Language Log

On Dec. 1, ABC News published the "excerpted transcript of Charlie Gibson's interview with President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush at Camp David", along with some video clips of parts of the interview. The "transcript" is here, and the video clip containing the passage discussed below is here.

Here's the audio of one linguistically fascinating Q&A, along with my transcription:

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Gibson: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?
Bush: You know, I'm in president during this period of time but I think
uh when the history of this period is written people will realize
a lot of the decisions
uh that were made on Wall Street
took place over
you know a- a decade or so, before I arrived in president, during I arrived in president.
I'm sorry it's happening of course, obviously
I don't like the idea of people
losing jobs or being worried about their 401Ks.
On the other hand, the American people got to know that-
that uh we will safeguard the system, I mean
we're in, and if we need to be in more, we will.

What I want to focus on here is the expression "in president", which occurs three times in this answer.

The latest episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles. Here's the blurb:

In this week's episode, "Kangamangus," Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, "Ozay." While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, "Dot-nose." Also, British actor, Matt Berry, ("The IT Crowd") makes a guest appearance.

Matt Berry, awesomely enough, plays the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who arrives to tell Brian that dot-nose is entering the dictionary, complete with a Word Induction Ceremony. Video clips after the jump.

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall titled a post "Neo-Hooverite Republicans". About an hour later, Matt Yglesias posted a sort of snide blogospheric RIAA letter:

A clever coinage from Josh Marshall. Why didn’t I think of that sooner (or this)?

Matt's point, apparently, was that he used the words neo-Hooverite and neo-Hooverism back in October, and so Josh should have credited him for the invention.

The latest issue of MaxPlanckForschung, the flagship journal of the Max Planck Institute, has China as its focus. To honor the theme of the issue, the editors asked one of the journalists who worked for the magazine to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover. This was the result:

No sooner had the journal fallen into the hands of Chinese readers than it set off a frenzy of indignation, uproarious laughter, and animated discussion.

The latest xkcd:

The television commercial asks:

What happens if you take remote Chiang Mai villagers who have never seen a burger? Who don’t even have a word for burger?  And ask them to compare a Whopper versus Big Mac?

Imagine that: so isolated and primitive that they don't even have a word for burger! Yet another instance of the "Language L has no word for X" trope.

This site has a description of Burger King's "Whopper virgins will decide" campaign, along with two of the teaser ads (including the one from Chiang Mai in Thailand) and some (negative) responses from viewers. The brief description:

Burger King travels in 13 planes, 2 dog sleds and 1 helicopter over 20,000 miles to find people who have never heard of the WHOPPER and perform the world’s purest taste test. Locations visited include a remote hill village in north Thailand, a rural farming community in Romania and icy tundra of Greenland.

Apparently, Burger King didn't ask the Greenlanders about their words for snow.

Over the years we've written many times about the disparagement of adjectives and adverbs by writers and usage advisers, most prominently in Strunk and White's "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71). Now Jef Mallett has taken the matter up in his comic strip Frazz:

(Hat tip to Andrew Hatchell.)

I have some things to say about markedness, variation, and the role of habits in creating meaning. And I was planning to say them this morning, taking as a starting point the US/UK difference in verb agreement with collective nouns like government and committee that Geoff Pullum cited in his recent post "More on verb agreement as a judgment call":

It is a curious fact that American English strongly favors the use of the singular with subject nouns like committee (likewise nouns denoting companies, teams, departments, governments, etc.), while British English clearly prefers the plural.

But then I made the mistake of checking into the facts. This was not because I doubted Geoff — on the contrary, my impression of the situation agreed with his — but because I wanted to provide not only some examples but also some numbers, in my usual humorless hyper-empirical style.

It all started with an entry in the "Sic!" section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter #614, on 11/22/08 (boldface added):

Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far."

This is not just a simple substitution of aborigine (in the sense 'aboriginal inhabitant of Australia') for aubergine (a mostly British variant referring to the egg-shaped fruit of a plant in the genus Solanum, eaten as a vegetable, and otherwise known in English as eggplant), since the two versions occur together in this very short text. The menu writer seems to be treating the two as alternative versions of "the same word", referring to a foodstuff, perhaps along the lines of aluminium and aluminum; aboriginal inhabitants of Australia probably don't come into it at all.

The variant aborigine 'eggplant' is widespread in food writing (especially in menu items and recipes). Literally widespread, in writing about food from places from Greece and Turkey through China and Japan (these from the first hundred Google webhits on {aborigine aubergine} on 11/25/08; no doubt I've missed some cuisines in this search).  I'll give a sampling of these occurrences, and then talk about what we might make of them.

According to Praveen Swami , "Terror mail analysis supports claim of Lashkar authorship", The Hindu, 12/1/2008:

Close textual analysis of a document issued by an until-now unknown terrorist group just after the recent massacre in Mumbai appears to vindicate claims by Indian intelligence experts that the document was generated by a non-Hindi speaker, using voice-recognition software.

For one, a series of spelling errors mar the Hindi-language text, typed in the Devnagari script, which was issued by a group calling itself the Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan — a fictitious group, investigators now say, invented to distance the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba from the attacks.

Hindi-language voice-recognition software, though commercially available, is at a development stage and often registers incorrect spellings. In the document, the word silsila, or incidents, is spelled with the wrong matras, or vowel markings. The word chetaavani, or warnings, and zindagi, or life, are again spelt with incorrect matras.

Moreover, the name of the organisation Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan. The phrase “Hyderabad Deccan” is frequently used in Pakistani comment to identify India’s southern plateau. It is, however, rarely used in this country.

Another case of agreement being a judgment call: which of the following (note the agreement forms of the underlined verbs) is correct?

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what is usually the hottest sixty days of the year.

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what are usually the hottest sixty days of the year.

In previous posts on "uptalk" in America, I've noted that there there are many conflicting assertions about its phonetic shape as well as its social distribution and its contextual function, but surprisingly few published examples that we can use to evaluate these claims. So from time to time, I've documented real-world examples on this blog. Such anecdotes are not a substitute for a systematic and demographically balanced study, but they're better than nothing.

However, you could argue that my posts on the subject have been, so to speak, demographically anti-balanced. In order to debunk stereotypes about the distribution of this intonation, I've often chosen strikingly counter-stereotypical uptalkers, like President Bush. So in the interest of equal time for stereotypes, this post documents some examples from the stereotypical sweet spot of the uptalk demographic — prepubescent girls.

Today's Doonesbury celebrates Sarah Palin's way with function words and inflectional affixes: