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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25 Champions League Returns – Matchday 1
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Language Log
Trump all-caps theories
From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):
I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.
But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.
ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM
But then there's more data:
In investigating my theory briefly, I have found out that it has some holes. This apparently needed emergency caps too.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:16 PM
Looking over a few days of "truths", I feel that Lane's idea has some force, e.g. this recent post, implicitly responding to the widely-noted gender gap in responses to Trump:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpOnWomen09202024.png
But a broader look suggests, unsurprisingly, that a broader theory is needed:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEasterAllCaps.png
Writing in all capital letters is (often) a typographical metaphor for increased vocal effort. Sometimes increased vocal effort just means that the intended listener is further away, or that the background noise level is greater. But those issues don't really apply to text, at least not in social media, where someone raising their textual voice, across a long stretch of capital letters, suggests a higher level of emotional arousal. And as this paper explains,
Dimensional models suggest that emotion is best understood as occurring within a dimensional space, most commonly a two-dimensional space spanning valence and arousal. Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, whereas arousal refers to its intensity, i.e., the strength of the associated emotional state (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Russell, 2003). These models typically assume valence and arousal to be at least in part distinct dimensions (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Reisenzein, 1994). However, behavioural ratings of emotion word stimuli show that highly positive and highly negative stimuli tend to be more arousing (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and negative stimuli are generally rated higher in arousal than positive stimuli (e.g., Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2012).
For a little bit more on the (very large) topic of typographical metaphors, see 'Everything, everything", 5/2/2017
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hood (1)
a neighbourhood, especially in a poor, urban area
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Idiom of the Day
like cheese at four pence
In an idle, awkward, and/or out-of-place state; being ignored, abandoned, or left to wait awkwardly. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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Language Log
Vanceism of the week: "Haitia"
Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.
J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Or maybe that shoud be "Heyshuh", as in lanetteking_81/video/7415969639982828830">this TikTok video.
This slip is pretty far down on the list of things for which Vance has recently been criticized, so one of the few other recent allusions to his morphological choice is buried in this thedailyshow/video/7415781354694217006">Daily Show segment.
For those from other countries (or planets) who haven't been following this story, the Haitians in Springfield OH are legal immigrants, and the accusations of pet-eating are false.
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Word of the Day
dusky
Definition: (adjective) Characterized by little or inadequate light; shadowy.
Synonyms: twilight, twilit.
Usage: I met him on the road one dusky evening, and he insisted on seeing me safely home.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
line up
If you line up, you join a line of people standing one behind the other, or side by side.
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ool of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
My response:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
Has anything changed?
Certainly not the false starts and parentheticals, and also not the repetitions and the associative jumps in topic. And there's even consistency in the focus on how others don't give him the credit that he deserves. I have the impression that a detailed analysis of his various rhetorical irregularities might show a quantitative increase in some dimensions — but I haven't done that yet, and neither has anyone else.
Donald Trump's rhetorical style is certainly different from most other contemporary American politicians. And there are plenty of plausible comparisons to alcoholic speech (though Trump is a teetotaler) and to the effects of various neuropsychological disorders, including some of those associated with aging. But his style is clearly effective in reaching an audience, and there's no clear evidence of any recent changes.
For (a list of far too many) more posts on related topics, see "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric".
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Word of the Day
suppliant
Definition: (noun) One praying humbly for something.
Synonyms: petitioner, requester, supplicant.
Usage: "Oh, God!" prayed the kneeling suppliant, "protect my husband, guard my son, and take my wretched life instead!"
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
whacked | whacked out
to be very tired, or very intoxicated from the use of alcohol or drugs
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Idiom of the Day
like rats abandoning a sinking ship
With great haste and having only personal well-being in mind. (Typically said of people who begin abandoning something or someone that is failing or about to fail.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: denigrate
This word has appeared in 61 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
save up
to put something aside for the future
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Word of the Day
interpenetrate
Definition: (verb) Spread or diffuse through.
Synonyms: imbue, permeate, pervade, diffuse, riddle, penetrate.
Usage: Crossing his arms on his chest, as if to control this new sensation of delight, he drank in delicious draughts of that mysterious air which interpenetrates at night the loftiest forests.
