Brooks doesn't cite or link to the papers, which in my opinion is a form of journalistic malpractice, so here they are:

Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile, "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012
Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir, "The Cultural Salience of Moral Character and Virtue Declined in Twentieth Century America", Journal of Positive Psychology, Forthcoming
Daniel B. Klein, "Ngrams of the Great Transformations", GMU Working Paper in Economics, 2013

I discussed the Twenge et al. paper last summer, with some (non-)replications:

"Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012
"Textual narcissism, replication 2", 7/14/2012
"What does this graph mean?", 7/15/2012
"It's all about who?", 7/31/2012

I haven't read the Kesebir and Klein papers carefully, and don't have time to do so this morning, but a glance at them raises an interesting point about the ideological resonances of certain time spans.

Daniel Klein's "very casual paper" surveys the past 250 years or so, because he's interested in the "governmentalization of society and culture" which on his view "began to set in" around 1880, "as a reaction to liberalism, the first great transformation". (By which he means classical liberalism, as represented by Adam Smith.) Since Klein is himself a liberal/libertarian, he notes with disapproval the rise since 1880 of phrases like "social needs", "needs of the community", "needs of society", "national unity", "social unity", "our society". He also notes a "long decline" — since the early 19th century —  in words and phrases like "liberty", "ought", "duty", "goodness", "good conduct".

In contrast, the Kesebirs are concerned with what they call the "well-established cultural trend in the United States toward greater individualism and its implications for the moral domain", which predicts that "during the twentieth century, words related to moral excellence and virtue" would "largely [wane] from the public conversation". This perspective resonates with the view that moral decline is a consequence of the rise of secular modernism. The underlying ideology, while not precisely the opposite of Klein's, certainly assigns a very different evaluation to the individualism/communalism dimension(s).

Jean Twenge also takes a negative attitude towards the rise in individualism — she calls it "narcissism", just so that we're clear what she thinks about it — but she sees the crucial cultural change as something that's happened since 1960 or so, presumably as a consequence of the counterculture and the hippies and all.  In the previously-cited blog posts, I noted that the trends of interest to her are actually much more striking in the period from 1900 to 1960, and in fact are hard to discern (or even reversed) in the post-flower-power era.

David Brooks doesn't mention this ideological and temporal inconsistency in his sources. In general, as I've noted in discussions of his earlier columns, his "unparalleled ability to shape an intellectually interesting idea into the rhetorical arc of an 800-word op-ed piece" crucially depends on skillful editing — or revision — of his raw materials into a form that fits his theme.

In one of the posts about Twenge on narcissism, I observed that there had been "surprisingly little uptake in the mass media", and expressed particular surprise that "so far, neither David Brooks nor the Daily Mail has taken the bait". So I'm glad to see that despite the debilitating influence of social democracy, modernism, and the counterculture, Mr. Brooks continues to demonstrate the virtue of self-consistency.

The line "The Lady doth protest too much, me thinks" from Hamlet that Mark Liberman blogged about at the end of last month struck me because it encapsulates in one sentence several significant changes that the English language has undergone. We are lucky that the written record is rich enough to let us see how features we take for granted today developed over time.

To begin with, the expression me thinks is curious since it is obviously a combination of me and thinks and both words seem to be in the wrong form. The source of this common Middle English expression is the so-called "dative subject" construction, which is common to many languages and was widely used in Old English. In this construction a noun phrase in the dative case functions in a subject-like way in place of the usual nominative case subject. The construction is commonest with a class of verbs called experiencer verbs, a class to which verbs with the meaning of Modern English to seem tend to belong. In our line, the verbal part of the expression looks like the modern verb to think but it actually descends from the verb þyncan, which meant "to seem" in Old English and got confused at some point with the similar sounding þencan, "to think." English is famous for losing the dative experiencer construction in Middle English, some time after the dative case collapsed with the accusative. In Old English, the Modern English sentence "The king likes books" would have come out as "Bec liciaþ þaem cyninge," with bec in the nominative case and cyninge in the dative. The verb agrees with the nominative plural bec and not with the singular "dative subject" cyninge.

The word doth has both an interesting spelling and interesting syntax. The spelling "doth" obviously contrasts with Modern English "does" and it is well-known that these two spellings reflect a dialect division between northern and southern England that goes back to Old English times. Here the spelling "thinks" shows the northern ending alongside the southern one in "doth." How and why the northern -s took over from the southern -th has long been a subject of investigation and we have come to believe that it reflects the growth of London as a metropolis from the fourteenth century on. At that time the north of England (prosperous due to the wool trade) had more cultural influence that at other times in English history and migrants from there made a large contribution to London's growth and to the language of the capital, which then influenced the local language throughout the south and midlands. The change in the 3rd person singular present tense verb form is not the only contribution to the grammar of Modern Standard English from the northern dialect. Even more striking is the third person plural pronoun they (including objective them, and possessive their). This pronoun was borrowed from the Scandinavian language of the Vikings who invaded northern and midlands England in the 9th and 10th centuries. They replaced the native Old English hi, (accusative hi, dative him, and possessive hira). The -s form of the third singular present tense may also be due in an indirect way to the Vikings, but this is a bit speculative.

The syntax of doth is just as interesting as the form. The verb do has two distinct uses in Modern English: it can be a general purpose action verb or it can be an auxiliary verb that appears in negative sentences and questions. In examples like "You didn't do your job" or "Did you do your job?" we see both uses at once in different positions in the sentence. The doth in our line is the auxiliary, which came into the language sometime in Middle English. The other do, which English shares with all of the other Germanic languages, is much older. It might strike a modern speaker as odd to find a do in our line, since the sentence is neither a negative nor a question. In fact, the word appears in only one of the three earliest texts of Hamlet, the second quarto. In other two early texts, the first quarto and the first folio, the verb is just protests. In early Modern English, do could be used without semantic effect in ordinary affirmative sentences. This usage reached its peak at about the time of Shakespeare's birth, when the written record shows it being used in almost 10% of such cases, but it declines steadily after that. Of course, if the auxiliary is emphatically stressed for any reason, then do is still used today, but that is not the case in our Hamlet sentence. It is interesting that the version of our line with do uses the -th ending, while the other two versions use -s. With -th, the verb would be spelled "protesteth." There was a tendency to drop the "e" in the -eth ending but in this case that move would have given the unpronounceable "protestth". So, it is perhaps not an accident that the choice of the -th ending goes along with the use of do. There is evidence that do was used more often in Shakespeare's time in cases like this one.

A final note on meter of the line. Mark points out that the line occurs in a prose passage and that only the second quarto version of the line can be scanned as iambic pentameter. It's interesting to me that the line seems to be preserved in our cultural memory in an altered form ("Methinks the lady doth protest too much"), which is easily scanned as iambic pentameter. This scansion does require that protest be scanned on the second syllable and the more common stress in everyday Modern American English is on the first. Disyllabic verbs with prefixes usually do have stress on the second syllable (provide, include, etc.) but there has been some tendency over time for the stress in these verbs to shift to the first syllable in line with the dominant trochaic pattern for English disyllabic nouns. For the verb protest, in particular, the shift seems to be very recent and still incomplete since the Oxford English Dictionary and the online Merriam Webster both indicate stress on the second syllable, though the noun is, of course, stressed on the first. If the older stress was obligatory when the altered form of the line entered the culture, then we have a possible motive for the use of the "meaningless" do, as it supports the metrical regularity of the line, while the one word forms protests and protesteth do not.

This reminds me … of something Jerry Norman was wont to say, i.e., that there were three good criteria for identifying Mandarin and deciding how old the family is. These are the concurrent presence of the third person pronoun tā, the negative bù, and the subordinative particle de/di. Jerry called languages of this type “Tabudish”, and he sometimes used this name for them in correspondence with me.

South was referring to the late specialist on Manchu and the Min branch of Sinitic who studied at Berkeley under Y. R. Chao and taught at the University of Washington from 1972-1998.

Other commenters on the Shanghainese post, especially Tsu-Lin Mei, gave additional, precise criteria for distinguishing Mandarin from Wu, which led them to conclude that the roots of Mandarin go back before the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to the Six Dynasties period (220/222-589).  I should note that both Tsu-Lin and South were close associates of Jerry Norman, and the three of them together have made remarkable contributions to the understanding of the early rise of Mandarin.

As for how much further the beginnings of Mandarin per se might be pushed, I wouldn't care to venture, but I have little doubt that the split between Literary / Classical and Vernacular Sinitic goes back to B.C. times.  Although three millennia of literary redaction have left precious little evidence of the vernacular before the Tang period when Buddhism began to legitimize its written form (see Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 [August, 1994], 707-751), we do find occasional bits and pieces of the vernacular that have managed to slip through the grasp of the literary editors of the textual tradition.  Even more exciting is the discovery of archeologically recovered texts which help to document the existence of the vernacular during the B.C. era.

One of the clearest indications of Vernacular Sinitic is the use of shì 是 as the copulative rather than as the demonstrative pronoun as in Literary / Classical.  Rare examples of this usage have been showing up in recently unearthed texts.  About six or seven years ago, Jeff Rice wrote a brilliant paper in which he showed how shì 是 evolved from being used for the Literary / Classical demonstrative into the copulative verb in Vernacular.  At the same time, he documented the shift from the Classical form X Y yě 也 to Vernacular X shì 是 Y for equational sentences ("X is Y").  Unfortunately, although from time to time I've nudged Jeff to publish that paper, it's still moldering is some drawer.  Maybe now that he's finished his dissertation on medieval historiography, perhaps I'll be able to persuade him to publish the paper on shì 是 and yě 也 before another six or seven years pass.

A syndrome called upper quarter dysfunction — its symptoms include pain, restricted immobility and impaired sensation and strength — has been reported in over half of breast cancer survivors and may be more frequent in those who undergo breast reconstruction, according to a 2012 study in the journal Cancer. [emphasis added]

Reader E.S.M. wondered whether "restricted immobility" should have been "restricted mobility" or "partial immobility" or something else.

Some evidence for this view comes from Margaret L. McNeely, et al., , "A prospective model of care for breast cancer rehabilitation: postoperative and postreconstructive issues", Cancer 2012 (which appears to have been one of Ms. Rabin's sources):

The presence of upper quarter dysfunction (UQD), defined as restricted upper quarter mobility, pain, lymphedema, and impaired sensation and strength, has been reported in over half of survivors after treatment for breast cancer.

And in general, "restricted mobility" seems to be quite common in scientific and technical writing, whereas "restricted immobility" is rare.

Logically, "restricted mobility" is also "restricted immobility". "Restricted X" obviously has less of the natural properties of X than unrestricted X does, while still having some of them, and "restricted lack of X" also places us somewhere in the middle of the X scale. So perhaps this should be a free choice.

But in phrases of the form "restricted X", we generally think of X as unrestricted in the normal state, with the restrictions as something added on in certain cases. The commonest nouns following restricted in the COCA corpus are

stock, access, area, range, areas, airspace, use, zone, diet, model, shares, mobility, space, air, immigration, movement, sense, opportunities, set, data, ranges, …

With the partial exception of "immigration", these collocates seem to confirm the notion that the unrestricted case is the normal one, with the restricted case being special. Combining this observation with the usage patterns in the technical literature, I'll tentatively conclude that E.S.M. is right.

This was the sub-head: "Language is becoming more democratic as even MPs fail to speak properly, a study from Cambridge reveals."

So, it is "democratic" to speak improperly? And Members of Parliament are actually doing that? Intelligent readers will seek evidence.

But there is no hint of any support for this nonsense in Moody's article. Just one thing is said in the article about how Members of Parliament speak today: Michael McCarthy (retired from a professorship in applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham) is quoted as saying there is a "growth toward informality" in modern English over the last 20 years as exemplified in the latest version of the 2 billion word Cambridge English Corpus, and: "We can listen to debates in Parliament and hear MPs saying things like ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’."

But this isn't improper! It is evidence that some MPs are speaking what I have suggested we should call normal-style rather than formal-style Standard English in Parliamentary speeches, and accordingly they may pronounce the going to that indicates future time reference in the normal-style variant form [gənə].

Notice that there is a grammatical constraint on this: the substitution is never made when going to means "proceeding toward". So, for example, going to Germany does not have the same range of pronunciations as going to germinate.

To be more specific, going to Germany is not pronounced *[gənəˈʤɜməni] in British English (or *[gənəˈʤɝməni] in American): the verb of motion going must be pronounced something like [goiŋ]. By contrast, going to germinate is optionally and very commonly pronounced [gənəˈʤɜmɪneit] in British ([gənəˈʤɝməneit] in American), in normal style speech.

To say that if you use this special pronunciation option you "fail to speak properly" is lunacy. The opposite is closer to the truth: you are in danger of failing to speak the normal style of Standard English properly if you don't use gonna. There may be some British speakers who don't use the gonna form much, but it's there in John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary; and to me a sentence like "I am not going to put up with it" with every vowel and consonant pronounced individually in its stressed form sounds like an extraterrestial speaking ("Do. Not. Fear. Us. We. Will. Not. Harm. You").

The important point is that the many British speakers who do use gonna are not doing it by mistake. It's a style-dependent pronunciation variant familiar to tens of millions of speakers (plus hundreds of millions more in other anglophone countries); it's not a slip-up or a transgression.

Will we ever see a world in which there is enough linguistic training for journalists and editors that they at least know the difference between flawless command of normal-style Standard English pronunciation on the one hand and grammatical error on the other?

Still, a closer look at what the angry student, Zhang Tianpu, actually wrote will help us put the controversy in a clearer perspective.

Zhang's accusation against the Vice President appeared in an entry he posted on his renren.com (Facebook clone in China) account.  The entry is entitled "Bàidēng Bīndà bìyèshì yǎnjiǎng bùhéshíyí de yǒuguān Zhōngguó bùfèn" 拜登宾大毕业式演讲不合时宜的有关中国部分 (Outmoded portion about China in Biden's graduation speech at Penn).

Here are the two portions of Biden's speech about China to which Zhang took exception:

I love to hear people tell me how to use the vernacular "China is going to eat our lunch."

China is a great nation, and we should hope for the continued expansion. But ladies and gentlemen, their problems are immense, and they lack much of what we have. We have the best universities in the world. We have a legal system that is open and fair. We have the most agile venture capital system in the world. We lead the world in innovation and technology, all for a simple basic reason. Steve Jobs, speaking at Stanford was asked by a young man "how can I be more like you, how I can become like you?" And Job famously answered: think different.

You CANNOT think different in a nation where you cannot breath free. You CANNOT think different in a nation where you aren't able to challenge orthodoxy, because change only comes from challenging orthodoxy.

…

I spent 10 days with President Xi at the request of former president Hu and President obama…I listened to his questions and the interests he had and he asked me how I felt after the 5 days in the U.S. and 5 days in China. And I said he's a strong bright man, but he has the look of a man who is about to take on a job he's not at all sure is going to end well. I mean that seriously.

These sections appear at 11:05 and 17:41 of Biden's speech as recorded on this YouTube video.  Although there are a few minor errors, I won't quibble with Zhang's transcription of the VP's speech, but should point out that the very first sentence makes a lot more sense if "to use the vernacular" is set off with commas or dashes.

What is remarkable about Zhang's criticism of Biden's remarks is that he focuses so heavily on the VP's use of the word "nation" to refer to China:

Bàidēng zài “You CANNOT think different in a nation where you aren't able to challenge orthodoxy” zhè jù huà li yòng de shì nation zhège cí. Zhè yīdiǎn shì zuì ràng wǒ qìfèn de, yīnwèi Yīngyǔ zhòng nation zhǐ de “mínzú” de yìsi, hé country, state shì yǒu qūbié de. Country, state kěnéng gèng qiángdiào de shì yīgè guójiā zhěngtǐ de gàiniàn, shènzhì dài yǒu zhǐ zhèngfǔ de yìsi; huàn jù huà shuō, rúguǒ tā zhè jù huà li miàn yòng de shì country zhège cí, nàme jiù kěyǐ lǐjiě wèi kěnéng yóuyú zhǒngzhǒng wàibù yīnsù de zhìyuē, wǒmen mínzú de qiánlì méiyǒu 100% de fāhuī chūlái.

拜登在 “You CANNOT think different in a nation where you aren't able to challenge orthodoxy” 这句话里用的是nation这个词。这一点是最让我气愤的，因为英语中nation指的“民族”的意思，和country，state是有区别的。 country, state可能更强调的是一个国家整体的概念，甚至带有指政府的意思；换句话说，如果他这句话里面用的是country这个词，那么就可以理解为可能由于 种种外部因素的制约，我们民族的潜力没有100%地发挥出来。

In this sentence, “You CANNOT think different in a nation where you aren't able to challenge orthodoxy”, he used the word "nation".  This is what really infuriated me, because in English "nation" indicates "race, ethnicity", which is different from "country, state".  "Country, state" perhaps places more emphasis on the notion of the entirety of the country, even to the point of referring to the idea of government.  In other words, if he had used the word "country" in this sentence, then perhaps one could understand that, due to various external constraints, our people's potential has still not been brought to bear 100%.

N.B.:  Underlining indicates words in Zhang's text that are originally in English.

Note that, in the last sentence quoted, Zhang uses mínzú 民族 in a positive light (I have translated it as "people" here), whereas above he uses the same expression in the probable sense of "race, ethnicity".

The weakness in Zhang's reasoning lies mainly in his confusion over the multiple meanings of the word mínzú 民族.  As pointed out on Language Log just a few days ago in "Racist Park", mínzú 民族 can mean "ethnic group; race; nationality; people; nation".  Coming from the English side, we must keep in mind that "nation" can be translated into Chinese as guó 国 ("country"), guójiā 国家 ("country"), guódù 国度 ("country; state"), bāng 邦 ("state"), and, yes, mínzú 民族 ("ethnic group; race; nationality; people; nation").

It is clear that, when Biden said "China is a great nation", he was respectfully referring to the country as a whole.  Yet the sensitivity to questions of ethnicity in China, especially with regard to the shǎoshù mínzú 少数民族 ("ethnic / national minorities"), e.g., Uyghurs, Tibetans, and scores of others, caused Zhang to take umbrage over something that the Vice President never intended.

Finally, I should point out that mínzú 民族 is a neologism coined specifically for conveying the meaning of "nation".  It is but one of a host of new terms designed to convey Western intellectual, political, and scientific concepts that entered the Chinese lexicon around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, many of them coined or calqued in Japan.  Consequently, one would do well to avoid becoming overly testy and proprietary when using and defining polysemous terms such as mínzú 民族 ("ethnic group; race; nationality; people; nation").  Rather, one needs to be sensitive to their diverse meanings in various contexts and not insist upon a single interpretation for all situations.

Speaking of which, I'd be very curious to know how the folks over at Tea Leaf Nation render their name into Chinese.  I'd be surprised if it were cháyè mínzú 茶叶民族.

[h/t to Neil Schmid]

I am pleased to announce that the English section of this year's Blizzard Challenge listening test is now live. Please help us out by taking part, and encouraging your colleagues, students, friends, contacts, etc. to take part too. It's your chance to hear a range of speech synthesisers, including some really good ones. Please circulate this message widely - for example, on mailing lists, forums and using social media - we need to reach as many people as possible in the coming month or so.

In order to participate, sign up here and follow the instructions.

I think I have already demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Quechua people are a lost Nostratic tribe. Note that the semantic matches are impeccable and the similarity of the words is quite obvious to any open-minded observer. Indeed, the matches are much better than many of those in the LWED. The quality of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, in particular, is guaranteed by the fact that they represent statistically certified ultraconserved Eurasiatic vocabulary (Pagel et al. 2013). The famous items ‘mother’, ‘bark’, and ‘worm’ are among them. […]

But there is more to Quechua than just its Eurasiatic affinities. It seems to be particularly close to Proto-Indo-European. Compare the Quechua numerals pichqa ‘5’ and suqta ‘6’ = PIE *penkʷe, *sweḱs, clearly a common Indo-Quechuan innovation not shared with any other Eurasiatic group. I can’t reveal too much at present, but mark my words: you’ll read about it in Nature one day – or Science, perhaps, or PNAS.

Certainly the current reviewing standards at Nature, Science, and PNAS (at least for speech- and language-related papers) will allow and even encourage this future bombshell, if only Piotr can be persuaded to hold his nose and write the paper.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to integrate the Quechua data into the statistical analysis of Pagel et al. 2013. While you're at it, you could incorporate the Quechua/Sinitic correspondences revealed in Mark Rosenfelder's prescient 1996 work "Deriving Proto-World with tools you probably have at home". A quote from that source worth repeating:

When I first posted this stuff to the Net, one gentleman wondered aloud (wondered anet?) if I might have proved that Chinese and Quechua are related. Some days it's not worth getting out of bed.

Similar words with similar meanings do not prove that languages are related. They might point to a relationship– but they might also be due to borrowing ('gung ho' really is from Chinese); they might be due to universal processes like babytalk or onomatopoeia; and above all they may just be chance.

This seems to be hard for some people to accept. Just look at ren and runa, or gaijin and goyim, they seem to think– how could that possibly be due to chance?

These people should be treated with respect. They are the people who made Las Vegas what it is today.

What are the chances of finding maliq'a-style pseudo-cognates? Well, empirically, based on my experiences finding the above Quechua/Chinese list, the answer is "One half." That is, with a little ingenuity, and given languages with reasonably compatible phonologies, you can find a 'cognate' between two unrelated languages about once out of every two words you try.

[h/t to Ben Zimmer and Languagehat. See "Ultraconserved words? Really??", 5/8/2013, and "Scrabble tips for time travelers", 2/26/2009, for background.]

A visibly infuriated Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) tore into Attorney General Eric Holder after his time expired in a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.  […]

"I cannot have a witness challenge my character," said Gohmert, as the chairman told him again that his time had expired. Gohmert continued talking as other members of the committee asked him to observe hearing rules and suspend.

Gohmert asked again for a point of personal privilege and said that Holder was "wrong on the things that I asserted as fact." The other members of the committee disputed that his contention was a point of personal privilege.

"The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus," said Gohmert, in a malapropism for the ages.

Here's the audio from the crucial passage, beginning about 4:10 into the C-SPAN clip embedded in the HuffPo story:

I can't make out anything (of the crucial phrase) except "…((cast)) aspersions on my asparagus".

When I first heard this, I wondered whether it was some kind of down-home idiom. But I haven't been able to turn up any evidence for this view, so apparently it's just an unexpected Fay-Cutler malapropism for "cast aspersions on my character".

Update — In the comments, Dick Margulis and Jon Weinberg present evidence that this was in fact an idiom choice and not a speech error; and Cameron Majidi locates the locus classicus (though of a slightly different form of the joke).

I missed this reference myself, but it's definitely a symptom of the Decline of the West that nobody at the Colbert Report, the Washington Post, or The Guardian caught it.

mínzú yuán 民族园 ([Minority] Nationalities Park)

The mistake arises from making the wrong choice among the multiple meanings of the word mínzú 民族 ("ethnic group; race; nationality; people").

The reason this mistranslation is particularly inappropriate is because of the infamous (but not historically accurate) sign at the entrance to Huangpu Park in semi-colonial Shanghai — "No dogs or Chinese allowed" — which is one of the most frequent instantiations of racism from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The "main purpose" of the Recess Appointments Clause, therefore, is not—as the Eleventh Circuit held and the Board argues—only "to enable the President to fill vacancies to assure the proper functioning of our government." Evans, 387 F.3d at 1226. This formulation leaves out a crucial aspect of the Clause‘s purpose: to preserve the Senate‘s advice-and-consent power by limiting the president‘s unilateral appointment power. Accord Noel Canning, 705 F.3d at 505 (explaining that the Eleventh Circuit‘s statement of the Clause‘s purpose "omits a crucial element of the Clause, which enables the president to fill vacancies only when the Senate is unable to provide advice and consent" (emphasis in original)).

The importance of this aspect of the Clause‘s purpose is difficult to understate. [emphasis added]

More than you probably want to read on this topic:

"Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?", 2/26/2004
"We cannot/must not understate/overstate" 5/26/2004
"Overstating understatement" 6/22/2004
"Multiplex negatio feblondiat" 7/14/2007
"Weird logic and Bayesian semantics" 7/15/2007
"'Cannot underestimate' = 'must not underestimate'" 11/6/2008
"Misunderestimation" 4/4/2009
"Gov. Cuomo and our poor monkey brains", 1/21/2011
"…not understating the threat", 6/5/2012
"(Not) Underestimating the Irish Famine", 9/16/2012
"Overestimating, underestimating, whatever", 1/10/2013
"CIA unable to underestimate the effect of drone war", 4/7/2013

But in case you need more….

[h/t Jonathan Falk]

Many of the results of the Oregon study failed to meet the 95 percent standard, and I think it's wrong to describe this as showing that "Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years."

To be clear: it's fine for the authors of the study to describe it that way. They're writing for fellow professionals in an academic journal. But when you're writing for a lay audience, it's seriously misleading. Most lay readers will interpret "significant" in its ordinary English sense, not as a term of art used by statisticians, and therefore conclude that the study positively demonstrated that there were no results large enough to care about.

Many past LL posts have dealt with various aspects of the rhetoric of significance. Here are a few:

"The secret sins of academics", 9/16/2004
"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics", 9/26/2007
"Gender-role resentment and the Rorschach-blot news reports", 9/27/2007
"The 'Gender Happiness Gap': Statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007
"Listening to Prozac, hearing effect sizes", 3/1/2008
"Localization of emotion perception in the brain of fish", 9/18/2009
"Bonferroni rules", 4/6/2011
"Response to Jasmin and Casasanto's response to me", 3/17/2012
"Texting and language skills", 8/2/2012

But Kevin Drum's rant led me to take another look at the lexicographic history of the word significant, and this in turn led me back to the Oregon Experiment — via a famous economist's work on the statistics of telepathy.

The OED's first sense for significant has citations back to 1566, and  in this sense, being significant is a big deal: something that's significant is "Highly expressive or suggestive; loaded with meaning". This is the ordinary-language sense that makes the statistical usage so misleading, because a "statistically significant" result is often not really expressive or suggestive at all, much less "loaded with meaning".

The OED gives a second sense, almost as old, that is much weaker, and is probably the source of the later statistical usage: "That has or conveys a particular meaning; that signifies or indicates something". Not necessarily something important, mind you, just something — say, in the modern statistical sense, that a result shouldn't be attributed to sampling error. A couple of the OED's more general illustrative examples:

1608   E. Topsell Hist. Serpents 48   Their voyce was not a significant voyce, but a kinde of scrietching.
1936   A. J. Ayer Lang., Truth & Logic iii. 71   Two symbols are said to be of the same type when it is always possible to substitute one for the other without changing a significant sentence into a piece of nonsense.

And then there's an early mathematical sense (attested from 1614):

Math. Of a digit: giving meaningful information about the precision of the number in which it is contained, rather than simply filling vacant places at the beginning or end. Esp. in significant figure, significant digit. The more precisely a number is known, the more significant figures it has.

The OED gives a few additional senses that are not strikingly different from the first two: "Expressive or indicative of something"; "Sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy; consequential, influential"; "In weakened sense: noticeable, substantial, considerable, large".

And then we get to (statistically) significant:

5. Statistics. Of an observed numerical result: having a low probability of occurrence if the null hypothesis is true; unlikely to have occurred by chance alone. More fully statistically significant. A result is said to be significant at a specified level of probability (typically five per cent) if it will be obtained or exceeded with not more than that probability when the null hypothesis is true.

In an earlier post, I characterized sense 5. as "[a]mong R.A. Fisher's several works of public-relations genius". However, I gave Sir Ronald too much credit, as the OED's list of citations shows:

1885   Jrnl. Statist. Soc. (Jubilee Vol.) 187   In order to determine whether the observed difference between the mean stature of 2,315 criminals and the mean stature of 8,585 British adult males belonging to the general population is significant [etc.].
1907   Biometrika 5 318   Relative local differences falling beyond + 2 and − 2 may be regarded as probably significant since the number of asylums is small (22).
1925   R. A. Fisher Statist. Methods iii. 47   Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant.
1931   L. H. C. Tippett Methods Statistics iii. 48   It is conventional to regard all deviations greater than those with probabilities of 0·05 as real, or statistically significant.

In 1885, Sir Ronald's birth was still five years in the future. So who came up with this miracle of mathematical marketing? It seems that the credit is due to Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, better known for his contributions to economics. The OED's 1885 citation for (statistically) significant is to his paper "Methods of Statistics",  Journal of the Statistical Society of London , Jubilee Volume (Jun. 22 - 24, 1885), pp. 181-217:

The science of Means comprises two main problems: 1. To  find how far the difference between any proposed Means is accidental or indicative of a law? 2. To find what is the best kind of Mean; whether for the purpose contemplated by the first problem, the elimination of chance, or other purposes? An example of the first problem is afforded by some recent experiments in so-called "psychical research." One person chooses a suit of cards. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been. Many hundred such choices and guesses having been recorded, it has been found that the proportion of successful guesses considerably exceeds the figure which would have been the most probable supposing chance to be the only agency at work, namely 1/4. E.g., in 1,833 trials the number of successful guesses exceeds 458, the quarter of the total number, by 52. The first problem investigates how far the difference between the average above stated and the results usually obtained in similar experience where pure chance reigns is a significant difference; indicative of the working of a law other than chance, or merely accidental.

So the first use in print of "(statistically) significant" was in reference to an argument for telepathy!

Edgeworth gives no detailed analysis of the "Psychical Research" data in this article, though he notes that

we have several experiments analogous to the one above described, all or many of them indicating some agency other than chance.

But he went over the issue in great detail in a paper published in the same year ("The calculus of probabilities applied to psychical research", Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 3, pp. 190-199, 1885), which begins with an inspiring (though untranslated) quote from Laplace ("Théorie Analytique des probabilités", 1812):

"Nous sommee si éloignés de connaître tous les agents de la nature qu'il serait peu philosophique de nier l'existence de phenomènes, uniquement parcequ'ils sont inexplicables dans l'état actuel de nos connaissances. Seulement nous devons les examiner avec une attention d'autant plus scrupuleuse, qu'il parait plus difficile de les admettre; et c'est ici que l'analyse des probabilités devient indispensable, pour determiner jusqu'à quel point il faut multiplier les observations ou les expériences, pour avoir, en faveur de l'existence des agents qu'elles semblent indiquer, une probability supérieure à toutes les raisons que l'on peut avoir d'ailleurs, de la réjéter."

"We are so far from knowing all the agencies of nature that it would hardly be philosophical to deny the existence of phenomena merely because they are inexplicable in the current state of our knowledge. We must simply examine them with more careful attention, to the extent that it seems more difficult to explain them; and it's here that the analysis of probabilities becomes essential, in order to determine to what point we must multiply observations or experiments, in order to have, in favor of the existence of the agencies that they seem to indicate, a higher probability than all the reasons that one can otherwise have to reject them."

Edgeworth then undertakes to show that telepathy is real:

It is proposed here to appreciate by means of the calculus of probabilities the evidence in favour of some extraordinary agency which is afforded by experiences of the following type: One person chooses a suit of cards, or a letter of the alphabet. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been.

After considerable application of somewhat complex mathematical reasoning, e.g. the passage below, Edgeworth concludes that the probability of obtaining the cited results by chance — 510 correct card-suit guesses out of 1833 tries — is 0.00004.

Even if we grant his premises, Edgeworth's estimate seems to have been quantitively over-enthusiastic — R tells us that the probability of obtaining the cited result by chance, given his model, should be a bit greater than 0.003:

binom.test(458+52,1833,p=0.25,alternative="greater")
Exact binomial test
data: 458 + 52 and 1833
number of successes = 510, number of trials = 1833, p-value = 0.003106
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is greater than 0.25

But the p-value calculated according to Edgeworth's model — whether it's .00004 or .003 — is not an accurate estimate of the probability of getting the cited number of correct guesses by chance, in an experiment of the cited type. That's because his model might well be wrong, and there are plausible alternatives in which successful guesses are much more likely.

Recall his description of the experiment:

One person chooses a suit of cards, or a letter of the alphabet. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been.

He assumes that the chooser picks among the four suits of cards with equal a priori probability; and that the guesser, if guessing by chance, must do the same. But suppose that they both prefer one of the four suits, say hearts? If the chooser always chooses hearts, and the guesser always guesses hearts, then perfect psychical communication will appear to have taken place.

More subtly, we only need to assume a slight shared bias for better-than-chance results to emerge. And the bias need not be shared in advance of the experiment — since the guesser learns the true choice after each guess, he or she has plenty of opportunity to estimate the chooser's bias, and to start to imitate it. In other words, this is really not a telepathy experiment, it's the world's first Probability Learning experiment! (See "Rats beat Yalies", 12/11/2005, for a description of this experimental paradigm.)

If the result is equivalent to a shared uneven distribution over the four suits, then things are very different. With shared probabilities of 0.34, 0.33, 0.17, 0.16, for example, the probability of getting at least 510 correct guesses in 1833 trials is about 55%. And I assert without demonstration that such an outcome could easily emerge from a probability-learning process, without any initial shared bias.

My point here is not to debunk psychical research, but to observe that here as elsewhere, it's important to pay attention to the the details of the model, the data, and the outcome, rather than just looking at the p value.

And this brings us back to the contested paper, Katherine Baicker et al., "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", NEJM 5/2/2013.

Since this post has already gone on too long, I'll try to make this fast (for the two of you who are still reading…) Here's the background:

In 2008, Oregon initiated a limited expansion of its Medicaid program for low-income adults through a lottery drawing of approximately 30,000 names from a waiting list of almost 90,000 persons. Selected adults won the opportunity to apply for Medicaid and to enroll if they met eligibility requirements. This lottery presented an opportunity to study the effects of Medicaid with the use of random assignment.

Specifically

Our study population included 20,745 people: 10,405 selected in the lottery (the lottery winners) and 10,340 not selected (the control group).

They were able to interview 12,229 people, 6387 lottery winners and 5842 among the controls, about two years after the lottery.

But it's not quite as simple as that:

Adults randomly selected in the lottery were given the option to apply for Medicaid, but not all persons selected by the lottery enrolled in Medicaid (either because they did not apply or because they were deemed ineligible).

A more detailed picture of the lottery process is given in the paper's Supplementary Appendix:

In total, 35,169 individuals—representing 29,664 households—were selected by lottery. If individuals in a selected household submitted the appropriate paperwork within 45 days after the state mailed them an application and demonstrated that they met the eligibility requirements, they were enrolled in OHP Standard. About 30% of selected individuals successfully enrolled. There were two main sources of slippage: only about 60% of those selected sent back applications, and about half of those who sent back applications were deemed ineligible, primarily due to failure to meet the requirement of income in the last quarter corresponding to annual income below the poverty level, which in 2008 was $10,400 for a single person and $21,200 for a family of four.

In other words, we would expect that only about 30% of the lottery winners in this paper's sample were actually enrolled in the insurance program.  Thus the lottery selection was random, but the enrollment step for lottery winners was not: and the various reasons for failing to get insurance are presumably not neutral with respect to health status and outcomes.

When I first began reading this paper, this seemed to me to constitute a huge source of non-sampling error, since the lottery winners who actually enrolled may constitute a very different group from the lottery participants as a whole.

However, it turns out that this doesn't matter. Although the paper's title announces itself as a study of the "Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", the authors did not compares the outcomes of those who were actually enrolled against the outcomes of those who were not. Instead, they compared the outcomes of those who won the lottery—and thus were given the opportunity to try to enroll—against the outcomes of those who didn't win the lottery (even though some of these did have health insurance anyhow). So realistically, it's a study of the "Effects of an Extra Opportunity to Try to Enroll in Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes".

Of the 6,387 survey responders who were lottery winners,  1,903 (or 29.8%) actually enrolled in Medicaid at some point. A reasonable number of the control group had OHP or Medicaid insurance as well, and by the end of the period of the study, the differences between the two groups in enrolled in proportion enrolled in public insurance had nearly vanished (we're given no information about how many might have had employer-provided insurance, but presumably the proportion was small):

Of course, the study's authors set up their model to compensate for this situation:

The subgroup of lottery winners who ultimately enrolled in Medicaid was not comparable to the overall group of persons who did not win the lottery. We therefore used a standard instrumental-variable approach (in which lottery selection was the instrument for Medicaid coverage) to estimate the causal effect of enrollment in Medicaid. Intuitively, since the lottery increased the chance of being enrolled in Medicaid by about 25 percentage points, and we assumed that the lottery affected outcomes only by changing Medicaid enrollment, the effect of being enrolled in Medicaid was simply about 4 times (i.e., 1 divided by 0.25) as high as the effect of being able to apply for Medicaid. This yielded a causal estimate of the effect of insurance coverage.

And there was indeed a period of differential enrollment proportions between between the lottery winners and losers, as well a period of different enrollment-opportunity proportions, and so it's plausible to look for effects across the sets of winners and losers as a whole.

But the main physical health outcomes that the study examined (blood pressure, cholesterol, glycated hemoglobin, etc.) are age- and lifestyle-related measures that are not very likely to be seriously influenced by a short period of differential access to insurance. The things that were (both statistically and materially) influenced — self-reported health-related quality of life, out-of-pocket medical spending, rate of depression — are much more plausible candidates to show the impact of having a brief opportunity to get insurance access.

And as in F. Y. Edgeworth's analysis of card-suit guessing, the p values in the regression are not as important as the details of what the observations were, and what forces plausibly shaped them.

[Note: For more on the subsequent history of psychic statistics, see Jessica Utts, "Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology", Statistical Science 1991.)

How (you might ask) could it possibly be libelous simply to ask a question about why Lord McAlpine, after twenty years of living in retirement, was suddenly a hot topic on Twitter?

Well, McAlpine was being tweeted about in an unpleasant context. There were rumors about a famous person facing allegations of child sexual abuse. A man thought he remembered being sexually interfered with while he was a child living in a children's home, and had come to believe that his abuser from many years before was Lord McAlpine. A BBC TV program uncovered this, and mentioned "a senior Conservative" (McAlpine once served in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet) without releasing the name. The name got out anyway, and rumors started to spread on Twitter. But on being shown a photo of Lord McAlpine, the accuser immediately realized he had been mistaken about his abuser's identity.

As for the point about merely asking a question, under the British case law governing defamation it is well established a question can convey a statement by implication. You do not have to assert a defamatory claim: an implicature will do just fine to put you at risk of being found liable for huge damages.

Sally Bercow, who is the high-profile wife of the speaker of the UK House of Commons, could be in deep trouble. You can read here about the efforts of her defense attorney to claim that it was just an innocent question, and that *innocent face* was some kind of mood indicator meaning that she was sincere and didn't know the answer. The plaintiff in the case, Lord McAlpine, thinks the appended phrase was clearly a wink-wink nudge-nudge tipoff implicating that the growing Twitter rumors should be believed. Although he has dropped similar cases against Twitter users with few readers, he is not prepared to drop this one, because Sally Bercow has tens of thousands of followers, and was a major player in getting the rumors about him spread to millions.

Good luck with the innocent-face defense, Sally; but take your checkbook to court, you may need it.

The most important obstacle to intelligibility, of course, is the sheer difference (in grammar, syntax, phonology, vocabulary, etc.) among the topolectal varieties of Chinese. In this post, to show how dissimilar Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is from one of the most important Sinitic topolects, we shall look closely at a text composed in rather colloquial Shanghainese.

In "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2", we discussed the corresponding Shanghainese terms for these and related expressions. This prompted a friend who knows Shanghainese to send me an interview which is laden with vernacularisms in that language. The interview begins in Mandarin.

A CCTV reporter asks a resident of the city of Shanghai: "What do you think of the plan for the microblogs to start charging a fee?"

Shanghai resident: "May I speak in Shanghainese?"

Reporter: "Yes."

Whereupon the Shanghai resident replies in raunchy Shanghainese colloquial.

Most Language Log readers will have heard spoken Mandarin, so I give the resident's diatribe in three audio files in order that the very different sounds of Shanghainese can be fully appreciated. All three speakers are male because the female Shanghai speakers whom I asked to record the passage uniformly refused.

I will not give a word-by-word transcription of the Shanghainese, because you can hear for yourself from the audio files what it sounds like. I will, however, provide a rough translation of the whole, and then follow up with some notes.

"Bonk! This bunch of beasts are crazy over cash. If our government does not get this matter under control, then we're really screwed. Twat! Didn't the new boss Xi say that he was gonna give us common people a "China Dream"? Gimme a break! Bonk these businessmen who control the internet and the Development and Reform Commission! They're all a bunch of gangsters. If the Ministry of Industry lets them do whatever they want, then our "China Dream" will be a bonkin' pipe dream our whole life. Twat! Just thinking of these floating corpses in their coffins makes me angry — idiots! gangsters! beasts! damn devils! Muddleheads! If your shoes don't fit, wouldn't you just change to another pair? If your toes hurt, wouldn't you just cut them off? To hell with it! I'm not gonna talk about those bonkers anymore, I'm gonna go have a flat cake and fritter with some soybean milk. Bye bye!"

“拆那! 格邦宗桑想钞票想疯特勒，格宗桑活阿拉政府啊勿管额孩画，个么正宗一脚气了。娘比，新来额习老板勿是岗要拨阿拉 老八姓一只中国忙做做阿是啦？帮帮忙澳，拆那格底忙落运营桑德之发改委一帮瘪三，工信部要是再娘伊拉为诉越为，个么阿拉额中国忙一桑一丝啊就是拆那娘做白 热忙娄。娘 比，想想格帮棺材否尸缺西瘪三宗桑赤佬磨子就促气! 戆徒，鞋子佛适意好调一桑佛啦，脚节头痛好宰特佛啦? 算了算了，册那佛岗了， 爷叔要吃豆腐浆大饼油条去了，拜拜!"

[N.B.: The Sinographic transcriptions in many cases are tentative, since there are not always established, "standard" representations of Shanghainese morphemes in characters. I'm sure that some Language Log readers can do a better job of translating the colloquial passage, but I hope that my rough rendering can at least give an impression of the quality of the language.]

Lexical and general notes:

In this context, Shanghainese 生活 probably corresponds best to Mandarin gòudang 勾当 ("business; deal"; premodern yíngshēng 营生 ["earn a living"]).

The Shanghai / general Wu curse "animal" has an apparent Buddhist origin: zhòngshēng 众牲 < zhòngshēng 众生 ("sentient beings").

娘比 variant, short form of 娘希匹 (apparently this was Chiang Kai-shek's favorite curse).

The part about shoes not fitting and toes hurting is inspired by Xi Jinping's use of this analogy for how to make policy adjustments.

Speculation on the origin of the folk expression "floating corpse": to curse that someone's ancestral tombs be flooded — one of the the most vicious imprecations in premodern China. This certainly predated the recent spate of thousands of pig corpses floating in one of the main rivers of Shanghai.

The expression bāngbāngmáng 帮帮忙 still means primarily "(please) help me" in Mandarin and in most northern topolects, but in Shanghainese, it has become almost exclusively a euphemism for "don't insult my intelligence", similar to the evolution of English "Give me a break!"

Phonological notes from Matt Anderson, who is currently in Shanghai doing research on oracle bone inscriptions:

I've consulted the Shanghaihua da cidian 上海話大詞典, which is something of a misnomer, as it's not really a dictionary and it's not at all comprehensive (and the words are not only not arranged alphabetically, but they're not even arranged by any other system — just according to rough semantic categories, so you need to consult the index, which is only arranged by stroke order). It naturally doesn't have a lot of the single words in this text, and I don't think it has any of the most vulgar ones (though I may just not be able to find them).

I've put together a list of some transcriptions of some of the key terms (see below). In all cases, the Shanghainese transcription is for the last character or group of characters on a line.

