Language Log

Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, commenting on my posts about a Dilbert cartoon that skewers "the vacuous way managers talk", asks "What is a 'manager' anyway?"

My only comment here is not on the Bayesian inference but rather on the idea that "managers" are dweeby Dilbert characters who talk using management jargon. I was thinking about it, and I realized that I'm a manager. I manage projects, hire people, etc. But of course I don't usually think of myself as a "manager" since that's considered a bad thing to be.

For another example, Liberman considers a "spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys" as a manager. I don't know what this person does, but I wouldn't usually think of a spokesperson as a manager at all.

The LL posts in question were "Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day", 9/26/2009;  "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009; "Another nail in the ATEOTD=manager coffin", 9/28/2009; and "Memetic dynamics of low-hanging fruit", 9/30/2009.

And Andrew's comment is very much to the point.

Not, that is, unless you think that typical contemporary exponents of this linguistic register are Dick Cavett, Glamour Magazine, and Michael Bérubé.

I noted this morning that Scott Adams is far from the only one to suggest that "at the end of the day" (in the meaning "when all is said and done" or "in the final analysis") is typical of "the vacuous way managers speak".  This phrase is often cited as  "over-used" as well as "irritating", and  I did a little lunch-time experiment™ earlier today suggesting that over the past 30 years or so,  it's indeed been taking over its rhetorico-ecological niche from competing cliches.

However, an unsystematic scan of my searches seemed inconsistent with the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by "managers", however we define that much-maligned class.  I speculated that this might be another example of the common process of stereotype-formation, where some behavior perceived as annoying comes to be associated with a class of people who are also perceived as annoying, and the association is then repeatedly strengthened by confirmation bias. (See "The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007, for some discussion.)

Several commenters were not persuaded to abandon their prejudices, and so I decided to do a slightly more systematic check across sources, by comparing the frequency of "at the end of the day" to the frequency of "in the final analysis" in texts on the sites of 13 business, finance or management magazines, and 21 other diverse kinds of magazines and weblogs.

Kevin Drum recently laid out a long-standing unsolved problem, one that has preoccupied such luminaries as Paul Krugman, James Fallows, and Glenn Beck ("Saving the Frogs", Mother Jones, 9/23/2009). The problem is that there's no good substitute for the over-used and untrue story about how a frog, if placed in a pot of gradually heated water, will eventually allow itself to be boiled without jumping out.  And since this is a rhetorical problem, Drum describes the failure as a linguistic one:

So here's what I'm interested in. The boiling frog cliche is untrue. But it stays alive because, as Krugman says, it's a useful metaphor. So why aren't there any good substitutes?

This is very strange. Most useful adages and metaphors not only have substitutes, they have multiple substitutes. "Look before you leap" and "Curiosity killed the cat." "Fast as lightning" and "Faster than a speeding bullet." Etc. Usually you have lots of choices.

But in this case we don't seem to have a single one aside from the boiling frog. Why? Is it because it's not really all that useful a metaphor after all? Because the frog has ruthlessly killed off every competitor? Because it's not actually true in any circumstance, let alone with frogs in pots of water? What accounts for this linguistic failure?

Yesterday, Jonathan Lundell sent me a link to Drum's article, with the comment "Sounds like a job for Language Log". That was almost enough to make me move on immediately: when Geoff Pullum and I started Language Log, I promised myself that if it ever got to feel like a job, I'd quit.

But this morning, after half a cup of coffee, I realized that Jonathan's remark was just an instance of the conventionalized phrasal template "sounds like a job for ___". And this one usually refers to the super-activities of superheros, which are by definition superfluous to their day jobs.

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

That's not a-the-indefinite-article, it's a-the-immediate-future-marker, as in Kanye West's infamous "I'm a let you finish" interruption at the MTV awards. Steven Poole at Unspeak has a poll, where you can register your preference for how to spell it. (So far, "I'ma" has a plurality of 45%, with "I'm'a" next at 20%.)

Steven links to the discussion that Ella and I had about this back in 2005.

Following up on this morning's "bored" post, I wrote a little script to query the NYT's index for the number of uses of "bored of" vs. "bored with" from 1981 to the present. Although the number are fairly small and thus somewhat unstable (in 1981 there were 72 instances of "bored with" and none of "bored of"; in 2008 there were 48 instances of "bored with" and 12 of "bored of"), the results lend further plausibility to the idea that there's a change in progress, with of gaining ground on with during the past decade:

Sarah Currier asked:

Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am 43, grew up in New Zealand, but now live in Scotland.

This passage is set in 1960 and is between the narrator and his then elderly mother:

"She is too sincere for you," she said after a short pause.
"Sincere?"
"You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father".

The woman using "bored of" is also an Austrian Jew who escaped to England during WWII. So English is her second language.

I just found that really jarring, especially in such a beautifully written literary novel. My partner thinks I am mad.

The Jamaican Creole phrase often spelled batty man, pronounced ['bati'man] (also botty boy ['bati'bwai]), would be more easily interpreted by other English speakers if it were spelled botty man, since the first element is botty, a familiar British hypocorism for bottom. (My point about the spelling is not a prescriptive one; I'm merely pointing out that the first syllable sounds like Standard English bot, not bat.) The literal meaning of the phrase into American English would be "butt man" or "ass man", and the free translation is "homosexual" (trading, of course, on the juvenile assumption that all gays are ever interested in is bottoms). The phrase appeared in a note near the naked corpse of John Terry, found at his home in Montego Bay last week. It saddened me to see, in a week when one country atoned just a little for its homophobic past with a genuine apology from its government, another country continuing to forge a place for itself in the annals of intolerance and moral backwardness.

Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?"  (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic.  They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by overseas Chinese.)  The article was written by a well-known Singaporean Malay playwright named Alfian Sa'at (he also call himself "Naif" and writes a blog under that name).

Alfian Sa'at's insights on the close relationships between what he correctly terms Southern Chinese languages (such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese) and Malay are very interesting. His observations on how there are almost no similar connections between Mandarin Chinese and Malay are quite thought provoking.  In other words, Alfian Sa'at is saying that Mandarin is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the region and that the inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not have any deep affinity for it.

Whenever I fly on non-Indian carriers to India or there are Indians (South Asians) on non-Indian carriers flying elsewhere, I often encounter individuals who complain that they cannot eat the special meals that they ordered.

Steward(ess):  But, sir, you ordered a vegetarian meal, didn't you?

Passenger:  Yes, but I cannot eat this kind of vegetarian meal.

Steward(ess):  I can assure you, sir / ma'am, that our vegetarian meals have no meat or meat products in them.

Passenger:  But what you have given me has X, Y, Z in it.  I cannot eat it.  Please get me something else.

Steward(ess):  I am sorry, we do not have any other kinds of vegetarian meals.

Whereupon the passenger pulls out some biscuits from his / her carry-on bag and survives on them and whatever else he / she can scrounge up for the duration of the flight.

Stefan Krasowski recently booked a flight on India's Jet Airways.  Here are the choices he was offered for meals:

From yesterday's mail:

An idle question from a big Language Log fan:  Do you have any idea if the nice folks in, say Germany or Italy or Spain, go as nuts as Americans seem to when native speakers make "fundamental" grammar errors?

It appears that the strong form of "going nuts" that we've called word rage is mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, with the British as the originators and still the champions. But the sociolinguistic settings in Germany, Italy, and Spain are very different from the situation in the U.S. — and as a result, they have their own kinds of language wars over there.

Those who enjoyed Penny Arcade's take on ghey may also like Jay Smooth's "Old Person's Guide to 'No Homo'":

It's a strange fact about social scientists that hardly any of them, in recent years, have paid any analytic attention to language, which is the main medium of human social interaction.  At schools of "communication", you'll generally find that neither the curriculum nor the faculty's research publications feature much if any analysis of speech and language. In other disciplines — sociology, social psychology, economics, history — you'll find even less of it. (The main systematic exception, Linguistic Anthropology, deserves a separate discussion — but the conclusion of such a discussion, I believe, would note a steep decline in empirical linguistic analysis. And of course I'm leaving out sociolinguistics, which is healthy enough but largely alienated from the rest of the social sciences.)

There are notable exceptions of several kinds, such as Erving Goffman, Manny Schegloff, or Jamie Pennebaker. But such work emphasizes the paradox, since it shows that we can't blame the effect on a lack of intellectual opportunity.