Language Log

Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner have recently (June 19) published Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, a 608-page work in which, according to the publisher's blurb, "all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation are systematically explained".

I somehow missed this when it was fresh (Joseph Bottum, "Loose Language", The Weekly Standard 10/25/2010:

The plural of syllabus is syllabi. Or is it syllabuses? Focuses and foci, cactuses and cacti, funguses and fungi: English has a good set of these Greek and Latin words—and pseudo-Greek and Latin words—that might take a classical-sounding plural. Or might not. It kind of depends. […]

It’s common, in this context, to deride the pedants who constrict language with sterile rules of grammar. The problem, of course, is that there aren’t very many of those pedants left. The recent campaign against the word syllabi appears to have begun on the “Language Log” blog, a fairly representative hangout for grammarians and linguistics types, where some of the descriptivists still seem to see themselves as embattled radicals struggling against Victorian hypocrisy. I’d more readily believe it if America had enough unrepentant prescriptivists left to fill a Volkswagen. Reading the Edwardian-style attacks on school-marm grammar, one expects to come across brave calls for free love, women’s suffrage, and sentimental socialism.

Yesterday's SMBC:

Recommended reading: Loren Feldman, "Goldman Sachs and the $580 Million Black Hole", NYT 7/14/2012.

This story provides a shocking example of how little investment bankers often do to earn their money, and how badly they often do it; in short, how parasitic and destructive the culture of the financial industry has become.

It's a time series, from 1890 to 2008, of a certain socio-cultural index. The points in red are the year-by-year values; the blue line is a smoothed ("spline") version of the sequence.

If you had to summarize this plot to someone over the phone or in text-only form, how would you do it? I might say something like

It starts at about 0.95 through the 1890s and 1900s. Then around 1915 it starts rising, and keeps on going up to a peak of about 1.25, around 1950. Then it comes down a bit, and wobbles around until the present, in the range of 1.15 to 1.2.

My column in Sunday's Boston Globe is on a popular topic here at Language Log Plaza: the multitudinous metaphors spun to explain the Higgs boson discovery to a non-scientific audience. Metaphors noted by Mark Liberman in his two posts on the subject (from divine wraiths to smoking ducks) make cameos in the column as well, and I dig a bit deeper into the history of describing the Higgs field as "cosmic molasses."

Yesterday, I tried replicating one of the experiments in Jean M. Twenge et al., "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012, and got results that seem to be significantly at variance with their conclusions ("Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012).

This morning, I thought I'd try getting a replication with word counts from a different source of historical data.  I used the Corpus of Historical American English (Mark Davies, The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009., 2010). Some of the problems with the Google Books source are removed here: the COHA collection is balanced by genre, and a detailed list of its 107,000 sources is available.

And the results remain hard to square with Twenge et al.'s main conclusion, which they expressed like this:

This study demonstrates that language use in books reflects increasing individualism in the U.S. since 1960. Language use in books reflects the larger cultural ethos, and that ethos has been increasingly characterized by a focus on the self and uniqueness.

To my considerable astonishment I read this in a piece of boilerplate automatically tacked onto the end of an email reply that I received when I emailed my personal contact person and account manager at my bank:

This message originated from the Internet. Its originator may or may not be who they claim to be and the information contained in the message and any attachments may or may not be accurate.

I can't see anything in it that is actually incorrect (and I like the use of singular they); it just seems extraordinary to receive a sort of endorsement of global skepticism from one's bank. My philosophical friends tend to have no time at all for global skepticism of this sort. They would ask the sender, "Should we therefore not assume that this caveat is accurate? Should we doubt that it originated from the Internet, since the sentence saying so did?" And eventually the sender would vanish in a puff of logic.

Tyler Cowen, "I wonder if this is actually true", Marginal Revolution 7/12/2012.

Researchers who have scanned books published over the past 50 years report an increasing use of words and phrases that reflect an ethos of self-absorption and self-satisfaction.

"Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960,” a research team led by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge writes in the online journal PLoS One. “We believe these data provide further evidence that American culture has become increasingly focused on individualistic concerns.”

Their results are consistent with those of a 2011 study which found that lyrics of best-selling pop songs have grown increasingly narcissistic since 1980. Twenge’s study encompasses a longer period of time—1960 through 2008—and a much larger set of data.

That 2011 study was not very convincing — for details, see "Lyrical Narcissism?", 4/9/2011; "'Vampirical' hypotheses", 4/28/2011; "Pop-culture narcissism again", 4/30/2011;  "Let me count the ways", 6/9/2011.

On the face of it, however, the new study (Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile, "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012) looks more plausible. But I thought  that for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I'd take a closer look. And what I found diverges pretty seriously from the conclusions of the cited paper.

Lindy West "Are Men Going Extinct?", Jezebel 7/11/2012:

Did you hear the big news? Men are going extinct. Really really slowly, and probably only in theory, but extinct nonetheless! […]

Lame! RIP, dudes! Now, I'm sure kneejerk anti-feminist dickwads think that the eradication of men is exactly what we women mean by "plz can we have equal rights now thx." Because logic.

A few years ago, as a half-serious ending for a talk that I gave at the LSA annual meeting ("The Future of Linguistics", 1/7/2007), I suggested that there might be some opportunities in the supermarket checkout line:

This was, of course, the scond in a series, preceded by Erotic Grammar and followed by Erotic Rhetoric…

Kate Baldanza took this photo in Nanjing:

"Let's have lunch at that café — you know the one . . . Aquamarine," said my friend. And realized immediately, before even getting to the end of the word, that the café was not called anything like that. There is no Aquamarine café in Edinburgh. The one I rapidly guessed my friend was alluding to is a very nice Turkish place on Nicholson Street, and it's called Turquaz (their sign says "TurQuaz"). What the hell was going on with that crazy error? A random brainslip?