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Mark Liberman at the Log posts about Lau, Geipel, Wu, & Keysar, “The extreme illusion of understanding” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022), whose abstract reads:

Though speakers and listeners monitor communication success, they systematically overestimate it. We report an extreme illusion of understanding that exists even without shared language. Native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated how well native English-speaking Americans understood what they said in Chinese, even when they were informed that the listeners knew no Chinese. These listeners also believed they understood the intentions of the Chinese speakers much more than they actually did. This extreme illusion impacts theories of speech monitoring and may be consequential in real-life, where miscommunication is costly.

Mark says:

In the first phase of the study, 240 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were paired, and given 12 pragmatically ambiguous phrases […] Both speakers and listeners tended to overestimate the success of the verbal disambiguation […].

In the second phrase of the experiment,

We recruited 120 native English-speaking Americans as listeners. Each American listener was yoked to a Chinese speaker and was presented with an English version of the phrases and meanings. The procedure for the American listeners was identical to that of the Chinese listeners, except that they heard the speakers via audio recordings.

A similar overestimation of understanding persisted:

Next, we report the most surprising finding: the illusion of understanding persists even when the listener doesn’t know the language.

[…]

On average, American listeners who did not know Chinese identified the intended meanings 35% of the time, which was better than chance (25%) […] Though American listeners were less accurate than Chinese listeners, […] they still overestimated their success by 30pp, believing that they succeeded 65% of the time […] The Chinese speakers overestimated here as well. While Chinese speakers indicated that the American listeners would understand less (50%) than the Chinese listeners (70%),[…] they still overestimated the American listeners’ understanding by 15pp […].

I’m surprised at how surprised I am that people would think they could understand so much of a language they don’t know; I thought I was more cynical.

Faithful link-provider Trevor sent me a BBC story about a parliamentary first:

The popular Welsh word cwtch has been used for the first time in the UK Parliament. It commonly means a hug or cuddle but has no literal English translation. Brecon and Radnorshire MP Fay Jones said cwtch while questioning Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the House of Commons on 5 January. It is the only time the word has been recorded in Hansard, which publicly publishes a record of all parliamentary debates verbatim.

The Conservative politician was criticising Wales’ Covid regulations last Wednesday and said: “On Friday, I will be holding my team meeting in the local pub because under Welsh government rules we are not allowed to go to our socially distanced office. We cannot do Parkrun and we cannot watch outdoor sport on the touchline – but we can cwtch up together in the clubhouse to watch it.” […]

Ms Jones tweeted: “Absolutely delighted to learn this morning that my use of the word ‘cwtch’ in the Commons last week was the first time that word has ever been used in Parliament.” In 2019, another Welsh MP, Rhondda’s Chris Bryant, was making an ultimately unsuccessful run for election as Commons Speaker when he said that MPs “need more of a cwtch” – although he said it in interviews outside the chamber.

I was, of course, intrigued by the word; fortunately, the OED added it in December 2005:
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Having finished my latest Pelevin novel, Generation «П» (1999), I’m simultaneously amused and a bit disappointed — I’m glad I read it, mind you, but it signals what from my point of view is a descent from a generalized mystico-sociopolitical madness grounded in history (Russian and Soviet) to a ripped-from-the-headlines version that made him even more popular at the time and that he has continued ever since. I’ll let Mark Lipovetsky provide a general description (from his chapter “Postmodernist Novel” in Russian Literature since 1991 — see this post):

When Generation “P” (translated in English as Homo Zapiens and Babylon) appeared, the majority of Russian critics contemptuously attributed the novel’s unprecedented success to its political relevance — a fantastic version of the 1998 “default” of Russia’s economy and the subsequent resignation of the government – as well as to Pelevin’s recognizable parodies of numerous TV commercials. It was the first of Pelevin’s novels in which the writer displayed his unique sensibility to the “political unconscious” of the given moment and his ability to materialize phantasms hidden in political rhetoric by captivating and grotesque plots and images. However, what initially seemed well-packed journalism, is today almost universally acknowledged as one of the most impressive snapshots of, if not monuments to, the first post-Soviet decade.

