Language Log

Most people don't understand statistical ideas like distribution, correlation, and regression. And even if they understand these concepts, they often find them too complicated for everyday thinking, or impractical for everyday communication. So instead they fall back on essentialist beliefs and generic statements.

For example, "The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior". This statement attributes a belief about  one generic  category ("the lower classes") to  another generic category ("the upper classes"). It might be someone's subjective assessment based on personal experience, but in this case it's a journalist's description of the results of a series of psychological experiments, describing the fact there was a significant correlation (and a significant multiple-regression coefficient) between a "social class rank" variable and an "essentialist beliefs about class" variable. And as generic statements often do, it risks leaving readers with misleading ideas about the experiment and about the attitudes that it tested.

Stephan Stiller says that my post on "Good good study; day day up" reminds him of "people mountain, people sea" (rénshānrénhǎi 人山人海), i.e., "crowded; packed; a sea of people".  This is another fairly complex Chinglishism that has entered the vocabulary of many English speakers who know no Chinese.  It was popularized by a Hong Kong music production company that took this expression as its name, and there was also a Hong Kong film that used this expression as its title.

IT sent in a link to a web forum post that includes the following (emphasis added):

However as I have mentioned a few days ago, data could well be the death nail for Ovivo, as I am sure Vodafone will limit the data bandwidth they can have, so the more customers Ovivo get the worse it will become. Who knows what deal they have on volume with Vodafone.

John McIntyre ("You have not seen it all yet", You Don't Say 1/17/2014) relays a correspondent's claim to have gotten this note from her college professor:

Look up Strunk and White (1918) for good rules on writing.  Also, I recommend you do not use prepositions at the beginning or end of sentences their use does not reflect well on the writers. 

I do not agree with you on your point and from now on I will mark you down if you use prepositions to begin or end ssentences as you have now been advised to do so.  Once you get out of my class use them anywhere you would like.  

Other people like Winston Churchill had the same thought as you when his editors made the same correction.  Churchill said, "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."  So you have good company of those who disagree with using proper grammar — or at least this rule in grammar.

"Why Is This Bee Wearing a Sensor? Also, how did scientists get that sensor onto the bee in the first place?", The Atlantic 1/16/2014:

Australian scientists have devised a way to pinpoint the causes of the global die-off of bees that pollinate a third of the world’s crops: Attach tiny sensors to 5,000 honey bees, and follow where they fly.  

The sensors, each measuring 2.5 millimeters by 2.5 millimeters (0.1 inch by 0.1 inch), contain radio frequency identification chips that broadcast each bee’s location in real-time. The data is beamed to a server, so scientists can construct a three-dimensional model of the swarm’s movements, identifying anomalies in their behavior.  

Worker bees tend to follow predictable daily schedules—they don’t call them drones for nothing—leaving the beehive at certain times, foraging for pollen, and returning home along well-established routes. Variations in their routines may indicate a change in environment, such as exposure to pesticides.

Yanis Varoufakis, Stuart Holland, and James K. Galbraith, "A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis", 2013:

Europe is fragmenting. While in the past year the European Central Bank has  managed to stabilise the bond markets, the economies of the European core and  its periphery are drifting apart. As this happens, human costs mount and disintegration becomes an increasing threat.

It is not just a matter for the Eurozone. The fallout from a Eurozone breakup  would destroy the European Union, except perhaps in name. And Europe’s  fragmentation poses a global danger.

Following a sequence of errors and avoidable delays Europe’s leadership remains in denial about the nature of the crisis, and continues to pose the false choice between draconian austerity and a federal Europe.

By contrast, we propose immediate solutions, feasible within current European law and treaties.

There are in this crisis four sub-crises: a banking crisis, a public debt crisis, a  crisis of under-investment, and now a social crisis – the result of five years of  policy failure. Our Modest Proposal therefore now has four elements. They deploy existing institutions and require none of the moves that many Europeans  oppose, such as national guarantees or fiscal transfers. Nor do they require  treaty changes, which many electorates anyway could reject. Thus we propose a  European New Deal which, like its American forebear would lead to progress  within months, yet through measures that fall entirely within the constitutional  framework to which European governments have already agreed.

Sreekar Saha sent in this sign and expressed puzzlement over the English translation:

Yesterday on the American Dialect Society listserv, JSB wrote:

In his news conference on the GWB (that is, Bridge) scandal, Gov.
Christe used the word "I" or first person singular pronouns 273 times
[Slate]. After some "teasing" about it, in his State of the Union
message yesterday he used "we" or "we've" 97 times [NYTimes, today].

(1) "We['ve] is the new euphemism for "I['ve].

(2) Christie's ego has apparently diminished a bit. The frequency
of the first person (singular) in his 110-minute news conference was
2.48 I's/minute. The frequency of the first person (plural) in his
45-minute State speech was 2.15 We's/minute. (Do we have a term for
a new measure of egotism?) A decrease of about 13% — approximately
equal to the percent of persons recently polled whose opinion of
Christie had decreased (16%).

Sunday's Pearls Before Swine:

This strip illustrates a well-documented aspect of aging:

While it is clear that more people now live longer than ever before in history, it is less obvious that this is a blessing. In Greek mythology, Tithonus was the mortal lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal but failed to mention “eternal youth,” dooming Tithonus to an eternity of physical and mental decay. The tithonean account of aging echoes loudly in the literature of the psychological and brain-sciences, which portrays adulthood as a protracted episode in mental decline, in which memories dim, thoughts slow, and problem-solving abilities diminish (Deary et al., 2009; Naveh-Benjamin & Old, 2008), and where researchers seem to compete to set the advent of cognitive decrepitude at an ever younger age (Salthouse, 2009; Singh-Manoux et al., 2012). Thus, although studies indicate that older adults are, on average, happier than younger adults (Charles & Carstensen, 2010), in the light of the foregoing, even this small crumb of comfort might be seen as further evidence of their declining mental prowess.

Zhou Youguang, the main architect and early advocate of Hanyu Pinyin (the official romanized orthography for Modern Standard Mandarin), had his 108th birthday yesterday.  Although I've been a close friend and admirer of Professor Zhou since 1981, I've never dedicated a Language Log post exclusively to him, so it's about time that I do so.

Paul Krugman, "You're all losers", NYT 1/13/2014:

The other day someone — I don’t remember who or where — asked an interesting question: when did it become so common to disparage anyone who hasn’t made it big, hasn’t gotten rich, as a “loser”? Well, that’s actually a question we can answer, using Google Ngrams, which track the frequency with which words or phrases are used in books:

Sure enough, the term “losers” has become much more common since the 1960s. And I think this word usage reflects something real — a growing contempt for the little people.

Somebody gave a friend of Rose Hill this coin purse as a gift:

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to take up Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, perhaps better known as "that case about recess appointments". The issue is the interpretation of Article 2, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution,

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

You can find a summary of the case at oyez.org, and complete background information at SCOTUSblog, including a recent "Plain English" summary by Amy Howe.

This case is rich in linguistic issues:  The scope of of the prepositional phrase  "during the recess of the Senate"; what "the recess" means;  what "happen" means,  and so on. There's some earlier LL discussion in "What 'the' means", 1/28/2013; no doubt there will be more to say after the oral arguments in this case, and especially when the decision is announced.