Language Log

Barbara and I, having both seen so many Star Trek episodes, both from the first (Shatner) series and the second (Stewart) series, couldn't resist going to see the new prequel movie Star Trek at a huge cinema in London's Leicester Square the other day. (My god, is THX sound loud these days. Take earplugs unless you are fully accustomed to the sound of a full-scale artillery bombardment. We forgot to.) Of course, this is Language Log, not Science Fiction Movie Log, so to even mention it here I need a linguistic hook. And I don't have a really good one: there are no alien tongues like Klingon in this film (unless you count the young Chekhov's sometimes rather heavy Russian accent), and although I spotted some discreet rewording of the famous "seek out new life" prologue, recited before the closing credits, there's nothing very interesting. But I did notice one tiny thing: a sign on a big assembly of tubes and tanks in the bowels of the Enterprise that said "INERT REACTANT". I hate to be a pedant here (that's my day job), but really, was there no one on the set who could point out that a chemical substance is inert if and only if it cannot be a reactant? Am I wrong, chemists?

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to a topic last aired there in 2007: the alternation between and and zero in numerical expressions like "two hundred (and) six" (in speech and in writing), in particular when they are used as determiners, as in "two hundred (and) six elephants". These discussions quickly range over a variety of types of numerical expressions, uses of them, and contexts for these uses. Plus a lot of back-and-forth about the acceptability of the variants.

Several sorts of numerical expressions recur in these discussions, among them those expressing a whole number plus a fraction, and those in the related case of a dollar amount plus a cent amount. Until this morning, I'd attributed the appearance of these cases (which seemed to me to be irrelevant to case above) to simple thread drift, one phenomenon reminding people of phenomena that are similar to it in some respect. But then Russ McClay posted a collection of net discussions that suggested to me that something much more interesting — something familiar to me from discussions of other alternations — is going on.

Sally Thomason's puzzling comma-spotting reminds me of Louis Aragon's ambiguous invitation to his readers:

Je demande à ce que mes livres soient critiqués avec la dernière rigueur, par des gens qui s'y connaissent, et qui sachant la grammaire et la logique, chercheront sous le pas de mes virgules les poux de ma pensée dans la tête de mon style.

Or as translated in the Columbia dictionary of quotations:

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Oliver Lutz Radtke is the host of the popular Website called "The Chinglish Files by olr." He has a brand new book out that is entitled More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues.  Aside from the fact that it offers an entertaining compilation of photographs, the reason I'm calling More Chinglish:  Speaking in Tongues to your attention is that it includes (pp. 9-11) an interview of me by Oliver.  The interview spells out clearly why I believe that the collection and explication of Chinglish specimens is a worthy endeavor.  Although I haven't made many recent posts about Chinglish, especially not those of the more outlandish and challenging sort, I intend to do so in the coming weeks and months, and the interview provides the justification for not avoiding the study of Chinglish altogether.

Over the years, several LL posts have documented the irrational aversion that people sometimes feel to certain words — a strong negative reation that is apparently not related to the meaning, or to any alleged fault in grammar or usage, but to the sound or feel of the word itself. (See the links in "Moist aversion: the cartoon version", 8/27/2008, for a review of this strange phenomenon.)

I've been meaning for some time to take up the question of whether there's a positive counterpart to word aversion, an irrational lexical exuberance that we might call "word attraction". To that end, I've been saving up Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur for 11/28/2005, where Danae & Joe exhibit a candidate behavior:

I may have imagined it, but this is what I thought I saw yesterday morning at about 6:15, written as graffiti on a wall in Washington, DC (unless the Metro train was still zipping through Silver Spring at the time):

MORE MORE MORE MORE COMMA COMMA COMMA COMMA MORE MORE MORE MORE

The reason I think I might have misread it is that it seems so unlikely that a graffiti artist would be inspired to paint an apparent plea for more punctuation.

An article today’s NY Times and another in WalesOnline tell us about a linguist in Wales who was praised for discovering that a murderer — who had been having an affair with his victim — unconsciously revealed his identity as the writer of a fake text message that included either the phrases, “need to sort my head out” and “sorting my life out” (according to WalesOnline) or “sorted her life out” and “head sorted out” (according  to the NY Times). Regardless of which quotation is accurate (assuming that one of them got it right), this can sound like something from an ill-conceived TV cop show and hardly something that would cause the linguist to “jump out of” his skin.

Obituary in the New York Times, Monday 11 May:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto

She died on 30 April at her home in Banstead, Surrey.

The millionth-word saga, speaking of bogosity, continues.

Whatever would we do without the hardworking investigative journalists employed by major newspapers like the Telegraph? Or the "100 years of journalistic excellence" at UPI?

Last week, at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding the syntactic and semantic scope of knowingly in 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), the English High Court decided, in effect, to insert wide-scope knowingly into a newspaper Op-Ed piece.

A couple of weeks ago, the Schott's Vocab column in the NYT featured a request for "Family Phrases". This reminded me of a work that I recently read about (along with many other interesting things) in Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science.   It's a shame that Prof. Merton is not alive to see that Contributions towards a glossary of the Glynne language, by a student", privately printed in 1851, is now available on line (along with many other interesting things) through Google Books.  

Last month the phrase potty parity appeared on the front page of the New York Times (13 April), in connection with laws designed to provide (roughly) equal treatment for women and men in the provision of toilets in public places (arenas, concert halls, and the like). The substantive issue is interesting in itself, and complex: merely supplying the same number of toilet stalls for women and men won't do for obvious reasons, so the question is how to balance things out, and doing that in a reasonable way will depend on the ratios of women and men in various venues. (There's a brief Wikipedia page.)

But I'm talking here in my linguist voice, and what attracted me about the story was the everyday poetry of potty parity.

For the upcoming 2009 Book Expo in New York, the Perseus Book Group (of which my publisher PublicAffairs is a member), has organized a project to collaboratively create and publish a book in as many formats as possible within 48 hours. The text of the book will consist of submissions from the public of the first sentence of a yet-to-be published sequel of some well known book — A Tale of Three Cities, To Fricassee a Mockingbird; you get the picture. Submissions are welcome.

Since I sort of suggested this idea to them, I got roped into writing the introduction to the book, and also felt obliged to make a contribution. Inasmuch as The Elements of Style has been on the minds of everybody around here recently, I had the idea of imagining how Pope would have dealt with the work in a sequel to the Essay on Criticism. I had intended to write just a few introductory couplets, but at a certain point the whole world started speaking in iambic pentameter, and the thing just growed.

An Essay on Criticism II

By Alexander Pope

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do’t.
The Author of a Thriller or Romance
Envisions Strings of Noughts in his Advance,
A Shot on Oprah, front-page Times Review,
Three-movie Deal, and Pad in Malibu.

The Language Critick must console himself
With Dreams of lasting Life upon the Shelf;
For Fame, tho’ most inconstant in her Favor
To USAGE BOOKS, routinely grants a Waiver.
Few Men the slightest Memory retain
Of Edna Ferber, Thomas B. Costain,
Ernest K. Gann, or others once the Rage
With Readers in the Eisenhower Age.
Yet Fortune even now bestows her Smile
On Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style,
Still teaching to new Dogs its antique Tricks,
At Amazon.com Rank 206.