Language Log

In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate: "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears…" My initial assessment was that Obama had created an idiom blend, combining the more established expression "wet behind the ears" with the metaphorical extension of green implying immaturity. But as it turns out, the story of "green behind the ears" has some unexpected intricacies, including a surprising parallel in German.

Following some of the news yesterday, on the radio and in print, I was struck by a quote from U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that was repeated several times:

Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans — me included.

(The quote can be found several places, such as near the end of this WSJ blog post.)

Another one from the news yesterday: at 6pm every weekday, my local public radio station broadcasts one of the three daily editions of the BBC's The World Today. In one of the interviews (at around 20 mins. after the hour, if anyone finds the audio), an American whose name I unfortunately didn't catch was comparing the U.S. bank bailout plan with the corresponding plan in the U.K., and he was attempting to argue that the U.S. plan was somehow "less socialist" than the U.K. plan because (for various reasons I'm ill-equipped to understand or critique) the U.S. plan is deliberately temporary in a way that the U.K. plan is supposedly not. Anyway, he summed up his argument like this:

This is a temporary situation and we'd like to keep it that way.

And I suppose that the British are in a permanent situation that they'd like to change at some point?

In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue 1, page 99), and again made it clear that for him it was a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items. Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University, an expert on the history of the OED (author of Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED and creator of the marvellous Examining the OED website), mentioned in a paper presented at the ISLE-1 conference in Freiburg last week that she was baffled by the word mumfordish. So am I. Can any Language Log reader shed serious (rather than speculative) light on its etymology? Comments are open.

Those who follow LL's posts on the public presentation of science may be interested in a recent essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli , discussed in the Economist under the title "Publish and be wrong".

The original essay is Neal S. Young, John Ioannidis, Omar Al-Ubaydli, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science", PLoS Medicine.

In the past, Ioannidis has explained "Why most published research findings are false". And that's before the press gets hold of them.

Will Pavia at the Times, discussing the recent Loebner Prize event ("Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test", 10/13/2008), explains how he figured out which of his two interlocutors was human:

The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ No sentient being could possibly answer in this way.

That's harsh. A more difficult test of politico-linguistic currency would be commenting on John Cole's recent coinage "Peak Wingnut" (Balloon Juice, 10/13/2008):

As I look around the blogosphere, and view memeorandum, it occurred to me that we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut. Don’t get me wrong, this election is still not over and by no means in the bag, but as I read things, the hey day of modern wingnuttia may have passed.

Visiting the New York Times homepage has become rather predictable over the last few weeks. The only question: will the headline scream that the markets are soaring or plummeting?

With the anniversary of Black Monday near (and the prospect of another such Monday looming), I got curious about what financial headlines have been like over the past few decades. The Times search links are amenable to reverse engineering, so I was able to get 23,372 headlines mentioning stocks, markets, dow, nasdaq, from October 13, 1981 to October 13, 2008. This seems like a large enough data set to explore the question, What have the markets been doing since 1981 — or, more accurately, what has the Times been saying that the markets have been doing?

I was delighted to see this article at the NYT profiling a friend and colleague of mine, Jamie Pennebaker. You might also like to check out this website where he and his students analyze language use in a little preznitential contest thing that appears to happen for about two years of every four in the country I call home. (In return, it calls me a resident alien.)

If you're a linguist, I'm guessing you'll either love Pennebaker's work or hate it. Why might you hate it? Because he's a social psychologist who looks at at language in the most superficial way possible, eschewing all the tools of modern linguistic theory in favor of word counts. Not a tree in sight.

Today I had both lunch and dinner at the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford. And on both occasions, I was puzzled by a couplet printed on the menu:

Famous for the
scribes who wrote
on leaving left
a kindly note

(At least according to the scrawl on the scrap of paper in my pocket, that's exactly how it reads, with no additional punctuation or other clues to construal.)

Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon in the New Yorker of 22 September, p. 61: woman speaking on the phone, saying

You never write, you never call, you never fax, you never e-mail, you never text, you never page.

Six verbs here, all referring to means of communication. Such verbs have a certain amount of fame for English syntacticians, because some of them represent a clear island of regularity in what looks at first glance to be a sea of idiosyncrasy.

I'm in Oxford for one of the events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the release of the Oxford English Dictionary, and one of the things that I've learned is an amusing anecdote about the work's title.

Comments on Mark Liberman's Left Dislocation posting drifted for a while into the vexed question of how to express possession when two (or more, though I'll restrict myself to two here) conjoined possessor NPs are involved. For the coordination of a 1sg (pronominal) possessor NP with a 3sg non-pronominal possessor NP, commenters came up with five possibilities (to which I can add many more from my files and from web searches).

Some people weren't comfortable with any of the alternatives, but some had a very clear preference for one of them, and different people's preferences were different. This is not an uncommon sort of variation, occurring what principle for connecting semantics to morphosyntactic form should apply. (What verb form to use with the subject either you or I: am, are, or is?) Different people opt for different solutions, and some people "opt out", rejecting all the solutions whenever possible, choosing instead some quite different formulation of the intended meaning.

I'll sidle up to the particular case the commenters were looking at by first considering some (apparently) much simpler cases.

In addition to everything else that's gone wrong, the McCain campaign is suffering from out-of-control metaphors. According to Adam Nagourney and Elizabeth Bumiller, "Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain", NYT, 10/11/2008:

“My sense of where things are: John McCain beat back what was a political climate that would have snuffed out any other candidate in the Republican Party,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser. “He’s beat back every hurdle that was ever placed in front of him.”