There's a lot to be unhappy about in J. L. King's recent book, On the Down Low (Broadway Books, 2004), but most of it doesn't have to do with linguistic issues. However, one of King's aims in the book, to sound the alarm about "straight" black men who have sex with men and the danger they present to black women, is furthered by the way he phrases his warnings. Implicature is working in the service of a moral panic over DL men. [Added 1/1/05: Linguistic and sociological background (perhaps more than you wanted to hear, but people have been asking)... "MSM" stands for "men who have sex with men", which does not refer, as you might have imagined from working through simple compositional semantics, to men who at least sometimes engage in gay sex, but is a technical term in the social services and sociological literature for one specific subset of such men, namely men who consider themselves to be "straight" but seek out and engage in gay sex with some frequency while concealing their form of sexuality from most of the world. MSMs -- don't fuss at me about this pluralization -- are thus to be distinguished from what I call "frankly" gay and bisexual men, who identify as either "gay/homosexual/queer" or "bisexual", can be either closeted or open about their sexuality, and can be either sexually active or not; MSMs are by definition both closeted and sexually active. The expression "the DL" stands for "the Down Low". Men "on the DL" (or "in the DL life(style)"), also known as "DL men", are the black-on-black variant of MSMs, where "black" is a synonym for "African American". So "DL" is a specifically U.S. expression, and it's a folk term. In contrast, I've seen "MSM" used in U.S., Canadian, U.K., and Australian contexts, usually as a technical term; white MSMs mostly have no term for their sexual activity (which they tend to view as something more akin to a hobby than a sexuality), though they do recognize the ordinary English expression "men who have sex with men" as applying to them, which is why the expression is useful in attempts at outreach to MSMs, of whatever race or ethnicity.] Life on the DL was last discussed here back in July. Since then I've read King's book, with some dismay, though possibly not as much as Keith Boykin, as expressed in his article "Not just a black thing" in The Advocate of 1/18/05, pp. 31-3 (Boykin, an openly gay and politically very active black man, has a book Beyond the Down Low soon to be published.) Boykin is particularly outraged at King's claim that men on the DL are the vector for the spread of HIV/AIDS among black women; he notes that the phenomenon of "straight" men having sex with men is as widespread among whites as blacks, yet HIV/AIDS is much more prevalent among black women than among white women. So Boykin sees King as engaged in a campaign of blaming the gays. My dismay, on the other hand, is over King's fomenting a moral panic -- in this book, in television interviews, and in public appearances -- about the prevalence of DL life. Now, King lived on the DL himself for years, and he's writing about what he knows, which includes a very large number of men on the DL, so in his world the Down Low is all over the place. This view of the world finds expression in the way he frames his warnings to black women (the bold-facing is mine): The first thing I want to say to women who are seeking DL signs or behavior traits is that not every black man is on the DL. Not every black man in your life is on the DL. (p. 128) I also want to make sure that I am clear when I say not all black men are living a double life, a double lie. (p. 129) Well, that's generous. Not all gay men are child molestors. Not all straight men are gay-bashers. And so on. But all these assertions that not all Xs are Y implicate that a large percentage of Xs are Y. King might well believe, given his life history, that a large percentage of black men are on the DL, but this claim is almost surely false. Estimates are hard to come by, but many studies put the percentage of men who are gay in a broad sense (including bisexuals and, despite their self-identifications, MSMs) at around 5%. Let's opt instead for the larger figure of 10% that is often bandied about. Surely MSMs are no more than half of this population, probably a good deal less. So a very generous estimate of the incidence of guys on the DL is 5%. Not an insignificant number, but scarcely a omnipresent threat to women. King's recommendations to women are in line with the sense of omnipresent threat and moral panic that he projects. Although he concedes that You cannot be with him twenty-four hours a day. You don't have access to his e-mail accounts or his phone calls, and you don't always know if he is where he tells you he is. (p. 128) this very phrasing suggests that it might be a good thing if you (the typical black woman) could do all these things. He counsels vigilance ("A woman should... keep up with her man's comings and goings" (p. 131), "A woman should know her man's schedule" (p. 132), "Come home early from work one day; surprise him" (p. 132)) for pages, offering detailed accounts of how guys on the DL cheat and lie, how they hook up with one another, and so on, and even suggests drastic action: I don't have a "sure list of signs" that will give women the answers they seek. Women can hire a private investigation company or get a very masculine-acting and -looking gay man and have him approach their man. No, I'm not making this wild-eyed paranoia up. The irony here is that men in general, and MSMs especially, complain that their women are too controlling, interfering, demanding, full of "drama and hassles" (p. 142), so that they feel the need to escape the ol' ball and chain for undemanding companionship with other men (which for MSMs comes with easy uncommitted sex). zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 01:45 PM Reporting on site from the MLA meetings, Geoff Pullum tells us that Labov has found a spreading sound shift in inland Northern cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, but not Columbus or Indianapolis) stopped dead by a line where the prevailing ideology of Northern Yankees (anti death penalty; pro gun control) ceases to be a typical feature of local political opinion — a sharp and rather unexpected intrusion of ideology on the course of linguistic change. The image Geoff uses here is like that of a spreading wave, which is halted by natural barriers. But wave trains are not a particularly good metaphor for the spread of linguistic changes. Contagion is another attractive metaphor, but it too is unsatisfactory in most cases. When we look at the micromechanisms at work in the spread of variants, though, the "barrier" effect that Labov observes is not at all surprising (though it's nice to have it illustrated so dramatically). Quite possibly Labov said this in his MLA talk, but let me say it here anyway. For a wave to propagate, all it takes is for molecules to be in contact. The molecules that have energy transmitted to them don't have to be receptive to it; they just have to be there. The spread of linguistic variants doesn't have this automatic quality. Merely hearing some variant doesn't cause you to adopt it; you have to be receptive to it. The contagion metaphor is a bit better, since it incorporates some notion of susceptibility to the disease, which translates in the linguistic case into some kind of receptivity to a new variant. And in some cases -- notably the spread of many lexical items -- this seems to be an adequate picture of the events in question. But the spread of syntactic, morphological, and phonological variants requires more than contact and simple receptivity to new variants. You have to view yourself as like the people who use the variant, so that you'll be willing to accommodate to their speech to some extent. These variants spread locally, by interaction among companions. Insofar as you don't identify with people -- say, because you hold to very different ideologies -- even if you're in regular contact with them, you're unlikely to adopt their behaviors. So there is a barrier, a social and psychological one. zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 12:42 PM
ABC News has named bloggers as "People of the Year", for "providing unique insight into people's thoughts." The ABC article starts this way:
By "it" ABC of course means "the word blog". This is a good example of a pronoun referring to an entity that is evoked but not named, a phenomenon that has recently come to be known as booger anaphora. And by the way, Merriam-Webster's choice was not based on someone's subjective evaluation of lexical impact, but rather on a simple count of word lookups on their free internet site. Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:41 AM
Much-maligned author Dan Brown is one of the few lay people who shows a proper appreciation for linguists, but not the only one. I just turned on the TV (purely for research purposes, of course) and came upon an episode of Friends. Ross was explaining why he wouldn't cancel his date for the evening: She's an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department. They're WILD!So there. Posted by Bill Poser at 11:16 PM
According to a recent wire story from Xinhua