Furthermore, when rereading Pelevin’s novel today, one cannot fail to notice its prognostic aspect. Even on a surface level, the novel presents a shrewd political forecast for the 2000s. In Generation “P,” a graduate from the Literary Institute trained to translate poetry from languages he does not know, a character without features but with a “pile of cynicism,” Vavilen Tatarsky, a virtual non-entity and pawn on the chessboard of invisible mighty players, becomes a copywriter, first for commercial then subsequently political advertisements, and as a result rises to the position of the supreme ruler of the media space, the living god and head of the ancient Guild of Chaldeans secretly ruling post-Soviet Russia.

Lipovetsky goes on to analyze the mythological and political aspects, which don’t interest me very much (not to mention that the politicians and businessmen of the day have long been forgotten); what does, and what kept me reading with pleasure, is Pelevin’s unquenchable linguistic humor, which keeps coming up with gems like these:

Эти агентства множились неудержимо — как грибы после дождя или, как Татарский написал в одной концепции, гробы после вождя. ‘These agencies multiplied irrepressibly — like mushrooms after rain, or, as Tatarsky wrote in a conception [i.e., outline/plan for an ad — I don’t know what this would be in English], like graves after the Leader [i.e., Stalin; he changes griby posle dozhdya to groby posle vozhdya].’

МАЛ, ДА УД АЛ [a slogan for a condom] ‘SMALL, BUT THE PENIS IS RED’ [a slight deformation of the saying мал, да удал ‘small but bold’ — i.e., don’t judge a person by outward appearance]

Седера Луминоса [a play on Сендеро Луминосо ‘Sendero Luminoso’]

кока-колготки, кока-колбаски, кока-колымские рассказы ‘Coca-pantyhose [kolgotki], Coca-sausages [kolbaski], Coca-Kolyma stories’

Mercedes is transformed into Merdeses (to get merde) and then Merde-SS

«Богоносец Потемкин» [ship name Godcarrier Potemkin, with богоносец ‘God-carrier, bearer of a religious mission’ a play on броненосец ‘battleship’]

That’s just a random sampling; he tosses them off the way Mozart tossed off tunes. The ads are also hilarious even if you don’t know the originals he’s riffing off, and I loved the bit where Tatarsky calls a friend late at night because he’s having a bad acid trip — the friend gives him a mantra to repeat, Ом мелафефон бва кха ша [Om melafefon bva kkha sha], which he later admits is a slight alteration of the Hebrew phrase od melafefon bevakasha ‘more cucumber, please’ (which is especially amusing because the friend urges him to repeat it while drinking vodka, cucumber being a traditional zakuska). Pelevin’s obsession with drugs (especially hallucinogenic), organized crime (and its jargon), and Buddhism (in what I’m guessing is a very idiosyncratic version) can become wearying, but I never get tired of his jokes. (Incidentally, the name Vavilen is derived from Vasily Aksyonov + Vladimir Ilich Lenin, which is a good joke in itself; it also sounds like Vavilon ‘Babylon,’ which winds up being a reason he gets elevated to godlike status.) Of course, most of the jokes will be lost in translation, but it’s a fun read anyway. Oh, and the “P” in the title stands for Pepsi… but of course we can’t help but think of Pelevin as well.

As with the polyglot story, I wasn’t expecting to post Imani Perry’s What Black Women Hear When They’re Called “Auntie”, even though it was very much language-related, because I was weary just thinking about the hot takes it might provoke from people who had no experience with the issue and yet would instantly form doggedly held opinions about it, but it was so brilliantly written and showed such a nuanced understanding of how to approach difficult areas of language that I thought what the hell, I’ll go for it. Herewith some excerpts:

In the spring of 2017, I noticed that young Black people on social media were referring to congressperson Maxine Waters as “Auntie Maxine.” It was a nickname given in response to her witty, acerbic, and wise comments about Donald Trump. A digital public sphere, horrified by his behavior, delighted in Waters’ giving him hell.

That nickname was a harbinger of something that has since become widespread: a renewed use in public of the word auntie in reference to Black women. I must admit, I didn’t like it at first. I was irritated that a congressperson was being called “Auntie” instead of by her professional title. That is a sign of my own formalism, rooted in the culture of the Black South. I am always wary of those who might diminish the hard-earned professional standing of a Black person.

Perry mentions “other distinguished Black women [who] have rejected being called Auntie” and continues:
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Not directly language-related, but this is such an amazing selection of freely accessible books I can’t resist passing it along for anyone interested. Click on the URL, then when the book page comes up click on “Contents,” and you can download the pdfs. And, wait, here’s some language-related stuff: Old Church Slavonic Grammar, by Horace G. Lunt, and Slavic on the Language Map of Europe: Historical and Areal-Typological Dimensions, edited by Andrii Danylenko and Motoki Nomachi, not to mention A “Handbook” to the Russian Text of Crime and Punishment by Edgar H. Lehrman. Via Martin Krohs at FB.

I wasn’t originally planning to post Jessica Contrera’s Washington Post story (archived) about a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages; after all, I’ve done a bunch of posts about polyglots (e.g., 2007, 2008, 2015, 2020, and of course Michael Erard’s Babel No More). But I soon realized this was exceptionally well done — Contrera spent months with her subject, 46-year-old Vaughn Smith, and interviewed all sorts of people about him — and I couldn’t resist sharing it. Here are some excerpts:

“So, how many languages do you speak?”

“Oh goodness,” Vaughn says. “Eight, fluently.”

“Eight?” Kelly marvels.

“Eight,” Vaughn confirms. English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.

“But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation,” he explains, “I know about 25 more.”

Vaughn glances at me. He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl. to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain. […]

How did he get this way? And what was going on in his brain? But also: why was he cleaning carpets for a living?

To Vaughn, all of that is missing the point. He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not.

His origin story:
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I recently looked up the abbreviation Z”L (= Hebrew ז״ל for זכרונו לברכה zikhrono livrakha ‘of blessed memory’) and found the ” between the letters referred to as a “choopchik” (so spelled). Needless to say, I was intrigued, and googled up the Haaretz article “Word of the Day / Chupchik” by Shoshana Kordova:

If you’ve been in the market for a handy, versatile word that can refer to a wide variety of objects, look no further than chupchik. This word, pronounced CHOOP cheek, is defined as a protrusion or protuberance but is often used to mean just about any small item or part of an item whose name has escaped you or that doesn’t necessarily have a name. […]

Chupchik comes from the Russian word for “curly forelock,” originally chubchik, according to the Hebrew etymology site Hasafa Haivrit.

Chupchik actually features two chupchiks in the word itself, in the form of the apostrophe that come after the letter tzadi (which makes a double appearance here) to turn it into the “ch” sound that features so prominently in sentences like “Chuck chowed down on Chinese food.”

What a great word! (I decided to use Kordova’s spelling as more scientific-looking.) Its Russian forebear is чубчик, diminutive of чуб ‘forelock’; when I looked it up in my Webster’s New World Hebrew Dictionary, there were so few words under “CH” and they were mostly so piquant that I thought I’d list them all (giving only the entry form and definition):
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Orrajt (Eng Title: Alright) is an “Award Winning Maltese Short Film – 2021” about “The uphill bilingual battle George needs to face as being both an English and Maltese speaker.” The Maltese is not subtitled, which is fun and shouldn’t cause a problem — the English dialogue makes it clear what’s going on. It’s only nine minutes, and it’s a sympathetic look at a problem a lot of people have to deal with in this increasingly multilingual world. (It was shot in the Beggars Inn Pub, which looks a little rowdy for the likes of me but is certainly photogenic.) Via Slavo/bulbul at FaceBook.

