Ballsy euphemisms

We, as a culture, are rich in euphemistic variations on the theme of balls in the meaning 'courage, guts', etc. Cajones seems, for instance, to be widely accepted and used. And we get a kind of euphemistic ellipsis pretty often, like in the usually sarcastic: "Must be hard to walk" [with balls that big.] A common part of that these days (no idea on the age of it) is variants on to grow some balls, etc. Last night's Daily Show, in fact, had a good example, graphically illustrated. See here.

In the context of increasing Democratic, oh let's say, "resolve", Ed Schultz today talked about somebody having "the ping-pong balls in his shorts" to get a job done. He later made a remark about ordering some ping-pong balls to be delivered to a particular US senator. I just caught that much, but it sounded like he might be starting a campaign to mail ping-pong balls to Democratic lawmakers.

Teh Holiez Bibul

The Summer Institute of Linguistics ("SIL International") is notorious or famous for its efforts to translate the Christian bible into every language on earth.

H3y, $1L d00dz, u haz m1$$t 0|\|3!

Google the string "teh holiez bibul" and you get zero g-hits (as of this moment, at least), just that old message:

• No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
• Your search - Teh Holiez Bibul - did not match any documents.

Be sure all ur werdz iz spell'd korrekt, yeah yeah yeah. But the Lolcats Bible Translation Project has its own wiki. Click on the image to see the first page in full size, for easy reading. This whole deal is brilliant, just brilliant.

Hat tip to Ben F — I t0ta11y ow3z u a br3w.

Colbert: "I say we carpet bomb the University of Wisconsin"

You read it here first.

Colbert was talking about stories of giant badgers roaming Basra (in southern Iraq). Bombing UW was just to be safe.

For our international readers: The University of Wisconsin sports teams are called the 'Badgers' and our mascot (yeah, I know, a whole nother world) is 'Bucky Badger', pictured here.

Why do you hate us, Stephen, why?

Update, 6:20 am: Looks like Colbert barely skimmed the cream on the real story —see this.

Proto-World in the Press! (Again)

Wow, with the Weekly World News abandoning the newsstand and going to on-line only, I was starting to fear we might suffer a reduction in the truly insane coverage of language issues in the print media. But this is America, and you know that somebody will step up. Today, it was USA Today, with an article picked up from the Christian Science Monitor (here) called:

Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one.

I thought the whole Proto-World thing had returned to dark corners. Details will follow, time permitting, tomorrow.

What do they know and how do they know it?

OK, this probably isn't going anywhere (and it's generally not nearly as serious as this issue), but it's been driving me crazy in some recent reading and I have to get it off my chest.

How can we get more basic clarity on the epistemological status of claims we read in scholarly journals? On what basis and how securely to do we know something we assert in a publication? Is it received wisdom, vague suspicion, well-documented pattern that fits a broad set of facts, etc.? Much of the peer-review process seems aimed to ferreting out fudging on this front, but I see constantly when and where it hasn't worked, especially in theoretical linguistics.

This was brought to the fore by a TPM post by Josh Marshall this morning, with this passage (the quote at the beginning is from an NYT editorial):

"Unwilling to accept [DOJ's refusal to reauthorize the program], Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping."

The folks at TPMmuckraker are the ones really following this story closely. So perhaps this is a detail that has eluded me. But I was not aware that it had ever been established that Vice President Cheney ordered the visit. Speculated, rumored, sure. But I wasn't aware this had been established at all.

And yet the Times states it rather offhandedly as a fact. So what do they know?

Editorials like these are sometimes a venue where facts are stuck in which are 'known' to be true but which cannot be sourced cleanly or clearly enough to make it onto the news pages. Is that what's up here?

Good questions, right?

His The Big Picture column

In a piece called "New Life on the Web for a Killed Newspaper Column", the NYT today opens with a quote:

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.”

I hear things like this occasionally, where a title beginning with a determiner get inserted into noun phrases beginning with a possessive pronoun. With intonation as a cue it doesn't sound bad, but the construction strikes me as odd. In print, it just doesn't work for me. If you search for the exact string "his the", you see tons of examples, many from scholarly and other high-brow sources, exactly of this type. I have to drop the article in such cases, probably as part of the broader pattern of not treating articles as core parts of titles:

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues …
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues …
*In his The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues …

Do other people find the third sentence odd, or even ungrammatical,* or is this a case where I've internalized an overly analytical view of things?

*Keeping in mind that soliciting comments on this blog kills all comments.

Patti Smith on Elizabethian lyric

Just heard Patti Smith doing a radio interview (she's coming to Madison soon) and she was praising a lyric (no idea what — I came in after the antecedent was established) this way:

The lyrics are so beautiful they're almost Elizabethian.

If you don't know her as a heart-attack serious poet, only as a 'punk singer', the whole content may surprise you. But two other angles got me. First, I'm somewhat surprised that she thinks of Elizabethan as the standard of lyric beauty. Second, the adjectival form made me jump: Why not just Elizabethan? Probably a performance error, although her form gets a fair number of g-hits.

McKean on Corpus: Somewhere, pigs must be flying

Yesterday, after posting on yet another depressing topic, I was hoping that the next piece of material I would stumble across might be something positive. The Sunday NYT can provide such every so often, though even thinking of that triggers thoughts of "On Language", where the odds of finding anything positive to talk about have been precisely nil to date.

Unfreakinbelievably, though, today's column provides tasty substance. Of all people, after the collection of clowns and goons they've had, Erin McKean is sitting in this week. She's part of the young superstar lexicography crew that includes Ben Zimmer, Jesse Sheidlower and others. A guest column by somebody who actually knows about words? I got dizzy. But it gets better: "Corpus: Exploring what words really mean" lays out neatly and cleanly how searchable electronic corpora ('corpuses' if you're young enough?) serve as 'microscopes' allowing us to see things about language you'd never catch with the naked eye.

Using the Oxford English Corpus, McKean starts from the surprising finding that the good old spork (see image above) is used in connection with violence a quarter of the time. Of course, it's almost always humorous violence.

I had just enough time this morning to run some numbers through my new prototype Secret Linguatext Overall Quality Evaluator. (Don't ask — it starts from a Hidden Markov Model and some techniques developed by Bill James. All tenure decisions in linguistics will soon be based on it.) Anyway, SLOQE (pronounced slow-key, patent pending) spits out the results shown on the right when asked to compare the highest quality ever reached by "On Language" before with today's result. In fact, this column compares well with top-shelf writing by people who know something about language.

I fear the NYT won't appreciate the value of transmitting reliable knowledge about language over publishing the spittle-caked rantings of a senile amateur, but these results are clear. But this is a day I never really expected to see.

High-tech spork image from here.

Court interpreters

Our new contributor Monica debuted yesterday with something on drunk driving and I posted this morning on plagiarism. Let's get back to linguistics, if not yet to happier subject matter: The news has been filled recently with one of those stories of outrage at the judicial system: A young man accused of raping a child was freed after a judge ruled that he'd been denied a speedy trial because of the failure to find an interpreter for his native language, Vai. (It's a Mandé language of West Africa —Liberia and Sierra Leone, spoken by something like 100,000 people, according to various sources.)

There are various issues here, including how badly he needed an interpreter: He apparently was enrolled in ordinary classes (not ESL) in high school and gave an interview in English to a reporter. But whatever the facts, the coverage is pretty flawed … A TV report I caught part of earlier today raised the question of how difficult it was to get an interpreter, going for a kind of gotcha moment: They interviewed a man who speaks Vai and asked him if he'd be willing to serve. He said more or less "yes, of course". This creates the impression that anybody with good basic knowledge of two languages is competent to serve as an interpreter in court. Not so, of course.

I hope that Roger Shuy at Language Log or somebody else who understands issues of language and the judicial system will give some expert commentary here.

Plagiarism is theft: A last note on Tolzmann

My post from last week about the Tolzmann affair churned up a set of comments on Joe's original post on the topic from April (here), and an email from Tolzmann that circulated quite widely and brought some traffic to this blog. (The email came to me very indirectly.)

So, this affair ended with a whimper and not a bang: Charges dropped, job kept, etc. Publishing a huge chunk of a book under your own name almost verbatim without attribution and getting away with it. I guess what holds for Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales holds for littler folks too.

Tolzmann can continue his life's work of raising public awareness of how the historical “persecution and victimization of German-Americans” represented "one of the most brutal inquisitions in American history”.*

*Actual quotes, from here: Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, ed. 1995. Vol. I: The Anti-German Hysteria of World War I; vol. II: The World War on [sic] Experience. München: K.G. Saur.

Talk to Houston

Ever since I first heard about the drunk astronauts (see here for example) I've been thinking back to my bad old past. Ah, the days when we thought driving drunk was cute and funny. So sometime in the 70s I read an article by a person in a magazine (sorry, all that drinking has fuzzed out my memory a bit) about How to Drive When You're Drunk. It was a simple method, and I practiced it many a time. It's called "Talking to Houston." What you do is you pretend you're an astronaut. You say, "Houston, I am reaching into my pocket. Houston, I have located the keys. Houston, I am inserting the ignition key into the ignition and turning it on. Houston, I am depressing the clutch." Well, you get the picture. It works really well. Not that I would advocate driving drunk, really. It was a different time.

p.s. If you don't recognize the picture, you don't know The Thin Man, and you must. The dialog that goes along with this picture is:
REPORTER: Is he working on a case?
NORA: Yes he is.
REPORTER: What case?
NORA: A case of scotch.

The earlier movies are the best; they kind of went downhill.

"The Midwest"

Haven't had a chance to mention it yet, but Wishydig has a poll going on about what states make up the American "Midwest". He's going to post some analysis when the poll is closed in two days. I'd urge you to take it, then check out results so far. I'll probably post a follow up on it after he treats it, or maybe ask one of the Wisconsin Englishes folks, or solicit a response from somebody at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, since this is a fairly important topic for them.

Colbert on punctuation

Colbert opened tonight with words to this effect:

Hey! Semicolon, comma, or period. Pick a side. We're at war.

You know where I stand, gentle reader, and there's no need to waste more words on this topic among us. It's like liveblogging the devolution somehow …

Crucial correction … Hey, semicolon: comma or period, pick a side. We're at war. (See the last two comments.)

Junie B. Jones: Bad verb! Bad, bad verb!

I guess the whole "perfect kid" obsession made this inevitable: Today's NYT has a long piece on the children's books about a girl named Junie B. Jones, by Barbara Park. Worse than her playing with scissors (a scissor? a scissors?) and head-butting other kids, Junie B. apparently leaves -ly off of her adverbs, says runned and funnest, and calls zucchini Sue Keeney (an anthropomorphizing eggcorn, mentioned as "an odd little-girlism").

For this, the author has made the American Library Association's 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors" list. Beyond being banned, her work gets called stuff like "loathsome" and "the mental equivalent of toxic waste." One outraged parent says: “No wonder we have declining literacy and writing proficiency rates in this country!” The article says of the author:

the negative responses sting, and she’s loath to talk about them. …

“I’ve stopped reading about my books on the Internet because it’s too hurtful,” she said. “People act as if I’m teaching children how to blow up cats."

You can't be surprised by this, but can people actually believe that this is responsible for declining literacy? More importantly, will this "girla non grata" be tried as an adult in Word Court?

Update, 10:05 am: Mark Liberman at Language Log (here) has explored another of the oddities in this piece that I didn't mention, the notion that phonics plays some role here. I should have mentioned that the article is filled with pretty odd views at almost every turn ("weird reactions to the book" was what I had in a spew draft of the post, actually).

And while you're over at LL, do have a look at Ben Zimmer's post on peevology … .

"Linguistic parsing"

Before I get rolling, a quick correction on the Bush quote from yesterday: The quote was something like …

There's a good reason they're called Al Qaida in Iraq. They are Al Qaida in Iraq.

The NYT has a piece here laying out some basics on the story. And yes, I know that another positive doping test is going to be announced at the Tour today. Dammit.

But back to another of yesterday's outrages: Berto's appearance in front of the Senate. Both Republicans and Democrats came stunningly close to accusing him of lying, and some did pretty directly: "untruthful", "I don't trust you", etc. from Dems and then the senior Republican on the committee (Arlen Specter) piles on with: “Your credibility has been breached to the point of being actionable.” That's harsh. It's not quite an actual charge of perjury, but that may be coming soon.

How do you defend yourself against this stuff? From the NYT, you read that:

… Justice Department aides acknowledged in a background briefing for reporters after the hearing that his “linguistic parsing” had caused confusion.

We've gotten used to hearing parsing as a political term, but I was struck by the adjective there … look, guys, he's just freaking lying, OK? Turns out this usage is fairly established, especially on the right wing, it seems. (Why do they hate linguists? I don't know.) Here's an example, from www.lies.com (attacking Bill O'Reilly):

So I go back and look at what O’Reilly wrote in his piece, and glory be, he didn’t really lie, at least if you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and employ the kind of hypertechnically strict linguistic parsing that seems to be as necessary a tool for modern life as, say, lungs.

Wow, where do I learn to do that kind of parsing?

More or less random image for 'parsing' from here. Doesn't strike me as particularly strict and it's surely not hypertechnical.

Bush insists on the truth of a tautology, only not quite

On the very day that Alberto Gonzales testified so miserably in the Senate that they're talking about a perjury investigation (here) and Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping and his whole Astana team withdrew from the Tour de France (here), you're working hard to look like a fool in today's news.

But Bush was quoted at length on NPR just now doing one of his famous "X is X" deals: Trying to dismiss the (true, as far as I can see) claim that "Al-Qaida in Iraq" is distinct from the "Al-Qaida" that was behind 9/11. No sound yet (it's worth hearing), but the story is up here, and the money quote is this, using quotes to mark the phrasing:

"Al Qaida in Iraq" is "Al Qaida" "in Iraq".

Same name, same place. Case closed. Gotta run ... life's too short to explain how stupid this one is.

PS: In the ever-changing transliteration of the terrorist group's name, I'm following NPR today. Just because.

UW funding

Another baby step forward in getting the message out about funding ... two UW linguists published this today in the CapTimes. Finally a word about something more fundamental than faculty salaries: How we're losing grad students right now due to the funding crisis. Of course, there was a massive front page piece on faculty salaries in the same issue.

Update on the earlier post about cutting funds for the Law School: Steve Nass (Knuckle-dragger, representing Whitewater in the Assembly) has proposed specifically cutting funds to pay some aides to the chancellor and System president. These people "aren't doing their jobs". That's not micromanagement, that's insanity.

I promise to get back to linguistics ...

Imagine: The Wisconsin Idea revived

Consider this possibility: For decades, the notion of service to the state was central to the University of Wisconsin. This is the great Wisconsin Idea (here, what, you thought wikipedia wouldn't have that?), which …

holds that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state, and that research conducted at the University of Wisconsin System should be applied to solve problems and improve health, quality of life, the environment and agriculture for all citizens of the state.

While the University still pays constant lip service to this, in practice many people have grown disconnected from UW and vice versa. As pointed out repeatedly on this blog, I'm utterly convinced that a real and renewed commitment to this great idea would be the single biggest step UW could take toward getting the state to commit adequate funding, and to moving education back toward something more than turning out cogs for the MegaCorp machine.

Imagine if every student in Madison were required to do — I mean, had the opportunity to do — some hands-on project that connects with the state. Your job as instructor is to make sure that you have projects that help understand Wisconsin, past and present.

For linguists, this would be tremendous: An explosion of work on documenting old immigrant languages like Polish and Norwegian, newer ones like Hmong and Somali, working with Native communities on preservation (to the extent involvement is welcome) and on second language pedagogy for their language teaching programs, tracking distributions of various regional features spreading through the state or following them through time in historical recordings and written documents.

That is a university I could stand to work for.

Anglo-American miscommunication

The Word today focuses on a crucial difference in the meaning of to chat up in British versus American English: In the US, it mean something like to shoot the breeze, but in the UK it's to flirt with, to hit on (see graphic on the right). The Boston Globe apparently ran a story about drawbridge operators who …

pass the time listening to music, smoking cheap cigars and cigarettes, and chatting up the State Police officers who patrol the area.

It doesn't sound like classic singles bar type action to some Globe readers, but it does remind me of something that happened when I was a beginning student of linguistics: A (Scottish) linguist was giving me advice on fieldwork in a community where I didn't have contacts, but knew people who did. He advised:

Why don't you just go right out there and knock them up?

I had no idea whatsoever that was supposed to mean — the only interpretation I could get was an impossible one — and must have looked bewildered. Noticing that, he added:

Then have your mate go and knock them up.

Took a minute to straighten out. We all have cross-cultural misunderstandings involving fieldwork, but usually not quite like that.

So there, Mr. V, one of your contributors has posted, finally. You can stop with the late night phone calls.

Finally! Good local journalism on UW funding

Sue Lampert Smith has a beautiful piece in today's Wisconsin State Journal on funding for UW, here. She's reacting to a particularly insane set of proposals from the Republican state assembly that not only cuts far over $100,000,000.00 from the UW System budget, but would make extremely specific cuts, like eliminating funding for the UW Law School (the only public law school in the state!), the Haven Center and the School for Workers. The proposal to cut off Law School funding was made by Frank Lasee. Word on the street is he got burned on a divorce and child support, so has it in for lawyers. That's how we make laws? That budget proposal will have no connection to eventually budget reality, it's being assumed, but it does suggest that crack addiction is rampant among Republican Assembly leaders.

Kudos to Smith for reminding folks of the crucial historical parallel behind this kind of move. It starts with this quote:

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

—Board of Regents, 1894

That motto of goes back to a case when a political appointee tried to fire an economist, Richard Ely, for supporting workers. Once again, goons are trying to trammel inquiry.

But you should read Smith's article. This is the kind of reporting we need today.

Fargo (the film) dialect

Me and the missus, after a long day and a fine dinner (all from the grill), kicked back in front of the TV. No cage death match stuff and none of those chick shows she's so wild about on the Oxygen Network, so we went surfing. What do we find: Fargo. OK, it's not the definitive movie of our region, but it's the Coen Brothers and I frankly worship the ground they film on. And just so you know, the city of Fargo plays a pretty small role in the movie — it's basically set in Minnesota, mostly in Brainerd.

Entertainment value aside (Is it funnier to see Steve Buscemi shot in the jaw and walking around with bloody paper stuck to his face or to see his white-socked foot sticking up out of the wood chipper? I can never decide.), the film gets a lot of attention for the regional English used. The Coen Brothers are Minnesotans and they are hamming it up big-time. For some people, it's all they know about Upper Midwestern English; for many here, it's Gomer Pyle or Hee Haw imposed on their region.

So, I listened a little, when I wasn't laughing so hard I was crying, to how they talked. A few things just screamed 'parody' — there are a couple of exchanges that consist basically of Yah? Oh, Yah. So, yah. OK, then, yah. Generally, the discourse marking and 'Minnesota nice' cliches are over the top, including good old you betcha. And they get a few salient constructions in that you might hear but that don't say much to me structurally or sociolinguistically, beyond rank stereotyping, like somebody being up from Brainerd when they're in the Twin Cities (south of Brainerd).

When it comes to real structural features, though, it seems less overplayed: There's a fair bit of 'devoicing' (or fortition, as the local phonologists call it) of final stops and especially fricatives — in fact, we get the phrase Go Bears! (for the White Lake Bears high school team) with a clear [s], like da Bears on Saturday Night Live, and a screaming Upper Midwestern long /o:/ in go. A few characters have stops for interdental fricatives a lot of the time and various folks have them occasionally (what the Wisconsin Englishes folks call dem dere dose [= them, there, those]). I don't hang out with Minnesota State Troopers, but could imagine this as a relatively slight exaggeration for Brainerd speech. And we get the distinctively Upper Midwestern use of yet, for still: "You're here yet."

But there are a few things that are real and don't seem to be on the stereotype radar screen. One such example is the frequent lack of aspiration on initial /p, t, k/. A trooper uses tags like this strikingly for example, sounding almost like dags.

When the Wisconsin Englishes guys get around to media representations of English up here, they've got some fodder here.

Quote of the week ...

From a quick conversation with an obviously frustrated colleague who has been struggling for some very long period of time to review "one of the weakest papers I've ever read" for a major journal:

Linguistic argumentation gone bad is a terrible thing.

When writing an article, I like to:

• Build a coherent argument!
• Present relevant data!
• Draw conclusions!

Remember, kids: Get that manuscript into tiptop shape before you send it out!

"Issuing a stunning rocket"

You probably know about the letter from Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, directly accusing Sen. Hillary Clinton of …

reinforc[ing] enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.

It's more than a little odd to have high Pentagon officials declaring that a sitting US senator and major presidential candidate is aiding and abetting people we're at war with. Nobody has yet noted, that I've seen, that this comes on the heels of an Executive Order from Bush that the government will confiscate the property of anybody seen as "undermining efforts" in Iraq, remarkably broadly defined. (No joke, here's the White House release.) So, maybe this is a ploy to seize Hillary's campaign funds.

But there's a little language angle: I see on wonkette.com that Kate Phillips, who writes for The Caucus, opened her discussion of this topic like this:

The Pentagon Issues Warning to Clinton
Issuing a stunning rocket, one of the Pentagon’s top officials sent a letter to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton …

I'm with wonkette on this one:

We have no clue what it means but we like it and may begin all of today’s posts with it.

Well, on second thought,it's pretty clear what it means. I can see cliches you might build off of to get this: shot across the bow, fire a warning shot, etc. Rocket is rich in figurative uses and meanings — check UrbanDictionary's three-page entry. (We can leaving aside people who use it for the salad ingredient I know as arugula.) It turns out, it even has an appropriate extended meaning, 'a severe reprimand' in Army officers' slang, according to Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. If that's what she was reaching for, I've got to ratchet up my assumptions about that blog.

But even beyond rocket, wow, is that an awkward phrase: Some weapons are of course designed specifically to stun (rather than maim or kill) and to issue works fine with 'press release' or something, but it also means 'to discharge' and such.

The only way to kill reader comments on this blog, I'm learning, is to invite comment so I won't, but if I had to complete a sentence starting with "Issuing a stunning rocket …", I wouldn't get close to Phillips' usage. I'd go more with bad sci-fi.

The image, by the way, is from here, and the article included this:

Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be.

Note that the author of the piece (a nine-part series) is also named Phillips. Big difference from the current example is that it was part of the Progressive effort to rid congress of corruption, especially "to weaken the influence of large corporations and other major financial interests on government policy making". Sounds kinda like where we are today.

Animal communication conference

The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) is an old linguistics conference — going back to 1974, and founded as:

a forum for the free flow of ideas and discussion on human communicating behavior from all possible points of view, going beyond traditional grammatical studies in the various traditional modes.

As that suggests, they stretch the bounds of your typical neighborhood linguistics conference, but it's mostly people of traditional structuralist orientation and they've had lots of famous people at the core: past presidents include Bolinger, Hockett, Pulgram, and more.

A regular reader of this blog (can we get a shorthand here — arrotb, maybe, just to remind us of how weird violations of the Sonority Sequencing Generalization are?) alerted me to the program announcement for this year's conference, here. The paragraph that got his attention may have been this:

The conference theme “Speech and Beyond” invites scholars to consider all possible modes of communication and the question of whether language is a uniquely human activity or not. Speakers include Louis Herman, president of the Dolphin Institute; Irene Pepperberg, well-known for her work with the African grey parrot Alex; and Neda De Mayo, founder and president of the California wild horse sanctuary, Return to Freedom, who’ll talk about communication with horses.

You may be thinking, whoa, this is pretty far off the beaten track. The implied leap from 'communication' to 'language' gets your breath, maybe especially when we're talking horses. But as long as everybody has understood stuff like Doctor Dolittle's Delusion (whether they agree entirely with that particular work or not), I'm cool with work on animal communication.

Hat tip to Mr. Rasmussen. Image from here. (I can't actually check out the site right now because it's not accessible from Linux, or even Mac.)

Tolzmann plagiarism case: Has it died?

Every so often, I check SiteMeter to see how folks get to this obscure corner of the blogosphere. Most people seem to be regular readers, but a certain number come from google searches (and, yes, other search engines). "Good verbs" is a big one for some reason, and "etymology of hoser" was up there for a while. But one steady item has been "Tolzmann plagiarism" and related variants. Back in the spring, our contributor Joe posted a long piece on the bizarre tale of how Don Heinrich Tolzmann, librarian at the University of Cincinnati and the president of the Society for German-American Studies, was accused of plagiarism. Long after the initial allegation in a book review, a couple of folks raised questions about what had happened and that triggered some attention to the case finally; the charges turned out to have merit. Tolzmann was tossed from his position as president of SGAS and lost his position in the German Department at Cincy.

A new comment appeared on that old post this morning and it prompted me to have a look and see where things stood. The comment consisted only of the URL for Tolzmann's personal page (here), where of course nothing is said of the matter. Looking around, there's nothing recent on the topic in fact on the web that I see, and only one older piece that seemed to add anything new, a post by the Annoyed Librarian (nice blog, by the way), here. Note especially the comments, where it gets pretty personal. (But a caveat: This was not about a paragraph taken without a footnote; it was a ton of material, basically verbatim, unless I've really misunderstood the whole case.)

What's alarming is that he's still listed as library staff. What does it take to get fired? The plagiarism originally came to light in 2003, so the wheels are moving very slowly, it seems. If anybody gets word on what's happening here, leave a comment or drop me a line.

Peevology and its semantic field

Jan Freeman of The Word (Boston Globe) emailed the other day about her brilliant coinage peevologist. She raises some good questions and (with her permission, of course) I reprint the key part here:

When I used it, I meant to say that not only peeve collectors but also students of peevishness would find rich material in the Telegraph's online collection; and it seems as if the latter deserve the title "peevologist" more than the former. Shouldn't those who collect language peeves, rather than studying them, have a name that reflects the irrational, obsessive side of the pursuit?

Say: Peevotaries /peevepots/ peeve phreaks/ peevomaniacs / peevehounds /peeve puppies/ peeve petters / peevenuts / peevepests /peevewits / peeve peepers / peeveseekers / peeveophiles/ peeverts [I know, too suggestive of other fetishes] / peevehoarders / peeveseekers / peevepickers / peevechasers / peevepreeners / peeverazzi / peevespotters . . . add yours here.

Now, she's raising good questions, surely, but I still think peevologist is spot on — the irony of -ology, hanging there off the back of peeve, the core of what that enterprise is about. Seems perfect. I'd say that there's room for both her groups under the big peevologist tent. Still, putting some shades of meaning into this semantic field seems good. Peeverazzi has a lot of appeal, for example, since it gets at how annoying those folks are and how worthless the substance of what they do. But a bunch more candidates have real promise, and this opens a big window to additional ideas.

So, there, readers: The comments over the last weeks and months have made quite clear that the collective readership of this blog has more horsepower than both F1 Ferrari's in the wind tunnel. Here's a set of more concrete questions:

• Where should we aim to set the bounds of peevologist? (Here as throughout, of course, usage will rule, but let's think about what we're comfortable with.)
• Should we add another term to distinguish collectors from students?
• If so, what's your preference?

Dying to know ...

Giving vandalism a bad name

Early today, Mark Liberman on Language Log did a post on Boston's 'grammar vandal' (see here for one of her blogs), with this quote:

Without punctuation, we have nothing.

All day, it's been running through my head. First, I think, you just gotta figure "that's a joke", then you worry it isn't. Later, I was wondering what variant could push the absurdometer to the red line:

• Without toe jam, we have nothing!
• Without the little container of corn starch in the cupboard, we have nothing!
• Without "you might be a redneck if" jokes, we have nothing!

And no, none of the ones I thought of were much better than these.

Slowly, it's dawning on me that what's so striking about the use of "without X, we have nothing" is how it's traditionally been used: Check around a little and you get love, hope and dreams filling that X. And we have nothing surely triggers a continuation with to fear but fear itself. These are all matters with some metaphysical heft. I'm fairly sure you have never been so high that punctuation made that list. And you don't know anybody who has.

This 'vandal' (never to be confused with real Vandals — take your pick of here or here) is aiming to parlay this trivial little defacement into a moment of Paris Hilton-like infamy, so maybe it's part of the joke. Good luck on that whole career deal there, Kate.

Update, July 18, 10:15 am: Jan Freeman (who works in Boston, after all) has posted a set of blogospheric reactions to this case, here.

A new language blog and the broader landscape

Just learned about the Linguistics Zone over the weekend, and it's sought out a fairly clear slot among language blogs: Seems like there's a big public out there interested in language and linguistics but without formal background of any sort in the academic discipline. The posts on LZ offer edifying sketches on topics from pronunciation to Gricean maxims. But it's not Ling 101 on-line, certainly: At points, it's oriented toward usage, and gives explicit advice on various points.

One footnote: LZ uses verbification rather verbing, the form in pretty wide usage among linguists. Despite its the origin of its fame (that is, Calvin & Hobbes), verbing sounds utterly normal, while verbification strikes me as a form I'd only use ironically: "Nice piece of verbification there, Mr. President. Impeach now!"

But this calls to mind something I've wondered about for a while: Charting the linguistics blogging landscape. But think about the established ones, many of which cover more than one niche: We've got everything from Language Log as the serious and professional flagship to a set of linguistics grad students blogs. There are some really excellent technical blogs on particular areas (Phonoloblog springs to mind), a few good blogs written by journalists, then a good set of basically socio-oriented ones and a ton of usage-oriented blogs. It's really a pretty rich world we've got going here.

There is probably no adequate way to describe how random the start of this blog was and that utter purposelessness is still visible in the ramshackle string of topics, themes, levels of assumed knowledges and tones that show up here from day to day. So, old Mr. Verb is the pinball of this little world, probably, to the extent that this is a linguistics blog.

Asceticism and peevology

So, part of the brilliance of the term peevology is that it makes really clear what those folks are about. As I've worked out very slowly in this space over recent weeks, I'm coming to realize that it's not worthwhile to deal with them much for linguistic purposes. (We are, as Bo Diddley said recently in a moment of nouning, a nation of slow understanders.)

Anyway, one thing that has come into focus with this is that these folks are really denying themselves the pleasures of language. Like a lot of linguists, I've mostly thought of these folks as elitists, interested in asserting power over those who don't obey their rules. But it also involves a kind of denial, asceticism.

In some sense, this is one of the cultural divides in our culture:

• People who really revel in how you can be creative with language in a fundamental way (hip-hop [leaving aside the really formulaic junk], good 'colorful rural sayings', and of course lots of slang).
• People who can't actually enjoy language — Safire probably gets some pleasure from the Bard, but that's kind of the missionary position of language enjoyment.
  

Friday the 13th

Actually heard on CNN radio news: Monday the 26th is actually the unluckiest day, according to British researchers. This sounds like BBC science reporting, as discussed often on Language Log.

Mass nouns and count nouns

I mentioned a while back here that the Wisconsin Englishes folks (link in the links and blog roll section to your right) had talked a little about a pattern where Wisconsin English treats some nouns as count noun but most English speakers treat them as mass nouns:

I'm going to wash my hairs.
Let's have some beers.

The first seems to be pretty limited these days and second is widespread beyond here, surely.
Surely related is that some things which are plural for most English speakers are singular here:

a scissor(s)
a nail clipper

These are really common around these parts. The whole set may reflect immigrant language influences, as the Wisco English crew is exploring in some current research. Last night, I heard a good one, having dinner with a group of Madisonians:

There's a roll of paper towel on the shelf.

The meaning was quite clear: A roll of paper towels. Following up, it wasn't a performance error or anything, but a normal-sounding form to those present. When I tried to get the group's reaction on things like a clipper and whether they say a scissor or a scissors, I got some surprises, like one speaker (Wisconsin born and bred) who reported a pair of scissors but then spontaneously used a nail clipper in talking about the issue.

"Might be going to V"

Overheard an interesting sentence yesterday (said out loud to a cat about to go outside):

Hold on a minute, buddy, it might be gonna rain.

Took me a second to realize that this was suspiciously like a double modal, widespread in the South. That is, you've got a modal plus an auxiliary plus a main verb here. The Dictionary of American Regional English (under may B6) talks about these things as "multiple modals" or "non-std multiple auxiliaries", with examples like:

• I might could enjoy myself.
• You might better keep out.
• He may didn't want to come.

A big set of examples is in Mishoe & Montgomery 1994 — in American Speech — including how and where they occur with negatives, in interrogatives and so on. Anyway, the speaker was a Southerner, in fact a native user of these creatures, but one who no longer uses double modals regularly.

Given how tremendously stigmatized these constructions are in areas where they're known, not just regionally but also socially (marked as lower class, uneducated, etc.), it's hardly a surprise that an educated speaker working in the professional job up here would lose them. There may be a communicative reason too: When I've talked about these constructions to Wisconsinites, sometimes people say they wouldn't know how to interpret such things if they heard them. (I assume that means interpret pragmatically — they seem unlikely to trigger tragic miscommunication.)

But really, the sentence at the start of this post is more like quasi-modal used to (so some people call it), as in:

You used to could buy gas cheap.