宗桑/畜牲(畜生) ts‘oʔ33 sɑ̃44

桑活/生活 sã55 ɦuəʔ21

勿/不 vəʔ12

孩/好 hɔ34

一脚气/一脚去 iɪʔ33 tɕiᴀʔ55 tɕ‘i21

岗/讲 kɑ̃34

八/百(as in 老八/百姓). 百 pᴀʔ55

阿是 ᴀʔ33 zɿ44

瘪三 piɪʔ33 sᴇ44

娘/让 ȵiã23

否尸/浮尸 vɤ22 sɿ44

磨子/模子 mo22 tsɿ44

戆徒/戆大 gɑ̃22 du44

脚节（头）(I included the last syllable because that’s how it was listed in the dictionary and I don’t know how its absence might affect the tones) tɕiᴀʔ33 tɕiɪʔ55 dɤ21

脚趾（头） (I’ve also included this one because it was your correspondent’s translation / transcription and it was also in the “dictionary”) tɕiᴀʔ33 tsɿ55 dɤ21

Shanghainese is definitely alive and well in my neighborhood. In my apartment complex (or however you translate xiaoqu 小區), it's probably the primary language. I haven't really been able to learn anything, though, except for a few words.

Glosses from Richard VanNess Simmons:

I think the "Shanghai_interview.doc" that you supplied is quite effective in showing how the passage was transcribed into characters. There are actually very few words that are purely Shanghainese, even counting the few vulgarisms. So much of the character transcription is simply using characters to gloss the Shanghai pronunciation of a common Chinese word -– thus effectively making it look as strange as it sounds to a person who knows Mandarin but does not speak Shanghai. For example 岗 glosses the Shanghai pronunciation of 讲 'say', which would be Romanized as /gã́w/; and 娘 glosses the pronunciation of 让 /niã́/ 'let, allow'; 八 for 百 /bāq/ 'hundred'; 桑 for 生 /sã̀/; 丝 for 世 /sì/; 忙 for 梦 /móng/, etc. In a few places, the characters are fairly standard ways of writing the actual Shanghai words, such as

阿拉 (=我们) āq-la
伊拉 (=他们) ‘yí-la
佛／勿 (=不) veq
额 (=的) g’eq
勒 (=了) leq
个么 (=那么) gēq-meq
特 (=掉) tēq
格底 (=这点) g’eq-di
适意 (=舒服) sēq-yi
阿是 (=是不是) āq-zï

Much of the rest is the same in both Shanghai and Putonghua, as can be seen by the fair amount of overlap where the characters are what they usually mean and are thus the same in both.

[Thanks to Sanping Chen, Richard VanNess Simmons, Matt Anderson, Wenkan Xu, Jidong Yang, Zhichen Zhao, Bill Hannas, Rebecca Fu, and Rostislav Berezkin]

We’ve got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point since the Pliocene, when there were jungles in northern Canada. And the number hurdles ever upward, as ocean levels rise and extreme weather becomes routine. Three-fifty was the old target; four-fifty is the new one. But what indication is there that we’ll stop at five hundred, six hundred, or even more?

The OED (in an entry not updated since 1899) calls hurtle, v. "Now only literary or arch.", giving the etymology as

apparently a diminutive and iterative of hurt v., in its original sense of ‘strike with a shock’.

One sense that remains active in contemporary journalistic use is "6. To dash, rush, hurry; esp. with noise", perhaps because of resonance with hurry and hurl. (Though the "with noise" part seems to have withered away…)

The half-dozen most recent uses in the NYT are:

Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today.

At the precise millisecond the nut succumbs, the jaw muscles sense the yielding and reflexively let up. Without that reflex, the molars would continue to hurtle recklessly toward one another, now with no intact nut between.

You reach down and take a small hand, and joined, you hurtle toward the future.

It was one of the premier skiing venues in the nation in the 1930s and 1940s, drawing up to 5,000 people to watch top skiers like Dick Durrance hurtle past them on seven-foot-long wooden skis.

The combination is lethal, and as I hurtle toward the end of my 30s, my guilt has gone rogue.

But Mr. Obama’s effort to define success on his terms is coming up against two primary counterarguments as the White House and Congress hurtle toward the next budget showdown in coming weeks.

For most Americans, hurtle is pronounced exactly the same way as hurdle. And hurdle, in addition to being commoner than hurtle (about 7.69 per million for the "hurdle" and "hurdles" in COCA, compared to 0.60 for "hurtle" and "hurtles"), has the advantage of referring to a concrete type of object and a specific associated action.

This creates the perfect situation for eggcorn creation: a relatively rare and somewhat archaic word that is pronounced in just the same way as another word that is much more common in everyday usage, and has a clear meaning that overlaps at least metaphorically with most examples of the more unusual word.

If you hurtle through or towards something, you don't necessarily hurdle any obstacles — but if there were any obstacles in your way, you probably would hurdle them. And the idea of moving quickly without regard for obstacles is not a bad proxy for the usual uses of hurtle.

Given all this, it's surprising that hurdle for hurtle is apparently not very common — it's not in the Eggcorn Database, and news or book searches for some obvious cases (e.g. "hurdle recklessly"  or "hurdle toward") don't turn up many relevant examples. But it's Out There:

From Financial World at some point in the 1950s:

For another — in electronics — we expect gross to hurdle upward 160% and net income to climb from 51 a share to around $1.30.

From The Adélie Penguin: Bellwether of Climate Change:

The seals lurk below and hurdle upward, crashing through the soft ice to snare a penguin.

A few examples from a Google News search:

The remaining survivors are huddled together on the titular train that hurdles through brutal landscapes of ice and endless snow.

“Someday girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun,” Springsteen croons as the song hurdles toward its titanic finale, “But until then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

One of New Jersey's most famous boardwalks, in Seaside Heights, is hurdling toward completion as well.

You can double jump, which sends your robot unicorn hurdling into the air while it expels a rainbow.

We're hurdling towards the end of the term and graduation.

After seeing 40 oz. glass bottles hurdling through the air, I wasn't surprised at the injuries we saw.

Her death again sent the home hurdling toward foreclosure and possible demolition.

The Eagles actually beat the Ravens last season in week 2, 24-23 to begin the season 2-0 before hurdling into the NFC East's abyss.

Hysterical! Screaming flower girl goes hurdling down the aisle.  (link to video)

[h/t to Monte Davis]

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