What is it, Lassie?
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Today's Strange Brew:
This reminds me of an old joke, which picks up yesterday's theme of communication by telegram.
A dog walks into a telegraph office, gives the clerk the recipient's address, pays the fee for a minimum-length telegram, and dictates: "ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF".
The clerk says "The minimum fee covers ten words, and you've only used nine. You want me to add another ARF?"
The dog responds, scandalized, "But that wouldn't make any sense!"
[Hat tip: Alec Baumans]
[By the way, the spelling uncertainty guage/gauge is a big problem for me, in that my fingers naturally want to type langauge instead of language, for some reason I can't figure out.]
Aaron Davies said,
August 4, 2009 @ 7:06 am
it's gotten to be something of a standing joke on World of Warcraft that everyone misspells "rogue" (one of the types of characters you can play) as "rouge". (i tend to use such misspellings as opportunities for puns about make-up, but i'm perverse that way.)
mph said,
August 4, 2009 @ 7:23 am
Note that "lbs. PSI" is a redundancy, like "ATM machine."
Ray Girvan said,
August 4, 2009 @ 7:33 am
myl: my fingers naturally want to type langauge instead of language
Similarly, however often I see Langage Farm (a local make of ice-cream around here) I can't shake off the impression of it being a misprint.
Graham J Campbell said,
August 4, 2009 @ 8:11 am
Re: your By the way about misspelling, my fingers react in the opposite way to yours Mark.
I always tend to 'naturally' misspell gauge as guage, when I have occasion to use the term. Indeed, occasion is one I consistently get wrong save for my spelling checker before submitting a reply to a post on this blog!
Sili said,
August 4, 2009 @ 8:11 am
How gauche.
Mark P said,
August 4, 2009 @ 8:11 am
I wonder if there is a biomechanical reason for the gauge-guage misspelling. "Guag" alternates left and right hand use, while "gaug" does not.
Gabriel Burns said,
August 4, 2009 @ 8:30 am
But both of those have three left-hand letters to one right-hand letter, so neither of them alternates. (Also if you add the final e, that makes four left-hand letters.)
Mark P said,
August 4, 2009 @ 8:43 am
It's the G-U-A part that's misspelled. That alternates. But that probably doesn't answer the question, or at least not completely. For some reason the hands like to do certain things and not others. Touch typing is not a conscious action; it relies on muscle memory. Apparently there is something in that word for myl (and some others for me) that makes it easier to type if it is misspelled.
Barrie England said,
August 4, 2009 @ 9:11 am
David Crystal touches on typing errors on his blog here: http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-prosiopesis.html.
rootlesscosmo said,
August 4, 2009 @ 9:38 am
Years ago a friend phoned Western Union with a telegram to be sent; the text he gave the operator was "Happy Birthday." "You can add eight words for the same rate," the operator advised him. After a moment's thought, he added "boodly boodly boodly boodly boodly boodly boodly boodly."
Stephen Jones said,
August 4, 2009 @ 10:38 am
Redundancies sometimes serve a useful purpose (but not in 'lbs.PSI').
When ATMs weren't universal you'd use the redundancy so it was clear what you were talking about, just as you would hear people talking about RAM memory fifteen years ago. As the thing referred to by the phrase become ubiquitous then the necessity for the redundancy disappears.
vet said,
August 4, 2009 @ 10:39 am
While I have a hard time believing that biomechanical effects of hand alternation have something to do with it, I do believe that there's the effect of muscle memory which may be at work…I know that when I type I often add silent e's to the ends of words when they aren't supposed to be there. Try typing the alphabet as fast as you can – did you type a "u" after "q"? I do. I think muscle memory effects, in addition to the pronunciation-spelling mismatch in gauge and rogue, might be the issue here. Also, without a spell checker, a lot of people may not remember how to spell those words – they know the letters that go into the spelling, but don't recall the exact order and end up guessing.
Nicholas Waller said,
August 4, 2009 @ 10:43 am
@ Barrie England – David Crystal on that blogpost rather engagingly manages to misspell fingers while explaining typing errors could be because "he does not put his fimgers in the right position". There must be a term for committing the kind of error you are seeking to explain while still in the process of explaining it.
