Language Log

In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:

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I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes — as well as results from — the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop platonism and unrepresentative samples", 7/26/2008; 'The happiness gap returns", 7/26/2008;. "Reverse Whorfianism and SHAs", 12/23/2008).

But there are other, more lexically specific, sources of confusion about statistical concepts and statements. One that I noticed for the first time yesterday is an ambiguity in the word chance. Its popular use in the sense of probabilistic odds ("little chance of success"; "his chances are good" , etc.) is relatively recent, and has always overlapped with an older meaning that emphasizes complete unpredictability and the lack of any discernable cause.

This history helps explain the shocking sentence that I read yesterday on the online front page of the New York Times; "A longtime trainer uses an actuarial approach to predict injuries, defying the assumption that what happens to players is a matter of chance".

Today's Rhymes with Orange:

In two recent posts, Mark Liberman has investigated the religious echoes in expressions from Sarah Palin: "I know that I know that I know" and "If I die, I die." In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take up yet another religiously evocative Palinism: "Only dead fish go with the flow." Turns out that variations of this adage have been circulating in Christian circles for nearly two centuries.

Subtle dog whistle or a typical comment from someone who brags about being covered in fish slime? You be the judge!

Do not prop open this door for security reasons, says a sign on the inside of the side door to a garage full of delivery trucks on Haste Street in Berkeley. (Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the door was propped open with a traffic cone.) And then it goes on:

Failure to do so will result in disciplinary actions.

But… failure to do what? What has gone wrong here?

One thing on which I would appreciate help from a copy editor, if there is a single one still prepared to talk to me after my latest dumb copy editor story, is how to write the name of the worthy profession that I have so cruelly mocked for just occasionally displaying pointless tone-deaf bossiness. I currently write "copy editor". But I notice that some of my commenters (even those claiming to be or to have been copy editors) write "copyeditor", and others "copy-editor". I wouldn't want to be out of step with the literate world. This is basically a spelling convention, and I have no axe to grind, and I'm perfectly prepared to go along with current literate practice, once I know what it is. I did just one quick experiment to see if I was way off base: I searched the familiar 44 million words of 1987-1989 Wall Street Journal files (they have become much beloved of computational linguists for testing parsers and so on since Mark Liberman on behalf of the Association for Computational Linguistics obtained them for scientific use in 1993), and simply counted the hits. The modest results of this 60-second survey work with grep are as follows:

So that looks like an overwhelming, knock-down, drag-out victory for my present policy. (A couple of the 12 hits supporting me seem to be repetitions; but even so, it's a win.) However, perhaps someone has some good, clear evidence that this is misleading data and my spelling should be revised. I am fully prepared to accept guidance.

Given the importance of religion in Sarah Palin's life, it's not surprising that her ways of talking are full of echoes or allusions that others may not understand or even notice. Earlier today I discussed her phrase "I know that I know that I know this is the right thing for Alaska".  The same interview contained a phrase that may well allude to the book of Esther.

A few days ago, I was puzzled by the triple know in one of Gov. Mark Sanford's interviews:

Everybody's got their own value system, but to me, even if it's a place that I could never go, if I wanted to know that I knew that I knew, if that's more important to me than running for president, that's my prerogative as a human being.

I wondered whether he might be exhibiting an unexpected run of multiple-target speech errors (compare "the biggest self of self is self" from his earlier press conference). But a commenter, William Ockham, set me straight:

"To know that you know that you know" is a stock phrase in fundamentalist evangelical speech that's used to make an experiential claim about a supernatural reality. "To know" something is to have learned about it. "To know that you know" is to be certain of something you've learned. "To know that you know that you know" is to be certain of something because you learned it by experiencing it directly.

I think Sanford is saying that he went to Argentina because he believed that he had discovered true love and wanted to be certain of that, even if it went against his own moral code.

Today's news brings another example of the same construction, this time from Sarah Palin.

According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009:

In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making.

That would be \$4,623.51 per editor-year,  if none of the \$3.5M went for typesetters, pencils, rent, or other expenses.  And if I'm reading this CPI table right, the ratio of today's prices to those of 1960 is around 213.856/29.5, or about 7.25 to 1; so in today's dollars, the yearly per-editor costs would be around \$33,520. Apparently lexicographers worked cheap in those days.

The new dictionary in question was Webster's Third New International (Unabridged), and as Skinner explains,

It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals.

The party to have been at last night, I mean the place for a linguist to be seen, was Larry Hyman's house in Berkeley for the gathering that welcomed the faculty of the Linguistic Institute that the Linguistic Society of America is running on the Berkeley campus of the University of California for the next six weeks. Mingling in this star-studded cast of what seemed like hundreds and was certainly scores of the finest linguists in the world, I ran across George Lakoff, who told me the best Dumb Copy Editor story I have ever heard. I like Dumb Copy Editor stories, as you know; but this one is so good I think it takes the prize. I will reveal all below the jump.

Last Thursday morning's little project was tracing the word linguablog ('blog about matters related to language and linguistics') and the related nouns linguablogger and linguablogging. As so often happens with such projects, it turned out to be fairly challenging and developed an offshoot, on innovative ling– vocabulary.

The ordinary-language meaning of technical terms often wanders far from home, following paths of connotative association and denotative opportunity. We've followed the semantic travels of "passive voice" through meanings like "vague about agency", "stylistically listless", and "failure to take sides". I recently read that writers should "Use an active voice (putting things in present/future) instead of a passive voice (putting things in the past)".

The terminology of the "autism spectrum" seems to have started a similar journey through successive steps of family resemblance.

Somehow a discussion of language universals ends up with fart noises:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)