The used to could construction strikes the speaker as less salient, and might be gonna + V as off the radar — not something he'd think twice about using and something he thinks he uses often. Now, my judgments are so fried on this kind of point that I just asked a Wisconsinite about them. Her response was that these are all equally "alien", so weird that they can't count as 'stigmatized' for her. But all equally weird.

If this is right, the speaker is suppressing a set of forms as stigmatized, but doesn't get the generalization about what the full set is. So, I'm wondering if he's ended up using some of the less common parts of it while losing only the real stereotypical parts.

More generally, I wonder if there's work on this particular construction, the fringes beyond double modals?

Image from here, the website of the band Might Could.

UPDATE, November 20: See this new post on the topic.

Beyond peevology: Word Court hits bottom

Wow. As noted last week here, Barabara Wallraff of Word Court promised to publish complaints from restaurant servers about the language of their customers, after running a column of customers griping about those who serve them. Here's how she starts:

Anonymous, of Oakland, Mich., writes: "If ever there was a more useless mundan (sic) what you call a job telling people that have no lives and are probably as boring a person as you are, you nut case kook."

Dear Readers: Such is the level of eloquence and clarity of my critics.

Everybody who writes for a public audience gets incoherent, stupid mail. That's hardly the measure of one's 'critics'. As this blog has pointed out, Wallraff doesn't really know much about language, how it works, how it evolved, etc. But she does know how to use a spell checker and bitch about those who don't.

Some servers apparently complained about the letters from last week, which triggers this response from "the judge":

I don't get that. Isn't the customer "always right"?

Depends on whether you're the boss or the worker, and Wallraff certainly wants servers in their place. Then, another letter gets at the heart of the matter:

What do you really expect from a server who makes $2.65 an hour?

Whatever the customer wants. As Rosina-Lippi Green said in an early comment on this blog (here), it's not worth taking on folks like this self-appointed judge because they "prefer make-believe to reality". That's seems to be clearly true. But do they have to be so petty about it?

Really, I have to ask Mrs. Verb (not her real name) to keep me away from peevology of all stripes. I just love language, how it's so richly structured, how it's used and learned, how it varies and changes. That's why I'm in this biz. Maybe the beauty of the label peevologist is that makes explicit why these folks aren't worth much of our time ...

Hesitation markers: 'Senate' mix

The latest issue of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics is now available, 19.2, with this article:

de Leeuw, Esther. "Hesitation Markers in English, German, and Dutch." Pp. 85–114.

Very engaging piece, treating the phonetics of these little creatures (vocalic versus vocalic-nasal, etc.) and where they appear (with regard to pauses or silence, before or after utterances, etc.). She finds significant differences among the languages studied, with lots of inter-speaker variation, as you'd expect.

But what lucky timing ... today was of course the day that Sara Taylor, former White House political director, was supposed to testify before the Senate. In addition to saying that her boss won't let her say anything, she stumbles around a lot and uses striking quantities of hesitation markers. In the video below, there's a fair bit of it, like around 1:51.



The thing is aggravated by the creaky quality of her voice. (I'm listening with low-quality sound here, but I think that's what's going on.) And you've got to be sweating bullets under those circumstances, knowing that this could be bigger than Watergate and all that, with an attorney at your elbow telling you when not to talk, knowing that whatever happens, it's highly unlikely to end well for you, and so on. But man, this is some hesitating.

Memes

It is, no doubt, mere confirmation that I'm really not a word person, but the word meme has vaguely, half-consciously puzzled me for a long while, and I never actually got around to giving it much thought. (Relevance: It was used here and here in a quote on this blog and picked up in a comment by Oscar Madison.)

It's from (evolutionary) biology, but I didn't realize at all that Richard Dawkins, now more famous than ever, had coined it. The wikipedia entry defines it like this, which sounds pretty reasonable to me:

1. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
2. A self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics).

As the full entry points out, the success of a new scientific term in popular usage is remarkable in some ways, but I find the current blog usage striking somehow: The definition is extraordinarily broad, surely by intent, and genes (the model for the term) spread in very specific ways (if not as specifically as folks used to think). Blog and internet memes seems far more focused and have a very particular kind of transmission. There is a little lexical gap, I suppose, but we've got lots of stuff piled into this general semantic field: fad, trend, craze, fashion, vogue, movement. Most of those sound old-fashioned or too formal, so maybe it's that kind of hip gap that we constantly renew our vocabulary for, like intensifiers.

Thinking back to Jan Freeman's column where peevologist was first used, she wrote:

New usages don't wait for vacancies in the vocabulary; they just show up at work and make themselves useful. When one succeeds, we're good at explaining it after the fact: We needed just that word, with just that nuance, we say, whether it's Shakespeare's puke or the 300-year-old bye-bye or today's dumbing down.

Even after the fact, I'm not quite sure I get the success of this one. In sharp contrast to peevologist.

Had some glitch on getting the URL for the image, but if you do an image search, it's instantly findable.

Peevology 101: Let's get some basics clear

One of Madison's most famous bloggers is Ann Althouse, UW professor of Law. I do not read her,* but she's so big that there's a parody of her blog, here (also the source of the graphic). In looking for reactions to yesterday's sub-Safire peevology, I found that Althouse had blogged about the topic. She calls it:

A good column, by Jaimie Epstein, about the travails of looking for love on line when you're a language buff and you have to get to know people from their writing.

There's just one little tiny point to make: Epstein is no "language buff"; she's a peevologist. A 'buff' is a fan of something, an enthusiast. I know lots of language buffs — some of them love crossword puzzles or learning languages spoken where they're going to travel, and some read about word histories, or they develop remarkable skills at language play of various sorts like punning. Some just develop great ears for what's happening around them linguistically. Hey, some of them read blogs about language and post smart comments.

Look back at Jaimie Epstein's column. Even the bitching isn't about language, but first about knowledge of literature. Then it's about spelling, especially of names, and then typos in email messages. Sure, the piece is called "Sentence Sensibility", she complains about "grievous abuses of syntax" (no examples given), declares herself a "usage addict" and to be "afflicted with an excess language-sensitivity gene" (as Wishydig noted), but none of the substance is really about language as we understand it: structure, history, variation, for instance. And where is the love … of language? As Wishydig rightly puts it: "She's addicted to complaining about usage."

Rule 1: Do not expect the peevologist to actually talk about language.
Rule 2: Do not expect the peevologist to actually like language.

*There's a tiny (until now) inside joke on this blog that's comes from Altmouse: She runs quotes about her in her header. The joke, of course, is that Althouse's call her 'divine' and 'formidable', while mine have included variants of the "a few Xs short of a Y" snowclone and worse.