My most common typing error is porblem and porbably for problem and probably. (and when I first tried to type "porblem" just then to illustrate, I incorrectly typed it "problem" and had to go back and redo it).
Troy S. said,
August 4, 2009 @ 10:55 am
It occurs to me PSI might have been erroneously decoded as "per square inch" since one of the two p-words gets suppressed in the abbreviation. It's not PPSI, after all.
John Lawler said,
August 4, 2009 @ 11:02 am
@Nicholas:
My word for that is 'toyp'.
My fingers also have the tendency, like Mark's, to type 'langauge' instead of 'language', and since I'm also a linguist, I type the word a lot more often than I do 'gauge'. I'd rather have the opposite habit, frankly, like Graham Campbell.
Robert Coren said,
August 4, 2009 @ 11:10 am
@Aaron Davies: I had a colleague (not a native speaker of English) who invariably spelled and pronounced "rogue" (as in the common phrase "rogue process") as "rouge". It occurred to me later that it would have been a kindness to have corrected this impression (as well as his belief that "vague" rhymed with "ague").
Mark P said,
August 4, 2009 @ 11:58 am
@Robert Coren – a student from India who I knew at Georgia Tech pronounced Georgia as "Jaw-jaw." He said he intentionally exaggerated the pronunciation to help him remember how it is actually pronounced. At least in Georgia.
Jim said,
August 4, 2009 @ 12:32 pm
"I had a colleague (not a native speaker of English) who invariably spelled and pronounced "rogue" (as in the common phrase "rogue process") as "rouge". It occurred to me later that it would have been a kindness to have corrected this impression (as well as his belief that "vague" rhymed with "ague")."
As long as you were really being kind when you corrected him. My father once wickedly convinced a Chinese worker of his that "Scotch" was really pronounced "Scrotch" and then watched him order round after round of "Scrotch on the rocks", waiting for the bartender to finally lose it.
There ought to be a name for this kind of prank, because people do it all the time. Actually, there ought to be a law.
peter said,
August 4, 2009 @ 12:58 pm
mph said (August 4, 2009 @ 7:23 am)
"Note that "lbs. PSI" is a redundancy"
Not in my experience (mostly the UK and her former colonies), where it stands for "pounds per square inch", a standard unit of pressure.
Tom Recht said,
August 4, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
I've noticed that my typing errors follow a pattern where a right-hand letter is typed too early, or a left-hand letter too late (I don't know which). This would explain 'guage' as well as 'porblem/porbably' (and maybe 'rouge' for 'rogue' depending on your hand position), but not MYL's 'langauge'. Mark, are you left-handed?
y said,
August 4, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
The rogue/rouge confusion is quite common. For example, a book with the unfortunate title of Rogue Queen had one edition with the spelling "Rouge Queen" right on the spine.
Andrew said,
August 4, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
With 'gauge', though, there's surely the added factor that it clearly ought to be spelt 'guage'. Since 'gu' is often pronounced simply as 'g' – in 'guard', for instance – 'guage' is a plausible spelling of a word pronounced 'gage'; while 'gauge' would naturally be pronounced – well, 'gauge'.
dr pepper said,
August 4, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
#
peter said,
August 4, 2009 @ 12:58 pm
mph said (August 4, 2009 @ 7:23 am)
"Note that "lbs. PSI" is a redundancy"
Not in my experience (mostly the UK and her former colonies), where it stands for "pounds per square inch", a standard unit of pressure.
Exactly. So "lbs PSI" is "pounds pounds per square inch" and therefor a redundency.
mollymooly said,
August 4, 2009 @ 4:37 pm
The point is: if the "P" in "PSI" stands for "per" rather than "pound", it's not redundant.
