Language Log

The LPGA has announced that it is backing down from its "plans to suspend players who could not efficiently speak English at tournaments" (which I posted about here).

[Democratic California State Sen. Leland] Yee said he understood the tour's goal of boosting financial support, but disagreed with the method. "In 2008, I didn’t think an international group like the LPGA would come up with a policy like that," Yee said. "But at the end of the rainbow, the LPGA did understand the harm that they did."

This understanding is indirectly reflected in a statement from the LPGA:

"We have decided to rescind those penalty provisions," [LPGA Tour commissioner Carolyn] Bivens said in a statement. "After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities for every tour player."

[ Hat tip to Ben Zimmer. ]

Having just posted (again) on less/fewer with plural C (count) nouns, I was primed to catch the following in Gail Collins's op-ed piece ("Sarah Palin Speaks!") in the NYT yesterday:

How many times have you heard McCain promise to slash taxes and pay for it by eliminating unnecessary programs? And who better to help carry out that agenda than the governor of a state whose residents pay less taxes than anyplace else in the union, because of their genius in making the federal government pay the tab for virtually everything?

Collins could have written pay less tax, with a M (mass) use of the lexical item TAX, or she could have written pay fewer taxes, with the modifier fewer that some usage critics insist on with plural C nouns. All three variants are attested, but not (apparently) with equal frequencies. I found Collins's pay less taxes entirely natural, indeed to be preferable to pay fewer taxes, and I would have found pay less tax also natural.

There are two points of interest here: yet another context where less is fine with plural C nouns, plus the double classification of TAX as M and C, with the result that M tax and plural C taxes overlap significantly in their meaning (a situation also seen for E-MAIL, SPAM, and some other lexical items).

Josh Marshall was amused by Governor Tom Ridge's word-substitution error, in an interview last night on MSNBC:

But the fact is, Governor, that you've *had* eight years
of a Bush administration, and a lot of Republicans in Congress for the last eight years,
so why wouldn't the American people say
"Look, they've had their shot, we're going to change."

Uh, because uh John Bush [0.213]
b- because uh John McCain [0.396]
is very much his own man, because John McCain brings a different style and a different approach toward Republican leadership, [0.388]
because John McCain has made some promises that I think Americans can feel comfortable about,
that he will keep.

To a recent article about metamaterials ("Chinese boffins crack invisible-shed problem", 9/3/2008), Lewis Page at The Register added this disclaimer:

WARNING: Habitual use of our science coverage may harm your baby and others around you. Such use has been linked to incidence of the King's Evil and is thought to contribute to global warming, entropy, substance abuse, terrorism, hair loss, volcanoes, orbital decay, intellectual languor and decline of moral standards in team sport.

Unfortunately, this warning is not yet required by the FCC. But if you're in the market for some entropy, intellectual languor and decline of moral standards in team sport, it'll be hard to top the past week's reports about the "monogamy gene" (AKA the "infidelity gene", the "divorce gene", etc.). A small sample of the headlines (with linked stories):

"Is monogamy genetic?"; "Baby, my genes made me do it"; "Some men carry 'commitment-phobia' gene"; "Is Lover Boy a Louse? It May Be Genetic"; "Infidelity: It's All In the The Genes"; "Would you abort George Clooney?";  "Study: For men, genetics might untie marital bonds"; "Marriage Woes? Husband's Genes May Be At Fault"; "Marriage problems? Husband's genes may be to blame"; "Study Finds Fear of Commitment May Be in a Man's Genes"; "Commitment phobes can blame genes: A man's reluctance to marry may be down to a genetic 'flaw', say researchers"; "Marital crisis? Blame it on male genes"; "'Bonding Gene' Could Help Men Stay Married"; "Divorce gene linked to relationship troubles"; "Scientists Discover the Monogamy Gene"; "Gene Variant Holds The Key To A Long And Happy Marriage"; etc., etc.

You can pretty much guess how this is going to turn out. The researchers found a small effect — the biggest result was a 5% difference in group means on a "Partner Bonding Scale", for 41 (out of 1,104) guys who were homozygotic for one of the 11 alleles examined at one of three loci. There was a lot of overlap in the distributions — the biggest effect size was about 0.38 — and most of the differences and effect sizes were much smaller. And because it was a twin study, the small group of subjects with the genetic pattern associated with the biggest difference was effectively even smaller, and may well have shared a large number of other cultural and genetic traits.

But most of the media coverage presented this as another triumph of contemporary genetic Calvinism: the fate of our relationships is written at birth in the book of our genes.

The BBC News Magazine, expanding on earlier BBC News coverage of the Tesco "10 items or less" flap (reported on here), passes on more misinformation from various sources about the usage of fewer and less. The piece ("When to use 'fewer' rather than 'less'?") begins inauspiciously:

Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer". But it's not just huge, multinational supermarkets that get confused about this grammatical point.

The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years.

"Plain English speakers" — where does that come from? From, I assume, the primary source that BBC News used for these stories, the Plain English Campaign, which was also the source for the replacement for "10 items or less": "Up to 10 items".

There's a lot to unpack here, including objections from some to "up to" as a replacement for "or less".

As has been widely reported, the text released to the press of Sarah Palin's speech, and the version that appeared on the teleprompters for her to read, contained a quasi-phonetic spelling that signals a striking departure from the policy of the Bush administration:

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines … build more new-clear plants … create jobs with clean coal … and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.

The dangers of TV-studio live mics were demonstrated again yesterday, this time by Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy after an interview by Chuck Todd on MSNBC. Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse. The relevant segment:

Mike Murphy: They're all bummed out.
Chuck Todd: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I would think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives, and ((unintelligible)) picture …
Chuck Todd: Yeah they went to narrative.
Mike Murphy: I totally agree.
Peggy Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that — because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at — they blow it.

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:

(Click on image for larger version.)