Language Log

I hope the skirt is waterproof, too

On Future Now, Alex Pang posts a video of a 1960's Braniff Airlines ad that depicts the future of air travel, which was picked up by Boing Boing. The problem, Alex notes, is that

the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.

I can't think of anything more satisfying than having an error named after me -- for one thing, errors tend to have much longer half-lives than theorems, laws, and conjectures. One small thing, though: Alex links to a paper of mine called "Farewell to the Information Age," where I discuss a picture from 1950 number of Popular Mechanics that bears the caption "Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose." It's nice example of the way these representations tend to naturalize contingent social categories like "the housewife" even as they exaggerate the impact of technological innovations like synthetics. But that article doesn't contain the picture itself, which deserves reproduction here:

Note, among the other anachronistic touches, the ashtray on the table.

University name bulletins

Four follow-ups to my posting on university names:

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Commiseration

Please extend your sympathy to Prof. John Wells in his hour of need. A little while ago, a PR firm working for a cheese company called him to ask whether it was possible that cows might moo with regional accents. Rather than tell the flack where to stuff his cows, John responded with a politely-worded negative, adding a few choice intellectual nuggets as professors are wont to do. Then the BBC ran the resulting press release as if it were not only real news but even real science; the story was picked up and embellished around the globe; and now John writes

This appeared in last Sunday’s Observer newspaper. I have only just seen it.
I fear my scholarly reputation must have been destroyed for ever.
For the record, I have never claimed that cows moo with a regional accent.

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Bards of Speech

I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeares.

It was Bush's claim that he'd read Camus that got the most ink, of course, but his reference to "three Shakespeares" also got a lot of people wondering. There was clearly something odd about the construction -- all the newspapers put the phrase in quotes -- but it was hard to pin down. "God, that was FUCKING EMBARRASSING," wrote ginmar. "Who calls reading Shakespeare.....three Shakespeares? Does this guy count on his damned fingers?"

Everybody seemed to sense that the phrase was revealing, but how, and of what? Well, you've come to the right place. Are you sitting comfortably?

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What's the name of your university?

Mark Liberman reports on the renaming of Peking University as the University of Beijing (in English), with a shift from the premodifying form "X University" to the prepositional form "University of X", the reported justification having been a "rule of English grammar" that "place names used as adjectives in school names are frequently found only in abbreviated names in speech; in formal written language, the place name should be placed after 'college' or 'university' as a noun."

Mark notes that this purported rule of grammar (call it the P Rule) is easily refuted -- I'll expand on this point -- though he admits that the statistical preference seems to be for the prepositional form; I'll expand on that point, too.  And then I'll refute the claim that the premodifying form is found mostly in abbreviated names in speech.  Along the way I'll point out a part of this system of naming where variant forms, not differing in meaning, are freely tolerated -- against the pronouncements of many usage advisers, who take the position that consistency requires choosing a single form in such cases.

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Towards proto-cow

Despite the recent surge of interest in the emerging science of cow dialectology, one crucial piece of the puzzle has been lacking: the perspective of historical linguistics. There have been few advances since Ferdinand le Taureau's pioneering "Mémoire sur le système primitif des meuglements indo-européennes" (1879). But it turns out that Christina Skelton, from the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory at the University of Texas, has been on the case since 2001:

The superior cunning of women

A hundred years ago, many scientists saw cognitive differences between human sexes and races -- or thought they did -- and hypothesized that these differences were biological, due to inborn, instinctual differences like those in aptitude and temperament between animal breeds. During the middle of the 20th century, this perspective had a run of bad public relations, but recently, biologism is back. In the modern version, it's sometimes women and members of other disadvantaged groups whose innate characteristics are depicted more positively. But we need to remember that this was also often true of the stereotypes in vogue a hundred years ago.

Thanks to Google Book Search, I recently stumbled over a lovely example of this, in the conclusion to a paper by William Isaac Thomas, "The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races", reprinted in his collection Sex and Society, which was published in 1907 by the University of Chicago Press (p. 312 of this 5 MB .pdf):

Indeed, when we take into consideration the superior cunning as well as the superior endurance of women, we may even raise the question whether their capacity for intellectual work is not under equal conditions greater than in men. Cunning is the analogue of constructive thought -- an indirect, mediated, and intelligent approach to a problem -- and characteristic of the female, in contrast with the more direct and open procedure of the male. Owing to the limited and personal nature of the activities of woman, this trait has expressed itself historically in womankind as intrigue rather than invention, but that it is very deeply based in the instincts is shown by the important role it plays in the life of the female in animal life.

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The main job of the girl brain

Louann Brizendine's book The Female Brain has "80 pages of notes and references supporting 190 pages of text", as Deborah Tannen observes in the Washington Post ("A Brain of One's Own", 8/20/2006). At least with respect to matters of speech, language and communication, however, the scientific support for Brizendine's picture of biological determinism seems to slip through the fingers as you try to grasp it.