For myself, I would not have known what "PSI" was meant to stand for [I'm metric, and the only abbreviation for "pound" I'm familiar with is "lb", which doesn't have a P in it] whereas I could work out "lbs PSI" quite easily. So even if it is redundant or nonstandard, it is useful for at least one person.
peter said,
August 4, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
dr pepper said (August 4, 2009 @ 4:02 pm)
"Exactly. So "lbs PSI" is "pounds pounds per square inch" and therefor a redundency."
No. "lbs PSI" is an abbreviation for "pounds Per Square Inch" in the UK, Australia, NZ, South Africa, etc (ie, the "P" in "PSI" stands for "Per", not for "pounds"), and thus contains no redundancy.
Mark P said,
August 4, 2009 @ 5:42 pm
In the US, it's typical to use PSI to mean "pounds (per) square inch." That's the way it's used when referring to things like tire pressure. I have never seen tire pressure specified as, for example, "30 pounds psi." Some engineers might use it differently in a different context. A great deal of engineering in the US is still conducted in what is called the English system, although, of course, almost no one uses it except Americans.
tablogloid said,
August 4, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
I am about to pick up a piece of gauze and dab it on some guanine guache.
Ellen said,
August 4, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
It's the American usage that is relevant here. A quick internet search shows that the comic and it's artist/author are American. Although all this is off topic to the original post.
Derek Balsam said,
August 4, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
Pace Peter, et al., PSI is "pounds per square inch" on both sides of the pond and all other English-speaking countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pounds_per_square_inch
The simplest explanation is that some folks are mistaken about what it stands for.
Sven said,
August 4, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
When I saw this post, I thought that "lbs. PSI" was the reason it was here. I noticed it as a redundancy immediately, while I'd never notice the misspelling "guage" without someone pointing it out to me. (Like most people, I don't really notice the order of letters in the middle of words while reading.)
[(myl) Really, it wasn't for either of those reasons that I thought the cartoon was interesting — Alec Baumans sent it in because it underlines the contrast between the expressive capacity of human languages and that of animal communication systems, and that's why I posted it. I considered saying so explicitly, but decided it would be redundant. Clearly I was wrong.
I didn't notice the reversed u and a in gauge until after I'd already posted it. I found it curious that this is exactly the reversal of the finger-tangle that I have to correct almost every time I type "language" fast, and so I said so.
The whole "ATM machine is redundant" thing seems kind of boring to me — it's true, but basically, what difference does it make? But I recognize that some people get het up over it, and that's fine.]
It's interesting to hear that in some countries "P" in "PSI" stands for "per". Of course, the confusion would be avoided if English-speaking people finally adopted metric units. (Weren't non-Americans already supposed to have done it?)
Ellen said,
August 4, 2009 @ 11:52 pm
I thought the comparison with the old joke made the reason for posting explicit enough, personally.
JimG said,
August 5, 2009 @ 9:35 am
For years, I had trouble with the spelling of guard and gauge. Language has some logic en francais: langue + -age. Seize any opportunity to make spelling rules clearer!
Ginger Yellow said,
August 5, 2009 @ 10:24 am
With 'gauge', though, there's surely the added factor that it clearly ought to be spelt 'guage'. Since 'gu' is often pronounced simply as 'g' – in 'guard', for instance – 'guage' is a plausible spelling of a word pronounced 'gage'; while 'gauge' would naturally be pronounced – well, 'gauge'.
Yeah, I think this is much more plausible than the typing issue. I have to look the damn word up every time I write it, just to make sure.
Nick Lamb said,
August 5, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
Sven, the metric system is widely used but it hasn't (and probably never will) entirely eliminated traditional units from some niches, particularly in idiom ("a country mile" is unlikely to become "a country kilometre" because the point about the kilometre is that it's precisely defined). That's not just in English, you'll see traditional units used in speech (even if not to actually measure anything) in many languages.
It scarcely matters, only SI ("metric") units are actually maintained. Anywhere you see a modern application requiring some other units you'll find they're defined in terms of the SI units (e.g. the "inch" people use today is an international inch, defined as 0.0254 metres, leaving SI to define how long exactly a metre is, all the traditional inches based on physical prototypes have fallen into disuse)
peter said,
August 5, 2009 @ 3:44 pm
Derek Balsam said (August 4, 2009 @ 7:02 pm)
"Pace Peter, et al., PSI is "pounds per square inch" on both sides of the pond and all other English-speaking countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pounds_per_square_inch
The simplest explanation is that some folks are mistaken about what it stands for."