The English-language web page for the CASS Institute of Linguistics is here. I wasn't able to find out whether the recordings and transcripts will be published. I hope so -- the corpus-based dictionary and grammar will be even more valuable if the base materials are also available to scholars, as the British National Corpus and many other large linguistic corpora are. The cited numbers for the Beijing conversational recordings and their transcripts (650 hours of conversations, 8.9 million "words") add up to about 228 "words" per minute. This leaves me uncertain about whether this should be taken to mean "words" in the lexicographic sense, or "characters" as they would be used in transcribing the conversations into normal Chinese orthography. The Chinese writing system doesn't separate "words" by spaces or any other marks, but the project aims at producing a dictionary, which will certainly be organized in terms of multi-character words, just as (for instance) CEDICT or the ABC Chinese Dictionary is. Thus e.g. dian4 shi4 ji1电视机, meaning"television (set)", is three syllables, three characters, but one (lexicographic) word. 228 whatevers per minute seems too fast for the units to be words, which I think should average about two syllables each in Beijing conversation, but it's kind of slow for syllables in conversational speech. It's probably syllables (=characters), though, with some pausing accounting for the slower rate. Anyhow, it's terrific to see this development. [via Victor Mair] Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:20 AM
When Bill Poser recently pointed out to us an article about the revival of Irish, it occurred to me to ask a colleague about the subject. Jim McCloskey, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is one of the foremost experts in the world on the modern Irish language, and certainly the most prominent of those taking an interest in theoretical linguistics. His brilliantly worked-out and impeccably detailed theoretical works on Irish have been appearing since the late 1970s, along with philological notes (published not just about but in Irish) and a couple of popular works for an Irish audience. He regularly visits the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland to do fieldwork, and is just back from there. Here are his reactions, presented (in green, naturally) as a guest post. —GKP
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 07:00 AM
We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries. But it's my guess that most people take the first two clauses of the song as the protases of a conditional, rather than as rhetorical questions. True, most versions of the lyrics end the lines with question marks (this is the most familiar version, a little different from Burns's):
But a fair number of people leave out the question marks (for example here, here, and here), which suggests that the interrogative force isn't obvious. It may make no sense that way -- "if old friends should be forgotten, we'll drink to bygone days anyway." But incomprehensibility only adds to the sense of immemorial tradition, even this happens to be a borrowed one, grafted onto American culture in 1929 by a Canadian of Italian ancestry. As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, after all, the point of invented traditions like the kilt or the Pledge is to provide "emotionally charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club." And what could be more evocative than a New Year's song that's sodden with quaintly impenetrable phraseology? "Is not the Scotch phrase Auld Lang syne exceedingly expressive?" Burns wrote to a friend in 1793. Well, it works for me, anyway. Posted by Geoff Nunberg at 02:12 AM
The lede of the 12/29/2004 Guardian report by Alok Jha has a more breathless, not to say awestruck, take on these results:
An article by Ronald Kotulak in the Chicago Tribune takes a similar tack, saying that "brain-building genes mutated at a tremendously rapid rate in humans, compared with the brains of chimpanzees, macaque monkeys, rats and mice". But there's nothing in the Cell article to support the view that humans are "truly privileged" as a result of "extraordinary fast evolution", or that the rate of genetic evolution responsible for the human brain has been "tremendously rapid". The article provides strong evidence that brain size and complexity has been subject to greater selective pressure among primates than among rodents, and that this is especially true of the human lineage among the primates. But the calculated rates of brain evolution at the molecular level are small relative to (say) snake venom or virus coat proteins. At first I thought that the Guardian's science writer had interpreted the research overenthusiastically, as journalists sometimes do, but both the Guardian and Tribune articles includes quotes suggesting that (some of) the researchers -- at least Bruce Lahn -- are complicit in this (what I take to be) misrepresentation, and perhaps even primarily responsible for it. From the Tribune article:
And from the Guardian, again quoting Lahn: Researchers have recognized for a long time that evolution has focused on brain size and complexity in the primate and especially hominid lineages, based on measurements of brain size relative to body size -- the numbers on the right in the picture above (from the Dorus et al. article) are (ratios of) encephalization quotients (here based on the equation EQ = BrainWeight/BodyWeight0.28), indicating that macaques have about 6 times as much brain relative to their body size as rats and mice do, while humans have about 9 times as much. (You'd get somewhat different numbers by using a different exponent in the EQ equation, but under any reasonable interpretation, primates are more encephalized than rodents, apes are more encephalized than other primates, and humans are more encephalized than other apes). What the Cell article adds to this quantitative evidence from gross anatomy is quantitative evidence based on molecular changes in DNA sequences, showing that nervous-system-related genes have evolved faster in primates than in rodents. There's no attempt to show that the rate of primate brain evolution is "extraordinarily fast", just that it's faster than brain evolution among rats and mice. The researchers looked at 214 genes "demonstrated to play important roles in the nervous system", "expressed exclusively or predominantly in the brain", or "implicated in various diseases of the nervous system, such as brain malformations, mental retardation, and neurodegeneration". They compared these nervous-system-related genes with a set of 95 "housekeeping" genes, which are "involved in the most basic cellular functions such as metabolism and protein synthesis" and "exhibit ubiquitous expression" (i.e. in all tissues and situations). The rate of protein evolution was estimated in terms of the ratio between nonsynonymous ( Ka) and synonymous (Ks) substitution rates in the DNA sequence. ("Synonymous" substitutions don't chance the amino acid that's coded for, while "nonsynonymous" substitions do.) In the primate line, humans and macaques were compared; in the rodent line, mice and rats were compared. As graph A below shows, the Ka/Ks ratio was about 37% higher for the nervous-system genes in primates vs. in rodents, while the ratio for housekeeping genes was about the same for both genera. Graph B shows that about 55% of the nervous-system-related genes had higher Ka/Ks ratios in primates, as opposed to about 36% with higher ratios in rodents, while the balance was nearly even for housekeeping genes. As the Cell article explains, these results could have two explanations:
In order to add to the plausibility of their favored explanation, the authors further subdivide the nervous-system-related genes into three groups:
The "developmentally biased" subgroup shows the greatest effect, suggesting that the key thing is brain size, structure and organization, not nervous-system physiology. There's more interesting stuff in the article, including evidence from comparisons including chimps and squirrel monkeys that the rate of nervous-system evolution at the molecular level has been greater in the hominin lineage than in the rest of primate evolution, and a (tentative) argument that human brain evolution has involved "a very large number of mutations in many genes" rather than "a small number of key mutations in a few genes". But there's no support in the Cell article for humans being the "privileged" beneficiaries of "a type of extraordinarily fast evolution that is unique to the species", as Alok Jha tries to tell us in the Guardian. On the contrary, the authors write
They don't ask whether genes under selective pressure in other species might show equally fast or faster changes -- but that's because they already know that the answer is "yes". In fact, the original perspective on this is that Ka/Ks ratios need to be greater than 1 to demonstrate that adaptive evolution is occurring at all, and you can see from the graphs above that the average ratio for nervous-system-related genes in the Cell paper was about 0.12. For lists of higher ratios, you can consult The Adaptive Evolution Database (TAED) here. TAED "is designed to provide, in raw form, evolutionary episodes in specific chordate and embryophyte (flowering plants, conifers, ferns, mosses and liverworts) protein families that might be candidates for adaptive evolution" and "contains a collection of protein families where at least one branch in the reconstructed molecular record has a KA/KS value greater than unity, or greater than 0.6." For example, the sample page linked in the TAED database documentation includes the gene for the (snake venom) protein phospholipidase A2 in the Malayan Krait, Bungarus Candidus, with Ka/Ks of 2.27. Browsing for a minute or two, I found a cell adhesion protein in the zebrafish with Ka/Ks of 4.55. And on the lower links of the Great Chain of Being, the Ka/Ks ratio for sequenced genes of SARS virus during the epidemic in 2002-2003 was as high as 1.98. Some individual genes among the "nervous-system related" set studied in the Cell paper had Ka/Ks as high as 0.833 in the primate comparison (that was MCPH1, "implicated in the control of brain size"), and the average of 0.12 was significantly higher than the rodent average of 0.09 for the same genes, but this is not some unprecedented, biologically unique level of extraordinarily fast evolution. Given all of this, it's hard to understand why one of the paper's authors, Bruce Lahn, told the Chicago Tribune that "mutations in genes that build the brain exploded in the human line when humans split from monkeys 20 to 25 million years ago" (emphasis added). What's going on here?
