the paranoia of celebrities

If totalitarian regimes greatly restrict public language, pushing people toward coded language but making codes problematic by taking away the shared platforms where they could be unambiguously decoded, then a fraying totalitarian regime where people are bolder with their codes but still lacking the platforms for decoding is doubly problematic.

(Think of a situation where any attempt at alignment, at “clearing up", could constitute an act of transgression in itself, threatening with high costs all participants.)

So while doublespeak and expected complicity were becoming commonplace in the city of my childhood, people were still rightly worried that 1) their codes may be misconstrued, 2) any innocent remark would be interpreted as a code by someone wishing them harm.

Amazing piece on Medium by Anna Gát (Three Prologues to Language), the whole thing here

Torments

People who at once start talking 19 to the dozen are exasperating. Just consider those documentary films about animals, in which those young, good-looking commentators say something which doesn't have anything to do with an answer. This is actually meaningless, because things are just being read off and because the spokeswoman has never seen the animal.  This is one of my chief torments.

Gadamer, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist in May 2000 (Interviews 1)

War has not broken out

You may disagree with me: you may see some thread of sensible presidential policy presentation in Trump's speeches. I'll leave that up to you in the privacy of the voting booth (this is Language Log, not Presidential Election Voting Advice Log). But don't imagine that my horror at the incoherent political ranting of this coarse, repellent, insulting, xenophobic, muskrat-coiffed, narcissistic property developer has to entail disagreement with my friend Mark Liberman about the characteristic features of spontaneous, unplanned monologue, because it doesn't.

Geoff Pullum on the incomparable Language Log, which is, needless to say, still bringing joy into our humdrum little lives after all these years. (No, Geoff, no, Mark, your hard work ain't been in vain for nothing.)

So lovely

I follow up a link for a job with the New Yorker as Associate Director, Audience Development. Am immediately blasted with a lot of language that would never be permitted in the pages of the, erm, New Yorker except possibly in a quirky little piece on corporatespeak.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with editors, publishers, product development, and sales & marketing groups to develop and execute data-driven audience-growth plans across all content distribution platforms and maximize customer monetization
• Develop and experiment with new content executions in emerging distribution platforms
• Project-manage all audience development touch points and their associated components, from inception to successful completion
• Measure the performance of audience development initiatives and optimize them according to business goals
• Identify new growth opportunities and best practices based on emerging digital trends, competitive business intelligence, and consumer insight
• Manage overall audience development testing strategy—including funnel optimization, distribution channel mix, and headline and image optimization
• Work closely with digital leadership to determine and meet growth KPIs and insure that they align with revenue strategy
• Apply SEO initiatives and best practices to the content strategy that will strengthen and optimize both website and keyword rankings

Cross-functionally!? (or possibly ?!)
Customer monetization!?
Content executions!?
Project-manage (wha-? new verb to me, and while there ARE publications that embrace the new, the type of person who would embrace this one would never get a gig as editor at the, erm, New Yorker). Moving right along to the object, Project-manage all audience development touch points. OK, or, as the New Yorker would put it, okay, I take it, having read this text, that there are people out in the world who know what an audience development touch point is, and if you know you can probably swan through "associated components" without driving yourself insane by asking what it would mean for something to be a component of a touch point. If you are such a person you are, I can't help feeling, unlikely to warm to the, erm, New Yorker, let alone subscribe to it. And yet YOU are the person whose job is, I gather, to get more readers AND get them to pay for something you think is a load of bollocks.

It's as if a 3-star restaurant thought it could best be promoted by someone who ate Pedigree Chum in the home.

An agent told me last year he could get me a 6-figure deal on work in progress + rights to The Last Samurai. Had his reach not exceeded his grasp, I would naturally not have been exploring careers at Condé Nast. If I did not have credit card debts that weigh on my mind I would have stopped at "cross-functionally."  Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.

I clicked on Continue, and was asked to complete a profile including a menu on Career Focus. The options:


Advertising
Corporate 
Editorial
Entertainment
Technology

Hm.

I selected Entertainment.

And it was at this point, cats and kittens, that I decided to write a blog post instead.

¿K?

