I'm not sure what went on behind the scenes at One Language Log Plaza to provoke this devastating take-down, but Geoff Pullum completely fucks shit up:
Certainly, it is possible that the phrase dada kraut psych mindblowing conscience expanding sublime acid oriented arcana coelestia weirdness has roughly nine stacked attributive modifiers; but one cannot really tell, because it all depends on how it is parsed: doubtless "consciousness-expanding" (I add the helpful hyphen) is intended as a syntactic unit, but one doesn't know about "kraut psych" and so on. This is basically the problem one finds with quotes from chimpanzee language: chimps are occasionally reported as having signed things with transcriptions like BANANA BANANA HELP REFRIGERATOR GIMME OPEN BANANA GIMME, and syntactically one does not really know where or whether to begin.Which raises the question: how much would you pay to see Belle Waring and Geoffrey K. Pullum in a heavyweight title bout?
Part of the problem here is that Eric is one of the younger staffers here at Language Log Plaza. They work with headsets on, they have X-men posters on their walls, they talk about whether Lara Croft's breasts in the new Crystal Dynamics video game release are as big as before. The average age in their part of the building is approximately 19. They typically list their hobbies as (i)~being wicked cool, (ii)~dancing to their iPods in public places, (iii)~shopping at American Eagle, and (iv)~staying out all night. One does not see them at EVOO; they dine at place where the menu is a series of brightly colored pictures on glass with lights behind them, and often there is a neon sign in the window saying "BURRITOS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD". And their reading material does not fully meet the criteria for being called "language".
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May 28, 2006


