Tenser, said the Tensor

Friendly Milk

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."

This is from a hilarious sketch by Fry and Laurie (via), which you can watch after the jump.

Notes on Hawaii

The Wife and I spent last week in Maui.  (Capsule review: paradise, plus good restaurants.)  Over the course of our stay, several linguistically interesting things happened, and I figured I should post about them.  What else is a language blog for?

Pressing the Turd

"They press it, and all the food (in the turd) goes away.  All that remains is the sweat, the shit with the sweat in it.  Then they scratch it."

A Serious

Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with the profusion of English collective nouns, which includes turns of phrase like a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, and many, many more.  These are also sometimes referred to as terms of venery, apparently the name for them popularized in An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.  (Yes, that James Lipton.)  At the moment, I'm catching up on a month of Language Log (a back-Log?), and I noticed the following typo in a post by Mark Liberman about the history of the site:

In October of 2003, we started to get somewhat serious about the enterprise, recruiting Geoff Nunberg and then a serious of other colleagues to join us.

This I Believe #21

...that when borrowing words into English, especially when their number is unclear and they tend to get used as mass nouns, you should invent singular forms for them as if they followed the high-prestige Latin pattern, regardless of their actual language of origin.  Examples:

(First declension)  The warrior class of ancient Japan were the samurai.  Each samura traditionally carried two swords.

(Second declension masculine)  When my wife dances, she wears decorative bindi.  Sometimes, during a performance, the glue comes loose and she loses a bindus.

(Second declension neuter)  Often for dessert at a Middle Eastern restaurant I will order a plate of baklava.  Generally it comes on a plate containing several pieces, so that each person at the table can have their own baklavum.

If you want to go the extra mile, you can even back-form an irregular third declension singular, as in:

I recommend the tempura. When eating it, be sure to dip every individual tempus in the special sauce provided.  (Extra bonus: round trip Romance-language borrowing!)

Finally, if you're really feeling ambitious, you can even do Latin-style number concord:

Traditionally, an order of nigiri sushi consists of two pieces.  Each nigirus sushus is a ball of rice with fish or some other food laid on top.

New Radiation Symbol

The IAEA and ISO have announced an updated version of the venerable ionizing radiation warning symbol.  The original was easily the coolest of the warning symbols, whose only serious competition was the biohazard symbol (though I have a soft spot for the laser symbol, myself).  However, it suffered from a serious flaw.  As the IAEA press release says, the original symbol "...has no intuitive meaning and little recognition beyond those educated in its significance."  They have therefore designed the following supplemental symbol:

Hmm.  It's not everything it could be.

More than Meets the Ear

Last week I heard a promo on the local NPR station for a show about the many meanings of the word transformers.  I didn't get a chance to listen to the show, which apparently discussed things like gang defection, personal style, and sexual identity.  What caught my attention was the way the announcer pronounced the word, which struck me as odd.  To my surprise, I seem to have two pronunciations of the word transformer in my mental lexicon with slightly different meanings, and I wonder if your judgments match mine.

Fold the Exalted Dog

This quarter I'm working on a machine-translation project.  For starters, we're working with a set of seventeen sentences that exercise some simple grammatical phenomena.  I don't speak most of the languages that have landed on my plate, so as a first pass I've been running the sentences through machine translation systems on the web.  I realize it's old news that round-trip translations are funny, but the results for the English-Korean-English loop are especially dreadful.

What Does the H Stand For?

I'm sure many of you have heard or used the expression Jesus H. Christ or one of its many variants, probably in connection with someone hitting himself in the thumb with a hammer or a similar mishap.  Have you ever wondered what the H stands for?  Cecil Adams wrote a column about this question more than thirty years ago, but he didn't have the Internet at his disposal.  I do, so to find and count all the variants of the expression, I fed it to my trusty snowclone script—though Jesus H. Christ doesn't have much syntax in it, so it probably isn't a phrasal template like a true snowclone, it's still of a form ("jesus X christ") the script can work on.  After the jump, therefore, I present to you: the many middle names of the Son of Man.

LSA 2007

I'm back from the 2007 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America:

...and it was great.  There's nothing quite like hanging out with a thousand or so colleagues for four days to renew your enthusiasm for linguistics.  After the jump, you'll find my notes on the meeting.