A newsreader on CBC Radio One has just seen fit to reassure us that, despite today's worrisome financial developments in the States, things look rather better "north of the forty-ninth parallel." This is not terribly comforting if you consider that the TSX is somewhere around 43º, and the Bourse de Montréal circa 45º.

The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In 1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following to say about widows and widowers:

Surely a bereaved husband and a bereaved wife are equivalent: they have both undergone the loss of a mate. But in fact, linguistically at any rate, this is not true. It is true that we have two words, widow and widower; but here again, widow is far commoner in use. Widows, not widowers, have their particular roles in folklore and tradition, and mourning behavior of particular sorts seems to be expected more strongly, and for a longer time, of a widow than of a widower. But there is more than this, as evidenced by the following:

24. 1. Mary is John's widow.
    2. *John is Mary's widower.

Like mistress, widow commonly occurs with a possessive preceding it, the name of the woman's late husband. Though he is dead, she is still defined by her relationship to him. But the bereaved husband is no longer defined in terms of his wife. While she is alive, he is sometimes defined as Mary's husband (though less often, probably, than she is as "John's wife"). But once she is gone, her function for him is over, linguistically speaking anyway.

As of this morning (at the latest), this is no longer true. Here is today's New York Times reporting on yesterday's election in Pakistan:

Bhutto’s Widower, Viewed as Ally by U.S., Wins the Pakistani Presidency Handily

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who has little experience in governing, was elected president of Pakistan on Saturday by a wide margin.

We talk about "sexist language," but, as Lakoff's book made clear, it's not really the language that is at fault. The sexist asymmetries in our language merely reflect, and to some extent reinforce, the sexism that is present in our society. (The words governor and governess, for example, were once about as parallel semantically as they are morphologically; that they have drifted apart is merely a reflection of the fact that society generally assigned men to govern states, and women to govern children. This pair, I think, is unlikely to swing back into sync; Sarah Palin is not the governess of Alaska.)

Zardari is described as "Bhutto's widower" for the same reason that so many women over the centuries have been described as somebody's widow: because the deceased spouse is more prominent in the speaker's mind than the surviving one. All it took to make the construction in Lakoff's (24b) grammatical was the remarkable career of Benazir Bhutto. If we want to change the language, all we have to do is change the world.

Sherry Stern, writing in the Los Angeles Times, and reprinted in my morning paper, tells us:

The creator of the popular comic strip For Better or for Worse has had a change of heart — literally and figuratively — and won't be retiring after all.

As it turns out, "literally and figuratively" seems to mean something more like "in two slightly different figurative senses"; Johnston's decision not to retire was prompted by a change in her personal life, not by a heart transplant. Now, I have, in a previous post, sketched a possible defence for the use of the word literally as a mere intensifier (not that I would ever use it that way myself, mind you). However, I don't think you can get away with using this bleached sense of literally if you are also conjoining (and contrasting) it with figuratively.

In any case, I don't think the intensifying meaning of literally was what Stern had in mind. The idea seems to be that Johnston had a change of heart (in the ordinary idiomatic sense of the phrase) about retiring after undergoing a change in a matter of the heart (in another conventional figurative sense of heart), namely the end of her marriage. But it's not at all obvious to me which one Stern thought of as literal.

Is it soap? Or is it a phone sex line?

Answer: It is a body wash. I saw it in a grocery store recently. Further research indicates that it comes packaged with a rather histrionic brand of masculinity. The Web site for the product (which is Flash-based, and which I decline to link to) proclaims that it is maintenance for your mansuit™. (I am not entirely sure what a mansuit™ is, but I would have assumed that it was dry-clean only, unless perhaps it was disposable.)

They also have rules. Rule number fourteen is "Women should smell like fruit. Men should smell like men."

I do not want to know what this stuff smells like.

I do not want to know what it is made from, either.

