Being Human

About a week ago, Arthur Laffer said the following on CNN:

I mean, i- i- i- if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care, done by the government.

Dylan Matthews at The Treatment ("Now Don't You Let The Government Get A Hold Of My Medicare", 8/4/2009) compared this to an earlier example of conservative pandering to public ignorance:

[Senator John Breaux] was walking through the New Orleans airport, returning home, when an elderly female constituent approached him. "Senator, Senator," she said, plucking emotionally at his sleeve. "Now don't you let the government get a hold of my Medicare." Breaux, ever the charmer, smiled and said reassuringly of this greatest of government entitlement programs, "Oh, no, we won't let the government touch your Medicare."

And Matthews commented, "I don't believe I have to explain what this says about the Republican economic policy elite" — which is a bit confusing, because John Breaux was a Democratic senator.

Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO ("Re: Hands Off Medicare", 8/5/2009) compounded the confusion by making an implausible linguistic argument in Laffer's defense:

I think this is a simple misunderstanding. Laffer seems to me to be saying that Medicare and Medicaid are not run well, and neither will health care in general when the government expands its role in it. "Done by the government," that is, modifies only "health care," not "Medicare, Medicaid, and health care."

This makes no syntactic, semantic, rhetorical, or phonetic sense.

Laffer is using a common rhetorical pattern of the form

If you like X, just wait till you see Y.

This can be used straight ("If you like the single, just wait til you see the video") or ironically ("Government: If you like the problems we cause, just wait 'til you see our solutions!") But in either case, the author suggests that X is viewed by many as good (or bad, in the ironic case), and predicts that if you're one of those that share that view, then Y will turn out to be even better (or even worse, in the ironic case). This implies that you're not already familiar with Y, or that Y will change in some way that will affect your evalution.

Laffer's statement is clearly an instance of this rhetorical template being used ironically. When he says "If you like X", for X = "the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles", he's suggesting that many people view the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles as bad — and indeed these are standard objects of right-wing scorn, disdained as bloated, inefficient and unhelpful bureaucracies. And thus in his next clause, "just wait till you see Y", for Y = "Medicare, Medicaid, and health care, done by the government", he's predicting that Y will turn out to be even worse than those icons of awfulness.

But Medicare, Medicaid, and health care already exist, as Laffer's hearers know well. So why is he making a prediction about our future perceptions of their quality? The only sensible construal is that these programs will change their nature when the government takes them over. Which in turn implies the absurd (but apparently widely-held) view that Medicare and Medicaid are not now government programs.

Ponnuru's proposed parse doesn't work phonetically either. If we eliminate punctuation from our transcript of the crucial clause, and annotate pause durations, we get:

just wait till you see [0.194]
Medicare Medicaid and health care [0.285]
done by the government.

In fluent speech, we expect the duration of pauses between words to correlate with the syntactic and semantic importance of the juncture. On that basis, if we place two pauses within a structure like

[just wait till you see
…[ Medicare Medicaid
……[and health care done by the government]]]

we'd expect them to fall after see and Medicaid — which is not what happened.

In contrast, if the structure were

[just wait till you see
…[[ Medicare Medicaid and health care]
…. [done by the government]]]

we'd expect the two pauses to occur after see and health care — which is exactly what happened.

But wait, there's more! The pitch contour is also exactly what we'd expect if [Medicare Medicaid and health care] were a constituent, with [done by the government] as a following modifier — but it makes no sense under Mr. Ponnuru's prefered construal. Listen again, and look (click on the image for a larger version):

In conclusion, I can see three ways to explain this:

(1) Dr. Laffer believes that Medicare and Medicaid are not now government programs, and would be changed for the worse if the government took them over. If this is true, he should educate himself, modify his views, and apologize to those that he may have misled. And CNN should be ashamed of itself for giving air time to an "expert" who is so badly informed about the topic he's asked to comment on.

(2) Many older Americans have a high opinion of Medicare and Medicaid, believe (counterfactually) that these programs are not now run by the government, and worry about the government "taking them over" and ruining them. Dr. Laffer knows that this belief is preposterously at variance with the truth, but chose to pander to it anyhow. If so, no self-respecting news organization should ever give him a platform again, except perhaps to give him the opportunity to apologize for being a lying weasel.

(3) Dr. Laffer because confused, got his clauses tangled up, and by mistake seemed to say something that he didn't believe. If this is true, then he should take the next opportunity to go on national television to clarify his views and apologize to those he may have misled.

Timothy Noah at Slate takes (2) for granted, which leads him to observe that "If there is a hell for libertarian poseurs, Laffer has secured himself a berth in it."

Paul Krugman comes down at about 2.2:

… if he was garbling his words, there was method in his garble. Right now, right-wingers do not, repeat, do not want people to understand that Medicare is the prime example of that dreaded condition, “government-run health care”; because if people understood that, they might think that government-run care is actually pretty good. So we don’t need to worry about what Laffer really meant; what he said was the party line, which is, “don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare.”

My own impression is that the error bars run from about 1.8 to 2.2. There's some more evidence from Dr. Laffer's own mouth: his next statement is "… I mean, the single provider, I think, is a real problem, Judy, …", which suggests that he is either deeply ignorant or shamelessly deceitful, since no single-provider plan is even remotely under consideration.

But mostly I'm shocked (shocked!) that the CNN anchordroid didn't pick up on Laffer's idiocy/dishonesty/gaffe during the broadcast:

[Note, by the way, that Paul Krugman and Nate Silver are not convinced that the DMV and the Post Office should be "unquestioned bywords for 'something bad'", and apparently most Americans agree with them, at least as far as the postal service is concerned.]

From YouRememberThat.com, a 1905 postcard that may be the oldest extant LOLcat:

The source suggests:

Perhaps soon, archeologists will discover an even older LOLcat on the walls of an Egyptian tomb… perhaps a cat with the caption, "I see what you did there!"