I've discussed this is some earlier posts, starting with "Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes" (see also "Leonard Sax on hearing" for additional discussion of a related issue.) This post will take up a small series of connected examples, in an attempt to illustrate the frustrating process of trying to use Brizendine's voluminous references to substantiate her claims.

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Pullum, there and then

An interview with Geoff Pullum, recorded some time ago, aired today during the noon hour today on NPR's Here and Now show. A streaming RealAudio version is here. The podcast mp3 version is here.

Another grammar hallucination

Mark Swofford at Pinyin News has an interesting post on Peking University's decision to change its English name to the University of Beijing ("English tips from the school formerly known as Peking University"). The interesting part is why PKU will be University of Beijing (UBJ?) rather than Beijing University (BJU): "that is, according to the school, because in formal English names the place name has to come after 'college' or 'university'".

Mark links to Joel Martinsen's translation of Fang Zhouzi's blog entry making fun of this "rule of English grammar" ("评北大将规范英文校名为University of Beijing"):

However PKU wishes to standardize its English name is its own right, but to manufacture a "rule of English grammar" like "place names used as adjectives in school names are frequently found only in abbreviated names in speech; in formal written language, the place name should be placed after 'college' or 'university' as a noun." This can't but bring ridicule - or jokes that there's no one in PKU's English department - from anyone in the world who knows English. When former PKU English professor Shen Hong came to New Threads in early February preaching this "rule of English grammar," he was sent packing in embarrassment. Who would have thought that the PKU administration would still take it as a golden rule?

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Arabic T-Shirt Grammar

The grammatical controversy as to how to say "I am not a terrorist" in Arabic to which Ben Zimmer refers, is, I think, not so much about what the correct grammar is as what sort of Arabic to use. As I understand it (and Arabic is not exactly my best language), it is definitely the case that a noun such as "terrorist" should be in the accusative case when it is the predicate nominal in a negative predicate. This rule, however, is a rule of Classical Arabic: the modern colloquials do not have the three-way case distinction of Classical Arabic and therefore have no such rule. What the debate is really about, then, is whether T-shirt slogans should be in the classicizing "Modern Standard Arabic" or in a more colloquial variety.

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Kahunas v. Cojones

The Editor at Blawg Review has noted an interesting usage on Kevin O'Keefe's blawg (or is it a meta-blawg?) Real Lawyers have Blogs. In a post under the title "New legal tabloid an idea long overdue", O'Keefe writes that:

It's going to take some big kahuna's to publish those cease and desist letters and demands for retractions. But they be some of the best posts.

O'Keefe probably meant to invoke the border-Spanish euphemism for manly assertiveness, "big cojones", rather than the surfing-derived term for boss or expert, "big kahuna". The Blawg Review suggests that this substitution is an eggcorn. It seems to me that the verdict is not clear -- perhaps O'Keefe is just confused about how to spell "cojones"; or maybe he's confused about what "kahuna" means; or maybe this was just a malapropism of the kind that afflicts all of us from time to time, when an unintended word comes out in place of one that sounds similar.

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Cucumber cows

I've learned from Hugo Quené that late summer, which in English-language journalism is called the "silly season" and in German is called "Sommerloch" (= "summer hole"), is known as "komkommertijd" (= "cucumber time") in Dutch. That's the basis for the cucumber slices in this picture, which adorns an item on Noorderlog, the weblog of the Dutch science news site Noorderlicht, posted on August 29 under the title "Komkommerkoeien" (= "cucumber cows"). The cow part of the picture comes from Noorderlog's earlier post, "Koeiendialect" (= "Cow dialect"), which had credulously passed along the BBC's reproduction of a cheese company's press release.

It seems that Hugo sent Noorderlicht a link to my post "It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section" (8/26/2006), and they found it persuasive enough to call in the staff photographer, slice up a cucumber and look around for a cow. (I like the visual reference to cucumber facials.) So far, the BBC has not updated its coverage of the cow dialect story, except to offer a link to a BBC Radio Five piece that compares and contrasts the moos of cows from Somerset, Essex, Norfolk, and the Midlands.

Memo to Ashley Highfield: ... oh, never mind.

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Arabic-ophobia

An addendum to Bill Poser's post about the fellow who couldn't fly out of JFK because he was wearing a T-shirt with an Arabic slogan... The wearer of the T-shirt was Raed Jarrar, the Iraqi Project Director for the human rights group Global Exchange, and the slogan in question was "We will not be silent" (لن نصمت), popular among opponents of U.S. policy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. There's a picture of Jarrar wearing the shirt here, and an image of a similar T-shirt accompanies this BBC report. Note that the shirt has both Arabic and English versions of the slogan on it, so it's not like the airline officials had no hints as to what the mysterious squiggles meant.

In protest of the incident, BoingBoing reports, Tim Murtaugh is selling a T-shirt that reads "I am not a terrorist" in Arabic: انا لست إرهابي (ana lastu irhaabi). There's been some nitpicking over the grammar — some say it should properly be انا لست إرهابياً since irhaabi 'terrorist' ought to be in the accusative after the verb lastu 'am not', unless irhaabi is intended as an adjective ("I am not terroristic"?). A good effort, in any case — Murtaugh even offers a female variant of the shirt.

