One of the standard cases of Gricean implicature is the interpretation of irrelevant praise. Thus in "Logic and Conversation", Grice's first example of "flouting the first maxim of quantity" is this:

A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: "Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc."  (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? he cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only on the assumption that he thinks Mr X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.)

But Sally's praise, though perhaps excessive, is not irrelevant.

This reminds me of a real-world rhetorical strategy that you sometimes see in reviews and evaluations: a set of very damaging criticisms are preceded by a roughly equal amount of strong praise.  In some cases, I think, the role of the praise is not so much to give an even-handed evaluation, as to strengthen the criticism by establishing that the writer or speaker is not prejudiced, sees the individual's good points, etc.

[In the world of this comic, however, Sally is just trying to be fair to people she genuinely (if fictionally) can't stand.]

There are languages in which the relationship between Edward and Michael has a name. In Carrier, this is the -loh relationship. One could say Lhloh 'uhint'oh "they are each other's spouse's sibling's spouse/sibling's spouse's sibling". (For extra credit, try to pronounce the onset cluster [ɬl].) German Schwippschwager seems to mean the same thing. The term "co-brother-in-law" is apparently used by some authors as a translation of such terms, but doesn't seem to be in natural use.

What I'm wondering is whether the news item that described Edward and Michael as brothers-in-law is simply in error or whether there are native English speakers for whom this is correct usage.

And today's:

Personally, I find that I get better results with a contingency table. A nice solid oak one, for example.

Texans: Are you really married?

Maybe not.

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

… [T]he troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.

Texans who read Language Log were apprised of this danger back in 2005, when I asked "Is marriage identical or similar to itself?" (11/2/2005). Actually, many others (mostly opponents of the amendment) noted this problem back then as well.

The amendment's backers are not concerned:

A conservative leader whose organization helped draft the amendment dismissed Radnofsky’s position, saying it was similar to scare tactics opponents unsuccessfully used against the proposal in 2005.

"It’s a silly argument," said Kelly Shackelford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano. Any lawsuit based on the wording of Subsection B, he said, would have "about one chance in a trillion" of being successful."

Ms Radnofsky's goal, of course, is to embarrass her opponent:

She calls it a "massive mistake" and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem.

As I wrote in 2005, this seems to be an interesting case for theories of legal interpretation, since on one hand, the intent of the drafters and supporters of the amendment is clear; but on the other hand, as Ms. Radnofsky says, "You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says."

As I understand Antonin Scalia's theory of meaning,  for example (about which more here and here), he would conclude that the state of marriage does not now exist in the state of Texas, at least if this amendment passes constitutional muster.

[Hat tip to Neal Goldfarb (update: who argues in the comments below that "it’s actually pretty easy to construct a Scalian analysis that arrives at the same conclusion as an intent-based analysis, but without relying overtly on notions of intent").]

There are many of us out here who should join Sally in thanking Dell, who was one of those unique individuals who taught multitudes of students and colleagues, even those who were never fortunate enough to sit in his classrooms. He was my inspiration and guiding light when in 1969 I wrote a proposal to the NSF to create and fund a new PhD emphasis in at Georgetown University on the interrelationship between the formal system of language and the ways it interacts with society and culture. Dell was one of the NSF's reviewers and it is not surprising that our new curriculum included the ethnography of communication that he had created and developed. Building on Dell's work as well as that of Bill Labov, we called the new program sociolinguistics, a label that had only recently been used by the late Bill Bright. A few years later, Dell invited me to join the Social Science Research Council's research committee on sociolinguistics, which he so ably chaired, where I got to learn even more from him during those years. He constantly encouraged me, as few others did, to continue trying to apply sociolinguistics to other fields such as education, doctor-patient communication, and law. And a bit later,  while he was still at the University of Pennsylvania, he invited me to become dean of the Graduate School of Education there. I greatly valued the opportunity to work in the same context with him and other linguists there, but the notion of becoming an administrator did not suit me, so I declined his kind offer. Over the years Dell and I have had continuous communication, from discussions at academic meetings to letter writing and brief Christmas card exchanges. I've always considered him my mentor, despite the relatively slight difference between our ages. He was a truly amazing scholar and friend. I will miss him greatly.

These enumerations have become more fevered on all sides as the bills make their interminable way  through Congress: Only seven instances of women! More than 3300 occurrences of shall, each a mandate that chips away at our freedom! On that last point, I note that, page-for-page, shall is more frequent in the Constitution than in the House healthcare bill, and conclude: "Critics of the bill are still free to insist that it opens a new fast lane on the road to serfdom. But that isn't something you can prove just by counting helping verbs."

Then there are the ubiquitous tallies of first-person pronouns aimed at demonstrating the egotism or arrogance of public figures. The targets have included John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and particularly Barack Obama,  which Mark has painstakingly dispatched in a series of posts (links here) that show that Obama and the other politicians charged with egotism don't actually use first-person pronouns more than other politicians have. (The posts have gotten a gratifying amount of attention from bloggers and journalists: you could have the hopeful sense that LanguageLog — well, or Mark, to be more precise — is becoming a kind of unofficial linguistic equivalent of the CBO).

Mark lays these misperceptions of pronoun frequency to confirmation bias, which is certainly the obvious conclusion, though I speculate that another factor may play a part:

You can't help thinking there's a measure of projection here, as well. Will and Fish are neck and neck for the most immodest style in all of American prose, and it's not surprising that they'd read Obama's impenetrable self-possession as the sign of a bristling ego. When you're a narcissist, every doorknob becomes a mirror.

Not that there's likely to be any slackening of the craze for counting words. As I noted in the piece, the Internet turns everybody into a linguist, the same way it turns us all into medical diagnosticians and tracers of lost persons. On the other hand, the Internet is pretty good at mobilizing the critical spirit, too. Do you suppose the sheer volume of inappropriate or misguided arguments from word counts might motivate more people to wonder what it takes to do this well?

In those days, Lee was asserting that people have only so many “gigabytes” in their brains to devote to languages.  Though admitting that speaking “dialects” in some situations can provide “extra warmth,” he warned that, by using such languages, “You are losing important neurons with data which should not be there. And like the computer, when you delete it, it doesn’t really go away. It’s there at the back, and you’ve got to go to the rubbish channel and say ‘destroy.’ And it’s still disturbing your hard disk.”  (See this useful summary and detailed list of references by Mark Swofford.)

Thus, those rubbish languages must be destroyed “dialects” must be let go, he intimated.

Lately, however, the Minister Mentor (MM) is singing a completely different tune.  Here's one recent article with some delicious, pertinent quotes.  Now Lee admits that:

his insistence on bilingualism in the early years of education policy was "wrong". Instead it has caused generations of students to be put off by the Chinese language [VHM:  by which MM means, of course, Mandarin, not Hakka or Hokkien or Cantonese, etc.].

Speaking first in Mandarin and then in English at the official opening of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language on Tuesday, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave a blunt assessment of Singapore's bilingual policy.

He said: "We started the wrong way. We insisted on ting xie (listening), mo xie (dictation) — madness! We had teachers who were teaching in completely-Chinese schools. And they did not want to use any English toteach English-speaking children Chinese and that turned them off completely."

As a result of these overly forceful policies, students balked at learning Mandarin and flocked to English more enthusiastically than before.

MM Lee (who is of Hakka and Hokkien ancestry, though his best language appears to be English, and he has long struggled to acquire full fluency in Mandarin) goes on to advance some rather dubious ideas about sexual differences in language learning ability:

Mr Lee added: "At first I thought, you can master two languages. Maybe different intelligence, you master it at different levels."

But his conclusions now, after over 40 years of learning Mandarin, cannot be more different.

MM Lee said: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you're deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things.

"Girls are better at languages because their left side of the brain to learn languages [sic], as a general rule, is better than the boys. Boys have great difficulty, and I had great difficulty.

Shifts in Singaporean language policy are as changeable as the winds that blow across the harbor there.  Regardless of what MM may be thinking at any given moment, we can be sure that the current status of English (far and away the main language), Malay, Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, Tamil, Singlish, and the other languages spoken there will not remain static.

The modern (non-obsolete) positive verb to friend isn't in the current NOAD yet, or for that matter in the OED,  so I hope that it gets in as part of the package deal.