"in South African language"

One of the most galling things you can hear pretty often is that, in discussing placenames and such, people talk about what something means "in the Indian language". News flash: There is no such language. It's easy enough to see how people stumble into the lair of this monster: for whites in the general public, there are just 'Indians' for most purposes, whereas the notion that Navajo ≠ Cherokee ≠ Micmac ≠ Hochunk only comes to mind in really specific contexts of some sort. Casino visits, maybe? Jewelry purchases? Subdivision street names?

Now, if you were to read something in the newspaper about what a word means "in South African language", what would you think? I'd be instantly wondering Zulu, Xhosa or Tswana (or, if you don't object to visiting an SIL link, see the full list here). In fact, it was a piece about the local bike maker, Trek (see here for the full piece):

Trek, in South African language, means "long journey," and the company has been on an amazing path since its work began in a barn near Waterloo [Wisconsin, between Madison and Milwaukeee] in 1976.

OK, so the language in question is Afrikaans. The word clearly continues the Dutch word, and it's been in English since 1821, according to Merriam-Webster's.

Was this an effort to toss in a randomly interesting linguistic factoid that went awry?

You're it!

OK, many it's some kind of bizarre peer pressure in the anonymity of the web or who knows what, but I'm actually playing blog tag. Some folks I would have tagged have already been tagged and other blogs are so focused that the bloggers surely wouldn't play the game, and so on. But here's a group of bloggers who might play and who would surely give interesting answers, in alphabetical order:

• Away with Words
• Columnist Manifesto
• Just Thoughts
• Polyglot Conspiracy
• Wishydig
  

Just for the record, to quote the Ridger, "Certainly you don't have to participate! I threaten no supernatural reprisals; this isn't a chain letter."

A new name for 'those people'! Damn the peeve-ologists!

In her column today, Jan Freeman seems to have coined a very useful word: Peeve-ology. From there, we can derivse peeve-ologist. (I could do without the hyphen but it looks odd any way I can see to spell it.) You don't even need to hear what it means — as a proficient speaker of English, you know. And it sure looks like a coinage: Trying all sorts of variants, the only g-hit I can find is to this column. I'm just plain gobsmacked.

The column is generally worth reading, too, for showing how hard the particular peeveologists (see? Looks wrong.) are scraping against the rusted bottom of the usage bucket with their primitive tools for 'fresh' material. And, in Safire-esque fashion, they have just harvested the gripes of their readers.

And in a great big bonus, I discovered the image on this website. I knew the guy's name and had seen a couple of the pieces up there, but he's brilliant.

Even Safire's substitutes fire blanks

When I saw that it was a column by a sub this morning, I dared to glance at "On Language" in the NYT Magazine. It was a particularly elitist slam at people who aren't 'careful' enough about their language: Jaimie Epstein rants about how she can't find a man because her "literacy" (!?!?) is "dangerous to [her] dating health." After a breakup, she goes looking for male company …

I didn’t realize, however, what a huge boulder I would be rolling uphill — what with my being a “literary person,” a sometime editor of this column, someone whose ear is as tuned to the pitch of language as a cellist’s is to music — until the misplaced modifiers, dyslexic spellings and grievous abuses of syntax started pouring in.

Oh, a grammar harpy, there's a big turn-on. Or maybe there's some kind of S&M inside thing that I'm not getting. (Please, baby, 'e' before 'i'. Oh yeah.)

Besides, even if the commas are in the right places, the column looks like weak writing to me — leaving aside her bragging about the tuning of her own ear. I was going to ignore the column, but the ads-l has had a pretty good string under the subject line 'Safire'. Or see key points here.

But maybe there's a business possibility in here, especially now that it's in the news that men talk as much as women:

Subject: Enhance your 6r@mm@r!
Isn't it time you did something about your problem? Finally the genuine stuff – without money tricks! Want harder grammar? Want to make your sentences up to three clauses longer? Now, don't be ashamed: you can have the biggest lexicon in the locker room.

Used by millions of men! Check it out, it's ten times cheaper than in your local Linguistics Department!

"I love how rapidly your product worked on my boyfriend, he can't stop talking about how excited he is having such a big new vocabulary and firm command of syntax!"

The game of blog tag

Well, the Ridger has tagged me, in a blogging game. These are the rules:

This is another meme experiment:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Now, this is an exercise that I wouldn't do normally, and it's way out of character for this blog somehow, but The Ridger's Greenbelt is one of my favorite blogs, so I'll play. Can't bring myself to tag eight other bloggers yet, though.

Eight random facts/habits, hopefully in the intended spirit of things:

1. I strongly agree with the new cliche that unattended children in restaurants should be given espressos and free puppies.
2. Blogging is extremely difficult but it's a good challenge to learn to think about discussing language outside of narrow academic circles.
   
3. I closely follow the local weather.
4. These days, I work harder and harder to understand earlier linguists — it would be nice not to reinvent quite so many wheels.
5. Living off the grid doesn't sound like a bad idea a lot of days, except that this blog would become too much like Ted Kaczynski's notebooks.
6. Many years ago, I regularly baked bread that you probably would have paid money for.
   
7. I dislike handguns intensely, but like shotguns just fine.
8. In school, I flunked some classes.

So there. I'll try to tag some folks eventually ...

Linguistics on Facebook

Something I haven't seen remarked on anywhere, except by one of our contributors in passing, is the question of what Facebook might be able to tell us about language on college campuses or elsewhere. In what will probably become an occasional series, I'm pondering what's there and what it means, using the University of Wisconsin network as a data set. (And how ever big Facebook may be or get, this will never rival HeiDeas' brilliant Simpsons series — I'll get over it.)

The comment I heard on this topic was that the very existence of a group called "It Is a Bubbler, Damn it!" tells you something about language awareness on campus. It has 181 members right now, with 34 more members in "Advocates For New Bubblers at UW-Madison". This outstrips the competition: "Maybe its Not a Bubbler...but its Definitely Soda, Not Pop!" (18 members), "Seriously its a Qwa, Not a Bubbler or Water Fountain" (5), "It's Not a Bubbler, it's Not a Water Fountain. it's an Evervescer!!!" (2) , "It's a Damn Water Fountain. Thank You" (4), "It's not a Bubbler™, it's a water fountain...just like it's not Kleenex®, it's tissue paper" (1), "It Is a Drinking Fountain!...not a Bubbler!" (39), "It's a Waterhole" (11) and even "Bubbler...? Drinking Fountain...? Who CARES!??!!! WE LOVE TITTIES!!!" (18). Felt like I had to include the last one for completeness, but it's a big step below the rest, obviously.

But then, there's "It's NOT a Bubbler.. Seriously" with 1,692 members and the keeno graphic you see above. But start scrolling through the messages and, along with the Coasties you'd expect, there are lots of people who say things like this:

i just joined this group to tell everyone that it is, in fact, a bubbler....

thank you for your time

But there's plenty of more serious stuff in there, like a group reacting to English Only crap:

Welcome to America - Now Speak Cherokee!