This all reminds me of another example of American anxiety in the presence of written Arabic, involving the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who died on Wednesday at the age of 94. As noted by Lameen Souag on his excellent blog Jabal al-Lughat, Edward Said tried to convince a New York publisher to put out English translations of Mahfouz's great Cairo Trilogy back in 1980 (before he won the Nobel). The publisher demurred, telling Said that "Arabic was a controversial language." Sadly, it remains controversial, at least at our nation's airports.

Terrorism and the magical power of words

According to press reports, a man wearing a T-shirt with an Arabic slogan on it was denied boarding on a flight out of Kennedy airport recently. One of the officials reportedly told him: "Going to an airport with a T-shirt in Arabic script is like going to a bank and wearing a T-shirt that says, `I'm a robber'". It isn't clear, apparently, whether the culprits were airline staff or TSA staff.

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Free books

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has an informative post about the new option to download pre-1923 (public-domain) books from Google Book Search.

Oh sleepies!

What do you call the crusts of dried mucus that you sometimes have to rub or wash out of the corners of your eyes when you wake up? The dialect map that Bert Vaux collected for this item shows the variants sleep, sleepers, sleepies, sleepy bugs, sleepy dust, sleepy seed, eye crud, and several others, without suggesting much in the way of geographical regularity. It looks like Americans have a lot of idiosyncratic and mostly childish names for this substance. But none of us, as far as I know, pronounce any of these names in order to express frustration, annoyance, exasperation or pain.

In Finnish, I've recently been told, the word for sleepies is rähmä, and when something fails in a frustrating way, you can exclaim "voi rähmä!", where voi is an exclamation similar in force to English oh. I should add that, according to my Finnish correspondent, this expression "is pretty strongly associated with a local long-time celebrity who tended to use it in a TV show". And an online Finnish-English dictionary offers somewhat more generic glosses for rähmä, like "discharge" and "secretion". Not that muttering "oh secretion!" seems a whole lot more satisfying, as a way to discharge frustration, than "oh sleepies!" is.

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Science is... a verb??

From an article in Salon last week about Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society:

We've got to get past this idea that science is a thing. It isn't a thing like religion is a thing or a political party is a thing. It's true that scientists have clubs. They have banners and meetings and they drink beer together. But science is just a method, a way of answering questions. It's a verb not a noun.

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By any other name

Mark Liberman reports, once again, on misapprehensions of Gregory Pullman's Geoffrey Pullum's name.  This after a week in which a blogger managed to get <Geoffrey K. Pullum> and <Roger Shuy> right (angle brackets enclose spellings) -- no small trick -- but stumbled some on <Mark Liberman> (just the usual <Lieberman>) and fell flat on his face with <Arnold Zwicky> (<Andrew Zwickey>).  Both Geoff and I have large collections of manglings of our names, painstakingly (or pain-stakingly) assembled over many years, but this is the first time I've been called Andrew.  <Zwickey>, thousands of times, but Andrew, no.

There's some linguistic interest, as well as entertainment, in where these misnamings come from.

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Language Log type size

Some readers tell us that they have difficulty reading Language Log because the type is too small and faint. For me, the type in Language Log is fine, but I find the type on some other sites difficult to read. Type weight is a bit harder to control — perhaps we should change the stylesheet to use a heavier typeface — but fortunately, it is easy to enlarge the type in your browser, or to make it smaller if you prefer. Most if not all browsers have a type size control either right on the front panel or on an easily accessible menu. I'm currently using Mozilla Firefox most of the time. In Firefox, the control is on the View menu (the third from the left). The sixth item down, the first in the third group, is the character size submenu. Here's a screenshot:

Mark Liberman tells me that in Internet Explorer as well the View menu has a Text Size submenu.

All of the browsers that I have tried also respond to Control-+ to increase type size and Control-- to decrease it. Eric Bakovic reports from Macintosh-land that this is true of Safari as well except that one uses Command-+ and Command-- instead.

Suck it up, buttercup

Headsup: The Blog takes me to task in fine style, for blaming Prof. Alan Smither's mis-statement about Spanish in the U.S. on editors at the Guardian. It's a great rant, and Prof. Smithers and I deserve every syllable. But I still think that the Grauniad should have caught the mistake, or at least posted a correction in the original article. Can you imagine any self-respecting blog that wouldn't?

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A Geoffrey by any other name

In the Chicago Tribune a few days ago, Julia Keller took a stylistic look at Vice President Cheney ("Cheney's usage of 'if you will' is 'like' hedging", 8/24/2006), and cited Gregory "Grisha" Pullum's classic Language Log post "It's like, so unfair" (11/22/2003).

For the rest of us here at Language Log Plaza -- Arnold Zwickley, Boris Zimmer, Sally Thompson , and all -- references in the popular press are rare enough that we need to echo George M. Cohan's plea “I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right.” (I expect that "Cohen" was a special problem for him.) But Jeff Pullman, whose names seem to be everywhere these days, has transcended mere nomenclature.

