I am grateful:
1) for my bio-family
Yeah, my parents and brother may be far away, but I felt their love today. We talked for just a bit as they ate dinner together, and I missed them. The stuffing was apparently very good this year, and Dad talked about trying to send some to me in the mail. We might just wait until the reunion, when we can have a small turkey together (or a large one with everyone?). I love them very much.
I spent t-day dinner with the two loves in my life, and L's kids. It was good. The turkey was especially good. Thank you, L!!
'Bout time someone in the Democratic Party grew a pair...
Former DNC Chair Howard Dean called on Senator Joe Lieberman to resign as chair of Senate Homeland Security Committee if he can't bring himself to oppose a Republican filibuster of health care reform legislation.
Appearing on Joe Scarborough's radio show on Wednesday, Dean stressed that he had no problem with Lieberman opposing the bill on its philosophical merits, but he insisted that it was irresponsible and unprincipled to not allow the legislation to come to an up-or-down vote.
"I think that (Lieberman) is a very complicated guy," said Dean. "He does because he says he's a principled guy but there's nothing principled about holding up a bill... If he was a principled guy he'd resign his chairmanship."
"If you are with a caucus you don't owe the leader any vote on any substance," Dean added. "I have no problem with him voting against the public option... You owe it to Harry Reid to allow him to run the Senate. And if you're not willing to do that the proper thing to do is to step aside."
Dean also urged the party to reconsider the use of reconciliation to pass aspects of reform. Such a parliamentary maneuver, he noted, would remove the "leverage" of the party's conservative members by allowing the bill an up-or-down vote.
"[Lieberman has] announced he's gong to be 'stubborn' about this," said Dean, "and I think that means going to reconciliation. You can start it all over and that's going to take about six weeks, but there are a majority of senators who are not going to favor (a bill) without a public option."
If I ever run into Lieberman in person, I'll be mighty tempted to piss down his crooked little leg.
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Torches & Pitchforks
Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics:
"Negated, or not" 1/21/2004
"I challenge anyone to refute that this negative is not unnecessary" 1/21/2004
"Challenge as negation" 1/23/2004
"Too complex to avoid judgment?" 2/21/2004
"Who is to be master?" 2/21/2004
"On not avoiding negatives" 2/21/2004
"Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?" 2/26/2004
"Overnegation supererogation" 3/12/2004
"Another overnegation" 4/27/2004
"We cannot/must not understate/overstate" 5/26/2004
"Another overnegation opportunity: Yet vs. Yet to" 5/31/2004
"Overstating understatement" 6/22/2004
"Nothing that cannot impede even by failure" 8/16/2004
"Rumsfeld overnegates Powell, Powell uses 'fulsome' correctly" 11/16/2004
"Overnegation alert" 1/11/2005
"Still unpacked after all these years" 5/17/2005
"Still upacked: threat or menace?" 5/17/2005
"The temptation of overnegation" 5/23/2005
"Things that are rarely better than they normally are" 10/17/2005
"Never anything but less than precise" 10/20/2005
"Negation, over- and under-" 12/21/2005
"On not emerging unscathed" 3/1/2006
"Not doubting that the door could not be opened wider" 6/5/2006
"Unlike no other" 7/27/2006
"It's hard not to read this and not do a double-take" 8/1/2006
" Been anything so long it looks like not to me" 8/3/2006
"The most powerful person no one has ever heard of" 5/23/2006
"Not doubting that the door could not be opened wider" 6/5/2006
"Overnegation as obfuscation" 8/9/2006
"Scalar failure" 3/5/2007
"Everyone was spared no mercy" 3/26/2007
"Barely missing a chance to overanalyze" 4/1/2007
"Total undernegation" 4/17/2007
"Before nary an overnegation could be uttered" 5/27/2007
"Undernegation of the day" 6/14/2007
"Multiplex negatio feblondiat" 7/14/2007
"Couldn't be more" 9/29/2007
"I'll teach you to undernegate!" 12/22/2007
"That'll teach me …" 1/6/2008
"Ask Language Log: More or less?" 6/30/2008
"The Astonishment Effect in negation" 7/20/2008
"Negation plus exclusion: a dangerous pairing" 9/14/2008
"Electoral overnegation" 11/5/2008
"'Cannot underestimate' = 'must not underestimate'" 11/6/2008
"'Any' = 'hardly any'?" 12/26/2008
"Still ahead of his time" 2/10/2009
"A long time since we did not meet" 2/23/2009
"I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't" 2/23/2009
"Misunderestimation" 4/4/2009
"Candidates must be a student" 4/16/2009
"The reality could not be further from the truth" 4/20/2009
"Misnegation in the Encyclopedia Britannica" 4/26/2009
"Annals of scalar predication" 1/1/2009
"The shyness of architects" 4/15/2009
"The risk that the taxpayer does not bear a disproportionate burden" 6/24/2009
"No detail too small" 11/27/2009
We're still doing the original ripping on a PC. This doesn't require real-time intervention, so the lag inherent in using VNC to connect to another machine doesn't matter. However, we needed to do something different on the editing side, as keeping a PC with direct monitor and keyboard connections around in addition to my Mac wasn't going to work.
Some of you gave me various recommendations, which I appreciate. In the end I bought Amadeus Pro for $40. The workflow is pretty easy: load WAV file representing one side of a tape or album; find the first track break; cut from beginning until there into a new file; edit that file (trim silence, fade in/out if needed); save; iterate. Once I have a directory full of WAV files, use the batch processor to convert to MP3, filling in most of the tagging as part of that process. If I have been clever enough to name the individual files 01.wav, 02.wav, and so on, I can feed file name (sans extension) in as the track number, saving a tedious step. So the batch processor can do everything except track name, which is fine. Finally, import into iTunes (in a "tmp" playlist created for this purpose) and type in the track names. Move the new tracks to the "to be verified" playlist. Done.
I can do almost everything in Amadeus Pro using keyboard shortcuts, including fade in/out. If I could figure out how to deselect without having to click somewhere else in the file, I'd be golden. I've used the program to do several tapes now and it's going very smoothly. This might even be faster than what I was doing on the PC (WavePad to edit, DAK software to batch-convert to MP3 (but no tagging built in), Tag & Renamer to tag, and then import into iTunes.)
We're just starting the early music now. For those who care, yes, Mt. Holyoke did eventually re-issue "The Medieval Lyric" on CD; they sell an upgrade for people with the cassettes. ("Upgrade" price excludes the books, which you are presumed to already have.) They have a web site but can't take digital orders, so we've just put an actual check in an actual envelope with an actual stamp. :-)
The Spinal Sinnet is fundamentally a chain of Eternity Knots, the completed piece
creating the look of a spinal column that includes a spinal cord and transverse processes. Whether used
as a bracelet, necklace or bag strap, the tie is sure to grab attention!
John V. Burke wrote to draw my attention to a phrase in Walter Kaiser's "Saving the Magic City", NYRB, 12/3/2009 (emphasis added):
Roeck's book, for which he has done an impressive amount of research, tries to be a number of things at once: it is an account of the social and intellectual world of the expatriate community in fin-de-siècle Florence; it continues the biography of Aby Warburg he began with his earlier book; it is a history of late-nineteenth-century Florentine urban development; it is a cultural history; it addresses a wide variety of ancillary topics such as anti-Semitism, anarchism, labor conditions, and economic trends; and it discusses the various aesthetic theories being formulated at the turn of the century. No detail is too small to escape Roeck's net, not even the plans formed in 1898 to produce artificial ice commercially in Florence.
This echoes the classic example "No head injury is too trivial to ignore", discussed by Peter Wason and Shuli Reich, "A Verbal Illusion", The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31(4):591-97, 1979.
