Language Log

Three freedom-of-speech updates on various language-related shock- horror- scandal- probe episodes in the UK this morning.

(1) Prince Harry is being sent away to an equality and diversity training course where perhaps he will at last learn that the royal family should avoid any use of offensive epithets for ethnic minority groups in the population over which they have hereditary rule.

(2) The Dutch far-right-wing politician Geert Wilders has been denied the right to enter Britain to attend a screening of his anti-Muslim film Fitna (it reportedly juxtaposes shots of the 9/11 attacks with quotations from the Qur'an), which a member of the House of Lords wants to screen for parliamentarians. The refusal of entry is said to be because Wilders poses a danger to the public through the ferocity of his extreme anti-Islamic views (at least 79 preachers deemed to preach "hate" have also been denied entry to the UK under the same European Union law). Wilders plans to fly in anyway, daring the authorities to "put me in handcuffs".

(3) The twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning novelist Salman Rushdie to death for disrespecting Islam is causing some renewed discussion of the case. At the University of Bristol broadcaster Kenan Malik and Professor Tariq Modood will debate limits on free speech in a multicultural society — both attacking the liberal left, but for different reasons (Malik thinks liberals have been complicit in gagging free speech; Modood them liberals of inconsistency and double-standards for not extending protection from offensive speech to religious minorities).

Life struggles on in this peaceful but frozen country. Rowan Laxton is on bail. Here in Edinburgh a light snow is falling outside, and as I sit at the laptop over breakfast in my kitchen posting about possible threats to linguistic liberty, so far the heavy footfall of police has not been heard on the stairs outside our apartment. Wait a minute, there's someone at the door…

In the February 9, 2009, broadcast of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart presents a well-argued Optimality Theory analysis of part of Bill O'Reilly's journalistic standards. Stewart and his research team do a good job of gathering and presenting empirical support for a theory involving ranked, violable constraints. Here's a screenshot that links to the full episode:

If the stars are in the right alignment and if you live long enough, you too can become a victim of stereotype and prejudice. I’ve been a semi-privileged, middle class, male Caucasian all of my life, but now, thanks to The New Old Age I’ve discovered that I too am a card-carrying member of a group that is besieged by politically incorrect language.

A stylebook for the media now shows how writers and broadcasters can avoid being sued for discrimination by, uh, well, er, whatever we’d rather be called (hint: it isn’t the e word). I’ll bet that this book will be cited in a slew of forthcoming lawsuits on age discrimination. Elderly is out, along with senior citizen, golden years, feisty, spry, senile, and grandfatherly.

As I understand ageism these days, I’m even supposed to be offended if someone says that I’m seventy-eight years young. Okay, I know about the more obvious ageist words, like codger, old fart, geezer, old goat, and fossil, but the insult of adding years young to my age mystifies me. For some reason I kinda like it. Maybe I need to get out more.

The Newsweek story begins:

How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809.

(Similar stories can be found all over the place.) And that day is tomorrow, Thursday 12 February.

But wait! It already is Thursday 12 February some places — much of Australia, for instance. "Same day" here means 'same date, as determined locally'. Dates and times are reckoned locally; they are relative to a location and depend on conventions for labeling spans of time (via time zones and the like). These conventions allow us to say that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, 12 February, meaning that it was 12 February in Shropshire when Darwin was born there and 12 February in Kentucky when Lincoln was born there.

And now it's Thursday 12 February throughout Australia, though it wasn't when I started writing this posting. But it won't be Darwin/Lincoln Day here in California until tomorrow.

Here's the old Pepsi logo and the new (recently redesigned) one. Not an enormous change, you might think, but these things don't happen without a Design Process.

Bruce Webster has posted on the Pepsi Logo change:

according to this document from the Arnell Group, the product design firm involved, the new Pepsi logo is based on extensive analysis not just of all previous Pepsi logos and trade dress, but also of fundamental design principles and the creation of the universe itself.

At first I thought that the design document was a parody of advertising talk (a very elaborate parody, granted, with lots of complex graphics), but the Arnell Group's webpage has more of the same, so the design document might well be genuine.

TerMine is a system for recognizing multiword terms. The algorithm was originally presented in Katerina Frantzi, Sophia Ananiadou, and Hideki Mima, Automatic recognition of multi-word terms, International Journal of Digital Libraries 3(2): 117-132, 2000. You can try it out on a site at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester in the UK, where they have a web demonstration that will analyze short (<2 MB) texts or URLs for you.

