Sprung from a common source
Mark Liberman's
latest
posting on l'affaire Brizendine follows the diffusion of
misinformation from Brizendine's book through a recent review of it by
Fiona Macrae in the Daily Mail and then on to (at last count) over 60
media outlets. Tracking this diffusion is made possible by
idiosyncratic errors in Macrae's piece:
Macrae misspelled Dr. Brizendine's
first name as "Luan" (instead of "Louann"), and second, she cited the
book as The Female Mind
(instead of The Female Brain).
These scribal errors are as good as a fingerprint or a hyperlink, and
they will allow future scholars of media influence to track the flow of
misinformation from Brizendine via Macrae to all sorts of places around
the globe, simply by text search.
Here we see an echo (surely intended by Mark) of the methods of
historical linguistics, and before that, of studies of textual descent.
The crucial step is to use shared innovations to group languages (or
texts) together, as likely to have sprung from a common source.
The inference is stronger for a shared innovation that's unusual (no
one will be much impressed by languages that share intervocalic voicing
of consonants, or word-final devoicing, since these are such common
changes; and no one will be much impressed by English texts that share
the misspelling of
the as
teh, or of
its as
it's, since these are fabulously
common errors), and it's stronger when more than one independent
innovation is shared. The inference that takes many recent media
reports on Brizendine back to Macrae is supported by both types of
evidence.
Using "mind" for "brain" (or vice versa) is probably a reasonably
common error, so let's put that aside for the moment. But "Luan"
for "Louann" seems to be rare indeed: removing dupes, I get 25 webhits
for "Louanne Brizendine" and 2 for "Louan Brizendine"; there's a huge
pile for "Luan Brizendine", but all of them (so far as I can see) from
the last few days.
The evidence for grouping the "Luan Brizendine" spellings together as
likely to have sprung from a common source is even stronger than it
might at first have seemed, since the "Luan" spelling is actually a
composite of two separate misspellings: "u" for "ou" and "n" for
"nn". All the other attested misspellings of Brizendine's first
name ("Louanne" and "Louan") preserve the "ou" -- "Luanne Brizendine"
and "Luann Brizendine" are not attested -- so "u" for "ou" stands out
as an unusual error. As for "n" for "nn", the only moderately
frequent misspelling of her first name (before Macrae's review),
"Louanne", preserves the "nn" as well as the "ou", so this misspelling,
too, is unusual.
So much for the misspellings. The other error is "mind" for
"brain", which is surely independent of the misspelling; absolutely
nothing would predict that someone who makes one of these errors would
be likely to make the other. So we have
TWO
shared independent innovations/errors, and stronger evidence of descent
from a common source.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 1, 2006 02:41 PM