Language Log

A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line: This was, of course, the scond in a series, preceded by Erotic Grammar and followed by Erotic Rhetoric…

William Deresiewicz, "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths", NYT 5/12/2012: THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” […]

The marginally linguistic topic of freedom of linguistic expression occasionally occupies me here on Language Log, as you probably know. And you may be aware that my instincts tend toward the libertarian end of the spectrum, and the defense of the First Amendment. Possibly you are also aware that there really isn't anything I despise […]

Mike Paluska, "Investigator: Herman Cain innocent of sexual advances", CBS Atlanta, 11/10/2011: Private investigator TJ Ward said presidential hopeful Herman Cain was not lying at a news conference on Tuesday in Phoenix. Cain denied making any sexual actions towards Sharon Bialek and vowed to take a polygraph test if necessary to prove his innocence. Cain […]

The best part of Monday's post on the Facebook authorship-authentication controversy ("High-stakes forensic linguistics", 7/25/2011) was the contribution in the comments by  Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski.  It's interesting to compare the situation they describe — and the frustration that they express about it — with the history of technologies for answering questions […]

You know what I think is happening? This is just too insane not to be true. I believe Hong Kong script kiddies wanting to try Nigerian-style thieving of bank account details are actually using Google Translate to translate their phishing messages from Chinese into English. Below the fold I quote in full (obscuring my address […]

I'm used to being solicited by email to submit papers to spamferences like WMSCI, and (less often) I'm solicited to contribute to spam journals. But the names of these conferences and journals are generally plausible idiomatic (if somewhat abstract) imitations of the genuine article. So I was surprised yesterday to get an invitation from a […]

According to Ian Sherr, "Apple, Microsoft Hire Linguists to Duel Over App Store Name", WSJ 3/30/2011: Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) have both hired linguists to serve as experts in the tech titan's ongoing battle over whether or not the government can grant a trademark for the term "app store."

I'm at the AAAS 2011 meeting in DC, mainly because as chair-elect of Section Z (Linguistics) I'm duty-bound to be here, but also partly because I'm giving a talk in a symposium tomorrow afternoon on "The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer". The session was organized by Victoria Stodden, and this is its […]

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake): Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed? Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use […]

One of the papers that caught my eye at the just-complete LSA meeting in Baltimore was Abby Kaplan, "Articulatory reduction in intoxicated speech". Here's the abstract: Voiceless stops are commonly voiced post-nasally and intervocalically. Such alternations are often attributed to articulatory ‘effort reduction’: a hypothesis that voiced stops are ‘easier’ in these environments. My experiment […]

Questions about disclosure of possible conflicts of interest don't arise very often in our field. I take that as that as a testament to the economic insignificance of our results. There are plenty of people who have a financial interest in linguistic research, but they rarely have a stake in having it come out one […]

An article today’s NY Times and another in WalesOnline tell us about a linguist in Wales who was praised for discovering that a murderer — who had been having an affair with his victim — unconsciously revealed his identity as the writer of a fake text message that included either the phrases, “need to sort […]