powerpoint parsing fail

Yesterday, I was puzzled by this curious bullet-point at our weekly ecology seminar:
- recruitment unlikely due to Allee effects

Because I was parsing "unlikely" as an adverb modifying the verb "due" - of course, this didn't make any sense because Allee effects are not typically mentioned except as a mechanism to inhibit recruitment. Even more confusing was the previous sentence that no significant recruitment had been observed since the 1960s - so in some ways the statement that there *was* recruitment could have been new evidence to overturn earlier findings.

Eventually, I figured out that the intended parsing was for "unlikely" to be an adjective modifying the noun "recruitment" - recruitment is unlikely to occur because of low population densities (Allee effects).

Which begs the question of using complete sentences vs. phrases in powerpoint bullets: in this case, I think a complete sentence would have been fairly unambiguous, and would only have needed to be a bit longer - but in other cases, a complete sentence would take up a lot more space and be confusing as a block of text for the audience to read.

Loanwords in Japanese

Recently, I was eating in Sakura the other day and noticed something interesting on the specials menu, 黒豚ソーセジポトフ (kurobuta sausage potofu). Turning the menu over for the English side, all I found was the added word, soup, in parenthesis, which led me to believe that potofu was, indeed, derived from the French pot-au-feu. With that, I went ahead and ordered it, since the first and only time I had pot-au-feu, it was a delicious duck broth with seared foie gras and truffle oil. (thank you, Captain Jack!) Well, this one was not nearly so good - a rather bland vegetable mix with some decent sausage that tasted a bit more like hot dog than kurobuta, although in retrospect, I think that may be due to the rather unusual sweetness in kurobuta.

EDIT: This post wouldn't be complete without pointing you towards the wiki page on loanwords in Japanese, Gairaigo and the hilarious non-example "left-over", which refers to a "hit that goes over the left-fielder's head" in baseball rather than, well, leftovers. :)