You've probably already read more than enough about the drawing of Barack and Michelle Obama that recently appeared on the cover of The New Yorker. I don't really have anything to add to that discussion, except to say that I wish more of the people who wrote about it had (as Arnold Zwicky at Language Log did) bothered to note the title of the piece, which was "The Politics of Fear." (To find the title, you actually have to open the magazine and look it up in the table of contents, but I think it's worth the effort.) Once you know the title, the satirical intent of the drawing is clear; it is an image of a paranoid racist fantasy extrapolated by the American right from the fist bump in the centre of the page. All that remains to be debated is the effectiveness of the satire; the obvious objection is that it is simply not possible to satirize something that is itself already as outrageous as the frenetically slanderous bushwa of Fox News and its ilk.

So what I'd like to talk about instead is another recent New Yorker drawing that I happen to find considerably more offensive than "The Politics of Fear," but which will undoubtedly receive nowhere near the same degree of attention. This one is by Seymour Chwast, and it appears on page 87 of the August 11 & 18 issue, illustrating a piece by Nicholas Lemann called "Conflict of Interests," which discusses Thomas Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew in the context of Arthur Bentley's hundred-year-old book The Process of Government. Here's the relevant portion of the picture, together with its caption:

Well, let's see here. What kinds of interest groups do we belong to?

• business executives
• doctors
• construction workers
• women

In the world depicted in this drawing, then, your interests are defined by your profession if you are a man, but by your sex if you are a woman. (I'm making some inferences here, of course, but I think they're reasonable ones—it's not completely unambiguous what group the guys in suits are supposed to represent, for example, but I'm assuming that because they are dressed so similarly, their defining characteristic is meant to be their occupation, or perhaps their wealth, but in any case not their sex.)

Remind me again—what century is it?

Of course, an illustration is just an illustration, and any drawing that could have gone in this space would necessarily abstract away from all sorts of complexities discussed in the article itself. In the real world, each of us belongs not to a single group, but to several overlapping ones, with various and sometimes conflicting interests, but it would be rather awkward to try to convey all of this in the picture. Nor do I expect each little trio in the drawing to be perfectly representative of the demographics of the group it signifies; you just can't do that with three figures. That's not the problem. The problem is that in this picture, women are the only group defined by what they are instead of what they do, and there are (as far as I can tell) no women at all among the groups defined by occupation.

Obviously, this sexist view of the world is not the point of the illustration. This (combined with the fact that it appears inside the magazine, rather than on the cover) is why it will not elicit the same uproar as "The Politics of Fear," where the racism was the point. It's also what makes it so much more insidious than the controversial cover, and that's precisely why I feel compelled to point it out.

Every now and then, an article in my morning newspaper will call to mind scenes of high fantasy presumably uncontemplated by the journalist who wrote it. Consider for example the following sentence, from a piece by Tim Harper, of the Star's Washington bureau, speculating about potential vice-presidential candidates for the upcoming election in the United States:

With many of her supporters still reticent [sic] to move into the Obama camp, there is a sense the nominee would also be reluctant to pick Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius [sic] for fear of further alienating Clinton backers who believe the New York senator is the most qualified woman in the country.

Here's how I pictured it: (Please forgive the prose style; I'm seriously out of my genre here.)

But politics—even American politics—is not fantasy, no matter how fantastic it may seem at times. Most of Senator Clinton's supporters, I should think, believe that she is the most qualified person (of either sex) for the job. A great many of them are feminists. Why on earth would they be more alienated by the choice of Governor Sebelius (or any similarly qualified woman) than by the choice of Governor Kaine (or any similarly qualified man)?

This "sense" that support for Clinton means that Obama cannot choose any other woman as his running mate is nonsensical. Its an existence is a reminder of how far North American political culture has to go to achieve anything like true equality between the sexes. The fact that a woman can be a serious contender for the nomination of a major party is good, but it is nowhere near good enough if there still lurks behind it the notion that one female contender blocks any possibility of another female contender, while male candidates are always an option. And it's not just the political culture, either; I'm reminded of a somewhat clue-deficient professor of mathematics who asked a colleague of mine, "Is there another woman in your department?" (Well, yes, actually—in fact a large majority of the faculty there are women. Why do you ask?)

The vice-presidential nomination will not necessarily go to the most qualified candidate. (As Kim "Qoheleth" Campbell would say, the race is not always to the swift.) There are always lots of considerations other than the question of who would actually be best at the job of being vice president. Some reasons for rejecting a candidate are better than others, but "Sorry, we've already considered someone else of your sex" is one of the worst.

As discussed in a recent post on Language Log, John McCain has an interesting tendency to say "Iraq" when one might expect to hear "Afghanistan." In the most notorious example, he referred to "the Iraq-Pakistan border"; this led to some speculation about whether he really thought there was such a border (the least charitable hypothesis), or whether it was just a slip of the tongue (Mark Liberman's charitable interpretation), or whether "the Iraq-Pakistan border" is the new way to say "Iran" (my suggestion).

From what I heard on CBC Radio last night, though, I'm now inclined to think that McCain really does think that Afghanistan and Iraq are the same place. The CBC played a clip in which McCain made an ‘argument’ that can be paraphrased as follows:

1. Barack Obama says that the U.S. should send more troops to Afghanistan.
2. Sending more troops constitutes a surge.
3. But Barack Obama said that the surge in Iraq was a bad idea.
4. Therefore, Barack Obama is being inconsistent. Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah!

McCain's reasoning is sound if and only if "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" refer to the same place, or perhaps if there is One Correct Strategy that applies to all conflicts everywhere. If John McCain believes either one of those things, it would be extremely foolish and dangerous to put him in charge of deciding where to deploy U.S. military forces.

UPDATE: This post has now been incorporated into Number 35 in The Ridger's series called What's Important, an enlightening and frequently alarming look at John McCain's misguided and fluctuating platform and his disingenuous campaign tactics.

A couple of days ago, my morning newspaper published a sidebar¹ from Reuters about "some steps taken by Chinese officials to get Beijing ready for the Olympics." One item reads as follows:

Chinglish: Officials have been trying to wipe out Chinglish, a quirky, nonsensical language combining both Chinese and English, off menus and road signs. One example? “Racist Park” signpost at a park celebrating ethnic diversity. Crimes against grammar range from spelling mistakes to paragraphs of total gibberish.

This is egregiously misleading on at least three counts. (It's also rather poorly written.)

First of all, the term "Chinglish," at least as it is used here, does not refer to a language; it is a (rather unfortunate) name for English text that has been badly translated from Chinese. It's the sort of translation you get when the translator is largely ignorant of either the source language or the target language, and is thus not in a position to do sanity checks to make sure that the translation actually means approximately the same thing as the original. (This happens a lot with unsupervised machine translation; if you're using a computer to translate text into a language you don't know, you might even end up mistaking an error message for a translation.) You look in your Chinese-English dictionary for an adjective meaning something to do with race; you find racist; you don't know what it means, and don't bother looking it up in the English-Chinese section of the dictionary to find out; and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of English-speaking tourists laughing at the sign outside your well-meaning park.

It's a bit like John Searle's famous Gedankenexperiment in which a person who speaks no Chinese is confined to a room containing a book with detailed instructions for manipulating Chinese characters. Chinese text comes in, and the person looks up what to do with it, performs the necessary operations, and sends out the reply. The person in the room appears to be communicating in Chinese, but in fact has no comprehension of the content of any of the messages. Searle's point was to suggest that even if we someday manage to make a computer that fluently manipulates natural language, that still won't mean that it understands anything. But if we replace the wonderful book in Searle's room with an ordinary bilingual dictionary (and swap languages), this approximates the situation of the hapless translator rather nicely.

There's nothing particularly special about "Chinglish" as compared to bad translations between other pairs of languages. (This blog, for example, is named after a mistranslation of my own that could perhaps be called an example of Czenglish.) If bad Chinese-to-English translations are more common than some other types, this may be because (1) the two languages are not related to each other, so the translator gets no help from cognates, (2) the two languages use different writing systems, so it takes more work to learn to read both of them, and (3) there are more Chinese-to-English translations than there are English-to-Chinese translations out there on the menus and signposts of the world. (Englinese is no less risible than "Chinglish"; it's just less common.)