First, a note on why I decided DGA's comment wasn't spam. Anderson appears to be a graduate student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University (in Virginia). He has a blog "For the Turnstiles … on critical theory and integral theory", and there's a recent interview with him ("Nonviolence of Nonmetaphysics") here and mentions of him and his work on a number of sites.

(Of course, this could all be an elaborate fiction, an invented persona and backstory, but at some point you have to trust some of the things you read. Another possibility is that someone has appropriated his name, e-mail address, and blog link; I've written him to check that he was in fact the source of the go rogue comment. Later: he has now written back to say that he was the author but that he's learned he was the victim of a prank. He apologizes for repeating misinformation, and asks that his comment be deleted — but that wouldn't really help much, now that I've posted about it.)

The upshot of all this is that I'm closing my books on sexual go rogue. I started out dubious, but now I'm convinced that it's a sheer invention. DGA is not an invention, but this story about go rogue is. Alas, the story seems to have spread, in the way that amazing stories do — probably because it digs at Sarah Palin.

On to spam. There's an OED draft entry of 2001 for spam as a verb: transitive 'to flood (a network, esp. the Internet, a newsgroup, or individuals) with a large number of unsolicited postings, or multiple copies of the same posting', intransitive 'to send large numbers of unsolicited messages or advertisements'. The first cite is from 1991, but that's from the New Hacker's Dictionary, so the word (in a non-food sense) goes back before 1991.

The OED has, at the moment, no entry for a noun spam, but that's also been around for some time.

[Added 11/18: Actually, it does have a sub-entry (a draft addition of 2001) for the computing noun spam, but it's under the main entry for Spam (the food name), where I didn't think to look. See discussion by Alex Boulton and me in the comments on this posting.]

In fact, it's been around as a mass noun ("how much spam?") and a count noun as well, meaning 'spam message, piece of spam' — a count noun that can have an ordinary s-plural ("how many spams?") or a zero plural ("how many spam?"). By 2001, when I discussed the noun in section 10 of this paper, all three of these uses were attested, and some people were using two or all three of the variants, sometimes in the same text, while other people had very strong preferences for one of the variants (I myself strongly prefer the mass variant).

(Entertaining fact: the spam filter that WordPress uses — on both Language Log and my blog — used to announce

Akismet has caught N spam for you since you first installed it. [with the zero-plural count variant]

but at some point it shifted to

Akismet has protected your site from N spam comments already … [with the noun as the first element in a noun-noun compound, a position where the count/mass distinction is normally neutralized]

The count of spam comments on Language Log is over 160,000 at the moment. Oi.)

But what counts as a spam comment? A bulk mailing of a comment, for sure. Your classic spam comment has no real content — instead, it has nothing that relates to the posting it's "commenting" on ("Great blog!"; "How can I subscribe to this blog?"; "This simply prodigy!"; "Can you explain your point?"; a URI or list of URIs; a quotation from some random work; an advertisement for some product; etc.). The point of such comments is to send the unwary reader to a commercial URI or to jack up the sender's hit count (or, of course, both). Others, in particular those that are all random gibberish, seem to be just malicious.

Spammers have gotten cleverer over the years, as I noted a while back. Comments now often seem to be tailored to some degree to the posting they're commenting on: comments linking to porn sites attached to postings with sexual content, for instance, or comments purporting to come from people the blog has mentioned, but linking to a commercial site. Some actually refer to the content of the posting ("That is an old cartoon" is a recent one on my blog, following up on a posting with a cartoon in it), but then it turns out that the URI provided is a commercial one, concerned with this content in some way (with the subject of the old cartoon, in this recent case).

It becomes increasingly difficult for bloggers to decide whether they're dealing with bulk mailings (with the targets selected by software crafted for the purpose) or with hand-crafted comments designed to send the reader to a URI or just to make mischief. As a result, many people — clearly, I am one — have extended the word spam to cover a variety of annoying, mischievous, or malicious postings and comments that might not have been mailed in bulk. Marking such postings and comments as spam for the purposes of a spam filter is then a useful step, since the malefactors are likely to repeat their offense, and one of the things spam filters are sensitive to is the sender's address. This isn't dangerous. In WordPress, the Akismet filter doesn't automatically delete things that appear in the spam queue, but merely offers them up for moderation, so misclassifications (in either direction) can be corrected.

