Language Log

I need to apologize for causing some confusion. My recent posts on journalistic quotation practices ("Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan, and journalistic unquotations", 8/3/2012; "More unquotations from the New Yorker", 8/4/2012) dealt with two issues at once: journalistic carelessness and journalistic deceit. And some readers seem to have concluded that I meant to treat all carelessness as a form of deceit.

Journalists are indeed routinely careless about quotations, and that tolerance for carelessness makes it harder to regulate deceit, since accusations of journalistic deceit often come in the form of accusations about fabricating quotations. But most cases of "approximate quotations" are innocent enough, except for their role in perpetuating this culture of carelessness.

I should add that quotations can also be misleading or false without being maliciously deceitful, when the writer misunderstands things or wants to simplify a complex issue. This is especially common in writing about science and engineering, where it's difficult to separate deceit from carelessness, confusion, or the simple desire to tell a good story.

From reader JD in Montreal:

My brother-in-law, Dan Heitkamp, bought the following object at an estate sale in Seattle:

From Elmore Leonard, Raylan: A Novel (2012), a representation of the English immediate future marker as "on":

Rita closed the door after him and locked it, hurried over to Mister, got her face down close to his and heard him breathe. She knew it. You don’t kill this dog with one shot. Rita said to him, “Honey, don’t move. I’m on get you to the hospital.”

Rita is a young African-American woman living in Kentucky, so it would make sense for this to be a differently-spelled version of the I'ma form discussed in Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte, "The grammaticization of going to in (African American) English", Language Variation and Change, 11 (2000), 315-342:

[T]he phonological reduction of [going to] is said to be “highly characteristic” of AAVE (Labov et al., 1968:250). Some authors have associated these variant forms with different meanings. Joan Fickett (personal communication, cited by Labov et al., 1968:25) suggested that the reduced form I’ma denotes immediate future, in contrast to I’m gonna, which would be more remote.

For more on other pronunciations and spellings of reduced forms of I'm going to, see "I'ma" , 7/3/2005; "I'monna", 7/3/2005; "'On' time", 8/4/2005; "I'm a?", 9/19/2009; "I'ma stay with the youngsters", 5/14/2010; "Ima", 1/11/2012; "Prime time for 'Imma'", 4/26/2010.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann, "Beyond the Brain", Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2012, writing about a new approach to treating schizophrenia:

In Europe, the Hearing Voices network teaches people who hear distressing voices to negotiate with them. They are taught to treat the voices as if they were people–to talk with them, and make deals with them, as if the voices had the ability to act and decide on their own. This runs completely counter to the simple biomedical model of psychiatric illness, which presumes that voices are meaningless symptoms, ephemeral sequelae of lesions in the brain. Standard psychiatric practice has been to discount the voices, or to ignore them, on the grounds that doing so reminds patients that they are not real and that their commands should not be followed. One might think of the standard approach as calling a spade a spade. When voices are imagined as agents, however, they are imagined as having the ability to choose to stop talking. Members of the Hearing Voices movement report that this is what they do. In 2009, at a gathering in the Dutch city of Maastricht, person after person diagnosed with schizophrenia stood up to tell the story of learning to talk with the voices–and how the voices had then agreed to stop.

The flexible fiber-optic laryngoscope was invented by a group including Osamu Fujimura, my former boss at Bell Labs (Masayuki Sawashima, Hajime Hirose, and Osamu Fujimura, "Observation of the Larynx by a Fiberscope Inserted through the Nose", JASA 1967).  During the past 45 years, this technology has become a routine part of otolaryngology. This 2009 film by John Fink used an Olympus ENF-V2 Video Rhinolaryngoscope:

When I started to learn Mandarin nearly half a century ago, it used to be that xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") was a polite way to refer to or address a young, unmarried woman. You could also extend xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss", lit., "little elder sister") to convey other, related meanings, such as lǎo xiǎojiě 老小姐 ("old maid / miss"), xiǎojiě píqì 小姐脾气 ("petulant; flirtatious; coquettish"), and so forth. Gradually, however, xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") evolved to the point that it often came to be used in a jocular or facetious manner.  Furthermore, when used by itself, xiǎojiě 小姐 may be applied to prostitutes, so one must be careful when referring to someone with this word.  It seems that there is no longer a broadly accepted, relatively respectful term of address for a young, single woman.

It's been a while since I've been on the endangered languages beat. Here are a couple of links of recent writings on the topic for those who are interested.

• Last month's National Geographic featured this story by Russ Rymer. Be sure to check out the stunning photographs by Lynn Johnson, some of which didn't make it into the print magazine.
• Late last month, the Australian web news magazine New Matilda featured this piece by Claire Bowern, who points readers to the extensive catalogue of endangered languages at endangeredlanguages.com.

There's a passage in James Gleick's "Auto Crrect Ths!", NYT 8/4/2012, that's properly spelled but in need of some content correction:

If you type “kofee” into a search box, Google would like to save a few milliseconds by guessing whether you’ve misspelled the caffeinated beverage or the former United Nations secretary-general. It uses a probabilistic algorithm with roots in work done at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1990s. The probabilities are based on a “noisy channel” model, a fundamental concept of information theory. The model envisions a message source — an idealized user with clear intentions — passing through a noisy channel that introduces typos by omitting letters, reversing letters or inserting letters.

“We’re trying to find the most likely intended word, given the word that we see,” Mr. [Mark] Paskin says. “Coffee” is a fairly common word, so with the vast corpus of text the algorithm can assign it a far higher probability than “Kofi.” On the other hand, the data show that spelling “coffee” with a K is a relatively low-probability error. The algorithm combines these probabilities. It also learns from experience and gathers further clues from the context.

The same probabilistic model is powering advances in translation and speech recognition, comparable problems in artificial intelligence. In a way, to achieve anything like perfection in one of these areas would mean solving them all; it would require a complete model of human language. But perfection will surely be impossible. We’re individuals. We’re fickle; we make up words and acronyms on the fly, and sometimes we scarcely even know what we’re trying to say.

Evgeny Morozov, "The Naked and the TED", The New Republic 8/2/2012 (Reviewing Hybrid Reality):

As is typical of today’s anxiety-peddling futurology, the Khannas’ favorite word is “increasingly,” which is their way of saying that our unstable world is always changing and that only advanced thinkers such as themselves can guide us through this turbulence. In Hybrid Reality, everything is increasingly something else: gadgets are increasingly miraculous, technology is increasingly making its way into the human body, quiet moments are increasingly rare. This is a world in which pundits are increasingly using the word “increasingly” whenever they feel too lazy to look up the actual statistics, which, in the Khannas’ case, increasingly means all the time.

Skin Horse for 7/27/2012:

Janet Malcolm and Jonah Lehrer are not the only New Yorker writers who have been accused of fabricating quotations. A more recent case involves a piece by Jared Diamond, "Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours", 4/21/2008 (abstract on the New Yorker's web site here).  Diamond's article led to a long series of negative responses at iMediaEthics and Savage Minds, as well as a $10M libel suit (which as far as I can tell is still pending).

Yesterday's xkcd:

Mouseover title:

"Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact … holding … still holding … ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!"