Language Log

What with all the controversy over Sarah Palin's views and (lack of) qualifications to be President, as far as I can tell thus far no one has claimed that she is prone to linguistic errors. That's really too bad. If only she would make the right sort of error, rather than the mundane bushisms we could be discussing palindromes.

A recent XKCD:

The "Russell and Whitehead" reference is to Russell's paradox, which raised a problem for naive set theory by bringing up the set of all sets that don't include themselves. The "Katherine Gates" reference is to the book Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, 2000.

The image's title attribute has the value "They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea." This seems to be a evocation of another problem of self-reference, one leading to infinite recursion with an exponential explosion of fetishes at every step, rather than an endorsement of the maxim that "Once is cool, twice is queer".

According to Matthew Moore in the Daily Telegraph:

Google searches turn up 3,810 results for "clbuttic", 5,120 for "consbreastution", and 1,450 for "Buttociated Press".

Well, Language Log readers who had already read about the athletic feats of Olympic star Tyson Homosexual will immediately recognize the clbuttic symptoms, and will know what has gone on here. Surely, I was moved to think (but see the update below), surely someone who is being paid for writing filtering software should be able to distinguish instances of ass preceded and followed by other letters from instances flanked by non-letters such as spaces or punctuation. Not to get too nerdy about it, but for those acquainted with Unix editors like vi or sed, shouldn't a programmer know the difference between the s/ass/butt/g command (wrong) and the perhaps slightly more reasonable s/\([^a-z]\)ass\([^a-z]\)/\1butt\2/g instruction? This much was within the competence of even rank beginners by the sixth week of the linguistically-based freshman course on Unix that I used to teach at UC Santa Cruz.

Yet Moore mentions sites on which you can see discussions of embbutties dealing with pbuttport holders and even unconsbreastutional laws pbutted by a Congress butterting powers to buttbuttinate foreign leaders.

According to Bruce Bower, "Evolution's Ear", ScienceNews, 8/30/2008

In a new study, anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison finds that eight hearing-related genes show signs of having evolved systematically in human populations over the past 40,000 years. Some alterations on these genes took root as recently as 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

“Hawks makes a compelling case that not only is human evolution ongoing in the past 10,000 years, but it has sped up,” says anthropologist Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus.

Seven genes identified by Hawks produce proteins that make stereocilia and the membrane that coats them. The eighth gene assists in building middle ear structures that transmit sound frequencies to the inner ear.

As far as I can tell, this work hasn't come out in written form yet. John Hawks has a terrific weblog ("John Hawks weblog: Paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution") and he mentions the Bower article in a brief note ("Hawks featured in Science News"), but all he says about it is "This is a really nice article, and I wasn't expecting it to come out, so please go read it!"  Which you should do.

Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: "I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that." (Audio and discussion here.) Tonight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann interviewed Gary Miller, National Disaster Relief Operations Director for the American Red Cross, about the current situation with Gustav. Miller said:

And by people adheeding [əd'hidɪŋ] the warning and paying attention to the officials and leaving town and getting to safe areas, this makes all the difference in the world.

Politicians, baseball stars, and other celebrities don't need this training. Nor do regular readers of Language Log. But for others, yesterday's Basic Instructions may be useful:

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Further linguistic adventures at grocery store check-out counters: last time it was a New Yorker cartoon in which "10 items or less" was altered to "10 items or fewer", mimicking real-life episodes like the one in which (under grumbling from customers) the Marks & Spencer chain replaced its "6 items or less" signs with "6 items or fewer", reported on here.

And now, also from the U.K., comes the news that the giant supermarket chain Tesco is also replacing its checkout signs. This time "10 items or less" will bow to "Up to 10 items".

As unneeded further testimony to the lasting damage done by George Orwell's dishonest and stupid essay "Politics and the English language", with its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all familiar phrases and word usages, Robert Fisk treated his readers in The Independent on August 9 to some ranting about his most hated clichés.

I supply below an exhaustive list of the alleged clichés about which he raved. All that is striking about them (for there is certainly nothing interesting or noteworthy about the choices made in his lexical hate list) is their utter arbitrariness and unreasoned character.

There's been surprisingly little discussion in the popular press of a recent paper about cohesion in human/ape conversation. So far, all that Google News turns up is a couple of republications of the press release, though a taste of the expected response can be seen in the headline for the press release at TopNews: "Apes can follow conversations the same way humans do".

Even the blogosphere is relatively silent so far — all that I've found is "Inter-Species Diplomacy" and "Let's talk dirty to the animals".

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. He had warned that such a move might be necessary on Thursday night, at a press conference with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. A clip of Nagin speaking at the press conference was played in a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday. I've isolated some of the audio here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is, this is serious business, and
we would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation
unless we thought there was a serious threat
and I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that.

Though he clearly said [æd'hid], NPR transcribed it rather differently in its online article:

"This is serious business. We would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation unless we thought there was a serious threat," Nagin said. "And I think most people will pay heed to that."

A query by a commenter on Victor's post raises an issue that seems worthy of discussion here on the main page. The question is whether it is possible to distinguish written Mandarin from written Cantonese. A widely believed myth is that even forms of Chinese that are mutually incomprehensible in their spoken forms are identical in writing. This is not true. Victor's post itself points out small differences between written Taiwanese Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin. Written Cantonese can in fact be distinguished from written Mandarin.

The distinguished German writing instrument manufacturer, Staedtler, lavished 19 (!) languages on the box for its Mars® Lumograph® 100 pencils.

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I think it's turning into a trend — journalists are becoming linguists. Really bad linguists, but any sort of interest in the analysis of language and communication ought to be a good thing for the field, right? Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bad thing for the nation.

A couple of days ago ("Does CBS News mean it?", 8/27/2008), the CBS News Morning Show enlisted an ex-FBI gesture analyst to support the now-standard narrative about Clinton ego and Democratic disunity. There was one small problem: his analysis was based on vague but checkable assertions, which 20 minutes of investigation sufficed to call into question.

This morning, I'll subject another journo-linguistic analysis — of the same speech by Hillary Clinton — to a few minutes of empirical and logical scrutiny.