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing — and, especially, the growth of general literacy — led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century.

It's certainly true that Tudor and Elizabethan spelling was catch-as-catch-can, and it's also true that prescriptive rules of usage blossomed in the 18th century, along with the standardization of spelling. But it's not true that native speakers in Shakespeare's time never accused one another of using their own language improperly.

.As evidence, and because it's fun to read, I'll post again a few paragraphs of Thomas Nash's "Epistle to the Reader", apparently published as an introduction to the 1594 second edition of Christ's Tears over Jerusalem,:

The ploddinger sort of unlearned Zoilists about London exclaim that it is a puft-up stile, and full of prophane eloquence: others object unto me the multitude of my boystrous compound wordes, and the often coyning of Italionate verbes, which end all in ize, as mummianize, tympanize, tirannize. To the first array of my clumperton antagonists this I answer — that my stile is no otherwise puft up, then any mans should be which writes with any spirite; and whom would not such a devine subject put a high ravishte spirite into? For the prophaneness of my eloquence, so they may terme the eloquence of Sainct Austin, Jerome, Chrysostome, prophane, since none of them but takes unto him faire more liberty of tropes, figures, and metaphors, and alleadging heathen examples and histories.

To the second rancke of reprehenders, that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in ize, thus I reply: that no winde that blowes strong but is boystrous, no speech or wordes, or any power of force to confute or persuade, but must be swelling and boystrous. For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men, who, having gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little scutes into great peeces of gold, such as double pistols and Portugues. Our English tongue, of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monasillables, which are the onely scandal of it. Bookes written in them, and no other, seeme like shop-keepers boxes, that contain nothing else save halfe-pence, three farthings and two-pences. Therefore, what did me I, but having a huge heape of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my pia mater's purse, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them foure into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Come, my maisters, enure your mouths to it, and never trust me, but when you have tride the commodity of carrying much in a small roome, you will, like the apothecaries, use more compounds than simples, and graft wordes as men do their trees, to make them more fruitfull. My upbraided Italionate verbes are the least crime of a thousand, since they are growne in generall request with every good poet.

Besides, they carrie farre more state with them then any other, and are not halfe so harsh in their desinence as the old hobling English verbes ending in r: they express more than any other verbes whatsoever, and that substantives would be quite barraine of verbs, but for that ending. This word mummianized, in the beginning of my first Epistle, is shrewdly called into question, for no other reason, that I can conceive, but that his true derivative, which is mummy, is somewhat obscure also: to phisitions and their confectioners it is as familiar as mumchance among pages, being nothing else but mans flesh long buried and broyled in the burning sands of Arabia. Hereupon I have taken up this phrase of Jerusalems mummianized earth manured with mans flesh. Express who can the same substance so briefly in any other word but that. A man may murder any thing if hee list in the mouthing, and grinde it to powder extempore betwixt a huge paire of jawes, but let a quest of calme censors goe upon it betwixt the houres of sixe and seaven in the morning, and they will, in their grave wisdome, subscribe to it as tollerable and significant.

When I posted this passage before, in "Centuries of disgust and horror?" (3/16/2009), I noted that the OED atributes the ize phrase to a work published in 1591:

1591 NASHE Introd. Sidney's Astr. & Stella in P. Penilesse (Shaks. Soc.) p. xxx, Reprehenders, that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in ize.

But in commenting on a post at at Epea Pteroenta, Conrad Roth confirms that the 1594 citation is the correct one, and also quote this passage from his master's thesis, which indicates that Nash took both sides of the argument over neologistic "huge woords":

As his use of language developed in later works, Nashe began to defend his own inkhornism in terms of persuasive rhetoric. In the preface to Christs Teares over Ierusalem, he argues in favour of 'boystrous compound wordes' that 'no speech or wordes of any power or force to confute or perswade but must bee swelling and boystrous' (2/184). Rather than censuring the 'mechanicall mate', who 'abhorreth the English he was borne too' (3/311), he now advocates the compounding of monosyllables, after the manner of the 'Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian' (2/184), comparing this neologistic technique to the grafting of trees 'to make them more fruitful'. When, having explained the word 'Mummianize', he issues a challenge to 'Expresse who can the same substance so briefly in any other word but that' (2/185), Nashe is using one of the chief justifications given by mid-century neologisers. The appeal to rhetoric continues in the preface to Lenten Stuffe, in which Nashe justifies his use of 'huge woords' with the claim that he has become a 'tragicus Orator' (3/152): the very species he had lampooned in the Preface to Menaphon ten years earlier."