In any case, "Chinglish" is not a language in the formal sense, because it would be absurd to ask whether a given sequence of words is or is not a well-formed utterance of Chinglish. And it's not a language in the functional sense, because the people who write it don't know what it says, and the people who read it don't know what it means.

Secondly, "Chinglish" doesn't really combine English and Chinese. The words are English, and they're influenced by Chinese only indirectly. There are certain patterns of substitutions and other errors that tend to come up because of ambiguities in possible correspondences between Chinese characters and English words—for example, 'dry' is often rendered as 'fuck'—but that's not at all the same thing as "combining both Chinese and English."

Thirdly, spelling is not grammar, dammit. (And I don't much care for this rather tired metaphor of "crimes against grammar" in any case, but it seems especially inappropriate in a context where the infractions are clearly unintentional.)

Why does any of this matter, apart from my general preference that my morning paper report truths rather than falsehoods? Aren't these errors fairly trivial? Well, it matters because this sort of nonsense has the potential to confound the way people think about real languages, and here I am thinking in particular of Singlish. Singlish really is a language:² people speak it, on purpose, and use it to communicate with one another, and fluent speakers can readily distinguish sensible Singlish sentences from gibberish. Singlish combines elements of English and Chinese (and Malay and Tamil and a few others besides). I believe it could reasonably be characterized as "quirky." (What natural language could not?)

So part of the trouble with the newspaper's account is that their description of "Chinglish" makes it sound very much like Singlish (except, of course, for the part about being nonsensical). If Reuters and the Toronto Star can't be bothered to differentiate between "a language that combines elements of other languages" and "a collection of bad translations from one language to another," then they are contributing to the misconception that mixed languages are somehow degenerate or inferior.³ To mistake a mistake for a language makes it easier to mistake a language for a mistake.

1. The main article to which it was adjoined was about attempts to reduce air pollution in Beijing, also for the Olympics.

2. In calling Singlish a language, I don't mean to get into such vexed questions as how to distinguish between a language and a dialect, or when to say that an interlanguage has become a pidgin, or a pidgin has become a creole. All I mean is that Singlish is very clearly something that "Chinglish" is not.

3. Consider, for example, the Singaporean government's effort to get people to speak English instead of Singlish; what I read in the newspaper obscures the differences between this and the Chinese government's effort to improve the quality of the English translations on public signage.

	I love the tonic,
The minor relative,
	Then the subdominant,
And then I love the fifth.

Boom de yada,

Boom de yada.

Mistah Helms, he dead.

I'm certainly not going to pretend to be at all saddened by that fact, but I'm not dancing for joy, either. The United States Senate was much improved by Jesse Helms's departure,¹ but his departure from the world of the living does nothing to repair the harm he did over the course of his long and nasty political career. Of all the right-wing lunatics who were in office during my formative years, Helms was probably the one I detested and resented the most, but I didn't want to see him defeated by old age and ill health; I wanted to see him defeated at the polls, preferably by Harvey Gantt, and by a very large margin.

Failing that, I would have liked to see Helms recant and repent. In later years, he did acknowledge that he had been wrong about AIDS as a global health crisis, evidently deciding that he had nothing against AIDS victims as long as they were heterosexual, and nothing against black people as long as they were in Africa. He also gave a revisionist account of his virulent opposition to the civil rights movement, claiming that what he had really objected to was government-imposed integration, and that he had thought all along that communities should just sort of integrate themselves naturally, in their own time. There is, of course, absolutely no evidence to support this interpretation, and Helms spoke of civil rights leaders, and of African Americans in general, in contemptuous terms for as long as it was politically possible to do so. In the fifties, he would rather have seen the public school system abolished than integrated.

