Language Log

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.

A piece of fluff on the op-ed page of the NYT on December 28: Philip Niemeyer, "Picturing the Past 10 Years", with an item a year for 2000 through 2009 in twelve categories. The last two categories are words: Nouns and Verbs.

There are no statistics here, just someone's judgments about what was hot in each year; others would no doubt have made other choices. For the last two categories:

Rick Rubenstein wrote:

Is the usage "I can't speak to the Iranian situation" as opposed to "I can't speak [about/regarding] the Iranian situation" relatively recent (or at least recently accelerating), as I perceive it to be? I feel as though I first noticed it about a decade ago, and found it very strange. I'm now almost accustomed to it.

There's no question that "speak to (a topic)" is quite a bit more recent than "speak of (a topic)", and somewhat more recent than "speak about (a topic)". But Rick is probably not old enough to have noticed the difference.

In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret ("I'm sorry it all happened"), or grudging self-exculpatory conditionals ("If some people think I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry they were upset"), it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

That's how to say it (ignoring the punctuation error — the missing comma after work): not a bunch of evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple "We're sorry."

I learn here that that John McIntyre (whose name has often come up in these parts) has now left the Baltimore Sun. Yet another language writer on a newspaper (who was not merely retailing peeves — quite far from that, in John's case) to bite the dust. I hope that we will hear from him in another venue soon.

[(myl) It didn't take long: as of April 30, 2009, John was blogging again at http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/, still under the title "You Don't Say". Welcome back! ]