Watching Narcos on Netflix.  Weirdly, Pablo Escobar addresses his brother as usted, while his brother addresses Pablo as tu.  Can this possibly be Colombian usage? I find it hard in any case to believe that one brother would address another as usted, but if this sort of asymmetry were to occur, I would expect the more powerful to use tu and the less powerful to use usted. Baffled.

either either

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific things that Americans don't say and English people don't realise … Also New York has enough writers, and I don't think I need to add to them," she said.

Zadie Smith says she will never write another book set in the US, because she got so many complaints about On Beauty.  Well, I can see it would be annoying if peevish emails kept turning up in one's inbox. We can only hope Lee Child does not follow her example.

Sometimes, of course, one is bad. One knows one is in the wrong and goes on regardless.  Someone pointed out to me some time ago that "in no very good mood" is not American usage. I kept trying to think of a replacement that I liked and couldn't.  Finally I thought, Well, it may not be American usage now, but who's to say? Maybe Americans will see it and like it and start using it, and then this instance in my book will simply be the first attested case in American English.

over there

Part of a series begun in World War II for American GIs going abroad, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was intended to introduce them to the customs, and, rather lightly, the dangers of the place where they were headed. First issued in 1962, it was revised in 1966 and has now been republished by Oxford’s Bodleian Library, with an introduction by Bruns Grayson, a veteran who arrived in Vietnam in 1968 and was given the booklet. Grayson describes the average soldier handed the Pocket Guide as “about twenty years old, not well-educated, not wily enough to avoid the draft in most cases, very often on his first trip away from the United States. I don’t know what the Vietnamese equivalent of ‘overpaid, oversexed, and over here’ was…such a phrase would have described almost all of us.”

But the young, uneducated soldiers described by Grayson also had to be told why they were going to Vietnam, from which, after all, they might not return. “It is interesting,” Grayson writes, “that the booklet accurately and briefly describes the history of the Vietnamese resisting outsiders—the Chinese and others—while assuming that we could never be cast in this light.” 

Jonathan Mirsky at NYRB blog, the rest here

Yesterday

Gestern wurde ein Humalog KwikPen vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Mammut vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Ring vergessen.  Gestern wurde ein Gebilde aus Kunststoff vergessen.

Went back to check out the Sankt Oberholz blog, which gives poignant yet witty descriptions of items left at the café.  As so often, think some of the books I would like to write can only be written in German.

ipse dixit (allegedly)

1. Mr. Chicago Hates Hyphens

What’s wrong with hyphens?  Mr. Chicago hates them, loathes them, despises them.  He hates them so much that he wouldn’t let me refer to Jesus’s original audience as “Palestine-dwellers,” but instead insisted on “Palestinians.”  (Palestinians?!  I’ll get hate mail!)  He also wants me to use “words” like nonmoral, nonillusionistic, nonmagical, noncomic, noncraft, nonformative, noncentrality, nonmythical, semimythical, counterposition, antireferential, pseudoimmortality, and selffashioning (all of which get squiggly red lines from Microsoft Word.)  I sometimes think he has a secret desire to turn English into German.  An Englishintogermanconvertingdesire.

Then again, he regularly wants me to glue the prefix onto the word, even where the resulting monster looks like it should sound different: firsthand, preemptively, preexisting, preestablished, cooperative.  (Yes, I know what the New Yorker does with those; the hörror, the hörror.)

Siu Kam Wen

¿QUÉ SIGNIFICA PARA TI, UN CHINO DE PRIMERA GENERACIÓN, ESCRIBIR EN ESPAÑOL? ¿HAS INTENTADO HACERLO EN CANTONÉS O EN MANDARÍN?

Comencé a escribir ficción a los diez años, pero en chino. Sólo a partir de los 29 decidí hacerlo en español. En esa época el panorama literario de los chinos en Perú era desolado; no había poetas ni novelistas; y se me ocurrió que si los de segunda o tercera generación no estaban dispuestos a asumir ese reto, lo haría yo. Fue una actitud un poco arrogante pero dio resultado. Por supuesto, antes de poder tomar la pluma y sentarme a escribir mi primer cuento en español, tuve que pasar por un largo y penoso proceso de aprendizaje del idioma. Yo no aprendí el español en la forma ortodoxa que conocemos, en la calle y en el colegio, sino haciendo traducciones de textos clásicos, del español al chino y viceversa, durante mis vacaciones de verano. Eso fue entre las edades de once y dieciséis. Cuando ingresé a un colegio nacional a los diecisiete, ya podía expresarme literariamente en español. 

Luis Pulido Ritter interviews the Chinese-Peruvian writer Siu Kam Wen

I went to Meeting this morning at the Society of Friends in Planckstraße.  I got there very early; the woman who greeted me, Gisela Faust, talked to me for a while before the meeting began.   The Meeting was founded in 1920, after the First World War.  It had been here through National Socialism, through the Second World War and everything that followed. I asked if she had been here for all this; she said yes, she was 98. (I think I heard that right.)  She then said that Quakers addressed each other as du.  (I had used Sie.) Which of course they would - except it had never occurred to me.  The early Quakers used only thou for the second-person pronoun, I think not only for each other but for everyone; now English pronouns no longer offer a distinction comparable to that between 'you' and 'thou'; I had never bothered to think about Quaker linguistic practice in languages that had kept the informal second person singular.  (Since you ask, the German plural of Quaker is Quäker. A form it is impossible not to love.)

I used to go to Meeting quite often in Chesterfield, but I have not gone often since.  I did go once in New York last autumn.  As you may know, Meetings are normally silent, but if someone is moved to speak they may do so. The principle is that there is that of God in everyone.  The contributions the spirit moves people to make are, as you can probably imagine, something of a mixed bag; this Meeting was silent for about 20 minutes or so and then became rather talkative. I missed the silence. After several contributions a woman stood up, placed her hands on the back of the seat in front of her, and remained standing in silence.  A couple of minutes passed. Another woman stood up and began to share some insight. The silent woman said: I am standing in silence.

I didn't know you could do that, preemptively stake out a space for silence.  What a wonderful convention!  And how splendid it would be if some such convention were more widely available.

   

will have had gone

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

comment on Languagehat. Who does not normally draw attention to items on Language Log, assuming most readers will be reading LL anyway.  (I know I do.)  But could not resist discussing a post on LL on a tense that was certainly new to me: will have had gone.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

(I was reminded of the fact that there are people who honestly believe that if a speaker of British English had a moment of extreme emotion such as fear or anger, the affected British manner of speech would drop away and they would cry out in American English.) 

...

But back to the evolution of language. Caesar makes only one other intelligible spoken utterance in the film. It is a full clause, well enunciated, right at the end. Naturally students of the evolution of syntax will want to know the structure. It is what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) calls a complex-intransitive canonical clause, with copular be as its main verb.

Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the whole thing here.

It's not just lexical. You can walk — or run, crawl, scurry, roll, etc. — out the gate, out the back, out the exit, etc. You can look — or stare, peer, gaze, squint, etc. — out the window, out the porthole, out the viewport, out the sunroof, etc.
But you can't (standardly) walk out the house, or out the plaza, or out the village, or whatever — all of those need "of". Nor can you (standardly) peer out the box, or stare out the car, or shoot out the bushes — though you can perfectly well shoot at someone out of the bushes, etc.
Apparently out as a transitive preposition has something to do with transiting from within an enclosed space through a limited aperture of some kind.

Mark Liberman at Language Log 

Conversely, out of has to do with exiting an enclosure or container.
It seems to me that you walk or come out of X for those X values where you can’t be in X in the sense of inside X or fully within X.” You can be in the bushes, in the house, in the water, in the blue, and in the car, all of which are containers of sorts (or of you), so you walk or come out of those things. You cannot be inside the door or the window, so you come out those things (without of).

commenter Steve Kass, ibid.

no more fried ants jokes

the age of an individual is not measured chronologically in Amondawa culture, which lacks a numerical system able to enumerate above four. Rather, individuals are categorized in terms of stages or periods of the lifespan, based upon social status and role, and position in family birth order. As we have also noted, each Amondawa individual changes their name during the course of their life, and the rules governing these name changes form a strict onomastic system.

Courtesy Language Hat, Stan Carey on “When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture,” a paper by Chris Sinha et al. in Language and Cognition.

unable to understand basic sentences

Overall, I found the experiments fairly convincing. I do worry a bit about what some colleagues and I used to call "the paper airplane effect": At one point we thought we had discovered that a certain fraction of the population is surprisingly deaf to certain fairly easy speech-perception distinctions; the effect, noted in a population of high-school-student subjects, was replicable; but observing one group of subjects more closely, we observed that a similar fraction spent the experiment surreptitiously launching paper airplanes and spitballs at one another.