Helms's eulogists insist that, whatever you may think of him politically, in person he was the model of the charming Southern Gentleman. This glosses over episodes such as his notorious run-in with Senator Carol Moseley Braun, in which he said he was going to sing Dixie at her until she cried. Moseley Braun was generous enough to laugh this off as just so much light-hearted collegial banter, and responded in kind by telling Helms that his singing was enough to make anyone cry, but in light of Helms's record, it's impossible to imagine that there wasn't genuine malice behind his facetious threat.

Helms used charm as a weapon. Barry Saunders, of the News & Observer, recalls a phone conversation in which Jesse said the worst thing he could have said to me: You're my favorite columnist. This statement was not one that anyone would be likely to believe; the point was presumably to make Saunders wonder, How [...] could I continue to write bad, albeit truthful, things about him after that? (As it turned out, It wasn't hard.)

In 1962, Helms and his wife, Dorothy, adopted a child with cerebral palsy, so there is reason to believe that the senator had some capacity for empathy. But he never had the imagination or courage to allow either empathy or reason to transport him beyond the commonplace bigotries of his time and place. His notion of defending freedom consisted entirely in fighting "communism"—never in standing up for individual liberties in the United States (or South Africa, or Chile)—and his notion of what constituted communism was broad enough to encompass (for example) Martin Luther King and the University of North Carolina. When the times moved forward, Helms was at best dragged reluctantly and belatedly along after them.

Rob Christensen in the N&O tells us that A number of historians say Helms' historical image will be tarnished by his opposition to the civil rights movement and the aspirations of black people. But that opposition is no mere blemish on the surface. How else should we remember "Senator No," if not as an obstacle to the rights of black people, women, and gay people? There is no metal under the corrosion; it's tarnish all the way through.

1. This statement should not be mistaken for an endorsement of his successor; to the extent that it implies that Senator Dole is an improvement over Senator Helms, this should be construed as damning her with faint praise.

A note about the illustration: The cartoon is by Dwayne Powell, of the News & Observer; it originally ran on July 7, 1980. If you are interested in calibrating your sense of who counted as a "liberal" in Jesse Helms's books, you may wish to recall that this was just a couple of months after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, and that the public had therefore not yet been exposed to the redeeming characteristics of Darth Vader that emerged three years later in Return of the Jedi.

This one's been around for a while, but The Ridger just did it again, and it looked like it might be fun. So here are, more or less, the first lines of the first twenty-five tracks to come up when I set iTunes to play my library of digitized music in pseudo-random order. Why "more or less"? Well, two tracks don't have lyrics, so for those I've given the first few bars of the melody; for songs whose first lines include their titles, I've reduced the title to initial letters and dashes; and in one instance there was a word I couldn't quite make out.

1. The sunlight fades behind the shades of cloud
2. There's n- n--- t- a---- anymore
3. Lord, hear my prayer
4. Well, I'm kinda tired of playing this game
5. I was sitting in Soho Square
6. Aghju cridutu di vede per annant'à lu stradone
7. I've got a [unintelligible] sublime; my spirits are high
8. She's got a mountain for a name
9. Billy ran around with a rare old crew
10. I got a number on me
11. We're sailing in a s------ b---
12. Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick
13. I----- B----, give me a ride to the city
14. McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
15. On a Friday it fell, in the month of April
16. Follow me; don't follow me
17. Yo no me he tomado, pero me voy a tomar un traguito ahora
18. 
19. Pain from pearls
20. 
21. [sound fx: telephone ringing] J-- r----- p- f-----
22. I k--- y-- r----, gonna miss me when I'm gone
23. I danced in the morning when the world was begun
24. Oh, darling, why'd you talk so fast?
25. Down, down, come on down; follow me down to the c------ w---

What's the point? Well, ostensibly you're supposed to come up with the titles and the performers, although the latter are really not recoverable in some instances. (I'll be reasonably impressed if you can identify the languages in 6 and 21; if you think 6 is Italian, you're not too far off, but have another look at the first word.) And presumably the other point of it is that you learn something about my impeccable taste in music, except that what I have digitized is somewhat haphazard. Some of this music I love, and some of it I barely know; I think two or three of these tracks were free Singles of the Week from the iTunes Canada store.