Bogosity

In response to Arnold Zwicky's post on Snickers morphology, several readers have written to reference the much-loved Jargon File entry for bogosity:

1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is bogus. Bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say “My bogometer just triggered”. More extremely, “You just pinned my bogometer” means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say “You just redlined my bogometer”). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat.

2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.

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Playing with your morphology

Advertisers like to play with language.  People notice, and maybe, they'll then remember.

So we get the latest Snickers ad campaign, in which striking invented words appear (on billboards, sides of buses, etc.) in the characteristic Snickers font and colors, on a chocolate brown background that looks like a Snickers wrapper.  The words:

hungerectomy
peanutopolis
nougatocity
substantialicious [see correction below]
satisfectellent

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A bad week for the lord of the underworld

You'd think that Pluto had just lost a contract with Viacom. Everyone has been worrying about whether Pluto is a planet or not, thereby proving that planet or no planet, Pluto is still a star:

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Generational style as "language"

Since we haven't had a cartoon in a couple of days:

Another Plutonian Casualty?

It's an irresistible story, right down to the quaint names of the dramatis personae. On March 14, 1930, Falconer Madan, the librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, reads his 11-year-old granddaughter Venetia Burney the press story about the discovery of a new planet by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. She has been studying Greek and Roman mythology and tells her grandfather that the planet should be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. He relays the suggestion to the Oxford astronomer Herbert H. Turner, who in turn cables it to the Lowell Observatory. When the name is announced on May 1 by Vesto Slipher, the Observatory's director, Venetia is given due credit for her suggestion. After the story is popularized in a 1964 article in Sky and Telescope, "the girl who named Pluto" becomes a favorite topic in popular books about astronomy, and even in her 80's, Venetia is still the subject of news features and interviews.

As long as people are raining on 75-year-old planetary parades, maybe this one is worth some cold-eyed reconsideration as well.

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Spanish in the states

A few days ago, we looked into an article in the Guardian, which stated that "Spanish is fast rising in importance and there are now more Spanish speakers in the United States than English." I speculated that "the Guardian's entire editorial staff is on vacation, and has delegated its duties to the night office-cleaning crew, who are having a little competition among themselves to see who can slip the most extravagant falsehoods into print." But it turned out that it was simply a slip of the pen on the part of the article's author, Prof. Alan Smithers, who explained that "[t]he thought that was in my mind when I wrote that part of the sentence was `there are now more Spanish speakers in some of the United States than English'.

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Scottish dialect genetics

For some reason, the worldwide excitement over English cow dialects hasn't connected with the more localized excitement over Scottish crossbill dialects, which was also recently featured on the BBC News web site ("'Accent' confirms unique species", 8/15/2006):

Debate has raged for years among experts about whether the Scottish crossbill was unique, or a sub-species of the common crossbill.
[...]
DNA tests had shown the Scottish crossbill, common crossbill and parrot crossbill - which visits from Europe - to be genetically similar.
The results of long-running research has now found, according to the RSPB, that the Scottish variety is a distinct species of its own.
The society said it had a "Scottish accent", or call, which it uses to attract a mate from among other Scottish crossbills.

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Silly-season linguifying?

Though the journalistic silly season may give rise to even-worse-than-average science reporting, at least there are some redeeming qualities. As recently noted by Matthew Yglesias guest-blogging on Talking Points Memo, the good news for reporters is that "editors tend to be on vacation, so you can get a little goofy." The example Yglesias gives is the sardonic conclusion to an otherwise unremarkable article in the Aug. 25 New York Times about the marketing campaign launched by "the CW," the network formed out of the merger between UPN and WB:

"We had a challenge," said Mr. Haskins, the CW marketing executive, "in that we had to put under one roof programming from UPN and WB and make it feel like one network."
The solution, Mr. Haskins said, was to focus on what the predecessor networks had in common, which was their younger viewers, "and create an environment that was relatable to their lives."
Someday, there will be an article about television in which no executive uses the word "relatable," industry jargon for something with which viewers are supposed to identify or connect. Alas, this is not that article.

On the surface, this little dig at TV executives seems to be a clear case of reportorial linguification. But it turns out that this claim about the prevalence of the word relatable has much more grounding in reality than other instances of linguifying we've examined here (see links at the end of this post).

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It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section

A few days ago, some brilliant British public-relations consultant decided to spread the fame of West Country Farmhouse Cheeses by floating the story that West Country cows not only give special local milk, they even moo in a special local way. (This concern for cheesy terroir is part of the spread, at least in Britain and the U.S., of wine-tasting culture into other agricultural product areas.) The PR firm asked a famous linguist, John Wells, whether cows could have regional accents. He gave a sober and sensible response , which they were able to spin into a form of "yes", even though what he actually said was "probably not". (Specifically, according to John's own account, "I told them I thought it highly unlikely; but that there was well established scientific evidence that several species of bird exhibit regional variability in their calls, so you could not entirely rule out the possibility.")