It's worth quoting the earlier Nashe at greater length:

I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is grown of late; so that euery mechanicall mate abhorreth the English he was borne too, and plucks, with a solemne periphrasis, his vt vales from the inkehorne: which I impute, not so much to the perfection of Arts, as to the seruile imitation of vaine glorious Tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excell in action, as to embowell the cloudes in a speech of comparison, thinking themselues more than initiated in Poets immortality, if they but once get Boreas by the beard and the heauenly Bull by the deaw-lap. But heerein I cannot so fully bequeath them to folly, as their ideot Art-masters, that intrude themselues to our eares as the Alcumists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) thinke to out-braue better pennes with the swelling bombast of bragging blanke verse. Indeede it may bee the ingrafted ouerflow of some kil-cow conceit, that ouercloyeth their imagination with a more then drunken resolution, being not extemporall in the inuention of any other meanes to vent their manhoode, commits the digestion of their cholericke incumbrances to the spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasillabon.

At this point, we should quote one of the OED's examples for ink-horn term "a term of the literary language, a learned or bookish word":

1589 PUTTENHAM Eng. Poesie II. xii[i]. (Arb.) 130 Irreuocable, irradiation, depopulation and such like,..which..were long time despised for inkehorne termes.

And I note in passing that someone who writes "the spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasillabon" can never have been a fully sincere opponent of the ink-horn.

But leaving Mr. Nashe behind, we turn to the source of the OED's earliest citation for ink-horn term, namely The Arte of English Poesie, apparently published in 1589 (though perhaps written several decades earlier).  It's less entertaining than Nashe, but if anything even more peevish, e.g. here:

Now also wheras I said before that our old Saxon English for his many monosillables did not naturally admit the vse of the ancient feete in our vulgar measures so aptly as in those languages which stood most vpon polisillables, I sayd it in a sort truly, but now I must recant and confesse that our Normane English which hath growen since William the Conquerour doth admit any of the auncient feete, by reason of the many polysillables eeuen to sixe and seauen in one word, which we at this day vse in our most ordinarie language: and which corruption hath been hath been occasioned chiefly by the peeuish affectation not of the Normans them selues, but of clerks and scholers or secretaries long since, who not content with the vsual Normane or Saxon word, would conuert the very Latine and Greeke word into vulgar French as to say innumerable for innombrable, reuocable, irreuocable, irradiation, depopulation and such like, which are not naturall Normans nor yet French, but altered Latines, and without any imitation at all: which therefore were long time despised for inkehorne terms, and now be reputed the best and most delicat of any other. Of which and many other causes of corruption of our speach we haue in another place more amply discoursed …

There are quite a few other passages in this work that could pass for 20th-century prescriptivism, if translated into a more modern idiom. For example:

.. after a speach is fully fashioned to the common understanding, and accepted by consent of a whole countrey and nation, it is called a language, and receaueth none allowed alternation, but by extraordinary occasions by little and litle, as it were insensibly bringing in of many corruptions that creepe along with the time; of all which matters, we haue more largely spoken in our bookes of the originals and pedigree of the English tong.

And this:

[W]e finde in our English writers many wordes and speaches amendable, and ye shall see in some many inkhorne terms so ill affected brought in by men of learning as preachers and schoolemasters: and many straunge terms of other languages by Secretaries and Marchaunts and trauailours, and many darke wordes and not vusall nor well sounding, though they be dayly spoken in Court. Wherefore great heed must be taken by our maker in this point that his choise be good.

