Language Log

In his post "In defense of Amazon's Mechanical Turk", Chris Potts wrote "Overall, the workers are incentivized to do well". David M. Chess commented

Interesting post! Thanks for writing it up.

But… "incentivized"?

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) says of incentivize that "This is perhaps the most recent of the infamous verbs that end in -ize", noting that the members of a usage panel in 1985 "rejected it almost unanimously with varying degrees of disgust and horror".

But why are coinages in -ize such an enduring source of disgust and horror?

As anyone who blogs knows or soon learns, doing so makes you a whole lot more transparent than you might otherwise wish to be. In fact, writing anything like books, articles, or blogs makes you an attractive target for people who may not appreciate what you say. No clearer example can be found than the vetting process the government inflicts on nominees for high-level appointments, such as the US Supreme Court. It’s unfortunate that the persons who finally survive these processes are often are the ones who have written little or nothing about which they can be criticized.

The problem with putting anything in print is made very clear by Paul Barrett in his Harvard Magazine review of a new book by Lawrence Tribe, The Invisible Constitution. Barrett feels that Tribe’s candid views about the US Constitution automatically eliminate him as a possible nominee to the highest court in the land—primarily because he clearly elaborates his own positions (reasonable, to me anyway) about the hot topic of the originalist theory of interpretation. 

Worth reading: Virginia Walbot, "Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts?", Journal of Biology 8:24, 2009.

I strongly support what Prof. Walbot has to say. One way to think about it: she's talking about the difference between the standards you ought to apply in order to believe something, and the standards you ought to apply in order to publish it.

I can find no better description of Amazon's Mechanical Turk than in the "description" tag at the site itself:

The online market place for work. We give businesses and developers access to an on-demand scalable workforce. Workers can work at home and make money by choosing from thousands of tasks and jobs.

This is followed by a "keywords" meta tag:

make money, make money at home, make money from home, make money on the internet, make extra money, make money …

This makes the site sound a bit like the next stop on Dave Chapelle's tour of his imagined Internet as physical place, and indeed it does have its seamy side. But I come to defend Mechanical Turk as a useful tool for linguistic research — a quick and inexpensive way to gather data and conduct simple experiments.

The Stanford Semantics Festival (SemFest for short) took place Friday and Saturday. A program, with links to the abstracts for the papers, is available here.

That's apparently the commonest 5-word sequence in English, barely beating out "property of their respective owners". At least, those are the commonest five-word sequences on the web.

Last week, in commenting on Geoff Pullum's "Familiar six-word phrase or saying" post, I observed that

For five-word phrases, a version of the question "What five-word phrase occurs most often on Google?" can definitively be answered by reference to the Web 1T 5-gram corpus, created by researchers at Google, which contains English n-gram counts from about one trillion words of web text.

Several readers asked me what the answer actually is.  The answer turned out to be not entirely trivial to get, and it may not be as interesting as you'd expect. Or maybe it's more interesting, I don't know. Anyhow, I live to serve, if not always at internet speeds, and the details are below.

Thomas Whiston, Bill Poser, and Victor Steinbok called my attention to a bizarre device made in China that goes by the name "Closestool Burst Destructor." It was introduced to the world by David Bernstein on the Volokh Conspiracy, March 10, 2009.

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part because of the proper name problem: a reasonably restrictive spellchecker dictionary can never encompass all the proper names that might appear in a given text, particularly unusual foreign names. Consider the old Obama/Osama tangle: after 9/11, Osama was added to Microsoft's spellchecker dictionary, but at the time no one could have predicted that Obama would also be an important name to include. Thus they had to scramble to add Obama when he rose to prominence and spellcheckers were giving Osama as the first suggestion.

Now, as if on cue, the District of Columbia Republican Committee kindly illustrates my point in a new press release.

Katie Roiphe (in the NYT Book Review, 8 March, p. 16) reviews Elaine Showalter's synoptic A Jury of Her Peers: American Woman Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and along the way notes that

Showalter's wide net draws in writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose novel, "The Home Maker," written in 1924, includes the abysmally written passage: "What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another full of drudgery." Very few people, I imagine, would argue for the elegance of the prose, but the passage is undoubtedly interesting from a feminist point of view.

I am often baffled by a critic who merely quotes a passage while sniffily dismissing its writing style — without a word about the defects the critic sees in the passage. (I won't comment here on Roiphe's indirect swipe at feminism.)

Passive voice is a grammatical term whose first use in English, according to the OED, was about 600 years ago:

a1450 (a1397) Prol. Old Test. in Bible (Wycliffite, L.V.) (Cambr. Mm. II. 15) xv. 57 A participle of a present tens either preterit, of actif vois eithir passif, mai be resoluid into a verbe of the same tens and a coniunccioun copulatif.

Spiegel Online, Germany's biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections. (See my primer on OUPblog as well as our ongoing coverage on both the old and new Language Log.) I was interviewed for the piece, which was written by Konrad Lischka for his column on everyday things that do not work (Fehlfunktion, or 'malfunction'). Though I don't read German, the article looks pretty solid. I especially like the German Cupertinos that are provided, based on spellchecker suggestions in German Mac Word 2008. For instance, Barack Obama prompts the suggestion Barock Obama (barock means 'baroque'), while Stinger-Rakete ('Stinger missile') prompts Stinker-Rakte ('stinker missile'). Looks like a job for the intrepid Microsoft Office Natural Language Team, Teutonic division.

It's really hard to write a story about an obscene pun in a foreign language, when your publication won't let you say anything about the pun except to give the English translation of its innocuous side. That's the unenviable task attempted by Michael Wines in today's NYT ("A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors", 3/12/2009):

Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon. A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

Yesterday I had the opportunity for an eye-opening talk with a man who for 20 years has been the director of a world-renowned biochemistry and physiology research institute.  His job frequently takes him to key labs in China and Japan, and he always has scores of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean staff scientists and postdocs working in his own labs.  Here are some of the mind-boggling things the director told me: