Language Log

People have begun to ask why Language Log hasn't yet commented on the remarks of Sonia Sotomayor about the sterling value of (you guessed it) Strunk & White. One recent commenter (here) actually seems to imply that we have jumped all over Charles Krauthammer solely because he is conservative, and shielded Sotomayor from criticism because she is the nominee of a Democratic president! Come on, you know us better than that. Sotomayor has come up in the comments area a few times (here and here, for example), and the only reason there hasn't been a full post on her remarks is — speaking for myself — lack of time (I don't know if you have any idea what early June is like for academics with administrative duties) plus a dearth of interesting things to say. You can read this piece on The National Review site for quotes and links to the relevant speeches. What she said about grammar in one speech (PDF here) was this:

If you have read Strunk and White, Elements of Style, reread it every two years. If you have never read it, do so now. This book is only 77 pages and it manages, succinctly, precisely and elegantly to convey the essence of good writing. Go back and read a couple of basic grammar books. Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister. These are basic errors that with self-editing, more often than not, are avoidable.

From Charles Krauthammer, "Obama Hovers From on High", Washington Post 6/12/2009:

On religious tolerance, [president Obama] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence" (note the use of the passive voice). He then criticized (in the active voice) Western religious intolerance for regulating the wearing of the hijab — after citing America for making it difficult for Muslims to give to charity. [emphasis added]

You readers are not going to like this, because you've heard too much on the topic already, and you are begging for relief; but I am going to report it anyway. My job is not to be merciful; my job is to get stuff out there, on the record. Charles Krauthammer, whom the Financial Times in 2006 described as the most influential commentator in America, is yet one more major figure who doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground. His June 12 column in the Washington Post, "Obama Hovers From On High", says:

"On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."

No, Mr Krauthammer, we do not note the use of the passive voice: clauses of the form X has/have/had led to Y are in the active voice. Now, your defenders, I know, are going to say that all you meant was that Obama did not specify the agents of the tragic violence. But tragic violence is simply a noun phrase, like mythic affluence or comic indolence. The passive has nothing to do with it. If you are noting a reluctance to come out and say who commits violence, then say that. Don't lurk behind a putative linguistic observation because you think it will sound more like someone who went to college. Did you want Obama to make the agent fully explicit? Did you want him to stand there in Cairo and say, "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led you dogma-crazed towelheads to unloose brutal violence and large-scale war on each other, killing millions of your own people, you insane bastards"? Then just say so. (And recommend a comparable-sized bit that he could have cut: this version is about 20 words longer.) Because I am getting really tired of these mealy-mouthed, misinformed, pseudo-syntactic grumblings about the passive voice. And Language Log readers, I know, are getting really sick of me saying so.

This post combines three LL themes into one peculiar anecdote — with added beer. We've often analyzed cases where a phrase seems to come out with one negation too many or too few; we've tried to follow the FCC's reasoning about the "inherent sexual connotations" of the "F-word"; and we've devoted many posts to untangling confused translations.  Today's trifecta winner comes courtesy of two edgy young Scottish brewers, the European Entrepreneur of the Year competition, and former Roumanian president Emil Constantinescu.

Gus Tate lives in Guangzhou (Canton) where he teaches "conversational English and Time Travel to a group of high school students wearing white polo shirts and blue track pants." For fun, he runs a blog called Cantonstinople. Currently there is displayed on that site the following photograph of a sign for a "4D" movie about dinosaurs (Gus explains that the extra "D" is probably to indicate the fact that the seats in the theater move and there are other physical effects that are apparently quite terrifying):

The heading of the announcement reads quite matter-of-factly:  "Items [You Should] Pay Attention to [upon] Entering the Theater."  Mysteriously, this comes out in the English translation as "4 Uygur theater admission matters needing attention."  Before you go on to the next page, if you know even a small amount of Chinese, try to figure out how the translator got from "Enter Theater" to "4 Uygur theater."

Geoff Pullum's recent posting on the sentence

(1) Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965.

has elicited comments going off in several different directions. I'll try to clarify three things, each in one posting. [Correction: actually, I won't, since Geoff Pullum has now appended responses on things two and three within some of the comments.] This one is on the occurrences of (forms of) HAVE in (1). Start by asking what the writer (or editors) at the Wall Street Journal might have been aiming at with (1); what were they trying to say?

If you're in a hurry, just follow this link and (if you agree with it) add your name to a statement, hosted at Sense about Science, arguing that "The law has no place in scientific disputes".

