Language Log

Here's what I heard today on my local National Public Radio station:  "The first American has died of swine flu." And also, for clarification, "The first American has died of H1N1." But who is or was the first American, I mused, heartlessly, while being an asshole in the defenseless Texan evening traffic. Obama? Benjamin Franklin? Some spear-wielding mastodon hunter? At any rate, not the unfortunate woman who just died.

Today's Get Fuzzy (click on the image for a larger version):

My immediate reaction was that "Wait, what?" is an idiom characteristic of American youth — 20-somethings and teenagers.

OK, so Geoff Nunberg plugged his new book here on Language Log. Shamelessly. But in fact he is shy, very shy. He is one of the quiet National Public Radio superstars who move among us invisibly, dynamic and brilliant and yet never recognized in the streets. He could have plugged the fact that he is teaching a course on Language and Public Discourse this summer at Berkeley, in the Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America. You could register, and take that course at an amazingly low fee. But you simply didn't know about it, because he is too shy to mention it. It's 10:30 to 12:15 Mondays and Wednesdays between July 6 and 23. Of course, you would need a course for the afternoon as well; but then (I point this out with all due modesty) you could have a bite of lunch and then take my course on English Grammar from 1:30 to 3:15 on those days. There is a staggering list of heartbreakingly tempting courses by towering geniuses from all subfields of linguistics, in fact. Nearly all of them too shy to tell you how great they are (though I think George Lakoff would hint at it if you pressed him). Shy linguists teaching brilliant courses all summer at low rates in gorgeous northern California. Language Log personalities you could meet in the flesh. This could be the ultimate most fantastic summer of your life, if you just thought to yourself "Carpe diem!," and signed up. Or you could just hang out at home and watch summer reruns on TV of course.

Google reports about 37,000 hits for "shameless plug of/for my" or "shamelessly plugging my," and the total would be a lot bigger if you allowed for variants like "my shameless self-promotion" and so forth. The phrases are much more common now than they were in the old media, mostly because the new media have dramatically increased the opportunities for self-exposure — Google Blogsearch alone turns up more than 4000 hits for the phrases. The vast majority of these are associated with creative works and activities, in a broad sense of the term: people apologize for shamelessly touting their books, TV appearances, t-shirt designs, videos, high-school band performances, blogs, and new CD's. (Others apologize for shamelessly plugging their hairdresser or a PC they have for sale on Ebay, which seems to me a little unclear on the concept — what's to be ashamed of?)

The modifier accomplishes several things at once: it concedes that the self-promotion is an impropriety, but one venial enough to be joked about; and it averts the reader's censure with preemptive self-reproach. It reminds me of the way H. W. Fowler described the use of apologies like "saving the reader's reverence" and "if we may adopt the current slang":  "A refinement on the institution of the whipping boy, by which [writers] not only have the boy, but do the whipping."

My new collection The Years of Talking Dangerously was published today by PublicAffairs.

Here at Language Log, we have several times discussed Li Yang's Crazy
English: Crazy English, Crazy English again, and A Sane Survey of Crazy English. Now there is an excellent movie from Singapore entitled "Mad about English." Here I provide a trailer for the movie and a clip of a phenomenal policeman featured in the film who not only can say "Welcome to Beijing" in more languages than I can count, but who also can talk like a New York gangster. First the multilingual cop:

Fifty years ago, my job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in the rural part of the state of Illinois as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.  The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciation patterns of older residents who had lived in the same general area all their lives. This proved to be  a fascinating experience for a young man who had lived in large cities all his life. But it actually made me a good field interviewer because I knew nothing about farming and other aspects of rural life and this ignorance actually legitimized my rather mundane questions about such things as what the farmers called the utensil they use to fry eggs with, the machinery they use  to reap their harvests, and what  they call their animals. I haven’t done linguistic geography since those halcyon days, but this New York Times article about the controversy over FCC’s crackdown (the Bono Rule) on the use of dirty words brought back some fond memories.

Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones.

I've cited many examples involving journalists or popular authors, most recently with respect to the effects of poverty on working memory ("Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009). But in fact, this is a problem that afflicts everyone, even prize-winning behavioral economists.

A little while ago I posted here about the NP Hotel in Seattle, which inspired readers to suggest other syntactic establishments.

When it comes to matters of the toilet, translators in China seem to reach for the old and arcane.  Perhaps you may recall our "Closestool Encounters" back in March.  And now witness the sign in the following photograph:

In previous postings on word rage, we've noted (mock) threats of punching, slicing, bludgeoning, shooting, hanging, and lightning strikes.  Commenting on Ron Charles, "1 Millions Words! But Who's Counting?", Washington Post, 4/29/2009, someone identifying himself as andrewsalomon added judicially-sanctioned electrocution:

I don't know anything about the million-word business, but is there any chance of getting Benjamin Zimmer or, I don't know, Congress, to enact a statute that would allow for the zapping of 1,000 volts of electricity through anyone who uses "impact" as a verb?

Last week, fev at Headsup: The Blog featured an unusual referential tangle ("March of the pronouns", 4/24/2009):

A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man’s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.

Rob Balder continues to display his delicate yet often dark and naughty linguistic genius. The latest strip is wonderful. Look at the sensitivity, in that last panel, to the currents of contemporary journalistic and educational phraseology about controversies like creationism, and the corrupting force of dangerous misinformation. Deliciously, wickedly funny. No, I'm not reproducing the strip here; you owe it to yourself to click through and browse his site.

A bullshit lie detector company run by a charlatan has managed to semi-successfully censor a peer reviewed academic article. And I don't like it one bit. But first, some background, and then we'll get to the censorship stuff.

Five years ago I wrote a Language Log post entitled "BS conditional semantics and the Pinocchio effect" about the nonsense spouted by a lie detection company, Nemesysco. I was disturbed by the marketing literature of the company, which suggested a 98% success rate in detecting evil intent of airline passengers, and included crap like this:

The LVA uses a patented and unique technology to detect "Brain activity finger prints" using the voice as a "medium" to the brain and analyzes the complete emotional structure of your subject. Using wide range spectrum analysis and micro-changes in the speech waveform itself (not micro tremors!) we can learn about any anomaly in the brain activity, and furthermore, classify it accordingly. Stress ("fight or flight" paradigm) is only a small part of this emotional structure

The 98% figure, as I pointed out, and as Mark Liberman made even clearer in a follow up post, is meaningless. There is no type of lie detector in existence whose performance can reasonably be compared to the performance of finger printing. It is meaningless to talk about someone's "complete emotional structure", and there is no interesting sense in which any current technology can analyze it. It is not the case that looking at speech will provide information about "any anomaly in the brain activity": at most it will tell you about some anomalies. Oh, the delicious irony, a lie detector company that engages in wanton deception.