Language Log

Mediate Metrics ("Objectively Measuring Media Bias") explains that

Based in Wheaton, IL, Mediate Metrics LLC is a privately held start-up founded by technology veteran and entrepreneur Barry Hardek. Our goal is to cultivate knowledgeable consumers of political news by objectively measuring media “slant” — news which contains either an embedded statements of bias (opinion) or an elements of editorial influence (factual content that reflects positively or negatively on U.S. political parties).

Mediate Metrics’ core technology is based on a custom machine classifier designed specifically for this application, and developed based on social science best practices with recognized leaders in the field of text analysis. Today,  text mining systems are primarily used as general purpose marketing tools for extracting insights from platforms such as like Twitter and Facebook, or from other large electronic databases. In contrast, the Mediate Metrics classifier was specifically devised to identify statements of bias (opinions) and influence (facts that reflects positively or negatively) on U.S. political parties from news program transcripts.

(The links to Wikipedia articles on "social science" and "text mining" are original to their page.)

Language Log has been asked more than once to comment on an unpublished working paper by Yale economist Keith Chen that is discussed in various online sources, e.g. here and here, and most recently David Berreby's post at Big Think. Briefly, Chen's paper alleges that a certain simple grammatical property of languages correlates robustly with indicators of profligacy and lack of prudence, as revealed in the speakers' lack of concern for their financial and medical prospects. Language Log does not really want to comment on an unpublished working paper about language by a non-linguist that is not written for publication and has not had the benefit of serious critical attention from academic referees. But neither does it want to disappoint its readers by clamming up. So I will make a few remarks about Chen's work, and the journalistic reporting that it is beginning to attract. I will not be very rigorous; but as I will explain, it is too early for that.

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

The Australian minister of transport and infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). He delivered a speech in which one passage, a piece of nicely honed rhetoric about the leader of the opposition (the Liberal party), was lifted with hardly any alteration from a speech that Michael Douglas was seen giving in a 1995 American romantic comedy, The American President (script by Aaron Sorkin). Naturally the two speech segments are now available side by side on YouTube. Albanese's staff, who prepared the speech for him (Albanese claims never to have seen the movie) had apparently forgotten that (1) millions of Australians have in fact personally visited a movie theater, and (2) some of them remember at least parts of movies that they have seen.

Joel Martinsen writes:

Here's a comment I came across on Sina's microblog service today from someone reading various terms used by the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese media to report Kim Jong-il's death and inferring politeness based on the Chinese usage of the terms. Is there a name for this sort of phenomenon?

Josef Fruehwald has an excellent post "On vocal fry". (For some background, see "Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011.)

He observes that the media coverage has been an intellectual "train wreck", and he promises to explore the whys and wherefores in a future post. I'll look forward to his analysis — but I came to my own conclusion a few years ago ("Bible Science Stories", 12/2/2006):

I've concluded that "scientific studies" like these have taken over the place that bible stories used to occupy. It's only fundamentalists like me who worry about whether they're true. For most people, it's only important that they're morally instructive.

What would the producers of CNN Headline News, NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me" or the BBC's "Have I got news for you" say, if presented with evidence that they've been peddling falsehoods? I imagine that their reaction would be roughly like that of an Episcopalian Sunday-school teacher, confronted with evidence from DNA phylogeny that the animals of the world could not possibly have gone through the genetic bottleneck required by the story of Noah's ark. I mean, lighten up, man, it's just a story.

In the tumultuous run-up to the momentous announcement of the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year (to be proclaimed on January 6, 2012), Language Log's own Ben Zimmer is the main point-man with the media.  See here, here, and here.

The Chinese, of course, are not to be outdone, so they have for the past few years been choosing a "Character of the Year."  This year, 2011, the character selected is kòng 控.  Everybody seems to think that kòng 控 means "control".  In this post, however, I'm going to question that assumption, and I'm also going to cast doubt upon the whole usefulness and validity of choosing a "Character of the Year".

A note from Stephen Mouritsen:

I wanted to give you a heads up about a second judicial opinion (again by Justice Tom Lee on the Utah Supreme Court) that overtly relies on data from Mark Davies' COCA.  The opinion is here, and the discussion of corpus data is found in paragraphs 36 through 40.

"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife."

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn't count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

Winter has definitely come to Scotland. It is cold, and when light first returns to the sky around 9 a.m. I can see snow on the cars outside my apartment that have driven in from out of town. The winter silly season in the UK newspapers has begun. Here is Charles Nevin in a putatively quite serious newspaper, The Independent:

Minor British Institutions: The white hell

The most unexpected regular event in Britain is on its way, if it hasn't already arrived.

The Inuit may have more than a few words for snow, but so do we: transport chaos, hundreds stranded in sub-zero misery, grounds to a halt, disrupted flights, mass cancellations, forced to spend another night, enjoying another day off school, clear or don't clear the pavement outside your house if you don't want to be sued, it doesn't happen in Norway.

UK broadcasting personality Jeremy Clarkson is paid millions of dollars a year out of the BBC's revenue, which is raised by means of a tax that all owners of TV equipment are required to pay. Wouldn't you agree that he should be fired from his job if he used his privileged position to advocate on nationwide public TV that nurses and teachers on strike should be rounded up and shot in front of their families?

I think I'd be happy to see him fired for that. If he had done it. Over this weekend an extraordinarily stupid manufactured news brouhaha led to a large proportion of the British public believing that he had. But he hadn't. Journalists either don't know how to report speech acts accurately or they aren't trying.

The lower-grade newspapers in Britain this morning have been making much of what happened to a group of birdwatchers, gathered excitedly in a coastal area for a rare chance to photograph a Hume's leaf warbler. It seems they happened upon a calendar photo shoot and had a rare chance to also snap a blonde model, draped over a motorcycle, wearing nothing but a thong.

Last month ("Xtreme Isisism", 8/13/11), Mark Liberman analyzed a TED talk by Kevin Slavin, a speaker who is particularly prone to copula-doubling ("the point IS IS that…", "the reality IS IS that…", etc.). Slavin even produced an impressive case of copula-tripling: "and the thing IS IS IS that this isn't Google." The triple IS is rare enough that any instance in the wild is worth noting. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Jonathan Lighter reported one that he heard in an interview of Ron Suskind by Howard Kurtz on the CNN show "Reliable Sources." Well, it's an IS IS IS with a vocative "Howie" inserted, but close enough.