If you've got a little extra time to spend, read on.

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum posted a meditation on the role of The Elements of Style in befuddling Americans about the nature of the passive voice ("Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", 6/6/2009). His point of departure was a passage illustrating the confusion, taken from a 2007 article by Ada Brunstein ("The House of No Personal Pronouns", NYT, 7/22/2007).

Last night, Ms. Brunstein sent me the letter reproduced below, in which she corrects Geoff's  conjecture that Strunk and White were directly responsible for her slip, and graciously offers to enlist (or more exactly, to be hired) as "an active proper-passive promoter".

The Language Log marketing department, bored with refunding the subscription fees of disgruntled readers, is delirious with enthusiasm (or would be, if it existed). But Ms. Brunstein's stated price is a copy of Strunk and White's book, signed and dedicated by Geoff, whose agent is also ontologically challenged. So it may take some time to set up the proposed promotional campaign.

Paul JJ Payack, after all the run-up, has botched the story of the millionth word. The most amusing thing was that he forgot to write a script that would stop updating his headline when the millionth word was hit and exceeded, so at 11:30 a.m. in the UK he had this headline at his Global Language Monitor website:

The English Language WordClock: 1,000,001
0 words until the 1,000,000th Word

Oops! I think that should be minus one words, not zero words until the millionth!

The other thing he screwed up on was the fixing of the choice of word. He let his script decide — not a good idea when the whole point of the exercise is promotion and P.R. I'm not sure how his script works, but what it finally picked as the millionth "word" with at least 25,000 attestations on the web turned out to be: Web 2.0. Oops! First, that isn't a word, it's a phrase containing a noun (web) and a one of those stylish postpositive decimal numeric quantifiers; and second, it is boring boring boring. If phrases containing numbers are allowed, no wonder there are a million words. I was scheduled to go to the BBC Scotland studio and talk about this in a couple of hours, but when the people at the BBC World Service heard that the millionth word was Web 2.0, and that among the runners-up was the two-word Hindi exclamation jai hoo, they dumped the story and told me not to bother going over to the studio. Quite rightly. Payack should have hand-picked a more convincing and likable word.

It is clear that *Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965 is ungrammatical. What was responsible for the editing mistake that led to its appearing in this page on the Wall Street Journal's law blog? Quite possibly, suggested Victor Steinbok to the American Dialect Society mailing list early this morning, a sentence-planning botch that resulted from an attempt at obeying the Strunkian imperative to use the active voice.

Mary Kate Cary ("Barack Obama Journeys From 'Yes We Can' to the Imperial 'I'", U.S. News and World Report, 6/9/2009) joins the media chorus:

"The Great I Am." That's what Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, used to call it when one of her children used too many "I's" in a sentence. Casting it in biblical terms, she'd tell them, "Nobody likes The Great I Am. Don't be talking about yourself." […]

I tell you all this because I've noticed lately that President Obama used to be that way, too. […]

But lately he's moved from the second person to the first person. Apparently I'm not the only one who's picked up on it. Stanley Fish blogs in the New York Times that [… etc. …]

George Will's column earlier this week points out that the president has become "inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun," as evidenced in the GM takeover speech. Terence Jeffrey of CSN wrote a similar piece about the same speech titled "I, Barack," talking about the economic implications of the switch from "we" to "I" […]

As pointed out at tedious length in a series of earlier posts, the only trouble with this theory is that Barack Obama uses "The Great I Am" at a significantly lower rate, in comparable speeches and press interactions, than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did.

The good folks over at Gmail have been busy lately, rolling out several new features of note over the past several weeks. I've recently used their new automatic message translation feature to render a hilarious translation into English of a Spanish message that my father recently sent, and I thought about blogging about that first until I even more recently had the opportunity to test their new mail and contact importing feature. You might think that this is less language-related for this blog, but think again. (And feel free to add your funny message translations in the comments — you know you want to.)

Scarcely a month and a half ago, we were hearing calls for the restitution of the complex / traditional characters on the Mainland.  Now, I am absolutely stunned to hear that the President of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, himself is calling for the adoption of simplified characters on the island.  Hearing this news is literally as though a bombshell had gone off next to my ears.

The precise formulation of Ma's proposal is interesting:  "We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones," Ma told a visiting delegation of US-based Taiwanese community leaders.  This means that the simplified characters would be the dominant, active set and that the traditional / complex (he calls them "standard") characters would be the secondary, passive set.