At a recent concert, Van Morrison uttered the vulgar phrase, “Fucking shut the fuck up.” The sentence presents a challenge to the linguistic minds at Language Log. The different uses of the word “fuck” don’t affect the meaning of the sentence, since the sentiment could be conveyed simply as “shut up.” According to the blog, “The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the fuck is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up.” The author concludes the latter.

Source:  Language Log  

Last week’s New York Times detailed the tragic case of Hiu Lui Ng, a New Yorker of 17 years who died a grisly death after his cancer and fractured spine went insistently undiagnosed at a detainment center in Rhode Island. This week, the paper followed up with a similar story of a detainee who crossed paths and cells with Ng; Marino De Los Santos lived to tell his tale (and file a lawsuit). The July issue of KoreAm recounts the cases of two women—one who died in custody, the other still ailing there—and their thwarted attempts to receive proper care. And in an extensive investigation back in May, the Washington Post weaved the narratives of several detainees—many who died, some who survived abysmal care—into a withering dissection of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureaucracy fatally unequipped to meet the post-9/11 demands hastily placed upon it.

In the past five years, the Post found, 83 detainees have died in custody or soon after being released. Thirty of those deaths, according to analysis and expert reviews arranged by the Post, may have been caused by the actions, or inaction, of medical staff. “The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the Post’s Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein wrote.

I’ve often wondered at the unwitting and anodyne adoption of the word “detainee” in the years since September 11, 2001—its easy migration from referring to “terrorists out to kill us” to aspiring immigrants and asylum seekers swept up in the bowels of a frightened, misguided bureaucratic reflex. “Detainee,” it seems, is meant to delineate someone outside the criminal justice system per se, someone whose case awaits judicial review. “It’s not like we’re throwing folks, in prison, see; they’re going to detainment centers.” The words roll of the tongue and the conscience.

But as the dismal state of medical affairs at the publicly and privately run “detainment” facilities shows, it’s time to start calling things by their right names. Perhaps if people “detained” because of paperwork glitches (which played a crucial role in Ng’s situation) or people denied proper medical care because of software errors (see Yusif Osman’s case in the Washington Post) were reported as being sent to “death houses” or “disease centers,” our linguistic faculties might be triggered into focus, and with them our moral compass.

A synthesis of all things linguistic, Language Magazine is page after page of worldwide news, technologies for improving language acquisition, and resources for anyone who values communication. The latest issue features news about Portugal’s decision to change its national language to the Brazilian Portuguese, anecdotes from Spain, France, and Belgum, and a back page by Richard Lederer, author of several books celebrating the complexities and humor in language.

An article in the July issue, “Xpert sez txt is gr8 4 language,” considers Professor David Crystal’s research on text messaging as a new language style. Concluding that text messaging enhances and enriches language skills, Crystal “called it an ‘urban myth’ that school work was riddled with text speech, and said in fact students knew when to use it in the right context.”

Formerly known as the American Language Review, Language Magazine could be mistaken for a strictly academic publication. Though some articles are geared toward language teachers, many more are endlessly useful for those considering learning or improving proficiency of another language, which—to put it simply—most people could stand to do. Whether that language is French or Spanish, or a rare dialect known to only a few hundred folks, there is a laundry list of resources to be found between these pages, including recommendations for study abroad locations, program specifications, and news about language-learning software to help ease your journey toward language enlightenment.