Language Log

I had a how's-that-again moment on Christmas Day as I was reading a New York Times story by Ken Belson and Eric Lichtblau about the short-lived presidential pardon of Isaac Toussie:

Neighbors say the elder Mr. Toussie built the fence a decade ago to  keep rabble-rousers away from the shoreline promenade on the Rockaway Inlet that abuts his family’s waterfront homes, including one where  Isaac lives. While Mr. Toussie’s fence, which has No Trespassing signs in English and Russian, has largely kept the derelicts at bay, it has also alienated neighbors who might otherwise have little bad to say about him.

After a double-take, I conjectured that rabble-rouser here must have been a thinko for rabble — I mean, they're talking about keeping derelicts at bay, not communist agitators. And I can see how the rouser might follow as a kind of unconscious reflex, since the two words are so closely associated.  In Nexis's US Papers and Wires, better than 80 percent (421/524) of the instances of rabble over the last six months occurred in forms like rabble-rouser or rabblerouser, rabble-rousing, etc. And two-thirds (215/316) of the occurrences of rouser are preceded by rabble (actually it's more like 90 percent if you exclude the uses of Rouser as a proper name). Given the mutual priming here, it wouldn't be surprising that rabble should evoke rouser even when that wasn't the intended meaning. But it turns out that I'm behind the curve on this one. 

I posted yesterday on my blog (though the posting was mysteriously dated 12/28 by WordPress) about what looks like a whimsical proscription from Ambrose Bierce, who in 1909 instructed his readers not to use

Because for For. “I knew it was night, because it was dark.” “He will not go, because he is ill.”

Jan Freeman pointed me to this "rule" in Write It Right. She and I have been unable to find it elsewhere (in the 19th or 20th centuries); it seems to have been an invention of Bierce's, a concocted usage rule — like the ones that Freeman discussed in an entertaining recent column entitled "Rule by whim".

Meanwhile, in a comment on Freeman's latest column (on usage advice that hasn't aged well) I came across another candidate for whimsical proscription, against complement clauses missing the complementizer that.

Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor. As regular Language Log readers know, Mr. Payack has been trumpeting the arrival of "the millionth word" in English for some time now. In fact, he's predicted that the English language would pass the million-word mark in 2006… and 2007… and 2008… and now 2009. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, the date that Payack has now set for the million-word milestone is April 29, 2009.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was "a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs." So I can't say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack's book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor's word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack's publishing schedule!

In "Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft", I detailed the unfortunate appearance of a rather unseemly Chinese text on the cover of the flagship journal (3/2008) of the Max Planck Institut. As evidenced by the enormous outpouring of comments on this subject here at Language Log and across the Internet, people were perplexed, titillated, amused, and outraged that such a strange event could have occurred. All sorts of explanations were proffered, from accusations that somebody was trying to make fun of Chinese to insinuations that nefarious persons wished to make fools of the Germans. After weeks of further investigation, I can now say with confidence that the real cause for what happened was sheer ineptitude.

George McAllister (comment number 75) was right when he said, "Given that the only evidence we have is the cover itself and a generic 'we're sorry' statement, it seems to me we should turn to statistics to solve the 'incompetence v. very clever trick' debate." There was no dirty trick to make fun of Chinese or to deride Germans / Westerners — at least not on the part of the editorial staff of MPF.

I've been reading David Laitin's Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience, which discusses a kind of linguistic determinism that (in my opinion) hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.  So in keeping with my third annual New Year's resolution to emphasize positive blogging about linguistic issues, I'm going to tell you about some fascinating 35-year-old experiments described in Laitin's book,  in the context of some more recent work on related issues.

I'll frame the discussion in terms of a deceptively simple question: do the results of public opinion polling depend on the language of the interview? The answer, it seems, is often "yes", and the effects are sometimes very large. This immediately raises a more difficult question: why?

In a NYT Op-Ed yesterday, Iain Gately described finding himself at a loss for words in Spanish ("Besotted — Etymologically, That Is", 12/31/2008):

I cleared my hangover on Boxing Day by going for a surf at Espasante, near my home in Galicia, northern Spain. […]

A fisherman — with Anton, the town pig by his side — had been watching me and he asked, “What happened to you out there?” I tried to explain, but my Spanish was inadequate. The only way I could say I’d drunk too much the day before was “estuve borracho” but borracho wasn’t the word I wanted. To me it implies a bestial, slobbering sort of drunkenness, which wasn’t quite how it had seemed when I was celebrating Yuletide with family and friends.

We’d feasted, played games with the children, danced, decorated each other with fluorescent paint, and drank: beer and Cava for the race down the stream, Albarino with the salmon, Priorat with the suckling pig, more Cava for musical chairs, Port with the Stilton and roasted chestnuts, a cleansing ale during the treasure hunt, brandy with the Christmas pudding, then back to wine and anything else that was open for dancing. When I fell into bed with my partner I was happy: inebriated yes, wasted, no. Squiffy rather than sloshed, trashed or flayed. But how do you say squiffy in Spanish?

