Being Human

You just can't stop people putting themselves in harm's way. If they're not walking into the buzzsaw they're crashing like bugs into the windshield… As the previously referenced discussion about usage in The Guardian's online pages developed a bit further, a commenter called scherfig responded to Steve Jones's devastating piece of evidence about Mark Twain not obeying Fowler's which/that rule by saying this:

OK, steve, let's forget Mark Twain and Fowler (old hat) and take a giant leap forward to George Orwell in the 30's and 40's. In my opinion, in his essays, the finest writer of the English language ever . Check out his use of English - it is, after all, several decades after Twain and still 70 years ago, and he has actually written sensibly about language (quite a lot).

What Steve immediately did, of course, was to take a relevant piece of Orwell's work and look at it; scherfig, the Orwell fan, astonishingly, had been too lazy to do this. And again his result was total and almost instant annihilation of the opponent.

Here's what Steve wrote to scherfig:

I didn't bring out Mark Twain, Michael did. And it was Fowler who was responsible for the non-rule in the first place.

If you are suggesting that we should copy Orwell, 'the finest writer in the English Language ever' then you'd better jettison your nonsense about 'which' not been used in restrictive relative clauses because his famous essay 'Politics and the English Language' is full of it being used thus, starting with the very first paragraph.

belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Did scherfig acknowledge that this was a point against him? Not at all. Not one bit (read for yourself).

What is going on here? People insist that they believe in the fictive rule that which is a mistake at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause; they cite examples of writers they admire, and predict that these writers would never disrespect the rule; they don't look to see, not even at the first page or so; instead they publish their unchecked claim in an online department of a national newspaper; Steve Jones checks their claim quite easily in a minute or two of research and shows that they are just plain wrong; and they refuse to accept that the evidence tells us anything. They move on to suggesting a different author, or change the subject, or post personal insults against the messenger (scherfig tells Steve, who is spot-on relevant and exactly correct, "I have come to the conclusion that you have no idea what you're talking about … you just witter on…", and also accuses Steve of claiming that there are no rules at all).

Linguistics is a very strange business to be in. Matters like what rules or regularities expert users of English are following when they construct relative clauses are not difficult like quantum mechanics is difficult. They are readily settled by inspection of text that anyone could do. And all linguists want to base on such inspection is an accurate description of the language of which the texts are a sample. Linguists believe (and could anyone seriously think otherwise?) that on the whole a correct description of the grammar of a language has to be an account of the rules or regularities that expert users of English follow when they construct sentences. That doesn't mean everything any user writes down is in compliance with the rules — we all make occasional mistakes from inattention. But it does mean that overwhelming evidence concerning a regularity in published English prose should count for something (probably quite a lot) when we're discussing English grammar.

And the overwhelming evidence says that the regularity about English restrictive clauses, in speech as well as published prose, and in cases where the users themselves would say that they were not in error and did not choose their words carelessly, is that they sometimes begin with which (a thing which I have often wondered about), and sometimes begin with that (the thing that I can't understand), and sometimes begin with neither (the thing I want to explain). The evidence is overwhelming. But people can't accept it, and insist it isn't so.

It's like being a chemist and explaining to people that mercury is poisonous and accumulates in the body and causes mental deterioration; and they just keep adding mercury to their food, and eating it and going mad, and claiming that chemists say there should be no food.

The ideal David Bowie song, according to (Nick Troop's interpretation of) the output of Jamie Pennebaker's LIWC program, correlated with sales figures across Bowie's oeuvre:

This is a big step up (or down, depending on your perspective) from the typical "Experts solve mystery of ___'s success" story — Prof. Troop puts his theory into practice, and lets the public judge the results.

[Hat tip: Gordon Campbell]

For the last dozen years, it's been known that young people who follow the stylistic advice of Strunk & White are more likely to get Alzheimer's disease when they get old. Well, at least, in a cohort of nuns,

Low idea density and low grammatical complexity in autobiographies written in early life were associated with low cognitive test scores in late life. Low idea density in early life had stronger and more consistent associations with poor cognitive function than did low grammatical complexity. Among the 14 sisters who died, neuropathologically confirmed Alzheimer's disease was present in all of those with low idea density in early life and in none of those with high idea density.

And if you look into what "idea density" means, you'll see that many aspects of Strunkish writing style, especially avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, are precisely designed to lower it. (For details and links, see "Writing style and dementia", 12/3/2004; and "Miers dementia unlikely", 10/21/2005.)

Now there's a new chapter in the story, based on looking for physical symptoms of Alzheimer's in living nuns using positron emission tomography (PET) brain imaging, rather than relying on post-mortem examination of the brains of dead ones ("Can Language Skills Ward Off Alzheimer's? A Nuns' Study", Time, 7/9/2009).

The recent journal article under discussion is D. Iacono et al., "The Nun Study. Clinically silent AD, neuronal hypertrophy, and linguistic skills in early life", Neurology, published online 7/8./2009.

Background: It is common to find substantial Alzheimer disease (AD) lesions, i.e., neuritic β-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, in the autopsied brains of elderly subjects with normal cognition assessed shortly before death. We have termed this status asymptomatic AD (ASYMAD). We assessed the morphologic substrate of ASYMAD compared to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in subjects from the Nun Study. In addition, possible correlations between linguistic abilities in early life and the presence of AD pathology with and without clinical manifestations in late life were considered.

Methods: Design-based stereology was used to measure the volumes of neuronal cell bodies, nuclei, and nucleoli in the CA1 region of hippocampus (CA1). Four groups of subjects were compared: ASYMAD (n = 10), MCI (n = 5), AD (n = 10), and age-matched controls (n = 13). Linguistic ability assessed in early life was compared among all groups.

Results: A significant hypertrophy of the cell bodies (+44.9%), nuclei (+59.7%), and nucleoli (+80.2%) in the CA1 neurons was found in ASYMAD compared with MCI. Similar differences were observed with controls. Furthermore, significant higher idea density scores in early life were observed in controls and ASYMAD group compared to MCI and AD groups.

Conclusions: 1) Neuronal hypertrophy may constitute an early cellular response to Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology or reflect compensatory mechanisms that prevent cognitive impairment despite substantial AD lesions; 2) higher idea density scores in early life are associated with intact cognition in late life despite the presence of AD lesions.

See also William E. Klunk et al., "Amyloid Imaging with PET in Alzheimer’s Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Clinically Unimpaired Subjects", chapter 6  in Dan Silverman (Ed.) PET in the Evaluation of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders, 2009.

From John McIntyre:

You've heard about the Cupertino. You have seen the eggcorn. You know about the snowclone. Now — flourish by trumpets and hautboys — we have the crash blossom.

At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline:

Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms

(If this seems a bit opaque, and it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)

A quick response by subtle_body suggested that crash blossom would be an excellent name for headlines done in by some such ambiguity — a word understood in a meaning other than the intended one. The elliptical name of headline writing makes such ambiguities an inevitable hazard.

And danbloom was quick to set up a blog to collect examples of "infelicitously worded headlines."

Chris Waigl, reporting on the same neologism, describes "crash blossoms" as "those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking." Indeed, when such infelicitous headlines have come up here on Language Log, they have typically been discussed as examples of "garden path sentences." After the break, a recent headline of the classic "garden path" variety.

On Sunday night, this headline appeared on the CNN Wire before events took a more tragic turn:

The lede graf of the story explained:

Three people missing Sunday after large ocean waves knocked several people into the Atlantic off Maine's Acadia National Park have been located, a park official said.

(The headline and lede graf were quickly replaced after news emerged that one of the three people, a 7-year-old girl, had died.)

As John McIntyre points out, headlines are particularly susceptible to improper "garden path" parsing, since the elliptical nature of headlinese can lead to various syntactic ambiguities. In this example, we're so used to copula deletion in headlines that "3 missing…" is easily parsed as "3 are missing…" But by the time we get to "located" at the end of the headline, we discover that this is a misparsing. Following the structure of the lede, the headline is intended to be read as "3 [people] missing after waves hit Maine [have been] located." I'd be impressed if anyone got that reading the first time through.

For more garden path headlines, see:

• "Garden paths at the Guardian" (9/21/2004)
• "Surprising crocodile kin" (1/26/2006)
• "Linguist thought able to read isn't" (7/16/2006)

John McIntyre at You Don't Say considers a hypothetical Museé des Peevologies. The curator's job is apparently open, or will be once a founding donor is located.

From the Times Online of August 23, under the head "Quangos blackball … oops, sorry … veto 'racist' everyday phrases", a story that begins:

It could be construed as a black day for the English language — but not if you work in the public sector.

Dozens of quangos and taxpayer-funded organisations have ordered a purge of common words and phrases so as not to cause offence.

Among the everyday sayings that have been quietly dropped in a bid to stamp out racism and sexism are “whiter than white”, “gentleman’s agreement”, “black mark” and “right-hand man”.

Details to follow, but first a word about quangos, for readers unfamiliar with the term.

(Hat tip to Danny Bloom.)

Quango is a mostly British term. Here are the OED (draft revision of March 2008) definition and etymology:

Originally: an ostensibly non-governmental organization which in practice carries out work for the government. Now chiefly: an administrative body which has a recognized role within the processes of national government, but which is constituted in a way which affords it some independence from government, even though it may receive state funding or support and senior appointments to it may be made by government ministers.

[Acronym, originally < the initial letters of quasi non-governmental organization…, but in later use also frequently reinterpreted as the initial letters of either quasi-autonomous non-government(al) organization or quasi-autonomous national government(al) organization.

The coinage of the acronym is frequently attributed to A. Barker of the University of Essex: see e.g. R. L. Wettenhall in Current Affairs Bulletin 57(1981) 14-22, and compare:
1982 A. BARKER Quangos in Britain 220 This was around 1970, when I invented this near-acronym from an American term ‘quasi-non-governmental organisation’.]

(NOAD2 characterizes it as "chiefly derogatory", but the OED has no such usage label, though it does label as "depreciative" the derivatives quangocracy and quangocrat.) Probably more than you wanted to know, but quangos have come up on Language Log only in a passing remark by Geoff Pullum, here, that "quangos are now called NDPBs" (that is, non-departmental public bodies).

Now let's return to our muttons, with some specific pieces of language advice from the Times Online story:

The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has advised staff to replace the phrase “black day” with “miserable day”, according to documents released under freedom of information rules.

It points out that certain words carry with them a “hierarchical valuation of skin colour”. The commission even urges employees to be mindful of the term “ethnic minority” because it can imply “something smaller and less important”.

The National Gallery in London believes that the phrase “gentleman’s agreement” is potentially offensive to women and suggests that staff should replace it with “unwritten agreement” or “an agreement based on trust” instead. The term “right-hand man” is also considered taboo by the gallery, with “second in command” being deemed more suitable.

Many institutions have urged their workforce to be mindful of “gender bias” in language. The Learning and Skills Council wants staff to “perfect” their brief rather than “master” it, while the Newcastle University has singled out the phrase “master bedroom” as being problematic.

Advice issued by the South West Regional Development Agency states: “Terms such as ‘black sheep of the family’, ‘black looks’ and ‘black mark’ have no direct link to skin colour but potentially serve to reinforce a negative view of all things black. Equally, certain terms imply a negative image of ‘black’ by reinforcing the positive aspects of white.

