Language Log

In the "halfalogues" research that I've discussed in a couple of posts recently ("Halfalogues", 6/9/2010; "Halfalogues onward", 6/11/2010), one of the experimental manipulations was intended to establish that "it is the unpredictable informational content of halfalogues that result [sic] in distraction", and not (for example) that the distraction is simply caused by an acoustic background that comes and goes at irregular intervals like those of conversational turns.

As I suggested in passing, the method that was used for this experimental control has some intrinsic problems, and the paper doesn't give enough information for us to judge how problematic it was. Today I'm going to explain those remarks in a bit more detail. (Nerd Alert: if you don't care about the methodology of psychophysical experimentation, you may want to turn your attention to some of our other fine posts.)

In response to Wednesday's post on the (media response to the) "halfalogues" research, Lauren Emberson sent me a copy of the as-yet-unpublished paper, and so I can tell you a little more about the work. As Lauren agreed in her note to me, it was bad practice for Cornell University to put out a press release on May 19, well before the paper's publication date.

It's apparently normal for journalists to write science stories purely on the basis of press releases, sometimes eked out with a few quotes from an interview. And when the press releases are misleading, this can lead to a spectacular effervescence of nonsense.

However, I'm happy to say that in this case, the press release is an accurate (though brief) description of the research, and as a result, the media coverage is also generally accurate if incomplete. (The earlier post links to a generous sample of it.)

Forwarded to Victor Mair by Jeff DeMarco, two photos of English stream-of-consciousness signage on the window of a jazz bar in Xi'an. Above:

Doonesbury's view, imagining that BP has hired Uncle Duke to handle its PR:

The Onion's take: "Massive flow of bullshit continues to gush from BP headquarters".

Recently in the news, a (not yet published?) study by Lauren Emberson and MIchael Goldstein, on why "halfalogues" are so annoying. Thus "Eavesdropping a waste of energy", ABC Science:

Ever wonder why overhearing a phone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer.

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only hearing half of a conversation drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

"We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation, or 'halfalogue', than when listening to a dialogue," says Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she says.

The Economist's article on the Cumbrian shooting rampage opens with this nicely styled and balanced sentence:

"It's like watching something from America," said one resident of Whitehaven, a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast. [The Economist 5 June 2010 p.33]

The subject of said has been postposed. This improves intelligibility because the subject is rather long (it has an attached supplement, the noun phrase a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast).

Now compare the following glaringly inept piece of style from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

"Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn't even open them," Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who works as one of Ai's assistants, said. [The New Yorker 24 May 2010 p.56]

Grossly and unnecessarily clumsy, and hard to process. What on earth is wrong with them?

When Bob LeDrew sent in the headline "Other medical isotope cuts wait in Ottawa", I figured that it really meant something like "earlier attempts to cut spending on medical isotopes may not be enough, and so the Canadian national government has contingency plans to reduce expenditures further", while allowing the humorous misinterpretation that an alternative choice of isotope is reducing delays in the capital city.

But I was wrong, as the article's opening shows:

—Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven; Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads, (A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

— Exerpt from Walt Whitman's Year of Meteors, 1859

I've been complaining for years about bad science writing in the popular press, and occasionally I've even made (futile) suggestions for improvement. This morning, though, I've realized that there's a cure.

But first, the disease.

There are a variety of factors that are believed to be involved in the establishment and maintenance of the language varieties that are commonly called "dialects". Among these are substrate or contact influences, patterns of initial settlement, group identity, and patterns of communication. Some of these factors, such as settlement patterns, mainly re-distribute existing variation in geographical and social space. But others, such as patterns of communication, affect the way that innovations arise and spread.

The rise of internet-based social media offers new pictures of such patterns of communication, and a few months ago, I came across an interesting analysis of the geography of Facebook friend links: Pete Warden, "How to split up the U.S.", 2/6/2010.

Down in South Carolina, there's a weekly webcast from local bars called Pub Politics (slogan: "Beer … bringing Democrats and Republicans together"). The hosts are Phil Bailey, the Director of the SC Democratic Caucus, and Wesley Donehue, a Republican political consultant. The most recent episode was taped at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia, and was scheduled to feature State Representative Boyd Brown. But State Senator Jake Knotts showed up and stole the show.

According to Wikipedia, Real Madrid was voted the  "most successful [soccer] club of the 20th century" by FIFA, who ought to know.  The club's current full name is Real Madrid Club de Fútbol, but they weren't real (Spanish for "royal") until 1920, when King Alfonso XIII extended his royal patronage.  Before that, they were simply Madrid Club de Fútbol — and in 1931, when the Spanish monarchy was abolished, the name reverted to the un-real version. The club again became real in 1941, a couple of years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the monarchy was restored (although there wasn't an actual king on the throne until 1975).

The point here is that the real part of Real Madrid Club de Fútbol actually means something. It was added and taken away and added again, as a function of historical contingencies involving the Spanish monarchy.

But apparently this is one of those cases where a word's connotation (here "successful soccer team") has taken over from its denotation. In 2005, when a Major League Soccer franchise was established in Salt Lake City, Utah, the owners considered a long list of possible names: "Salt Lake City Highlanders", "Salt Lake Soccer Club",  "Alliance Soccer Club",  "Union SLC". But in the end, they settled on "Real Salt Lake".

I don't know, and I have no reason to care. But one of the more bizarre political stories of 2010 has been the series of Republican political operatives claiming to have had sexual relations with Nikki Haley, the leading Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina. (Haley denies the claims, and blames her political rivals for concocting the stories.)

I bring this up only because it's necessary background for a discussion of the second sex-related linguistic innovation to come out of South Carolina politics in the past year. The first, of course, was "hiking the Appalachian trail", which was one of the cover stories that the current S.C. governor, Mark Sanford, offered for a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress.

One of the first sites to flag that expression as an idiom-in-the-making was Talking Points Memo.  And in a recent post at TPM on the Nikki Haley story, Josh Marshall implicitly noted a gap in the word-stock of English, and proposed a way to fill it ("Somethin' in the Water Down There", TPM 6/2/2010):

I'm not sure which would make for a more colorful and entertaining story: Haley exposed as an inveterate … what I guess you'd call, man-izer or the idea that a series of different GOP operatives, each of whom is currently married, conspiring to publicly allege phony affairs with Haley. What say you?