But there's no "hyper-evolutionary development" here, unless I'm missing something. We're just seeing the molecular correlates of the long-recognized increased encephalization of the human lineage, with rates of change that are not spectacular at all relative to thousands of other well-documented cases elsewhere in nature. The resulting degree of encephalization is unique, and clearly causes (and is probably also caused by) some qualitative differences in language, tools and social organization. But what's special about us is what we see and do every day, not the Ka/Ks ratios of the brain-related genes in our lineage. [Update 12/30/2004: As expected, this story has spread widely in the press. The Independent writes about "evolutionary overdrive"; SciTech today features "unprecedented natural selection pressure" and an "explosion of genetic mutations in the brain"; and so on through more than 50 other stories so far indexed by Google News. ] Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:24 AM The tsunami and its ever spiraling death toll may have been getting you down. But don't worry. CNN.com has had the following comforting headline up all day: Swimsuit model survives tsunami It links to sports illustrated which pictures the survivor herself. Hard to tell from the picture that she broke her pelvis, although she's obligingly undone the string which otherwise might have slightly obscured that part of her anatomy. [Yes. I know the picture is not actually meant to display her in post-tsunamic state. Perhaps I should have used a smiley here.] Is it just me, or is this headline, with or without the implicature that swimsuit modeling helped her survive, bizarre?Posted by David Beaver at 01:25 AM
A little while back I sent the American Dialect Society list a link to Mark Liberman's posting on redact(ed), and we were off and running. Here I reproduce most of this discussion, unredacted ('not redacted'; see below for un-redacted 'with redaction undone'). As far as I now know, the verb redact (along with the derived noun redaction) began as a learnèd synonym for edit; developed a specialized sense in legal contexts; extended its usage in legal contexts; and then spread into more general usage as a (euphemistic) synonym for censor 'remove, black out', while preserving specialized uses in some contexts. Mark's examples are of REDACTED being used as a reference to blacked-out bits of text that are "classified" or "sensitive" -- effectively, as a replacement for the unpleasant participle CENSORED. But the ADS-L discussion begins with John Baker's observation that in his world the verb redact is more specific than edit, scarcely overlaps with censor, and is genuinely useful: (12/22/04) I think it's just a case of an obscure word being tapped to fill a need. I have to redact documents on a regular basis (i.e., edit them to remove identifying, privileged, or irrelevant information). If that were to be described as just editing them, it would not be clear without additional explanation, and I cannot offhand think of any other words that would make sense. Redaction, in this sense, is what we do when we remove or disguise identifying information in corpora. Redaction, in this sense, is the imperative of our Institutional Review Boards and Human Subjects Committees. I was up to bat next. I didn't quite get Baker's point (I preserve the typographical conventions of the original): (12/22/04) i think the question here is: when and in what circumstances did "redact" develop from its general 'edit' sense (reported by NSOED from the mid-19th century) -- essentially, a fancy or technical *synonym* of "edit" -- to this more specific sense? the development is natural enough, but it wasn't inevitable (though, like all linguistic changes, from the point of view of the users of the innovative form it might seem so). in any case, the long-established verb for this sort of activity was "censor" (and "black out" could easily have been specialized for this purpose; it describes well the particular method used for censoring, and is appropriately restricted to written or printed material [1]). at some point someone decided that "censor" needed replacement (and fixed on the learned verb "redact") -- undoubtedly because censorship is so, well, *nasty*. the development looks to me like linguistic laundering of vocabulary. the development is recent enough that it's not in AHD4, which has only the older, more general, sense. i'm away from my dictionary trove at the moment, so i can't speak about other dictionaries. a lot of the google hits are for the older sense, but then there's:Pixel-counting can un-redact government docs: A Luxembourgian/Irish security research team have presented a paper on a technique for identifying words that have been blacked out of documents, as when government docs are published with big strikethroughs over the bits that are sensitive to national security. (http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/10/pixelcounting_can_un.html)Delta Dental Plan will redact all but the last four digits of the SSNs on electronically submitted documents and on ID cards. ... (www.deltamass.com/benefitsadmins/ pdfs/Fall%202003%20Check%20Up.pdf)"redaction" has a parallel sense in some contexts, not surprisingly. [1] is "redact" ever used to describe the censoring of audio material, that is to describe bleeping (out)? Then Ben Zimmer chimed in with an actual early citation: (12/22/04) The earliest relevant cite on the Nexis database suggests that US government officials began using "redacted" as a synonym for "censored" in the '70s:(Washington Post, Dec 19, 1978, A2) Prosecutors in the FBI break-ins case mistakenly circulated to defense lawyers highly classified material that is only supposed to be seen or discussed in a spy-proof vault.Attorneys for three former top FBI officials charged in the case made the disclosure yesterday in a lively pretrial hearing where they protested Justice Department attempts to get the documents back for censoring as part of a proposal to place strict limits on collecting new information.[...] The lawyers voiced special opposition yesterday to a government request that they return their clients' grand jury testimony to be "redacted" - censored - of material containing "sensitive compartmented information (SCI)."A bit more from this case, from an AP wire story that appeared in the New York Times:(New York Times, Dec 19, 1978, p. A12) Alan I. Baron, who represents the former acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray 3d, said, "We are being denied the right to conduct a defense. The Government wants an unlimited right to redact information as to intelligence techniques, and that's what this case is all about."The term "redact" has been adopted by the Government and in this context means censorship of classified material. Barnett D. Skolnik, a Justice Department lawyer, said, "We are redacting in good faith."Seems clear that the lawyers representing the Government needed a euphemism for "censor" in this case -- it would be difficult for them to say, "We are *censoring* in good faith." Next, John Baker went back into the legal literature and took things into the '50s: (12/22/04) It may be that the term began as a legal term, which in large part it continues to be. It certainly predates the '70s. Here's an early use from 1957:<Justice Bastow and I agree that feasible means should have been adopted to redact DeGennaro's confession and admissions,--before their introduction into evidence,--so as to restrict their contents to his own inculpations, and thus have avoided any possible prejudice to Lombard.> (People v. Lombard, 4 A.D.2d 666, 669 n.2, 168 N.Y.S.2d 419, 423 n.2 (N.Y. App. Div. Dec 10, 1957).)Here's what the leading legal dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary (8th ed. 2004), has to say:<redaction (ri-dak-sh<schwa>n), n. 1. The careful editing of a document, esp. to remove confidential references or offensive material. [Cases: Criminal Law 663; Federal Civil Procedure 2011; Trial 39. C.J.S. Criminal Law §§ 1210-1211; Trial §§ 148-153.] 2. A revised or edited document. -- redactional, adj. -- redact, vb.>I don't think this is the same as censoring, although in some cases both terms might apply. Here's what Black's says about censor:<censor (sen-s<schwa>r), vb. To officially inspect (esp. a book or film) and delete material considered offensive.> At this point, I tried to tie the whole thing together: (12/22/04) this definition of "censor" takes us pretty far afield. the relevant sort of censoring in our context is removal of material because of its possible information value to outsiders (not because it is confidential to the source or because it is offensive). think censoring of wartime letters. it looks like "redact(ion)" started as a legal term with a specialized meaning (in particular, editing to remove references confidential to sources) and then extended its usage, still in legal contexts, to such editing done for other purposes; the word then encroaches considerably on "censor(ship)" in its restricting-information sense. And then today Bethany Dumas returned us to Mark's original data: (12/28/04) I recently received a lengthy legal document from a lawyer. A great deal of information had been removed from the document. The removal was accomplished in each instance by omitting a section of the document. For each instance of removal, this item appeared:[redacted] [Late-breaking ADS-L addition, 12/29/04: Doug Wilson observes that redact has shifted in the kind of direct objects it takes:] It seems to me that the most pronounced novelty in recent use of "redact" is being ignored to some degree. "Redact" historically means virtually exactly "edit" AFAIK. So if an editor alters a paper by deleting the entirety of its fourteenth paragraph it is conventional to say that the paper was edited, or that the paper was redacted. But I don't think it's conventional in such a case (until recently) to say that the fourteenth paragraph was redacted [or edited]; the fourteenth paragraph would conventionally be said to be deleted, removed, expunged, etc., even edited *out* ... but not just edited or redacted or altered (it's gone!). Nowadays one sees "redact" applied specifically to the deleted material itself, so that "redact" not only has become specialized to "edit by deletions" (and after all most editing is more by deletions than otherwise) but has drifted away to the extent that it has come to mean "delete entirely", which is generally not within the range of unadorned "edit" or of traditional "redact": "I edited/redacted your paper" would not traditionally be used for "I deleted your whole paper", and "I edited the fourteenth paragraph" would not be the way to express "I removed the fourteenth paragraph entirely". zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 11:41 PM
John Strausbaugh's story about the Modern Language Association meeting currently taking place in Philadelphia (here if you register with The New York Times) is aptly described by Arnold Zwicky as pissy and snarky. Strasbaugh would have you believe that the meeting is all loopy feminists and rampant queers clamoring to be more outrageous than each other. It isn't. I'm at the MLA too, reporting for Language Log (a news source you can trust, one that has not had to dismiss a reporter and two editors for running dozens of faked stories). Let me tell you a bit about the meeting. There are a staggering 774 separate events on the program. Yes, there is feminist research, and studies of gay literature, some serious, some less so. There are dull titles and provocative ones (abstracts are not published, so people try to create long and eye-catching titles; if you were trying to get your session noticed among 773 others, you would do the same). The question is whether you go looking for gaudy titles to make moronic jokes about or whether you have an interest in language and literature. If the latter, you can choose from a vast range of serious stuff. I chose a presentation by sociolinguist William Labov this morning. Strikingly original, gripping in its import, compelling in its presentation. Labov has found a spreading sound shift in inland Northern cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, but not Columbus or Indianapolis) stopped dead by a line where the prevailing ideology of Northern Yankees (anti death penalty; pro gun control) ceases to be a typical feature of local political opinion — a sharp and rather unexpected intrusion of ideology on the course of linguistic change. Labov is a giant of the field with a constantly progressing research program (he is reportedly 75, but looks about 50 and works like a man of 30, so this age statistic is not very useful). The session was worth the price of registration all on its own, in the opinion of this reporter. And I could be wrong, but I don't think I saw Strausbaugh in the session. He may have been off somewhere being pissy and snarky and trivial. Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 09:37 PM
Seth Kanter, author of Ordinary Wolves, on NPR's Morning Edition, 12/28/04: People are used to these stories of Alaska that are romantic and beautiful, and flowing wilderness, and here comes me with, y'know, an assault rifle and a jug of R&R. Note the bold accusative. And note that a nominative, as in here come I, just won't cut it. The English construction with fronted motional adverbial -- Along came Jones, There goes the neighborhood, Into the valley of death rode the four hundred -- has been studied for a long time. One of its little peculiarities is that along with front placement of the adverbial goes inversion of main verb and subject. Uninverted examples are possible but usually marked: Jones came along 'Jones arrived', There the neighborhood goes, Into the valley of death the four hundred rode. The preference for inversion is at least in part metrical: inversion yields an alternating accent pattern on constituents, with the main accent on the final constituent, which is focused. When the subject is a personal pronoun, however, the uninverted pattern is hugely preferred: Along he came, There it goes, Into the valley of death they rode. Again, the preference is at least in part metrical: personal pronouns are normally unaccented, so that the uninverted pattern has an alternating accent pattern on its constituents. With unaccented personal pronouns, the inverted pattern is unacceptable: *Along came hĕ, *There goes ĭt, *Into the valley of death rode thĕy. Now, you'd think that this could be easily fixed, just by putting an accent on the inverted personal pronoun. Accented it is generally iffy, so I'll put it aside, but even the other pronouns don't sound great: ??Along came hé, ??Into the valley of death rode théy. What to do, what to do? Especially if you want the pronoun in final, focus position. Well, this is where we came in, with the use of an accusative pronoun in the inverted construction: Here comes mé. Similarly, Along came hím, Into the valley of death rode thém. The third-person examples are much improved if the pronouns are clearly deictic rather than anaphoric; the first-person examples are already deictic, of course. An incidental point: once we have accusative subjects, the third-person singular verb form comes in here comes me is just what we'd expect. English verbs in finite clauses agree with nominative subjects, but default to third-person singular otherwise; this sort of defaulting is very well known in other languages, and can be seen elsewhere in English (either it's Poor me is going to suffer for this or you can't say it at all; but certainly *Poor me am going to suffer for this is just out, as, for that matter, is *Poor I am going to suffer for this). Ok, but what licenses accusative subjects? Putting aside some well-known complexities like coordinate subjects and also putting aside a slew of normative prescriptions, the basic rule for nominative/accusative choice in English is: nominative for subjects of finite clauses, accusative otherwise. This rule has to be understood literally: only subjects of finite clauses; things understood, or interpreted, as subjects of such clauses don't count. So free-standing pronouns are accusative, even when they're interpreted as subjects: Who did that? Me. On the other hand, the subjects of "present subjunctive" clauses, which are finite but nevertheless have base-form, rather than finite, verbs, are still nominative: I demand that she be chair This rule would, however, predict nominative case in the inverted motion examples, and agreeing (rather than default) verb forms would go along with that: *Here come I. Oops. (Notice the contrast between this inversion construction and the celebrated Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI), which always has nominative subjects (and they are accented): Kim would object, as would I, *Kim would object, as would me.) I can see two ways of describing what's going on here. One way is just to say that the inverted motion construction (or constructions) has accusative subjects. Accusative case is a stipulation, as it apparently is in the construction that poor me is an exemplar of. Stipulations happen, after all. Another way is to analyze the inverted motion construction as having two parts, in a kind of setup/payoff paratactic arrangement also seen in some other constructions: Here's the problem: the frammis and The issue is: the virus and even What bothers me (is): their passivity. That is, the inverted motion construction has two immediate constituents, a setup consisting of a motional adverbial followed by a motion verb, and a phrase serving as the payoff. So long as the payoff phrase is not actually a subject (even though it's interpreted as the subject), the basic case rule would predict accusative case. Yes, it's speculative, and it needs some filling out (just what is the grammatical function of the payoff?). But it's not entirely crazy. zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 06:01 PM
An indication of the salience of 津波 tsunami in Japanese life is the fact that one term for landslide is 山津波 yamatsunami "mountain tidal wave". Posted by Bill Poser at 12:34 AM
My favorite story about the Modern Language Association convention was in an article in the New York Times many years ago. I no longer have the citation, but I copied down the relevant bit: Posted on a convention announcement board is an agitated adolescent scrawl: Did your parents force you to come to MLA? Are you going stir-crazy, like me? Call if you are age 18 and just want someone normal to go sightseeing with!!Red-inked below, in a firm professorial hand: Watch punctuation. Vary sentence structure. Try not to end sentences in prepositions. Posted by Bill Poser at 12:13 AM
So goes the New York Times headline (p. B1, 12/27/04) for this year's pissy snarky story (by John Strausbaugh) on the Modern Language Association meetings. While admitting, "The convention has become a holiday ritual for journalists", the piece goes on to revel anyway in the wackiness of those "postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates", piling on astounding titles, especially the sexy ones, and summarizing things as follows: "The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop." (This is not a quotation; this is the journalist's own voice. It's not labeled as opinion, but, hey, this is a feature story, so I guess anything goes.) Concluding sentence, of a story with 24.25 column-inches of text: "And yes, many believe that the press is encouraging them [the freak show contingent of the MLA] by continuing to pay attention." I know, I know, the editor made him do it. (But I think that he secretly enjoyed it, and lord knows it's an easy story to write.) By the way, other papers picked up the story; the pared-down Palo Alto Daily News version ran (on page 1) under the nutty head "Language purists, rebels face off". zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 09:24 PM
Heard today on NPR, one for the "contingent fatalities" file: "Tsunami is a Japanese word for a good reason." Posted by Geoff Nunberg at 04:48 PM
James Fallows has an article in yesterday's NYT business section under the headline "At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday". He's talking about UIMA, which I've heard pronounced as "weema", and which stands for Unstructured Information Management. If you're interested in more, there's a whole issue recent issue of IBM Systems Journal, 43(3), entitled Unstructured Information Management:
Here's an IBM diagram that lays out what this is all supposed to do: On 12/16/2004, IBM posted to alphaWorks its Unstructured Information Management SDK ("Software Development Kit"), from whose User's Guide the previous picture came:
More specifically
Unfortunately, the downloadable stuff is just a development framework -- no interesting Analysis Engines or Annotators are supplied. IBM's framework would be more likely to be widely adopted, instead of various emerging (partial) alternatives, if at least a basic set of analysis methods (and procedures for training new ones) were provided. Another IBM banner recently raised is Autonomic Computing, featured in another recent issue of the IBM technical journal:
Posted by Mark Liberman at 02:48 PM
Tom Hundley of the Chicago Tribune reports some good news about Irish, a language that has long been giving way to English. Although Irish is a required subject in Irish schools and since 1922 has been the national language of Ireland, outside of the small area known as the Gaeltacht, whose population is only 83,000 (1991 census), few people actually used Irish in their daily lives. Even in the Gaeltacht over two-thirds of Irish speakers use the language less than once a week according to the Central Statistics Office. However, the number of people reporting themselves as Irish speakers rose 9.8% from 1.43 million to 1.57 million between 1996 and 2002, and over the last twenty years, the number of Irish-medium schools has increased tenfold. According to Padhraic O Ciarda, an executive at Irish-language television station TG4, over the past decade it has become cool to speak Irish. Irish has gone from being the language of the poor, rural, and backward, to being a symbol of the new, modern, prosperous Ireland. Indeed, here's a website promoting cultural tourism in the Gaeltacht. In addition to the usual sorts of tourist activity, they offer Irish language instruction. I've learned to be skeptical of reports of good news about endangered languages, but Irish may be recovering. Posted by Bill Poser at 12:14 AM
In my post on gingerly, I suggested that one curiosity of the adverbial use is people's reluctance to back-form an adjective ginger. Not so fast, emails Charles Belov, who reports that a Google search on ginger steps -- which of course I should have done myself before issuing my pronouncement -- turns up a number of instances of an adjectival use: In the Night Kitchen... marks Santen's first solo foray, taking a few ginger steps away from his longtime collaborative project Birddog. Since this use of ginger is considered obsolete by the OED, these instances suggest a re-invention via back-formation rather than a survival of the old word. And for these writers, gingerly is pretty clearly just a common-or-garden adverb formed in -ly. But the adjective is still relatively rare. A Nexis major papers search on "gingerly way," "gingerly fashion," or "gingerly manner" turns up 124 hits; a search on the same phrases with ginger turns up just one, from the Washington Post (2/15/1988): In a very ginger way on Iowa caucus night, just before a commercial, Rather told viewers, "Vice President Bush declined our request to be interviewed on this broadcast." It seems fair to conclude that for most people who use gingerly as an adverb, it has the distinction of being the only manner adverb formed in -ly (well, make that the only one I can think of) that isn't formed on an adjectival stem -- that is, unless you assume as I do that the word is really a haplologized version of gingerlily. Not a reason to condemn it out of hand, but I'm still going to give it a pass. Posted by Geoff Nunberg at 01:32 PM
According to an AP Newswire story on the recent midwest storm,
The American Heritage Dictionary says that half as an adverb means
So did trooper Meadows mean that drivers were scared to the extent of 50%? or that they were not completely or sufficently scared? We'd have to ask him, but my bet is that he meant to let us know that drivers were like, really scared. In support of this view, the same AP story mentions 5-foot snowdrifts, "more than 100 stranded travelers ... rescued from their snowbound vehicles", hundreds of abandoned cars, sections of interstate being closed, and so forth. There's another case of a modifer based on half used as an intensifier. The OED notes the use of not half to mean "extremely, violently" as well as "to a very slight extent":
I guess that "didn't half" became an intensifier by (partial?) conventionalization of ironic understatement. In the case of "about half", something else seems to be added to irony and/or modesty. Maybe there's a bit of uncertainty about whether the modified phrase is exactly the right way to put it, comparable to Muffy Siegel's analysis of like as "used to express a possible unspecified minor nonequivalence of what is said and what is meant". And the basic meaning "partly" is always still lurking defensively in the shadows, ready to be called forward when socially stigmatized characteristics are being confessed or attributed to others. In the Charlie Daniels song "Good Ole Boy", some negative self-evaluations are qualified with "little" and "about half"
even thought the verses make it clear that the singer is proud of having pretty well pegged the meter on wild, breezy, mean and lazy. Well, maybe you've got to refer to another song to get the details on lazy. And there I'd say that Daniels wants us to interpret layin'-around-in-the-shade as a sort of countrified appreciation of the Second Noble Truth:
In a 1977 novel by Dan Jenkins, "Semi-Tough", a couple of football players from Texas and their friends use semi as as a jokey substitute for colloquial half. The book was made into a semi-popular movie, which spread semi (used to mean "very") around for a while. This may remind you of an old controversy over another scalar predicate: if a poor performance is half-assed, is a good performance no-assed or full-assed? Posted by Mark Liberman at 09:50 AM
"It was a gingerly first step," The New York Times' Erik Ekholm and Eric Schmidt wrote on December 24, in a page one article about the return of some residents to Falluja (or "war-ravaged Falluja," to give the city its official name). The sentence caught my attention merely because it used gingerly in what I always assumed to be the correct way, as an adjective. That's so rare as to be newsworthy -- if you do a Nexis search of the previous 50 instances of gingerly in the Times, going back to July 1, 2004, you find it used an adverb every single time:
Maybe I should throw in the towel on this one, I thought, but then began to wonder whether there was ever actually a towel for me to be holding in the first place. In defense of the usage, gingerly began its life as an adverb. It was formed from the adjective ginger, "dainty or delicate," and the OED gives citations of its use as an adverb right up to the end of the 19th century -- the adjectival use appeared in the 16th century. And unlike most other adjectives in -ly, like friendly or portly, gingerly has an adverbial meaning, so that it can only apply to nominals denoting actions (like "step" in Ekholm and Schmidt's article); otherwise it requires a clumsy periphrasis like "in a gingerly way." Moreover, Merriam-Webster's exhaustive Dictionary of English Usage gives no indication that anybody has ever objected to the use of the word as an adverb. But the adjective ginger has been obsolete for a long time, and it's notable that nobody is tempted to back-form it anew, as in "his ginger handling of the question," which is what you'd expect if the adverbial gingerly were really analyzed as composed of the root ginger plus the derivational suffix -ly. What we seem to have here, rather, is a haplology (or "haplogy," as some linguists can't resist calling it), the process which gave us Latin nutrix in place of the predicted *nutritrix and which leads people to say missippi instead of mississippi. Gingerly is just the way the mental lexicon's gingerlyly comes out on the tongue or the page. That's natural enough, but there's something to be said for insisting that the word be used as an adjective, as one of the small obeisances we make to the capriciousness of grammar. So, kudos to Ekholm and Schmidt, one each. Posted by Geoff Nunberg at 03:32 PM
Thomas Shannon said that "[y]esterday was one of the worst days of my life". That's because the Bloomberg wire service reported that Shannon's bowling alley chain was partly owned by Yasir Arafat, or at least by "Palestine Commercial Services Co., a Ramallah, West Bank-based holding company" controlled by Arafat through his financial advisor Mohamed Rachid. The AP wire service story quotes Shannon as saying "We don't choose to be affiliated with any political-based organization, especially one that may or may not have ties to things we find absolutely abhorrent." There's an interesting point of interpretation here. What Shannon means, I guess, is that the question of whether the PA has ties to abhorrent things is a serious one, worth thinking about; or maybe he means to assert that such ties exist, while weakening the assertion so as to avoid offense or lawsuits. Weasel words like "may or may not [have property P]" are often used to flag uncertainty while still getting the idea out there. This is a perfect way to spread a rumor: "Madonna may or may not be pregnant". Logically, this phrase offers perfect deniability while transmitting no information whatever. That's because it's necessarily true, no matter what P is. At least, "it's possible that P or it's possible that not P" is a theorem in just about anything worth calling a modal logic (given the "law of the excluded middle", which says that "P or not P" is always true, and the fact that if P is true, then P is possible, at least for alethic modality). So strictly speaking, I myself may or may not have ties to things Mr. Shannon finds absolutely abhorrent, and so may you. Not only Madonna, but also Geoff Pullum may or may not be pregant. In order to conclude that these statements are literally true, we don't need to learn anything more about my ties, your ties, Mr. Shannon's moral sentiments, or Geoff Pullum's physiological state. There's a principle of relevance here. If you ask me why I don't trust X, and I say "well, I'm always uneasy about someone who may or may not be an embezzler", I'm communicating a fairly specific suspicion. Literally, it's true of every single one of us that we may or may not be an embezzler -- or drug dealer or a saint -- but the fact that I choose to raise the particular issue of embezzlement by X communicates something in and of itself. Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:57 AM
The stay/live thing that Geoff Pullum started has morphed into Bill Poser's allusion to "J'y suis, j'y reste" as uttered by the commander of the French forces in the Crimean War, and that's caused me to think of Martin Luther's famously recalcitrant "Hier stehe ich" at the Council of Worms. Now I'm trying to find out just what Luther said. No question that the man was as stubbornly unmoving as a hunk of granite, but there's some question about what words he used. Look, I had a Lutheran childhood, before I traded up to the Anglicans and then trucked on out of church affiliation entirely, and what I was taught as a kid was that Luther locked his legs, gritted his teeth, and defiantly intoned: "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders" 'Here I stand/stay, I cannot do otherwise' (or something like that in English). But when I check sources, some of them quote it this way and some of them have Luther saying "Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders" 'Here I stand/stay and cannot do otherwise' -- a small difference, one of stylistic choice, but not literally identical to the version I was taught. Everyone seems to agree that he went on to finish with the dramatically pious "Gott helfe mir, Amen". Lord knows what the man actually said. There were no council stenographers taking down the proceedings. What we have now is, apparently, recollections from years afterwards. You have to suspect that the text got polished up some in the intervening years. In any case, there's that stand/stay business with the German verb stehen. zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 09:44 PM
There's a widespread European superstition that at midnight on Christmas Eve, animals are able to speak in human voices. There are some heartwarming treatments of this story, in which the gift of speech is God's thanks to the animals in the manger in Bethlehem, and the animals use this gift to help humans. However, in most of the versions of the story, overhearing the animals' midnight speech is very bad luck. In some cases, the animals predict misfortune.
In these stories, occult knowledge is bad, and research beyond normal bounds creates not only unwelcome knowledge of misfortune, but also misfortune itself. A story by Saki, Bertie's Christmas Eve, takes a different route to a similar end. Listening for the miracle of animal speech brings misfortune, but this time it's because stereotypical properties are transferred across species in the opposite direction. Bertie, it seems, can be beastly. Posted by Mark Liberman at 08:55 AM
Another quick follow-up on Geoff's note regarding stay vs. live: I think stay is used instead of (or at least synonymously with) live in at least some varieties of English. While riding BART from Oakland to Concord once (maybe 10 years ago), a 40-something African American man and I struck up a conversation. At one point the man asked me, "Where do you stay?" (Maybe it was "Where you stay?" -- I was too struck by the use of stay to remember that detail.) "I live in Walnut Creek," I replied, with contrastive stress on live to emphasize that I wasn't just passing through. "What about you?" The man replied, with no particular emphasis, "I stay in Oakland." From the rest of our conversation, I gathered the man had lived in Oakland all his life. [ Comments? ] Posted by Eric Bakovic at 06:43 AM
Geoff's discussion of the usage of stay with an address as complement reminded me of a joke. During the Crimean War when General Patrice de MacMahon, the commander of the French forces, was asked by Lord Raglan, the commander of the British forces, whether he could hold Malakoff fortress, he gave the famous response: J'y suis, j'y reste."Here I am; here I stay." (The story is told in more detail here.) The joke is the mistranslation: I'm Swiss and I'm spending the night.This is probably the only funny thing about the Crimean War. Posted by Bill Poser at 01:41 AM
As I noted here recently, advice givers often view slang as a threat to their languages. And again and again they finger another class of innovations as an agent of decay and decline: borrowings, especially from languages that they view as culturally intrusive (or invasive, or imperialistic, as the case might be). Case in point: official French hostility to English borrowings since World War II. Sometimes the two types of threatening innovations come in a single package. That most dangerous of creatures, the street-speech borrowing. Luis Casillas has sent me a particularly nice example of panicked response to such borrowings: Spanglish, the composite language of Spanish and English that has crossed over from the street to Hispanic talk shows and advertising campaigns, poses a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America. Those who condone and even promote it as a harmless commingling do not realize that this is hardly a relationship based on equality. Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English. ["Is 'Spanglish' a Language", Roberto González Echevarría; New York Times, March 28, 1997; http://members.aol.com/gleposky/spanglish.htm] Casillas comments: The nice thing about that quote is that the "threat" theme is developed in a more concrete manner than it often is, because the use of "invasion" casts it in nationalistic terms, which makes the cultural issue at stake quite clear. Further down:If, as with so many of the trends of American Hispanics, Spanglish were to spread to Latin America, it would constitute the ultimate imperialistic takeover, the final imposition of a way of life that is economically dominant but not culturally superior in any sense. zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 12:30 AM
In conversation last night my friend Jatin described an area in Philadelphia as "near where Professor Katz stays." I pointed out that he had apparently used the wrong verb: English does not use stay that way. The apartment in which Professor Katz lives cannot be referred to as the place where he stays. (Linguists are allowed to make this kind of remark about syntax and semantics whenever they like. Don't worry, it's not rude. It's like when you're watching birds with an ornithologist.) Jatin agreed with me immediately about the semantics: he knew how live and stay are used, but had made the slip anyway (it's an extremely common lexical error among non-native speakers of English). But it then struck me as we talked about it that the situation with this verb is very strange. The root meaning of stay is something like "remain". But you can only say you are staying at an address if you are not going to remain. If you are going to remain there for the indefinite future, so it's your actual domicile, you can say you plan to live there. To say that you're going to be there for a fixed period but it won't become your regular domicile, you would say that you'll be staying there. You're only staying if you're not staying. (This is the Standard English usage I'm describing, of course. Both Susannah Kirby and Eric Bakovic have pointed out that there are African American Vernacular varieties of English in which stay does mean "permanently reside", and at least three people have pointed out that the same is true of Scottish English.) Curiously, the actual case at hand turned out to be a problematic one that hadn't occurred to me. The Professor Katz involved was Elihu Katz. It turns out that he currently spends exactly six months of the year in Israel and six months in Philadelphia, so it is completely unclear which place should be regarded as his permanent domicile (doubtless, his home is where is heart is). So that would be the one case in which it would be unclear whether to say he stays there or that he lives there. Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 05:51 PM
The briefest of footnotes to Mark Liberman's observation that Geoff Nunberg's example "page-burner" is not just a common, or garden, malaprop, but an idiom blend: Surely the current hot number in the world of blends involving noun-noun compounds is "X BE NOT rocket surgery", as in "Look, sentence diagramming isn't rocket surgery". A few thousand Google web hits. It's a bit more complicated than "page-burner", since the contributing compounds, "rocket science" and "brain surgery", are not themselves idioms (while "page-turner" and "barn-burner" are). Nevertheless, formulaic expressions figure in "rocket surgery" examples, since what's blended are the clichés "X BE NOT rocket science" and "X BE NOT brain surgery", both conveying 'X really isn't difficult'. zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 12:40 PM
Mark's discussion of Kemosabe jokes raises an interesting point. If one doesn't know the background and takes the jokes literally, they seem to support the notion that Kemosabe is offensive. But the very basis for the humor is the fact that one starts off with the assumption that Kemosabe is not offensive; the punchline is the (false) discovery that it is offensive after all. Posted by Bill Poser at 11:38 AM
The Lone Ranger was on the radio every week when I was a kid. The cry "A cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!'" rang out often on the playground. And in third grade, I remember a rash of jokes about what kemosabe really means. The gloss in the punchline was never respectful or even friendly, so I sympathize with the notion that the term can be an offensive one. In response to a Reuters story about the same Nova Scotia court case that Bill Poser discussed earlier today, a site called "The Jokester" has recently posted several Lone Ranger jokes. They are all suitably bad, but none offers a hypothesis about the meaning of kemosabe. My favorite Lone Ranger joke, back in third grade, was this one (also lacking a gloss for kemosabe). I think that others must have agreed, because its punch line "what do you mean 'we', white man?" seems to have become a proverbial tag line. Gary Larsen immortalized the genre of kemosabe jokes with a Far Side cartoon in which kemosabe turns out to be "an Apache expression for a horse's rear end." And a few of the other "meaning of kemosabe" jokes that I remember from third grade are still rattling around the internets, for example here. Posted by Mark Liberman at 09:44 AM
According to this CBC News article, the Supreme Court of Canada is being asked to decide on a complaint originally submitted to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission in 1999. Dorothy Kateri Moore, a Mi'kmaq woman working at a sports store in Sydney, N.S., had complained that her boss, Trevor Miller, referred to her and other workers as "kemosabe" – the term used by the 1950s TV character Tonto, the Lone Ranger's sidekick, to describe the masked cowboy. Moore said Miller told her the word meant "friend." But she claimed it was a racial slur and that its repeated use led to a poisoned work environment.The Human Rights Commission and the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal have taken the position that kemosabe is not a slur and that Ms. Moore had no basis for complaint. If the criterion is how the term is used by most people, it is pretty clear that they are right. The idea that the term is offensive is new to me. Tonto, the Indian, would hardly have used a pejorative term for Indian to refer to the Lone Ranger, his white partner. Nor is there any hint in the show that Tonto means the term in any way that is disrespectful. If anyone was slurring anybody in The Lone Ranger, it was the other way around: in Spanish tonto means "silly, foolish". Nobody seems to know for certain what, if anything, Kemosabe was intended to mean. There's a good review of the possibilities that have been suggested here. It isn't offensive on any of the plausible suggestions. Both the script writer and the director thought that it meant "trusty scout". Some people will argue that it doesn't matter whether a word is generally considered offensive or if the speaker intended it to be offensive: so long as the person hearing it was offended, that makes it offensive. The problem with this approach is that you never know what will bother someone so a speaker is always at risk of being accused of harassment. Even if culpability is limited to persistent use of the offending word after learning that it is offensive, problems remain. For instance, when dealing with a single individual it is possible to cater to his or her preferences, but what happens when one speaks to a group? A case in point is how to refer to black people. Everyone agrees that nigger and coon are offensive, but there is no such consensus about the terms black, African-American, Afro-American, and Negro. Many people have strong preferences, but in the absence of a consensus, there is no choice of terms that will please everyone. As far as I know, no satisfactory analysis of this question exists. That's probably a good reason for courts and human rights commissions to stay away from all but the clearest and most egregious cases. Posted by Bill Poser at 02:10 AM
Yesterday's NYT had an article by Andrew Revkin about "a solitary whale, species unknown, that has been tracked since 1992 in the North Pacific by a classified array of hydrophones used by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines". Apparently experts are convinced that the sounds are made by a whale, but the pattern is different from that of any known species, and tracking information indicates that there is only one individual calling out this way. The article indicates that the "most likely" explanation is that the whale is "a hybrid of a blue whale and another species". You can hear the "52 Hz 'whale-like' signals" for yourself at the Vents Program Acoustic Monitoring site. The idea that a hybrid whales should sing hybrid songs may surprise some people, though it shouldn't. We don't really know why hybrid animals show a mixture of complex physical characteristics inherited from their parents, and it's no harder in principle to explain how a hybrid animal might show a mixture of complex behavioral characteristics such as species-specific vocalizations. And in the specific case of hybrid vocalizations, there's a well-documented precedent: gibbons. Gibbons are arboreal apes who live in the tropical rain forests of southeast Asia. There are 12 species in four subgenera, and the subgenera are apparently more different from one another genetically than humans are from chimps. Here's the "family tree" showing the relationship of gibbons to us and the other primates. The gibbons are the Hylobatidae. Gibbons travel mainly by swinging through the treetops ("brachiation"). Like 90% of bird species but only 3% of mammal species, they're monogamous, pair-bonded animals. According to a discussion of gibbon singing at Thomas Geissman's Gibbon Research Lab:
Among the apes, only gibbons and (ambiguously) humans have pair bonding. Also, only gibbons and humans sing. According to Charles Darwin's theory that human language developed from love songs, this is not a coincidence. Apparently, gibbon duetting is initiated and dominated by the female's contributions:
Guy gibbons are by nature laconic, but open up a bit as a duet proceeds:
Gibbon species are (sometimes?) able to cross-breed, and often do so in zoos. The hybrid gibbon offspring produce hybrid songs, which are a predictable amalgam of the songs of the parents' species. The picture below shows six sound spectrograms, top to bottom. Each spectrogram shows time on the x axis (for twenty seconds), and frequency (here equal to perceived pitch height) on the y axis. The topmost spectrogram (a) is a typical female "great call" of the white-handed gibbon, Hylobates lar. The bottom spectrogram (f) is a typical female "great call" of the gray gibbon, Hyobates muelleri. The intevening spectrograms are hybrid great calls from hybrid female gibbons, (b) and (c) from H. Muelleri x H. Lar crosses, and (d) and (e) from H. Lar x H. Muelleri crosses. The two versions of each type of hybrid call were produced by unrelated hybrid gibbons at different zoos: You can learn more by reading the paper from which I took this illustration (Thomas Geissmann, "Gibbon Songs and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective", fig. 6), and you can listen to many sound samples at Thomas Geissmann's site. Is there any analogy to human language here? If so, it must be a very abstract one, because there do not seem to be any connections at all between human genetic differences and human linguistic differences. Posted by Mark Liberman at 10:47 AM
