Language Log

I wonder how many of Language Log's tens of thousands of American readers will have done a quick double-take on seeing the sentence that Bill Poser just quoted: "Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education". A chambers? Not a chamber? Or a bunch of chambers? Isn't chambers the regularly formed plural of chamber, meaning "room"? And isn't the indefinite article a(n) incompatible with plural nouns? Well, as I write this, the buzz and chatter in the comments below Bill's post does not include anyone asking this question, but I wouldn't be surprised if some found the phrase a chambers odd-looking. Especially since I believe it is almost entirely limited to British English (perhaps someone will correct me on this). A chambers is really just a law practice. A group of lawyers working together would take a suite of rooms in some suitable district of London proximate to the major law courts, e.g. the Temple area or the Grays Inn Road, and that suite of rooms would be referred to as their chambers; and from there, "chambers" seems to have morphed into a singular count noun denoting a law practice. That's how I understand the history to have run, anyway. (Perhaps someone will correct me on this too. But more likely the prattle in the comments area below will digress into talk of chamber pots, and from there to flower pots, and from there to the Chelsea Flower Show, and from there to the Chelsea football club, and so on… Comment warp seems uncontrollable, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists report is forcing the universe to fly apart.)

David Malki's Wondermark takes on grammar peeves:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

I don't think this excuse will work anymore.

My reactions to David Brooks' August 11 column "Harmony and the Dream" led me to look again at three books by prominent psychologists: Richard E. Nisbett's 2003 The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why; and James R. Flynn's 2007 What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect; and Alexander Luria's 1976 Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

I looked at Nisbett's book because it's the intellectual foundation of Brooks' column; and at the Flynn and Luria books because… well, you'll see.

There's no reference to Flynn in Nisbett's book; and Nisbett is not in Flynn's book either. Yet both are crucially concerned with how people in different places, times and social contexts interpret similarities, especially as judged by certain kinds of psychological test instruments. And both books draw important ideas, with attribution, from the same place: the research of a couple of Soviet psychologists, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, who studied the cognitive effects of modernization in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia (now the Kyrgyz Republic) in the 1930s.

Given Nisbett and Flynn's well-deserved prominence, and the importance of the various phenomena at issue, and the similarity (and common origin) of their ideas, I'm curious about the mutual lack of reference. But in this post, I'm not going to say anything more about this odd lack of explicit discussion of a strong implicit connection. Instead, I'll limit myself to a sort of catalogue of quotations from various relevant sources.

Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show:

This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised.

It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the main focus of the camera, combined with the reassurance that the people whose bodies are (however negligently) on display are indigenous peoples — "primitives" and not "full people" like you and me, the viewers (or like Janet Jackson). That's the social point, which has been commented on on the net by a fair number of people, and about which there's a gigantic literature having to do with the attitudes and stances of people in dominant, urban, colonializing, modern, Western, literate, largely white, and/or "civilized" cultures towards the Other, the Exotic.

Then there's a linguistic point, about the nominal expression indigenous nudity, which is clearly an adjective modifier plus a noun head, but isn't understood as predicating some property (indigenousness, in this case) of some entity (nudity, in this case), but is understood as relating two entities (nudity and indigenous peoples, in this case). That is, the expression is Adj + N, but it functions semantically (and to some extent syntactically) like N + N, like a noun-noun compound.

Meghan Daum's LA Times column on "nonplussed" came out a few days ago — "I'm nonplussed, maybe: Many people use words outside their original meaning, but does that make them wrong?", 8/9/2008. She's refreshingly up front about her own reaction:

I need to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

The word "nonplussed" does not mean unfazed, unperturbed or unconcerned. I know just about everyone uses it that way, but I really wish they'd stop.

Meghan is the journalist whose questions I answered last week in "Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008. She was nonplussed, in the sense she prefers, by the fact that instead of setting up a phone interview, I asked her for questions by email, and then posted my answers on Language Log (though I left her role anonymous until now). Her email response:

Thanks, Mark. I must say, I've never received a personal answer in a public forum (you are the Madonna of linguists!)

According to David Brooks, "Harmony and the Dream", NYT, 8/11/2008:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

Those who've followed our previous discussions of David Brooks' forays into the human sciences ("David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006; "David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) will be able to guess what's coming.