The mistaken folks in question being the writers of Wikipedia, for it is surely less simple to assume the mistake has been made by every British and Australian school teacher for the last 150 years. As I keep saying, it is standard practice in these countries to write "lbs PSI", not merely "PSI", to denote pressure; so the letter "P" in "lbs PSI" has to be an abbreviation for "per", not an abbreviation for "pounds".
Janice Huth Byer said,
August 5, 2009 @ 6:18 pm
Ah, the mystery is solved as to why I always want to misspell "gauge".
_____________
The discussion of "lbs PSI" vs. "PSI" indirectly recalls a certain Verizon costumer service office in Canada, where the reps sincerely failed to comprehend a customer's problem with having been billed $.02 per unit used, after being told he'd be charged .02 cents per unit.
The employees, I think, confounded "cents per" with "per cent". Very frustrating for all involved, whose deliberations proved strangely fascinating on the audio that went viral.
Mark P said,
August 5, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
@peter, the wikipedia citation doesn't clear anything up. In fact, you can infer from the ksi units (kilopounds per square inch) that the first letter in psi does actually represent "pound" rather than "per."
Russinoff said,
August 6, 2009 @ 8:45 pm
Coincidentally, I just noticed this line in G.W. Moon's "The Bad English of Lindley Murray" (3rd ed., p. 27):
"These are, certainly, remarkable errors for an author to commit while actually writing on the improprieties of the English langauge [sic]."
Andrew said,
August 7, 2009 @ 5:19 am
Peter,
I don't believe "lbs. psi" is standard use in British English speaking countries, and I don't believe it's something that's been (mis)taught by many teachers. It's something I've never heard before, and a quick play with google.co.uk seems to show far more support for the p in psi standing for "pounds (weight)".
Stephen Jones said,
August 7, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
—"The mistaken folks in question being the writers of Wikipedia, for it is surely less simple to assume the mistake has been made by every British and Australian school teacher for the last 150 years."—–
Which is why there is not a single example of 'lbs psi' or 'pounds psi' in the British National Corpus but 139 for 'psi' on its own.
mph said,
August 7, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
Here's a brochure for British pressure gauges for aircraft tyres-with-a-y. It uses PSI to mean "pounds per square inch."
Here's a glossary on units of pressure from a UK vendor. It says "Pounds or pound force per square inch (psi or lb/in2) is a widely used British and American unit of measure for pressure. 1 psi equals 6,894.76 Pascals."
I'm not seeing evidence that the correct usage of PSI differs between the UK and USA. If I google for "lbs psi" (in quotes), the hits do not appear to be predominantly from the UK, nor from knowledgeable sources.
fs said,
August 9, 2009 @ 12:46 am
@Aaron Davies: Interestingly this is somewhat of an inside joke on Wikipedia, where you can find an administrator cabal of "rouge admins".
Achim said,
August 10, 2009 @ 8:42 am
@ Nick Lamb:
Actually, during our recent holidays in France, a dairy farmer was explaining her business to us (Germans), and after explaining her different sizes of yoghurt cups she felt obliged to explain what une livre is. My impression is that livre in French is much less in use than Pfund in German, her experience being that her fellow French didn't understand her. (Both of them are nowadays 500g).
When my niece returned from her English summer course in England, she had some fun in expressing everthing in the household not just in yards and feet, but, where applicable, in stone, pounds, and ounces.
cearta.ie » Laff, laff said,
August 23, 2009 @ 6:16 am
[…] On Australia Day, if you can't forget Skippy, then you can't forget Lassie either. From Strange Brew via the Language Log: […]
Michael said,
August 26, 2009 @ 9:37 am
@Peter
I'm English, and have never seen or heard of lbs psi. It's always psi, whether spoken, printed on pressure guauges(!), or taught at school (no longer, of course).