Language Log

David Craig writes:

I saw a post on Facebook declaring Chanticleer to be the Navy SEALs of music and got to wondering how far this snowclone had taken off.  A quick googling on "the navy seals of" and, in the first ten hits three were undeniable snowclones where "the Navy SEALs of X" had X filled with "the NFL", "cars", and "seahorses".  I can't convince my boss that future research into this is in the interests of my company so I'm passing the job on to you.

I very much enjoyed Andrew Gelman's post "Bayesian statistical pragmatism" (4/15/2011) on his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. And one aspect of that post struck me as especially relevant to some recent LL discussions:

I am surprised to see Kass write that scientists believe that the theoretical and real worlds are aligned. It is from acknowledging the discrepancies between these worlds that we can (a) feel free to make assumptions without being paralyzed by fear of making mistakes, and (b) feel free to check the fit of our models (those hypothesis tests again! Although I prefer graphical model checks, supplanted by p-values as necessary). All models are false, etc.

I assume that Kass is using the word "aligned" in a loose sense, to imply that scientists believe that their models are appropriate to reality even if not fully correct. But I would not even want to go that far. Often in my own applied work I have used models that have clear flaws, models that are at best "phenomenological" in the sense of fitting the data rather than corresponding to underlying processes of interest–and often such models don't fit the data so well either. But these models can still be useful: they are still a part of statistics and even a part of science (to the extent that science includes data collection and description as well as deep theories).

Andrew E. Kramer, "Russian A.T.M. With an Ear for the Truth", NYT 6/8/2011:

Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing a machine that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an A.T.M. with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud.

Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.

The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”

The voice-analysis system was developed by the Speech Technology Center, a company whose other big clients include the Federal Security Service — the Russian domestic intelligence agency descended from the Soviet K.G.B.

Dmitri V. Dyrmovsky, director of the center’s Moscow offices, said the new system was designed in part by sampling Russian law enforcement databases of recorded voices of people found to be lying during police interrogations.

A couple of months ago, an Italian friend brought to my attention a quirk of Italian usage. Like English, Italian has adopted the Latin word forum to mean "a place for public discussion".  In English, as usual with borrowed Latin words, the plural is sometimes "fora" (the original Latin plural) and sometimes "forums" (the regular English form). In Italian, borrowed words are often treated as invariabile ("invariant"), so that the plural is the same as the singular. For forum this yields the plural "forum", and (for example) "in tutti i forum" (meaning "in all forums") is common on the web.

But there are also two Italian words foro, plural "fori": one means "hole, opening", and the other means "court, tribunal".

Molly Ireland, Richard Slatcher, Paul Eastwick, Lauren Scissors, Eli Finkel, and James Pennebaker, "Language Style Matching Predicts Relationship Initiation and Stability", Psychological Science 12/13/2010.

Previous relationship research has largely ignored the importance of similarity in how people talk with one another. Using natural language samples, we investigated whether similarity in dyads’ use of function words, called language style matching   (LSM), predicts outcomes for romantic relationships. In Study 1, greater LSM in transcripts of 40 speed dates predicted increased   likelihood of mutual romantic interest (odds ratio = 3.05). Overall, 33.3% of pairs with LSM above the median mutually desired   future contact, compared with 9.1% of pairs with LSM at or below the median. In Study 2, LSM in 86 couples’ instant messages   positively predicted relationship stability at a 3-month follow-up (odds ratio = 1.95). Specifically, 76.7% of couples with LSM   greater than the median were still dating at the follow-up, compared with 53.5% of couples with LSM at or below the median.   LSM appears to reflect implicit interpersonal processes central to romantic relationships.

This is interesting stuff, in my opinion. But so far, it's gotten relatively little uptake in the popular press. And in one of the few — rather obscure — pieces to mention this research, it was spun as a guide to dating success.

Today's Zits:

Following up on my post "Counterfeit cultural capital" (5/11/2011), David Russinoff sent some additional information about the early history of expressions like "angles comprised of equal right lines" in English translations of Euclid.  I reproduce his note in full below, in order to make his efforts available to other interested scholars, while adding a warning to others that this may go a bit deep in the historical-lexicography weeds even for hardened LL readers.

Around the water cooler at Language Log Plaza yesterday, David Beaver noted a HuffPo headline "With Pitfalls Abound For Prosecutors, Could Edwards Case Fall Apart?", where abound is used like aplenty. He also reported that a quick web search turns up many examples where abound is used like afoot: "speculation is abound", "excitement is abound".

If you followed my advice (in "Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky", 5/31/2011) and read all of Peter Norvig's essay "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning", you may have detected a certain restrained testiness in Norvig's response. The goal of this post is to give a bit of explanatory background, and to suggest why, on the whole,  I share Norvig's reaction.

Reader KH asks:

I currently have a number of people trying to convince me that the phrase "that's mighty white of you" originated in the American South in the ~1920s, deriving from racial ideas of whiteness and white supremacy.  It was my understanding that "white" in this phrase derived from completely non-racial ideas correlating whiteness with purity or goodness.  Do you know of any source that might settle this?  I have not been able to find anything reliable on my own and thought you might have more extensive resources at your disposal.

Mike Powell, "The Unfairly Maligned Coca Leaf", Bolivia for 91 Days, 5/24/2011:

Consider a distinctly US American product. Let’s say hot dogs: invented in 1870 on Coney Island and enjoyed in our great nation ever since. But in 2015, Korean scientists learn how to distill the noble hot dog into a lethal drug. Hotdogaine. International hot dog trafficking becomes a lucrative business and, over decades, people across Asia become addicted to hotdogaine, even while aw-shucks, overall-wearin’ Americans continue to enjoy the hot dog in its “natural” form.

You see where I’m going with this? In 2030, the world’s sole superpower (China) pushes a hot dog ban through the UN. As part of its war on hotdogaine, it supplies the US Government with planes to fire bomb hot dog factories. A quintessential part of American life has come under attack; do you think we’d be pissed off?

I think that we all know people like this:

Apparently the international branch of the Bèn School of Translation has landed a contract with a certain cruise line to translate their menus. Here is the first of six buffet items, which begins innocently enough in English as "Chicken and Mushroom Tart":