Language Log

A new cop show called Mentalist has been one of the big hits of this season’s television fare. It features Simon Baker as a former fortune teller turned honest by renouncing his former fraudulent practice and now working with an unlikely bunch of California Bureau of Investigation officers to catch the bad guys. What caught my eye, however, was the title of the show, which is broken into what the writers believe to be the syllables of Mentalist:

/’men – tuh—list/    noun

Okay, the second syllable is actually /t / plus schwa, but I don’t have a keyboard with a schwa, so you understand what I mean by the /-uh/.

Billy Bob Thornton gave a bizarre interview today on CBC Radio that could serve as a case study for Paul Grice's conversational maxims and how to violate them. Billy Bob was there with his band the Boxmasters, but he was upset that the host Jian Ghomeshi mentioned his acting career in the introduction to the segment. He proceeded to take a passive-aggressive approach to answering Ghomeshi's questions, finding the most uncooperative possible responses.

Right off the bat, when asked by Ghomeshi about the formation of the band, Billy Bob flouts the Maxim of Quality ("be truthful") and the Maxim of Quantity ("be informative") by claiming that he doesn't know what Ghomeshi is talking about. Later Ghomeshi asks him about musical influences, and he gives a long, rambling recollection of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, thus flouting the Maxim of Relevance ("be relevant") and the Maxim of Manner ("be clear"). It's truly a tour-de-force performance, sure to be appreciated by students of pragmatics everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJWS6qyy7bw

According to The Economist, 4/2/2009, "Neuroscience and social deprivation: I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told":

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. [emphasis added]

OK, keep that bold-faced statement in mind. Now let me offer you a bet. Suppose we have a large group of "children who have been raised in poverty", and another large group of "middle-class children", taken from the same groups described in the cited research; and we measure the capacity of their working memories, using the same testing techniques as the cited research.  We pick one of the "children raised in poverty" at random, and one of the "middle-class children" at random. Will you bet me that the rich kid will outscore the poor kid, giving odds of, oh, say, 2-to-1? (That is, you put up \$200 and I put up \$100.)

You might not like to gamble on single events — I certainly don't — so let's give you the benefit of the law of large numbers. We'll run this same bet 100 times, with 100 different random pairs of kids. Will you take the challenge now?

English is a fine language in most respects, but its morphosyntactic resources for talking about sampled properties of groups are remarkably poor.  (Not that other languages are any better, as far as I know.)  In particular, English speakers have no simple alternative to the use of generic statements about whole groups or typical members, when discussing cases where between-group differences are significant, but small relative to within-group variation — Xs are P-er than Ys, or Xs prefer A to B, or an X prefers A while a Y prefers B.

The result is especially unfortunate when it involves invidious comparisons in socially sensitive areas, but the problem comes up whenever anyone discusses properties of groups.  This morning, Stephen Jones brought a particularly striking example to my attention: an article in today's Independent, "Oodles of noodles: Britain prefers Chinese to curry".

Ben Goldacre at badscience.net, in his miniblog, links to a blog post at Doctors from the Future, "Times misreports maggot therapy research", with the comment:

I want a site that links media coverage and blogs to the academic article / automated plus crowdsourced, wld change everything.

Me too.

Some sub-editor at the  Telegraph has recently held a sort of master class in prepositional phrase attachment. It starts with the headline: "Gordon Brown is frustrated by 'Psycho' in No 10". The sub-head then leads the reader down a parenthetical garden path with  virtuosic bravado (though purists may object to the use of missing punctuation):

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington.

Here is one of the saddest facts about language and culture that I have noticed in quite a while: the search pattern "before turning * gun on himself" gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.

Several people have drawn my attention to a harmonic convergence of LL topics on CNN.com today: social media, gender-neutral pronouns, and linguistic time machines. The article is Elizabeth Landau, "On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?", and Ms. Landau is worried that English will be unable to reach the epicene ideal, due to fundamental principles of linguistics:

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "they" is grammatically incorrect. […]

It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.

Fev at Headsup: The Blog has followed up his post on Britosphere headline culture ("Hed noun pileup of the morning", 2/24/2009), and my comments ("UK death crash fetish?", 3/1/2009), with "Nude pic row vicar resigns", which features great noun strings like "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a brain surgeon who tried to get the dying George Harrison to sign a guitar), and "Kid porn shame councillor".

OK, the whole time machine thing is over (for now), but along the way, I unaccountably neglected to link to a lovely explanation by Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval of why Mark Pagel's choice of historical examples was unwise, and why the BBC's elaboration and illustration raised unwisdom to levels of hilarious incongruity rarely seen outside of The Onion: "Tips for Time Traveling William the Conqueror Fanboys". Carl discusses the rest of the British media's response in a later post, "Further Thoughts on Time Traveling".

Mark Pagel can take comfort in the fact that his remarks about phrase-books for time-travelers were far from the dumbest stuff from a famous scientist to be featured in the mass media last week. As Ben Goldacre explained on badscience.net:

Professor Susan Greenfield is the head of the Royal Institution and the person behind the Daily Mail headline "Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist”, which has spread around the world (like the last time she said it, and the time before that).

It is my view that Professor Greenfield has been abusing her position as a professor, and head of the Royal Institution, for many years now, using these roles to give weight to her speculations and prejudices in a way that is entirely inappropriate. […]

We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim, however, is to improve the public’s understanding of science: and yet repeatedly she appears in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, without evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that she is a scientist. By doing this, the head of the RI grossly misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a claim. It makes me quite sad, when the public’s understanding of science is in such a terrible state, that this is one of our most prominent and well funded champions.

A few days ago, Fev at Headsup: The Blog posted about the "Hed noun pileup of the morning", namely "Texting death crash peer jailed". His link actually points to a BBC News story whose headline now reads "Peer jailed for motorway texting". All the same, Fev's larger point seems to be exactly right: "American hed dialect just doesn't do this".

Does the network of journalistic credulousness still follow the connections established during the glory days of the British empire? I'm not sure how else to explain the diffusion pattern of Mark Pagel's little jokes about his estimates of cognate-replacement rates in language change.

In my post a couple of days ago ("Scrabble tips for time travelers"), I linked to a calvalcade of foolishness that included coverage in the Times ("A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age"), the BBC ("Oldest English words' identified"), the Guardian ("Word facing extinction: 'Dirty' will be scrubbed from the English dictionary"), and the Daily Mail ("Revealed: The world's oldest words… and the ones that will disappear"). And a Google News search yields a cornucopia of other giddy idiocies in British-empire media.