“For example, in the context of being above suspicion, the phrase ‘whiter than white’ is often used. Purer than pure or cleaner than clean are alternatives which do not infer that anything other than white should be regarded with suspicion.”

I haven't read all of the comments — there are 158 at the moment — but they seem to be uniformly negative, in various modes (dismay, outrage, mockery, and so on, with plenty of references to Orwell). It does seem like a (laudable) desire to avoid offense has gotten out of control, probably as a joint effect of the etymological fallacy (the idea that the original meaning of a word, or rather what people believe the original meaning to have been, continues to color uses of the word) and the belief that all uses of a particular pronunciation or spelling are united, so that if some use gives offense, all do (offense inheres in the physical object itself, not in a relationship between the object, the people who say or write it, the people who hear or read it, and the context of use).

[Addendum 26 August: Ray Girvan writes with an important cautionary note — something I'd intended to incorporate in the original posting but left out in my hurry to get the posting out:

The Times piece follows a very common story format in the more right-wing UK newspapers, which tend to be hostile toward various bodies (local councils, quangos, arts organisations, groups helping minorities, etc) and use "political correctness" stories as a stick to beat them with.

Quite often the edicts cited in these stories turn out to be exaggerated, urban myths, or even fictitious.

Alas, yes. I don't know the true status of the four reports in the Times story.]

Not only are the stereotypical Japanese fastidiously clean,  they are also extraordinarily polite.  They will not just tell you to be careful not to endanger yourself.  They will be sure to preface the warning with a "please" (actually the word for "please" in Japanese, KUDASAI, comes at the end of the sentence).

In today's Japan mail (from Kathryn Hemmann) come two signs, one warning, "Please Be Careful to Strong Sunlight" and the other, "Please be careful to traffic."

The first example utilizes the intriguing device of a sign within a sign, and it is all in English.

The second example in Japanese reads KURUMA NI GO-SHUGI KUDASAI (car with-regard-to [honorific]-pay-attention please; please pay attention to the cars / traffic).

The consistency of usage leads me to suspect that this may be an established pattern in Japanese translations into English.  And using "be careful to" in order to mean "be aware of the dangers of" can create odd results, even when what follows is a verb phrase rather than a noun phrase (from here):

Indeed, "Please be careful to forget valuables" won the 2005 Sign Language Award of the English-Speaking Union of Japan.

And there are many web site warnings along the lines of "This is a scratch site, then please be careful to lose your way."

Michael Bulley made a profoundly incautious comment in a discussion in the Guardian newspaper's "Comment is free" online section today. He was following up a pathetic column on usage by the paper's style guide editor, David Marsh. Unsurprisingly, Marsh had attempted to defend the totally fake which-that rule for integrated (or ‘defining’) relative clauses, which we have so often critiqued here at Language Log. Wrote Bulley, rather pompously:

No one would deny that there are numerous examples of "which" introducing a relative clause that defines (if they weren't any, no one would object to them as being bad style!), but are you just going to say to someone "This is what lots of people do, so it's OK for you to do it as well"? I'm reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. I haven't checked, but I'd bet he never uses "which" as a defining relative.

Oh, no! It was like watching someone walking backwards toward a buzzsaw. I could hardly bear to look. You don't say things like that in the age of We-Can-Fact-Check-Your-Ass!

What's more, Bulley had said this in a thread where Steve Jones was participating. Steve has (how shall I put it?) never worried unduly about whether his smartness-to-niceness ratio might stray above 1.0 sometimes. I knew he would grab an electronic copy of Twain and check immediately, and Bulley could expect no mercy. Sure enough, a few comments later, there was Steve, with a response even more brilliantly acid than I was expecting:

Well, when you've finished the table of contents, and get round to reading the Preface, you'll find this example in the third paragraph.

In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the Daily Alta California

Smack! When will people learn the new first rule of the blogosphere, WCFCYA?

(Twain was, of course, an excellent writer. He knew there was no rule forbidding which in integrated relatives, so he used it when it struck him as right. Excellent writers who have not been forced to submit to American copy editors on this point tend to use which and that in roughly equal proportions at the beginnings of their integrated relative clauses. And there may be a subtle meaning difference: it seems to me that there is a slight bias toward using which when the noun phrase is indefinite or introduces something new, and that when the noun phrase is definite or refers to something established in the discourse. It is the nervous, insecure, and gullible minor writers, not the great ones, who believe there is a hallowed rule of English grammar that they can comply with if they deprive themselves of their freedom to choose between which and that as best suits the context. Great writers know better.)

A couple of weeks ago, Yale University Press decided to remove the illustrations from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book The Cartoons that Shook the World. (See "Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book", NYT, 8/12/2009). Among the many condemnations of this decision that I've read, Christopher Hitchens' ("Yale Surrenders", Slate, 8/172009) is the only one that makes a lexicographical argument:

[YUP director John] Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

Samuel Johnson, the first great English lexicographer, wrote about the connotations of instigate from a slightly different point of view ( The Plan of an English Dictionary, 1747):

There are many other characters of words which it will be of use to mention. Some have both an active and passive signification, as fearful, that which gives or which feel terror, a fearful prodigy, a fearful hare. Some have a personal, some a real meaning, as in opposition to old we use the adjective young of animated beings, and new of other things. Some are restrained to the sense of praise, and others to that of disapprobation, so commonly, though not always, we exhort to good actions, we instigate to ill; we animate, incite and encourage indifferently to good or bad. So we usually ascribe good, but impute evil; yet neither the use of these words, nor perhaps of any other in our licentious language, is so established as not to be often reversed by the correctest writers. I shall therefore, since the rules of stile, like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated, collect the testimonies on both sides, and endeavour to discover and promulgate the decrees of custom, who has so long possessed, whether by right or by usurpation, the sovereignty of words.

