Language Log

Because I seldom listen to the news on the radio or watch it on TV, most of what I know about happenings in the world is gleaned from print media:  books, magazines, papers, and so forth.  Consequently, I occasionally adopt a "reading pronunciation" for the name of a person or place that is at variance with the actual spoken pronunciation of the name.  Such is the case with a place name that is currently prominent in the news:  Ossetia.  In my mind, and even when speaking to others, I have been blithely and happily saying Os-sĕ-ti-a.  After all, I thought to myself, the people who live there are Os-set(e)s, and their language is Os-sĕt-ic or, so I thought, Os-sĕ-ti-an.

From the LiveJournal of lord_whimsy, a social report, with amateur dialectology. The setting:

Last week, the Missus and I attended Interview's relaunch party, held on the top floor of the partially-completed Standard New York, a retro-brutalist sort of structure which towers on tall stilts over the Meatpacking District.

and now the observation:

we followed the gaggle of impossibly tall, thin models and sundry gay boys through the construction site to the elevators, whose walls were still bare plywood. We literally came up to the waist of some of these striking extraterrestrials. I calculated the lisp per capita ratio in the elevator to be an astounding 3:1, which had a similar aural effect as a swarm of summer locusts. My ears literally hurt from the insectoid crispness of the diction being volleyed overhead. I've long suspected that there's a third dimension to regional dialects: not just geographical, but vertical. Someone should do a linguistic field study of New York elevators that lead to media offices: A much overlooked micro-dialect is thriving in elevator shafts all over Midtown Manhattan. 

Some of this — in particular, the hyperbolic "my ears literally hurt from the insectoid crispness" — is just routine disdain for the gay voice (similar to the intense disdain many people freely express about the speech of young women, various social and geographical dialects, and so on). But there's a small chance that lord_whimsy was on to something about the vertical dimension in this particular case.

Every so often we post here about baffling headlines — baffling to readers who don't have the real-world knowledge needed to interpret them. Most recently, Geoff Pullum posted about

Detective attacks jailed canoe wife who lied to sons

(which he used as a springboard for a discussion of noun-noun compounds like canoe wife). Today's delight (from Bruce Webster, who came across it on Dave Barry's blog) is

All Blacks lock rubbishes Wallabies poor form line

Without some context, this is impenetrable — unless you something about rugby (especially in the southern hempishere) and some British slang. It's significant that the headline comes from a New Zealand rugby site. And that All Blacks and Wallabies are capitalized; they refer to rugby teams (the All Blacks are the national team of New Zealand, and the Wallabies of Australia). So lock is not a verb, but a noun referring to a rugby position and the person playing it. And so on.

The slang is the verb rubbish, which means 'criticize severely and reject as worthless' (NOAD2) in British English and varieties influenced by British English (including at least Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Indian English).

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

A recent PartiallyClips strip illustrates a technique that we might call "associative dialogue":

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The tailor's algorithm, obviously, is to use the customer's questions as queries into a database of quotations.

This technique has been used to great advantage by generations of chatbots. The one whose design I know most about is the "extended chat" mode of Cobot, described in C. Isbell, M. Kearns, D. Kormann, S. Singh, P. Stone, "Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent", AAAI 2000:

Any utterance directed towards Cobot that is not recognized as a request for social statistics becomes a candidate for the following process. Words in the incoming utterance are matched to words appearing in sentences in the documents, assigning to each sentence a weight based on the number of matching words. […] Cobot randomly chooses a sentence to utter according to the distribution defined by the weights.

The Presidential campaign of the past few days provides us with not one but two examples of false claims about candidates' statements. The first is the now widespread claim that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin believes that the Iraq War is divinely ordained because she said that:

our national leaders are sending them [the troops] out on a task that is from God

The title attribute for the most recent xkcd strip has the value "Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er", with apostrophes in place of the two initial h letters. This is a cultural mistake, a rare thing from Randall Monroe, who is usually pitch perfect.

Commenting on our posts about Business Week's credulous coverage of the SpinSpotter software release, Trent defended his former profession:

When we are knowledgeable in a particular field, we notice errors made by outsiders. […] Because the typical journalist at a newspaper is a generalist, and because he or she may have to write 10 column inches within 20 minutes about something unfamiliar, there are bound to be errors — some substantive, some not so. […] Demanding that a newspaper hire experts in all fields is just … unreasonable. Demanding that a journalist spend hours researching the material — well, you can get it perfectly accurate, or you can get it fast. Newspapers are in the business of being fast. Journals are in the business of being rigorous.

I've heard versions of this excuse many times over the years. And with respect, I believe that it's irrelevant to the case under discussion, and largely nonsense in general.