And if that doesn’t interest you, I present HamBam: The Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian:

The HamBam corpus contains annotated recordings of contemporary spoken Persian, compiled as part of a cooperation between Bu-Ali Sina University in Hamedan, Iran (team coordinator: Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand), and the University of Bamberg in Germany (Geoffrey Haig). […]

The corpus was primarily designed for investigations into the impact of information structure on word order variation in spoken Persian, but is freely adaptable to other research questions, including research on prosody, referential density, or usage-based approaches to grammar.

1) This Twitter thread by The Meanest TA, PhD. starts off “Everyone on my team (5 men ages 48-75) texts me to make sure the slang they’re using is correct in context. Some examples below.” It’s very funny:

From Boss (74): “Can I say this meeting got lit if I mean people were getting upset?”
Me: “No but you can say they were salty about it.”
[…]

Project Manager (48): “Do people still say hella?”
Me: “Not in this state.”

In return they translate my frustrations into professional corporate.

Me: “How do I say this meeting is a waste of my time I am not paid enough to deal with your bullshit?”
Boss: “Can you provide me with a meeting agenda so I can ensure my presence adds value? I want to prioritize my schedule to support our most urgent needs.”

Me: “How do I say there is no way you are this fucking stupid?”
WorkDad: “I think there was a disconnect, can you restate your definition of this concept so we can ensure there’s no miscommunication?”

Thanks, Nick!

2) Caleb Madison of The Atlantic writes about a new use of “go off”:

Go is up there with be as one of the most versatile and abstract verbs in the English language. […] Add off, easily the most dramatic preposition, and you’ve got the key to semantic ignition: “Change to be really far away” in the rapid fire of two sharp syllables. And on the internet in the mid-2010s, people truly started to go off. Go off first came into the common vernacular sandwiched between but and I guess as a sarcastic flourish at the end of a categorical disagreement. If I read a post saying that bees are scary and bad, I might respond with, “They actually play a crucial role in the global ecosystem, but go off, I guess.” And while to go off on had long been used to describe a strong reprimand, this smug final flourish after owning someone with logic drew the phrase more specifically into the world of internet discourse. Eventually the internet winnowed it down to just go off (as in, “to go on a passionate tirade without concrete structure or purpose”).

Thanks, Ariel!
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Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s TLS review (Nov. 20, 2020; archived) of Ben Katchor’s The Dairy Restaurant is full of delights, though not as full as I’m sure the book is — Katchor has been one of my favorites ever since his strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was running in the New York Press a generation ago. I’ll quote some excerpts below, the linguistic hook being the Yiddish word מילכיג (milkhig, aka milchig):

The dairy restaurant is hard to define. It sprang from two comingling histories: those of kosher law and of the restaurant as it arose in its modern form in eighteenth-century France (Katchor’s citation, which would be mine, too, is Rebecca Spang’s wonderful The Invention of the Restaurant, 2000). Kashrut’s injunction against mixing milk and meat produced a tripartite taxonomy of kosher foods: meat (fleisch, in Yiddish – meat foods are fleischig), dairy (milch; milchig), and foods that can be served with either (pareve). But dairy restaurants are not necessarily kosher – nor necessarily vegetarian, especially if you consider fish to be meat (which kosher law does not). The cuisine itself generally complies with kashrut, and consists of a range of specific dishes, usually Eastern European Jewish. Here is Scholem Aleichem in praise of milchig cuisine: “From meat you have a roselfleisch, and esikfleisch, a roast. … and that’s it. From milk you have milk, cheese, butter, sour cream, pid-smetene, whey, kasha with milk, noodles with milk, rice with milk …”. This list, from the short monologue “Milchigs” (1903), truly goes on. […]

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