Palin blames bloggers

Wow, the internets are on fire, if tubes can be on fire, with charges made by Sarah Palin about Bloggers in PJs slamming her. (See here or search 'palin bloggers' for tons of links.)

OK, Team Verb is not mentioned, of course, and our weak AM signal doesn't reach the Halls of Power, and we just kinda looked into how she talks, which isn't much by today's standards. But still, we're touched.

Say, Mrs. Verb, if you bought me pajamas, I could blog in them.

Recursion, recursion, recursion

I was NOT going to post about this pic:

But the issue of recursion has AGAIN reared up its head, much like Putin over Alaskan air space, as I read in Geoff Pullum's new post on the Log.

Sheesh, and I was thinking we'd be moving to the high ground now that the election was over ...

Ask The Verb: ''log in into the system"

I have a question involving the use of the verb "log in" vs. "log". Which question is correct or which is "most" proper?

1. "Can you log into the system?"

or

2. "Can you log in into the system?"

The second seems to be redundant however the correct verb is being used. The verb "log in" is associated with a computer.

The verb "log" in question 1 refers to recording such as recording a ships daily record of actions. For example. Capt Kirk often kept a Captain's log; although this is the noun. He logged the action he took (i.e., He would "log" it down).

The verb "log in" is correct in the sense that if someone from the help desk was asking a question such as "Can you log in?" It is comprehensible that they are asking if I could access the computer system.

The proper response would seem to be "No / Yes, I can('t) log in into the system.

Which is correct and why?

Thanks,
Mike

There's surely some change going on here. I wonder if these people are verbing login — that is, that 'to log in into the system' is actually 'to login into the system'? In technical writing, verb login looks pretty common, and some examples of to log in into look like they might really be the same too. The difference between the two looks pretty ambiguous and it's easy to see speakers reanalyzing this.I'm not sure I've heard the form myself, but in speech, you could probably distinguish the two.

The f-word and the s-word

I'd been meaning to write something on the unspeakably inane case before the Supreme Court about taboo language on the teevee, mostly to boost my cuss-o-meter rating, I guess. But the ever reliable Jan Freeman has freed me of that obligation with this very nice column on "What makes language 'foul'?"

WIllkommen in Der Rathskeller!

Now, I know as much as German morphology as John McCain* did about economics. But this didn't look right:


It was taken in the Wisconsin Union's famous Rathskeller, as the sign suggests. (We've talked about the 'Rath' before, as a search of this blog will show.) I've talked about this to people who know some German and they say that Keller is masculine, so the nominative form is der Rathskeller. In parallel constructions in German, you get dative case, like "Willkommen in der Heimat" 'welcome home' or "Willkommen im Klub" 'welcome to the club', which would give "Willkommen im Rathskeller" here, presumably. In fact, Google gives lots of examples with im if you use the modern spelling Ratskeller. At any rate, a nominative determiner after a preposition has got to be off and I was ready to jump on this as a blunder.

But some folks around here who know German also know something about language contact and suggested alternatives. For instance, you don't have to read this as German, but can treat it as an English sentence with German loanwords: willkommen is well-established here on signs and such, and Der Rathskeller is the real name of the place. The problem with that is that I can't get the German-like preposition in to work: Willkommen to Der Rathskeller would be the outcome. And if that's a Wisconsin-English-ism, I haven't heard it.

Or maybe somebody insisted on treating Der Rathskeller as an invariant phrase, so that it's German with a switch to English for the last noun phrase, which is of course borrowed from German. The cap in Der would be consistent with that — distinctly not German-looking. Very odd to a German eye, I'll bet, but in line with the Union's consistent use of the determiner with that noun.


*John McCain was once a candidate for president of the United States. He ran on the 'Republican' ticket. I'm sure he has a wikipedia entry.

The real winner in the elections

Oh, Team Verb is plenty excited about "President Hopes-a-lot" (to borrow, sort of, from Wonkette), but there are other winners here. The Onion has one take, running this huge headline in the print edition:

KLEMKE WINS
Democrat Alan Klemke Becomes Wichita's 4th District Alderman

But I was thinking more along these lines, from xkcd:

Not clear? Check out the rollover. Nate Silver is the new hero of the world. Everybody from wonkette to xkcd raves about him, he's a guest on every show the hip kids watch.