In his dictionary, Johnson defined instigate as "to tempt or urge to ill", which asserts that the instigated action is a bad thing, and also supports the view that the instigating party intends it. The OED gives two senses, corresponding to different syntactic frames: instigate (someone) to VerbPhrase meaning "To spur, urge on; to stir up, stimulate, incite, goad (now mostly to something evil)", and instigate NounPhrase meaning "To bring about by incitement or persuasion; to stir up, foment, provoke". In all of the citations, the subject does seem to desire the result. But following Johnson's prescribed method, let's collect recent "testimonies on both sides". Among the first 20 uses of instigate that I found in this morning's Google News, 17 (read in context) support Hitchen's contention that "[i]f you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen":

In another video, a resident was told to push another far bigger resident to instigate a fight.
WUC member spreads faked video to instigate riot
Greenpeace Uses Design to Instigate Corporate Change.
Russia, it seems, has had enough of the constant bickering and wants to instigate a change in Ukraine, one which will play in its favor.
To fail to instigate an inquiry will continue to hide the truth from terrorism’s victims and from the public.
Flintoff himself will certainly not instigate a return to Test cricket.
It would be left up to the United States to continue on its own in Afghanistan or instigate an emergency withdrawal.
… any people who are coming into the community that just want to have their way, trying to instigate the community to create more tension within the community, is just not acceptable for the Council …
Hodgson hardly had the manpower to instigate sweeping changes, so Chelsea remained largely unruffled after the interval.
O'Brien's approach enables him to instigate emotional reactions from the less stable and immature portions of our society.
It is particularly offensive when this is expressed by political hacks who are well-known to instigate such tactics.
The Christian Association of Nigeria in Kaduna says it is alarmed at an attempt by unknown persons to instigate religious antagonism
… the aim was to instigate indoctrinated Muslim youth to fight against the Russian armies …
With electron beams used widely to instigate industrial and manufacturing chemical reactions, the company’s offerings could add up to substantial energy savings if it can increase its market share.
The primary focus of this role will be to instigate a strategic marketing campaign in terms of online e-commerce and direct marketing…
100 reformists, including senior officials, stand accused of trying to instigate a so called “velvet revolution”.
The best evidence Ms. Kadeer did not instigate the riots paradoxically comes from the Chinese themselves.

But I found 3 examples where instigate seems simply to mean "cause" or "start":

If an inmate were to read the article and told other inmates, that in itself could be enough to instigate a riot.
A title certain to instigate debate is Princeton University Press's Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History
The media does not look the other way when phrases like "loosely based", "inspired" and "heavily borrowed" are thrown casually in interviews.
If anything, these types of responses instigate further grilling.

It's not clear that these count as examples of "the correctest writers", but at least with respect to contemporary journalistic prose, Hitchens' view that "If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen" needs to be qualified by Johnson's "commonly, but not always". And though I'm certainly in favor of Hitchens' general oppposition to "blame the victim" theories of moral responsibility, the whole argument is probably beside the point. Martin Kramer, among others, makes a plausible case that the Yale administration's motivation was not to avoid bloodshed, but rather to preserve access to money.

[Update: we can check the status of instigate's implication of intentionality more directly, by searching for things like {"unintentionally instigate|instigated|instigates|instigating"} in various places. Google Scholar turns up e.g. this

It may surprise some to learn that the pop star has, albeit unintentionally, instigated a broader examination of HIPAA violations. But HIPAA, as a relatively new law, was festering behind the curtain, waiting for a high-profile patient privacy violation before enforcement could truly begin.

where the odd use of festering doesn't give us a lot of confidence that this counts as one of the "correctest authors"; or this one

This alternative hypothesis would be in keeping with the “victim precipitation” model of aggression that assumes that victims of aggression intentionally or unintentionally instigate some negative acts such as aggression.

which is more convincing as English prose, and also suggests that for some people at least, the connection between instigation and intention is at best an implicature. This impression is strengthened by a search of Google Books, which turns up examples like

But the truth is, I unknowingly and unintentionally instigated my own seduction.

Yang Changjun unintentionally instigated the Hezhou violence by trying to save characters in his announcement. Instead of writing "Sa-la-er Hui", which unambiguously means "the Salar Muslims", he wrote "sa Hui", which might refer to the Salars or might mean "disperse and scatter the Muslims".

… by annexing a significant portion of tribal lands, had unintentionally instigated an uprising in the mountains that threatened to overwhelm the Ottoman forces in the region.

These examples seem plausible and idiomatic to me.]

]

Just a pointer to Jan Freeman's "On Language" column — she was subbing for Bill Safire — in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about Ambrose Bierce's advice on English usage in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), which Jan characterizes as "often mysterious, perverse and bizarre". With examples.

Max Heiman wrote to me with a nice point. I present it here as a guest post.

An ambiguity in a New York Times story caught my eye:

But in the wake of the financial crisis, attendance at the [Museum of American Finance] ― located at 48 Wall Street, near the epicenter of last year’s market collapse ― has risen to about 200 visitors a day, nearly double its tally last summer. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art averages that many visitors almost every 90 seconds.)

Quiz: does the Met average more or less than 200 visitors every 90 seconds?

If I were to read, "The winner ate 200 hot dogs in almost 90 seconds", my reaction would be, (1) "Gross!", and (2) "It took slightly longer than 90 seconds to eat all those hot dogs."

But in the museum example I interpreted the meaning (after a pause) in the opposite way, as 200 visitors arriving in slightly less than 90 seconds.

What struck me as interesting is that I realized that, during that pause, I was thinking about how the sentence wasn't written — specifically, in the unambiguous form "[the Met] averages almost that many visitors every 90 seconds" — and then deciding that the ambiguous version in front of me must mean the opposite.

I realize there are some problems with this analysis. For example, the author could have written "[the Met] averages more than that many visitors every 90 seconds" but this didn't occur to me as the 'unambiguous' counterpart to what I read.

My main point is that I noticed my mind trying to resolve ambiguity not by taking apart the sentence that was there, but by comparing it to the sentences that weren't.

— Max Heiman

My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar to readers of Language Log and my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. So here is our nepotistic "diavlog" for your enjoyment. (Diavlog is a second-order blend, by the way: it blends dialog and vlog, with the latter element representing a blend of video and blog. Or make that third-order, since blog blends Web and log.)

Rope 'may have saved girl', said the headline in the Metro alongside a photo of pretty 21-year-old British tourist Emily Jordan, and I felt my heart leap with new optimism. I had read the previous day that Emily had been trapped under water while riverboarding on vacation in New Zealand, and the story had said that although her river guide had been saved, poor Emily had drowned. Now it seemed that was inaccurate: she survived, and it may have been rescue ropes that saved her! But no, reading the full story confirmed again that she was dead. What had gone wrong with my interpretation process?

The answer is that in my variety of Standard English the modal verb may, which has the present tense form may and the preterite form might, absolutely must be in the preterite form to convey either a past time reference sense (John thought he might join us, but it didn't work out that way) or the counterfactual "remote conditional" sense (If you offered me money I might take it). The story made it clear that it is now thought that rescue ropes might have saved Emily if they had been available. I can interpret Ropes might have saved her — that is, as a remote conditional (the apodosis of a conditional claim with the prodosis clause implicit: it would have been possible for ropes to save her (if they had been available) but they didn't). But for me, the sentence Ropes may have saved her cannot have the counterfactual sense of the remote conditional: it means either "Possibly ropes have saved her" or "She has been saved, possibly by ropes."

But that's me. There is a slowly growing tendency for other Standard English speakers to use may for both past time reference (%John thought he may join us but it didn't work out that way — the prefix % is used to mark a sentence on which there are divided opinions within a dialect concerning the grammaticality of the example) or in a remote conditional context as in the headline just discussed.

The usage in the newly developing subdialect indicates a separation of may from might, and perhaps a very slow eroding away of the latter. (Might already sounds a bit pompous or 20th-century to many young American speakers.)

I am well aware of the trend the new subdialect represents. It is carefully documented by Rodney Huddleston in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, chapter 3, section 9.8.4, pages 202-203). But this time the headline-writer's use of it threw me. I thought poor Emily might still be alive, but it didn't work out that way.

Half an hour before touchdown at Narita, the pilot turns on the "fasten seat belt" sign.  Because something (or some things) served during the in-flight meals on the 14-hour flight did not quite agree with your alimentary tract, you are already experiencing ominous rumblings down in your bowels.

You do your best to ignore the bouncing and jolting of the huge 747 as it descends through the various layers of stormy clouds.  Breathing deeply and slowly, you focus all of your thoughts on the first toilet you will encounter when you enter the terminal.

Finally, the plane screeches to a halt, then slowly, ever so slowly and with many pauses and turns, it taxis to the gate.  Since you know that you will have a major evacuation and it may take some time,  you  deplane along with everyone else.  But, horrors!  You are guided down lengthy hallways and escalators, then stand in line to wait for a bus that will take you to another part of the terminal to go through immigration.  After arriving at the immigration hall, you stand in line, alternating between doing a jig and exercising maximum sphincter control.  At last you pass through immigration and customs, then race to the nearest toilet you can find, open the door, dash to he only unoccupied stall you can find, enter, and come face to face with THIS.

What to do?  Which button(s) to push?  You can't even spot which language to read for any given instruction.  There's no help for it but just to sit down, do your business, and read all the instructions later, hoping that such rashness will not lead to a major calamity in the WC.

In case you couldn't guess from the coinage, a "washlet" is a toilet that also washes your bottom and does all sorts of other fun things to make you feel nice and clean.  The Japanese invented washlets and have become increasingly dependent upon them.

Here are a couple of videos that demonstrate how they work.

The star of the second video is W. Hodding Carter IV (son, grandson, and great-grandson of other distinguished Hodding Carters).

He's also the author of Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization.

As someone who learned to like Japanese squat toilets back in the 70s (see paragraph 5 here), I must say that I was quite intimidated the first time I encountered a top-of-the-line washlet.  But once you get used to them, you can't do without them.  I'm pretty sure that's why Mr. W. Hodding Carter IV had one installed in his house up in Maine.

My thanks to Miki Morita for sending me the photograph of the instructions.

From yesterday's mail:

An idle question from a big Language Log fan:  Do you have any idea if the nice folks in, say Germany or Italy or Spain, go as nuts as Americans seem to when native speakers make "fundamental" grammar errors?

It appears that the strong form of "going nuts" that we've called word rage is mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, with the British as the originators and still the champions. But the sociolinguistic settings in Germany, Italy, and Spain are very different from the situation in the U.S. — and as a result, they have their own kinds of language wars over there.

The most obvious difference is the role of traditional local language varieties. Each of the European standard languages developed in the midst of a complex dialect continuum, where differences increase with geographical and social distance, and enough distance creates differences like those between German and Dutch, or French and Italian. As a result, many if not most Europeans speak a local "dialect" that is very different in morphology, pronunciation, and word stock from the standard national language that they also control to one extent or another; and in practice, the local and standard varieties are often mixed to a variable degree depending on circumstances.

Something of the same kind is also true in the U.S., but the differences are generally not as great.

Do our European friends comment among themselves as often as Americans seem to about their neighbor's grammar?

I don't know the facts about the conversational density of metalinguistic commentary, and I don't think that anyone has ever studied this empirically. But in Europe, there's more to talk about, since geographical and social differences among language varieties are bigger and more complicated.

Do Germans hotly chastise newspaper editors for an occasional faulty case? Do the Spanish roll their eyes when a writer fails to employ the subjunctive? Do Italians suspect the imminent demise of civilization if a subject and verb fail to agree?

There's apparently quite a bit of concern in Germany about the fate of the dative case, with journalists very much under the gun on this question. I'm not sure about the ideology of mood in Spanish, but there was a fair amount of discussion a few years ago about whether a Francophone mass murderer used the subjunctive appropriately.

Those are both instances of concern about the evolution of the standard national language, and there are plenty of those around.  But most European countries have one or more governmental institutions charged with establishing and maintaining language standards — the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, the Académie française, etc.– and perhaps this makes the citizenry less prone to take up pitchforks and torches on their own initiative.

A different sort of struggle is described by Jillian Cavanaugh in "Remembering and Forgetting: Ideologies of Language Loss in a Northern Italian Town" (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(1), 2008):

One wintry afternoon in the northern Italian town of Bergamo, I had coffee with Giani, a retired engineer in his mid-sixties, and talked about the impending loss of his dialetto (‘dialect’), Bergamasco. Giani, speaking Italian with a strong Bergamasco accent, told me a story about the punishment children endured for speaking Bergamasco when he attended elementary school. Every morning, the first time the schoolteacher heard a child say something in Bergamasco, he or she would hand that child a wooden baton, which the children cheekily called—in Bergamasco—a bastù. This child held the baton until they heard another child speak Bergamasco, and then passed it on; this continued throughout the day. At the end of the school day, the teacher called the last unlucky child to the front of the class and made them tell who had passed them the baton. That child was then called up to the front to tell who had given it to them, and so on back to the original offender. The entire chain of Bergamasco-speaking children was then punished in front of everyone else (often with a strap). The next day, the gruesome relay began again. Giani laughed as he told me that on some days, practically the whole class would end up in the front of the room. “Everyone was poor and spoke Bergamasco,” he said, “and though we suffered for it, we all got through it.”

In most European countries, I believe that struggles of this kind remain very much alive. In some cases, the result is the loss of the local variety; in other cases — for example Catalan — the local variety has become established as a standard in its own right. In either case, the struggle seems to leave less ideological energy to spare for questions like whether a change in word sense threatens the foundations of civilization.

If you want to see all the illogic and angst of the prescriptive poppycock merchants on display, Howard Jacobson provides one-stop shopping. I don't think the UK has a more unprepossessing columnist of the foaming-at-the-mouth language-is-going-to-the-dogs persuasion. Oddly, he is not in the Telegraph but in the relatively liberal Independent. You might (or you might not) want to look at the way his last piece of rambling, ranting, frothing bitterness ends. It is entitled "In the face of overwhelming ignorance, it is the pedant's duty to keep battling on". Read on if that title holds any appeal…

We have no regard for schoolteachers. There are countries where to be a schoolteacher is to enjoy considerable esteem. Here, we pay them badly and encourage our children to treat them with contempt. The reason for this is that we fear learning and would rather mock it than acquire it. No one must draw attention to our ignorance, no one must teach us how to think, how to say what we mean or how to mean something better, no one must correct our spelling or our syntax or our speech. The very concept of correction is anathema to us.

The capitulation of the pedant himself to this free-for-all of knowing nothing was in evidence this week on Fry's English Delight, Stephen Fry's Radio 4 programme about the English language. A schoolmasterly man himself, Fry listened, I thought, with regret, as an assortment of language experts — I mean no disrespect: some of my best friends are lexicographers and linguisticians — preached the gospel of wrong is right because whatever the people decide to make of language is what language must become.

Say less when you mean fewer, infer when you mean to imply — none of it matters because what the unlettered populace does with words today the rest of us will meekly do tomorrow. Brute proof, of course, is on the side of those who argue in this fashion; yesterday's sins do indeed become forgotten in the democracy of usage. But that doesn't mean there is not a vice called illiteracy, and that we shouldn't, every now and then, seek to save something from its all-devouring maw.

Take the uninterested/disinterested confusion which Fry's programme mentioned. It is true that these words have changed places over time; that disinterested once meant unconcerned and uninterested meant without bias, whereas it is now the other way around. Or would be the other way around had absence of bias not become a forgotten concept and unconcern — do I look bovvered? — not carried all before it. But it is not pedantry for pedantry's sake that makes one argue for the retention of disinterested. It is because the state of mind it describes — freedom from self-seeking, preparedness to think and act impartially, without taking account of personal advantage, a grand carelessness of profit — is one we cannot afford to lose.

Differentiation matters. Ignorance is not argument. Disinterestedness is not another word for "Whadever!". We are quick to outlaw words when they don't suit the temper of the times. We should, to defy the temper of the times, try rescuing a few.

What is this stuff about preaching "the gospel of wrong is right"? (I'm afraid I do not listen to Stephen Fry's Radio 4 series on language. I have heard promos, and a snatch of it, and despite being a Stephen Fry fan I find it unbearable.) It's hard not to read Jacobson as declaring wrongness to be permanent. That is, he seems to deny that the spreading of what was once an error or a confusion can eventually solidify into a feature of the language. Yet Jacobson admits that the words "disinterested" and "uninterested" have changed their meanings during the recorded history of English and he accepts the newer, changed meanings, so he is not being consistent.