Discuss
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Language Log
International Talk Like a Pirate Day, again…
We missed it this year, but the New York Times didn't , and posted a link to Laurel MacKenzie's "Pirate Lingo 101":
Past Talk Like a Pirate Day posts:
"R!", 11/03/2003
"Type like a pirate day", 9/9/2004
"R!?", 9/19/2005
"Type like a pirate", 9/18/2006
"Pirate R as I-R-eland", 9/20/2006
"Powarrr law", 9/20/2006
"Post like a pirate", 9/19/2007
"R", 9/9/2008
"Said the Pirate King, Aaarrrf", 9/27/2010
"R R R", 9/19/2012
"Talk like a pirate", 9/19/2017
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Word of the Day
embodiment
Definition: (noun) A new personification of a familiar idea.
Synonyms: avatar, incarnation.
Usage: The State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kneel down
If you kneel down, you lower your height by putting one or both knees on the floor.
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Language Log
Genealogy rocks
Not only is it hard to spell, few people know what it means.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, on my trip to SLC three or four days ago, I fulfilled three of my childhood dreams: 1. float in the Great Salt Lake; 2. hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person; 3. visit the Family Research Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest genealogical library in the world (I remember that when I was a graduate student more than half a century ago, Mormon archivists spent two years filming every Chinese genealogical record in the Harvard-Yenching Library; at that time I did not understand why they would do that, now I do).
I was chatting with some people in the lobby of the motel where I was staying, and a young man in his early twenties asked me why I wanted to do #3, visit the genealogy research center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he himself was a Mormon).
I asked him, "Do you know what "genealogy" means?"
"Rocks?" he suggested.
I burst out laughing, and felt embarrassed that I did so, because I mystified the poor young man.
Selected readings
"Being descended from Confucius" (2/9/12)
"Confucius didn't mean that" (10/23/21)
"Moody's vs. Confucius and Mencius" (12/9/23)
"Mao and Chinese Character Reform: Revisionist History on CCTV" (11/7/23)
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Language Log
Can Google AI count?
Apparently not. Given this recent tweet, in which Google AI Overview explains that "October 21 is not a Libra, as the Libra zodiac sign is from September 23 to October 22", I thought I'd try for myself. The result had a different format but the same problem:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip4.png
We've previously described AI problems with counting R's in "strawberry", numbering sentences, etc., so this isn't surprising.
These various LLMs are very much a moving target, so what fails now might work next week. Or maybe not — consider the "John Backflip" legend, which was first noted in the spring of 2023 but remains alive today, as per this recent Bluesky post:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip1.png
When I tried it myself this morning, Google's AI overview distances itself a tiny bit by citing the source as a YouTube video and waving its metaphorical hand at other answers, while still featuring the fable as if it were true:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip0.png
The fact that most of these systems' answers are correct makes such logical and factual backflips more troubling.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pain | pain in the arse | pain in the backside
someone or something that's annoying or troublesome
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Idiom of the Day
like attracts like
People tend to seek out or be attracted to those that are similar or like-minded. Watch the video
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Language Log
Mormon Tabernacle Choir vowel variations
I departed a total of about 260 miles from my Route 30 / Lincoln Highway running route to come down to Salt Lake City for a few perduring reasons.
1. From the time I was a little boy, I have always wanted to float in the Great Salt Lake.
2. From the time I was in junior high school, I've always wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person.
3. From the time I was in high school, I have always wanted to visit the world's greatest collection of genealogical records, created at great expense and effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Last night I was privileged to hear the MTC — all 360 members, plus 110 members of the orchestra — during their Thursday evening practice session. Of course, the director paid a lot of attention to emphasis, volume, tonal quality, pronunciation, breathing, and so forth, but what amazed me most of all was the amount of time, attention, and care he devoted to variations in the quality of vowels.
At first I was going to refer to this phenomenon as vowel gradation, but then I realized that expression has been coopted for ablaut and umlaut. So I'm referring to it as vowel variation. What was particularly stunning was the fact that the quality of the vowels he demonstrated was intimately related to the melodic contours being performed. The director paid exceedingly close attention to this linkage, and the 360 members of the choir responded immediately and exactingly.
