Language Log

Fear North Dakota

The Oct. 10 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was partly devoted to a sort of debate between the Colorado Senate candidates Ken Salazar and Pete Coors, moderated by Tim Russert. At one point, Coors got a little tangled up and said "North Dakota" when he meant North Korea:

MR. RUSSERT:  But if you knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, the president is saying very clearly, "Even though there are no weapons of mass destruction, knowing what I know today, I still made the right decision to go to war."  Do you agree with that?

MR. COORS:  This is a war on terror.  And this is a--we can say "weapons of mass destruction," "no weapons of mass destruction"; clearly, we should be more worried today, actually, about Iran and North Dakota than we are--North Korea than we are about Iraq, based on weapons of mass destruction.  But I think that the conditions change on an ongoing basis, and we must look at the facts that we have before us at the time we make a decision.

Coors got a certain amount of ribbing about this. M.E. Sprengelmeyer's story in the Rocky Mountain News started out

Put down your accordions and man your battle stations.

For at least a split second Sunday, the home state of Lawrence Welk was declared part of the "axis of evil."

Coors' mistake is consistent with several of the patterns that psycholinguists generally see in slips of the tongue. The substitution was a single word -- though other units like phrases, syllables and morphemes can be substituted, the commonest slips involve either single words (like "Iran and North Dakota" for "Iran and North Korea") or single phonemes (like "you have tasted the whole worm" for "you have wasted the whole term"). The substitution preserved syntactic category, and the substituted word was prosodically similar to the target -- both are three-syllable words with second-syllable stress. This didn't involve the intrusion of another word from the same discourse (like "balls on base" for "base on balls") -- it was a "non-contextual substitution" in the psycholinguistic jargon -- and as usual in such cases, the subsituted word is similar to the target in meaning and in collocational properties.

However, this case does not seem to confirm the best-known psychological theory about misspeaking. There's no obvious sense in which saying Dakota instead of Korea in this debate revealed anything about Pete Coors' unconscious fears or desires. In other words, it doesn't seem to have been a Freudian slip.

Of course, Freud's analysis of Freudian slips was generally anything but obvious. In chapter one of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he devoted 1,200 words and a diagram to explaining why he himself once had trouble retrieving the name of the painter Signorelli. His explanation involved concerns about sexual disfunction among the Turks of Bosnia, and a message that he had gotten a few weeks earlier while staying in the town of Trafoi, and -- well, read it for yourself, I've reproduced it at the end of this post. So maybe Pete Coors substituted Dakota for Korea because he'd been thinking about bacterial growth in sanitary napkins, and was worried about some bad polling trends that he learned about while campaigning in Cripple Creek. Or something else equally obscure and random. But I doubt it.

A half-century of research into slips of the tongue suggests that Freud's attempt to provide them with unconscious motivations was at best unnecessary. We screw up in speaking because speaking is incredibly hard. Our poor overloaded frontal lobes are trying to select packages of multi-modal associations from the other end of the cortex at a rate of three or four per second, arrange them in complex patterns, and use them to coordinate the multi-dimensional wiggling of our eating and breathing apparatus so as to modulate sound waves in a way that will cause some mostly-unknown fellow humans to experience analogous patterns of structured associations, and consequently modify their mental state in ways advantageous to us. When it comes to talking, our unconscious fears and desires are the least of our problems.

[Some more discussion of this point, with links, can be found in the notes for lecture 17 of my intro linguistics course at Penn].

I vainly strove to recall the name of the master who made the imposing frescoes of the "Last Judgment" in the dome of Orvieto. Instead of the lost name -- Signorelli -- two other names of artists -- Botticelli and Boltraffio -- obtruded themselves, names which my judgment immediately and definitely rejected as being incorrect. When the correct name was imparted to me by an outsider I recognized it at once without any hesitation. The examination of the influence and association paths which caused the displacement from Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio led to the following results:--

(a) The reason for the escape of the name Signorelli is neither to be sought in the strangeness in itself of this name nor in the psychologic character of the connection in which it was inserted. The forgotten name was just as familiar to me as one of the substitutive names -- Botticelli -- and somewhat more familiar than the other substitute -- Boltraffio -- of the possessor of which I could hardly say more than that he belonged to the Milanese School. The connection, too, in which the forgetting of the name took place appeared to me harmless, and led to no further explanation. I journeyed by carriage with a stranger from Ragusa, Dalmatia, to a station in Herzegovina. Our conversation drifted to travelling in Italy, and I asked my companion whether he had been in Orvieto and had seen there the famous frescoes of --

(b) The forgetting of the name could not be explained until after I had recalled the theme discussed immediately before this conversation. This forgetting then made itself known as a disturbance of the newly emerging theme caused by the theme preceding it. In brief, before I asked my travelling companion if he had been in Orvieto we had been discussing the customs of the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had related what I heard from a colleague who was practising medicine among them, namely, that they show full confidence in the physician and complete submission to fate. When one is compelled to inform them that there is no help for the patient, they answer: "Sir (Herr), what can I say? I know that if he could be saved you would save him." In these sentences alone we can find the words and names: Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Herr (sir), which may be inserted in an association series between Signorelli, Botticelli, and Boltraffio.

(c) I assume that the stream of thoughts concerning the customs of the Turks in Bosnia, etc., was able to disturb the next thought, because I withdrew my attention from it before it came to an end. For I recalled that I wished to relate a second anecdote which was next to the first in my memory. These Turks value the sexual pleasure above all else, and at sexual disturbances merge into an utter despair which strangely contrasts with their resignation at the peril of losing their lives. One of my colleague's patients once told him: "For you know, sir (Herr), if that ceases, life no longer has any charm."

I refrained from imparting this characteristic feature because I did not wish to touch upon such a delicate theme in conversation with a stranger. But I went still further; I also deflected my attention from the continuation of the thought which might have associated itself in me with the theme "Death and Sexuality." I was at that time under the after-effects of a message which I had received a few weeks before, during a brief sojourn in Trafoi. A patient on whom I had spent much effort had ended his life on account of an incurable sexual disturbance. I know positively that this sad event, and everything connected with it, did not come to my conscious recollection on that trip in Herzegovina. However, the agreement between Trafoi and Boltraffio forces me to assume that this reminiscence was at that time brought to activity despite all the intentional deviation of my attention.

(d) I can no longer conceive the forgetting of the name Signorelli as an accidental occurrence. I must recognize in this process the influence of a motive. There were motives which actuated the interruption in the communication of my thoughts (concerning the customs of the Turks, etc.), and which later influenced me to exclude from my consciousness the thought connected with them, and which might have led to the message concerning the incident in [p. 8] Trafoi -- that is, I wanted to forget something, I repressed something. To be sure, I wished to forget something other than the name of the master of Orvieto; but this other thought brought about an associative connection between itself and this name, so that my act of volition missed the aim, and I forgot the one against my will, while I intentionally wished to forget the other. The disinclination to recall directed itself against the one content; the inability to remember appeared in another. The case would have been obviously simpler if this disinclination and the inability to remember had concerned the same content. The substitutive names no longer seem so thoroughly justified as they were before this explanation. They remind me (after the form of a compromise) as much of what I wished to forget as of what I wished to remember, and show me that my object to forget something was neither a perfect success nor a failure.

(e) The nature of the association formed between the lost name and the repressed theme (death and sexuality, etc.), containing the names of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Trafoi, is also very strange. In the scheme inserted here, which originally appeared in 1898, an attempt is made to graphically represent these associations.

The name Signorelli was thus divided into two parts. One pair of syllables (elli) returned [p. 9]

unchanged in one of the substitutions, while the other had gained, through the translation of signor (sir, Herr), many and diverse relations to the name contained in the repressed theme, but was lost through it in the reproduction. Its substitution was formed in a way to suggest that a displacement took place along the same associations -- "Herzegovina and Bosnia" -- regardless of the sense and acoustic demarcation. The names were therefore treated in this process like the written pictures of a sentence which is to be transformed into a picture-puzzle (rebus). No information was given to consciousness concerning the whole process, which, instead of the name Signorelli, was thus changed to the substitutive names. At first sight no relation is apparent between the theme that contained the name Signorelli and the repressed one which immediately preceded it.

Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that the given explanation does not contradict the conditions of memory reproduction and forgetting assumed by other psychologists, which they seek in certain relations and dispositions. Only in certain cases have we added another motive to the factors long recognized as causative in forgetting names, and have thus laid bare the mechanism of faulty memory. The assumed dispositions are indispensable also in our case, in order to make it possible for the repressed element to associatively gain control over the desired name and take it along into the repression. Perhaps this would not have occurred in another name having more favourable conditions of reproduction. For it is quite probable that a suppressed element continually strives to assert itself in some other way, but attains this success only where it meets with suitable conditions. At other times the suppression succeeds without disturbance of function, or, as we may justly say, without symptoms.

Time is space: when fronter is farther behind

When I say "back in August", you know that I mean two months in the past, not ten months in the future. The past lies behind us, the future is ahead. We're striding through history, or maybe riding a runaway railway car, but anyhow we're facing forward. Um, ahead. That is, future time. It's obvious, right?

But if we were speaking one of the West African languages that I've studied, it would be equally clear that the equivalent of "back in August" would be a reference to the year 2005. After all, the past is relatively clear to us, so it must be in front, where we can see it, right? And the future is sneaking up on us, invisible, from behind. Obvious. To emphasize the point, I might illustrate my words with hand gestures. Talking about our grandchildren's time, I'd sweep my hand backwards, like throwing salt over my shoulder. At least, that's how it was all explained to me.

Before you start thinking about attitudes towards progress and agency, you should remember that the ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have agreed with the Africans. Thus Latin post means "Of place, behind, back, backwards", according to Lewis and Short, but "Of time, afterwards, after". We still use some Latin expressions involving these meanings: an "ante bellum house" is a before-the-war house; a "post hoc" explanation is one that's concocted after the fact. And some of the corresponding English words derive from the same metaphor: "before" is almost exclusively used for (earlier) time now, but it's original meaning was spatial "in front of".

I suspect that the temporal applications of ante and post to time came originally from thinking about a line of march of a group, not the visual field of an individual. If you're watching a parade, you see someone in the front of the procession before you see someone who is behind them. So "in front of " is "earlier than", and "in back of" is "later than". The same thing is true if you're marching in a column yourself. The people who are in front of you get to places earlier than you do, so again "in front of" means "earlier than". And it's possible that the apparent African "past is ahead of us" metaphors have a similar origin, I don't know.

Anyhow, even when we stick to the language of space in a single culture, people disagree about how to translate among frames of reference, as we've learned here recently in discussing route nomenclature. And Neal Whitman at Literal Minded has recently written about individual differences in talking about grocery carts: which end is front? Well, as he points out, it depends on whether you think of a grocery cart as being like a car or like a refrigerator.

When you combine the description of time and space, and move across cultures and over history, things get really mixed up. Consider the etymology of English after, according to the OED:

Orig. a compar. form of af, ... with compar. suffix -ter, THER = ‘farther off, at a greater distance from the front, or from a point in front’; and hence in the Teutonic languages ‘more to the rear, behind, later.’

Is that perfectly clear? I've often thought that Jacques Derrida missed his calling -- he really should have taken up the history of word meanings.

Next, an even greater source of confusion: desire is necessity (and what you want is what I suggest).

Ceci n'est pas un Bushism

Since I dedicated so much time picking apart Kerry's pronunciation of paraplegic and quadraplegic in the second debate, I thought I'd fairly balance things out by picking apart something Bush said during the third debate last night.

Note: this is not (necessarily) a Bushism. If you've come for that sort of thing, this is the wrong place. This is Language Log, after all.

I have not yet received my complimentary copy of The Cambridge Grammar -- I had thought it was standard issue to all recent Linguistics PhD recipients -- and, keep in mind, I'm not a syntactician (but I have been known to play one in the past). So I may have much of this wrong, and I welcome corrections of my premises (and reasoning).

Right at the beginning of his closing statement, Bush found himself in the (I think very unpleasant) position of having to form a notoriously difficult type of noun phrase (NP). The ordered contents of this kind of NP are [ Det N1 of N2 and pro ], where Det is a determiner (the, a, etc.), N1 and N2 are nouns, and pro is a pronoun.

In the Oval Office, there's a painting by	a	friend	of	Laura	and	mine	named -- by Tom Lee.
	|	|	|	|	|	|
	Det	N1	of	N2	and	pro

What's difficult about this type of NP is that (I think) most of us find it difficult to judge what the correct form of -- not to mention order between -- N2 and pro should be. We have no problem with identical NPs without pro, and no problem with identical NPs without N2 (Asterisks indicate ungrammaticality; your judgments may vary):

1. a friend of Laura's / *a friend of Laura
2. a friend of mine / *a friend of me

UPDATE 1, 10/15/2004, 10:00 PDT

Mark writes to point out that "some people might object to" my judgment on a friend of Laura:

I guess I share the judgment that with a single first name, and out of context, "friend of Laura's" is preferred. But remember "friend of Bill", abbreviated as "FOB" during the Clinton years?

Good point. I agree. Mark continues:

Because of the way that Google works, it's hard to get reliable counts, but checking a couple of pages by hand I get
"friend of Biff" 8
"friend of Biff's" 11
(and then other things like "friend of Biff Henderson's"...)
suggesting that the preference is a marginal one at best, far from meriting a star on the less-favored outcome.

And with full names, I think things go the other way:

Google gives us
"friend of Abraham Lincoln" 651 (- 40 = 611)
"friend of Abraham Lincoln's" 40

"friend of Thomas Jefferson" 452 (- 10 = 442)
"friend of Thomas Jefferson's" 10

See also UPDATE 2 just below.

Put the two together, though, and they all sound neither good nor bad, just odd in a strange, unfixable way. (The question mark on the last one is because I find it more strange than the rest -- but I don't know why.)

1. a friend of Laura and mine
2. a friend of Laura's and mine
3. a friend of Laura and me
4. ? a friend of Laura's and me

UPDATE 2, 10/15/2004, 10:00 PDT

Mark's message (cited above) concludes:

This doesn't detract from your observation that the construction
"friend of Laura and mine"
mixed types in the conjunction.

I didn't (explicitly) note this observation, but then again, I was really tired when I posted this. Looking back at the NPs above, I now see that (1) -- the wording Bush used -- is just as strange to me as (4). So, the above should read:

1. ? a friend of Laura and mine
2. a friend of Laura's and mine
3. a friend of Laura and me
4. ? a friend of Laura's and me

This is in line with Mark's observation (which he kindly credits to me).

Firm judgments about the form of pronouns are elusive in all kinds of conjoined NPs -- I know that Joe Emonds once wrote about this ("Grammatically deviant prestige constructions", in A Festschrift for Sol Saporta, M. Brame, H. Contreras, and F. Newmeyer (eds.), Noit Amrofer Press, 1986). Steven Pinker also writes about it in The Language Instinct (citing the Emonds paper).

OK, if this is not intended to be a Bushism-of-the-debate or something like that, why am I bringing it up? Only to suggest that this is a piece of evidence that Bush probably wasn't as well-prepared for this closing statement as he has been (accused of being) for the other two. The complete lameness of the painting reference, the stumbling for the completely irrelevant name of his and Laura's great friend the painter, the awkward NP -- all in the very first sentence of his closing statement? Why? Are Rove, Cheney et al. trying to deflect the charge that Bush was wired?

OK, the awkward NP thing is too subtle, I admit -- unless: they've noticed the influence of blogging in the media, and in the hopes that Language Log would bring this up ...

Nah. Too complicated, and it's late. Besides, W gave us the answer himself, earlier in the debate:

I tell the people on the campaign trail, when I asked Laura to marry me, she said, "Fine, just so long as I never have to give a speech." I said, "OK, you've got a deal." Fortunately, she didn't hold me to that deal. And she's out campaigning along with our girls. And she speaks English a lot better than I do. I think people understand what she's saying.

[ Comments? ]

Is parapalegic like nucular?