Update, Saturday, 7:00 am: Stop the presses! See the comment on this post by Polyglot Conspiracy. My future posts on the topic will be informed by CP's pioneering contributions to this area of investigation.

États-unien and the French mavenhood

I always read Paul Krugman on Friday mornings, and today's "Sacrifice is for suckers" was a pretty depressing start to the day. Fortunately, there's an engaging language piece on the same page, this. It's an essay on how américain is used in French, along with états-unien, which comes originally from Quebec (I learned), and which is now being used in France. In fact, the NYT piece is a translation (and reworking) of a piece from the language blog of le Monde (original here). The use of états-unien provoked a negative response from some of their readers — hey, you knew France had its prescriptivists.

And I have to note in passing that this week's Word Court was basically "Just face it, world, we're called 'Americans'" — le Monde comes to a similar conclusion without having quite so much of that whole ill-informed-American-preaching-to-the-world thing going on. (Couldn't bring myself to blog about it, or even talk to the Missus about it.)

The language blog itself is notable … worth reading, though not worth learning French for (see graphic below). Of course there's also lots of stuff like this:

Lu récemment : “… ce qui tente à prouver…”. Ô saint Pierre (Larousse) et saint Paul (Robert), délivrez-nous de la tentation et tendez-nous un d bien tendre qui n’aurait pas le goût du t !

That gripe seems somehow cleverer and less bitchy than the stuff we normally get from American mavens … or maybe just because it's in French?

I can't figure out, though, why in the world they set the whole blog in boldface — at least in the two browsers I've checked it out in.

Two positives never make a negative

Linguistics humor in the news: Wow, I never thought I'd hear this joke again. Let alone from a national news agency.

Bob Uecker

Well, Milwaukee Brewers radio announcer Bob Uecker just asked bloggers to blog him. I was out of the room and didn't hear why, but sometimes you don't need to know.

Here you go, Bob, again. Any time you need to be blogged, just say the word.

Is UW "tragically in decline", and if so, who's to blame?

Here's an answer from one retired Political Science prof at UW. The stinging critique of the University's current leadership is surely on the mark … "inept and timid", hiding in "their shells", and:

True leaders would know it is time to appeal to the public (of which thousands are UW-Madison grads). Instead, their typical response is, in Patrick Farrell's words, that they "don't have dollars left" to make good counter-offers to all the faculty considering outside offers. The job of leaders is to fight for more money, not to accept limitations.

Wiley, Farrell and company need to go, and soon. But while we have second-rate leadership (or worse), we aren't yet a second-rate university. It's the top of the University that's intellectually and morally threadbare, not the grassroots: We have tons of excellent faculty, staff, students here who are struggling to keep the ship afloat.

Tip of the classic Brewers cap to J for the link to the article.

Miscellanea — blogospheric and other

Was out and about too much yesterday to post, but a few scattered tidbits:

Polyglot conspiracy, working from the left coast (LSA Summer Institute), picked up and ran with the also too deal, here. I particularly like the notion that this has some discourse angle to it.

We're certainly developing tons of stuff in that realm now. Mrs. Verb (not her real name) often remarks on how "at all" in the language of people in service jobs (so, 98% of the population?) no longer indicates anything scalar: "Would you like the check at all?" (And no bitching about service workers' language, OK?)

Celebrating the 4th yesterday, Rebecca at the OUP Blog posted a BBQ quiz, here, … with a wonderful Homer Simpson quote about cookouts:

Homer Simpson had a point, “you don’t make friends with salad.”

Anatoly Liberman also has a column there, by the way, along with Ben Zimmer, so there's plenty of etymology happening at OUP Blog.

On a less happy Independence Day note, I got about 30 seconds of Lou Dobbs ranting about immigrants yesterday. He was pushing English Only — it sounds like in the form of cutting off everything in languages other than English in the government — when a panelist representing LULAC (sorry, no time to track down who it was, and his name wasn't on the screen) noted that such a move would hurt legal immigrants as well as the "illegals" Dobbs is obsessed with. It looked like Dobbs didn't quite get the point. He tried to say something about how if you're a legal immigrant you should already know English (or that's how I heard it as I was doing something else.) Maybe he should learn a little bit of immigration history, like the long tradition of public bilingual education, printing of official documents in many languages, and on and on. At least I now know why I avoid watching him.

Just published: Speculative Grammarian!

The latest issue is up here, "We theorize, you fall for it." If you haven't played it yet, I recommend the "Choose your own career in linguistics" feature.

Immigrant history

An occasional reader of this blog (ahem, you know who you are) called my attention to this little essay on immigration history. If you've dealt with the topic, there won't be much news in there for you, but it's always good to be reminded of just how many waves of people have been declared threats to the nation.

Bush on Scooter: Putting ambiguity to use

On Sept. 30, 2003, George W. Bush said:

There's leaks at the executive branch; there's leaks in the legislative branch. There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.

It turns out, he means this in the only sense Merriam-Webster's gives:

to attend to or provide for the needs, operation, or treatment of

The usual sense here is positive: "She's taking care of her elderly parents" doesn't call to mind euthanasia, at least to me. But there's possible ambiguity in there, for sure, so that in the right context you could can make a wicked (in the old sense) joke.

If you reach for your Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy for the entry on ambiguity (or click here, if, like me, you're not in the room with your hard copy right now — it's by Kent Bach), you can read this:

'pragmatic ambiguity' is an oxymoron. Generally when one uses ambiguous words or sentences, one does not consciously entertain their unintended meanings, although there is psycholinguistic evidence that when one hears ambiguous words one momentarily accesses and then rules out their irrelevant senses. When people use ambiguous language, generally its ambiguity is not intended. Occasionally, however, ambiguity is deliberate, as with an utterance of 'I'd like to see more of you' when intended to be taken in more than one way in the very same context of utterance.

I imagine that back in 2003, I heard this phrase in context (I do remember the quote) in the more marked meaning of "see that he gets punished" without consciously considering the other meaning — I figured it for grandstanding, not deception. Is this a case where Bush chose his words carefully or where the Boy Genius fed him the right line? No, he just got lucky.

Now, I just need to understand why the mavens aren't pecking his eyeballs out over subject-verb agreement.*

*Just kidding. I think I understand.

Image from here. The caption there is: The Judgment of Solomon — putting ambiguity to use (from Iconum Biblicarum, 1627).

Update 1:30 pm: Others are declaring Bush to be Solomonic here, more directly: Talking Points Memo says:

Tony Snow explains Bush's Solomonic decision -- you "need to respect the jury system," you see. It's just judges, apparently, who don't require such respect.