Mark Halperin, "Biden Pool Report", 12/23/2008; Nia-Malika Henderson, "VP-elect warns against pork-laden stimulus", Politico, 12/23/2008; etc.:

“Economists rarely agree, but on this score, there is overwhelming agreement that we need a robust and sustained economic recovery package,” Biden said. “There’s virtually no disagreement on that point with economists from left to right. The greater threat to the economy lies with doing too little rather than not doing enough.”

According to Michael J. Jordan, "Corruption in Bulgaria tests EU expansion", Christian Science Monitor, 12/31/2008:

As the economy worsened here, so, too, did corruption, says John Heck, who runs an EU-funded, anticorruption project in Sofia. The problems are ingrained deeply into modern Bulgarian society, he says, "Integrity – if you look in the Bulgarian dictionary, you won't find the term."

This is an alternative version of an old anti-corruption anecdote about how language X has no word for "accountability", for X = {French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, Bemba, Chinese, …} — see "Solving the world's problems with linguistics", 12/17/2006.

Although I don't know any Bulgarian, I disbelieve Mr. Heck on general principles: when someone makes a sociological point by saying that language L has no word for concept C, you'll rarely lose by betting that they're wrong. (And if they say or imply that speakers of language L have no way to express concept C, then you'll almost never never lose by betting against them.)

As a public figure, you're in trouble when the media are less interested in what you have to say than in how you say it. This is now the sad situation of Caroline Kennedy, whose filled pauses seem to be getting more press than any other aspect of her bid for Hillary Clinton's senate seat.

A sample of the stories: "How Many Times Can Caroline Kennedy Say 'You Know' in Under a Minute?", Gawker, 12/27/2008; "Say goodnight, Caroline: How JFK's daughter flubbed the audition to become the next Senator Kennedy", NY Daily News, 12/28/2008; "Caroline Kennedy roasted over lacklustre press debut" AFP, 12/30/2008; "Kennedy's 'you knows' become political fodder", AP, 12/31/2008.

Several Language Log readers have asked me what a linguist might be able to do with the undercover tapes in the escalating case of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. The simple answer is, “I don’t know; I haven’t heard them.” That puts me in the same predicament with his lawyer, Ed Gensen, who faces the problem of having to defend the governor on charges that, so far at least, have not been accompanied with the hard evidence allegedly on the tapes. But hey, that’s how the system usually works. Prosecutors wait as long as possible before revealing their best evidence. Among other things, this helps to delay the defense from preparing as quickly as it could.

One scarcely needs to comment at all sometimes. I am most grateful to Victor Steinbok for alerting Language Log to an article in the Daily Telegraph (the link will be given below) about how singing the old song "The Hokey Cokey" could be defined as a hate crime, at least in Scotland. You might like to reflect for a minute, before I give you the link, on how this song could conceivably stir up hatred against any racial, religious, ethnic, or cultural group. A sample of the lyrics (you can read the whole of the lyrics here):

You put your left arm in, your left arm out
In out, in out, you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That's what it's all about
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Knees bent, arms stretched
Raa raa raa…

Back in October, Allan Brown wrote a piece in Times Online about the money being spent on promoting and broadcasting the basically moribund Scots Gaelic language. It seemed at first that he was making a reasonable critique: spending about $30,000,000 on a digital TV service for a language with no more than 50,000 speakers, all of them bilingual in English and most of them without digital TV, could be argued (though linguists aren't supposed to think this way) to be an enterprise of doubtful value. But just as I was getting interested, Brown blundered into linguistics and revealed his dumb side:

I say language but Gaelic isn't one, not really. Its vocabulary is tiny, with no form of saying yes or no and attuned to a distant, pre-technological world. It's essentially a kind of rural patois, a bonsai idiolect; a way of specifying concepts central to a particular, highly codified way of life.

Yecchhh. Everything about the layman's concept of a language that I rail against is there.

In re-reading my post on Prof. Fish's attempt to correct the syntax of an AT&T call center employee, I'm led to wonder whether his cri de coeur ("It is a factual matter as to what is and is not syntactically correct") is itself syntactically correct.

The basic construction here is what is traditionally called "extraposition from subject" (see e.g. here for further discussion and examples). It involves an expletive pronoun it (sometimes also called a "pleonastic" or "dummy" pronoun) in subject position, standing in for a sentence-final clause that might have been the subject:

It's a shame that things turned out so badly. = That things turned out so badly is a shame.

It's not clear what she wanted. = What she wanted is not clear.

It's odd how well the timing worked out. = How well the timing worked out is odd.

So the sentence "It is a factual matter what is and is not syntactically correct" would be normal, though awkward because of the three repetitions of "is", the hard-to-parse "and", etc. The version with the what-clause in subject position would be "What is and is not syntactically correct is a factual matter".  However, adding "as to" between "matter" and "what" is not only redundant, but (it seems to me) probably ungrammatical.