Something interesting is going on here, as Wason and Reich observed, but it's not entirely clear what it is. The most striking aspect of the problem is that it's so hard for people to recognize that it exists.
Let's start with some real-world instances of the pattern No NOUN is too small to VERB:
No business is too small to play a role.
No donation is too small to make a difference.
No amount is too small to benefit from compounding interest.
No country is too small to make it as a sovereign nation.
No exposure is too small to intitiate cellular damage.
No news item is too small to be lampooned in the blogosphere.
No occasion is too small to warrant a gift.
You could translate these as something like All NOUNs, however small, [can or should] VERB. Thus the last one comes out "All occasions, however small, warrant a gift".
To understand how this works, consider the positive statement "This occasion is too small to warrant a gift". This presupposes that we can set a value on the scale of occasion size, such that larger occasions warrant a gift, while smaller ones don't; and it asserts that the designated occasion is below the threshold. Now if we say that "No occasion is too small to warrant a gift", we're asserting that the gift-warranting threshold is so low, in the context under discussion (which was Japanese culture), that no occasion worth mentioning is below it.
One additional wrinkle: In the pattern NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB, the initial NOUN might either be the subject of the VERB ("The patient is too weak to eat") or the object ("The soup is too hot to eat"). All the examples that we've seen so far are subject-type cases; but object-type cases exist as well:
No service is too small to render to the King.
No problem is too small to obsess over.
But now consider these examples:
No pavement irregularity is too small to overlook.
No social injustice is too small to ignore.
No risk is ever too small to disregard.
No convenience is too small to forget.
No precaution is too small to be omitted.
No detail is too small for you to discard it as insignificant.
No expense is too small to escape the finance chief's attention
No worthy cause was too small to escape his generosity.
These can't be translated in the same way as the earlier batch. "All worthy causes, however small, escaped his generosity" — no, that's not what the writer meant at all.
And the corresponding positive assertions are already problematic in the same way, e.g. "This expense is too small to escape the finance chief's attention". To make them make sense, we want to flip something: "This expense was too large to escape the finance chief's attention"; "This expense was too small to attract the finance chief's attention".
But examples like "No detail is too small to overlook" are very common. You see them all the time, even in the work of careful writers like Walter Kaiser, in well-edited publications like the New York Review of Books. Legend has it that "No head injury is too trivial to ignore" was posted on the walls of London hospitals for decades. I suspect that this is untrue, but it's a good story — certainly versions of this same apparently incoherent phrase, attributed to Hippocrates, have been published many times in reputable books, journals, and other places, e.g. here, here and here.
So what's going on here? As discussed in many earlier LL posts, these puzzles tend to arise from interactions among negatives, scalar predicates, modals. And explanations include variants on "it's a mistake", "it's an ambiguity", and "it's an idiom".
There are many different types of what we've called misnegation (also overnegation and undernegation), and different explanations may be appropriate for different examples. In this case, though, I think that Wason and Reich's 1979 account has held up pretty well. I'll lay out their hypotheses and their experimental results in another post.
[Note — Francis Adams' translation of Hippocrates On Injuries of the Head has nothing that seems likely to be the source of the phrase "No head injury is too severe to despair of, nor too trivial to ignore". If you know where in the Hippocratic Corpus this comes from, please let us know in the comments.]
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devreux
( Comment Always Welcome! )
P.S. All proceeds to PAWS Chicago this year. Click the banner!
- Location:Chicago
- Listening to::Sumo Wrestling
Pinhole photograph. If I remember correctly this was an exposure of about 40 seconds but I could be wrong about that.
The camera was set up about 15 inches from the model.
The good:
* The title is superb. As a connoisseur of titles, I have to say I could not have done better myself. It follows the HHG convention of having titles be quotes from the series, but distinguishes itself by not taking its quote from book 1. The actual passage referred to is both very apt, and contains an Adams-worth piece of self-deprecating humour.
* The way in which he manages to rescue our intrepid heroes from the destruction of every earth ever is satisfyingly done. I was worried about that.