Eric Bakovic and Bob Kennedy consider this question at length over at Phonoloblog. Warning: class V phonological passages; check your helmet and flotation devices.

Putting the buggy before the horse

According to the official transcript of last night's presidential debate, George W. Bush at one point said:

Thirdly, one of the reasons why there's still high cost in medicine is because this is -- they don't use any information technology. It's like if you looked at the -- it's the equivalent of the buggy and horse days, compared to other industries here in America.

There's a substantive point here, as well as a linguistic one. Anyone who's had any contact with the American health care system recently will be surprised to be told that "they don't use any information technology" -- as the president said in another context last night, "it's kind of one of those exaggerations." I'm sure that costs could be reduced by better IT systems for dealing with patient records and the like, but is medicine really "the equivalent of the buggy and horse days, compared to other industries"? Maybe so, I don't know. What I do know, though, is that the usual idiom is "horse and buggy". And despite what he said, I'm pretty sure that George W. Bush knows that too.

Google tells the statistical tale: "horse and buggy" has 61,900 hits, while "buggy and horse" has just 470: 132 to 1. In fact, the whole expression "horse and buggy days" has 5,230 hits, to just 1 for "buggy and horse": more than 5,000 to 1!

There's nothing incoherent about the expression "buggy and horse days", especially if you're speaking literally, as the author of the phrase's one previous citation was:

(link) I worried about mother. It was buggy and horse days, so it took more time to go and see her.

Still, "horse and buggy" is a fixed expression, a collocation, an idiom, and "buggy and horse" is not. This is not an isolated fact -- there are patterns to the typical order of words in conjoined expressions, and the key influence in this case was first described by the Indian grammarian Paṇini about 2,500 years ago -- but that's another story. Whatever the explanation, the preference for the idiomatic order "horse and buggy" is an indisputable fact of the English language as we use it now.

Why do I think that President Bush knows this, even though he said "buggy and horse"?

Well, listen to the sound clip. Here's a more careful transcript of this passage:

uh thirdly [pause 0.339]
uh one of the reasons why there's [pause 0.365]
still high costs in- [pause 0.235]
in medicine is because [pause 0.750]
this is the- they- they- they don't use any information technology, it's like if you looked at the- [pause 0.287]
it's the equivalent of the- [pause 0.790]
of the buggy [pause 0.526]
and horse days [pause 1.364]
compared to other industries here in America, and so we've got to introduce high technology into health care, we're beginning to do it, we're changing the language, we want there to be
[pause 0.542] um [pause 0.475] {total 1.195}
electronic medical records to cut down on error as well as to reduce costs. People tell me that [pause 0.457]
when- when the uh health care field is fully [pause 1.774]
integrated with information technology it'll wring some twenty percent of the costs out of the system

Bush starts out disfluently here. In the span of about 12.3 seconds from the start of "uh thirdly" to the start of "of the buggy" -- 33 words in the official transcript -- he racks up two uhs, six repetitions or self-corrections, and five silent pauses in inappropriate places. I'm sure that he knows what he wants to say, but he's having some trouble putting it into words.

(Parenthetically, before you take this as evidence for some sort of linguistic disability, compare it to Kerry's equally disfluent answer to another medical question, discussed here, which includes a truly spectacular 7-second lexical access failure. Public speaking is hard, especially under the kind of pressure that these two men face.)

Anyhow, the president is in a certain amount of linguistic difficulty from the start of this passage. He gets as far as "it's the equivalent of the". Then he pauses for almost 4/5 of a second, he repeats "of the", and out pops the "buggy" part. It's clear that he's having trouble retrieving the idiom, and "buggy" gets over threshold first, so he uses it. But he knows it's not the right thing, because he pauses again for more than a half a second before "and horse days", and then pauses again for almost 1.4 seconds before completing the phrase "compared to other industries here in America". By now the rest of the mental file card is well activated, so he presses rapidly through several clauses without stopping.

There's just one point that still puzzles me. What did the president mean by saying that "we're changing the language"? I don't understand what that has to do with cutting costs by introducing high technology into the health care industry. I doubt that he meant replacing COBOL with java. And I'm not interested in any snarky remarks about replacing English with Bushian.

My first thought was that a fragment of another sound bite got accidentally disinhibited enough to slip into the flow of his answer. "We're changing the language" sounds like a slogan of some kind, though not one about health care automation. However, searching the web did not turn up any evidence that this is a current White House slogan in any field at all. If you know the answer, email me (myl at cis.upenn.edu) and I'll tell the world.

[I'll indulge myself in one non-linguistic point here. As a part-time computer scientist and full-time taxpayer, I'd be happy to believe that better automation of patient records would save 20% of health care costs -- but can this really be true? If it were true, I'd expect some biomedical Wal-Mart to be out there cleaning up. I haven't seen this point discussed on any of the "fact check" sites.

More important, why is a conservative Republican president talking about introducing high technology into health care as if it were the responsibility of the executive branch of the Federal government? ("...we're beginning to do it...") Is he proposing socialized medical automation on top of a largely private-sector health industry? Given the recent IT record of the FBI, the FAA, the social security administration, etc., this would be a dismaying proposal if it were seriously meant. ]

Twenty greatest equations -- minus three?

Robert P. Crease discusses the results of an unusual popularity contest: the "twenty greatest equations ever".

I feel some affinity with this strange quest, since a few years ago I tried to persuade my colleagues that "The Ten Greatest Equations of All Time" would be a good organizing principle for a general-education course in mathematics and its applications.

However, three of my personal top-ten list are missing from Crease's top twenty: Shannon entropy, Bayes' Theorem and Euler's generalization of Fermat's little theorem. Entropy is arguably the most important new concept of the twentieth century*; Bayes' theorem is fundamental to most statistical pattern recognition, whether by computers or by animals, and Euler's totient theorem is the basis of most current public-key cryptography. Also, all three of these are easy to understand, both intrinsically and in their applications.

Crease's poll had a pretty small N -- he got 120 proposals, with the top of his list getting 20 votes and the bottom just 2. That makes it all the stranger that my three were missing. I guess it's because he was surveying mainly physicists rather than psychologists or engineers, but still...

There are a lot of other great equations that are not on that list. But it's just wrong to leave those three out. I guess Fermat's little theorem isn't as fundamental as the other two, except that it allows you to bring up the question of whether P = NP and related stuff.

Are there any equations that come out of linguistics that should be included in my hypothetical course? Well, Shannon entropy is all about the information content of messages, and so it belongs to linguistics as the field should properly be defined. One other candidate would be Zipf's Law (~ Pareto's Law, Benford's Law, etc.). Of course, many of the other Great Equations have obvious linguistic applications, though I haven't been able to come with any plausible ways to bring E=mc² to bear.

*OK, Bolzmann wrote in 1877, and the Bolzmann equation S = k ln W is one of Crease's top twenty, but the implications of Boltzmann's work were not worked out until the 20th century, and Shannon's form of the entropy equation is more general and more important...

[via Ray Girvan at the Apothecary's Drawer weblog.]

There will always be an England

At least, as long as government ministers talk like this:

The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a minister for Europe can only use when speaking French.

[Denis MacShane, Minister for Europe]

I suppose that "MacShane" is a Scottish name, so make that "U.K." rather than "England". From across the Atlantic, these differences don't look as large as they should. Anyhow, I haven't seen a quote like this recently from a U.S. government official of similar rank. But maybe there's something equally British about this reaction:

Who? I don't know who you are talking about? I'm in a meeting with a group of City luminaries and none of them has heard of him. I can Google him for you if you are having difficulties.

[Ivan Massow, former chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts]

Stereotypes in action...

[Update: Des von Bladet emails invaluable context:

MacShane is one of my favourite politicians, and (not-coincidentally) a stalwart enthusiast of the Yoorpean Onion who speaks (by his own account) good French, German, Spanish and Italian, but he wasn't especially born MacShane:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3002848.stm:

His father was a Polish officer who fought the Germans in 1939, was wounded and then got to England where he became a commando. Denis MacShane was actually born Denis Matyjaszek and kept that name "without problems" through school and Oxford University.

"It was the BBC which gently but firmly suggested that such a name might not be 'readily pronounced' in the Midlands when I joined as a trainee in Birmingham," he said.

The BBC was like that then. "I chose my mother's maiden name instead. Her family is originally from Donegal in north-east Ireland and settled in Glasgow where I was born."

UKish is a better bet than English, for sure, (English is a folk-category with no standing in law that I'm aware of, so I would not even put these in the same category given that there's an 'R' in the month) but to claim that there will always be a UK implies some claims about the future of Northern Ireland, in particular, that would raise eyebrows in some circles.

Cheers,

Des,
folk-classifies himself as European

Aha. As our president said, "You forgot Poland!" (Here by "you" I mean "me".) ]

[More musings on Derrida here and here. ]

Getting kids (and politicians) wrong

Yesterday I heard a fascinating talk by Paul Foulkes, of the University of York, on the development of local dialect features in the speech of children in Newcastle, England. He reported a large number of interesting results that I won't discuss in this post. Instead, I want to speculate about one tantalizing fact that that he mentioned in passing: when he asked a large number of adults, both local and non-local, to guess the sex of two-to-four-year-old children by listening to short utterances, about two thirds of the judgments were wrong.

Here's the background. Some characteristic features of the local Newcastle dialect are gender-associated in young adults: glottalized variants of medial /p/, /t/, /k/ are found more in males than females, while pre-aspirated variants of final /p/, /t/, /k/ are commoner in females than in males. This differentiation begins to develop in children from about the age of three. Part of the reason is that mothers' speech to their children is differentiated in the appropriate way by sex.

Foulkes and his colleagues wanted to look at the perception of their features, by local and non-local listeners. Since it's hard -- maybe impossible -- to tell the sex of children at the age of 2-4 from their voice alone, they figured that these gender-associated dialect features might be used by local listeners. And they were.

The experiment was designed using a selection of naturally-occurring isolated-word stimuli, recorded during the original studies of the development of this structured variation. So the stimuli were not well controlled, as Paul was at pains to explain. That is, half of them overall came from girls and half from boys; the stimuli with medial glottalized stops were likewise half from girls and half from boys; the stimuli with pre-aspirated final stops were ditto; and so on; but the interaction of these features with speech rate, loudness, pitch range, and other stereotypically gender-associated features was not controlled. It was not exactly random, either -- it was just whatever it happened to be in the real-life recordings they had made.

It's probably because of this complex and uncontrolled variation that the results of the experiment were somewhat messy. The effect they were looking for -- evidence that the local listeners were sensitive to the gender-linked features of the local dialect -- could be seen in the data, but it was a small effect and a somewhat erratic one.

The thing that most interested me, though, was something that Paul didn't focus on his talk, because it wasn't part of the design or the planned interpretation of the experiment in question. He hadn't analyzed the effect in the experimental data, didn't have the exact figure on his slides, and only mentioned it in response to a question. So I don't want to put him on the spot with respect to any claims about this result -- for now let's just say that it's a speculation on my part about a result that might be true. If it turns out (after Paul checks) that I've gotten it wrong, I'll post a correction. However, effects of this general type do happen, and it's interesting to see why.

The way this experiment was designed, if the subjects had guessed "boy" and "girl" without any information from the stimuli, they would have been right half the time. A subject could have guessed "boy" all the time, or "girl" all the time, or "boy" and "girl" alternately, or "boy" and "girl" randomly, or "boy" through the first half of the experiment and "girl" through the second half. It doesn't matter -- they'd still be right half the time. (I think -- I didn't check for the relevant experimental design issues).

So if the subjects were wrong about 2/3 of the time overall, that means that they were getting some useful information from the stimuli. It was just wrong information, information that led them to a false conclusion. What could this have been? Paul did some multiple regression analyses that showed that subjects' judgments were being influenced by features like amplitude, pitch, speech rate and voice quality. Basically (as I recall) his subjects showed the effects of the conventional stereotypes that girls' speech is softer, slower, higher in pitch, and more breathy-voiced, while boys' speech is louder, faster, lower in pitch, and more creaky-voiced. These stereotypes are not random: they correspond to an image of girls as more polite and controlled, and boys as more, well, boisterous. (Except for the pitch business, which is complicated but probably reflects an influence of adult norms along with a confounding influence of the pitch-raising effects of greater loudness and vocal effort).

Now at least for some of these features, these stereotypes are known to be wrong. For example, girls talk faster than boys do, on average, according to the experimental results I've seen cited. In the particular stimuli used in Paul's experiment, it might well happen to be true that several salient features were distributed in the anti-stereotypical way.

Notice that it's not enough for the stereotyped features to be distributed randomly. Suppose that girls and boys are equally likely to be loud or soft, but listeners think that "loud" means "boy" and "soft" means "girl", and so whenever in the experiment they hear a recording of a kid yelling, they say "boy", and whenever they hear a recording of a kid speaking softly, they say "girl". The result will still be that they're right half the time.

For them to be wrong more often than right, the basis of their response has to be worse than wrong in the sense of unconnected with the facts. It actually has to be the opposite of the facts, to some extent. There's an interesting story to be told about why humans -- who are usually such accurate statistical learners -- can (all too often) develop shared perceptual associations that are so significantly at variance with the facts. (Positive feedback due to greater salience of stereotypical features will get you random beliefs, but sometimes there's something more...)

The point that I want to make here is that stereotypes have a powerful influence on the perception of the "subtle style cues" in speech that so much of current political journalism is focusing on. These stereotypes can be associated with groups (like Southerners or New Englanders), or with individuals (like George W. Bush or John Kerry). And despite their powerful influence on perception, they can be quite wrong.

Policy vs. "character" -- and its linguistic correlates

This evening, Kevin Drum's Political Animal weblog has the clearest short statement that I've seen about what's wrong with political journalism in America:

POLICY vs. CHARACTER....Jon Chait has an interesting piece in The New Republic today. Ostensibly it's about flip-flopping (bottom line: Kerry does it less than you think, Bush does it more), but about halfway through he switches to media criticism:

One of the curiosities of political journalism is that reporters tend to be assiduously even-handed about matters of policy (which can revolve around disputes over objective fact) but ruthlessly judgmental on questions of character (which are inherently subjective). In fact, most reporters don't know or care much about policy. They see politics primarily through the lens of the candidates' personal traits.

Now, this is hardly an original observation — in fact, it's downright pedestrian to anyone who reads Somerby regularly — but Chait does a good job of teasing it out and explaining how an increasing fixation on "character" has made political life almost impossible for moderates from either party — but especially for Democrats.

As the 9/26 article by Alex Williams in the NYT Fashion and Style section explains, we're talking about personal traits whose objective correlates are often things like "gesture, posture, syntax and tone of voice". It might be true, as Williams claims, that "subtle style cues" like these "account for as much as 75 percent of a viewer's judgment about the electability of a candidate". Perhaps it's always been that way, I don't know. It certainly seems to me that this stuff makes up a larger fraction of journalists' campaign coverage than it used to.

Ironically, most of these "subtle style cues" could actually be investigated empirically and objectively, if they really mattered. I guess you could make a case that they do indeed matter to some extent. In predicting how someone will act in the future, your estimate of their character has to be mixed in with your opinion of their promised policies and their past record, and your estimate of their character has to depend to some extent on these subtle cues. But in this area, as Chait, Drum and Somerby explain, journalists these days mostly work from conclusion to evidence. They decide what they think each candidate's character issues are, positive or (mostly) negative, and then they pick examples of "subtle style cues" to suit -- or they just invent things.

My own opinion about this stuff is that it would probably be better if journalists focused on candidates' statements, records and promises, along with the relevant factual background, leaving evaluation of the candidates' characters up to individual voters. But that's not the world we live in. Instead, we've got a media system with powerful positive feedback loops that rapidly create shared stereotypes, fed by clever political operatives (and journalists!) busily drawing caricatures with vivid and telling anecdotes that are often out of context, misinterpreted or outright false.

