened to myself at the time. I was more concerned with finding a hook that would set me apart from the tens of thousands of other applicants, who were, of course, trying to do the same thing.

At my affluent public high school, potential pre-meds and Wall Streeters (yes, at age 17) lined the hallways. Foreign languages were a more unlikely passion. So I seized on that, choosing to narrate my journey from middle-school Francophilia to full-blown foreign grammar nerd.

Looking through the brochures accumulated on endless campus visits, I didn’t find many schools that offered bachelor’s degrees to people who studied a random assortment of languages, and wanderlust made me reluctant to choose one. But most offered a major in something called linguistics. Maybe by professing my appetite for such a charmingly obscure course of study, I could win over the admissions officers.

This week's NYT On Language column features Patricia T. O'Conner and Stuart Kellerman defending singular they ("All Purpose Pronoun", 7/26/2009). They lead, topically, with the value of shedding five characters from "he or she" to help stay under the limit of 140 characters per tweet. And they blame the retreat from singular they to sex-neutral he on Anne Fisher:

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

Barbara Phillips Long pointed me to Prof. James Maule's  tax-law blog, Mauled Again, because, she wrote, "he touches on three areas that intrigue me –language, teaching and economics". So I followed the link and read a few pages, and I was struck by a number of implicit connections. For example, his approach to teaching the tax code reminded me of the way I was taught, many years ago, to "construe" Latin texts:

I take the students through an analysis of how Code sections and Treasury regulation sections are constructed, showing them that the secret to parsing the language is … to break the conglomeration of words into phrases and other segments and then to re-connect them, preferably in a manner that resembles English more than what I call "tax-ese."