I don't think that any notation system (IPA or other) could record on a two dimensional surface the fine gradations / variations of the director's demonstrations. It had to be done orally and even visually by perception of the director's vocal apparatus (mouth, throat, lips, and — to an extent — tongue): high, low, front, back, middle, rounded, closed, and so forth, including glissandos from one to the other. It is this dedication to the precise analysis of tone production that accounts for the smooth, full, rich sound of the MTC. Although there were 360 voices, the result was that of an intimate ensemble.
The acoustics of the tabernacle (built 1863-1867) are perfect, so I could hear every detail, though I was sitting at the back of the hall in the balcony. One of the demonstrations of the superb acoustics of the MT is that someone can tear a piece of paper at the front of the hall and you can hear it clearly from any spot in the auditorium.
Selected readings
* "Vowel chart body art" (12/26/09)
* "Tabernacle Choir" (Wikipedia)
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Language Log
Is there evidence of senility in Trump's speech?
Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:
In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.
Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?
I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?
The answer, I think, is "maybe, but not very much". We'll begin with the 9/17/2024 Flint passage, and then compare the 7/21/2015 passage.
The first point is that the cited passage from the recent Flint town hall is not "incomprehensible". Here's the prompt from Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And Mr. President, we don't mind that you give long answers, because you actually have something to say, because you actually got something done when you were president.
And Trump's response (I've edited the kamalahq transcript for accuracy, also including a bit more around the edges, with changes in blue vs. red for the original…):
Your browser does not support the audio element.
You know, it's a very interesting- cause she-
she said- I ((could)) said-
I don't think I've ever said this before.
So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies.
Everybody loves– everybody stays till the end by the way.
You know,
when she said that,
"well, your rallies people leave"
Honestly, nobody does.
And if I saw them leaving, I'd say "and ladies and gentlemen make America great again" and I'd get the hell out, ok?
Because I don't want people leaving.
But I– I do have to ((say)) so–
I give these long sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs
But they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with
uh… raising cane, that story; I do it with the uh
story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers, I do it with a lot of different stories.
When I mentioned Doctor Hannibal Lecter
I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in, from Silence of the Lambs.
I use it, they say
it's terrible.
So they say–
so I'll give this long complex area,
for instance that-
I talked about a lot of different territory–
the bottom line is I said the most important thing.
We're going to bring more plants into your state, and this country
to make automobiles. We're going to be bigger than before.
But the fake news
says-
There's a lot of them back there, if-
You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of peo–
but the fake news likes to say,
the fake((s)) news likes to say "oh,
he was rambling." No, no, that's not rambling.
That's genius. When you can connect the dots.
((You gotta connect-))
Now,
now,
Sarah,
if you couldn't connect the dots, you got a problem.
But every dot was connected and many stories were told in that little paragraph.
But there is something-
but they say that-
…and onward, through more complaining about not getting credit for his alleged rally sizes and crowd enthusiasm.
Incomprehensible? I don't think so — Trump is clearly complaining about various things that Harris poked fun at during the 9/10/2024 debate.
There are plenty of false starts, parentheticals, and associative jumps. But the focus on reacting to Harris's jibes is consistent and plain.
Compare the 2015 passage that Geoff Pullum reacted to. Here's the audio, followed by the (not very accurate) transcript that Geoff took from Slate magazine:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton Sch[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: watershed
This word has appeared in 168 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
seal off
to stop people from going into an area or a building, often because it isn't safe
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Language Log
Cultural literacy at The Guardian
There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia. No one could be closer to the center of the turmoil than the gentleman in the middle of the doorway in this photograph:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/goldapollo.jpg
He is Hsu Ching-kuang (Xǔ Qīngguāng 許清光), founder and chief executive of Taiwan tech company Gold Apollo, which is alleged to have made the offending pagers, although Hsu denies it.