But it seems to me that if there are Egyptian (or Sumerian, or Mayan, or Mycenean, or Etruscan, or …) LOLcats, they've probably already been dug up and are now lying on some dusty museum shelf, waiting to be revealed to the world by a scholar who reads Language Log.

[Hat tip: Randy Alexander]

[Update — commenters (below) have informed us that this appeared last December on icanhascheezburger.com, and that this was one of a large number of similar proto-LOLcats produced by Harry Whittier Frees (1879-1953), a sample of which can be found here.]

Over the past couple of months, there's been a surge of media interest in various politicians' pronoun use. For some of the Language Log coverage, with links to articles by George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Peggy Noonan (among others), see "Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009);  "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009); "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009); "I again" (7/13/2009); "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

In a comment on one of those posts, Karl Hagen asked:

Other than gut instinct, what's the evidence for assuming that greater use of first-person pronouns actually indicates excessive ego involvement? The absolute rate of first-person pronouns will obviously vary a lot depending on the context, but even controlling for context, is it really the case that those who say I more often are really more ego-involved?

I responded:

The best person to comment on this is Jamie Pennebaker. Pending his contribution, I'll quote relevant observations from a summary page on his web site …

Prof. Pennebaker has graciously contributed a guest post on the meaning of "I", which follows.

Before reading any further, it might be best if you took a quick 10-item “I-Exam.”  This is a very brief quiz about who uses 1st person singular pronouns more than others.  I’m serious, go to www.utpsyc.org/itest, take the test, check out your feedback.  Then come back.

Welcome back.  You should now have a better sense of the social and psychological meaning of I-words.

A little bit of background might be helpful.  Not surprisingly, first-person singular (FPS) pronouns are used at very high rates in everyday speech.  Across thousands of natural conversations that we have recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, the word “I” is consistently the most frequently used word (averaging 4.73% of all words, compared with 0.56% “me” and 0.69% “my”).

A data set that my students and I have been relying on in the study of Bush, Obama, and others comes from press conferences or press opportunies wherein the person responds to questions posed by the press or, in some occasions, legislators or interested citizens.  In preparing the press conference texts, we strip out prepared remarks that typically occur at the beginning as well as the actual questions.  As presidents, both Obama and Bush have answered questions from the press approximately once per week.

Consistent with Liberman’s analyses of Obama’s and Bush’s inaugural address and other important speeches, Obama uses FPS pronouns at much lower rates than Bush. During the first 6 months of their presidencies, FPS pronouns accounted for 4.35% of Bush’s words and 2.88% of Obama’s.  Bush was significantly higher for all FPS words.

What do I-words mean?

From a psychological perspective, the use of FPS can reflect a number of overlapping processes.

The attention rule. Pronouns can be thought of as markers of attentional focus.  If the speaker is thinking and talking about a friend, expect high rates of third person singular pronouns.  If worried about communists, right wing radio hosts, or university administrators, words such as “they” and “them” will be higher than average.

The word “I” is no different.  If people are self-conscious, their attention flips to themselves briefly but at higher rates than people who are not self-conscious.  For example, people use the word “I” more when completing a questionnaire in front of a mirror than if no mirror is present.  If their attention is drawn to themselves because they are sick, feeling pain, or deeply depressed, they use “I” more.  And, by the same token, if they are deeply immersed in a task, FPS can drop to almost zero.

A common misperception is that I-use is associated with arrogance and dominance.  Studies consistently find the opposite: people higher in the social hierarchy use “I” words less.  The secure boss is surveying her or his kingdom calculating how to get more goodies.  The insecure underlings are trying to control their behaviors so as not to offend the leader.

The ownership rule. Use of FPS can also serve as a territorial marker.  If people want to emphasize their connection with their topic, they may increase their use of I-words.  The use of I-words, then, links their connection of self to their conversational target.  By the same token, people occasionally distance themselves from a target.  Across multiple studies on deceptive communication, the best predictor of lying is a drop in the use of I-words.  For example, if an administrator is asked why large sums of money were spent for office décor, an open speaker might say, “I felt that the funds were being used in the ways the donors had requested.”  The more deceptive might say, “It was felt that the funds…”

The graceful-I versus the sledgehammer-I. Not all I-words are alike. The graceful-I, often associated with the use of hedges, is one where the person is subtly acknowledging multiple perspectives.  Phrases starting with “I think that..”, “I wonder if..”, or “It seems to me that..” are all examples where the person is implicitly or politely making a request or an observation.  “I think it’s cold outside” (as opposed to “It’s cold outside”) is actually saying “I know that there are many views on this matter and I may, in fact, be wrong.  Indeed, when you go outside you might find it a bit warm but I personally felt that it was a bit cold outside. But I don’t want to intrude.”

One can imagine a continuum of I-phrases that range from the ultra-polite graceful-I’s to more reportorial phrases (e.g., “I saw”, “I heard”) to egotistical, controlling sledgehammer I’s.  Sledgehammer-I’s are typically associated with action verbs such as hit, won, stop, or push.  Intuitively, the person who uses graceful-I’s is a person who is trying to withdraw from the action, attempting to be smaller from the listener’s perspective.  The sledgehammer user, on the other hand, is attempting to expand in the psychological environment.

Based on informal counts within natural conversations, the rate of graceful-I’s is quite high whereas the sledgehammer-I’s are low.  Perhaps because of these base rates, we tend to hear and to remember sledgehammer statements more than graceful ones. Indeed, this is why most people’s stereotypes of I-usage are wrong:  they are based on the relatively infrequent sledgehammer-I users.

A good example of the different uses of I-words occurred in the 2004 presidential election. According to a New York Times article at the time, John Kerry’s advisors were working with him to change the way that he spoke.  They felt he used the word “I” too much and that he should use the more inclusive “we” at higher rates.  Without going into detail here, use of “we” in the political world is a reliable marker of being cold, distant, and arrogant.  Our analyses of the speeches, debates, and press conferences up to that time showed Kerry to use I-words at rates far below his opponents (especially Bush) and his We-words far above the others.

Kerry’s handlers did not understand personal pronouns and, in particular, the important distinction between graceful and sledgehammer I-use.  To appreciate the difference in I-use, look at 10 randomly selected uses of I from the third Bush-Kerry presidential debate in 2004:

Kerry:
I have supported or voted for tax cuts over 600 times.
I broke with my party in order to balance the budget
I voted for IRA tax cuts.
When I'm president, I'm sending that back to Congress
I'll make them secure.
I believe it was a failure of presidential leadership
I am a hunter, I'm a gun owner.
I ran one of the largest district attorney's offices in America
I put people behind bars for the rest of their life.
I've broken up organized crime; I know something about prosecuting.
I was hunting in Iowa last year

Bush:
Actually, I made my intentions — made my views clear.
I did think we ought to extend the assault weapons ban
I believe law-abiding citizens ought to be able to own a gun.
I called the attorney general and the U.S. attorneys and said…
And the prosecutions are up by about 68 percent — I believe — is the number.
To me, that's the best way to secure America.
Mitch McConnell had a minimum-wage plan that I supported
But let me talk about what's really important for the worker
I remember a lady in Houston, Texas, told me
I haven't gotten a flu shot, and I don't intend to because I want to make sure those who are most vulnerable get treated.

Although Bush used the word “I” at much higher rates in the debates and other interactions, virtually everyone assumed that Kerry was the big FPS user.  The misperception is attributable to how the two men used their pronouns.  Bush was the graceful user and Kerry the sledgehammer.  Whereas Bush thought, believed, remembered, intended, talked, and called, Kerry was busy voting, breaking, sending, running, hunting, and making people secure. Oh, and he was a gun owner.

At this point, we don’t yet have a trustworthy psychological profile of the sledgehammer-I user.  An educated guess, however, would be that people adopt sledgehammer pronoun use in settings where they are insecure but want to come across as active, powerful, and confident.  The element of insecurity is central to this framework in that the sledgehammer user simultaneously is emphasizing that an important action was taken but, at the same time, I ME MYSELF caused that action.  It is important that you the listeners know how important I ME MYSELF am.

Who is Obama and what can his I’s tell us?

In an interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition on August 8, 2009, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson were asked about their recent book, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election.  Johnson, looking back over his distinguished political reporting career studying presidents since Eisenhower, noted that Obama is “the single most self-confident of all the presidents” he has ever seen.

Obama’s use of pronouns supports Johnson’s view.  Since his election, Obama has remained consistent in using relatively few I-words compared to other modern U.S. presidents.  His usage is overwhelmingly gentle-I as opposed to sledgehammer-I.  Contrary to pronouncements by various media experts, Obama is neither “inordinately fond” of FPS (George Will, Washington Post, 6/7/2009) nor exhibiting “the full emergence of a note of … imperial possession” (Stanley Fish, NYT, 6/7/2009).  Instead, Obama’s language suggests self-assurance and, at the same time, an emotional distance.

References

(Other relevant papers can be downloaded from my Publications page)

Chung, C.K., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2007). The psychological functions of function words. In K. Fiedler (Ed.), Social communication (pp. 343-359). New York: Psychology Press.
Pennebaker, J.W., Chung, C.K., Ireland, M., Gonzales, A., & Booth, R.J.  (2007).  The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2007. [Software manual]. Austin, TX: LIWC.net
Pennebaker, J.W., & Lay, T.C.  (2002).  Language use and personality during crises:  Analyses of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s press conferences.  Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 271-282.
Pennebaker, J.W., Mehl, M.R., & Niederhoffer, K.G.  (2003).  Psychological aspects of natural language use:  Our words, our selves.  Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547-577.
Tausczik, Y.R., & Pennebaker, J.W. (in press).  The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

It's a strange fact about social scientists that hardly any of them, in recent years, have paid any analytic attention to language, which is the main medium of human social interaction.  At schools of "communication", you'll generally find that neither the curriculum nor the faculty's research publications feature much if any analysis of speech and language. In other disciplines — sociology, social psychology, economics, history — you'll find even less of it. (The main systematic exception, Linguistic Anthropology, deserves a separate discussion — but the conclusion of such a discussion, I believe, would note a steep decline in empirical linguistic analysis. And of course I'm leaving out sociolinguistics, which is healthy enough but largely alienated from the rest of the social sciences.)

There are notable exceptions of several kinds, such as Erving Goffman, Manny Schegloff, or Jamie Pennebaker. But such work emphasizes the paradox, since it shows that we can't blame the effect on a lack of intellectual opportunity.

It's not only in the social sciences where linguistic anemia is evident, of course. Over the past generation, the amount of language-related teaching and research in "language departments" (including departments of English) has declined to an unprecedented level. It's common to find highly-ranked English departments where neither undergraduates nor graduate students are trained in any sort of linguistic analysis at all, except perhaps by accident (see this earlier post for a more specific discussion).

But climate change is coming, in my opinion. And in this case, the driving force is not carbon emissions, but digital technology.

To state the obvious: Traditional mass media are now nearly all digital; new media are documenting (and creating) social interactions at extraordinary scale and depth; more and more historical records are available in digital form.  The digital shadow-universe is a more and more complete proxy for the real one. And in the areas that matter to the social sciences, much of the content of this digital universe exists in the form of digital text and speech.

A future social scientist who wants to use this proxy universe to learn about the real one had therefore better know how to analyze the form and meaning of large digital archives of text and speech. And future social scientists who choose not to do this will work under a significant competitive disadvantage. (Numerical data, video recordings, and various kinds of relationship graphs are of course important too, but without analysis of speech and text, their value is lower.)

