Language Log

Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, has posted some comments of his own on the linguistic side of a recent British parliamentary controversy ("Nadine Dorries, linguistic pioneer", The Telegraph 9/12/2011). David Cameron said something about Ms. Dorries that some perceived as offensive; he later apologized to her, and she responded:

I don’t for one moment believe Mr Cameron meant to insult me with his “frustrated” remark. […] He has since apologised fulsomely.

Mr. Chivers pounces on that fulsomely — but first, he links to a Language Log take-down of Simon Heffer, who used to write for the Telegraph:

Today's Zits:

This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday:

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post.

This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so not ready for this", which I had perhaps mistakenly been mentally lumping together with "That's so Dick Cheney" or "That's so 1960's".)

I'm not sure what's changing, "very" or "not" or both. I suspect that "not" may be moving into uses previously reserved for "un-".

According to Stephen Cass, "Unthinking Machines", Technology Review 5/4/2011:

Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades.

During a panel discussion—moderated by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker—that kicked off MIT's Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium, panelists called for a return to the style of research that marked the early years of the field, one driven more by curiosity rather than narrow applications.

The panelists were Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, Emilio Bizzi, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Partee, and Sydney Brenner. Based on Cass's short summaries, it sounds like an interesting discussion. I hope that recordings and/or transcripts will be available at some point — all that I've found so far is the symposium's advertisement on the MIT150 web site,  another write-up at MIT News, and a few other notes here and there. (Video for one of the other MIT150 symposiums is available here, so perhaps this will appear in time.)

But Cass's brief sketch of what Chomsky said was enough to provoke a lengthy and interesting response from Peter Norvig: "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning".

Following up on the recent discussion of legal automation, I note that Paul Krugman has added a blog post ("Falling Demand for Brains?", 3/5/2011) and an Op-Ed column ("Degrees and Dollars", 3/6/2011), pushing an idea that he first suggested in a 1996 NYT Magazine piece ("White Collars Turn Blue", 9/29/1996), where he wrote as if from the perspective of 2096:

When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

Murray Smith asks about a phrase in Joe Drape, "Looking for Zenyatta's Mr. Right", NYT 1/13/2011:

How Zenyatta will fare in her new career as a broodmare at Lane's End Farm is anyone's guess. She was a once-in-a-generation princess on the racetrack, winning 19 of 20 starts […]

Breeding, however, is more magic than math. […]

The Mosses and the people they have entrusted Zenyatta to know that the odds of coming up with another horse like her are long.

Murray observes that "The context makes clear that it is considered somewhat unlikely that Zenyatta will produce offspring of her calibre (the odds are against it), but the quote seems to say that it is likely (the odds of it are long)". Any idea what's happening? Any way to tell whether 'odds of' has always been ambiguous between "'for' and 'against'?"

Six and a half years ago, in a Language Log post about the spread of texting in Japan, I commented on the lack of enthusiasm for texting in the U.S. ("Texting", 3/8/2004):

I don't think that I've even seen anyone texting in the U.S. Now that I think about it, this is a bit surprising, since there are plenty of foreign students at Penn who come from places (like China, Korea and much of Europe) where texting is common.

Times have certainly changed. Now pretty much everyone in the U.S. — certainly every high school and college student — seems to be texting all the time. And a recent Nielsen blog post cites some extraordinary statistics ("U.S. Teen Mobile Report", 10/14/2010):

"What, then, can be done?"

So asks Stanley Fish in "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives", NYT 10/11/2010, responding to SUNY Albany's decision to close programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater.

I've been telling friends that I'm in Tokyo for InterSpeech 2010, but that's wrong. In fact, I'm in Chiba City, which seems to be roughly to Tokyo what Jersey City is to New York. And I'm sorry to say that the weather changed this afternoon from sunny to overcast to rainy without ever going through the state described in the memorable opening sentence of Neuromancer, describing Chiba City:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

A Zits on modern menaces:

I've been getting reports of texting while bicycling / bicycling while texting, too.

Following up on our most recent "kids today" post, I decided to spend a few minutes over lunch searching Google Books for interesting examples of the genre. Thus:

Many children today are greatly to be pitied because too much is done for them and dictated to them and they are deprived of the learning processes. We seem to have dropped into an age of entertaining, a breathless going from one sensation  to another, whether it be mechanical toys for the five-year-old or moving-picture plays for the sixteen-year-old. It not only destroys their power to think, but also makes happiness, contentment, and resourcefulness impossible. At seventeen, life is spoken of as "so dull" if there is not "something doing" every waking hour.

"Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text", The Onion, 3/9/2010.

Then again…

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said "Insert opposite end into typewriter." It wasn't so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no difference if you used the sheet one way up rather than the other); it was the quaint old lexical item typewriter. I wonder what young people would think of that advice, if they ever read the instructions on anything (they don't, of course; they learn the operating systems of their new cellphones by intuition). A typewriter? When did I last even see one? It was like coming upon a word like "spats" or "snuffbox" or "inkwell" in a modern business context. I wonder if the wording will survive unnoticed on every sheet of labels manufactured by that company until the phrase has become a sort of dead metaphor or incomprehensible incantation.