Our recent adventures with the vaporware/demoware SpinSpotter (here and here), which purports to detect passages of untrustworthy spin, reminded me of last month's software delight, apostrophree, which, it was said, automatically and silently

corrects common errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage in blogs and especially comments and discussion forms.

(this from a Typical Programmer interview with apostrophree's founder John Scogan).

What is spin? According to the OED's 1993 additions,

2. g. fig. A bias or slant on information, intended to create a favourable impression when it is presented to the public …

What is SpinSpotter? According to Claire Cain Miller in the NYT ("Start-Up Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time", 9/8/2008), it's a Web tool that "scans news stories for signs of spin".

The Spinoculars find spin in three ways, said Mr. Herman. First, it uses an algorithm to seek out phrases that violate six transgressions that the company’s journalism advisory board came up with based on the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. They are personal voice, passive voice, a biased source, disregarded context, selective disclosure and lack of balance. […]

SpinSpotter’s algorithm also uses a database of common phrases that are used when spinning a story. Finally, readers can flag instances of spin. Other SpinSpotter users can see these flags, and the reported phrases will enter the spin database.

The guy being quoted is  "SpinSpotter founder and chief creative officer, Todd Herman". Other stories about SpinSpotter — and there are quite a few of them — give a similar picture.

But here's another definition, offered by me in comments on a weblog post yesterday:

This might be an unusual type of demoware …, one that is released for general use in the hope that enough people will submit their proposed spin-spots to give the company enough free training data to actually develop some of the technology that they pretended to have in the first place.

A SpinSpotter tool — a plugin for the Firefox browser — has been announced in a credulous article by Jon Fine in Business Week. It will (its inventors claim) scan the text of web pages that you view, and identify passages of untrustworthy spinspeak. Our experts at Language Log's research laboratory have run it through our secret multi-million-dollar bullshit detector, and we got a strong positive. Having written several times before on Language Log about people who publish claims about language, and mention the passive voice, when they are completely unable to tell an active clause from a passive clause, I was delighted to see one more instance. Look at this description, from Jon Fine's description of SpinSpotter, detailing the "tenets" (i.e., diagnostics) that enable SpinSpotter to spot spin:

The tenets are: reporter's voice (adjectives used by a journalist that go beyond the supporting evidence in the article); passive voice (example: a story says "bombs land" without stating which party is responsible for them); a biased source (a quoted source's partisanship is not clearly identified); disregarded context (a political rally's attendance is reported to be "massive," but would it have been so huge had the surviving members of the Beatles not played?); and lack of balance (a news story on a controversial topic gives much more credence to one side's claims).

Bombs land is of course an active clause. Passive clauses always have a participial form of the verb, in almost all cases (setting aside "concealed passives" like "This needs looking at") a past participle. The past particple of land has the form landed. So quite independently of the absurdity of an algorithm running on raw text being able to spot things as subtle as strength of supporting evidence or balance on controversial topics, the inventors of this crucially linguistic tool (or the people who wrote their press release) don't know even the most elementary things about English grammar. Caveat downloader.

One of the curious things about the uses of linguistics in the legal context is that the smallest units of language get the most public attention. Linguists analyze language in all its shapes and forms, from minute sounds to broad discourse structures, but the media's interest is on the smaller language units like letters, punctuation, and words, not the larger language units like syntax, discourse structure, and conversational strategies.

A case in point is the area of authorship identification, which typically focuses on small language units such as morphology, lexicon, or stylistic choices found in evidence documents. It's tempting to think that such language features can actually identify authors with as much validity and precision as the way DNA analysis helps law enforcement identify suspects. Personally, I have some reservations about what I see linguists doing as they try to help the police and the courts determine issues of innocence or guilt.

John Wells has been posting a lot of nice stuff recently on his daily phonetics blog. The current page (no permalinks yet, alas) discusses epenthesis in toponyms and similar forms — why are graduates of Harrow "Harrovians" while people from Congo are "Congolese"? And what about "Kittitian" from St. Kitts, and "Torontonian", and "tobacconist", and so on? (Some relevant socio-historical information can be found in "Who let the 'n' in?", 1/22/2006; and "Chinian, not Chinese?", 1/26/2006. You may also be interested in the theological implications of such sound-pattern irregularities.)

Many commentators have observed that John McCain is campaigning as if it were the Democrats, not the Republicans, who had been in office for the last eight years, hoping that voters will forget about George Bush and view the Republicans as the party of reform. If only more people had a classical education, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate would have provided yet another point for the Democrats: the Ancient Greek word whose transliteration is the same as her family name, πάλιν, means "again" or "back".