Language Log

This morning, let's take a break from the analysis of headlines, and look at some phonetics research. Recently, Jiahong Yuan and I have begun working with a woman who aims to revise and improve tests that are used to certify court reporters. (For some background about the techniques and devices that the court reporters must learn to use, see here or here.)  The (preliminary) results of our (pilot) experiment may be interesting to some of you; I think that they also point to a broader opportunity for linguistic research of other kinds.

Apple previewed iPhone OS 3.0 earlier this week, and they conveniently posted a video of the event on their website. I was grateful to be able to watch the video, mostly because I wanted to hear how the folks at Apple pronounce the name of the iPhone-centric game designing firm ngmoco:).

Some sub-editor at the  Telegraph has recently held a sort of master class in prepositional phrase attachment. It starts with the headline: "Gordon Brown is frustrated by 'Psycho' in No 10". The sub-head then leads the reader down a parenthetical garden path with  virtuosic bravado (though purists may object to the use of missing punctuation):

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington.

Victor Steinbok reports that a Google search on {eggcorn} pulls up some strange stuff, in addition to hits for things like the Eggcorn Database and discussions of eggcorns on Language Log, ADS-L, and elsewhere. It also pulls up sponsored links to sites that don't have eggcorn anywhere on them, but do have acorn on them, in particular, sites selling Acorn brand slippers.

This is, in a sense, a reverse eggcorn effect, in which acorn is interpreted as a variant of eggcorn.  We could call it an acorn.

The effect seems to be limited to the sponsored links. Web searches work the way you'd expect them to.

Or was it just mostly chalk? Did he not stray too far from chalk, or did he go with the chalk all the way?

Opinions on this subject were all over the news today. But what did it mean? Were they talking about our president's sometimes-professorial demeanor? Was he pale with rage at the AIG bonuses?

Edward Liddy chose, bizarrely, to start the third paragraph of his Op-Ed piece in today's WaPo ("Our Mission at AIG: Repairs, and Repayment") with a classical allusion:

Mistakes were made at AIG, and on a scale that few could have imagined possible. The most egregious of those began in 1987, when the company strayed from its core insurance competencies to launch a credit-default-swaps portfolio, which eventually became subject to massive collateral calls that created a liquidity crisis for AIG. Its missteps have exacted a high price, not only for the company and its employees but for the American taxpayer, the federal government's finances and the global economy. These missteps brought AIG to the brink of collapse and to the government for help.

From yesterday's editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the conviction of a local political boss, Vince Fumo, on 137 corruption-related charges:

There was an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Fumo. That would be the city that spawned him, took what he delivered and then pretended to be shocked, shocked at the unsavory details of how he manipulated the process.

That, of course, would be Philadelphia. That, of course, would be us.

The editorial's headline is "We've met the enemy, and he is us".

For St. Patrick's Day, Dinosaur Comics muses on Middle English (among other things):

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Hello, blogosphere — the fifth collection of Simpsons linguistic humor is up, here. Enjoy!

This afternoon, John Baker posted to the American Dialect Society's listserv (ADS-L) the following note:

Mark Liberman recently wrote in Language Log that, for everyone except linguists and a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals, what "passive voice" now means is "construction that is vague as to agency". Disturbingly, a short piece by Nancy Franklin in the March 23, 2009, issue of The New Yorker seems to bear that out.  It is a discussion of Bernard Madoff's allocution, his formal court statement acknowledging guilt:

<<Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith-he "believed"!-that it would soon be over. Yes, "soon." In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer:  "To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.">>

If there is an example of the passive voice in Madoff's quoted statements, it has escaped my attention.  Unlike the blog Liberman cites, The New Yorker reportedly has professionally edited text.

Linguists sometimes have run-ins with copy editors over points of usage: the linguists use variants that they know to be standard, but the editors edit them out in obedience to some fancied "rule of grammar". Frustration ensues.

On to John McWhorter (in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008)) on "singular they", a topic we've returned to many times on Language Log. The short version is that in certain (not all) contexts, singular they is entirely standard and has been so for a very long time. Yet many people believe, passionately, that it is always wrong, because it offends "logic".

In his post "In defense of Amazon's Mechanical Turk", Chris Potts wrote "Overall, the workers are incentivized to do well". David M. Chess commented

Interesting post! Thanks for writing it up.

But… "incentivized"?

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) says of incentivize that "This is perhaps the most recent of the infamous verbs that end in -ize", noting that the members of a usage panel in 1985 "rejected it almost unanimously with varying degrees of disgust and horror".

But why are coinages in -ize such an enduring source of disgust and horror?

As anyone who blogs knows or soon learns, doing so makes you a whole lot more transparent than you might otherwise wish to be. In fact, writing anything like books, articles, or blogs makes you an attractive target for people who may not appreciate what you say. No clearer example can be found than the vetting process the government inflicts on nominees for high-level appointments, such as the US Supreme Court. It’s unfortunate that the persons who finally survive these processes are often are the ones who have written little or nothing about which they can be criticized.

The problem with putting anything in print is made very clear by Paul Barrett in his Harvard Magazine review of a new book by Lawrence Tribe, The Invisible Constitution. Barrett feels that Tribe’s candid views about the US Constitution automatically eliminate him as a possible nominee to the highest court in the land—primarily because he clearly elaborates his own positions (reasonable, to me anyway) about the hot topic of the originalist theory of interpretation.