The required tools include a good deal of computer science and statistics, but you also need to know what to program and what to model.  As a result, the basic concepts and skills of speech and text analysis are an important part of the future social science tool kit.

There's an increasing amount of research along these lines, mostly by computer scientists and computational linguists, along with a few rogue social scientists like Jamie Pennebaker. We've blogged about quite a few examples over the years. But I suspect that most social scientists don't see most of this stuff, because it appears in conference proceedings and journals that they don't read.

All the same, change is sure to come. I predict that over the next 20 years or so, this work will go mainstream. (I know that 20 years in internet time is a millennium or two, but Academia is culturally conservative to a degree that would turn Pashtun village elders green with envy.)

One symptom (and cause) of corpus-based social science going mainstream is that individual pieces of research will increasingly break out into the old media (or go viral in new media). This happened a few days ago to Peter Sheridan Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, whose paper "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents" (Journal of Happiness Studies, published online 7/17/2009) was covered in the New York Times (Benedict Carey, "Does a Nation's Mood Lurk in Its Songs and Blogs?", 8/3/2009).

Here's the paper's abstract:

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.

Here's the figure showing the secular trend in song-lyric happiness:

Here's the figure showing the recent trend in emotional valence estimated from aspects of blog posts:

And finally, the effects of age, latitude, and day of the week (phase of the moon is not pictured):

Like most work of this type, the linguistic analysis involved is pretty simple — but it's still more than you'll now find in the collected works of the faculty of the communications schools that I've looked at.

And you could raise various questions about their methods and their conclusions, as always in science (though the work seems basically sound to me). But the nice thing about this kind of research is that all of their data is published — their paper gives the URLs that they got it from. (In fact, they doubtless undertook this study in large part because the basic data is easily available.) And they could easily publish their code as well (though the algorithms seem simple and easy to replicate).

So if you have an idea about how to qualify, modify or extend their findings, go to it!

[I'll note in passing that linguistics was left out of the publicity in this case: thus the NYT article quotes Prof. Pennebaker to the effect that “The new approach that these researchers are taking is part of movement that is really exciting, a cross-pollination of computer science, engineering and psychology. […] And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.”  From Jamie's mouth to God's ear; but let's recognize that this type of work will not reach its full potential unless the researchers involved also understand something about how speech and language work.]

That's what Descartes said to Huygens about Pascal. Another Shoebox cartoon, this one by brian, gives the background:

There's some serious history behind this famous but widely misunderstood slogan, coined originally (I think) by Hero of Alexandria. Before Pascal and Descartes (and Boyle and Hobbes and a cast of thousands), there was Hero's footnote to Aristotle's "plenism".

For the background, we turn to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Nothingness:

Aristotle denied the void can explain why things move. Movement requires a mover that is pushing or pulling the object. An object in a vacuum is not in contact with anything else. If the object did move, there would be nothing to impede its motion. Therefore, any motion in a vacuum would be at an unlimited speed.

Aristotle's refutation of the void persuaded most commentators for the next 1500 years. There were two limited dissenters to his thesis that vacuums are impossible. The Stoics agreed that terrestrial vacuums are impossible but believed there must be a void surrounding the cosmos. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occurring vacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially. He cites pumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believed that bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to prevent their formation. You can feel the antipathy by trying to open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might, you cannot separate the sides. However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thought that if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you could separate the sides and create a vacuum.

Hero's views became more discussed after the Church's anti-Aristotelian condemnation of 1277 which required Christian scholars to allow for the possibility of a vacuum. […]

… scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of 1277 proposed various recipes for creating vacuums. One scheme was to freeze a sphere filled with water. After the water contracted into ice, a vacuum would form at the top.

Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point. When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinder was that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice.

Neither side appears to have tried out the recipe. If either had, then they would have discovered that freezing water expands rather than contracts. […]

Hero was eventually refuted by experiments with barometers conducted by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal. Their barometer consisted of a tube partially submerged, upside down in a bowl of mercury. What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there an unnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquid up? Or is there no vacuum at all but rather some rarefied and invisible matter in the “empty space”? Pascal answered that there really was nothing holding up the mercury. The mercury rises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. The mercury is being pushed up the tube, not pulled up by anything.

When Pascal offered this explanation to the plenist Descartes, Descartes wrote Christian Huygens that Pascal had too much vacuum in his head. Descartes identified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums.

Descartes was not the only 17th-century wit to make this joke. Thus Thomas Pecke, "Upon Marcus", 1659:

Why durst you offer Marcus to aver
Nature abhorr'd a vacuum ? confer
But with your empty skull, then you'll agree
Nature will suffer a vacuitie.

There's a more extended and more effective version of the joke in Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Mr Anthony, A Comedy (which seems to have been a sort of 17th-century Breakfast Club), where Mr. Anthony and his friend Jack Plot gang up on Mr. Pedagog:

Plot: How like you this, Mr. Pedagog , have I not taught your Pupil rarely this Morning?

Anthony:  Prethee let me have my full swinge at him (for he has had his many a dismal time at me:) I say, if thou dost not conform to all the Maxims of Jack Plot, Tom Art , and my own dear self, I will peach thee at such a rate to my Sire, as shall provoke him to uncase thee out of thy Pedagogical Cassock, Condemn to the Flame, Martyrlike all thy Ferula's, Grammars, Dictionaries, Classick Authors, and Common-Place Books; nay, take thy Green Glasses out of thy Spectacles, and leave thee only thy Horn-cases to look through; by which, thou wilt be as able to read Prayers with thy Nose as with thy Eyes.

Plot: Nay, if thou dost not frisk as lustily to a single Kit, whenever thy late Pupil and my present Convert bids thee, as to 24 Violins, I will Convert thy Lictorian Bundles of Birch, which Consul-like thou hast carryed before thee, into Rods for thy own Posteriors, and have no more mercy on thy Hanches, than thou usest to have on my Friend Anthony 's, when he cannot say his Lesson, though he be the greatest Dunce of the two; only his Imbecillity, varnish'd over with a Pythagorean Gravity, passes for profound Knowledge in thy Fathers Shallow Pate; where, if there is a Vacuum in Nature, there it needs must be.

