Language Log

J.W. writes:

In connection with some of your prior statements on the Log about the importance of publishing underlying data, you might be interested in Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff", PERI 4/15/2013 (explanation in lay language at "Shocking Paper Claims That Microsoft Excel Coding Error Is Behind The Reinhart-Rogoff Study On Debt", Business Insider 4/16/2013). In sum, a look at the data spreadsheet underlying a really influential 2010 economics paper reveals that its results were driven by selective data exclusions, idiosyncratic weighting, and an Excel coding error [!].

My faith in the possibility of integrity and self-criticism in humankind got a real boost the other day when I read a post on Lingua Franca in which an editor (who is also a professor in an English department) stopped to think about whether she was in the right about a construction she had been proscribing for years in the journal papers she edited, and decided that she wasn't.

Is it legitimate to say "On the other hand, …" in a text where you have not first used "On the one hand, …"? Professor Anne Curzan thought the answer was no. And for years she told authors to change on the other hand to something like in contrast if they hadn't got a preceding instance of on the one hand somewhere nearby. But then one day she got to thinking: Am I right? Is it really an error to use on the other hand alone? So she did what people interested in grammar only rarely do: she started looking at the evidence, and decided that it refuted her rule.

R.S. writes:

Remember when using English words to create French counterparts was considered (I believe this is the technical term) a shonda?

Me neither. Still the case in Quebec, apparently, where the STOP signs say ARRET, but in the Hexagon apparently not so much.

In support of his case, he sends along this ad from Le Monde:

The buses run by Lothian Buses in Edinburgh currently have a prominent sign near the entrance that says "REVISED Adult Fare".

Revised. I will leave it to you to guess whether the fare has been revised upward or downward.

From the University of Winnipeg News Centre, a press release dated 04/11/2013, "Study Supports Theory On Teen Texting And Shallow Thought":

A University of Winnipeg study finds that students who are heavy texters place less importance on moral, aesthetic, and spiritual goals, and greater importance on wealth and image. Those who texted more than 100 times a day were 30 per cent less likely to feel strongly that leading an ethical, principled life was important to them, in comparison to those who texted 50 times or less a day. Higher texting frequency was also consistently associated with higher levels of ethnic prejudice. […]

The main goal of the study was to test the so-called ”shallowing hypothesis,” described in the Nicholas Carr bestseller, The Shallows, and by some social neuroscientists. According to the shallowing hypothesis, ultra-brief social media like texting and Twitter encourages rapid, relatively shallow thought and consequently very frequent daily use of such media should be associated with cognitive and moral shallowness.

Today's Frazz:

I knew it wouldn't be long before someone came up with a Chinese equivalent to alphabetical typoglycemia:

Today's "Frazz" (via Ed Cormany on Twitter):

Another fragment of aleatoric sub-poetry, from the 5,036,601 spam comments that Akismet has caught since we installed it:

I image this might be numerous upon the written content material? nevertheless I nonetheless believe that it may be suitable for just about any type of topic material, because it could frequently be pleasant to resolve a warm and delightful face or possibly listen a voice whilst initial landing.

Joe Abley is in Beijing this week attending the 46th ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) meeting, and this sign appears in the window of one of the polished, expensive-looking boutiques within the Beijing International Hotel:

Smitha Mundasad, "Babies' brains to be mapped in the womb and after birth", BBC News 4/9/2013:

By the time a baby takes its first breath many of the key pathways between nerves have already been made.

And some of these will help determine how a baby thinks or sees the world, and may have a role to play in the development of conditions such as autism, scientists say.

But how this rich neural network assembles in the baby before birth is relatively unchartered territory.

Meena Vathyam sent in this photograph from Shanghaiist:

NPR has launched an engaging new blog called Code Switch. From the inaugural post, "How Code-Switching Explains The World," by Gene Demby:

You're looking at the launch of a new team covering race, ethnicity and culture at NPR. We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we'll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.

When you're attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity and culture plays out all over the place.