Jacobson also shows some signs of being in the grip of the fallacy that if anything goes, everything goes. If ever some form of words once thought to be a solecism is taken to have become part of Standard English, then all is lost. Acceptance would be capitulation to the schoolteacher-hating ignorance of a culture that tosses aside all generalizations about usage, refusing to accept them precisely because they involve judgment and the possibility of correction. "Say less when you mean fewer, infer when you mean to imply — none of it matters…", he wails. But why does none of it matter, just because one opinion about acceptable usage is revised?

I am not suggesting that there is anything to revise about disinterested and uninterested, by the way: I am not a fan of the tendency to use the former for the meaning that the latter standardly bears. (And it's interesting, I think, that there seems to be no current sign of any tendency to shift meanings in the other direction. The two words are not collapsing together.) But suppose we did decide that it had become standard for disinterested to be ambiguous between "unbiased" and "uncaring". Why would that imply a cataclysm of abandonment, a whole domino series of cascading usage mergers?

I happen to think that the generalization about less and fewer (the former goes with non-count nouns and the latter with count nouns), which Jacobson mentions, has been erroneously formulated by many usage authorities. (This is particularly clear when we consider count nouns that are units of time: I am unable to believe that less than five years violates the syntax of my native language.) But that doesn't mean I have to toss away the distinction between imply (something that the speaker does) from infer (something that the hearer does in response): that distinction seems well grounded, and I am happy to follow the usual dictionary descriptions of it. Certainly, I am
not bound to abandon that distinction just because I have a revisionist opinion about less than.

For those who take an intelligent interest in language, there can be reasoned discussion about what exactly the rules exclude or permit — discussion that is disinterested in the modern sense, rather than committed in advance to a defense of current conservative dogma and uninterested in hearing anything to the contrary. But not for Howard Jacobson. For him it seems to be a choice between, on the one hand, adherence to every single rule any purist nutball has ever defended, and on the other, flushing all syntactic and lexical distinctions down the toilet. I reject this insane dichotomy.

People report that Jacobson has given up his former academic pretensions (he once taught in higher education institutions), and that when not pretending to be apoplectic over dangers to the English language he writes extremely funny novels about Jewish life in Britain. It's odd how little of his humor comes through when he writes about English instead of in it. But I think I've said as much before, in "Educational sky is falling says blithering windbag" and at the end of "Canoe wives and unnatural semantic relations".

The most recent xkcd:

(The original has the title tag "You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.")

Fail Blog has a picture of a panel with two switches labeled as follows:

天花燈                  夜燈
SMALLPOX        NIGHT LIGHT

This photograph elicited considerable discussion at Fail Blog, but — despite well over 150 comments — there was much consternation and little comprehension of why or how the confusion occurred.  The quality of the discussion at ADS-L was much higher (though far more limited), yet still left a number of questions unresolved.

Since, in the past, many Chinese friends (and even many Chinese teachers) have asked me why the Mandarin words for "smallpox" and "ceiling" share the same two characters, I've decided to make a fairly determined effort to explain how it happened.  Here's the etiology, not of smallpox, but of the failure.

夜燈 means exactly what the translation on the panel says:  YE4DENG1 — "night light" — so we won't worry about that.

天花燈 is TIAN1HUA1DENG1 — "sky flower light."  How in the world do we get "smallpox" out of that?

The problem arises because the word for "ceiling" in Mandarin is TIAN1HUA1BAN3 天花板 ("heaven flower board," a reasonable enough term since proper ceilings were decorated and "heaven" signifies "above," hence, "a decorated board above"), while the word for "smallpox" is simply TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]").  Obviously, the label on the left should have been "ceiling light," not "smallpox."

There is also a more scientific term in Chinese for "smallpox" and that is DOU4CHUANG1 痘瘡, but it is much less used than TIAN1HUA1 (Google hits 3,390,000).  Aside from the simple fact that it is more technical, I suspect that people avoid DOU4CHUANG1 (Google hits 88,400) partly because it looks and sounds a lot more scary than TIAN1HUA1.  First of all, both characters have the frightful Kangxi radical 104 for "illness, sickness" on the top and left side; just looking at 痘瘡 bashes you with a double dose of disease.  Second, the first character means "pox," and its phonophore calls up associations of some bean-like eruption.  Third, the CHUANG1 character means "skin ulcer," not a very pleasant thing to contemplate.  Certainly, TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") is a lot easier to deal with than DOU4CHUANG1 痘瘡 ("bean-like pox — skin ulcer")!

There is much controversy in the medical literature over just why "smallpox" is called TIAN1HUA1 in Chinese.  Most people would agree that the HUA1 ("flower[s]") part refers to the appearance of the pustules that cover the body of the afflicted.  See the photographs here and here.

Now comes the hard part:  why should smallpox pustules be characterized as "heaven(ly)"?

Fundamentally, there are two main theories in Chinese medical thought about the characterization of "heaven(ly)" for smallpox pustules.  The first is that they were caused by a smallpox deity (TIAN1 can also refer to deities).  Others hold that the smallpox deities (which were very much in evidence in premodern Chinese towns and villages) were there to protect people from smallpox, not cause them to get it.  The second main theory is that smallpox was "natural, innate, inborn"; I shall explain in detail below what the connection with TIAN1 is in this case.  A growing consensus among contemporary researchers seems to accept the second main theory over the first one.

I would add an additional theory of my own that I don't think has ever been broached before.  Namely, perhaps "heavenly flowers" was used as a sort of euphemism for this horrible disease.  I do not think that, if indeed such a euphemism were operative to any degree, it necessarily would have been employed instead of one or another of the above explanations, but rather it might have been used concurrently as a way to soften the harsh reality of the affliction.  The main reason I make this suggestion is because the expression TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") was already well established in Buddhist terminology before it was applied to smallpox.  Consequently, it would have been a familiar term that could have been used euphemistically in a novel way to refer to smallpox pustules.

TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") was the Chinese translation of Sanskrit KHA-PUS.PA = KHA-CITRA ("a picture in the sky") — anything impossible or not existing.   TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") was also the Chinese translation for various Sanskrit plant terms, but I don't want to go into them because they are too botanically complicated and not really essential for our purposes anyway.  I should mention, however, that one of the plants with which TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") has been associated is Hibiscus mutabilis (common name "cotton rose").  If we look at pictures of Hibiscus mutabilis, the red ones do bear a resemblance to smallpox pustules (the white ones resemble the final stages of the flaking scabs to a lesser degree).

Be that as it may, KHA-PUS.PA, or TIAN1HUA1 in Chinese translation, were the divine flowers in the Lotus sutra, one of the most popular Buddhist texts in East Asia.  These divine flowers in the Lotus sutra were of four kinds, two red and two white.  It is curious that, in the 10-12 day period of development of the disease from macules to papules to pustules to lesions and finally scabs, they pass through stages of firm, fleshy redness to flaky, depigmented whiteness.

Another way of writing TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]") in Chinese is TIAN1HUA1 天華, which also means ("heaven flower[s]"); this form was used to translate Sanskrit DIVYA-PUS.PA ("divine flower" — Ner[i]um odorum).

Smallpox became endemic in China around the 10th century, well after the Buddhist terminology in the Lotus sutra had become established and people were thoroughly familiar with the notion of TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]").
Once smallpox was endemic, it became a disease of children, almost a rite of passage.  If they survived smallpox, they were safe and had a good chance of growing up to adulthood.  People began to assume that some component of smallpox was inborn, a "fetal poison" (TAI1DU2 胎毒) that everybody carried around — the toxic residue of conception, some said — and that under the influence of seasonal energy (SHI2QI4 時氣), it would erupt into a case of smallpox.  In this sense, smallpox was "innate" ("inborn," "natural" — in Chinese, TIAN1 天 can imply all of these things as well as "heaven").  This theory of the "fetal (i.e., innate) poison" that could potentially cause smallpox was already prevalent from the Tang period (618-907).

The theory of "fetal (i.e., innate [heaven-born] poison)" also ties into Chinese medical ideas about XIAN1TIAN1 先天 ("pre-heaven, i.e., congenital") traits and HOU4TIAN1 後天 ("post-natal") disorders.

Just before I finished writing this blog, Randy Alexander wrote to me from Jilin (China) and mentioned that he had made a new addition to the discussion at ADS-L.  Randy's remarks are mostly focused on Manchu materials but are very helpful for understanding the sensitivity of late imperial Chinese toward this terrifying illness.  There can be no doubt that the Manchus dreaded this disease; two of their emperors died from it, Shunzhi (1638-1661) and Tongzhi (1856-1875).

The leading researcher on the history of smallpox in China is Chia-feng Chang.  Here are some of his important publications on the subject (Randy mentions the last one in his post):

Chang Chia-feng. 1995. “Strategies of Dealing with Smallpox in the Qing Imperial
Family,” in Hashimoto, Jami, Skar, eds., East Asian Science, 199-205.
______. 1996a. “Aspects of Smallpox and its Significance in Chinese History.”
Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.
______, [張嘉鳳]. 1996b. “Qing chu de bi dou you cha dou zhidu” 清初的避痘與查痘
制度 (Eradicating and diagnosing smallpox during the early Qing dynasty”).
Hanxue yanjiu, vol. XIV, no. 1, 135-56.
______, [張嘉鳳]. 1996c. “Qing Kangxi huangdi cai yong rendou fa de shijian yu yuan
yinshi tan,” Zhonghua yishi zazhi 26.1, 30-2.
______. 2000. “Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox
Aetiology in Pre-modern China.” In Conrad and Wujastyk, eds., Contagion:
Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, 23-38.
______ 張嘉鳳. 2001. “‘Jiyi’ yu ‘xiangran’—yi Zhubing yuanhou lun wei zhongxin
shilun Wei Jin zhi Sui Tang zhijian yiji de jibing guan” ‘疾疫’與‘相染’以
“諸病源候論”為中心試論魏晉至隋唐之間醫籍的疾病觀 (“Epidemics and
Contagon: Using the Treatise on the Origins and Symptoms of Various Diseases
to discuss the medical perspective on illness from the Wei and Jin to the Sui-Tang
period”). Taida lishi xuebao 27 (June): 37-82.
______. 2002. “Disease and Its Impact on Politics, Diplomacy, and the Military: The
Case of Smallpox and the Manchus (1613–1795)” Journal of the History of
Medicine and Allied Sciences 57.2: 177-197.

Thanks to Che-chia Chang, Marta Hanson,  Hilary Smith, Charlotte Furth, and Wenkan Xu for assistance with the medical literature.

In response to my question here, an authoritative answer from Alana Johns, who was asked by Ewan Dunbar, who was asked by Bill Idsardi:

iquq means stuff hanging down around the anus (dingleberries?).  S___ says when they were kids they would tease each other by calling each other "iquq" (in English we also say "you dirty bum!")

Adding -aluk would intensify the noun 'large, impressive' and then of course it is pluralized with -it:

iqu(q )+ alu(k) _it  'many large dirty bums'  →  iqualuit

BUT iqaluit (the name of the capital of Nunavut) is

iqalu(k) 'fish, normally char' + it plural → iqaluit

For Americans, perhaps a more idiomatic translation of iqualuit would be "big poopybutts", or "major dingleberries".

Next question: is the syllabification i-qu-a-lu-it vs. i-qa-lu-it, so that the place name has one fewer syllables than the (Inuktitut pronunciation of) the wrongly spelled version?

Those who enjoyed Penny Arcade's take on ghey may also like Jay Smooth's "Old Person's Guide to 'No Homo'":