But I think it's cooler than that: He and pollster.com and a few other people have been very clear in talking about numbers to a general public. If you're not a math/stat type but read Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com with any care, you've probably learned a number of valuable points about how to think about numbers.

It's time to get back to language, though ...

President O

Random: when I was a teenager we lived in Chile for a year and a half, and happened to be there when Allende was elected. Although I was just 15 and basically only cared about boys, I do remember the night he was elected. We went downtown, where there was a huge rally going on. It was the first time I ever saw those orange-ish streetlights and everything looked like it was on fire. It was a very cool, almost frightening effect. But (in my dumb 15-year-old memory) part of the reason for the rally was to make the point that Allende had won, so that the election couldn't be stolen. Watching the rally in Grant Park tonight I'm kind of having flashbacks. I'm really scared to believe that this country has actually done something right, but maybe it'll actually be true. Naaaaah...

Obamapocalypse

From Politico.com, maybe another word form from this election season that I haven't noted:

OBAMAPOCALYPSE. Obama is more or less finished if he loses Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida — with the stat wizards at FiveThirtyEight.com giving him only a 9.76 percent chance of victory if he loses the battleground trifecta.

Don't fret, now: That chunk of material comes in a long list of 'things to watch for' tonight.

Even here at my undisclosed location in Verbville, voting was a little slow — ca. 20 min. waits, but people in good cheer, with lots of new voters signing up. Somebody's already stuck a "I voted for change" sticker on the front door.

Note: I will not be on any TV shows tonight talking about the election and Team Verb has no plans to liveblog anything tonight, though we will be keeping an eye out for language-related angles.

Limburgs on the web!

The Limburgish Academy Foundation, or rather De Stiechting Limbörgse Academie, just announced www.limburgs.org. If you're interested in the Germanic languages, this is a pretty nifty development — extensive lexicon, tons of references, and on and on. I've poked around on the site some today, but barely scratched the surface.

This West Germanic variety has, it seems like, been grossly underappreciated by most specialists save for a small set. Here's your chance to get caught up.

— Joe, reporting from the Germanic languages desk at Team Verb

A new (?) threat to English: Latin

English sure is under attack these days from every angle. Check out the headline of this article from the Telegraph:

Councils ban 'elitist' and 'discriminatory' Latin phrases

Yes, that is plural, councils. In more than one place in the UK, local councils are trying to ban stuff like 'etc.' Latin, like a linguistic zombie, rises from the crypt to threaten English!

Of course the piece has at least the usual amount of claptrap about people 'not knowing Latin' (these words and phrases are really part of English), about Latin loanwords as 'the great strength' of English (poor Germanic vocabulary!), blah blah freakin' blah.

The bottom line:

Professor Mary Beard, a professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge said: "This is absolute bonkers …".

Thank you, Professor Beard. Of course, bonkers is probably more obscure than half the Latin terms banned, so maybe that should be rephrased. (The word is recent and etymologically pretty unclear, I think.)

Hat tip to R.

(Image from here. Pictured from left, that's Habeas Corpus, Ipso Facto, Primus Dudus, and Accusativus C. Infinitivo.)

Visual Thesaurus spelling bee

I'm usually not much for word games for some reason, but I might have a new addiction: Visual Thesaurus has an on-line spelling bee, here. Ben Zimmer — now executive producer for VT — alerted me to this a few days ago and I finally stole a minute yesterday to try it.

Part of the deal is that it automatically adjusts to your spelling ability. This morning, I just played it some and found that it adjusted up pretty quick — to the point that I didn't have to really try to make an error. I was typing as quick as I could, and completely blew cerumen 'ear wax'. It has to start with a 'c' (Latin cera 'wax'), but I just automatically tried 's'. Pretty fun, and free to play.



The actual Visual Thesaurus itself is obviously a serious tool, and I hope to post on that after I have explored it in more depth. Probably just as addictive. And on a Sunday morning, it beats fretting over Safire!

Eunoia

This link was passed along from A.M. via a contributor, about Christian Bök's new book which uses only one (orthographic) vowel per chapter. Of course, much like on this blog, the comments are often better than the story. The exercise calls to mind Gadsby, the novel written without using the letter 'e' and other efforts.

Much more interesting would be prose restricted to single vowel sounds over long stretches. There's plenty of that in poetry, but is there prose like that?