Ambiguous interest(s)
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"Interest(s)" (8/6/2025) engaged the often-unnoticed usage difference between "in the interest of" and "in the interests of". In a comment on that post, Yves Rehbein wrote
I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural.
And I responded
Indeed. See "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018, for an explanation of why /sts/ and /st/ and /s/ can be phonetically ambiguous. I've verified that this applies to interests / interest and will provide details in another post before long.
There are 601 instances of "in the (best) interest(s) of" in the NPR podcast dataset described here (and here and here and etc. …). I picked 11 of them at random, and invite you to decide in each case whether what the speaker said "interest", or "interests", or something in between:
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 | |
| 8 | |
| 9 | |
| 10 | |
| 11 |
Below is a table with the spellings given by NPR's transcriptionists. Do you agree?
| 1 | interest | |
| 2 | interests | |
| 3 | interests | |
| 4 | interests | |
| 5 | interests | |
| 6 | interests | |
| 7 | interest | |
| 8 | interest | |
| 9 | interest | |
| 10 | interest | |
| 11 | interest |
And how would such examples affect someone expecting "interest" or "interests" as the only possibility? My guess is that they would usually not notice any violations of their expectations.
I don't have time this morning to characterize the detailed phonetic properties of a larger sample, much less try a real perception experiment — maybe in a later post. Or maybe not?
[Note: the combination of NPR's transcriptionists and the transcribed speakers actually yielded 478 instances of "interests" vs. 123 instances of "interest" in the phrases under consideration, so I weighted the random selection process to produce a more balanced sample…]
Yuval said,
August 14, 2025 @ 8:21 am
Staunch interest-user here (to the extent that I hadn't realized "interests" existed until that post). I also do (volunteer) transcription work, fwiw.
I heard 1, 7, and 10 as clear "interest", 6 and 9 as ambiguous, and the rest as "interests". So I'm disagreeing with the transcribers on 8 and 11, but they might have been in my position of only having "interest" in their lexicon at the time of transcription.
Julia Preseau said,
August 14, 2025 @ 10:47 am
I'm just here to add my name to the list of those for whom these posts have been my first exposure to "in the interests of."
I had only been aware of "in the interest of."
(I'm a 62 year old female America from the northern lower peninsula of Michigan currently living in Washington DC, having also lived in Germany {for a few years in the 1990s}, New Jersey, Iowa, & Illinois {Chicago} ).
Yves Rehbein said,
August 14, 2025 @ 12:55 pm
I thought they mostly articulate the t, i.e. anything from stop flap fairly clearly. 2 and 11 do not and the transcription goes contrary to my intuition, but I am not attuned to the usage reported for 2, and I am less sure in hindsight about 6 and 8.
Chris Button commented on "toward" vs "towards", and I recall for X's sakes, which the Wiktionary confirms as a variant of for Christ's sake, only, but there may be more. German um Himmels Willen in the same sense is ambiguous. I cannot explain that, but DWB quotes "um ein biszgen ehre willen" and I would try to translate the syntagma in analogy to the movie title Für eine Handvoll Dollar – A Fistful of Dollars, original Italian Per un pugno di dollari (singular) – or on second thought for want of …, as DWB compares Old English willa m., will n., and separately the verb wilnian ("to wish", causative, e.g. he willed it).
Hence I suppose nilly-willy that In what interests [of] brievity – As concerns [our] stakeholders. Note Dutch of ("or").
Bob Ladd said,
August 15, 2025 @ 9:45 am
My judgements were somewhat in line with Yuval's – in particular, 1 and 7 struck me as definitely "interest", and a lot of the others as "interests" (which is my default version of the expression). Clear disagreement with the official transcription only on 8 and 10 (I heard s but the transcriber heard t), but I also marked 4 and 6 as s? and 9 as t?. In all three cases my guess agrees with the transcription.
In any case, MYL's basic point seems clearly established.
Michael Watts said,
August 21, 2025 @ 8:49 pm
I tend to agree that people are unlikely to notice any of these. That said, I agreed with the official transcription in 9 out of 11 cases, with the caveat that I marked 6, 9, and 11 as "s(t)" on the theory that they sounded more like /s/ than /st/.
Ignoring the possibility of /s/, I disagreed on 6 and 8. It seems worth noting that every comment preceding mine that reports any opinions also mentions those items in specific.