In this situation, linguists' insights can certainly be helpful to political operatives and other campaign junkies. I'm not as confident that we can help ordinary voters in a positive way. But when we can clear away some of the trash obscuring the issues (and also obscuring the candidates' characters!), we should try to do so.

How to Decide Who to Vote For

Public Service Announcement: If you're still not sure how to cast your votes on Nov. 2, some good places to start looking for information might be the website for the League of Women Voters, Public Agenda's First Choice 2004, or Project Vote Smart.

Some of my colleagues here on Language Log have made a cottage industry of pointing out the errors of critics of George Bush who pick on his alleged linguistic ineptness as evidence of his stupidity and/or ignorance. What I find more irritating than the questionable evidence for his ineptness is the idea that it is reasonable to judge presidential candidates by their linguistic skills. Its true that we make judgments on this basis, but for the most part we make such judgments when we don't have much else to go on and we recognize that they aren't terribly reliable for most purposes.

In the case at hand, we have a tremendous amount of much more useful information. The candidates have made many statements about their policies. In addition, we have considerable information about their performance in prevous political offices and military service. It shouldn't be at all difficult to decide between them on this basis. They have different policies on foreign affairs, the economy, civil liberties, the environment, and many other issues. They have different world views and moral values. These are the bases on which rational people should decide. I wouldn't be a linguist if I didn't think that language is interesting, but that superficial judgments of linguistic ability should enter into one's decision as to who to vote for is the height of silliness. Pace linguistics geeks and Jacques Derrida, language isn't everything.

Beware linguistic and political stereotypes

Dick Hamming always used to say that you should beware of finding what you're looking for. He was talking about the dangers of accepting a mathematical model of natural phenomena just because you could adjust its parameters to fit a few experimental observations. However, his warning applies even more strongly to vaguer sorts of theories, especially those that are sanctioned as socially-accepted stereotypes. In this case, the "facts" that fit are often selected from among many that don't fit, and then exaggerated to boot. Sometimes things are just plain made up.

In today's Register, Thomas C. Greene has an opinion piece under the headline "Was Bush packing Wi-Fi in TV Debate?" Greene makes it clear that he thinks the answer is "yes", based mainly on his evaluation of the president's linguistic performance:

Wireless technology might explain why US President George W. Bush performed better than usual in the last two presidential debates with his opponent, Senator John Kerry.

Unless he's reading a well-rehearsed speech, the President is normally much given to malapropisms and incoherent syntax. [...]

Yet, during both presidential debates, he miraculously spoke in clear, organized sentences that were fairly relevant to the questions asked. He stumbled only occasionally, and then only briefly.

I think that Greene's arguments are nonsense. He's selecting and exaggerating some facts, while ignoring others that don't suit his prejudices.

We've pointed out in several posts here at Language Log that George Bush's contributions to the first two presidential debates were sometimes not particular clear, not particularly well organized, and not particularly relevant to the questions asked. I suppose that the logical way to try to refute Greene's argument would be to show that Bush's debate performance so far has not been been strikingly more coherent than his performance in other settings. But this would not really scuttle the wireless-prompting theory, because other attempts to promote it (like Dave Lindorff's 10/8 Salon article) have speculated that Bush is usually wired in the same alleged way.

The thing is, I don't believe that George Bush's public speaking is nearly as different from John Kerry's, in terms of linguistic coherence, as (many) people think.

Let's start out by noting that the arguments about coherence go both ways. Bush has been stereotyped as linguistically and cognitively inept; but Kerry has been stereotyped as distracted by details, unable to articulate the forest for parenthesizing about the trees. When Kathleen Hall Jamieson told a NYT reporter that "the language of decisiveness is subject, verb, object, end sentence", she was supplying quotes to bolster the reporter's theory that "Kerry has a tendency to ramble, when an audience wants punchiness", and that he uses too many hedges, "words and grammatical constructions that imply uncertainty or qualification".

If you think about it, the two men's different stereotypes can be applied to exactly the same behavior, giving alternative and roughly opposite explanations for the same facts. If Bush sputters or rambles, it's because he's got some sort of linguistic or cognitive deficit: he's not intellectual enough. If Kerry sputters or rambles, it's because he's trying to be too nuanced, not responding from the gut: he's too intellectual.

But roughly as often as not, the stereotypes don't fit. For example, consider this passage from Kerry's side of the second presidential debate:

And I believe ((that)) if we have the option which scientists tell us we do
of curing Parkinson's
curing diabetes
curing
uh uh a- a-
you know
some kind of a- a- of a-
uh ((s- p- th- you know))
paraplegic, or quadraplegic, or
uh uh you know a spinal cord injury, anything
that's the nature of the human spirit.

This is hardly a paragon of linguistic facility, either syntactically or phonetically. There's that embarrassingly long (almost 7-second) delay in lexical access. If George Bush had experienced a lexical-access breakdown like this, we'd have commentary all over the "internets" about early senile dementia and the like. There's also a pronunciation issue here -- an extra schwa between [p] and [l] in paraplegic and quadraplegic, similar to the extra schwa in Bush's much-discussed "nucular" pronunciation of nuclear.

But did Kerry sputter and stumble here because he's trying to be too nuanced, or hedging, or explicating complexities? No, this is an enthusiastic projection of faith straight from the gut, and his difficulty seems to be a purely linguistic one -- he starts with a list of nouns for conditions that stem cells might cure, and then can't figure out what noun to use to describe the condition of suffering from a spinal cord injury. He apparently starts from the adjectival form paraplegic, and then can't decide what the right corresponding noun should be, or how to pronounce it. This is exactly the kind of linguistic muddle that is supposed to characterize George W. Bush. In fact, it's similar to the syntactic trap that resulted in Bush's famous "practicing their love" gaffe. But this kind of syntactic incoherence is a general human problem, and if you want to tag it as characteristic of Bush, you need to do more than to present some anecdotes in which he exhibits it.

John Kerry has gotten a stiff dose of stereotyping in the press. Geoff Nunberg has recently apologized for having repeated a false quotation originally published by the egregious Maureen Dowd, who apparently made something up that John Kerry might have said (but didn't) in order to make a point about the kind of person she thinks Kerry is. And Geoff also debunked the New York Post's gossip column, which reckoned (with no evidence, and as it happens, falsely) that Kerry's use of "sort of" (one of those hedges) "is a subtle indicator of upper-class origins or aspirations."

Those two cases both involved journalists (if we can use that word for Dowd and the Post's gossip columnist) who found what they were looking for. These "journalists" happen to have been looking -- not by chance -- for the same thing: a quote to show how John Kerry is an elitist. And of course, many commentators, journalistic and otherwise, have been looking for years for "Bushisms": evidence to confirm their prejudice that George W. Bush is a dolt. They don't have any trouble finding suitable "facts" -- but the discovery process involves a great deal of selection, exaggeration and over-interpretation.

I'm not trying to say that there are no linguistic or rhetorical differences between these two candidates. We've found plenty to say about that, and so have others, and all the commentary has barely scratched the surface. (For example, I might speculate that Bush is unwilling to fumble around for the right word for as long a span of time as others -- like Kerry -- are, and that this is part of the explanation for his occasional malapropisms.) But when you look into such things yourself, or read others' reports, be careful. If you find what you're looking for, and you care about the truth, beware.

And if you don't find what you're looking for, the explanation doesn't necessarily involve secret wireless transmissions from hidden controllers...

Trevor's Law of hip etymology

Newsweek recently printed an excerpt from John Leland's forthcoming book Hip: The History. Lelend traces the word hip back to Wolof verbs meaning "to see" or "to open ones eyes", following Clarence Major. Trevor at kaleboel is very skeptical, basing his objection less on any particular facts than on a general principle of historical linguistics. The principle in question strikes me as a plausible one, with a considerable range of potential applications. And I haven't seen it expressed elsewhere, so in keeping with the tradition for such things, I propose to name it after its author: Trevor's Law. The only trouble is, I'm not quite sure what the principle is.

Here's the background. First, Leland:

Clarence Major, in his study “Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang”, traces the origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi (“to see”) or hipi (“to open one’s eyes”), and dates its usage in America to the 1700s. So from the linguistic start, hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia. The slaves also brought the Wolof dega (“to understand”), source of the colloquial dig, and jev (“to disparage or talk falsely”), the root of jive.

Now, Trevor (slightly abridged):

[M]y principal complaint is of the improbability of a word like hip emanating from seeing or looking, instead of, as I think is normal with such terminology, from f*cking. The OED service I was using with great pleasure has vanished, but I do think that such words are generally knicker-born (I am not aware of what gentlemen--or prison wardresses--wear these days), and in the following fashion:

1. Cooler (woman, late C17-early C19: low, ex the cooling of passion and bodily temperature after sexual intercourse (Partridge)) → cool (impertinent, audacious, colloquial ca 1820-1880, then standard English (also Partridge)) → cool in the modern sense.
   1. Hip (lump of plastic contributing not inconsiderably to China's export earnings) → various sexually-tinted expressions involving the biological substitute for former (see Partridge) → hips, she is|was|were (anecdotal, mid-C20 sex trade, still used ... → hip (record company sales exec, tight trews, dandruff)).
   2. Hebben (Dutch, to have and to hold; b → ~p in many parts--just ask Barry, Scheveningen's finest drummer-florist ) → (Nieuw Amsterdam) → hep, in the (not so) modern sense.
   3. If you consider this bo!!ocks with bells on, try Cecil Adams' hypothesis; I am sceptical: his hypothesis is asexual, and thus floored (no seeling here, thank you, South Asian scholars).
2. Dig (early C19: clobber successfully (Partridge), ie related to f*ck-type terms implying violence) → dig in the modern sense.

I'm afraid that the OED is no help with respect to the specific case in question: it gives the etymology of hip and hep as "origin unknown" and "of unknown origin", respectively, and the first citations are

1904 G. V. HOBART Jim Hickey i. 15 At this rate it'll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?

1908 Sat. Even. Post 5 Dec. 17/1 What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn't hep.

I don't own a copy of Clarence Major's Juba to Jive, so I don't know what evidence he cites for am 18th-century origin of "hip" or "hep" in the U.S., or for its connection to Wolof. I'll try to stop by the library at some point and check it out.

But what mainly interests me here is not the history of hip, but rather the nature of Trevor's Law. Trevor says that it's "normal" for "such terminology" to "emanate" from "f*cking". He restates his principle more directly, though more euphemistically, by saying that "such words are generally knicker-born".

I believe that I know what Trevor means by "emanate" and "knicker-born". And as for "normal" and "generally", that's just a question of what the domain of quantification is and what the statistics turn out to be. What's obscure to me is what he means by "such terminology" or "such words".

He could mean "slang in general" -- but that's clearly not true, though sexual metaphors are no doubt well represented in slang. He could mean "slang terms for positively evaluated characteristics of style" -- but that wouldn't cover dig, which he mentions along with hip and cool as examples of "such words". Is is "slang terms for in-group perception or evaluation"?

This could be a very popular Law, I'm sure. If I could only figure out what it is. Sorry to be so unhip, Trevor.

Personal and intellectual history of sentence diagrams

Like Bill Poser, I recently read Kitty Burns Florey's essay on diagramming sentences, following the link from A.L.D. Unlike Bill, I was taught sentence diagramming in elementary school, so the content of Florey's analyses didn't surprise me.

I'll confess, though, that this approach to grammatical description never made much sense to me, back when I was nine or ten years old. Questions about why the lines should go one way rather than another were treated like questions about why there are three feet in a yard -- that's just how it is, kid, shut up and finish the exercise. At nine, I probably wasn't ready to understand a better answer, but in any case, diagramming sentences wasn't something that I ever did for fun.

When I studied syntax again in college and graduate school, I never really connected what I learned to my elementary-school experience. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I saw those old diagrams as an alternative notation for surface syntactic structure, some sort of informal way to encode lexical dependencies. Linguistics-course syntax was all about "why this and not that", and variant notations for the basic observations were not of much interest. And there was not a great deal of respect for earlier traditions of analysis -- the required "History of Linguistics" course at MIT was familiarly known as "Bad Guys".

In any case, syntax was still not my favorite subject. This time my problem was exactly the opposite of my problem with sentence-analysis in elementary school. In the third grade, everything seemed to be carved in stone, but in college and graduate school, the field was written on water. There was no stable description of the phenomena. The theory kept changing, not only in terms of explanations but in terms of the entities and relations of the basic descriptions. Doing syntactic analysis felt like trying to lay out a garden on an avalance. Exciting, at least at first, but it always seemed like a gamble whether you could get any significant piece of work done before everything changed out from under you.

Anyhow, I never asked myself, before now, just where the techniques of "sentence diagramming" that I was taught in grammar school came from. Who invented them, and when?

As usual, the answer is available on the internet.

There's an extensive practical introduction to "diagramming sentences" on line at Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut (about 30 miles west of my elementary school, FWIW). This is part of a larger "Guide to Grammar and Writing", which gives advice on numerous topics at the "Paragraph Level" and the "Essay and Research Paper Level" as well as "Word and Sentence Level".

For a quick explanation of how sentence diagramming works, there's a powerpoint presentation, an html page on Basic Sentence Parts and Patterns, and another one on Sentence Types and Clause Configurations. Here's an index to the whole site.

The "Brief Introduction" explains that

There are other ways to represent graphically the structure of a sentence, but the most popular method is based on schemes developed by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg over a hundred years ago.

Several works by Reed and Kellogg are available as etexts from Project Gutenberg, including Graded Lessons in English and Higher Lessons in English. A sketch of older history can be found here (at "polysyllabic.com"):

The sentence diagrams found in schoolbook grammars today are known as Reed-Kellogg diagrams. This system can be found in Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg. An Elementary English Grammar. (1878), and a simple example is shown to the right. Aparently they had an earlier incarnation, as in the introduction to this work, Reed and Kellogg remark, "We invite attention to our system of Diagrams They have grown out of the suggestions of different teachers in the Polytechnic Institute. They were copyrighted in 1868 by A. Reed and O. H. Hall; the copyright now stands in our own name." (Reed and Kellog, p. 5). I do not, however, have any bibliographical information for this earlier work.

Other systems existed in the 19th century too. These pages attempt to show the various older diagramming schemes. It is a work in progress, and I'm adding to it as time permits.

The earliest system I've seen is by S. W. Clark., A Practical Grammar: in which Words, Phrases, and Sentences are Classified According to their Offices, and their Relation to Each Other. Illustrated by a Complete System of Diagrams. (1847). He has a system of balloons drawn around words.

The polysyllabic.com author has scanned "Clark's entire introductory section on diagrams" and reproduced it on his/her site.

I still don't know the intellectual history of sentence diagramming before Clark, nor its influence on later developments. I suppose that most American linguists educated before 1960 or so must have learned this system, but I don't know whether there are any other connections. But I know where to start, I guess.

[The CCC grammar site is sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation, and was written by Charles Darling, a faculty member at CCC].

[The "Polytechnic" referred to by Brainerd and Kellogg is Brooklyn Polytechnic , whose web page includes a picture of one or the other of this pair, it's not clear which.]

Down the gopher poll

With all due respect to both Geoff and the gophers, I feel compelled to join Eric in defense of TAPS. And partly on linguistic grounds, no less.

I suspect that Eric's right about the reasons why "eastward" and "westward" seem so natural in the context of UCSC geography: the inhabited part of the campus is considerably top-heavy, and the time when the direction of the shuttle matters most is in getting from one college to another. East-bound loops are the quickest way to get from west campus to east campus, and vice versa for the west-bound loops. (If your goal is to get down to the base of campus, on the part of the route that involves most of the north/south and counter-nominal east/west action, then any shuttle will do—though admittedly you'll have a slower and curvier ride if you go the long way.) Furthermore, getting from college to college is probably considered by TAPS to be the "primary" function of the shuttles. In fact, their own description emphasizes the "cross-campus" aspect (which I take to mean between colleges), while at the same time exhibiting doubt that people will understand the relation between the "main campus" (at the top) and the lower section on Hagar Drive:

Loop buses run both directions through campus, at 7–minute intervals. Cross–campus trips take as little as 20 minutes on the Loop! Loop buses do not enter Quarry Plaza; Loop buses enter the East Remote parking lot when northbound (travelling uphill) on Hagar Drive.

Naturally, no one going from Crown to Kresge cares about more subtle issues like which way the gophers are facing, whether the bus is planning on turning around after they get off, or what would happen if you snoozed and stayed on for an entire loop which wearing a GPS tracking device.

Geoff does care about subtle issues, though.

It is one of the things that makes him a great scholar, after all. He wants things to be named as accurately as possible. (Maybe he worries that outsiders might think that the campus is filled with ignorant or delusional people. Maybe he worries that one morning when he is sleepy or preoccupied, they will trick him into accidentally getting on the wrong shuttle.) But I think he is being overly harsh on the TAPS folks, by asking them to uphold a superhuman standard. Humans have limited perspective, and limited brain capacity, and better things to worry about. Not only does it take enormous thought (and several Language Log posts) to settle on a name that isn't misleading in one way or another, but once you do, few will understand it.  If there's no communicative payoff anyway, why not stick to something that's intuitive, even if you can't defend (or even explain) it?

But that was the practical defense. Now for the linguistic one. In recognition of the fact that routes are, well, intrinsically relational things, and suffer from all the problems that Geoff has pointed out, it seems that they are frequently named with the following convention: pick some salient spot along the route, and name it according to where the bus/train/mule/jitney would take most immediately you if you got on at that spot. I conjecture that at UCSC, the salient spot is Science Hill (about two-thirds of the way to the west along the roughly east-west portion of McLaughlin Drive). My evidence comes from (1) the fact that this is where the greatest number of students seem to get off in the morning, and on in the afternoon, and (2) this is where Santa Cruz Metro bus schedules print their "turn-around" times at. (It's also the only part of campus up there that isn't residential, so using it as a reference point avoids any claims of Orientalism among fervid partisans of east or west colleges.)

This same line of reasoning is why, when I am in downtown Boston, I must sometimes hop an "inbound" subway train to head back out to Cambridge. (I am already "in", but in this case the designated turning spot is Park Street). North/south and east/west street directions in cities almost always have this flavor, too: North becomes south at 1st St, east becomes west at Main St, and so on. We could use more subtle approaches, like finding the true geographic midpoint, or doing studies to pick the point with the greatest traffic flow, but the fact is that these defining points are conventionally determined by where the biggest buildings are, or the most opportunities to transfer, or by some accident of history. If we weren't allowed to pick arbitrary, conventionalized vantage points, then we'd never even be able have words like clockwise (which would mean something quite different if you're the clock, or the number 6).

Previous posts have already pointed out that the east/west designation depends on a particular vantage point, and that the point is one that makes sense to human riders. (Sorry, gophers. You can eat the lines that provide internet to the campus in revenge if you want, but it won't make you any more influential, linguistically.)  Geoff, wanting absolute truth, was not swayed. But what he seems to have overlooked is that all naming is, at some level, conventional and arbitrary. As Mark points out, he should be glad that they at least picked names that reveal the opposing nature of the two Loops. And now that I work on a campus that was evidently not designed with humans in mind, I can add that he should be glad that at least it makes sense somewhere—to humans, not to gophers.

First postscript, even before Geoff has debunked:

It is worth noting that the Santa Cruz Metro also runs buses in both directions, but they sidestep the naming issue entirely. Buses 10, 12, 16, and 20 follow the westbound/counter-clockwise/outer loop, while 13, 15, and 19 follow the eastbound/clockwise/inner loop. According to the list of routes, the last three are simply called "Reverse". It's contrastive, and true at every point along the route. But also utterly uninformative.

Second postscript, also before Geoff has debunked:

I agree that the suggestion of "outer" and "inner" loops is brilliant for getting around the loops problem, but unfortunately, it would cause a different problem: there are already Core and Perimeter routes, which aren't loops (they stop and turn around). As a phonologist, I'm troubled by the potential loss of contrast between "outer" and "perimeter".

Diagramming Sentences

Kitty Burns Florey has a nostalgic essay on diagramming sentences, an activity now very rare in American schools. The essay is illustrated with numerous diagrams. Florey points out that, like her, Gertrude Stein enjoyed diagramming sentences. She quotes Stein as writing:

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

Surprised though I was at Florey's and Stein's enjoyment of diagramming, I was even more struck by the analysis implicit in Florey's diagrams, which is that of a form of transformational grammar. Wh-questions, for example, are analyzed as having the wh-word in situ. The sentence What is the dog doing? is diagrammed as The dog is doing what?. Ditransitives are analyzed as containing a phonetically null preposition. The dog gave us his paw. is analyzed as containing a prepositional phrase to us in which the preposition to is phonetically null. It is hard to imagine that transformational grammar as developed by Chomsky can have had any influence on Catholic school education in the 1950s, so assuming that Florey's diagrams reflect what she learned in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette and not more recent influence from linguistics, this must reflect a variety of traditional or folk grammar.

Language rage in Spain

Miguel Ángel Moratinos, foreign minister of Spain, has asked the European Union (says The Economist: here by subscription; page 48 of the October 9th print edition) to make four of Spain's non-Spanish languages official: Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Valencian. So that would of course make the proud Basques (north central-east coast), Catalans (northeast coast), Galicians (northwest coast), and Valencians (central east coast) very pleased, wouldn't it?

No. Language politics are always a little stranger than you would think. The Catalans are furious. They regard Valencian as just a southern dialect of Catalan, so this move has actually undercut their status. Another crisis. Call in a linguist. (Not that linguists can hold out a lot of hope for exact, well motivated, and uncontroversial decisions concerning language boundaries.)

If the change is put into effect, it will be a new catastrophe for the EU's translation service. The number of translators the EU logically needs (assuming very optimistically that every translator from language A to language B can go the other way as well) goes up from the 190 conservatively calculated here on a basis of 20 languages, to a new figure of (24² – 24) ÷ 2 = 276 types of translator (you need Basque/Maltese, Galician/Latvian, Valencian/Dutch, Catalan/Estonian... and 272 others).

"Sort Of": As American as Heinz Ketchup

The New York Post's Page Six gossip column made a little foray into sociolinguistic analysis recently, with an item on Kerry's choice of hedges:

THAT John Kerry had better watch his tongue -- it's starting to betray his elitist leanings. The other day, he said, "This president sort of wandered back." Language mavens say the use of "sort of" as an adverb is a subtle indicator of upper-class origins or aspirations. You won't catch any good ol' boys in those vital swing states saying "sort of."

Not hardly. "Sort of" was country before country was cool -- in fact, before "cool" was cool.

The Post's writer didn't indicate which "linguistic mavens" he had in mind, but the idea that "sort of" is an upper-class affectation came as news to Paul Kay, whose 1984 paper on "sort of" is still the locus classicus for the topic. And in fact "sort of" is a staple of country lyrics, though often spelled as "sorta." For example:

I went to the country just the other day/To see my Uncle Bill and sorta pass the time away. Hank Williams, "Everything's Okay," Hank Williams

Across the alley from the Alamo lived a pinto pony and a Navajo/ Who sang a sort of Indian Hideho. "Across the alley from the Alamo," Bob Wills

And his eyes turn sorta misty as his heart begins to glow... "Ballad of the Alamo," Marty Robbins

You put me through some changes, Sorta like a Waring blender "Poor Pitiful Me," Terri Clark/Linda Ronstadt

Well I`ve been sorta worried About Santa Claus this year. "Santa's Gonna Come in a Pickup Truck," Alan Jackson

It was misty in the canyon, the light was sorta dim. "Rider on the Rim," Red Steagall

But the pride sorta died when the man got weary eyed. "The Christmas Trail," Don Edwards

One boy sorta snickered when the roll was read. "Vidalia," Sammy Kershaw

Yet I always sort of missed her / Since that last sad night I kissed her "Spanish is the Loving Tongue," Numerous artists

It could leave you with the suspicion that the Page Six crowd doesn't actually know who Bob Wills was.

True, Kerry tends to say "sort of" more than "sorta," but if that's the variable the Page Six writer had in mind, you could charge Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan with having elitist leanings, too. But it's Kerry's misfortune that anything he does is liable to be tainted as effete . Windsurfing may be "the poor man's sailing," but Kerry has managed to singlehandely turn it into a rich boy's diversion.

The question of the question and the question of the place

In juxtaposition with Jacques Derrida's death, we here at Language Log have undertaken a post-structuralist analysis of route direction nomenclature. As a result, the Transportation and Parking Services department at the University of California at Santa Cruz has already changed the naming system for its campus buses from East vs. West to Clockwise vs. Counterclockwise, although the US Department of Transportation is still stonewalling on the issue of Beltway signage.

Meanwhile, I imagine that Jacques Derrida has been disputing the inscriptional fallacy with the Recording Angel. Since Raduriel surely reads Language Log, perhaps the issue of loop direction naming has come up in their discussions. Jacques' initial reaction was no doubt dismissive: "But of course: difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude." If Raduriel then introduced the point-of-view problem -- topologists vs. cartographers, students vs. gophers, those in the loop vs. the outsiders -- the discussion will have become more animated, with Jacques quoting from one of his recent essays:

The very form of this question concerning a question -- namely "where?, in what place can a question take place?" -- supposes that between the question and the place, between the question of the question and the question of the place, there be a sort of implicit contract, a supposed affinity, as if a question should always be first authorized by a place, legitimated in advance by a determined space that makes it both rightful and meaningful, thus making it possible and by the same token necessary, both legitimate and inevitable.

According to the French idiom -- and already the usage of this idiom, the effective authority of this idiom, brings us back to the question of the cosmopolitical and would by itself enjoin us to ask this question -- one would say that there are places where there are grounds for asking this question.

Score one for the gophers.

Meanwhile, back at Language Log, our plain duty is to deconstruct chapter two of Of Grammatology, the one entitled Linguistics and Grammatology, on behalf of Derrida's many fans and anti-fans among our readers.

My earlier post on Derrida's 9/11 essay has stimulated as much email as anything else I've ever written. Most of the correspondents have either praised me for showing that Derrida's writings are nonsense, or attacked me for suggesting the same thing. Only Chris Waigl noticed what I actually said, in the end: that Derrida's ideas on 9/11 have content and are wrong. It's an appropriate tribute to his life and work, to believe the same thing about his views on language. If I were to discuss them, that's where I'd end.

[Signage via Reality Control via Nathan's Notebook.]

Westward on the eastbound shuttle; or, what a long strange trip that would be

In his first post on the shuttle loops at UCSC, Geoff states:

The idea that you can distinguish a clockwise from a counter-clockwise circular loop by saying that one goes to the west and the other doesn't is more than just wrong, it's a screamingly obvious geometrical impossibility.

And in his second post, he concludes:

There is no guaranteed, unambiguous, intuitive way to say of a shuttle running a loop that it is in general running westward or eastward.

Even before Geoff conceded a wrinkle in his proposal to rename the shuttles "Clockwise" (formerly "Eastbound") and "Counterclockwise" (formerly "Westbound"), I thought back to my shuttle-riding days as an undergrad at UCSC 10-15 years ago. I don't recall myself or anyone else ever even stopping to think about the names of the "Westbound" vs. "Eastbound" shuttles. They just made sense, in exactly the way that Geoff's report of John Cowan's steering wheel analogy makes sense.* I offer here five more arguments that the "Westbound" and "Eastbound" shuttle names make sense -- possibly more sense than the alternatives that Geoff has positively entertained.

Argument 1. The Colleges.

UCSC is divided into 10 colleges (in my day, only 8). If you want to get from a college on the east side of campus (Crown, Merrill, Cowell, Stevenson) to a college on the west side (Kresge, Porter, Eight, Oakes), a Westbound shuttle takes significantly less time than an Eastbound one, which will go far south before coming back north to where the action is. (Ditto in the opposite direction, mutatis mutandis.)

Four potential objections, and how to counter them:

1. What about going from one college to another on the same side of campus? On the east side there's no benefit to taking a shuttle from college to college -- it doesn't go up/down the hills that comprise most of the distance between them. On the west side, Kresge to/from Eight/Oakes is a hike worthy of a shuttle ride -- Oakes to Kresge, in particular, is largely uphill. Here we have a potential problem, since Kresge is further west than Oakes, but you take the Eastbound shuttle to get from Oakes to Kresge. But it's obvious that Kresge lies along the shortest shuttle path between Oakes and the indisputably east-side colleges, Oakes is closer to UCSC's West Entrance, and so on. No problem.
2. The two new colleges (Nine and Ten) are kind of in the middle. First of all, you don't shuttle between Nine and Ten. Otherwise, you have the east colleges to the east of you and the west colleges to the west of you. No problem.
3. Do students really identify with the colleges? Over time, the college system at UCSC has lost some of its significance (centralization of adminstration, establishment of departments), but each college still has its own dorms, dining hall, classrooms and offices, general education requirements, architecture, ambience, academic and social reputation, and so on. Judging from my own experience at UCSC and from what I see of the similar college system we have at UCSD, most undergrads do identify pretty strongly with their colleges.
4. Not everyone is shuttling from college to college; there are major classroom buildings, libraries, the health center, the bookstore, student services, etc. You have to learn where these places are and how to get to them at some point. Not all of them are accessible with this shuttle anyway. Will "Clockwise" vs. "Counterclockwise" or "Outer Loop" vs. "Inner Loop" really help? Get used to it.

Argument 2. Top heaviness.

While UCSC's Main Entrance is at the southern ("bottom") end of the loop, the overwhelming bulk of campus buildings themselves are on the northern ("top") end, facilitating the understanding of the steering wheel analogy. (In case you haven't yet, see the map.)

Argument 3. West = Left = Counterclockwise, East = Right = Clockwise.

John Cowan noted that "left" and "right" are conceptually linked with "counterclockwise" and "clockwise", respectively, and with "west" and "east", respectively. By transitivity, Cowan argues, there's a conceptual link between, e.g., "clockwise" and "east". But there is an even more direct link in the case of the shuttle loop, because it isn't circular -- there are turns. Every major turn made in the westbound/counterclockwise direction is a left, and every major turn made in the eastbound/clockwise direction is a right.

Of course, this assumes that you allow (as Geoff may not) that there's a conceptual link between e.g. "east" and "right" in the first place. Cowan says this is "based on the notion that north = top"; instead of "top" I would say "straight ahead", but it amounts to the same thing.

Argument 4. External evidence.

The steering wheel isn't the only possible basis for Cowan's analogy. Key locks are another. I don't think an instruction to turn a key left or right is very confusing; right is clockwise, left is counterclockwise. Even if you think that a prototypical lock is on one side or the other of a door and that we may thus conceptualize a prototypical key-turn as "away" (= unlocked) or "toward" (= locked) the door jamb, you still need "top" as a reference point for this distinction, on which see Argument 3 just above. (And note how disorienting it is when someone has installed a lock upside down.)

Argument 5. The proposed alternatives are more confusing.

Of course, your judgment/experience may differ, but I have to stop and think about "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" -- not because I picture myself as a gopher, but because I really do feel that I have to conjure up a clock face and map it on to whatever it is (the shuttle loop, in this case). Understanding "westbound" and "eastbound" correctly is effortless by comparison.

Peter Maydell's suggestion (as reported in the "Note added later" at the bottom of Geoff's third post) that "mentioning three stops along the route will unambiguously identify it" also requires more processing than I think is necessary in the case of "westbound" vs. "eastbound". Bertilo Wennergren's "Inner Loop" vs. "Outer Loop" distinction is interesting, but again I think that the conceptual links leading to an understanding of "westbound" and "eastbound" are less complex than those needed to map knowledge of driving rules onto campus shuttle routes. (And why put folks from left-hand-side-driving societies, not to mention 18-year-olds who have probably had a fake ID longer than they've had a driver license, at a disadvantage?)