The PR firm's spin on the matter was eagerly accepted by journalists from media outlets around the globe, and within a matter of hours, increasingly preposterous versions of this story had been presented to the public via thousands of newspapers, radio stations and television channels. John had become "a group of British linguists"; his off-the-cuff answer had turned into an in-depth investigation in which "numerous of the country's herds" were "subjected to screening"; and the scientific validity of cow dialects is now an established fact for millions of the world's better-informed people.

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Make Very Excellent Mnemonics: Just Start Using Noggin!

As Interplanetary Linguistics Week continues here at Language Log, let's return to Geoff Pullum's post about planet mnemonics back on Sunday, when it appeared that the International Astronomical Union might add three new planets to the current lineup. The IAU chose instead to banish Pluto, leaving us with just Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. So what's a good Pluto-less mnemonic to replace old ones like "My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas"?

A few science educators are reporting that they're switching to:

My Very Excellent (or Educated, or Elegant) Mother Just Sent Us Noodles

Boooring! Surely we can do better. My first suggestion was:

My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Naugahyde

...but somehow I doubt that will catch on. Let's see some other attempts.

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Dwarf planets and California lilacs

Ben Zimmer tackles the new technical term dwarf planet (denoting Pluto, Ceres, Xena, and others on the way), noting that some astronomers -- Owen Gingerich, in particular -- are offended that, with the new definitions, dwarf planets are not planets, which runs against our expectation that an English compound of the form A+B is a hyponym of B (so that, in this case dwarf planets WOULD be planets).  Ben considers, and dismisses, one class of compounds where hyponymy doesn't hold (ironyms).  But in fact ironyms are a special case of a more general phenomenon.  Is there a place for dwarf planet there?

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New planetary definition a "linguistic catastrophe"!

Owen Gingerich, chairman of the International Astronomical Union's Planet Definition Committee, is quite distressed about the resolution passed by the IAU's General Assembly in Prague yesterday, wherein "planets" (encompassing Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are distinguished from "dwarf planets" (the newly demoted Pluto, along with Xena and Ceres, with many more on the way). Gingerich told the BBC that the resolution was reworked after a "revolt" by planetary dynamicists, who felt "terribly insulted" that the original definition of a planet was drafted with a focus more on geology than dynamics. What's more, only 424 of the 2,700 attendees in Prague ended up voting (Gingerich himself didn't vote since he had to catch a plane back to the U.S.), or about 4 percent of the IAU's total membership of 10,000.

Gingerich laid out his objections in stark terms to the Guardian:

"We now have dwarf planets which are in fact not planets. I consider this a linguistic catastrophe. I think the union is going to get a lot of flak for this, in doing it in such a muddy way."

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Who done it?

It's August, and the world's news media are apparently being managed by the night-shift cleaning staff. In today's Guardian, there's an article under the headline "A tale of many tongues" that presents an astonishing statement:

The four most often spoken languages in the world are, in order, Mandarin, English, Hindustani and Spanish. Spanish is fast rising in importance and there are now more Spanish speakers in the United States than English. [emphasis added]

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The mathematical Itô and the phonological Itô

The obvious question most theoretical linguists will ask on learning that Kiyosi Itô has been announced as the first winner of the new Gauss Prize in mathematics (a major $11,500 prize established by the International Mathematical Union, comparable to a Nobel for mathematicians) is whether perhaps — given that unusual circumflex accent used to mark length on the final vowel — he might be some relation of Junko Itô, my phonologist colleague in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (and my department chair until this past June 30). And the answer is yes. It is Junko's dad. Junko flew to Kyoto to be with her family before the award became public, and the plan was for the whole family to fly from there to Spain to be present at the public award ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid this week. However, Kiyosi Itô (who is 90 now) was not in good enough health for such a long flight, so Junko went to the ceremony to receive the award from the King of Spain on her father's behalf, and thus became one of the very few linguists to receive a congratulatory handshake from a reigning monarch (there is a photo of it on page 5 of the August 23 ICM Daily News). Best wishes from Language Log to the whole Itô family: Kiyosi's stunning work in creating stochastic differential equations and founding the study of mathematical operations on stochastic processes (the Itô calculus, originating as far back as the mid-1940s) is long overdue for recognition at this level. And if there was a special award for being a fine phonological theorist, a dedicated administrator, and a great colleague, then Junko would be collecting a prize for herself.

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Where's the beef?

Sweet product placement for Ruth's Chris Steak house ("No ordinary restaurant!" says their website) in a CNN online article  this week:


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Obscenicons in the workplace

Here's the latest example of cartoon meta-commentary on cursing characters (let's call 'em obscenicons). It's the most recent winner of the New Yorker's weekly caption contest.

"The hours here are obscene."

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Mutating netlore, from "fuck" to "snakes on a plane"

That Indian spiritual figure Osho may have known how to work a crowd, but his grammatically questionable lecture on the utility of the word fuck is nothing more than a bit of musty netlore. The piece on fuck he's cribbing from has been circulating on the Net in one form or another since at least 1985, and may go back even further in xeroxlore.

