Language Log

Reuben Fischer-Baum, Aaron Gordon, and Billy Haisley, "Which Words Are Used To Describe White And Black NFL Prospects?", Deadspin 5/8/2014

Do NFL scouts talk about white players and black players differently? Are certain words reserved for white players? Are others used primarily to describe black players?

Let's try and find out. We've pulled the text from pre-draft scouting reports from NFL.com (written by the infamous Nolan Nawrocki), CBS, and ESPN, split them by player race, counted the number of times individual words appeared using the Voyant tool, and then calculated the rate at which each word appeared per 10,000 words. (In total we pulled 68,465 words on 99 white players—6,228 unique—and 223,868 words on 288 black players—10,580 unique). You can play with the data in the interactive below; simply plug a single word into the input field, hit search, and see how often the word appeared in black and white scouting reports.

Photograph of a sign in Taiwan from Jason Cox, whose friend posted it on Facebook:

A recent xkcd:

Morse code was first used for telegraphy in 1844. I'm not sure when the French navy started to use it, but I understand that transmission of Morse code by radio began in the 1890s, so if that last plaintive message was sent in 1997, Morse code in the French navy would have had a run of just about 100 years. LiveJournal was started in April of 1999, and of course some people still use it, but it flowered and faded in the U.S. over a period of about a decade: "In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia", according to Wikipedia.

Yesterday I attended a workshop on Social Media Data at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it occurred to me to wonder what the social media landscape will be like ten years from now.

A.S. sent in this quotation from Jeremy Fogel, “A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy”, Litigation Journal, Spring 2014:

Different cultures understand privacy in different ways. In societies in which large numbers of people typically live in close proximity to each other, often in very small spaces, very little truly is understood or expected to be private. There are entire languages without words for “I” or “me” or “mine.”

Email from D.D.:

After reading an article in The Economist about Nigeria's Boko Haram terrorists on my subway to work today, I asked an Oxford-educated Nigerian co-worker a question: if people from Nigeria are call Nigerians, what are people from the nation of Niger, to the north, called? The guy was stumped! Wow. (I have since done enough googling to learn that they are called Nigeriens — all French-like.)

But anyway, before I learned that, my co-worker and I discussed the issue. He suggested that the common origin of the two nations’ names was due to the Niger River that flows thru them both (according to him; I didn't consult maps).

My question of my co-worker—me being a guy who grew up near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers—was whether it was the French (as it was in early Missouri) who originally transcribed the name of the Niger river (and then some Anglicized the pronunciation), or was it the English.

The answer is "neither one" — it was the Berber/Arab/Andalusian etc. civilization of North Africa and Spain, transmitted via Italian, Latin and other European languages by al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, later known as Leo Africanus.

Over the last couple of days, I read Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Triumph of Life, and Paul de Man's essay "Shelley Disfigured", which is presented as a close reading of that poem. The essay quotes extensively from the poem, but its analysis struck me as telling us more about de Man than about Shelley:

Forgetting is a highly erotic experience: it is like glimmering light because it cannot be decided whether it reveals or hides; it is like desire because, like the wolf pursuing the deer, it does violence to what sustains it; it is like a trance or a dream because it is asleep to the very extent that it is conscious and awake, and dead to the extent that it is alive. 

Whether Shelly's or de Man's, these are ideas evoked by highly inferential connections among aspects of the poem's content. Which is fine, except that I was looking for "an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces".

The first British envoy to China was George Macartney; his mission is referred to in the historical literature as the Macartney Embassy.  The basic purpose of the embassy was to open up trade between Great Britain and China, which theretofore has been greatly restricted in various ways by the Chinese authorities.

Naturally, Macartney would have needed translation assistance to communicate with Chinese officials.  However, due to some peculiar circumstances that will be related below, translators were not easy to come by, as is detailed in this passage from the Wikipedia article on the Macartney Embassy:

From the University Chicago Library News:

Calling all historians of cryptography and stenography, Sherlockians (see “The Dancing Men”), and other amateur detectives!  The collection of Homer editions in the Special Collections Research Center – the  Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana(BHL) – includes a copy of the rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey that contains, in Book 11 (narrating Odysseus’s journey into Hades) handwritten annotations in a strange and as-yet unidentified script.  This marginalia appears only in the pages of Book 11 of the Odyssey; nowhere else in the volume.  Although the donor of the BHL is suspicious that this odd script is a form of 19th-century shorthand (likely French), he acknowledges that this hypothesis remains unsupported by any evidence offered to date.  

The donor of the BHL is offering a prize of $1,000 to the first person who identifies the script, provides evidence to support the conclusion, and executes a translation of selected portions of the mysterious marginalia.

I was not able to find high-resolution images for remote use — Can it really be true that aspirants need to travel to Chicago and inspect the material IRL?

Update: High-resolution images are now available here.

In response to "What would a "return to philology" be a return to?", Omri Ceren proposes a simple explanation for Paul de Man's assertion that literary "theory" was just a return to philology:

You might be overthinking the de Man thing.

Jon Kabat-Zinn's estimable (2013) Full Catastrophe Living (Revised edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness has an odd "Chinese character for X" blooper: "Maybe there is something to be learned from the fact that the Chinese character for 'breakthrough' is written as 'turning'" (e-book loc 8495, last sentence in chap 12).

Will Spence has an article on "Why 'gentleman' matters" in Caixin Online, part of a Mainland media group, with the following lede:  "The Chinese government often says it wants to build up its soft power, but for this to happen it may have to embrace its heritage and adopt a gentler approach".

A key passage is the following:

It is interesting to note that the the word itself is rarely translated – it is much more common to hear "gentleman" than to hear shenshi or junzi – suggesting that there is something uniquely British about the notion, in a similar vein to English adopting the words of Chinese concepts like taichi and yin yang.

Analytics is all the rage. Thus Keith Pompey, "Sixers aide immerses Brown in analytics", Philadelphia Inquirer 4/7/2014

Brett Brown is inherently curious.  

The first-year 76ers coach was eager to learn as much as possible about the data that tell us where every player is during every possession of an NBA game. It's called analytics, and the Sixers are among the NBA franchises that are shifting toward basing major decisions on data and model-driven analysis.  

"There's always the thing that they call unintended consequences," said Brown, who was introduced to analytics this season. "That's where my curiosity combined with, yeah, you know, there's a bit of defiance in me that I don't believe it. Prove it. And what about this? What about that?  

"And if you can get through all those type of layers, I say, 'Wow.' And I feel like I've improved."  

So much so that the 53-year-old is fond of Lance Pearson, who deals with advanced analytics and statistical scouting for the Sixers. Pearson was hired away from Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Ky., where he was an assistant coach and special assistant in analytics.  He has a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Boston University. Pearson also has bachelor's degrees in computer science, mathematics and philosophy from Kentucky.

Lǎowài 老外 (lit., "old foreign") is a ubiquitous term for a certain type of person from abroad in China, and dictionaries almost invariably gloss it as "foreigner".  Yet the subtleties and nuances of the term seem almost endless, and they can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings.  To try to get a handle on this colloquial expression, I asked a number of laowai who have had long experience in China what they thought of this appellation that they had doubtless been called hundreds of times and some Chinese friends who most likely had had occasion to employ that designation themselves.