Mark Liberman at Language Log

crash blossoms

I figured that my example, a news headline containing the extraordinarily garden-path-leading word sequence proposed to by a lightning strike, met the definition squarely. But your mileage may differ (you can comment below). I'm merely a linguist; nobody put me in charge of the development of the lexicon or the emergence of new words or phrases. Even with phrases coined or publicized here on Language Log (eggcorn, snowclone, etc.), ultimately all I can do is follow wherever I am led by the sure tread of the expert native speakers who give words and phrases their currency and their stability.

Geoff Pullum at LL

mind-reading fatigue revisitedl

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests to gauge people's reactions when exposed to four background noise settings: silence, a monologue, a conversation between two people and half a conversation (called a halfalogue). The study participants were seated at computers and asked to perform various cognitive tests while exposed to one of the three sounds or silence.

The study showed that hearing the halfalogue was the only background noise that distracted the study participants and lowered their scores on the cognitive tests. For some reason, our brains are unable to tune out half a conversation. Researchers believe this is because we can't predict the speech pattern of a halfalogue the way we can with a monologue or two-way conversation — making it harder to ignore. […]

LA Times ht Language Log

the house style

Mark Liberman finds a site, Onlinestylebooks.com, that lets you search 43 stylebooks at once:

Surveying this explicit variety of sources may help to avoid an otherwise-natural confusion. These stylebooks are not about the nature of (the formal written variety of) the English language: each of them documents (aspects of) one organization's policy about how to represent this language in writing, typically covering a limited set of cases that are both reasonably common and somewhat variable in general practice.

Some people are tempted to treat policies of this kind by analogy to the theological differences among religious sects. Believers are convinced that one set of policies is (or should be) God's Truth, with the others to be consumed in the fires of hell, while skeptics think that they're all just different forms of nonsense.

Both of these attitudes seem to me to misread the situation. Once you decide, for whatever reason, that representational consistency is a Good Thing, then you need to deal with the Long Tail of Linguistic Complexity. It's tempting to think that there are a few basic axioms from which the Right Answer could always be logically derived for any question of linguistic analysis — and perhaps some day a future linguistic Peano will give them to us. But as things stand, questions of linguistic representation are more like common law than like set theory. The only known way to achieve reasonably consistent results is to reason from a very long list of precedents, which is always in the process of gradual development, with occasional major revisions. This rational catalogue of worked examples is meant to be consistent with a hierarchy of more general principles, but it's not reducible to them.

The whole thing here. (HT John McIntyre's You Don't Say)

continent cut off

Mark Liberman discusses 'beg the question' on Language Log. A commenter chips in.

As to whether 'begs the question' is an archaic term for all but a few specialists, I didn't grow up surrounded by formal logicians or professional philosophers but I've used it unselfconsciously since my childhood (OK, we're a pretty argumentative family…).

[(myl) As someone who uses the this phrase in its medieval-logic version without being a philosopher or an intellectual historian, you fall into the category that I described as "the few pedants". The "few" part of this description is not open to question, I think — the phrase is fairly common in the mass media, and roughly 99% of its uses are the kind that make you "seethe in silence", with most of the rest being meta-discussions in writings about usage. And "pedant" seems to me like a plausible description for people who maintain an irrational residue of high culture that almost no one else knows about. If it makes you feel any better, I'm obviously a member of the same category.]

This is a bit unnerving - I had no idea 'beg the question' was commonly used to mean 'raise the question', and can't remember ever having heard it used that way. (I did, admittedly, study philosophy, so what I now find to be the minority usage seems natural.) ML, anyway, offers an excellent discussion of the history of the phrase.

[Er. I see Languagehat thinks the commenter is cut off from reality and we should dispense with this silly phrase. A slight problem is that I frequently find myself in arguments with people who assume the conclusion. I naturally want to point out that the argument is flawed, but the use of formal, academic language is often perceived as cold, aggressive, hostile; an 'ordinary language' phrase always seemed ideal for the situation. The point being, all this time I was under the happy illusion that ordinary language actually provided a phrase that was fit for purpose. The thing that's revealing about the discussion is not that the phrase is more esoteric than I had realised, but that the concept turns out, as far as I can see, to have no place in the culture at large.]