A new mutation recently appeared as a tie-in to the movie Snakes on a Plane. Here you'll find all of the same creaky grammatical humor, now repurposed for the catchphrase of the moment.

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God dead; "fuck" now the most important word in the language

Yes, it's an irretrievably silly idea, but a wonderful example of linguifying (a phenomenon named here by Geoff Pullum on July 3).  And by the Indian spiritual figure who calls himself Osho, so it has something of a higher imprimatur.  Having floated this remarkable proposal, Osho goes on, in a YouTube video, to riff at length on the uses of the word "fuck", exhibiting along the way the tenuous grasp of grammatical terminology that has so often nettled us here at Language Log Plaza.

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ATM languages

The bank nearest to my house -- a Washington Mutual, or WaMu, as it often refers to itself -- has installed a spiffy new ATM, which moves beyond the standard language choices (English and Spanish) and offers two more.  Any guesses about what they are?

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The communicative power of silence

While driving around yesterday, I caught the tail-end of this piece on All Things Considered. At first I could only hear enough of what was being said to figure out that it was a story about the planetary status of Pluto, something we've all been reading about here on Language Log (for more and less language-related reasons). So I began to listen more closely, and this is what I heard.

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Pluto is a dwarf planet, but not a planet

The International Astronomical Union has spoken, and Pluto is no longer to be classified as a "planet." It is, however, still considered a "dwarf planet." Don't be fooled by any preconceptions you might have about English hyponymy: a dwarf planet is not, in fact, a planet. A proposal to encompass "classical planets" and "dwarf planets" under the same "planet" umbrella failed, so Pluto has been definitively cast out of the planetary club.

Yet another resolution was confirmed supporting the creation of "a new category of trans-Neptunian objects" of which Pluto is the prototype. Even though this gesture to assuage Plutophiles passed, we'll have to wait to find out what to call members of the new category. There was no clear majority in favor of the leading candidate, "plutonian objects," so it will take a longer procedure by the IAU to establish how to refer to this anonymous family of Pluto-ish thingamajigs.

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Where are moo from?

Below is an email from John Wells, sent in response to my query about the great outpouring of cow-dialect stories.

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Oh, the moos you can moo

A couple of years ago it was ducks, and now it's cows. According to the BBC:

Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested.

They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from.

I would normally refer this directly to the Language Log humor writers, who value BBC science stories above rubies. But the apparent source of this one is a real and serious scientist:

John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds.

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Iceballs, revisability, language, and intelligent life in the universe

It's looking bad for Pluto. The International Astronomical Union is facing an upwelling of protest and a new motion that would deny planethood to the tilt-angled weird-orbited iceball from the ragged fringes of the Kuiper belt that was irresponsibly added to the planet roster in 1930. Of course, you may be wondering, why is this an issue of interest to linguists? Why are you reading about it on Language Log, where you normally turn for a brief respite from astronomy, ferret training, farm machinery insurance, whatever? Well, Adrian Morgan wrote to me with these ruminations on the connection:

It occurs to me that there is, to some extent, a parallel between the long-running debate about the planetary status of Pluto and the controversy between certain competing ideas about grammar. One side thinks it all-important that what people were taught in school should remain true forever (hence, Pluto is a planet). The other side thinks that classifications should be based on observable facts about the universe really does, and revised when necessary (hence, Pluto is a Kuiper belt object). Sound familiar? I thought so.

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Good-bye plutons, hello Plutonian objects

The latest news from Prague is that the International Astronomical Union is now leaning towards demoting Pluto from planethood rather than elevating three new candidates. Also, instead of creating a classification of not-so-planety planets called plutons, the IAU is now considering throwing the sadly downgraded Pluto a bone by declaring it the prototype of a new class of subplanetary bodies. Pluton seems to be out of the running as a name for members of the category, while plutoid and plutonoid are faring no better. The New Scientist reports that Plutonian object is currently the "least unpopular choice." (Quite a ringing endorsement!) Owen Gingerich, chairman of the IAU's Planet Definition Committee, explains, "The purpose of this is to give a nod to those people who are great Pluto fans."

That's right, Pluto fans! You might still get a modicum of respect after all. Don't let the Plutophobes get you down.

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Excessive activity leads to loss of intelligence

As readers well know, Language Log has been hot on the trail of false claims about language and gender recently (here, here, and here). Now it's time for the Geriatric Division to kick in because, I suppose, as we grow older we worry about our loss of mental capacity. How to guard against this comes from Pope Benedict XVI himself, who advises that work is the major culprit leading to IDS (intelligence deficiency syndrome). As proof, the Pope cites the 12th century writings of St. Bernard, who made this point:

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Bringin ablative from Latin

Some hip-hop artists might call themselves Linguistics, but others actually rap about the subject. Straight outta Vancouver, BC (Canada, y'all) come some linguistics students/artists with Schwhat's up? and Morphologilistic. Check 'em out.

