Language Log

Fifty years ago, my job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in the rural part of the state of Illinois as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.  The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciation patterns of older residents who had lived in the same general area all their lives. This proved to be  a fascinating experience for a young man who had lived in large cities all his life. But it actually made me a good field interviewer because I knew nothing about farming and other aspects of rural life and this ignorance actually legitimized my rather mundane questions about such things as what the farmers called the utensil they use to fry eggs with, the machinery they use  to reap their harvests, and what  they call their animals. I haven’t done linguistic geography since those halcyon days, but this New York Times article about the controversy over FCC’s crackdown (the Bono Rule) on the use of dirty words brought back some fond memories.

Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones.

I've cited many examples involving journalists or popular authors, most recently with respect to the effects of poverty on working memory ("Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009). But in fact, this is a problem that afflicts everyone, even prize-winning behavioral economists.

A little while ago I posted here about the NP Hotel in Seattle, which inspired readers to suggest other syntactic establishments.

When it comes to matters of the toilet, translators in China seem to reach for the old and arcane.  Perhaps you may recall our "Closestool Encounters" back in March.  And now witness the sign in the following photograph:

In previous postings on word rage, we've noted (mock) threats of punching, slicing, bludgeoning, shooting, hanging, and lightning strikes.  Commenting on Ron Charles, "1 Millions Words! But Who's Counting?", Washington Post, 4/29/2009, someone identifying himself as andrewsalomon added judicially-sanctioned electrocution:

I don't know anything about the million-word business, but is there any chance of getting Benjamin Zimmer or, I don't know, Congress, to enact a statute that would allow for the zapping of 1,000 volts of electricity through anyone who uses "impact" as a verb?

Last week, fev at Headsup: The Blog featured an unusual referential tangle ("March of the pronouns", 4/24/2009):

A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man’s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.

Rob Balder continues to display his delicate yet often dark and naughty linguistic genius. The latest strip is wonderful. Look at the sensitivity, in that last panel, to the currents of contemporary journalistic and educational phraseology about controversies like creationism, and the corrupting force of dangerous misinformation. Deliciously, wickedly funny. No, I'm not reproducing the strip here; you owe it to yourself to click through and browse his site.

A bullshit lie detector company run by a charlatan has managed to semi-successfully censor a peer reviewed academic article. And I don't like it one bit. But first, some background, and then we'll get to the censorship stuff.

Five years ago I wrote a Language Log post entitled "BS conditional semantics and the Pinocchio effect" about the nonsense spouted by a lie detection company, Nemesysco. I was disturbed by the marketing literature of the company, which suggested a 98% success rate in detecting evil intent of airline passengers, and included crap like this:

The LVA uses a patented and unique technology to detect "Brain activity finger prints" using the voice as a "medium" to the brain and analyzes the complete emotional structure of your subject. Using wide range spectrum analysis and micro-changes in the speech waveform itself (not micro tremors!) we can learn about any anomaly in the brain activity, and furthermore, classify it accordingly. Stress ("fight or flight" paradigm) is only a small part of this emotional structure

The 98% figure, as I pointed out, and as Mark Liberman made even clearer in a follow up post, is meaningless. There is no type of lie detector in existence whose performance can reasonably be compared to the performance of finger printing. It is meaningless to talk about someone's "complete emotional structure", and there is no interesting sense in which any current technology can analyze it. It is not the case that looking at speech will provide information about "any anomaly in the brain activity": at most it will tell you about some anomalies. Oh, the delicious irony, a lie detector company that engages in wanton deception.

I learn here that that John McIntyre (whose name has often come up in these parts) has now left the Baltimore Sun. Yet another language writer on a newspaper (who was not merely retailing peeves — quite far from that, in John's case) to bite the dust. I hope that we will hear from him in another venue soon.

[(myl) It didn't take long: as of April 30, 2009, John was blogging again at http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/, still under the title "You Don't Say". Welcome back! ]

A little while back, a representative of the publishers of the third edition of Paul Dickson's Baseball Dictionary wrote to offer me a free copy, in the hope that I would review the book on Language Log. I replied that I was an idiot about baseball — yes, I know, this totally undercuts any claim I might have to being a real American man, but I coped with that long ago — and so was not the person they wanted to take on this task.

But I did buy the book, because I knew that Dickson's dictionary was a work of serious lexicographic scholarship (with careful citations and thoughtful definitions, the sort of thing that could be accommodated in a revision of the OED). Many specialized dictionaries are not like this, and for good reason: in many domains, the evidence for usages in written texts is very hard to come by, and very spotty.

Irving John "Jack" Good, who died on April 5 at the age of 92, is best known to linguists as the author of a paper on mathematical ecology. The paper is I.J. Good, "The Population Frequencies of Species and the Estimation of Population Parameters", Biometrika 40(3-4) 237-264 (1953), and its abstract reads as follows:

A random sample is drawn from a population of animals of various species. (The theory may also be applied to studies of literary vocabulary, for example.) If a particular species is represented r times in the sample of size N, then r/N is not a good estimate of the population frequency, p, when r is small. Methods are given for estimating p, assuming virtually nothing about the underlying population. The estimates are expressed in terms of smoothed values of the numbers n_r (r = 1, 2, 3, …), where n_r is the number of distinct species that are each represented r times in the sample. (n_r may be described as `the frequency of the frequency r'.) Turing is acknowledged for the most interesting formula in this part of the work. An estimate of the proportion of the population represented by the species occurring in the sample is an immediate corollary. Estimates are made of measures of heterogeneity of the population, including Yule's 'characteristic' and Shannon's 'entropy'. Methods are then discussed that do depend on assumptions about the underlying population. It is here that most work has been done by other writers. It is pointed out that a hypothesis can give a good fit to the numbers n_r but can give quite the wrong value for Yule's characteristic. An example of this is Fisher's fit to some data of Williams's on Macrolepidoptera.

James Dreier wrote:

Your posting [about and ambiguity] made me remember that I had a question, also involving ambiguity, though I think this one is quite a bit harder.  "Who was the first president born in the twentieth century?"

JFK was born 5/29/1917
LBJ was born 8/27/1908

Thus JFK was president first, but LBJ was born first.

The sentence is, of course, a trivia question — it appeared in GAMES magazine. A reader wrote in to complain that the magazine had given the wrong answer (they said it was JFK). My view is that the question is genuinely ambiguous, but I don't know how to argue for this conclusion.

Last December, an episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" revolved around fanciful neologisms, culminating in a scene where the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary anoint their latest entries in a "Word Induction Ceremony." The FOX sketch comedy show "MADtv" (now in its final season) imagines the lexicographers of "Webster's Dictionary" announcing new words in a far less celebratory mood. Here (for the time being, at least) is a YouTube clip bringing together the three-part sketch and one outtake: