Language Log

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre has been preparing for National Grammar Day (4 March) by spinning a hard-boiled murder mystery involving an editor protagonist; Martha Brockenbrough (of NGD); a victim stabbed to death by red pencil ("an Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart"); and the Fat Man. The serial is up to its third installment, in which the Fat Man is introduced:

I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.

More to come.

[Update: Jan Freeman notes with pleasure the split infinitive in "too deep into descriptivism to ever come back". Not an obligatorily split infinitive, but to my ear certainly preferable to "too deep into descriptivism ever to come back".]

You know, I don't feel so good today (streaming cold, much work to do, no energy, and a foreign trip coming up on Thursday), but the extraordinarily stupid re-subtitled war film video snippet Mark just posted, featuring Hitler going into a wild tirade over having his grammar corrected, made me laugh out loud. Thank you, Mark. It was perfect for me, because (I have to admit this) I mostly don't understand spoken German at speed, especially when shouted in an apoplectic fury. Having a good passive knowledge of spoken German would kill it stone dead, I would guess. My ignorance made it absolute bliss.

Chris Massey wrote to point out that shovel-ready has already been cloned: Gardiner Harris and Kenneth Chang, "Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few", NYT, 1/23/2009.

Do the well-demonstrated Whorfian effects in color discrimination really reach down to the level of perception?  Some recent research suggests that Whorfian effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual.

David Craig sent in a link to yesterday's Blondie, a strip that I don't normally read. He may have uncovered the secret identity of Geoff Pullum's correspondent — but in any case, the last panel has a nice instance of overnegation, of a kind that I don't think we've discussed before:

I heard from cindy today. She would do well to join Becky in going to night school in grammar. Her message began thus:

Hi there!

It has been long time since we did not meet. I hope everything is okay with you.

She barely needed to continue by saying she had recently "found a great medicine shop on the net…"; I could see that coming. It certainly has been a long time since we did not meet, cindy. And I hope it will be a long time before we do not meet again.

Shovel-ready, Ben Zimmer's victorious nominee for "most likely to succeed" in the ADS WOTY competition, is clearly gaining ground:

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009.  It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html.  (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have crept in — I've found no better way to create posts from Word files than to cut and paste the material as plain text, and then to  restore the formatting of the original as html mark-up.)

Last Monday's post "Progress and its enemies" resulted in a vigorous exchange of views in the comments section. Reading over the comments, it seems to me that people were to some extent talking past one another. Such misunderstanding seems especially common in discussions of linguistic norms. So in a few paragraphs below, I've tried to explain how I, at least, think about these issues.

Heidi and I posted a few times last month about the job market in linguistics (see Counting linguistics job ads and dissertations for links and data). In the comments, Eric wondered:

Honestly curious here: are numbers of applicants for particular jobs a matter of public record (at least, at public institutions)? It would be good to contrast the numbers above with some numbers that show how many folks are actually competing for individual jobs.

As Scott Simon reminds us on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, The Linguists will premiere on PBS stations across the nation this Thursday. (Check and double-check your local listings for the exact time (or even the day) of the premiere, which may vary.)

I'm looking forward to finally seeing the film. I'm also looking forward to David Harrison's upcoming visit to my corner of Language Log Plaza on April 23 and 24. If you find yourself in the San Diego area around that time, come on by.

I have to add that I was a bit disappointed with Scott Simon's interview with David Harrison and Greg Anderson this morning. After a fairly good introduction and a good first couple of questions (asking what first brought David and Greg together, and what happens when a language dies), Scott decides to lighten things up a bit and chuckles to himself as he says: "May I ask, each of you in turn: what's the strangest language you think you've ever heard?" Greg (rather wisely) prompts David to go first, and David avoids immediately taking the bait by saying, "Well, they're all strange from a certain point of view, and English is strange, but…" — at which point Scott interjects: "English can be particularly strange." (David: "It can be, indeed.") Things devolve into a discussion of "strange language sounds", the idea that some technical linguistics terms sound obscene, and so on — it gets serious and picks up again towards the end, but Scott can't resist closing with more chuckles and another reference to the language Birhor (sounds like "beer whore"). Sigh.

Scientific writing is full of great noun compounds. My favorite recent example is part of the title of a paper featured in this morning's email from BioMedCentral: "Representations of odor plume flux are accentuated deep within the moth brain".

Odor plume flux turns out to mean just what you'd think: time variation in airborne smells. I look forward to using it in everyday life: "Mm, what's that delicious odor plume flux?"