As you'll find if you try, the results are not always perfect, but I think that the algorithm is remarkably good at guessing multi-word terms from small amounts of text. For example, if I try it out on a page (~2000 words) of lecture notes about "Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events", it comes up with a large number of sensible things like good-turing estimate, maximum likelihood, population frequency, belief tax, and negative binomial distribution — along with a few clunkers like cnew = cnew./token and some other fragments of Matlab code. (Maybe it was unfair to give it a sample that included such things…)

Jock McNaught recently reminded me of this service by trying it out on President Obama's inaugural address.

American readers are likely to be truly amazed to learn what has just happened to a senior British diplomat, Mr Rowan Laxton. He was on an exercise bike at a gym in the Regent's Park area of London, and he got angry as he watched film of the destruction in Gaza, and shouted: "Fucking Israelis! Fucking Jews!" — adding that they should be "wiped off the face of the earth."

Mr Laxton is head of diplomatic policy in South Asia at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government. He reports directly to brief the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. (In one of those twists that fiction has to avoid on grounds of implausibility but real life allows, Mr Miliband is Jewish.) But he was not merely reprimanded, or sent for anger management, or removed from his post, or dropped from a BBC talk program over this. The police came and arrested him. He faces a criminal charge of inciting religious hatred, which can carry a seven-year prison term. (For a newspaper account, see this report in The Times.)

This morning's NY Times science section is devoted to memorializing Charles Darwin, and the title of one of the featured articles is: "He was prescient in 1859, and is still ahead of his time." My first reaction to this headline was an unreflecting interpretation of it as simply meaning, 'Darwin was ahead of his time and his ideas are still on the cutting edge.'

But my second reaction was quite conscious: Wait a minute; this is an error — perhaps akin to those frequently noted confusions like "falling between the cracks" or "No brain damage is too minor to be ignored."  (If indeed they are properly considered confusions, see below.)

Following up on the discussion of "Actually" as a discourse marker, let me direct you to Rebecca Clift, "Meaning in interaction: the case of actually", Language 772(2): 245-291, 2001. Her abstract:

One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The temporally situated, contingent accomplishment of utterances in turns and their component turn-constructional units shows the emergence of meaning across a conversational sequence; it reveals syntactic flexibility as both a resource to be exploited for interactional ends and a constraint on that interaction.

She cites a detailed subdivision of possible positions, from Karin Aijmer's 1986 paper "Why is actually so popular in spoken English?" (Tottie and Backlund, eds., English in speech and writing):

A headline in today's Metro (a UK free newspaper) looks like this:

I was taken aback: it looked decidedly ungrammatical for quite a few seconds. And another reader, from Glasgow, has already mailed me to say the same thing. What is wrong with the headline? Or can it be parsed as grammatical?

Those seriously interested in the meaning and the politics of racial epithets (as some of the commenters on Pakigate, Sootygate, Gollygate seem to be) should take a look at a paper called "The semantics of racial epithets", published by Christopher Hom in The Journal of Philosophy CV [= 105], no. 8 (August 2008), pp. 416-440. This is a technical paper in philosophical semantics (it's philosophy, not linguistics; and let me say that I do not necessarily endorse the view that it defends). Hom outlines its aim on his website thus:

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE). CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

Thus Hom is offering a reasoned case that it is best to see the denigratory character of racial epithets as built into their actual conventional meanings, and not just as a possible concomitant of some of their occasional uses. (Many of commenters seem to align with this view, though they tend to just assert it and call any other views absurd, rather than present arguments.)

We are still encountering cases of people who leap to attack uses of particular word-senses without carefully checking the dictionaries and usage books first. Several emailers and commenters (some comments are now deleted) saw that I had repeated the BBC's claims that it had sought a "sincere and fulsome" apology from Carol Thatcher, and instantly wrote comments insisting that this was a gross mistake (on my part, some thought; I have now put in the quotation marks that I should not have risked leaving out), since fulsome doesn't mean anything like "full" but is in fact close to being an antonym of sincere.

People don't seem to look anything up before they leap to the comments box. (See Mark Liberman's documentations of astonishing earlier cases of ill-informed objections here and here, and similar remarks of mine on grammatical usage here and here.) The original senses of fulsome are, according to Webster (which is a constantly updated and extremely reliable dictionary of American English available online):

1 a copious or abundant;
1 b generous in amount or spirit;
1 c full and well developed.

Clearly the BBC intended one or more of these senses.

I've recently read David W. Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and I especially appreciated his clear explanation of the complex world of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology. There's a lot of new and relevant information, but you really do need a good guide — the facts and conjectures are complex enough, but the difficulty is multiplied many fold by the evolved disciplinary nomenclature, which is sometimes so baroque as to defy parody.