The photograph comes from this article:
"‘This is very embarrassing’: Middle East crisis takes a detour to an office park in Taiwan: Media spotlight shifted to Taiwan tech company Gold Apollo which has denied supplying the pagers that exploded across the Hezbollah network in Lebanon", by Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin, The Guardian (9/18/24)
I do not wish to get embroiled in all of the accusations and counter-accusations of this highly sensitive, high stakes international incident, but I do want to call attention to an uncanny, seemingly offhand remark from the The Guardian article, namely, that Gold Apollo's glass entrance "was still festooned with leftover Lunar New Year decorations wishing for prosperity."
Since the event occurred around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival (9/17/24), one might have thought that The Guardian slipped up and confused Mid-Autumn Festival decorations with Lunar New Year decorations. Examining the photograph for evidence one way or the other, I spotted the red poster on the wall behind CEO Hsu. Although the print is very small and I am on the road without a powerful magnifying glass, I think that the parallel verses of the matching couplet say:
niánnián hǎoyùn cáishén dào rìrì cáiyuán shùnyì lái
年年好運財神到 日日財源順意來
"May good luck and the God of Wealth arrive every year; may the source of wealth smoothly come every day"
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/goldapollo2.jpg
This is a typical New Year's poster showing a messenger from the Heavenly Kingdom and wishing for good fortune during the coming year. We may refer to the figure as a ménshén 門神 ("door god"). They are customarily put on the door as spiritual guards on New Year’s Eve and they’d remain there for the rest of the year. The banner across his chest reads “gōngxǐ fācái / Cant. gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4 恭喜發財“ ("May you be happy and prosperous!") — a Chinese New Year greeting. Although it may seem gratuitous to mention this detail, I thought it was sharp for The Guardian not to mix up up the Chinese festivals while at the same time evoking the atmosphere at Gold Apollo which is still producing this (somewhat) outmoded technology and continues to make money from it.
Selected readings
* "2024 Lebanon pager explosions" (Wikipedia)
* "Cracking down on the Hezbollians" (7/19/06)
[h.t. AntC; thanks to Jing Hu, Zhaofei Chen, Xinyi Ye, and Judit Bagi]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
eye-popping
amazingly large or impressive
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Idiom of the Day
get on like a house afire
Of two or more people, to enjoy one another's company very much from the start and become good friends at once. (Used when people are meeting for the first time.) Watch the video
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easier, and more accurate. Plans and proposals for lexicon, dictionary and thesaurus creation are also in place, which makes the website more worthwhile to watch out for in the future.
The author explains:
At the moment, the site consists of four major modules, with others still under active development:
1.
1. A high-resolution oracle bone font.
2. A database including over 52,288 glyphs.
3. A Multi-purpose text editor for inputting transcriptions.
4. Geographical and timeline visualizations.
In this two-part article, I will explain the programming technology that made them possible and the academic considerations behind the creation of these modules. In doing so, I hope that some reflections on my attempts regarding font development, database building, and interface design can be helpful for palaeography studies and the general field of DH.
The remainder of this long, first part of the two part post explains in technical detail how the font is constructed and how it is accessed and applied. The author concludes:
In general, this combination of the font as the base glyph compilation and the database interface as the base search tool firmly guarantees the correct input of desired oracle bone graphs and sets the foundation for future development of a genuine glyph database that covers the functions of a dictionary, lexicon, and eventually a transcription corpus. Some effort has to be made in order to become familiar with the functionalities of these modules of course. But compared to the current academic situation where everything is done by copy-pasting images, it is no doubt a worthwhile attempt towards the efficient utilization of the textual resources this field has to offer.
This is indeed a great improvement over the "drawing" and "copy-pasting" of individual glyphs (don't forget that there are 50,000+ of 'em!) that has heretofore constituted the state of the field. It's an ambitious project, but remains to be perfected and utilized.
A closing note. This post by Peichao Qin has appeared in The Digital Orientalist, which has also published scores of other posts on the application of DH and AI for the study of South Asian, Central Asian, East Asian, African, Middle Eastern, etc. languages, Selected readings
* "Nomadic affinity with oracle bone divination" (11/25/20)
* "Oracle" (3/21/14)
* "Paleographers, riches await you!" (10/28/16)
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
