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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1984 The holiday issue of the Economist has a number of feature articles, including two that are straightforwardly about language: on politeness in language and on "difficult languages", discussed briefly on my blog, here and here.
Commenter mollymooly noted that:
The Economist’s holiday features are the result of giving its journalists free rein to write about something they’re interested in and, one hopes, knowledgeable about. It’s a Christmas present for the staff as much as the readers.
What a nice idea. Ordinarily, writers would have to pitch stories to an editor, or would simply be assigned stories by an editor.
Today's phishing spam, purporting to protect my assets in some unnamed insolvent financial institution, had the subject line, "A new back is declared bankrupt."
http://ericberlin.com/?p=3252 After last night’s bedtime story:
Lea: Why did the Grinch hate Christmas so much, anyway?
Me: Well, the author says it was because his heart was two sizes too small.
Lea: (after a thoughtful pause.) What does that have to do with anything?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1983 Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett have done another end-of-the-year buzzword catalog for the NYT Week in Review. There's a sampling on the front page: aporkalypse, Chimerica, octomom, car tone, ununbium. And then Grant's main list, from athey to wise Latina woman, on p. 3.
Their piece, "Buzzwords: Coining a Not Great Year", begins
You could Tweet all the highlights of 2009 and still have time for dithering. But to catalog the lingo? It would be like one long torture memo. We need to impose a timetable. Let's get right to our full plate.
and continues in this self-illustrative vein.
A few entries have put in appearances on Language Log (though we don't attempt to chronicle new expressions systematically): crash blossom here, gaymarry or gay-marry here, I'mma let you finish here, meep here and here. And on my blog, heinie (in the spelling hiney). (I might well have missed some.) As usual, a nice crop of portmanteau words: aporkalypse and Chimerica from p. 1, and then jeggings, mancession, sexting, vook.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1982 Matt Bauer sent in a specimen of preposition doubling from a recent Chicago news story ("Man stabbed in head with screwdriver in Joliet", WGN/Chicago Tribune, 12/20/2009):
A Joliet man was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver by the husband of a woman with whom he was speaking with at a local bar, police said.
For background, see "A note of dignity or austerity" (5/3/2007); "Back to the future, redundant preposition department" (5/4/2007); "A phenomenon in which I'm starting to believe in" (5/19/2007); "Could preposition doubling be headed our way?" (5/15/2007); "Re-doubled prepositions" (5/19/2007).
Complicating matters further, a Chicago Sun-Times article suggests that it was actually the husband rather than the wife who was involved in the bar conversation:
A 44-year-old man was allegedly stabbed in the head with a screwdriver by the husband of the woman he was dropping off home early Sunday morning, police said.
The victim told police he was at a Joliet bar and had a conversation with the husband of the woman. At that time, the victim said he didn't feel like they had any kind of problem.
However, when the victim dropped off the woman at the intersection of Second and Wilson avenues at 2:05 a.m., the victim said the offender attacked him for no apparent reason, said Police Chief Fred Hayes.
This is the sort of case where the anaphoric/paratactic approach (as practiced by Elmore Leonard and the Pirahã) is likely to be helpful in keeping straight who did what to whom when.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1981 The Philadelphia Eagles have been winning recently, and this led [Inquirer columnist] John Gonzales to pose a generic question yesterday on the philly.com sports blog You Talkin' to Me?:
The Eagles are on a nice little run right now. Someone asked [Eagles head coach Andy] Reid about that the other day, about why his teams seem to come on strong late in the season. (Maybe that's something we just imagine; conventional wisdom and all that.) He just sort of brushed it off without giving an answer. Surprising, I know.
You guys are smart(ish). Why do Reid's teams appear to play better at the end of the year? And who wins today's game?
Another Inquirer sports columnist, Bob Ford, took the question semi-seriously:
The obvious answer - the one that will appeal to you, Gonzoremedial - is that the coaching staff tinkers along the way, adds a piece here, removes a piece there, crafts the schemes to the abilities of who it has, and, presto, the team is operating at peak efficiency at the end of the season.
There's probably some truth there, but 10 or 11 seasons is not a statistically significant sample. Let's say that because of the schedule and injuries, they start strong in five seasons and end strong in five seasons. That's what you would expect. Now if you give them a strong finish as opposed to a strong start in, say, just two of the swing seasons, that makes it look like an overwhelming trend. When, in fact, it's probably just happenstance and the vagaries of the schedule, etc.
Gonzales called a violation:
Lord. And I thought your columns were tiring. My eyes glazed over about halfway through.
Ashley asked Quintin Mikell a good question the other day about Reid's easing up on them in practice as the season goes along so they'll be somewhat fresher. Mikell couldn't pinpoint the exact time when Reid does that each year but conceded that it helps. I'll go with that.
Ashley Fox agreed:
Seriously, Bobby. That was brutal. What exactly were you trying to say? You Page One guys really are losing it.
Don't downplay the mental aspect of things. Many of the players have experienced success down the stretch, and that does matter. It matters that the Cowboys haven't experienced success. Yes, their schedule is brutal, and maybe they're just not good enough, but it's impossible to discount the effect of past December crashes.
Ford tried again:
If the Eagles win two of their three remaining games, just for argument's sake, they will be 6-2 in the second half of this season. In the last five years, that will make them 23-16-1 in the second half of seasons and 22-18 in the first half of those seasons.
Anyway, Eagles roll over the 49ers today. 38-13.
That pretty much ended the conversation, which had lasted long enough to fill the blog entry anyhow. Gonzales:
Way to look stuff up, Bobby. Birds 31, Niners 17.
Fox:
I agree. Eagles beat the fighting Bob Langes today, 35-24.
The actual score was 27-13. Oh, and Dallas unexpectedly beat New Orleans.
These three sportswriters are half-seriously acting out a conversational pattern that takes place over and over again, one which none of us are very well equipped by nature to deal with. In talking about sports (or life), people love to speculate about the causes and consequences of generally-accepted generic propositions. Some of these propositions are true, while others are a compound of stereotype and confirmation bias that don't even rise to the level of sampling error.
I've been reading recently about some relevant intellectual history (Ian Hacking's The emergence of probability; Theodore Porter's The rise of statistical thinking), and these works underline how recently, painfully, and incompletely our species has recognized the reality of random variation and the difficulty of inferring its causes from observation.
Everything did stay shut down yesterday. Signature Theatre actually sent me an email and left me a message on my answering machine. I'll just need to call them to exchange my ticket for another day. I used the time to get some house hold stuff done (but still have plenty to go), as well as reading and napping. My condo association's annual holiday party was, however, a go, since walking downstairs (and/or a few feet outside) is not a huge hardship. They put out a pretty nice spread of heavy appetizers and desserts, plus wine and beer. One of the people on the social committee told me she'd gone out to buy the wine in the morning. My Scottish neighbor did not, alas, wear his kilt this year. I get another day off today since the federal government is shut down and my company follows their lead. We have an emergency shutdown code we charge to for situations like this, so it doesn't make me use up any vacation either. I'm not sure if that means that we'll reschedule the (corporate) office party, but I am guessing it will be tomorrow. The metro is supposedly completely open so I would have been okay, but there is still some bus service that isn't operating. Major streets should be alright, but I'm sure side streets are still a mess. I actually need to drive tomorrow, since I have a dentist appointment, but I'm pretty close to streets which get plowed and get traffic, so I don't think it will be too bad.
My favorite things from the past decade, in various categories. Note that none of this should inspire any debate. I am not saying that any of these are the "best" or the "greatest" or anything like that. In most cases, I don't partake of enough things to make an informed judgment anyway (the amount of TV I watch is shockingly low, for example). So my opinions don't really mean squat. But to the extent that they reveal anything about me and the things I tend to like, I present them--followed by ten of the key events of my own personal decade-- ( behind the cut )
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1980 There's a nice example of a blended cliché in a post by Patrick Appel on Andrew Sullivan's blog:
A blend of two metaphors for imagining yourself in another's situation — looking at things through the eyes of others and walking in someone else's shoes — this phrase in various wordings has quite a few precedents, not all of which are intended as jokes. For example, a Phoenix AZ news story about a Spanish/Mandarin immersion pre-school:
"Research has shown that cognitively, they're more open to new ideas," said Diana. "They are able to see the world through other people's shoes because they become more bi-cultural. Languages are always connected to culture."
Or this answer to the question "What are the main differences between the theories of Max Weber and Karl Marx?"
Weberian thinking says that in society you should aim to achieve verstehen, or seeing the world through someone else's shoes.
A design that literally lets you see the world through (well, as reflected in) someone else's shoes is featured here.
What sources do you use to research whether a given retailer is socially responsible?
<3 ZzZzZzZz... --Kaja <3 
Just got word from the producer of the story on the 3-way tie and resulting album that the piece airs on tonight's (12/20) edition of Weekend All Things Considered towards the end of the show. Unless, of course, there's breaking news of some sort. I'll post a link here when it's available.
Edited: Yes, it did air. Here's a link!
http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/2009/12/20/new-scam-pay-a-usurious-fee-to-get-your-rebate-faster/ http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/?p=1168 Attention: Please post comments on this article here rather than on LiveJournal. Thanks!
I’ve just encountered a new (at least for me) scam in the ongoing quest by retailers and manufacturers to make rebates more and more onerous to apply for and therefore less likely to cost them any money.
While applying on-line for a $10 rebate on an ASUS motherboard I purchased recently at Micro Center, I was offered the following:
As you can see, the “No-Wait-Rebate service” checkbox was selected by default.
Let’s do the math here… I’m being offered the opportunity to get $10 seven weeks sooner for a fee of $1, i.e., 10% of the rebate. Annualizing from seven weeks to a year yields an APR of 74%.
Does this seem like a “small fee” to you?
It really is unbelievable. What kind of idiot would fall for this scam?
Attention: Please post comments on this article here rather than on LiveJournal. Thanks!
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1979 From the notorious Global Language Monitor:
(Click on the image for a larger screenshot.)
Even spelled correctly, "heroes" isn't a name. The FDNY and NYPD responders who died in the World Trade Center buildings were heroes, sure enough, but it's not a very respectful tribute to stick a mis-spelled reference to them at the top of a list that's not even the right lexical category.
This isn't the first time that one of Paul JJ Payack's lexicographic PR stunts has been mishandled: see "Millionth word story botched" (6/10/2009) for an earlier example; or this list of posts for some background.
[For a somewhat more serious — and also funnier — WOTY article, see Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett, "The Buzzwords of 2009", NYT 12/19/2009.] Sun, Dec. 20th, 2009, 09:46 am
![[i]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cjsmith: Snow!
I am loving it! We have about eight inches at the moment, and snow is still coming down. It's powdery and light. (God help us if the weather warms up a tad.) Zoltar the cat is Not Amused. I opened the side door, making a nice little arc in the snow cap, and he turned right back around to stay inside. Then I shoveled the front walk, with my dad joining me to make a little path down the driveway to the street, and when I came back in I opened the front door. Zoltar walked out gingerly. He shook his paws. He got dusted on his head and back. His fur twitched. He hid under a bush. A little bit of wind brought him some more powdered sugar on his back. That did it! He went back inside! My dad is, of course, out doing his daily run. He does not miss a day no matter what. He'll be back in a few and we'll give him some hot tea. Snow snow snow snow SNOW! Yay snow! :)
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1978 Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political discourse were a hot media topic, the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words rather than concepts. Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion — at least, an interesting study, published about a month ago in Psychological Science and featured in the Random Samples section of Science Magazine, hasn't (as far as i can tell) generated a single MSM news story or even blog post.
The paper is Mark Landau, Daniel Sullivan, and Jeff Greenberg, "Evidence That Self-Relevant Motives and Metaphoric Framing Interact to Influence Political and Social Attitudes", Psychological Science 20(7): 1421-1427, November 2009. The abstract:
We propose that metaphor is a mechanism by which motivational states in one conceptual domain can influence attitudes in a superficially unrelated domain. Two studies tested whether activating motives related to the self-concept influences attitudes toward social topics when the topics' metaphoric association to the motives is made salient through linguistic framing. In Study 1, heightened motivation to protect one's own body from contamination led to harsher attitudes toward immigrants entering the United States when the country was framed in body-metaphoric, rather than literal, terms. In Study 2, a self-esteem threat led to more positive attitudes toward binge drinking of alcohol when drinking was metaphorically framed as physical self-destruction, compared with when it was framed literally or metaphorically as competitive other-destruction.
Their simple and clever technique involved three experimental steps, which I'll describe in detail for their first experiment. 69 Arizona undergraduates participated in what was billed as a study about media preferences. In the first step, subjects read an article about airborne bacteria:
[P]articipants in the contamination-threat condition read an article, ostensibly retrieved from a popular science magazine, describing airborne bacteria as ubiquitous and deleterious to health. Participants in the no-threat condition read a parallel article describing airborne bacteria as ubiquitous but harmless.
In the second step, subjects read one of two articles about U.S. domestic issues other than immigration. One of these articles contained a number of "country = body" metaphorical expressions, while the other one didn't:
In the body-metaphoric-framing condition, the essay contained language subtly relating the United States to a body (e.g., "After the Civil War, the United States experienced an unprecedented growth spurt, and is scurrying to create new laws that will give it a chance to digest the millions of innovations"). In the literal-framing condition, the same domestic issues and opinions were discussed using literal paraphrases of the metaphors ("After the Civil War, the United States experienced an unprecedented period of innovation, and efforts are now underway to create new laws to control the millions of innovations").
In the third step,
[P]articipants completed two questionnaires, counterbalanced in order, assessing their agreement with six statements each about immigration and the minimum wage. The immigration items included "It's important to increase restrictions on who can enter into the United States" and "An open immigration policy would have a negative impact on the nation." The minimum-wage measure included statements like "It's important to increase the minimum wage in the United States." Responses were made on 9-point scales (1 =strongly disagree, 9 =strongly agree) and were averaged to form composite scores for anti-immigration attitudes (α= .87) and agreement with increasing the minimum wage (α= .88). Preliminary analyses revealed no significant effects involving presentation order, so we omitted this factor from subsequent analyses.
As a final check, they asked participants "To what extent did the article on airborne bacteria make you more concerned about what substances your body is exposed to?" and "To what extent did the article on airborne bacteria increase your desire to protect your body from harmful substances?". As expected, the subjects in the contamination-threat group were slightly more concerned about exposure to harmful substances than subjects in the no-threat group (mean response 5.64 vs. 4.48 on a 9-point scale, SDs 2.18) and 2.20). Similarly for concern about protecting their bodies from harmful substances (M= 5.60, SD= 2.14 vs. M= 4.70, SD= 2.15).
Our primary prediction was that a bodily-contamination threat would lead to more negative immigration attitudes when the United States was framed in body-metaphoric terms than when it was framed in literal terms, whereas minimum-wage attitudes would be unaffected by this manipulation.
And this is indeed how it came out. Their Table 1 shows the size of the effect on the answers to the immigration question:
The answers to the minimum-wage question were not significantly affected.
I wouldn't have been confident of seeing this doubly-indirect framing effect. Reading an article about the dangers of airborne bacteria influenced answers about immigration – but only if a second article, on a separate topic like innovation, used body-metaphoric language in referring to the United States.
The most surprising thing is that reading about bacterial contamination didn't influence answers to questions immigration attitudes when the intermediate article didn't use "country = body" expressions. The underlying metaphor in that case is so ubiquitous that you'd think it would always be activated to some extent.
The second most surprising thing is the media silence. I guess the cause is some combination of fashion (framing is old news), distraction (the study wasn't about health care, climate change, or Sarah Palin), and complication (this line of research doesn't give political operatives any clear marching orders).
O Snow You are so pretty Thank you for being Such pretty snow
It's been a long time since I've done probability, and I'd love for someone to check my work on the following question: Suppose you have 58 marbles in a jar, 28 white and 30 black, and you draw a marbles from the jar without replacement. (a) If you draw 19 total, what's the probability that exactly 9 will be black? (b) If you draw 17 total, what's the probability that all 17 will be black? If I've done this right, I get ( cut to insure the independence of your results ).
We ended up getting about 20 inches of snow. That's a new record for December in this area and somewhere on the list of top 10 storms here since they started keeping records. It may take a while to clean up from this, so I'm not sure what the impact on my theatre tickets for this afternoon is. While the beltway and 395 will probably be okay, the local roads are unlikely to get plowed until later. The metro (and bus services) won't be running for a while this morning either. (The metro is open underground only, which does me no good.) Depending on when they open, they could provide an option. But I would not be surprised if Signature Theatre cancels today's show, as they did yesterday's. That would be okay with me, since I didn't get through half the household stuff I intended to yesterday. I do need the roads to be functional again by Tuesday, since I have a dentist appointment. By the way, some snow does blow into our garage so it isn't like I completely escape having to clean off the car. It's still a lot better than having to dig things out.
Last night, I was reading a book about how one observes Israel Independence Day and stumbled across a beautiful discussion of one of the central prayers of Chanukah. I want to share it, even if it’s a little late. ( Read more... )
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