In this case, Mr. Brooks has taken his science from the work of Richard E. Nisbett, as described in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why, and in many papers, some of which are cited below. I was familiar with some of this work, which has linguistic aspects, and so I traced Brooks' assertions to their sources. And even I, a hardened Brooks-checker, was surprised to find how careless his account of the research is. The relation between Brooks' column and the facts inspired me to model my discussion after the Radio Yerevan jokes that arose in the Soviet Union as a way to mock the pathetically transparent spin of the Soviet media:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.

Yes, of course, it happens all the time. But not often to two men, and it usually doesn't get reported in the New York Times. Entirely by accident, I came across the announcement (Sunday 10 August, p. 14 of the Style section) of the marriage of Michael Flier and David Trueblood. Flier

is the Oleksandr Potebnja professor of Ukrainian philology in the Slavic languages and literatures department at Harvard and is the director of its Ukrainian Research Institute. He was the chairman of Harvard's linguistics department from 1994 to 1999.

Trueblood

is the director of public relations at the Boston Foundation, which makes grants to nonprofit organizations in the Boston area and …

Some of the political blogs (Marc Ambinder here, for example) are talking about counterfactuals today. A counterfactual conditional adjunct is a conditional adjunct (usually taking the form of a subordinate clause with the word if before it) that makes reference not to this world but to another world, a non-existent one. The phrase if Edwards were honest is unambiguously counterfactual, because were with first or third singular is a special possibility, the irrealis form of the verb, reserved solely for clauses making counterfactual reference. But the phrase if Edwards was honest doesn't necessarily have that meaning.

Yesterday I posted about the history of the English word infer, including the fact that an often-deprecated usage — "evidence E infers conclusion C" — is one of the original meanings, has been used by elite writers since the 16th century, and is hallowed by inclusion in authoritative dictionaries like Webster's 2nd.

Rob Gunningham's comment was: "I'll bet you're not going to start using … infer instead of 'imply' yourself, are you?"

I hadn't thought about it, but on reflection, Rob is right. More broadly, I can't recall ever having changed my speaking or writing habits on the basis of a grammatical analysis or a historical investigation. This isn't a matter of principle for me, but it's a fact; and on reflection, I think that it's a fact worth thinking about.

There isn't much connection between the Olympics and linguistics, but I feel compelled to point out that something that has been in the news would not be news to anyone who had studied acoustic phonetics. I refer to reports of a study showing that sprinters closer to the starting gun get off sooner than those farther away, giving them an advantage in the race.

Week after week the language-and-literacy pontificators fulminate in newspapers and magazines, nearly always revealing how little they know about language. The worst case I've seen in the past week is a column by Howard Jacobson in The Independent about how old teaching methods worked and new ones don't (muted thanks to Steve Jones for pointing it out to me). In the column he foams at the mouth over a contestant on a reality show who did not understand the meaning of the idiomatic phrase at your peril. Peril means "danger", of course but is somewhat archaic. Proceed at your peril means "If you proceed you will be in danger", but crucially, this is not compositional: the meaning does not follow from the regular principles for the rest of English phrase semantics. For example, you can't say ^??Proceed at your trouble to mean "If you proceed you will be in trouble"; you can't say ^??Proceed at your error to mean "If you proceed you will be in error". At your peril is a fixed phrase you have to learn as a whole. It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know this single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practice (rather than practise) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.

I did get one question phoned in by a journalist during my long stint on the night semantics desk. A reporter from the New York Daily News called to ask me about some things that former yoga instructor Rielle Hunter had said, about former Democratic politician John Edwards being "an old soul" with a "special energy" who could be a truly "transformational leader" if only he would use his heart more and his head less; and about her purpose on this Earth being "to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves." The reporter wanted to know what this meant — what becoming a better reflection of one's true repressed self would amount to, in precise terms. Doesn't it suggest that one's real self is trapped inside, he asked, and one's apparently real self that walks around among us, and eats breakfast, and experiences temptations regarding sexual relations with blonde videographers, is merely a reflection of that inner reality? Is this not, he went on (having apparently majored in philosophy at Columbia), a remarkable inversion of the way language is normally employed by philosophers talking about the self? Has Ms Hunter not got the outside inside and the inside outside?

I'm afraid I was unable to answer. In fact I have something of a headache, and since it is now breakfast time and I have been on duty all night I think I will have breakfast and go to bed. Ask Language Log, yes; but don't ask it absolutely anything at all. In particular, we are generally powerless to interpret reincarnationspeak and yogababble.