* The plot hangs together well enough, with the right balance of absurdity and coherence, albeit in a manner more reminiscent of Red Dwarf than of HHG
The bad:
* Colfer doesn't have a feel for the characters. Dent is too hapless, Trillian too wimpy, the Vogons too pathetic, the Bird too helpful.
* Wowbagger is a major character. Wowbagger was quite emphatically never meant to be a major character; it just doesn't work.
* The book has an altogether *smaller* feel to it than the originals.
The ugly:
* Colfer just doesn't have Adams's effortlessly whimsical style. Therefore the book ends up feeling a trifle plodding, and even worse, when he does try something Adamsy he gives the impression of Trying Too Hard.
* He does violence to the canon. Seriously, that is an unforgivable sin. There is really no excuse for having details that contradict those in the original books. That put me off right at the outset - on page 1 he refers to the Vogons destroying the earth with thermonuclear bombs, when a few seconds with the first book would bring up the quote "energize the demolition beams" - and jolted me out of the story every time I noticed another example.
The verdict:
* Don't bother.
gilmoure)...
...with from Black Friday thoughts from Cicily Janus.
So, who among you braved the zombie invasion today? Share your tales of terror!
P.S. Birthday wishes to
ferchissakes, navytron89, darthbecca and nadya_lev, with special get-well wishes to the deviously talented iron_chef_gein.- Location:Chicago
- Weather in brainland::
Distended
I think I worked how how to translate the more general Pfenning-Davies multimodal logic setup down into linear logic token-passing, but it's weirding me out how hard it seems to get the lax and possibility modalities to work right in the same translation.
12:34 Happy Thanksgiving to all the folks in the States <3 I'm off to create havoc (and a HUGE amount of food) in the kitchen.
18:27 Pork shoulder roasted w/onions, bay & garlic + mango salsa + dry-cooked long beans + baked yams + strawberry Boston creme cake =food coma++
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Following up on my commoner posting, I write to ask for some data. What I'm looking for is cases where person A uses an inflected adjective or adverb (comparative or superlative) and person B objects to it, saying that A should have used the periphrastic variant instead, or declaring that the variant A used is "not a word" or "not English". It's ok if you are person B, so long as you can cite the source of the material you objected to. It's also worth noting cases where someone says explicitly that they are unsure of which variant to choose.
Some things that need flagging: if person A is not a native speaker; if person A is a young child; if the original production is likely to have been a deliberate invention, intended as play or display, or to have been a quotation.
Now some information about what's in my files already. The items are listed in their base forms; some of these were collected in their comparative form, some in their superlative form, some in both. (Judgments on comparatives and superlatives aren't always parallel, by the way.)
First, two items that caught my eye, though I haven't seen them complained about or queried:
corrupt [quite a few hits for corrupter 'more corrupt', including in "corrupter-than-corrupt", where the periphrastic variant just won't do]
solemn [some recent hits; and solemner and solemnest from Emily Dickinson; also in the OED]
Plus, of course, curiouser from Alice in Wonderland:
"Curiouser and curiouser!" Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
This one seems playful. It's much quoted and alluded to, for example in the frequent variant "seriouser and seriouser".
And fun, which is a complex case that I will post on later.
On to the main list.
bitter
clever
common
cross
fond
highly
ill
often
open
pleasant
quickly
real
right
serious
solid
strict
stupid
vast
winning
wrong
Additions welcome. Note: I am not asking for nominations of adjectives/adverbs that someone judges to be unacceptable in their inflected forms, just of such forms that have been attested.
You're Welcome
I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.
What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?
- Listening to::Headscan -- Metadata
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dnalounge update
DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some more press.
