Language Log

I spend a lot of time these days (now that it's June and the long winter is nearly over) walking around Edinburgh alone, letting the architecture of the city and its myriad pleasant surprises inspire and comfort me. (There is pain to be grappled with: my lovely philosopher partner Barbara died of cancer on May 14, exactly a month ago, and the grief will take a long, long time to fade even slightly. Language Log kindly gave me four weeks of compassionate leave.) Sometimes there are little linguistic things to make me smile. There was one today. I had often walked past it but never noticed it before. On St. Stephen Street in the New Town there is a modest little shopfront divided between two businesses, the one on the left a bijou real estate office and the one on the right a boutique selling fancy infusion-beverage products. I don't know if they colluded, or if one chose a name based on the other, but the real estate office is named "The Property Shop" and the adjacent business calls itself "The Proper Tea Shop".

Today's Zits:

Nina Totenberg, "Skip the Legalese And Keep It Short, Justices Say", Morning Edition, 6/12/2011:

Most of the U.S. Supreme Court's work is in writing. The words on the page become the law of the land, but the justices have no uniform approach to the way they do that job. Indeed, each seems to have his or her own inspiration or pet peeve.

Much of this is laid out is a series of interviews conducted with the justices in 2007 and consigned to obscurity on a little-known website. Now those interviews have been published in the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, and they show some of the justices in an unusually revealing light.

Jason Eisner writes:

Language Log readers might enjoy the syllabic /l/ extravaganza from the most recent Prairie Home Companion.

Over at headsup: the blog, fev recently pondered variation in transcription practice ("Annals of g-droppin'", 6/6/2011).  He starts by noting that the same paper edited the same quote, in the same AP story, to have -in' in some but not all gerund-participles in one version, but -ing throughout in another version.  And his main concern is with the socio-political subtext of the choice to use eye-dialect in some cases and not in others:

It's worth puttin' the question to the AP (and/or your own political writers). What exactly are you trying to show about Palin's speech, and how consistent can you credibly claim to be about it — either within a single sentence of hers or among candidates who may have those or other speech features despite their necktie-wearin' formality?

Sometimes more is less. In Frazz for 6/6/2011, Caulfield is frustrated that Mrs. Olsen is among those who think that the first syllable of penultimate is some kind of emphatic particle:

(and related material), assembled on my blog, here.

Marc Lacey, "As Arizona Fire Rages, Officials Seek Its Cause", NYT 6/11/2011:

Deep within the burn zone, while trying to extinguish the more than 600-square mile Wallow Fire, firefighters have taken care not to trod on two small areas in the Bear Wallow Wilderness where smoke and flames were first spotted a mile or more apart on May 29. Those two fires quickly merged into one big, unruly, runaway blaze that eludes containment nearly two weeks later. (emphasis added)

In standard formal English, I believe, that should be "to tread on"; "trod" is the past tense form, with the past participle being "trodden" or "trod". (The editors of the New York Times agree with me, apparently, since the online article has now been changed to read "tread on" — so here is a screen shot of the original.)

Hockey is not a popular sport in the Punjab but it is THE sport in Canada, which now has a large Punjabi population. An interesting example of cultural integration is the fact that CBC Sports now has hockey commentary in Punjabi.

R. Luke Dubois, "The first computer musician", NYT 6/9/2011:

If the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, then Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century. – Miller Puckette

David Craig writes:

I saw a post on Facebook declaring Chanticleer to be the Navy SEALs of music and got to wondering how far this snowclone had taken off.  A quick googling on "the navy seals of" and, in the first ten hits three were undeniable snowclones where "the Navy SEALs of X" had X filled with "the NFL", "cars", and "seahorses".  I can't convince my boss that future research into this is in the interests of my company so I'm passing the job on to you.

I very much enjoyed Andrew Gelman's post "Bayesian statistical pragmatism" (4/15/2011) on his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. And one aspect of that post struck me as especially relevant to some recent LL discussions:

I am surprised to see Kass write that scientists believe that the theoretical and real worlds are aligned. It is from acknowledging the discrepancies between these worlds that we can (a) feel free to make assumptions without being paralyzed by fear of making mistakes, and (b) feel free to check the fit of our models (those hypothesis tests again! Although I prefer graphical model checks, supplanted by p-values as necessary). All models are false, etc.

I assume that Kass is using the word "aligned" in a loose sense, to imply that scientists believe that their models are appropriate to reality even if not fully correct. But I would not even want to go that far. Often in my own applied work I have used models that have clear flaws, models that are at best "phenomenological" in the sense of fitting the data rather than corresponding to underlying processes of interest–and often such models don't fit the data so well either. But these models can still be useful: they are still a part of statistics and even a part of science (to the extent that science includes data collection and description as well as deep theories).

Andrew E. Kramer, "Russian A.T.M. With an Ear for the Truth", NYT 6/8/2011:

Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing a machine that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an A.T.M. with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud.

Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.

The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”

The voice-analysis system was developed by the Speech Technology Center, a company whose other big clients include the Federal Security Service — the Russian domestic intelligence agency descended from the Soviet K.G.B.

Dmitri V. Dyrmovsky, director of the center’s Moscow offices, said the new system was designed in part by sampling Russian law enforcement databases of recorded voices of people found to be lying during police interrogations.