Language Log

Some more sociological platonism: Tamsin Osborne ("Are men happier than women?", New Scientist, 7/25/2008) explains that "I've just received the rather troubling news that I am doomed to be unhappy in later life". This turns out to mean that she will have a (very) slightly less than even chance of being in the happiest half of a gender-balanced sample of Americans older than 50 or so — and her way of expressing this is a typical (and thus interesting) example of the journalistic (and perhaps scientific?) tendency to turn small group differences into essential group characteristics.

I'm something of a fan of books that correct misinformation — about facts in general, about famous quotations, about medical matters, and so on. Among my latest acquisitions is John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong (2006) (with a foreword by Stephen Fry — yes, THAT Stephen Fry), a compendium of 230 misperceptions originally collected for the BBC panel game QI (Quite Interesting). As far as I can tell, it's pretty good (see some reservations below), but it has one serious defect: very few sources or references are given for the claims in the book. Lloyd and Mitchinson mostly just tell us what's so, and there's no way for us to check up on what they say. They do a good job on the Eskimo words for snow (p. 120), but how is the reader to know that what they claim (against "common knowledge") is right?

I've complained about such lack of scholarship at the low end of the literature on word and phrase origins, in particular Albert Jack's appalling Red Herrings and White Elephants (which I trashed here). But it's startling to see it in a book that purports to be authoritative.  And other recent misinformation-correcting books do considerably better: see Anahad O'Connor's Never Shower in a Thunderstorm ("surprising facts and misleading myths about our health and the world we live in") from 2007 and Nancy L. Snyderman's Medical Myths That Can Kill You ("and the 101 truths that will save, extend and improve your life"), published this year.

Now I'll turn to the coverage of language-related questions in The Book of General Ignorance.

Today's Dilbert:

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Yet another variation on the 1951 Damon Knight theme.

A few days ago, Arnold Zwicky expressed some annoyance at the New Scientist's cover story of July 19 ("Sex on the Brain", 7/22/2008). Arnold couldn't stand "to reflect on yet another chapter in this story", and I'm not especially enthusiastic about this either, especially because as far as I can tell, the New Scientist's story lacks any news hook. But this case raises a couple of points about the rhetoric of science journalism (and sexual science) that are worth making yet again, even though they've been made many times before.

Hannah Hoag's story appears under a headline that's really strange, if you think about it for a minute: "Brains apart: The real difference between the sexes". The implication is that all that stuff about genitals and the uterus, breasts and facial hair and larynx and so on, are fake or at least superficial differences — the "real difference" is in the brain. Furthermore, if the neurological differences are so much realer than all those differences in other body parts, then male and female brains must be really different, right?

An e-mail ad from 10percent.com (purveyors of goods to the gay community) appeared on my screen a few days ago. Well, the top part, offering 20% off on PERSONAL PLEASURES, appeared there. 

So: an ad for a photo book? A DVD? A music CD? Gay fiction? An advice book on gay sex? All of these were possible, and more (but not everything; 10 Per Cent doesn't offer escort services or massage, for instance). But it turned out to be an ad for a category of products roughly characterizable as '(gay) sex accessories'.

Although unintentionally humorous unilingual signs and labels are not as numerous as those that are bilingual, one does come upon them from time to time. Randy Alexander sent me this notice that he saw on a shop front window in Changchun, Jilin. It may be translated: "Starting from today, it is forbidden to urinate or defecate anywhere you please in this place. Fine 200-500 RMB." I get the "anywhere you please" from SUI2DI4 随地 ("anywhere; everywhere; any old place; wherever you please"), which is widely used in such phrases as SUI2DI4 TU3TAN2 随地吐痰 ("spit any old place"). The latter, by the way, is one form of Pekingese behavior that the authorities are trying to curb before the fast-approaching Olympics.

I'm puzzled. The reason is that I've just read Merja Kytö, "Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intrasitives from Late Middle to Modern English", pp. 17-86 in Matti Rissanen et al., Eds., English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and and Genre Styles, 1997.

The content of Kytö's chapter doesn't puzzle me — it explains very clearly how English changed from be to have as the marker of perfect aspect in intransitive verbs. This change is easy to see in bible translations, where for example in 1 Samuel 26:20, the King James Version of 1611 gives "the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea", where the 1978 New International Version of 1978 gives "[t]he king of Israel has come out to look for a flea".

And the timeline is also pretty clear. Based on tracking the use of be/have + past participle in a corpus of about 2.7 million words spanning the period from 1350 to 1990, Kytö demonstrates that "in the late Middle English period, the use of have increases gradually, gains in momentum in the late 1700s and supersedes the use of be in the early 1800s".

What puzzles me is why this process seems to have escaped the censure of prescriptive grammarians. Here's a change that "[gained] in momentum in the late 1700s", just when the likes of Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray were in bloom. Did anyone stand up against the rising tide of have for marking the perfect in intransitives? If so, their delaying action was ineffective and quickly forgotten.

I'm going to tell you a funny and true story that will reveal, for all you animal lovers, the true quality of canine lexical semantic competence. The story comes from my friend Moshe Vardi, who has a dog (a schnauzer, if you keep track of the different breeds) to which he has carefully taught various spoken commands. One of these commands is transmitted by uttering the English word down. When that command is issued, the dog obediently and immediately relaxes all four legs and drops to the ground, belly and genito-excretory organs in the dust.

Well, there came a day when a large pizza had been set on the table in preparation for the Vardi family's dinner, and for a few seconds, before people were seated, Moshe's wife foolishly left the room unguarded. When she returned from the kitchen, she was shocked to see the dog up on the table, standing over the pizza and licking at it tentatively.

"Down!", she commanded, in stentorian tones.

I rather fear you are ahead of me at this point. But let me just continue at my own pace and detail for you the denouement you probably already expect.

I thought I'd revisit the current presidential-candidate nickname situation, based on a study of headlines in the New York tabloids, well known as the Drosophila melanogaster of onomastic evolution. When I took a look at the nicknames that the French press used for the candidates in their presidential election last year ("Political hypocoristics", 4/18/2007), the consensus among readers was that American papers tend to use first names or initials, like Rudy, Mitt, Hillary, and W, rather than diminutive forms based on last names like  Chichi (for Chirac) or Sarko (for Sarkozy). But my current research results suggest that this consensus was wrong.

The case of Nick vs. Bethel, a lawsuit by Yup'ik Eskimos against the city of Bethel, Alaska, has elicited a good bit of comment recently due to a recent ruling that Yup'ik is not a "historically written language". A not atypical example is this comment on an indigenous language mailing list to which I subscribe:

This ruling seems to express a deep bias of Western culture. That is, written language is taken to be the model product of language/cultural evolution overall. Certainly, one could say that as a ruling it not just discriminates against Yup'ik speakers, but against most all indigenous languages in general as well as against oral-based cultures world wide.

Few people commenting on this ruling seem to be familiar with the details of the case, which it is helpful to understand before forming an opinon.

Just about 13 years ago, O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran made news with these words from his closing argument:

Remember these words: "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit". (.wav)

I'm not saying that this useful rhyme was the key to Simpson's acquittal, but it certainly stuck in people's minds. Together with images of O.J. struggling to put the gloves on, the significance of the ill-fitting glove evidence to the outcome of the trial is not a matter of significant debate. It certainly didn't hurt that Cochran was an effective speaker.

Compare this with yesterday's news reports of the opening statements from the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan, whose civilian defense attorney Harry Schneider has been quoted as follows:

The evidence is that he worked for wages, he didn't wage attacks on America […] He had a job because he had to earn a living, not because he had a jihad against America.

Get it? "he worked for wages" vs. "he didn't wage attacks" — see? "He had a job vs. "not because he had a jihad". See?

If this is the best Schneider can do against the prosecution's argument that Hamdan knew about "the dome" — which the U.S. prosecution team is arguing refers to the U.S. Capitol building (Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone: "Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew") — then Hamdan looks to be in big trouble.

Speech researchers at Google have applied speech-to-text to YouTube's Politicians channels, indexed the results, and wrapped the whole thing in a Elections Video Search "gadget" that you can add to your iGoogle page or embed elsewhere. The announcement on the Official Google Blog is here.

That's the title of the cover story (by Hannah Hoag) in the most recent New Scientist (19 July 2008). It begins:

ANYONE in a long-term relationship will tell you that, at times, men are indeed from Mars, and women are almost certainly from Venus. It's common knowledge that the sexes often think very differently, but until recently these differences were explained by the action of adult sex hormones or by social pressures which encouraged males and females to behave in a certain way. For the most part, the basic architecture of the brain, and its fundamental workings, were thought to be the same for both sexes.

Increasingly, though, those assumptions are being challenged. Research is revealing that male and female brains are built from markedly different genetic blueprints, which create numerous anatomical differences. There are also differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons. All this is pointing towards the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two.

Oh, spit! Here we go again, with reports of previous studies of anatomical and neurological differences (critiqued in a long series of postings here) interpreted as establishing categorical differences between the sexes and so echoing "common knowledge" in a crude way. I haven't the heart to reflect on yet another chapter in this story.