So, would I advocate keeping the shuttle names as-is (or "as-are")? Not that I have a stake in it -- this issue is entirely between Geoff and TAPS, as far as I'm concerned -- but yes, on the basis of the above, I think I would. Geoff is right, of course, that the above alternatives to "westbound" and "eastbound" have the distinct advantage of actually being accurate, but I would say that arriving at that realization involves more conceptual processing -- a claim I base entirely on personal introspection and intuitive conviction.

Whatever names are used, though, are probably going to be internalized by regular shuttle bus riders as typical unanalyzed proper names. New and irregular shuttle bus riders will have to puzzle things out a little no matter what, so any nonarbitrary naming system is as good as another. Institutional inertia seems like a good enough reason to leave well enough alone.

* The careful reader may have noticed that, just as carefully, Geoff neglected to note that John Cowan's common-sense theory makes the right prediction while Fernando Pereira's topology-intensive alternative makes the wrong one. back.

[ Comments? ]

Faulty Intelligence

I did a little interview on the Friday presidential debates on a local TV news program the other day, and in an effort to be "balanced," I noted some of the linguistic deficiencies of each candidate. To make a point about Kerry's difficulties in striking a demotic note, I mentioned the quote that Maureen Dowd ascribed to him, "Who among us does not like NASCAR?," observing that sentences that begin "Who among us does not like..." were more appropriately ended with something like "Placido Domingo."

"Wrong!," said my partner Michelle after we had watched the interview. "Kerry never said that." And indeed, he never did, as Bob Somerby pointed out in The Daily Howler last week. What Kerry said was "There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR..."

I suppose I could blame Dowd (who herself said she was told of the quote by someone else), or for that matter Frank Rich or Tim Egan or other Times writers who repeated the story. Or I could blame the Boston Globe reporter who has covered Kerry who originally told me about the quote.

But the fact is that the quote always sounded too apt to be true, like that quote ascribed to Bush about how the trouble with the French is that they have no word for "entrepreneur" — another discredited line.

Still, I believe that if person makes an error based on faulty intelligence that the person should have received more skeptically, except the person had ulterior motives for wanting it to be true and figured he could get away with saying it because he'd heard it from ostensibly credible sources and anyway, everybody else was saying it, then when the story is revealed to be bogus, the person ought to own up to his mistake. So, I'm sorry about that.

Sex in private

When can a sexual act be regarded as having taken place "in private" as the public decency laws in most places require? I do not ask for purposes relating to any activities of my own, you understand, good heavens no. As always with Language Log posts, a linguistic point has center stage.

An Italian judge recently ruled that having sex in the toilet at a bar does not breach public decency laws, so long as the door to the stall is shut. (The story has been spread around the world by Reuters.) A Swiss couple were accused of committing obscene acts after the owner of a bar in the northern Italian town of Como caught them having sex in the john. State prosecutors demanded a six-month prison term for the male defendant and a five-month term for his partner. (Why the one month difference? Who knows. Perhaps she was a naive innocent who showed instant remorse and and he was an evil seducer who accused the arresting officer of being a sexless fascist meathead.) Anyway, in this case what seems to me like intuitive common sense prevailed: Judge Luciano Storaci threw out the case, saying public decency was not offended because the door was closed.

This seems so obviously right that one wonders how the interior of a toilet cubicle when the door is shut could ever be considered other than private. How has it been possible for so many people to be successfully prosecuted for the offense of engaging in sexual acts in surroundings that are not only unobservable to passing members of the public but are protected by physical arrangements whose whole purpose is to ensure privacy for excretory acts? If the sex does not count as being in private, how on earth can it make sense for more normal uses of a public toilet not to yield prosecutions for defecating in public?

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the answer is likely to lie in the interpretation of public decency statutes that in their references to sex use the highly polysemous word private. Webster's Third lists its several senses in this order:

The space inside your toilet cubicle is certainly private in sense 3b, "free from the company of others"; but not in sense 1a, "not freely available to the public", since any member (or couple of members) of the public can use the same facility as soon as the previous person has finished doing whatever the hell it is that they're doing in there. The details of exactly what is meant by being in private or in public would have to be spelled out in very careful detail in any relevant law. And of course there are thousands of such laws, specific to states, provinces, counties, or cities, and they won't be all that carefully written, because (a) laws generally aren't very carefully written anyway, and (b) laws governing any kind of behavior that someone could think lewd are likely to get even less scrutiny than a tax cut, since no legislator who wants to get re-elected is going to stand up and quibble if that would appear to put him in the position of arguing for the likes of couples who want to be free to slip into the john for a quick screw. And (some Italian reader correct me if I'm wrong) Judge Luciano Storaci probably doesn't have to run for election. An American county court judge who has to gain public support for re-election to keep his or her job might not have been as inclined as Judge Storaci to dismiss a public indecency case.

Angry at the guy asking?

From liveblogging the second presidential debate at NRO's The Corner:

WHY DOES BUSH... [Jonah Goldberg]
Sound like he's angry at the guy asking about making drugs cheaper?
Posted at 09:43 PM

Jonah is referring to the exchange that starts this way:

HORSTMAN: Mr. President,
why did you block the reimportation of safer and inexpensive drugs from Canada
which would have cut 40 to 60 percent off of the cost?

BUSH: I haven't yet.
(( Just)) want to make sure they're safe. When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you.
And uh that's why the FDA and that's why the surgeon general
are looking very carefully to make sure it can be done in a safe way.
I've got an obligation to make sure our government does everything we can to protect you.
And um
And what ((I-)) my worry is and- is that, you know, it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.
And we've just got to make sure, before somebody thinks they're buying a product,
uh that uh
that it works. And that's- that's- that's why we're doing what we're doing.

To me, in this part of the exchange, Bush doesn't sound like he's angry. Listen to this sample and see what you think. In this direct answer to Horstman, I think the president sounds earnest and friendly.

However, after John Kerry's 90-second rebuttal, Bush breaks in without waiting for the moderator's instruction, and now he sounds vehement, even angry:

If- if- If they're safe, they're coming.
I want to remind you
that it wasn't just my administration that made the decision on safety.
President Clinton did the same thing
((and)) we have an obligation to protect you.
Now, he talks about Medicare.
He's been in the United States Senate twenty years.
Show me one accomplishment toward Medicare
that he accomplished.
I been in Washington DC three and a half years
and led the congress to reform Medicare so our seniors have got a medern-
modern health care system.
That's what leadership is all about.

Again, listen to this sample and make your own evaluation. To me -- and to Jonah Goldberg -- it sounds ranting and angry. Presumably Bush is angry at Kerry, but he's addressed someone as "you" who can't be Kerry: "we have an obligation to protect you"; "show me one accomplishment ... that he accomplished." In these phrases, "you" must be either the audience or Hortsman, so it's plausible for Goldberg to feel that Bush sounds "angry at the guy asking".

There's another whole set of questions about what makes someone sound "earnest" or "angry" or whatever. And there's a long litany of answers, hundreds if not thousands of papers, monographs and books full of details, which unfortunately can be summed up in one phrase: we don't really know.

That's a bit too pessimistic -- we know a lot of facts, some of which are even true, and people have a lot of theories, some of which even make sense. But it's interesting to contrast the emotional and attitudinal content of speech with its lexical content.

When we ask what words someone said on a particular (recorded) occasion, the answer is a subjective one. If people disagree, the best we can really do is to appeal to the perceptions of a panel of unbiased native speaker/hearers. No one would ever say "well, we can't agree about what this person said, let's look at the output of this speech recognition program."

However, the lexical perceptions of unbiased native speaker/hearers are pretty consistent. If transcription conventions are shared, independent careful transcripts of a passage of conversational speech are likely to disagree about no more than 4-5% of the lexical tokens. And many of these disagreements will be fairly inconsequential things -- was that "uh" or "a"? Was it "Cathy" or "Kathy"?

This is a phenomenon we might call "word constancy". We have an extraordinary shared subjective consciousness of words. On a plausible definition of "word", roughly similar to what dictionary makers would use to decide what a dictionary entry is, average American high school graduates have a passive vocabulary of at least 40,000 items, not counting lexicalized phrases, proper names, acronyms and some other sizeable categories. When I teach introductory linguistics, I have my students administer a similar sort of evaluation to themselves -- based on random samples from a dictionary headword list -- and the numbers that come back average about 65,000. There's a lot more to said about this question, but any way you look at it, the members of a speech community inhabit a common lexical world made up of tens to hundreds of thousands of word-like categories.

Lexical knowledge is not the consequence of literacy, but its essential condition. You can demonstrate word constancy in young children long before they've learned to read. For example, play a game with some four- or five-year-olds, where you name a word ("baseball", "sweater", whatever) and offer a prize to the first kid to raise a hand when you use it again. You'll a lot more arguments about whose hand went up first than arguments about whether you actually said "baseball".

Now try the same game with emotional or attitudinal loadings of speech. "The first one to raise a hand when I speak in an angry voice (a happy voice, a sad voice...) gets a prize." You can even start by demonstrating what you mean.

This time, the arguments will be of a very different kind. First, the number of distinct emotions that most people are willing to try to try to differentiate isn't very large -- half a dozen or a dozen or so. Second, the degree of individual confidence and joint agreement is not very high at best, and gets lower as the set of distinctions is increased.

"I win, that was a happy voice". "I think he sounded like he was just in a hurry, not happy". "Maybe he was a little happy, I'm not sure". "It sounded like an ordinary voice to me, that's how he talks all the time." It gets worse as you multiple the categories to cover more of the complex cognitive structure of emotion -- happiness because of personal accomplishment vs. pride in the accomplishment of a loved one vs. satisfaction from the misfortune of an enemy vs. unexpected luck; unselfconscious joy vs. suppressed glee; and so on. Psychologists' attempts to study the perception of emotion in speech tend to involve more like 6 categories than 60,000, and even so, the degree of intersubjective agreement is more like 50% than like 95%. (Of course, the details vary enormously -- I'll discuss some specific studies in a future post).

Now, there are particular questions about particular utterances where most people can agree. Here's another sound clip. Does the speaker seem relaxed, or upset? Submissive, or aggressive? Force such choices and most people will agree on the outcome. But there's a third problem that becomes clear at this point. How you describe an instance of emotional expression depends not only on your evaluation of someone's state of mind, but also on your opinions about them and their circumstances.

There are lots of ordinary-language terms for someone who feels negative-valence arousal directed towards others: aggrieved, angry, annoyed, bitter, enraged, furious, huffy, irate, incensed, irritated, outraged, pissed, upset, wrathful, and a couple of dozen others. These involve not only different degrees of arousal ("annoyed" vs. "enraged") and shades of emotion ("bitter", "outraged"), but also different evaluations of the person in question ("huffy", "wrathful"). There are also more neutral words for aroused emotional states of an aggressive character: fierce, impassioned, vehement.

I don't think that anyone will consider that George Bush's tone of voice, in that last clip, was "relaxed" or "soothing" or "amused" or "seductive". But whether you think that George Bush was "huffy" or "impassioned", "irritated" or "vehement", probably depends at least in part on what you think about him and his policies.

Though it's true that Jonah Goldberg, who is certainly a strong supporter of George Bush and (most of) his policies, perceived him as being "angry" in this sequence.

I'll try to say a few things in some later posts concerning what we do know about the expression of emotion in speech. It's a symptom of the poor state of our understanding, both of emotion and its expression, that it's going to be hard to do this briefly.

The gopher's eye view

The ground on which they built the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California is honeycombed by the activities of ground squirrels, pocket gophers, and various other burrowing mammals — running across a UCSC meadow is a good way to break an ankle. And below the tunnel-ridden soil is a sort of limestone sponge, riddled with caves, tunnels, sink holes, and water channels.

You're probably wondering how this is going to be linked to a linguistic topic, aren't you? Trust me. A link to a linguistic issue is coming, in two deft strokes. You just have to decide to read on.

Recently I argued that the signs on UCSC shuttles in early October 2004 talking about "westbound" loop shuttles having bike racks on the fronts of the buses are utterly meaningless. Thereafter, two suggestions were emailed to me that claimed to map a particular shuttle loop direction naturally onto an eastbound or westbound direction, but I pointed out that they contradicted each other. My claim was that "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" were the terms to use, and Transportation And Parking Services (TAPS) at UCSC has decided that I am right.

Don Olivier, who actually runs Linux on his digital wristwatch, has written me to suggest that in fact I am wrong. Consider again a shuttle route going up Hagar Drive, turning west at Coolidge Drive after Quarry Plaza, heading out of the West Entrance, and down Empire Grade to the Main Entrance (see the interactive aerial photograph here). It looks counterclockwise, I observed. But that is because I am tacitly taking the view from above ground. Suppose I take the viewpoint of a gopher located under the ground near the McHenry Library in the center of the campus, looking up. Now the same shuttle appears to be travelling clockwise. The clockwise / counterclockwise opposition is relative to observer viewpoint.

Paradoxically, there appears to be no general way to name the direction of travel of a loop shuttle. Leftward/rightward and westward/eastward are self-evidently useless because a loop must involve just as much travel to the left (or west) as to the right (or east), and just as much to the top (or north) as to the bottom (or south), if it is ever to get back to where it once was and thus continue in a loop. But the clockwise/counterclockwise opposition also fails if we cannot agree on where the observer is to be stationed — in three dimensions — relative to the set of points on the loop. (You might, foolishly, have spent a second or two thinking that one could distinguish the two routes by explaining that the one with the bike racks on the fronts of the buses visits Quarry Plaza on Hagar Drive before it gets to the Cowell Health Center on Coolidge Drive. But of course both routes do that. Think about it.)

Now I know that some people will say that the problem is solved by the contingent fact that students (especially those bringing bikes up the hill to the central campus) spend virtually all their time above ground, and that gophers virtually never travel by shuttle bus. But that is just the sort of anti-intellectual observation that we practitioners of lofty theorizing despise. There is a deep issue here. We sit in our campus shuttles travelling a three-dimensional path on the uneven surface of a spheroidal rotating planet orbiting a minor star that drifts in three dimensions in a galaxy drifting along with many other galaxies in a galaxy cluster in a rapidly expanding universe of possibly many dimensions... And the nonsensical reference to westbound loop shuttles in the notice TAPS put up should remind us that they face a serious problem: there is no general way to refer to the direction of travel in a directed loop that does not rely on a known orientation relative to the geography of the loop that can be agreed on by all observers.

God may be able to see the whole universe all at once without any perspectival bias; but if so, He will be unable to tell us unambiguously how to determine whether there will be bike racks on the fronts of our shuttle buses without referring to where we are now and which way we are looking. That is a deep and cosmic fact. And you read it here on Language Log.

Note added later (October 10, 4:15pm Eastern time):

Or at least I thought it was when I hit the Save button. But one can always be mistaken. And I appear to have been wrong once again. What I said was perhaps a deep and cosmic fact if you take shuttle loops to be one-dimensional paths with no referenceable named points; but those assumptions do not hold here, and they are crucial. Here are the two suggestions I received this morning from several readers:

Peter Maydell (and Sweth Chandramouli independently just a few hours later) pointed out that mentioning three stops along the route will unambiguously identify it. So the route with the bike racks could be called (rather longwindedly) the Quarry Plaza - Cowell Health Center - West Entrance route, the other being the West Entrance - Cowell Health Center - Quarry Plaza route. He notes that the London Underground train system does this with the Circle Line: "This is a Circle line train for Liverpool Street via King's Cross," they say, tacitly lining up the station where you are, the King's Cross station, and the Liverpool Street station in such a way as to unambiguously identify the direction of travel as clockwise (counterclockwise if you are on another underground train deeper in the earth and looking up). I missed this one by not extending the reasoning about stop sequence far enough: two points on a closed curve do not identify a direction on it, but three or more do.

Bertilo Wennergren (and again, Sweth Chandramouli independently just a few hours later, and Vardibidian a couple of hours after that, and Anders McCarthy from Seoul after that) pointed out that one of the shuttle routes will have buses travelling a larger loop than the other, because (this being the USA) buses travel on the right hand side of the road. This makes what I was calling the counterclockwise route (clockwise for gophers) trace out a larger loop, strictly outside the other one all the way round. So the route with the bike racks on the buses could be called the Outer Loop shuttle, the other being the Inner Loop. When an Outer Loop shuttle passes an Inner Loop shuttle, the Outer Loop bus is always on a path that is further out from any arbitrary point (say, the McHenry Library) inside the loop than the Inner Loop shuttle is.

Those two ideas are the best I have met with yet, and Bertilo's seems neater: the Outer Loop and the Inner Loop. Hugo Quené reports that they already do this in Paris, calling the two directions on the Périphérique the inner (interieur) and outer (exterieur) directions. I missed this possibility because I was thinking of the loop route as a one-dimensional line enclosing a two-dimensional area on the surface of a three-dimensional planet, an oversimplifying assumption that makes what I said true (unless you can name particularly points on the loop; see the previous paragraph). But a road is in fact a two-dimensional strip: it has width, and buses on it have positions on it relative to the two edges. TAPS might consider adopting that one. Though right now they are busily implementing the clockwise/counterclockwise idea and making new signs. It's always a mistake to move too fast on such things. You have to let the pajamarati of the blogosphere complete their analysis first.

His refusal to disgrace herself

Chinese has no case distinctions or gender distinctions in the inflectional paradigm of its third person singular pronoun. In fact there is pretty much no inflection at all (you can make an argument that a small number of phenomena might be treated that way, but it would be fairly iconoclastic to say that Chinese was even modestly inflectional). The word ta₁ (the 1 is a tone indication) does duty for "him", "her", and "it" (interestingly, they're different in writing, but identical in speech; see the note at the end of this post). My student Matthew Thomas Davis points out to me a paragraph in which this problem really comes through. It's from this page put up by the Xinhua news agency, and the opening paragraph says:

New York Times reporter faces up to 18 months in jail in CIA leak case

www.chinaview.cn 2004-10-09 02:33:45

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- A New York Times reporter is facing up to 18 months in prison after a federal judge held him in contempt of court on Thursday for refusing to name her source to prosecutors investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, media reports said Friday.

A difficult error to spot if you're a Chinese copy editor, accustomed to mentally translating him and her to ta₁. After all, ta₁ translates back into English as "either him or his or her or it or its", so where's the mistake?

John Cowan writes to me to point out that the story of how ta₁ came to have three different characters in the writing system ("hanzi", he calls them) is really quite strange, and involves foreign influence on Chinese:

In the beginning Mandarin had the the spoken pronoun ta₁, which referred to persons and was written by a single hanzi. Then the Chinese caught on that "progressive" (i.e. European) languages distinguished between "he" and "she", and introduced this distinction into writing by modifying the hanzi for ta₁ when it referred to females. This happened somewhere around 1911. Much later, probably in the 1960s, ta₁ was extended to mean "it" as well, primarily as a product of translation from Russian and other languages (the normal colloquial Mandarin for "it" is zero, although ta₁ can be used if there's a syntactic demand for it). As a result, another novel hanzi was introduced.

Linguistics is always even stranger than you would think.

Gibson scores a "Bushism", with an assist to Kerry

Talking is probably the most complex and difficult kind of skilled motor activity that any of us ever engages in. For a phonetician like me, it's a wonder that anyone can make it through a sentence. To get through a speech or debate without a major breakdown of planning or execution would be extraordinary. So it's no surprise that the participants in last night's debate made a few little slips here and there.

By reputation, George W. Bush is a less skilled verbal athlete than most politicians. However, he's not the one who committed the most striking speech error of the second presidential debate. Nor was the guilty party John Kerry, though he was a sort of accessory before the fact. The booby prize, in this case, belongs to Charles Gibson, the moderator.

This is doubly surprising. In the first place, Gibson did much less talking than either of the candidates. He didn't even ask the questions, he just introduced the questioners from the audience, and added a couple of follow-ups. In the second place, Gibson is a professional talking head. A kind of occupational Darwinism ensures that such people are way up on the upper tail of the curve of verbal facility.

And yet.

One of Gibson's few follow-ups dealt with the likely timing of the next terror attack within the U.S.:

I- I want to extend for a minute, Senator, and I want- I'm curious about something you said. You said it's not when, but if. You think it's inevitable? Because the sense of security is a very basic thing with everybody in this country.

Now, I have to say that even if Gibson hadn't swapped if and when, this would have been one of the sillier questions that have been asked in these debates. I won't insult your intelligence by explaining why. Let's just say that a plausible off-the-record answer from either candidate would have been "duh!?"

But of course Gibson did swap if and when.

Kerry kindly corrected Gibson by repetition, and then tossed in a couple of suitable sound bites.

Well, the president and his experts have told America that it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. And I accept what the president has said. These terrorists are serious, they're deadly, and they know nothing except trying to kill.

I understand that. That's why I will never stop at anything to hunt down and kill the terrorists.

But you heard the president just say to you that we've added money.

Folks, the test is not if you've added money; the test is that you've done everything possible to make America secure. He chose a tax cut for wealthy Americans over the things that I listed to you.

(More tests, by the way. Maybe Kerry would do better to avoid that word for a while, don't you think?).

Kerry himself started to make the same if/when speech error earlier in the debate, and then corrected himself. This probably helped prime Gibson's gaffe.

Kerry was answering a question from Ann Bronsing:

Senator Kerry, we have been fortunate that there have been no further terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. Why do you think this is? And if elected, what will you do to assure our safety?

Kerry's answer (in my transcription).

Thank you very much, Ann. [pause 0.657]
Um I've asked uh in my security briefings why that is, and I can't go into all the d- answers et cetera, but let me say this to you. [pause 1.243]
This president, and his administration, have told you, and all of us, [pause 0.807]
it's not a question of when, [pause 0.574]
it's a question of- [pause 0.312]
excuse me, not a question of if. [pause .680]
It's a question of when. [pause 0.513]
We've been told that. [pause 0.723]
The when, I can't tell you. [pause 0.676]

This set the stage for Gibson to get his ifs and whens crossed, a bit more than three minutes later.

This wasn't Kerry's only disfluency by any means. Although I haven't checked systematically, my impression is that he was roughly as disfluent as Bush in this debate. For example, shortly after his if/when confusion, he said (in my transcription)

And I'm gonna [pause 0.258]
put ((in)) place a better homeland security. [pause 0.239]
Effort. [pause 0.259]
Look at it. [pause 0.256]
95% of our containers coming into this country are not inspected today. [pause 0.769]
When you get on an airplane, your car- your [pause 0.421]
bag is- is- is [pause 0.184]
((b-)) x-rayed [pause 0.494]
but the cargo hold isn't x-rayed. Do you feel safer? [pause 0.686]

(387 KB .wav file here).This is implicitly repetitive as well as disfluent. If Kerry hadn't needed to add "effort" as an afterthought, and hadn't gotten tangled up in the luggage, this whole stretch would have been a more-or-less verbatim repetition of sound bites from the first debate.

There's nothing wrong with that, but let's not get the idea that Kerry is some kind of robotic talking machine who never stumbles, substitutes, misorganizes or repeats himself.

decisions remember yet Europe: ladies gentlemen left behind

Last week, I did a simple word-frequency analysis of the first presidential debate, looking for the words whose frequencies were most different between the two candidates. This morning, I fetched the transcript of the last night's (second) debate from the official site, and ran it through the same programs as before.

Without further ado, here's the top of the list:

(Again, let me say that my overall evaluation of the debate was consistent with what seems to be the conventional wisdom: Bush did much better than before, and Kerry was OK too. Score it a draw.)

One fact that's obvious in this table is that Bush was much less verbally repetitive this time -- in the second debate, Kerry repeated more words and phrases more often than Bush did.

Some of the candidates' themes are also clear in these simple-minded word counts. For example, in the first debate Kerry used spend or spending 3 times, Bush twice; but in the second debate, Bush used spend or spending 12 times, to none for Kerry. On the other hand, in the second debate, Kerry used kid, kids, child, children, young 27 times, to 3 for Bush.

The total word counts show a fairly consistent pattern:

Kerry used 12% more words than Bush this time, as opposed to 16% more in the first debate.

Both men used more words in the second debate than they did in the first one (Bush 12%, Kerry 8%). This might have been because they spoke faster (perhaps due to the more informal atmosphere), but I'm not certain that the number of questions and one-minute-extensions was exactly the same in the two debates.

A Milli Vanilli president?

An article by Dave Lindorff in Salon today, "Bush's mystery bulge", seems designed to bolster the rumors that in last week's debate, "President Bush was literally channeling Karl Rove" via a hidden earpiece. Technically, Lindorff just reports on the rumors, but the article has been widely cited as adding to their credibility.

The "evidence" cited includes Bush's "peculiar" pauses ("On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face."), the now-famous "let me finish" aside, and a bulge under Bush's coat, in back, thought to represent an electronics module of some sort.

Last Sunday I compared the pausing patterns of Bush and Kerry , and on Monday, I discussed the "let me finish" passage. At that time, I was skeptical of the "secret audio prompter" theory as an explanation for the "let me finish" aside, and argued that the aside seemed more plausible, in context, as a remark addressed to Lehrer. However, given that these rumors are now seeping into "big media", I thought I'd give the question another look (and listen). This prompted me to make some additional phonetic measurements, which turned out to bear on the question in a way that I didn't expect. It's by no means determinative, but it's enough to lead me to a tentative conclusion about these charges.

The main theory that Lindorff reports (taken from blogger Joseph Cannon among others) is this:

[T]he president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

There are reports of several earlier news clips of presidential speeches where the audio is said somehow to have picked up the audio prompting as well as the live speaking, for example this CNN clip. Attempts to use this technique might certainly result in unusual pausing patterns, or other oddities of presentation. However, I have remained rather skeptical that the president used such a technique during last week's debate. At least, many of his answers seem spectacularly unlikely to have been recorded in advance by the kind of process that Lindorff suggests.

Geoff Pullum cited a characteristic example a couple of days ago: Bush's answer to Lehrer's question

Do you believe the election of Senator Kerry on November the 2nd would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack?

which consisted of the following sequence of phrases (with linking verbiage removed):

• I don't believe it's going to happen.
• I've shown the American people I know how to lead.
• I understand everybody in this country doesn't agree with the decisions I've made.
• People out there listening know what I believe.
• This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate.
• We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren.
• Ten million citizens [in Afghanistan] have registered to vote.
• They're given a chance to be free.
• They [the Afghans] will show up at the polls.
• Forty-one percent of those 10 million [Afghans who have registered to vote] are women.
• It's a phenomenal statistic.

Geoff wrote that "my reading of the whole answer is that we're looking at a man in a panic who has no idea what to say to the question. He has been taught a whole slew of tough-sounding clauses to reiterate, but can think of nothing to do but hurl them around at random." Whether or not you agree with Geoff's evaluation, and whether or not you like what Bush has to say, does it seem plausible to you that Bush would have recorded this particular meandering sequence as a package to echo back during the debate? By all accounts, he has excellent speechwriters who know how to craft a rhetorical structure.

The other trouble with the "echoing prepared material" theory is that it doesn't actually explain Bush's "let me finish" aside. If he's just echoing what's coming over the air, why not go on echoing? There's another theory, about handlers giving more indirect advice through the hypothetical earphone, which fits that piece of evidence better. But now the earphone-evidence argument is turning into a whole set of subtheories, one for each observation -- sometimes the earphones were feeding pre-recorded speechlets, which accounts for the pauses; and sometimes they were feeding advice, which accounts for the "let me finish" aside; and sometimes they were were feeding nothing, which accounts for the meanders. At this point, though, the theory has lost its explanatory force, as we linguists say.

This is not enough to prove that there was no earphone, or that an earphone played no role in Bush's pauses or his "let me finish" aside. But it seemed much more likely to me that his pausing reflected the normal cognitive stress of trying to select, arrange and reproduce chunks of memorized material in an appropriate sequence, and that his "let me finish" aside was meant to prevent Lehrer from going on to the next question.

So I decided to look in more detail at the timing of Bush's pauses and speech segments in the answer containing the "let me finish" aside. To start with, I reproduce below my transcript of the passage leading up to the "let me finish" business, with a couple of additional turns added, and adding duration measurements for the speech as well as the silences.

Jim Lehrer: Ninety seconds, Mr. President.
George W. Bush: [pause 0.030]
[speech 2.156] Uh my opponent just said something amazing, he said [pause 0.465]
[speech 2.524]Osama Bin Laden uses the invasion of Iraq [pause 0.951 ]
[speech 2.180] as an excuse to spread hatred for America [pause 0.811]
[speech 2.833] Osama Bin Laden ((isn't)) gonna determine how we defend ourselves [pause 2.231]
[speech 1.952] Osama Bin Laden doesn't get to decide [pause 1.428]
[speech 1.233] The American people decide. [pause 0.762]
[speech 0.730] I decided [pause 0.306]
[speech 1.889] the right action was in Iraq. [pause 0.542]
[speech 2.068] My opponent calls it a mistake -- it wasn't a mistake. [pause 0.330]
[speech 1.355] He said I misled on Iraq. [pause 0.274]
[speech 4.117] I don't think he was misleading when he called Iraq a grave threat in the fall of 2002. [pause 1.303]
[speech 3.685] I don't think he was misleading when he said [pause* 0.126] that it was right to disarm Iraq [pause 0.965]
[speech 1.779] in the spring of 2003. [pause 0.609]
[speech 1.797] I don't think he misled you when he said that, [pause 0.565]
[speech 0.476] you know if you- [pause 0.372]
[speech 5.731] anyone who doubted whether the world was better off without Saddam Hussein in power sh- didn't have the judgment to be president, I don't think he was misleading. [pause 1.375]
[speech 1.128] I think what is misleading [pause 0.233]
[speech 1.239] is to say you can lead [pause 0.680]
[speech 1.096] and succeed in Iraq [pause 0.604]
[speech 1.680] if you keep changing your positions [pause 1.390]
[speech 1.335] on this war. And he has. [pause 1.256]
[speech 4.625] As the politics change, his positions change. [pause* 0.126] And that's not how a commander in chief acts. [pause 1.482]
[speech 3.273] I- t- I- uh uh w- let me finish ((here)). The intelligence I looked at [pause 0.807]
[speech 1.999] was the same intelligence my opponent looked at, [pause 1.520]
[speech 1.603] the very same intelligence. [pause 0.779]
[speech 6.879] And when I stood up there and spoke to the Congress, I was speaking off the same intelligence he looked at to make his decisions to support the authorization of force.

You can see that both the speech segments and the silent pauses vary quite a bit in duration. The question that I'm going to ask is how they co-vary: does Bush tend to pause longer before longer speech segments? If he's being fed lines in an earphone, I'd expect that he should have to listen to a longer stretch of prompt before launching into a longer phrase. Of course, if he's making it up as he goes along, it also might be taking him longer to plan a longer speech segment.

However, the correlation coefficient between his silences and the following speech segments in this passage is -0.05. This is not statistically distinguishable from zero. So there's no effect.

If there were an effect, we'd still have to decide whether this was due to prompting or just to the effects of compositional effort. But the fact that there's no effect makes it seem less likely, at least to me, that is is really being fed his lines. (I also have to say that it's hard to read this transcript and believe that the answer was composed as a whole in advance).

However, if we ask whether Bush tends to pause longer after longer speech segments, we get a very different answer: in this case, the correlation coefficient in this passage is 0.54. That's a respectable effect.

I'd confess that I didn't expect this at all. When I looked at the list of numbers, though, it kind of jumped out at me, and the correlation coefficient confirms the relationship. I have no idea why the effect holds -- maybe it's a rhetorical move, to give the audience more time to assimilate the longer phrases; maybe it's a compositional effect, with some short-term memory buffer taking longer to clear after finishing a longer phrase. It could be an accidental consequence of something about this particular answer.

Is this a general effect in public speaking? I don't know, and based on a quick literature search, I can't find any phonetic research that addresses the question. If some such research exists, I'll try to find out about it and let you know. If no one's ever looked at this simple question, it's a black eye for us phoneticians, I think.

So what's the conclusion? The rather meandering rhetorical structure of many of Bush's answers leaves me skeptical that he was getting his lines fed to him through a hidden microphone. The lack of any correlation between pause length and the following speech segment length tends to support this doubt, in my opinion.

The positive correlation between pause duration and the preceding utterance duration is fascinating, and worth following up on. If it's a general fact about debating, it's interesting to learn that. If it's specific to George W. Bush, or to a certain class of people including him, I'd like to know why. I can't think of any way to explain it in terms of the effects of a secret audio prompter, though.

As for that bulge in the back of Bush's coat, I have no clue what it is. I imagine that we'll find out, though.

[Note: the "Milli Vanilli" line is from Lindorff's Salon piece. It's kind of unfair, since what made Milli Vanilli a sacrificial llamb for pop inauthenticity, back in 1990 was lip syncing, not getting prompted.]

[Update 10/9/2004: an acquaintance who worked for some time as a producer at CNN told me that he has never heard of what Cannon describes as the "technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups", to have a pre-recorded version of their remarks played in their earphones as a prompt. That doesn't mean that it never happens, but at least it's not a routine method. And I haven't seen any validation of Cannon's assertion on this point by someone in a position to know. ]

[Wonkette pretty well sums it up: "Yes, we've seen the pictures. But we also watched the debate. If Bush was listening to some kind of radio signal, it was between stations." ]

Paulos vs. Dvorkin

In an October 4 column entitled The 'Innumerates' Among Us, NPR ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin wrote:

One of the rarely admitted secrets about journalists is that many of us are functional "innumerates" -- another way of saying "mathematically illiterate." Oh sure, we can add and subtract reasonably well. But with some exceptions, journalists generally don't know, understand or aren't interested in numbers. As for more complex subjects such as statistics and probability, well... many journalists would be hard pressed to tell the difference between "average" and "mean." [emphasis added]

Um, could that be because there isn't any difference?

As mathworld explains, "The quantity commonly referred to as 'the' mean of a set of values is the arithmetic mean ... also called the (unweighted) average". And if you look up average in the American Heritage Dictionary, you're told to "See arithmetic mean".

It's true that there are other kinds of mean -- geometric mean, harmonic mean, quadratic mean and so on. And it's true (as Ray Girvan pointed out to me) that statisticians sometimes use "average" just to mean "measure of central tendency", which could be mean, mode, median or midrange. But I don't think that's what Dvorkin had in mind. He might have meant "the difference between mean and median", I guess, since that comes up for journalists a lot in things like the difference between "mean income" and "median income". Anyhow, the bold-face material from Dvorkin's column, quoted above, seems to be a real-world example of a self-annihilating sentence.

Perhaps journalists should be given a sort of global (i.e. comprehensive) education, giving them command not only of means and modes and medians, but also of anaphors and antecedents, the difference between pausing and punctuation, description of pronunciation, basic grammar, and the use of dictionaries, among other relevant topics. And why stop at journalists?

Here, perhaps, John Allen Paulos and Geoff Pullum can agree. Let's establish universal competence in basic matters dealing with numbers as well as letters. Then John can get back to watching TV, while Geoff heads for Vegas and further adventures in field lexicography.

[Update: I originally had "Dworkin" throughout this post, but of course it's "Dvorkin", as Ray Girvan pointed out to me. Sorry for the mistake. I've been referred to as "Lieberman" often enough to know what this feels like from the other end. ]

The self-styled grammarian: no respect

I noticed recently that John Allen Paulos opens his well-known book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (Hill & Wang, 1988) thus:

Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens. The same people who cringe when words such as "imply" and "infer" are confused react without a trace of embarrasssment to even the most egregious of numerical solecisms. I rmember once listening to someone at a party drone on about the difference between "continually" and "continuously". Later that evening we were watching the news, and the TV weathercaster announced that there was a 50 percent chance of rain for Saturday and a 50 percent chance for Sunday, and concluded that there was therefore a 100 percent chance of rain that weekend. The remark went right by the self-styled grammarian, and even after I explained the mistake to him, he wasn't nearly as indignant as he would have been had the weathercaster left a dangling participle.

Oh, yes! That's us grammarians, stuffy old bores who drone on about lexical differences and can't tell when to add percentages and when to divide them by the number you first thought of! But hey, at least when we grammarians go to a party it doesn't involve first standing around distinguishing adverbs and then sitting down to watch the TV news! We have fun! There is such a thing as a grammarian who is a super fun wild and crazy guy, O.K., Mr Snooty Math Guy!

Us grammarians: we don't get no respect. I went out and bought a laptop. I chose an Apple. It had a worm in it...

Loopy defenses of the shuttle bus sign

I have just a small afterword on the strange case of the shuttle bus signs at UC Santa Cruz that describe the counter-clockwise direction loop shuttle as "westbound" when by the nature of loops it must go east just as much as it does west. And I must caution the reader who might be inclined to go on: Warning — high level of nerdiness.

John Cowan writes confidently from a perspective informed by naive geography and an analogy with the everyday cognitive/motor experience of using a steering wheel:

Conceptually, left is treated as counter-clockwise and right as clockwise; consider the way we talk about steering wheels (we turn them left, meaning that points near the *top* move leftward). Likewise, west is normally mapped onto left and right onto east, based on the notion that north = top. So what we need to know to interpret the phrase "westbound shuttle" is what counts as the top of the loop. Fortunately, the loop is in three dimensions, and so the top is ... the top, the point of highest elevation.

So he is telling me that I should see the shuttle route as a steering wheel with the top at the north (up the hill, roughly at Crown College), so that west is left, and regard a shuttle as westbound if it is going the way a left turn would move the wheel. But meanwhile the delightfully, brilliantly nerdy Fernando Pereira of the University of Pennsylvania (how nerdy? Fernando's shirt buttons are microchips and he runs Debian Linux on his microwave oven) writes to say:

Consider a single directed loop on the Earth's surface that does not cross the Equator. Consider a homotopy between it and the Equator in which each intermediate loop is also on the Earth's surface, and no such loop crosses the Equator. If it maps the direction of the loop to the westward direction on the Equator, the original loop is westward, otherwise the original loop is eastward.

What he means (and I did have to ask him: I can handle rocket science but I need a little help with topology) is that if you stretch the line of a directed loop shuttle route in the northern hemisphere as much as necessary and move it down to collapse it onto the equator, you can call the shuttle route westward if it collapses to an east-west equatorial route (one that proceeds through the time zones the same way the sunrise does) and eastward otherwise.

And what I now have to point out to you is this. I have carefully considered what these two defenses of UCSC's Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS) department entail, and I have to tell you that they predict differently. One identifies the direction of the shuttles that have the bike racks as westbound, and the other identifies those shuttles as eastbound. They contradict each other!

So I rest my case. It's not me, it's TAPS. There is no guaranteed, unambiguous, intuitive way to say of a shuttle running a loop that it is in general running westward or eastward. (It's very much like the way there is no ambiguous common-sense basis for the interpretation of the terms incall and outcall as used by massage services.) The shuttle must make eastward progress at some point and westward progress at some other point if it is ever to come back to its starting point. So the guys who wrote the signs are completely nuts. (They're probably relatives of the guys who paint the signs on the road that say >A href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001183.html"> ONLY LANE BIKE.) Language Log has spoken.

And in fact cognizant and duly empowered officials at TAPS have already accepted that this is true (everyone who is anyone reads Language Log), and they are going to change the signs. Language Log has once again been a positive force for the good of humankind.

Statistical misspelling

Tenser, said the Tensor ("now with a new twitchy logo"), points to a puzzle: how to put an extra "a" in "Michelangelo"? The problem starts with an AP wire story about how a new mural outside the Livermore CA library misspelled the names of 11 historical figures. According to a more extensive treatment by Lisa White in the Contra Costa Times, the artist misspelled 9 names, but rather than just give a list of the names and their renditions in the mural, the article gives some clues in the style of a puzzle page: "'Shakespeare' is missing the second 'a,' 'Michelangelo' includes an extra 'a' and 'Einstein' has one 'n' too few", adding later that "Alquilar also misspelled van Gogh, adding a rogue 'u'" to the Dutch painter's name".

As TstT explains

So, that's "Shakespere" for sure, either "Einstei" or more likely "Eistein", and probably "van Gough", but where did she squeeze in an extra "a" in "Michelangelo"? I suppose "Michaelangelo" is the best bet.

I agree. In fact, I calculate that the probability of this being the correct misspelling is approximately .97, based on the following Google counts:

Mesdames et messieurs, les jeux sont faits.

Can someone in the Livermore area tell us how the game comes out? (A digital photo would be nice, taken before the mural gets fixed...)

And does anyone have a model of serial order errors in spelling (or more likely, typing) that explains the apparent pattern of "leakage" from the focus of error in the table above?

[Update: here is the artist's web page on the Livermore work, but none of the problematic names are visible. ]

[Update: Charles Belov emailed to observe that I left out "Michelangelo". Oops. Fixed now. As always, in case of less than full satisfaction, the Language Log marketing department will cheerfully refund your subscription fees in full. ]

[Update 10/8/2004: wolfangel emailed:

The list of misspellings used: http://tinyurl.com/64594.

It was Michaelangelo, which I accidentally misspell that way more often than I would like to admit (in my defense, I'm related to and friends with Michaels but no Michels).

]

[Update 10/11/2004: more on this story, in an article by Leslie Fulbright in the SF Chronicle of 10/8. It seems that the artist may not correct the misspellings after all, since the public reaction has been so "nasty".]

"It's hard to know where to start"

I feel like Dick Cheney in Tuesday's Vice Presidential Debate. He kept beginning his answers with "it's hard to know where to start." OK, in fact he did it only twice:

Well, Gwen, it's hard to know where to start; there are so many inaccuracies there.
Well, Gwen -- I'm sorry, it's hard to know where to start.

Still, it's one of the things that stuck in my mind from the debate. Another piece of evidence that small n-gram (word-sequence) counts can be psychologically significant. But the reason that I feel like Dick Cheney -- and it's not a good feeling -- is because of what Jane Perrone wrote in the Guardian's Newsblog yesterday evening, under the heading "Language Matters".

Here's Perrone's entry:

Bloggers are a resourceful bunch: they like nothing better than to "fact check [insert name of candidate or journalist]'s ass".

MIT Media Lab graduate student Cameron Marlow has done wonders with Perl to create a tool to help bloggers analyse transcripts of the presidential debates. Just plug in a well-worn phrase - say, "war on terror" - and up pops a phrase count (Bush 11, Kerry 7, for the record).

Marlow lists the candidates' top 25 phrases during the first Bush-Kerry clash, and repeats the exercise for last night's vice-presidential debate: Cheney's top three phases were Saddam Hussein (11), fact of the matter (10) and United States (10), while Edwards' were John Kerry (36), American people (28) and tax cuts (16).

For more analysis of the candidates linguistic skills, see Language Log, which finds that John Kerry's sentences are, on average, 17.7% longer than George Bush's. Language Log's sober analysis is that, of four reasons for the statistic: "First, Kerry might have talked faster. Second, he might have used shorter pauses. Third, he might have paused less often. Fourth, he might have used intrinsically shorter words", the second is the key factor, sidestepping the well-worn debate over whether Bush is stupid, as evinced by this piece in Slate.

Perhaps I should update the old expression, and conclude that "I don't care what they say about me, as long as they spell my URL correctly." (Another connection to Dick Cheney, who sent millions of viewers to George Soros' blog by talking about factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org). However, Perrone wasn't talking about me, she was talking about linguistic analysis.

Now the whole point of Language Log, aside from having fun, is to encourage people to think and talk about language. But without being excessively pedantic, we'd also like to encourage people to think and talk about language in a way that's sensible, factual and logical.

I'm having trouble getting to the point here, because I can't understand how Perrone, an intelligent and accomplished journalist, could have got things so wrong. On her own fascinating horticultural blog, she would never confuse a comparison of beetroot weights with an analysis of the causes of caterpillar infestation. Yet in her short "Language Matters" paragraph, she manages to mix up two aspects of linguistic analysis that are just as different.

She combines quotes from two of my posts about the first presidential debate: one in which I compare the candidates in terms of the average length of their sentences in words, measured from the official transcript; and another in which I examine the reasons for a difference in the candidates' overall rate of speech, and show that the key factor was a difference in pause length, measured in an audio recording. Now, these are logically different things. You can talk slow or fast in long sentences, and slow or fast in short sentences. You can pause more or less often, for shorter or longer amounts of time, independent of how many words you put in your sentences. And my explanation for Kerry's overall faster speech rate -- that Bush's pauses were similar in number but much longer -- had nothing to do with the relative length of their sentences.

I measured these very, very simple things -- sentence length in words, overall word count per unit time, duration of silent pauses -- for two reasons. First, these things are really easy to measure. You don't have to parse the sentences or measure vowel formants or anything time consuming, so the empirical part of the research just took a few minutes. And second, these things are really easy to understand. When Geoff explains about "fronted negative adjuncts" and "long sequences of supplements and appositives", you've got to keep your wits about you. But how hard can it be to understand the count of words in a sentence, or the duration of a silence in seconds?

Too hard, apparently. Well, looking over those posts, I can see that it's my fault. I never said explicitly that there's a difference between counting words and sentences on the one hand, and counting speech time and silence time on the other. I never defined my terms: words, sentences, seconds, speech, silence. Seriously, it takes some sophistication of thought to keep these things straight. Pauses are not periods. Cabbages are not compost. I have to remember to explain that stuff.

As for Perrone's indirect swipe at President Bush's intelligence, she would have done better not to combine that with a display of intellectual carelessness on her own part.

[Update 10/8/2004: Jane Perrone has posted a gracious correction on the Guardian's newsblog site:

I concur with Dan Gillmor when he says in the introduction to his book We the Media: "I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do - and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life."

So I'm glad that Professor Mark Liberman of Language Log called me on my sloppy summation of his analysis of the Bush-Kerry debate. My apologies to Mark: socks are being pulled up as I type.

I feel less like Dick Cheney already. And next time, I'll try to write more clearly. ]

Un système où tout se tient, and east is west

Geoff Pullum has described a campus bus loop where counterclockwise buses are called "westbound" and clockwise ones "eastbound", or maybe vice versa, he's not sure. The uncertainty bothers him. But I can tell you that it's not always a comfort to know.

I'm now sitting just below the "r' in "Spruce St." in the map fragment on your right, about a half mile west of Interstate 76. Nobody around here calls it I-76, though -- it's the Schuylkill (pronounced "skookle") Expressway. Since north is up as usual, you can plainly see that the Schuylkill runs from southwest to northeast through this section of Philadelphia. Reasonably enough, some of the local access signs even offer you a choice between the "north" and "south" directions, with "north" here meaning "northeast". But even-numbered routes in the U.S. are east-west routes, logically speaking, and I-76 was at some point nominally amalgamated with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which runs east-west through the state. Though I don't know the political history, my guess is that this had something to do who pays for what. Anyhow, to maintain consistency with the rest of I-76, if you leave Penn in a geographically northeastern direction, the official signs tell you that you're going "west", while if you head in a geographically southwestern orientation, you're officially going "east".

More complex versions of this problem afflict the ring roads that partially or completely encircle many American cities. You'd think that on a circular road, the signs would say things like "Clockwise to Braintree" or "Counterclockwise to Silver Spring", but not so. Instead, compass directions seem to be assigned by some random and historically unstable mixture of local tradition, true geographical orientation, continuity considerations and even-odd number-direction parity.