Fev, at Headsup: The blog (syndicated here on LiveJournal as headsuptheblog) recently remarked on this peculiar headline:¹

FBI: Man throws ice, grabs buttocks on plane
A Charlotte-bound flight had to make a quick landing Tuesday after authorities said a man wouldn't cooperate with the flight crew, throwing ice at passengers, refusing to fasten his seatbelt and grabbing a flight attendant.²

Fev explains the infelicity of the headline as follows: "This is a fault of parallelism, or coordination. 'Ice' is a noun, and 'buttocks' is a noun, but they aren't the same kind of noun."

The second of these statements is exactly right, but I don't entirely agree with the first. Coordination is not the problem here—the constituents being coordinated are two verb phrases, and that's fine. The problem is with the internal structure of the second verb phrase. It's true that what's wrong with the second verb phrase is that the direct object is a bare noun that shouldn't be a bare noun, and it's true that the first verb phrase also contains a bare noun as a direct object, but this parallel has nothing to do with whether it's possible to coordinate the two verb phrases. It would be fine to say "Man throws ice, grabs flight attendant's buttocks," with a bare noun in the first verb phrase and a possessed noun in the second.

What's interesting here is that we're dealing with headlinese, which is generally much more tolerant of bare nouns than other varieties of English. In ordinary English, you can have bare mass nouns and bare plural nouns, with an existential interpretation, but not bare singular count nouns; in headlinese, though, bare singulars are usually okay: "Man throws ice on plane" is perfectly good headlinese, but if you're not writing a headline, it would have to be "A man threw ice on a plane." (Tense works differently in headlinese, too, as you may have noticed.)

The crucial difference between ice and buttocks (well, the one that's crucial for people trying to write headlines, as opposed to the ones that are crucial for people trying to make cocktails) is that buttocks, like other body parts, are inalienably possessed. If I give you my ice, then it's not my ice anymore; it's your ice. But if I somehow detach my buttocks and give them to you, then even though you may be their legal owner, they're still my buttocks, in some profoundly inalterable sense. They're also yours, in the alienable sense; if you then sell them to some third party, they cease to be yours, but they will never cease to be mine. (Inalienable possession is not just for body parts, either—the same thing applies to kinship terms. If my sister sells me to you, I may be your slave, but I'm still her brother.)

In ordinary English, it would sound odd to say, "A man grabbed buttocks on a plane." The bare plural is not ungrammatical, but the existential interpretation it receives (≈ 'There were some buttocks, and a man grabbed them') is pragmatically weird. Were the buttocks just sitting there all by themselves, or were they still attached to their original owner(s)? At best, I might be able to use that sentence to describe a situation in which a man on a plane went around grabbing at various people's buttocks, perhaps indiscriminately; I don't think I could ever use it to report that a man had grabbed exactly one person's buttocks.

In headlinese, though, a bare inalienable noun is typically interpreted not as an existential, but as belonging to someone mentioned in the headline itself. "Man throws ice at daughter" would be taken to mean that a man threw some ice at his own daughter—if the target of the ice were someone else's daughter, the headline would read "Man throws ice at girl" or "Man throws ice at woman" (or, if she's the daughter of some particularly notable person X, "Man throws ice at X's daughter"). So the most salient interpretation of "Man grabs buttocks" is that he grabbed his own buttocks. (Hence The Ridger, FCD, remarks, "I was envisioning a rather aggressive mooning.") There is a considerable differnce between "Man grabs buttocks on plane" and "Man grabs flight attendant's buttocks": the former, while certainly indecorous, would probably not be cause for an abrupt landing, while the latter (absent the flight attendant's approval) is at best harassment and at worst assault.

1. I don't know where it originally appeared.

2. "Authorities said" is presumably trying to be some sort of parenthetical disclaimer here, without much success. The way this sentence is worded makes it sound as if the report preceded the landing.