Advice about English usage -- don't use X; use Y instead -- is often couched in terms of the threat to the language presented by X. The threatening Xs are usually innovative, non-standard, or informal in style, so slang (which is informal, and might also be innovative or non-standard or both) is especially likely to be seen as the ruination of English. We're used to hearing such cries of panic from people who make some kind of living out of giving advice about English usage. But, probably as a result of the advice-givers' alarms, ordinary people express concern too. Now it turns out that this concern has spread around the world, as far as Vietnam, or so it would appear from the January 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine, in which a column ("Good Question, Vietnam", p. 26) offers selected "questions submitted by Vietnamese people to the U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation for its 'FAQ About America' project." Remarkably, the threat of slang finds its way into the list. The questions cover some basic information ("How many people in the U.S.A. like to drink Coke?" and "What is Hollywood?"), cultural matters ("When did your culture form?" and "Why do many Americans like to be single nowadays?"), and many political issues ("Why are American presidents so bellicose?" -- by the way, I assume the questions are translated from Vietnamese into English -- and ""What do Americans think about Communists?"). And, in question 14 of the 20 listed, a touching concern for our language: Do you think using an excessive amount of slang will gradually destroy the beauty of the English language? Note the suggestion that English speakers use an excessive amount of slang. Where might some Vietnamese have picked up that idea? zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu Posted by Arnold Zwicky at 02:40 AM
The documents that the ACLU's FOIA suit brought out on Monday, discussed in a NYT article today by Neil Lewis and David Johnson, are full of sections that have been omitted for national security (or in some cases perhaps privacy?) reasons:
I suppose that the documents were supplied in paper form, with the omitted sections blacked out. At least, that's what been shown in past facsimiles of similarly released documents. But in the version on the web site, the missing stuff is replaced by all-caps REDACTED, as in the paragraph above. This has become standard usage, I think. However, oddly enough, dictionaries don't seem to recognize this usage in any specific way. The American Heritage says that redact means
Merriam-Webster's 3rd Unabridged has
The Oxford English Dictionary gives two senses "in modern use":
These various glosses are not inconsistent with the usage to mean DELETED ON PURPOSE, but they don't give the reader any reason to expect that redacted would be used in such cases, as opposed to (say) edited or deleted or removed. Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:38 PM
From an 12/21/2004 NYT article by Cordelia Dean on heat-tolerant algae in coral reefs:
Whammy started life as a noun meaning "an evil influence or hex", apparently derived from wham "blow". The OED's earliest citation for whammy is about baseball:
and the second one is this from Al Capp's Li'l Abner in July of 1951:
Evil-Eye Fleegle seems to have been the source of most Americans' experience of whammies, and especially quantified whammies. Apparently he later advanced to the quadruple whammy, which "could melt a battleship but almost kill Fleegle himself", though it's not clear to me what the anatomical correlates were for whammies above order 2. There's clearly been some whammy inflation since 1951, since the double whammy has become by far the commonest whammy, according to Google:
The verbal form used in the NYT quote ("if we triple and quadruple whammy these reefs") doesn't make it into any of the dictionaries that I've checked, but it's definitely out there:
Some of these uses are little strange -- "as one of their reps once double whammied"? -- but for the most part, you can read past them without even noticing. That's certainly the case for the phrase "if we triple and quadruple whammy these reefs" in the cited NYT article. It's interesting how different faith is in this regard. Verbal uses of faith remain quite striking, at least to me. Posted by Mark Liberman at 09:27 AM
Neal Whitman at Literal Minded points out that "page-burner" is not a typical old-fashioned malapropism, since it doesn't involve simple subsitution of one word for another. Instead, there's a sort of exchange of parts between two similar phrases, "barn burner" and "page turner", where "A B-er" and "C D-er" are hybridized to form "C B-er" (and perhaps "A D-er"). This exchange process has been studied experimentally by J. Cooper Cutting and Kay Bock, who used the naturally evocative term idiom blend rather than malapropism in referring to it: "That's the way the cookie bounces: syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blends", Mem Cognit. 1997 Jan;25(1):57-71. Neal cites a 1/2004 post by Justin Busch at Semantic Compositions, asking for the right terminology for similar cases, and (independently of Cutting and Bock) Neal suggests the term idiom blending. Here's the Cutting & Bock abstract:
Here's a reference that explains what they mean by decomposable vs. non-decomposable. I suspect that their use of the term "blend" derives from what Dwight Bolinger called syntactic blends (Syntactic Blends and Other Matters," Language, 37 (1961), 366-381), though Bolinger doesn't discuss idiom blends as such in the cited article. I dimly recall that he has written about idiom blending in some other place, but a brief search didn't find it, and I might be wrong. Other relevant examples can be found in the list of Farberisms on the Icon site, many of which are idiom blends ("he flipped his cork", "that's a different cup of fish"), while others are just malaprops ("this report reads like a bleached whale", "he's as ugly as godzilla the hun"), or other sorts of modifications of fixed expressions ("let's solve two problems with one bird"). Unfortunately, Memory and Cognition is not yet available on line before 2001. Posted by Mark Liberman at 07:09 PM
There's been a lot of discussion about the recent decision by a WIPO arbitration panel to deny Microsoft's claim to the domain name mocosoft.com. The MSM articles that I've seen (such as this one in The Register) focus on the difference in sound between micro and moco, but there's a much greater gap in meaning. Is this a fight that Microsoft really should have wanted to win? Trevor at kalebeul has a relevant song, with a midi file so that you can sing along. Posted by Mark Liberman at 09:05 AM
In the commentary on today's Partially Clips, Rob Balder writes:
No fear -- we'll even warn you if Lynn Truss is on the prowl! Reading Rob's comment, I realized something about my own speech: I think that I've lexicalized cause of as a preposition, with a different pattern of usage from because of. If that's true, then perhaps the apostrophe should be omitted for linguistic rather than graphic design reasons, at least some of the time. I have the expected pattern with clauses after because and noun phrases after because of, and not vice versa:
But for me, 'cause of works like since or after, introducing either a clause or a noun phrase:
(This is in informal speech, of course). Google confirms one end of this -- the use of 'cause of as a clause-introducer (examples found by searching for "cause of I"):
Unfortunately for my theory, similar examples are common with because of:
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't recognize the (be)cause of SENTENCE construction, but it gives both spellings cause and 'cause, and indicates that the apostrophe is a sort of new-fangled fashion in this case:
Posted by Mark Liberman at 11:43 PM
Take a look at the complexity of this sentence from an article in The New Yorker (11/22/04, p. 62 of the print edition):
That's a preposed direct quote ("We are world champions at lawmaking") followed by the rest of a clause headed by the verb tell (Christine Ockrent told me ___). The clause has an additional adjunct at the end a few days after the law was signed): a preposition phrase headed by after, containing a pre-head measure adjunct noun phrase (a few days) and a post-head passive clause complement (the law was signed). Attached to the subject of the tell clause (Christine Ockrent) is a supplementary relative clause (beginning who has...), and the predicate in that clause is a three-part coordination of past-participialverb phrases, the three head verbs being anchored, run, and seen. Within the third of the coordinate verb phrases is another supplement (supplements used to be called ‘parentheticals’), an as-phrase with clause complement (as she says). And the third of the three coordinate verb phrases is itself a direct quote, semantically within the scope of the verb say. Just 37 words (counting L'Express as one, since this is English), but enough complexity to keep a syntactician busy for a quiet hour or two. I'm not entirely sure I could justify a complete structure for this sentence at all; it would certainly take half an hour to explain all the details. It is a mystery to me how we are able to read such sentences and understand them. Yet I doubt that any other reader of The New Yorker (other than perhaps Chris Potts) even noticed the sentence. Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 02:27 PM
It's always a little disappointing to have to say that I agree with Geoff P., not because he isn't much more often right than wrong (or for that matter than I am), but because the linguistic discourse is invariably more engaging when people leave a scrap of red meat outside his office door and quickly move out of the way. But Geoff and Mark are right to say that there's a difference between saying, say, "relationship is a verb" to suggest metaphorically that a relationships require constant work and saying "baptism is a verb" under the belief that verbs are "words that denote things that happen or are done," as Geoff puts it. Not that it isn't prescriptivism to condemn such usages, but it's prescriptivism of an entirely appropriate kind, the same way it's appropriate for economists to get on the case of conservatives who say that social security will become "insolvent" in 2019, the year the program begins to run a deficit. Linguists own the word verb; others are only borrowing it. And while there's no easy way to know how often statements like "Baptism is a verb" are offered in a spirit of figuration rather than out of ignorance, it's clear that these metagrammatical howlers often testify to a deplorable level of general linguistic knowledge, which can sometimes cause real mischief in the world. In a piece I wrote a few years ago for American Lawyer, I mentioned a decision by a Florida district court in a patent infringement case that turned crucially on the claim that the decoder key to a cable TV subscriber box was "not subject to revision or change." The court concluded that subject was used in the claim "as a verb (in the passive tense)," and identified the relevant dictionary sense as "to cause to undergo," as in "He wouldn't subject himself to any inconvenience." And on that basis, the court ruled that "not subject to change" meant that the decoder key could be changed but would not be changed. (See TV/COM International v. MediaOne of Greater Florida, No. 3:00-cv-1045-J-21HTS (M.D. Fla. Aug. 1, 2001)). Judicial incompetence doesn't come much grosser than that: it's fair to say that someone who doesn't know how to read a dictionary entry has no business adjudicating cases that call for interpretation of language -- which is to say, damn near all of them. But courts are full of judges who have no more knowledge of grammar and meaning than the half-remembered dicta they learned at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. Let's by all means continue to flog these things, even at the risk of sounding like pedants. Posted by Geoff Nunberg at 02:18 PM