This reminds me of a story that Roman Jakobson liked to tell. It seems that a certain African culture used "talking drums", with the traditional mapping of syllable count and timing onto drumbeats, using high and low pitched strokes for syllables with high and low lexical tone, respectively. Messages from the center of the village were sent by drumming on a large hollow log, one side of which sounded a low-pitched note while the other sounded a higher pitch. But then the log cracked, with the result that striking the previously lower-pitched part now actually yielded a higher pitch than the other part. What did the drummers do? Well, they went on drumming as before, except that now linguistic high tones mapped onto a lower-pitched drum sound, while linguistic low tones mapped onto a higher-pitched drum sound.

Jakobson liked this story because it illustrates the structuralist prejudice that it's only the system of contrasts that matters, not the content. But I'm almost certain that the story was false, all the same. Not the talking drum part, that sort of of thing was and is widespread in Africa. The thing is, though, if a drum had broken, I'll bet that the drummers would have fixed it or replaced it, or at worst turned it around.

Here in the U.S., we're not so sensible. The federal and state departments of transportation are hotbeds of unreconstructed structuralists. A road only goes two ways, right? All integers are even or odd, right? A plane surface, or the surface of a sphere, is two dimensional, right? Do you see where this is going? I mean, this is a system of oppositions! Clockwise/counterclockwise, east/west, north/south, even/odd, what's the difference? You're fretting about mere implementation details.

Roman Jakobson's good friend, that arch-structuralist aristocrat Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy, famously said that phonetics is to phonology as numismatics is to economics. Well, I'm a phonetician, myself, and it bothers me every time I drive northeast on I-76 West.

[Update: Emily Bender emails to point out that they do everything on a grander scale in California, even confusion:

I can beat your driving northeast on I-76 West story, by a bit: In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is as stretch of road that is both I-580 East and I-80 West (in one direction) and I-580 West and I-80 East (in the other). It actually runs North-South, of course.

(To locals, it would never be called I-580 or I-80, though. Just 580 or 80.)

Again, I blame the structuralists.

]

[And in defense of the midwestern forces of disorder, Daniel Drucker emailed a pointer to this picture of a north-south road segment (near Burlingame, Kansas) which is simultaneously 56 East and 31 West (or the other way around in the other direction, of course). He also diagrams the road graph that gives rise to this state of affairs:

<- 31 W _____ _____ 56 E ->
             |
             |
             |<-sign
             |
<- 56 W _____|_____ 31 E ->

I believe that I've seen clusters of road signs that encompass three of the four compass directions at once for the same stretch of road, though I can't cite an exact reference much less provide a picture. Has anyone seen a cluster that covers all four compass directions? That would be something to treasure, like the legendary intersection where four one-way streets converge, all pointing inwards. ]

[Update: Q_pheevr introduces some nifty terminology, and a picture of a three-direction road-sign cluster (421 north, 66 south, 80 west). Q even points to a picture of a four-direction cluster, from Kentucky -- but it's at an intersection, which is cheating. I'm still waiting for a cluster in which routes nominally in all four compass directions are oriented in the same physical direction on the same stretch of physical highway. This is clearly a graph-theoretic possibility, and I'm betting it happens a few times across this great land of ours.]

[Update 10/8/2004: Joshua Guenter (Editor of Pronunciation at Merriam-Webster) emailed that

There is, believe it or not, a single example of cardinal direction-sensitive highway numbering in the United States. I refer to U.S. Highway 101, which runs most of the length of the Pacific Coast. From Los Angeles to around Beaver, Washington, it's labeled pretty much what you expect of highways: North or South, regardless of what cardinal direction one may be actually heading in at the time. The thing is, though, it begins to loop around the Olympic National Park in Washington, first going east, then going South to Olympia. If this highway kept the same directional labeling system of all other highways, you'd soon find yourself going South on 101 North for about 90 miles. I guess this was just too much, so the west-east section of 101 to the north of Olympic National Park is actually labeled 101 West and East while the section to the east of Olympic National Park between Gardiner and Olympia is re-labeled 101 North and South, but corresponding to the cardinal directions.

In other words, if one drove from Los Angeles to Olympia, never leaving U.S. 101, you'd be first on 101 North (for quite a bit), then on 101 East, then on 101 South, all the time staying on the same road. This is the only example of this I know. Maybe there are others?

]

A westward loop

The closest buildings to the Main Entrance of my campus are a mile up the slopes of Ben Lomond mountain. Shuttle buses are used to get non-motorists up the hill. Cyclists often bring their bikes up on the shuttle and then cycle home downhill at the end of the day. One shuttle bus route goes around the campus clockwise (see map here), turning right outside the Main Entrance (at the bottom of the map and the bottom of the hill), going uphill and some way westward on a road called Empire Grade, turning right on arrival at the West Entrance, and following campus roads around to the east to come downhill to the Main Entrance to turn right again. The other goes counter-clockwise, turning left outside the West Entrance to come downhill heading eastward and then left again to re-enter the campus at the Main Entrance and head uphill and then proceed westward before turning left again and travelling eastward once again. The shuttles on these two routes are labeled "The Loop". On the shuttle buses is a sign warning cyclists that the crucial bike racks on the fronts of the buses are found "only on westbound Loop shuttles."

What in heaven's name can they mean? All the clockwise loop shuttles are going west from near the Main Entrance up Empire Grade toward the West Entrance. All the counter-clockwise loop shuttles are going west from the top of Hagar Drive toward the West Entrance. All the shuttles do some northward and southward travel as well. They have to, if they are to travel a route that is a loop. The idea that you can distinguish a clockwise from a counter-clockwise circular loop by saying that one goes to the west and the other doesn't is more than just wrong, it's a screamingly obvious geometrical impossibility. How could so many intelligent people — the Transportation And Parking Services people on campus, the sign writers, the administrators, the thousands of passengers, the top syntax-and-semantics graduate student I rode with on the shuttle this morning — have failed so utterly to see that the sign is nonsense and you cannot tell by reading it which direction you should take if you hope to see bike racks on the fronts of the buses? Is it me, or is it them? It's them, right?

Decisiveness and clause structure

I think Mark's series of linguistic analyses of the first presidential candidates' debate (see them here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) has been really important, and I'm still pondering on some of the issues. I have spent a particularly long time on the question (raised in this one) of what Kathleen Hall Jamieson (director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania) could possibly have meant when she said (if she indeed said), "The language of decisiveness is subject, verb, object, end sentence." Is there any sense that we can suck out of this apparently loopy remark?

Mark probed a little in a scripted speech of Bush's, and found only about 5.6% of the sentences were simple Subject + Verb + Object clauses with no embellishment at all. But it seems intuitively obvious that Professor Jamieson couldn't have meant this anyway: she would not have intended to claim that you will sound decisive if you say This makes sense but not if you say This is sensible. (Sensible is an adjective, so it isn't an object.) Jamieson must at least have been thinking we could allow Subject, Verb, other stuff — object if the verb is transitive or otherwise whatever complement is appropriate. But that can't be right either. Consider Winston Churchill's stirring and famous words about the Royal Air Force fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain:

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

That has a fronted negative adjunct and inversion of the subject and auxiliary. Surely Professor Jamieson cannot have meant that because of it Churchill missed sounding decisive because the subject failed to precede the verb. Examples could easily be multiplied: if A crucial choice lies before us sounds decisive (it has Subject + Verb order), would anyone really say that Before us lies a crucial choice does not, just because it inverts things and has the subject last? Surely such style differences (the topic of Chapter 16 in The Cambridge Grammar, if you want to reflect more on this) do not convey a difference in whether you sound like decisive leader.

I think the only potentially salvageable part of the Jamieson claim is that long sequences of supplements and appositives should be avoided because they might make you sound dithery. She is reported as saying that people fail to sound decisive if they "speak in sentences that contain parenthetical phrases" or if they "add a series of illustrative examples before they end the sentences." But after some study of the transcript of the first presidential debate, I don't actually think that avoiding such sequences characterizes either decisive-sounding speech or George W. Bush's style.

For a start, there is nothing indecisive-sounding about this sentence of Kerry's, with its series of illustrative examples and its succession of parenthetical phrases:

I have a better plan to be able to fight the war on terror by strengthening our military, strengthening our intelligence, by going after the financing more authoritatively, by doing what we need to do to rebuild the alliances, by reaching out to the Muslim world, which the president has almost not done, and beginning to isolate the radical Islamic Muslims, not have them isolate the United States of America.

Yet there can be plenty of indecisiveness in a stream of fairly simple clauses if they are all over the map in terms of subject matter. The opening question Jim Lehrer asked of President Bush in the first debate was this:

Do you believe the election of Senator Kerry on November the 2nd would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack?

This was a clear allusion to the suggestion Dick Cheney publicly made, which sounded to a lot of people like a claim that a Kerry victory would cause new and devastating terrorist attacks (I have commented elsewh ere on how difficult it is to say whether Cheney really committed himself to that claim or not). Lehrer wanted Bush to get off the fence concerning whether it was part of the Republican position that just by not being Bush, a President Kerry would draw down hijacked airliners on us like a magnet. The challenge to be parried, in other words, was one about whether the Republicans hadn't been overstating the dangers of a Kerry presidency.

Bush responded with numerous short, Jamieson-compliant clauses in standard word order. But he never actually answered the question, or came close (he may not have intended to, of course), and what was more alarming was that his sentences were all over the map semantically, wildly off the topic and getting progressively more so. He made the following claims, among others, in this order, and in these words (though I omit linking remarks):

• I don't believe it's going to happen.
• I've shown the American people I know how to lead.
• I understand everybody in this country doesn't agree with the decisions I've mad e.
• People out there listening know what I believe.
• This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate.
• We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren.
• Ten million citizens [in Afghanistan] have registered to vote.
• They're given a chance to be free.
• They [the Afghans] will show up at the polls.
• Forty-one percent of those 10 million [Afghans who have registered to vote] are women.
• It's a phenomenal statistic.

Hold on a minute. Lehrer's question was basically "Will Kerry's election cause terrorist attacks in America?" How did we get from there to the claim "The percentage of women among registered Afghan voters, at 41%, is surprisingly high"? I don't really know. You can try to reconstruct it yourself by reading the transcript. But although many of the sentences were nice short Subject-Verb-Object canonical clauses (e.g., "an enemy realizes the stakes"), my reading of the whole answer is that we're looking at a man in a panic who has no idea what to say to the question. He has been taught a whole slew of tough-sounding clauses to reiterate, but can think of nothing to do but hurl them around at random. He demonstrates, with his succession of mostly Jamieson-compliant clauses, real intellectual weakness and indecisiveness when faced with a challenging question.

You might allege that I have amplified this by omitting connecting passages that made the logic clear. By all means read the raw original and make up your own mind. But to some extent it does Bush a favor to leave stuff out. Some of what I left out was ungrammatical (e.g., *That's how best it is to keep the peace). And there were transitions like this:

This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate. And that's what they are.

What? What is what who are? What are they? Ideologists? Haters? Baffled, we move on to see if it gets any clearer:

This is a group of killers who will not only kill here, but kill children in Russia, that'll attack unmercifully in Iraq, hoping to shake our will.

Quite apart from the content (no single "group of killers" has been involved in all of the atrocities mentioned), this rambling, flailing sentence has — under the Jamieson doctrine — a syntactically very loose sequence of parts. This is the subject, and the predicate has the form is + noun phrase. That noun phrase is about killers, and a series of loosely connected modifiers follows:

a group of killers who will not only [verb phrase #1] but [verb phrase #2]... that will [verb phrase #3]... [subjectless gerund-participial clause adjunct]...

Cut it any way you like, this is decisively not Jamieson-compliant syntax.

Neither of the current stereotypes about styles of speech seems to be true: Kerry does not engage in long-winded unstructured rambling; Bush sometimes does; and neither limits himself to the sort of syntax alluded to by Jamieson, even if we interpret her with maximum charity. But what is true is that you can ask Bush a question about overstatements in Republican campaign rhetoric and he will ramble off into an answer that starts talking about the gender balance in Afghanistan's electoral roll. That doesn't look like decisive clarity incisive focus to me.

Web Crow

You've probably seen this news@nature.com piece on Web Crow, which can apparently solve crossword puzzles in any language by using Google searches. It's a cute idea. There's more context at aaai.org.

Marco Gori, one of the program's developers, explains that "the idea is not to spoil the enjoyment of players". Francis Heaney's reaction:

Well, that's a relief. I was worried that computers were going to break into my house and start solving my crosswords.

Wednesday morning grammar maven

How could I have missed this tragic gem of linguistic mis-analysis, from Greg Easterbrook's 8/24/2004 Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at nfl.com?

In the new Microsoft slogan -- "Your potential inspires us to create software to help you reach it" -- the antecedent of "it" is "software." So your potential inspires us to create software to help you reach software. This slogan must have gone through the Microsoft Word grammar-checker tool! Then again, the line does pretty much sum up Microsoft sales strategy.

So true, and yet so false!

Back on August 28, I blogged Easterbook's discussion of new proposals for the Washington Redskins' name, and specifically his plan to change his vote from the "Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons" to the "Washington Wohnata". But except for the discussion of the Eagles' prospects, I just glanced through the rest of that (long, long) column. So I missed the paragraph titled "TMQ, Grammar Snob", tucked in between the recommendation of tough love for Randy Moss and the evaluation of the Saints' defensive line.

Let's look at that Microsoft slogan again:

"Your potential inspires us to create software to help you reach it"

This slogan certainly demonstrates that short sentences are not necessarily clear sentences. But is it really true that "the antecedent of 'it' is 'software'", as Easterbrook confidently asserts?

On the linguistic merits, Easterbook is full of it -- and I don't mean that he's full of Easterbrook.

I can't persuade myself to understand this sentence the way Easterbrook thinks I should. Except as a sort of pencil-and-paper joke, I can only understand the antecedent of "it" as "your potential". In fact, I was unable to invent a sentence where pronoun linkage works the way Easterbrook thinks it does in the Microsoft slogan, even when I try to choose the material to nudge the meaning in the right direction:

??Alan Turing inspired me to create an AI program to help me write it.
??She told us to build a raft to let us float on it.

(where the boldface nouns are supposed to be the antecedents for the boldface pronouns).

There's a linguistic literature about "non-coreference conditions" that's probably relevant here, depending on what you think those conditions really are, and what you think the structure of these sentences is. But to say that Easterbrook's construal violates some grammatical rule gets it backwards. Any such rule is a summary of norma loquendi: what we (tacitly) know about our language and how we use what we know in practice. I'd be happy enough to discover that some of the people, some of the time, construe such sentences the way Easterbrook says they should. But looking to Google for guidance, I can't find any examples of roughly comparable structures where the pronouns work Easterbrook-wise:

We will write, edit, co-write or ghostwrite your book - and, if you're going to self-publish, we'll also design it inside and out, and even create material to help you promote it.
I love the fact that my job allows me to interact with people in different fields and learn about what they do and create software to help them do it .
We also offer special private life coaching in which you find out your purpose in life, form your goals, create strategies to help you achieve them, and have on-going support to help you stay motivated and follow through.
Since there may be times when you want to save email messages, Messenger allows you to create folders to help you organize them.
If you have many projects to complete in a given time period, create Tasks to help you sort them.
Where I have the contributor's permission, I'll also create links to help you contact them for additional advice.
Then we'll work with you to identify the decisions that you need to make and create solutions to help you make them.
If people have rights, they will create organizations to help them defend them.
Explain to the class that some of these words are similar and ask the students to help you group them together in logical clusters.
Then, bring all of the pizzas out and ask the children to help you sort them according to size.
Once, in my father's presence, he claimed that he had flung his resignation in the King's face, and that he had controlled the voting in the Conclave, forgetting that he had asked my father to beg the King to take him back ...
He knew that the chances of them being alive at the end of his long sentence were extremely remote, and so he asked my help to request the authorities to let him visit them just once.
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