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More on rats and men and women

In response to my post on Leonard Sax's account of the "emerging science" behind the claim that "Girls and boys ... see the world differently", David Hilbert sent some additional information. David argues that Sax's account of sex differences in vision is even more misleading, and also more internally incoherent, than I had understood. Below, I've reproduced David's note, with his permission.

We're getting pretty far away from speech and language, it's true, but this started because David Brooks picked up on Sax's misleading description of some shaky findings on sex differences in perception of emotional faces, and concluded that boys and girls need to be given different books to read. I've also just discussed Sax's claim that "Girls and boys... hear differently", and therefore need different teaching styles and different classroom environments.

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Leonard Sax on hearing

Leonard Sax's recent book, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, presents an impassioned argument for single-sex education. His basic message is that "Girls and boys play differently. They learn differently. They fight differently. They see the world differently. They hear differently." He claims that these are not stereotypes, but scientific facts. And therefore, boys and girls should be educated differently -- and separately.

In an earlier post, we took a look at Sax's argument that girls and boys "see the world differently", and found that he builds his case by presenting data about sexual dimorphism in rat retinas as if it were data about human retinas, when the (easily available) comparable human data is not at all like the rat data. In this post, we're going to consider what Sax has to say about how girls and boys "hear differently". Part of the problem here is the usual rhetorical move of claiming that boys and girls (or men and women) are essentially different as groups, when in fact the difference in average values between the sexes is small relative to the within-sex variation. But in this case, bizarrely, one of the two pieces of research that Sax cites actually found a difference in means that's in the opposite direction from what he claims.

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No plural shifting term

I just popped down to the Starbucks on the ground floor at Language Log Plaza and found when I got back to my corridor that the place is buzzing with a new problem from Caroline Henton and Wade Dowdell: the (supposed) problem of finding a term for shifting the "s" to the end in plurals like "WMDs" (compare "Weapons of Mass Destruction", which some people seem to think might suggest one would have expected the "s" before the "M"). I wish people would just wait for me to come back up with my latte and ask me. I have the answer. It is that there is no term, and there won't be one, and there shouldn't be, because there is no shifting here. The problem arises purely from a misapprehension.

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Is "singular they" verbally and plenarily inspired of God?

Back in October of 2004, Geoff Pullum discussed a wall inscription where they had a singular definite antecedent: "This person is not ignorant. They are a prophet." Geoff wrote that

The pronoun form they is anaphorically linked in the discourse to this person. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is "wrong" simply haven't done their literary homework and don't deserve our attention.

But Geoff left out the single most compelling example.

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Term for shifting plural s to the end of initialisms and acronyms?

One of Wade Dowdell's friends asked him, and he asked Caroline Henton, and Caroline asked us. I don't know the answer, so I'm asking the readers of Language Log, in the hopes that someone out there can tell me, so that I can tell ... well, you get the idea.

A friend has asked me the following question and I don't know the answer. Weapons of Mass Destruction is abbreviated WMDs, not WsMD. My friend wants to know if there is a name for this kind of transference of the plural ending to the end of the abbreviation, and if there is, what it is.

My only substantive contribution here is to observe that we could avoid the whole problem, in this case, by joining Ali G and Pat Buchanan in rendering the abbreviation for "weapons of mass destruction" as BLTs.

Translating leadership, creating verbiage

Every now and then you see some apparently simple text in your own language that you realize you simply do not understand. Gerbig Management has the slogan "Translating thought leadership...creating business results", six words with no plausible parse that I can detect ("translating thought"? "thought leadership"?); and the four things the company does are described as: "Structuring working partnerships that team with client resources, operations, and infrastructures"; "Assessing and approaching variegated causes and root concerns with targeted analysis solutions"; "Developing and managing complex information technology lifecycles"; and "Assisting client partners by managing risk and navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment." Yes, one wants to say, but what do you do when you get to the office? It all makes me realize that the Language Log corporation just doesn't have enough sloganware, mission-statementry, or marketspeak to belong to the modern business world. We just sit around writing stuff about language (or in young Bakovic's case, playing World of Warcraft when he thinks I am not watching his screen through the crack of his office door). It is sooo yesterday. We should be structuring linguistic resources to team with client communicational information infrastructures, assessing root neuropharmopsychosociolinguistic concerns for targeted linguistic lifecycle technologies, managing linguistic risk quotients to assist partners in navigating increasingly complex morpholexicosyntactic environments... That sort of thing. I think I just made my head hurt.

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Earnest snowclone of the month

Although the Eskimos are horseless, alert readers will sense them hovering in the background as Lawrence Scanlan reviews J. Edward Chamberlin's How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations and Margeret E. Derry's Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800-1920. Scanlan's lead:

The Blackfoot of the Plains had more than 100 words for the colours of horses, the Kazaks of central Asia 62 for bay shades alone. These are not just numerical curiosities from old horse societies, but signs of a human watchfulness and a deep connectedness to the natural world that was the norm, and is now rare. ["The horses we rode in on", Globe and Mail, posted online 8/19/2006]

If you know enough Blackfoot or Kazak to evaluate these claims, or can find a relevant reference, let me know. [Hat tip: Patrick King.]

