Language Log

From yesterday's editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the conviction of a local political boss, Vince Fumo, on 137 corruption-related charges:

There was an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Fumo. That would be the city that spawned him, took what he delivered and then pretended to be shocked, shocked at the unsavory details of how he manipulated the process.

That, of course, would be Philadelphia. That, of course, would be us.

The editorial's headline is "We've met the enemy, and he is us".

For St. Patrick's Day, Dinosaur Comics muses on Middle English (among other things):

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Hello, blogosphere — the fifth collection of Simpsons linguistic humor is up, here. Enjoy!

This afternoon, John Baker posted to the American Dialect Society's listserv (ADS-L) the following note:

Mark Liberman recently wrote in Language Log that, for everyone except linguists and a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals, what "passive voice" now means is "construction that is vague as to agency". Disturbingly, a short piece by Nancy Franklin in the March 23, 2009, issue of The New Yorker seems to bear that out.  It is a discussion of Bernard Madoff's allocution, his formal court statement acknowledging guilt:

<<Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith-he "believed"!-that it would soon be over. Yes, "soon." In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer:  "To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.">>

If there is an example of the passive voice in Madoff's quoted statements, it has escaped my attention.  Unlike the blog Liberman cites, The New Yorker reportedly has professionally edited text.

Linguists sometimes have run-ins with copy editors over points of usage: the linguists use variants that they know to be standard, but the editors edit them out in obedience to some fancied "rule of grammar". Frustration ensues.

On to John McWhorter (in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008)) on "singular they", a topic we've returned to many times on Language Log. The short version is that in certain (not all) contexts, singular they is entirely standard and has been so for a very long time. Yet many people believe, passionately, that it is always wrong, because it offends "logic".

In his post "In defense of Amazon's Mechanical Turk", Chris Potts wrote "Overall, the workers are incentivized to do well". David M. Chess commented

Interesting post! Thanks for writing it up.

But… "incentivized"?

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) says of incentivize that "This is perhaps the most recent of the infamous verbs that end in -ize", noting that the members of a usage panel in 1985 "rejected it almost unanimously with varying degrees of disgust and horror".

But why are coinages in -ize such an enduring source of disgust and horror?

As anyone who blogs knows or soon learns, doing so makes you a whole lot more transparent than you might otherwise wish to be. In fact, writing anything like books, articles, or blogs makes you an attractive target for people who may not appreciate what you say. No clearer example can be found than the vetting process the government inflicts on nominees for high-level appointments, such as the US Supreme Court. It’s unfortunate that the persons who finally survive these processes are often are the ones who have written little or nothing about which they can be criticized.

The problem with putting anything in print is made very clear by Paul Barrett in his Harvard Magazine review of a new book by Lawrence Tribe, The Invisible Constitution. Barrett feels that Tribe’s candid views about the US Constitution automatically eliminate him as a possible nominee to the highest court in the land—primarily because he clearly elaborates his own positions (reasonable, to me anyway) about the hot topic of the originalist theory of interpretation. 

Worth reading: Virginia Walbot, "Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts?", Journal of Biology 8:24, 2009.

I strongly support what Prof. Walbot has to say. One way to think about it: she's talking about the difference between the standards you ought to apply in order to believe something, and the standards you ought to apply in order to publish it.

I can find no better description of Amazon's Mechanical Turk than in the "description" tag at the site itself:

The online market place for work. We give businesses and developers access to an on-demand scalable workforce. Workers can work at home and make money by choosing from thousands of tasks and jobs.

This is followed by a "keywords" meta tag:

make money, make money at home, make money from home, make money on the internet, make extra money, make money …

This makes the site sound a bit like the next stop on Dave Chapelle's tour of his imagined Internet as physical place, and indeed it does have its seamy side. But I come to defend Mechanical Turk as a useful tool for linguistic research — a quick and inexpensive way to gather data and conduct simple experiments.

The Stanford Semantics Festival (SemFest for short) took place Friday and Saturday. A program, with links to the abstracts for the papers, is available here.

That's apparently the commonest 5-word sequence in English, barely beating out "property of their respective owners". At least, those are the commonest five-word sequences on the web.

Last week, in commenting on Geoff Pullum's "Familiar six-word phrase or saying" post, I observed that

For five-word phrases, a version of the question "What five-word phrase occurs most often on Google?" can definitively be answered by reference to the Web 1T 5-gram corpus, created by researchers at Google, which contains English n-gram counts from about one trillion words of web text.

Several readers asked me what the answer actually is.  The answer turned out to be not entirely trivial to get, and it may not be as interesting as you'd expect. Or maybe it's more interesting, I don't know. Anyhow, I live to serve, if not always at internet speeds, and the details are below.

Thomas Whiston, Bill Poser, and Victor Steinbok called my attention to a bizarre device made in China that goes by the name "Closestool Burst Destructor." It was introduced to the world by David Bernstein on the Volokh Conspiracy, March 10, 2009.

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part because of the proper name problem: a reasonably restrictive spellchecker dictionary can never encompass all the proper names that might appear in a given text, particularly unusual foreign names. Consider the old Obama/Osama tangle: after 9/11, Osama was added to Microsoft's spellchecker dictionary, but at the time no one could have predicted that Obama would also be an important name to include. Thus they had to scramble to add Obama when he rose to prominence and spellcheckers were giving Osama as the first suggestion.

Now, as if on cue, the District of Columbia Republican Committee kindly illustrates my point in a new press release.