(Note how "Secretaries" are persistently blamed for corruption of the language, anticipating the more recent peeving about manager-speak. )

[M]any other like words borrowed out of the Latin and French, were not so well to be allowed by us, as these words, audacious, for bold: facuditie, for eloquence: egregious, for great or notable: implete, for replenished: attemptat, for attempt: compatible, for agreeable in nature, and many more.

And finally:

Your next intollerable vice is solecismus or incongruitie, as when we speake false English, that is by misusing the Grammaticall rules to be observed in cases, genders, tenses and such like, euery poore scholler knowes the fault, and cals it the breaking of Priscians head, for he was among the Latines a principall Grammarian. […]

Another of your intollerable vices is ill disposition or placing of your words in a clause or sentence […]

All these remembred faults be intollerable and euer vndecent.

I think it's clear that English-language prescriptivism was well established in the 16th century.

In many parts of the English speaking world (UK and Commonwealth), "going rogue" is a euphemism for heterosexual women engaging in anal intercourse.

(I was at first suspicious, since the comment appeared over a year after the original posting, and many such long-delayed comments are spam, but this one looks legit.)

[Added 11/18: As I say in a follow-up posting, DGA is legit, and so is the comment, in the sense that he did post the comment and did so earnestly. But it turns out that his sources were playing a prank on him.]

Such a euphemistic use of going rogue was news to me, but then there are lots of usages I haven't noticed. Anderson didn't give any cites, and I haven't been able to find any, so that for the moment I suspect that euphemistic uses are neither widespread nor frequent, but I'm open for evidence (beyond some individual readers saying that they're familiar with the use).

[Added 11/18: I'm now convinced that claims about this use are sheer invention.]

Anderson's comment went on:

I find it difficult to imagine that Ms Palin is unaware of this connotation in choosing it for the title of her book, given that she has never been above flirting with straight male admirers in any of her gestures.

I don't follow this at all. There are two problematic things here.

First, I don't get the connection between Palin's flirtatious behavior and the expectation that she should be aware of sexual euphemisms (including those not current in the U.S.).

Second, I don't accept the idea that an expression that can serve as a sexual euphemism on some occasions has a sexual connotation on all occasions — that is, that any sexually tinged use contaminates all uses. That's a preposterous idea; a great many euphemisms work because they use perfectly ordinary vocabulary. Context is all.

Though I didn't find the use Anderson reports, I did find one example of go rogue with a reference to anal intercourse. It's from a comment by "thefrontpage" on a November 5 posting by Wonkette, who passed on a story about a proposed Clinton-Bush debate:

They cancelled [the debate] after Clinton said he was going to "go rogue" on Bush, but Bush knows the real meaning of "going rogue" (unprotected anal sex), and he took offense at that, …

However, the whole comment is a humorous invention, so it's hard for me to take any part of it seriously.

And of course the idea that the "real meaning" of go rogue is 'engage in unprotected anal sex' is silly. The conventional meaning of the expression is something like 'deviate greatly from training or expected behavior; cease to follow orders; go off on one's own' — a meaning that developed from rogue 'that which lacks appropriate control; something which is irresponsible or undisciplined' (as OED2 puts it, along with citations from 1964 on), which in turn seems to have developed from rogue elephant 'elephant driven away, or living apart, fom the herd, and of a savage or destructive disposition' (attested in OED2 from 1859 on).

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

In support of creative lexicography, I plan to be on the look-out for future opportunities to refer to the Igon Value Problem.

Gladwell uses "igon value" in an inessential way, to provide some local color in the chapter of What the Dog Saw called "Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy":

But eigenvalue really is a very basic concept in linear algebra, and the analysis of the   eigenvectors and eigenvalues of matrices is not just some ephemeral bit of esoteric mathematical fluff — among innumerable practical connections, consider this quote from Sergei Brin and Larry Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Seventh International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW 1998), April 14-18, 1998, Brisbane, Australia:

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.

Thus this silly mis-hearing tells us (as Pinker notes) that Gladwell's understanding of the ideas he's writing about is limited, here as often, to a sort of metaphorical caricature.  And the resulting conceptual equivocation can be a critical part of the "insights" that he has to offer, which, as Pinker also tells us, often reflect his role as the anti-intellectual's intellectual (or the intellectual's anti-intellectual?):

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left.

This "common thread" is central to the essay where Igon Value occurs: it constrasts Nassim Taleb, who thinks that investment success is "all pure luck", who "[doesn't] believe that things like the stock market behave in the way that physical phenomena like mortality statistics do", an "empiricist who doesn't believe in empiricism", with Victor Niederhoffer, whose "hero is the nineteenth-century scientist Francis Galton … and if he is your hero you believe that by aggregating and analyzing data points, you can learn whatever it is you need to know." No points for guessing who is the hero of Gladwell's narrative. And while eigenvalues don't play any direct role in the argument, things like Gaussian distributions and "fat tails" do. The "Igon value" flub doesn't increase my confidence that Gladwell has any clue at all what any of this really means.

I was going to end like this: "What I find most interesting here is that neither the author, nor the stereotypically legendary fact-checkers at the New Yorker (where the pieces in What the Dog Saw originally appeared), nor Hachette (What the Dog Saw's publisher), took the trouble to hire an out-of-work mathematician to check the text for things of this sort. I presume this means that they assign a very low value to the reputational damage associated with such errors; though of course it might also be hard to find a technically-competent proofreader who would see how to correct the flubs without disturbing the problematic substance."

But in my heavy-handed fundamentalist way, I decided to check the version of the piece in the New Yorker ("Blowing Up", April 22, 2002). And to my surprise, I found that the New Yorker (at least in its digital archive) spelled the term correctly:

So now I'm puzzled. Did some copy-editor at Hachette introduce the error? Was the mistake in Gladwell's draft, transferred uncorrected to Hachette despite having been fixed at the New Yorker? Did the New Yorker's editors read Pinker's review and retroactively fix Gladwell's 2002 essay in their archives? Inquiring minds want to know.

[In an unironically mock-Gladwellian spirit, I can't resist citing Thomas Pynchon's character Dr. Dudley Eigenvalue, and other aspects of Pynchon's vectorial poetics. See this discussion preserved at pychon.com, and  Hanjo Berressem's paper  "A multiplicity of critical eigenvalues".]

[Update — there are some amusing comments over at the Quantum Pontiff…]

The "Speech Gene", of course, is FOXP2, and Wade's article covers a paper by Genevieve Konopka et al., "Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2", Nature 462: 213-217, 11/12/2009. We've been muttering on this weblog for more than five years about the overselling of FOXP2 as "the Language Gene" or the "the Speech Gene" — for a recent summary of the issues, see "Mice with the 'language gene' stay mum" and "More on FOXP2", 6/5/2009.

The journal Cognition took up the cognitive aspects of the "gene for X" question in an excellent special issue in 2006, ("Genes, Brain and Cognition: A Roadmap for the Cognitive Scientist"). An articles that specifically discusses the FOXP2 evidence, as it existed in 2006, is Simon Fisher ("Tangled webs: Tracing the connections between genes and cognition", Cognition 101(2): 270-297, September 2006):

[T]he deceptive simplicity of finding correlations between genetic and phenotypic variation has led to a common misconception that there exist straightforward linear relationships between specific genes and particular behavioural and/or cognitive outputs. The problem is exacerbated by the adoption of an abstract view of the nature of the gene, without consideration of molecular, developmental or ontogenetic frameworks. […] Genes do not specify behaviours or cognitive processes; they make regulatory factors, signalling molecules, receptors, enzymes, and so on, that interact in highly complex networks, modulated by environmental influences, in order to build and maintain the brain.

(Fisher is the scientist who first identified the role of FOXP2 in speech and language impairment. See also the discussion of FOXP2 in Evan Balaban, "Cognitive Developmental Biology: History, Process, and Fortune's Wheel", in the same issue.)

The Konopka et al. paper is entirely in line with this perspective. Human FOXP2 differs from Chimpanzee FOXP2 in just two amino acids, and so, as Konopka et al. explain,

To test whether the amino acids under positive selection in human FOXP2 have a distinct biological function, which would support the role of these changes in evolution, we expressed either human FOXP2 or the same construct mutated at two sites to yield the chimpanzee amino acid content, FOXP2^chimp, in human neuronal cells without endogenous FOXP2. […] To determine if modifying two amino acids leads to changes in gene expression, we conducted whole-genome microarray analysis. We identified 61 genes significantly upregulated and 55 genes downregulated by FOXP2 compared to FOXP2^chimp […]

To place these gene expression changes within a more systematic context, we applied weighted gene co-expression network analysis […] to examine co-regulation of gene expression across all genes. We uncovered two modules where the module eigengene […] was driven by differences in FOXP2 and FOXP2^chimp, and one module driven by similar gene regulation […] Notably, two of the genes with the most connections, so-called 'hub' genes, in one of the differential networks are DLX5 and SYT4, two genes important for brain development and function.

Here's their figure of "one of the modules containing FOXP2 and FOXP2^chimp differentially expressed genes":

So this research supports the idea that the hominin mutation in FOXP2 has a biological effect, and perhaps an important one, apparently involving the interaction of a large number of genes with a large number of developmental and functional roles. It remains to be seen how this relates to human/chimp differences in anatomy, physiology, and behavior; and especially, what it has to do with speech, language, and communication.

Nicholas Wade's first sentence calls  FOXP2 "a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech", and his second sentence is

All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.

Having done his best to steer his readers along exactly the mistaken path that Simon Fisher warned against ("any characterisation of this as a 'gene for grammar' (or even as a 'gene for language') clearly becomes untenable once we are able to view it within a more complete biological framework"), Wade is then forced by the facts into a somewhat different narrative:

[T]hey confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro of the genome … Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from others.

In other words, it's been known since its discovery that FOXP2, like the rest of the FOX family, is a transcription factor.

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

And some of the genes in FOXP2’s network have already been implicated in diseases that include disorders of speech, confirming its importance in these faculties.

But the FOXP2 network is certainly not the only set of genes involved in language.

And, he didn't add, language is not the only thing that the FOXP2 network is involved in.

The "God Gene" is a different story altogether. To start with, it doesn't exist.

It's basically nonsense to call FOXP2 the "language gene" or the "speech gene", but at least FOXP2 exists, and is involved in the development of various anatomical structures that play a role in spoken language (as well in eating, breathing, etc.); and a FOXP2 mutation is known to be associated with developmental disorders that are partly linguistic.

But Wade's "God Gene" is entirely hypothetical. No one has discovered a family of atheists whose lack of interest in spiritual transcendence can be linked to a shared genomic variation. So what's the argument that there's a gene-for-belief-in-a-higher-power? Let's let Wade explain:

IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

In other words, the "God gene" is a completely hypothetical just-so story, with two components. The first is the theory that religion was culturally advantageous in the circumstances of early human evolution:

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it …

There's no evidence for several aspects of this, but it's a plausible argument in favor of … cultural evolution? No, Wade (and some others) want this lesson to have been learned genetically, not culturally:

[G]enes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

The beauty part is the universality of this argument. My current favorite application leads us to postulate the Hat Gene. (OK, the Head-Covering Gene — but Wade should really be writing about "the spirituality gene" or "the transcendence gene", since "God" is hardly a cultural universal. So I'm going to stick with my Hat Gene, since it's catchier.)

Think of the manifold advantages of head-coverings to paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and the near-universality of head coverings among human groups at all subsequent stages of development — the Hat Gene hypothesis is a winner all around. Still, I doubt that I could get funding for a Genome-Wide Association study looking for correlations with preferences in haberdashery.

Coincidentally, there's Wade's new book The Faith Instinct, published Nov. 11, 2009. I'm holding out for The Hat Instinct, myself.

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered looked into it, and actually added something to the story by interviewing a student, Mike Spiewak ("Principal Tells Students 'Meep' Is Off-Limits"):

According to Spiewak, the source was neither Beaker nor Road Runner, at least not directly:

RAZ: Well, did you pick it up from Beaker or the Road Runner?

Mr. SPIEWAK: No. Actually, my friend Alex, he picked it up on Xbox LIVE. He was in a party with a couple of kids playing Call of Duty last year. One of the kids that were in the party, you know, he said meep and, you know, Alex picked it up and we started using it.

Kudos to NPR for journalistic initiative.