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Piling on "pluton"

As we wait nervously for the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union to decree how many planets are in the solar system, we are also kept on the edge of our seats about the status of the term pluton. The IAU is considering the creation of the category pluton to cover any planet beyond Neptune, taking more than 200 Earth years to complete its orbit around the Sun. (Or as phrased more pungently by Geoff Pullum, a "planet that is really nothing more than a God-forsaken frozen slushball way out beyond Neptune drifting around in the Kuiper belt and damn lucky to be called a planet at all.")

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New planet mnemonic: Language Log is there for you

If the change to the definition of the term planet goes through at the International Astronomical Union in Prague this week, an old mnemonic phrase won't work any more: My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas will not give a clue to the names of the planets in their correct order proceeding outward from the sun (originally Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, but I suspect that after August 25 you can soon kiss that list goodbye). Fixing up the old memory aid to allow for the addition of Ceres (between Mars and Jupiter), Charon (which circles around Pluto, and we'll list the two in alphabetical order), and Xena (way outside Pluto's orbit) is clearly a job for Language Log (though we're a little bit behind the leading edge of research here: the linguistically unqualified people at Scientific American got onto this just before we did, and there are already about fifty suggestions posted; God, I hate to work alongside amateurs...). So don't worry: we're on the case. Just learn this: My Very Excellent Mother Could Just Send Us Nine Cheerleaders Playing Xylophones. Piece of cake.

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Crocodiles are fish in Australia

The press is making much of the Australian government's redefinition of crocodiles as fish in the Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Legislation Amendment (Export Control and Quarantine) Bill 2006, as if this were on a par with the stupidity of the attempt by Indiana legislators in 1897 to redefine π as 3.2, 3.232, 3.236, or 9.24 (all in the same bill!), or the nefarious silliness of the Reagan Administration's redefinition of ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches. As the digest of the bill explains, the purpose of this is to ensure that the law regulates the export not only of fish in the usual sense but of prawns, clams, mussels, and crocodiles.

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Translingual ironic snowclone of the day

Another snowcanard, submitted by Rob Malouf.

The title is "Fokke & Sukke feel just like Eskimos", and they're saying more or less: "As experienced Lowlands attendees, we can distinguish between at least... ...twenty different kinds of puke".  (Lowlands  is a famously raunchy music festival).

(More on Fokke & Sukke here.)

Bad headline pun of the week

"Flipper only a deep C student" -- Newsday/Scripps Howard.

Quantifier domain restriction and gel-filled bras

As Mark Liberman noted, security expert Bruce Schneier had some fun with this line from the Transportation Security Administration's byzantine list of prohibited carry-on items:

We encourage everyone to pack gel-filled bras in their checked baggage.

Schneier's riposte:

Everyone? Do I have to as well? Where should I go buy one?

But he wasn't the only online wag to crack this joke. Compare these two other iterations:

Everyone? First order of business, go buy a gel-filled bra. (Dvorak Uncensored)

Everyone means everyone. Even you. (Digg)

Nobody ridiculed the TSA for matching up an ostensibly singular quantifier (everyone) with an ostensibly plural personal pronoun (their). That sort of thing is old hat and hardly worth remarking upon (though Lord knows that doesn't stop us from remarking upon it, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here...). The humor, such as it is, instead hinges on a supposed ambiguity in determining the domain of the quantifier everyone.

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The Planet Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli

Astronomers have recently been debating the definition of a planet and whether Pluto really is one, with some astronomers reluctant to adopt a definition that would increase the number of planets in the solar system. User Friendly suggests that they will adopt a linguistic tactic for keeping down the number of planets recognized.

Another step towards gender equality

The Transportation Security Agency has advised that

We encourage everyone to pack gel-filled bras in their checked baggage.

Bruce Schneier asks

Everyone? Do I have to as well? Where should I go buy one?

This reminds me of a point about intonation and meaning. About 35 years ago, I heard Martin Kay describe a sign on the London Underground that read (as he performed it) "DOGS must be carried". (Here's a more modern version of the sign, courtsy of Annie Moie's London Underground Tube Blog.) I've never figured out a really convincing explanation for why stressing "dogs" seems to encourage the interpretation "everyone must carry a dog", while stressing "carried" encourages the interpretation "if you have a dog, you must carry it".

Of rats and (wo)men

I've recently read a couple of recent books on the science of sex differences: Leonard Sax's "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences", and Louan Brizendine's "The Female Brain". As I explained in previous posts, I was disappointed and even shocked at these authors' cavalier treatment of issues in speech, language and communication ("Are men emotional children?"; "Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes"; "Sex and speaking rate"; "Sex-linked lexical budgets"). And as I've read more, I've learned that at least some of the core neuroscience in both books is equally shaky. More precisely, both authors erect some robust and convincing rhetorical structures on some very weak scientific foundations.

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