Readers will have noted that a battle has broken out among the normally collegial Language Log staff. I found Liberman and Nunberg the other day just about ready to dash glasses of chardonnay in each other's faces. Cries of "Scoundrel!" and "Nay, sir!" echoed down the hall in the gleaming office block we all recently moved into, Language Log Plaza in downtown Philadelphia. I had to pull them apart; they were frightening the secretaries. Basically Liberman is saying that the Christians who claim faith is a verb are utterly and preposterously wrong, and Nunberg in reply comes pretty close to calling Liberman a prescriptivist (them's fightin' words) for not just accepting their cliché as an honest piece of vernacular usage. Here's my take on the dispute about whether we should criticize such people (and Nunberg is right that there are a lot of them out there). Let me begin by speaking in terms of a parable. There would be two possible criticisms of someone who claims that (for example) seeing is believing. To claim that they were using the language incorrectly, since is implies identity and the denotations of see and believe are in fact distinct, would be ludicrous prescriptivism of the worst kind. People have the right to use a familiar idiom with the interpretation they place on it (in this case, the intention is to express something like the claim that in ordinary situations one's visual apparatus supplies information that translates directly, effortlessly, and reliably into belief formation). But suppose a philosophical view was starting to gain ground to the effect that there was in fact no difference between sensory perception and belief: that seeing something and believing it were literally the same thing, as a matter of metaphysics. That (or so I would claim) would be an insane metaphysical view; speaking up against it would be one's moral duty as an intellectual. Everything turns on whether people really do think they are making claims about language use — whether a kind of folk linguistics has arisen that makes the gross error of equating nouns with things and verbs with actions. You can look at the cases Nunberg specifically points to and make up your own mind. But I think there are signs of people really being confused about the difference between a noun and the thing it purportedly names, between a verb and the action it purportedly names, and so on. In a world where people cannot tell active from passive clauses even where it is important to their argument, I think one could be forgiven for worrying that people really are blundering on elementary linguistic concepts. You be the judge. Here is another quote from Bible Food for Hungry Christians:
Here technical issues of translation from Greek are mentioned, and the suggestion is made that a word denoting the act of baptism must be a verb in English. I see real conceptual chaos here: I get a real sense that the writer doesn't understand that baptism in English is never a verb lexeme, regardless of whether it denotes something that God does or the doctrines concerning what God does. I think it is reasonable to worry that people are not just using a familiar cliché when they say this sort of thing, they are spreading a myth (that verbs in English can be identified by determining whether or not they denotes things that happen or are done — a hopeless view of how to diagnose verbhood), and amplifying the confusions that have evolved out of it. Pointing out the extreme degree to which even the educated public in the USA tends to be ignorant of even elementary technical facts about phonology and grammar and semantics is precisely what Language Log is all about (in its rare serious moments in between discussions of dude and critiques of Dan Brown's writing style and collecting of eggcorns and the other things we do for the sheer unadulterated fun of messing around with linguistic material). It is our métier; it our raison d'être; it's what the enormous endowment of the Language Log Foundation is devoted to, the reason we pay nearly $17 a year to rent the domain names that bring this great enterprise to you the public, the reason for our annual pledge drives. Language Log contributors are almost uniformly of the opinion that judgments about what is a linguistic error have to be based on inference from actual evidence about linguistic behavior. What distinguishes prescriptivists from typical professional linguists is the utter contempt prescriptivists show for that principle. But that doesn't mean that Language Log has no business critiquing gross abuse of elementary linguistic terms. Faith and baptism are essentially never verbs (except insofar as you can sort of use almost any word as a nonce verb if you push it in the way that Mark alludes to: to add to his examples, you can Photoshop a picture, you can Toyota around, you can Tabasco your sushi up a bit if you want it spicier). And terror is indeed a noun (Jon Stewart is wrong); and London is not an adjective in London fog; and so on. These points are important. For Language Log, they are of the essence. We can't just say "Oh, people just talk that way" and leave it at that. So I'm with Liberman on this one. Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 10:29 PM
A column by Ailee Slater, in the Oregon Daily Emerald of 12/6/2004, presents a striking argument against the method of grading now used in our educational system:
Comments from various perspectives have been echoing around the blogosphere ( here , here, here, here, here, here, here, among others). My favorite, though, is this Partially Clips cartoon, created independently of Ms. Slater's essay: What seems to bother my colleagues most about Ms. Slater's column is the analogy between teaching college courses and cleaning toilets. But she isn't the first to see knowledge as the result of cleansing:
However, Blake failed to specify any technique for evaluating the degree of cleanliness of the doors of perception. Nor did he specify who should be responsible for the evaluation. His main prescription for educational advancement is clear, though, and must work to some extent, since it has been followed by students since the first universities were established about a thousand years ago. I like the idea of a system in which there is only one formal grade -- call it "success" -- but students vary in how long it takes them to get it. For scheduling reasons, this is completely impractical in most settings, but it's essentially how the post-graduate system works. We don't formally evaluate the relative quality of PhDs -- you either get one, or you don't. Evaluation, comparative or otherwise, is informal, and works in both directions. Institutions and individual faculty are evaluated in terms of the quality of the students they turn out, just as new PhDs are evaluated in the job market in terms of the perceived qualities of their dissertation research and its presentation. [Cartoon reference due to Geoff Pullum] Posted by Mark Liberman at 10:00 PM
We've previously mentioned Microsoft's rather expansive notions of phonetic similarity, such as their claim that lindash will be confused with windows. They've just had a setback. An arbitration panel has denied Microsoft's demand that Mocosoft, a Spanish company, hand over the domain names mocosoft.com and mocosoftx.com on the grounds that Mocosoft sounds so much like Microsoft that people are likely to be confused. Posted by Bill Poser at 09:40 PM
The idea that faith is a verb starts as a metaphorical turn of phrase, as Geoff Nunberg suggests, though a few folks take it literally:
A larger number don't fully understand the metaphor, I suspect, and just think of it as a way to express their belief that faith is an action or process rather than a static condition. However, in looking around the web, I noticed many examples that embody in linguistic form the idea of faith as a process, without involving verbal forms at all. A page on Faith Development has four of these:
The trick here is that -ing can be used to make process nouns out of verbs, but it also often is used to make process nouns out of nouns. The OED explains that the original function of -ing1 is a
Thus pinting is a noun for a process associated with pints (i.e. drinking them in company), not a noun derived from some hypothetical verb to pint; likewise faithing seems generally to be a noun for a process associated with faith, not really a noun formed from the possible verb to faith. As evidence for this analysis, I'll note that the cited page on "Faith Development" includes 64 instances of faith used as as a noun, along with 4 instances of faithing used as a noun, and no instances of faithing as a verbal participle or faith as a verb. Similarly, the great majority of examples of faithing on the web seem to be process nouns of this same kind. The OED goes on to explain:
Faith as "process, practice, habit or art" is the notion that the theorists of "faithing" are aiming for, rather than what the OED describes as
In any case, the grammatical category of verb need not be involved in faithing. Nor is there necessarily any verbal faith in faithed -- as the OED explains, -ed has a long tradition of being added to nouns to mean "possessing, provided with, characterized by (something)":
Although such derivations have been normal since Beowulf, there was a brief attempt in the 18th and 19th centuries to ban them:
I like the idea of calling talented a "vile and barbarous vocable". I wonder why this bit of ignorant grammatical pontificating never caught on, while the equally ill-founded prescription against splitting infinitives did? [Update 12/21/2004: John Cowan emails
Ours is a rather serious and academic household, Barbara's and mine, with interests in language, linguistics, and philosophy. It isn't all that often that one will find Barbara and me lying on the floor laughing till the tears roll down our cheeks. At least, not from reading about lexical differences between Biblical and Modern Hebrew in The New York Review of Books. But Amos Elon recently had us in this unusual state. Don't read on, though, if you are easily offended, or if doctors have specifically warned you against falling on the floor laughing. When writer Amos Oz was a 12-year-old boy, we are told in Elon's review (NYRB 12/16/04, 22-24), he once sat with his father and his grandfather, along with other right-wing Israelis, in the front row at an event where a speech was given by Menachem Begin. Like most right-wing politicians of the time, Begin spoke a rather classical Hebrew, reminiscent of the Bible, not of the street. The front three rows were mainly intellectuals, but the people behind them, the great majority of the audience, were working-class immigrants to Israel from Middle Eastern countries, and they spoke the colloquial "street" Hebrew of the Jerusalem area. Now, it turns out that in biblical Hebrew, though not in the Jerusalem vernacular, the same word was used at the time for "weapon" and the male sexual organ. And in the vernacular, though not in Biblical Hebrew, the verb "to arm" (to slip someone your weapon, as it were) had acquired a new meaning: it was used to mean "to fuck". Says Elon: "Sharepoint" back in 2002 or so, which doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. I spent a few minutes poking around on http://spaces.msn.com and didn't find a lot that seems inspiring. Some people will be excited by the ability to "upload photos from your mobile phone to your blog" and "create and manage your space from a mobile phone"; but moblogging is an idea that's been in the air for a year and a half or so, in a variety of forms. Most of the linked-to blogs on MSN Spaces so far seem to be "let's see what this is like" experiments, many of them from people who are obviously already experts. But we'll see what happens. |
The example of the word kemosabe was used to illustrate
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