- Listening to::Massive Attack -- Small Time Short Away
- Location:Chicago
- Weather in brainland::
Speechless
electorprincej, I got a photo of the up-armoured porta-john. I also took a lot of mountain photos and photos of the Soviet ruins around me.After than I went to the office for a very short while, then headed off to Mass. Right now I'm checking in after Thanksgiving dinner. I had turkey, stuffing, mac 'n' cheese and shrimp cocktail. There was also steamboat round, ham, and I forgot what all else. We got in towards the end of the meal, so by the time we were ready for dessert it was gone, which was a pisser. But given I haven't been doing PT it's probably for the best, not that I appear to be gaining any weight. The uniforms that were tight in the seat at Benning are now baggy on me.
Quote of the day:
Me: Turkducken is nothing but excess.
MAJ T: Not if you eat all of it.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who observe it today. Everybody else, Happy Thursday.
I'm thankful that I live in a country where even not even Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck want to imprison people for using unsanctioned letters like ñ and í. This occurred to me yesterday evening as I was making the cranberry sauce and listening on the radio to "Illegal letters in Turkey":
In Turkey, a law dating back to the 1920’s bans the use of the letters Q, W and X. The law was created for Turkey’s transition from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin one. But today, it’s used against Turkey’s ethnic Kurds.
This story seems to refer (at around 3:00) to a trial that Bill Poser discussed here on Language Log three years ago ("Newroz Píroz Be!", 10/5/2006):
Although Turkey has taken some steps toward reducing its oppression of the Kurds in hope of being admitted to the European Union, it keeps on backsliding. It is reported that Osman Baydemir, a prominent human rights activist now the mayor of Diyarbakır, is being prosecuted for sending out cards containing New Year's greetings in Turkish, Kurdish, and English. "Happy New Year" in Kurdish is Newroz Píroz be!, the publication of which violates Act 1353 of November 1, 1928 on Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters, which forbids the use of any letters not found in the Turkish alphabet. Turkish does not use the letters q, w, or x.
The PRI report says that "the case is still making its way through the courts", but Baydemir's Wikipedia entry says that
He was prosecuted for violating a Turkish law prohibiting the use of letters not in the Turkish alphabet when he sent out a New Year's greeting in Kurdish which included the letter "W". On April 19, 2007, Diyarbakır Peace Court No. 2 dropped the charges since the Ministry of Justice had not permitted that such a case be heard.
So either Wikipedia is wrong, or the PRI report is wrong (or at least misleading — maybe some non-orthographic charges lodged at the same time haven't been dropped?). Anyhow, Act 1353 of November 1, 1928 on Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters really does exist, and it really was affirmed in the Turkish constitution of 1982 as one of "the Reform Laws indicated below, which aim to raise Turkish society above the level of contemporary civilisation and to safeguard the secular character of the Republic", and it really has sometimes been used to prosecute Kurds for orthographic offenses, as again in this LL post from October of 2005, "Better not use Q and W":
A Turkish court has fined 20 Kurds 100 lira (US$74) for holding up placards at a New Year's celebration containing the letters Q and W …
But it would be nice to trust a report from PRI about the state of affairs on such things in Turkey, without having to do one's own background research.
Having given thanks for our orthographic (and other) freedoms, it's time for me to get the turkey into the oven, and so I'll direct readers with time on their hands to some earlier Thanksgiving-related posts, including 2004's "Thanks giving", and a flurry of posts in 2007 about Thanksgiving stress (phonological, not psychological): "A Thanksgiving discussion"; "Thanksgiving variation"; "In the wake of Thanksgiving"; "Thanksgiving: the Greek influence".
[Update — the text of the 1928 Turkish law can be found here, in Turkish. I haven't found an English translation yet. Nor, given the considerable politicization of the question, have I found a description of the current state of affairs that seems trustworthy.]
[Update #2 — the root vegetables and other side dishes are done, the turkey is coming along nicely, and I'll start making the salad in a few minutes. Meanwhile, I haven't been able to learn anything much more about the orthographic situation in Turkey, but on a related topic, I'll draw your attention to the adventures of the New Turkic Alphabet, discussed here and here.]
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