Language Log

I don't do surveys, so don't ask. I cannot afford a quarter of an hour answering an ill-designed list of questions for you so that your manager can use the scientifically worthless results to make out a case that your service unit is doing a good job. And don't call me on the phone and tell me you're doing some social science research, because I just know there will be a follow-up call trying to sell me carpets or enrol me in a political action committee. However, my colleague Bob Ladd encouraged me to do a survey about the new building in which the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences lives its generally happy life at the University of Edinburgh. He told me there would be a treat at the end in terms of what I have dubbed nerdview. And boy, was there a treat. The survey was terrible — hopelessly designed, and will yield worthless results — but the feedback to the user at the end did indeed give me the best example of nerdview I ever saw.

Most people believe they're better-than-average drivers. They also believe that, while many others are taken in by advertising messages, they themselves remain immune to persuasion unless it's with the full consent of their rational and thoughtful selves. Charming delusions. But surely we're not left defenseless, and awareness of the persuasive intentions of advertising must provide some sort of skeptical buffer against the daily onslaught of commercial messages that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Enough so, argued the late free marketeer Jack Calfee, that the myth of the vulnerable consumer is just that, and advertising should be regulated as little as possible in order to allow its salutary effects to permeate the economy. In his book Fear of Persuasion, Calfee wrote:

Advertising seeks to persuade, and everyone knows it. The typical ad tries to induce a customer to do one thing—usually, buy a product —instead of a thousand other things. There is nothing obscure about this purpose or what it means for buyers. Consumers obtain immense amounts of information from a process in which the providers of information are blatantly self-interested and the recipients fundamentally skeptical.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is in the business of regulating advertising, happens to agree with Calfee about the protective effects of identifying persuasion for what it is. Which is one reason why it's recently clarified its guidelines on endorsements to require that bloggers and social media users disclose any pecuniary relationship with the makers of the products they're shilling for—even if free stuff is all they're getting for their efforts.

Worth reading: Josh Marshal, "Should you be you?", TPM; and the comments following it.

I've pretty much given up criticizing the BBC's reporting on science and technology, since this is Language Log, not BBC-Science-Reporting-Is-Broken Log, and documenting every breathless misunderstanding or credulous reprint of a misleading public-relations handout would take more time than I have available for blogging.  So for the past few years, I've examined an occasional bit of BBC-mediated neuro-nonsense, historical hooey or dialectal drivel as if it came from the Daily Mail or the Guardian or any other media outlet from which nothing better should be expected.

But today there's something new: the BBC actually announced, in public, the fact that it had been taken in by a (public-relations?) hoax masquerading as rational inquiry: "Internet Explorer story was bogus", 8/3/2011:

A story which suggested that users of Internet Explorer have a lower IQ than people who chose other browsers appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

A number of media organisations, including the BBC, reported on the research, put out by Canadian firm ApTiquant.

(That should actually be "AptiQuant", if you're keeping score at home.)

Eric Kleefeld, "Wis. Dems: Internal Polls Show Us Winning The State Senate", TPM 8/2/2011:

TPM asked a follow-up regarding internal polls for the two extra races for August 16.

"Our two Democratic incumbents, Bob Wirch and Jim Holperin, are in very, very strong shape," said Tate. "They are better well known than our opponents, they are better liked than their opponents." [emphasis added]

Yesterday, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described her colleagues' attitude towards the then-pending debt limit bill this way:

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We have a very democratic caucus,
and we come to our own consensus.
In this caucus today we have a divided consensus.

Yesterday morning, U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D Missouri) tweeted:

And a bit later, in an ABC News interview, Nancy Pelosi added to the menu:

There is a widespread misconception that Chinese languages are monosyllabic.  That is purely an artifact of the writing system, since most Chinese words average out at about two syllables in length.  Typical examples:  zhuōzi 桌子 ("table"), fēijī 飛機 ("airplane"), péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend"), qìchē ("car"), huǒchē 火車 ("train"), fángzi 房子 ("house"), and so on.  Even in Classical Chinese (or Literary Sinitic), there were many words that were greater than one syllable in length, e.g., húdié 蝴蝶 ("butterfly"), fènghuáng 鳳凰 ("phoenix"), shānhú 珊瑚 ("coral"), wēiyí 委蛇 / 逶迤 ("sinuous; winding; meandering"), jūnzǐ 君子 ("gentleman; superior man; person of noble character; sovereign; ruler; lord; m'lord"), and so on.

It will probably come as a shock to most readers of Language Log that not even all Chinese characters are monosyllabic.

Wikipedia's article on the Cornish language (the Brythonic Celtic language once spoken in the county of Cornwall, England) quotes this sentence (twice, in fact) from Henry Jenner, author of Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904):

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

Oh, what a mess we do create when first we practice to negate! Let's just think that sentence through, counting up the negations carefully.