Anthony: By this hand, I long to open it, to try the Experiment.

It's not clear to me whether (or how) Mr. Anthony's author, Roger Boyle,  was related to Robert Boyle, the antagonist of Thomas Hobbes in an important controversy about the existence of vacuums and the proper conduct of scientific investigation. Anyhow, Hobbes hated Descartes, but agreed with him about vacuums.

See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 1985; but also see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (2002), pp. 190-196:

By the time he published De corpora in 1655, Hobbes had actually adopted … a plenist theory, denying the existence of any empty spaces — even at the atomic level — in the universe. Why did he make this change? According to Shapin and Schaffer, the fundamental reasons were political. Hobbes settled on a materialist plenism in order to exclude 'incorporeal substances', such as spirits and the human soul …, because these were the props and devices used by priestcraft to harness people's fears and thereby gain power in the state, subverting lawful authority. The difficulty with this explanation is that his attack on 'incorporeal substance' required only materialism; it did not require plenism too. […]

The real reasons for Hobbes' shift from vacuist to plenist are to be found in experimental physics […] 'It is said that one can see through the empty space […] from which it follows that the action of a light-producing body is being propagated through a vacuum (which I think is impossible).'

Though action at a distance remains unmediated by ethereal vortices, the story continues, and not just in the comics:

Historians of science wonder whether the ether that was loudly pushed out the front door of physics is quietly returning through the back door under the guise of “space”. Quantum field theory provides especially fertile area for such speculation. Particles are created with the help of energy present in “vacuums”. To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty.

[Update — I'm very sorry to say that the remark attributed to Descartes may be a myth, or perhaps an exaggeration (In the Stanford Encyclopedia, too, and many other apparently authoritative places!) At least, according to Daniel Garber, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, p. 142:

All Descartes ever got from Pascal was the promise of a refutation of his preferred explanation. At the end of the Expériences nouvelles, a preliminary outline of a never completed treatise on the vacuum, Pascal promised to respond to the objection "that a matter imperceptible, extraordinary, and unknown to all of the senses fills the space [above the column]," a position formulated with Descartes in mind, no doubt. Descartes seems to have received the work in good humor. Writing to Huygens on 8 December [1647], shortly after having received the Expériences nouvelles, he noted:

It appears to me that the young man who wrote this booklet has the vacuum a bit too much on his mind, and is somewhat hasty. I wish the volume he promises were already available, so that one could see his reasons, which are, if I am not mistaken, insufficiently solid for what he has undertaken to prove. (AT V 653)

It's not at all clear from this translation that D was really making a joke about P having "too much vacuum in his head" — it would be nice to see the original French (or Latin?).]

People's aversion to the word moist has attracted our attention for a while now (most recently in this post — see also the links in this one). Mark Peters recently wrote about the moist phenomenon for Good, quoting Language Log discussion as well as a Word Routes column I wrote for the Visual Thesaurus. And now Mark's Good column just got noticed by the folks at "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!" on NPR — Mark and I were quoted in their "limericks" segment (skip to about 3:00 in):

And just so it's clear that I'm not pinning moist aversion entirely on the "oi" diphthong, here is what I originally wrote:

Why does moist merit a Facebook group of haters, while hoist and joist go unnnoticed? It's more than just the sound of the word: the disliked words tend to have some basic level of ickiness… slimy stuff, bodily discharge, or other things that people would prefer not to think about. Icky words include nostril, crud, pus, and pimple. Ointment and goiter share the "oi" sound with moist: there must be something about that diphthong that gets under people's skin.

(Read the rest here.)

Jem S at Shoebox turns the Purple Haze mondegreen around:

It's been done, but (apparently) not in a cartoon.

[Hat tip: Felix Hayman]

Some corrections to and clarifications of my posting on by the hundreds / by hundreds / by the hundred.

First, an apology for having posted about Burchfield's note on by the hundreds (which declares it to be "unidiomatic") without going back and checking the original Fowler and Gowers's edition of Fowler; instead Tim Moon and I just looked at our project files about Fowler and Gowers, and these files were (for some reason) missing coverage of the expression.

Now we know that the trail goes back to Fowler and that the "unidiomatic" label reflects Fowler's taste.

Second, an apology for rushing to post and not adding all the qualifications about searches for the three expressions at issue. Just searching for by the hundreds / by hundreds / by the hundred, looking for uses conveying 'in large number(s)', pulls up a fair amount of irrelevant material: instances of by the hundred 'in lots of 100′, examples like "noticed by hundreds of researchers", and so on. In my earlier posting I narrowed the search by adding the verb came, and found all three variants to be attested, but with different frequencies (with the hundreds well in front). I find all three variants acceptable, but prefer the hundreds.

Commenters tried a variety of searches (and expanded the scope to include score and dozen, which don't seem to work quite the same way as hundred and thousand). Mark Liberman noted that hits for the hundreds in books seem to be "mainly recent and/or American" — mainly but by no means exclusively. All three variants are attested for some time back and in British as well as American sources, but it's reasonable to speculate that Fowler's taste reflected British preferences of his time.

A final remark about a misunderstanding that crops up repeatedly in comments on Language Log postings about variation. When I expressed a personal preference for the variant the hundreds, some readers seem to have taken me to be disparaging the other variants, and responded by saying they found one of the other variants (in particular, the hundred) unexceptionable. But I never dissed the other variants, and indeed said quite clearly that I found all three variants acceptable. Different people have different preferences, and many people will use two or all three of the variants on different occasions.

My current guess at what's going on in these responses is that some people are implicitly subscribing to some version of the One Right Way principle, so that if one variant is allowed, other variants are disfavored, or even disallowed. But no scholar of variation or usage holds to such a principle.

Today's Cathy:

The interpretation of timing — not within but between communications — hasn't been studied much. There's Wally Chafe's Discourse, Consciousness, Time, but I don't recall much in it about interpreting the length of gaps or silences. There's some of this sort of thing in work on computer-mediated conversation. And there's some work on intercultural differences in conversational "dead air", which I'll try to find. But it's a topic that might repay further investigation, I think, in a culture where more and more interaction is asynchronous.

[Update — The work I was thinking of, on communicative norms in certain North American Indian cultures, is summarized by John Gumperz ("Contextualization and Ideology in Intercultural Communication", in DiLuzio, Günthner and Orletti (Eds.), Culture in Communication) this way:

Conversations are often punctuated with relatively long pauses and silences. In informal gatherings, Indian people may sit or stand quietly, without speaking. If addressed, they may look away and remain silent for a relatively long time (at least from the perspective of mainstream Americans) before responding. When a person is asked a question and she has no new information to provide, nothing new to say, she is likely to give no answer. In all such cases, American Indians themselves interpret the silence as a sign of respect, a positive indication, showing that the other's remarks or questions are being given full consideration that is their due.

He cites work by Philips on the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, and by Basso on Western Apache.

Thus Susan Philips, "Some sources of cultural variability in the regulation of talk", Language in Society 5(1): 81-95, 1976:

… Indian exchanges proceed at a slower pace than those of Anglos. […] The pauses between two different speakers' turns at talk are frequently longer than is the case in Anglo interactions. There is a tolerance for silences — silences that Anglos often rush into and fill. […]

For Anglos, answers to questions are close to obligatory … That this is not the case with Warm Springs Indians was pointed out to me by an Indian from another reservation who had married into the Warm Springs reservation. He observed wryly that it is often difficult to get an answer out of 'these old people' (and I should add that the phrase 'old people' has the connotation of respect). And he told an anecdote about posing a question that got answered a week after it was asked.

In other words, answers to questions are not obligatory. Absence of an answer merely means the floor is open, or continues to belong to the questioner. This does not mean, however, that the question will not be answered later. Nor does it mean that it ought not to be raised again, since the questions may reasonably assume his audience has had time to think about it.

This absence of a requirement for immediate response is also apparent in the handling of invitations.

Keith Basso notes the various interpretations that failure to speak can have in mainstream American culture ("'To Give up on Words': Silence in Western Apache Culture", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26(3), 1970):

Although the form of silence is always the same, the function of a specific act of silence — that is, its interpretation by and effect upon other people — will vary according to the social context in which it occurs. For example, if I choose to keep silent in the chambers of a Justice of the Supreme Court, my action is likely to be interpreted as a sign of politeness or respect. On the other hand, if I refrain from speaking to an established friend or colleague, I am apt to be accused of rudeness or harboring a grudge. In one instance, my behavior is judged by others to be "correct" or "fitting"; in the other, it is criticized as being "out of line."

He goes on to list a number of situations where conversation would be nearly obligatory in mainstream American culture, on pain of rudeness or other negative interpretation, but would be optional or even strongly discouraged among the Western Apache.

I've heard descriptions similar to those of Philips and Basso from several American Indianists whose experience and judgment I trust — though there is apparently (and unsurprisingly) cultural variation among different groups, as suggested by Philips' anecdote.]

After his NPR interview and MSNBC honor for debunking the Cronkiter myth, Ben Zimmer is subbing for William Safire as this week's NYT's On Language columnist: "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", 8/7/2009.

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

In a few years’ time, the use of fail as an interjection caught on to such an extent that particularly egregious objects of ridicule required an even stronger barb: major fail, überfail, massive fail or, most popular of all, epic fail. The intensifying adjectives hinted that fail was becoming a new kind of noun: not simply a synonym for failure but, rather, a derisive label to slap on a miscue that is eminently mockable in its stupidity or wrongheadedness. Online cynics deploy fail as a countable noun (“That’s such a fail!”) and also as a mass noun that treats failure as an abstract quality: the offending party is often said to be full of fail or made of fail.

Read the whole thing.

The National Taxpayers Union has been doing a little content analysis of the House Democrats' Health Care bill, noting the statistical predominance of words like require, limit, enforce, must, obligation, and restrict, and the scarcity of words like choice, options, and freedom. "House Democrats' Health Plan Contains Words of Coercion — not Choice — Text Analysis Shows," the headline on their news release says, as they conclude ominously:

if the language of the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ is a guide to its true intent then the bill is really about empowering bureaucracy and limiting freedom, competition, and the marketplace.

Leaving the bill's content aside, the linguistic assumptions here seem a little confused. As vexing as it can be to have laws telling you what you're obliged or required to do, it's probably better than living someplace where the laws tell you what you're permitted or free to do. If we have to have laws, I'd rather have them peppered with must than with may.

[Added 8/7: Nancy Scola and Micah Sifry make a similar point at TechPresident.]

In a report from the Yonhap News Agency out today under the title "Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system" comes a stunning story that is sure to warm the cockles of all Hangeul devotees everywhere.  I'll let the report speak for itself:

SEOUL, Aug. 6 (Yonhap) — A minority tribe in Indonesia has chosen to use Hangeul as its official writing system, in the first case of the Korean alphabet being used by a foreign society, a scholars' association here said Thursday.

The tribe in the city of Bauer and Bauer, located in Buton, Southeast Sulawesi, has chosen Hangeul as the official alphabet to transcribe its aboriginal language, according to the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute.

The Indonesian ethnic minority, with a population of 60,000, was on the verge of losing its native language as it lacked a proper writing system, the institute said.

The city of Bauer and Bauer began to teach students the Korean alphabet last month, with lessons based on textbooks created by the Korean institute.

Composed of writing, speaking and reading sections, all texts in the book — explaining the tribe's history, language and culture — are written in the Korean script. The book also includes a Korean fairy tale.

The city plans to set up a Korean center next month and to work on spreading the Korean alphabet to other regions by training Korean language teachers.

Linguists here expressed hope that the case will become a stepping stone to spreading and promoting the Korean alphabet globally. The Hunminjeongeum Research Institute has been trying for several years to spread the Korean alphabet to minority tribes across Asia who do not have their own writing system.

"It will be a meaningful case in history if the Indonesian tribe manages to keep its aboriginal language with the help of Hangeul," said Seoul National University professor and member of the institute Kim Joo-won. "In the long run, the spread of Hangeul will also help enhance Korea's economy as it will activate exchanges with societies that use the language."

Prof. Lee Ho-young, who helped create the Korean textbook for the Indonesian tribe, said it was a "historical case" for the Korean alphabet to be used in preserving the traditional language of a foreign society.

"I hope the case will serve as a meaningful opportunity to show off the excellence of Hangeul outside of the country," he said.

=====

That's one small step for [an] alphabet, one giant leap for the Korean people [and their economy].

Thanks to Michael Rank for calling this item to my attention.

In a comment on a recent LL post, Daniel C. Parmenter wrote:

In my MT days (starting in the early nineties) we used the WSJ corpus a lot. I read recently that the availablity of this corpus was in no small part thanks to you. And so I thank you. In those pre-and-early Google/Altavista days the WSJ corpus was an enormous help. Thanks!

Daniel is referring to an archive of text from the Wall Street Journal, covering 1987-1989, originally published with some other raw material for corpus linguistics by the  Data Collection Initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL/DCI). And the person who most deserves thanks for the availability of the WSJ part of this publication — perhaps its most important part — is Bill Dunn, who was the head of Dow Jones Information Services in the late 1980s.

As far as I know, Bill's role in making this corpus available is not documented anywhere, so I'll take this opportunity to tell some of the story as I remember it. (The rest of this post is a slightly-edited version of an email that I sent on 5/1/2008 to someone at the WSJ who had corresponded with Geoff Pullum about an article on the use of corpus materials in linguistic research.)

In the mid 1980s, Bill Dunn came to visit AT&T to talk about networked digital media — part of what we now call the World Wide Web, though of course the web didn't exist then. Bill was  the vice president for information services at Dow Jones & Company, and I was head of the linguistics research department at Bell Labs. Bill was convinced that in the future, people would get their information in digital form rather than on paper, via networked connections to information providers like Dow Jones. He felt that several sorts of technological innovation would be key to making that happen — changes in the network and in the devices that people connect to it with, but also in the way that information is stored, searched and presented.

Bill hoped that AT&T could help him with the network and the devices. I was most interested in the storage, searching and presentation, and I made the argument that the best way for him to foster progress in that area would be to make a body of WSJ text easily available in digital form to researchers around the world.

He agreed, and told some technicians at the DJIS site in Princeton to send me a few cartons of those old nine-track tapes. I read and decrypted them (they contained instructions for some antique typographical engine, as I recall, so this was not entirely trivial), and the contents were featured in a series of collections made available on CD-ROM via the Data Collection Initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which was founded for the purpose. (And that's another story…)

Anyhow, I recently searched the web to find out what happened to Bill, whom I haven't spoken with in 20 years, and I found this (Juan Antono Giner, "From Newspapers to 24-hour information engines", 10/2001):

In the early 1990s, digital language emerged as a new matrix to unify the traditional differentiation of the media. It was the start of a development that hitherto was impossible: electronification of the entire media — print or audiovisual.

From an era of co-existence we moved to a culture of cooperation. Although the transition from the analog world to a digital one called for strategies that were still passive, these new companies — such as Japan's Nikkei Group and Brasil's Agência Estado, which were pioneers of this convergence — became "post-newspaper" organisations.

Not everyone agreed on what lines to follow. William Dunn, vice president for electronic information services at Dow Jones & Company, was convinced that the print edition of The Wall Street Journal would soon be only one of many sources of revenue. His directors were skeptical, and Dunn left the company. Dow Jones later failed with its Telerate venture and lost its leadership position in world real-time financial services. Bloomberg, at the time an unknown but visionary news agency, came to the fore in less than a decade. So did Reuters, which reinvented itself in short order as a provider of content in digital multi-channels.

I regret to say that AT&T management was not any nimbler or more prescient in this respect than DJ&C was — in their view at the time, the key technical problem was how to make a cheap-enough piece of hardware combining a modem, a printer, and a cassette recorder, so that subscribers could download a personalized news feed in the wee hours of the morning (when bandwidth was essentially free), and have their choice of a printed or spoken version waiting at breakfast time.

They didn't understand that the most serious problems were editorial and human-factors problems: how to let users set up their profiles, how to match stories to their profiles cheaply and reliably enough (or let them search for stories conveniently enough), how to get the necessary stories read (or synthesized) at high enough quality for the audio version, etc. (At least, the people I dealt with at the time weren't interested in these questions.)

Anyhow, Bill understood that for things like this to work, all sorts of new search and retrieval and user-interface technology would need to be developed, and that in order to develop the methods, researchers would need large bodies of real text to work on. He got someone to send me tapes of three  years of Dow Jones newswire before I left AT&T in 1990.

Later on, in 1992 or so when a DARPA project needed more text, I tried to reach Bill again. I believe that he had retired by then; and his successors were frankly horrified that he had handed out so much stuff on a handshake. I don't think there were even any records at Dow Jones that the release had happened — he'd just asked one of the computer operators in Princeton to make me a dump.

Anyhow, the guy in change at that point, Peter Shuyten, was smart enough to recognize that  we could probably be trusted, given that no IPR disasters had occurred up that point, and was kind enough decide to give us more text rather than taking us to court — although I think that this time, we paid for it, at least at the standard newswire subscription rates.

Computational linguistics owes Bill Dunn a lot, and (I think) so does the world at large. Thanks, Bill!

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh commented on an odd sentence from the Las Vegas Sun:

He said he was not aware that any of the companies were already engaged in illegal activity at the time that he helped to set up them. [emphasis added]

Eugene's analysis:

The author or the copyeditor was enforcing some (entirely spurious) rule against splitting an idiom such as "set up," and as a result replaced a perfectly normal construction ("set them up") with a weird and jarring one.

My first reaction was different, as I explained in a comment:

I'm inclined to think that a more pedestrian editing error might have been the cause. For example, the sentence might originally have read "…helped to found them", and someone might carelessly have replaced "found" with "set up". Irrational editorial preferences that merely eliminate grammatical alternatives are viable, like which-hunting, but those that create obviously ungrammatical outcomes are unlikely to survive for long.

If there's really an editor at that paper who enforces a "rule" that object pronouns must follow the intransitive prepositions of so-called phrasal verbs, there should be plenty of evidence. You could, so to speak, look up it. I'll check and report back.

It's certainly true that editorial splitophobia is an endemic disease — see "The split verbs mystery" (8/23/2008) and "When zombie rules attack" (8/26/2008) for some documentation. But let's not diagnose a new locus of infection without more evidence.

For a normative sample, let's take a look at the New York Times. Searching their archives since 1981 for the sequence "them up", we get 12,747 results. Nearly all of these are cases of where them is the object of a verb+"particle" (i.e. intransitive preposition) combination:

I can call them up and talk to them about different technologies.
Seal them up with a good caulking material.
…there has been other fragmentary intelligence to back them up.

In the first 50, I found 5 clear examples of other structures

… at the expense of many of its suppliers, most of them up-and-comers.
… the developer will reimburse them up to a total of 10 percent of the loss in value.
Mr. Thaddeus, the astrophysicist, took them up to the roof
You might grow them up in Cold Spring, N.Y.
… dividing 5-to-4 or 6-to-3 in almost half of them, up from roughly a third in the three previous years

And one unclear example:

…city dwellers cook lunches in tiny kitchens and carry them up to rooftops

Assuming that this ratio is typical, we'd have about 0.88*12,747 examples of the "V them up" order, or about 11,000.

In contrast, if we search for the sequence "up them", we get 50 hits. Some of these are completely irrelevant things like

One-up them by seeing someone headed down to Austin first.
… life is trying to match up them two rhythms.
They get to pulling up them fish, nobody wants to come home.

A few are pretty clearly mistakes, apparently a residue of incomplete editorial activity of the kind that I suspect in the Las Vegas Sun case, resulting in either "up them up" or "them up them":

…persuaded Iran to temporarily suspend its most worrisome activities while negotiating a package of incentives for Iran to give up them up altogether.
…may have an effect on the chemistry of contaminated industrial sites, helping to clean up them up.
But he usually got mud on the cuffs and his wife, Sue, suggested he roll up them up to save on cleaning bills.
Warner serves more than a million customers in Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn — hooking them up them has proven difficult.

In most of the hits, "up them" is a prepositional phrase, where them is the complement of up, like

Mr. O'Connor tumbled through walls and tried to walk up them
Those steps are nice and comparatively flat and you could drive right up them
… it isn't only sleeves that have tricks up them.

I found no examples whatever where them is the object of what Eugene called an "idiom" consisting of a verb and an intransitive preposition.

OK, that's the background: 11,000 to 0. Now for the Las Vegas Sun.

Searching the Sun's site via Google for "them up", we get 679 hits. Checking the first 50, I find two where up is part of a following idiom ("up close and personal") or a transitive preposition:

And I don't think our moms, if we ask them up close and personal, would condone how we do health care for very long.
…people who have relationships with the Culinary all year long are making deals with them up in Carson City.

All the rest are the normal sort of V+them+up structures ("tying them up", "hold them up", "clean them up", etc.). So adjust the count to about .96*679, or about 650.

Searching via Google for "up them" produces quite weird results. We get the Tarkanian story that Eugene Volokh commented on. We get two irrelevancies and typos, namely

Put Up or Shut Up? Them's fightin' words.
A parent can only do so much for their child, after a while, it's up them to make the right choices …

There's one example, in an unedited comment full of other typos and brainos, which doesn't tell us anything about copy-editing notions at the paper:

I am guessing for each Califorian that ACORN probably has sign up them at least 10x's.

Then there are about 180 reported hits where the search string doesn't appear at all, like Nick Christensen, "Wranglers come up empty in home opener", 11/3/2004. I've checked all 125 alleged hits (the rest seem to be duplicates), and the only examples of "them up" are the four already quoted — Eugene Volokh's find of "to set up them", and the three irrelevancies and typos just listed. So this seems to be some weird sort of Google bug, or perhaps a side effect of a Google "feature" intended somehow to be helpful.

[We can check this by using Bing, which lacks this "helpful" "feature", whatever it is. Searching the Las Vegas Sun site for "up them" gets 5 hits. One is the original Tarkanian sentence; three are the others we've already seen; the last is this irrelevancy (in a quote):

Can Sens. Reid and Ensign round up them votes? I don't know.

In contrast, seaching Bing for "them up" yields 1,060 hits, and the usual check of a sample of 50 shows that they are almost all instances of the V+them+up structure.]

Conclusion: The sentence that Eugene Volokh found is probably an inadvertent editorial error, not a mistaken editorial choice.

[And secondarily, "…helped to set up them" (with the relevant structure and interpretation) really is ungrammatical, i.e. well outside the norms of contemporary English, not just (as Eugene suggested) "unidiomatic". The only (marginal) exception, I think, would be cases with contrastive stress on the pronoun, e.g. "First we'll set up YOU, and then we'll set up THEM".]

The National Science Foundation put out a press release today under the title "U.S. Students Win Big at the International Linguistics Olympiad", subtitle "Event in Poland highlights significance of emerging field of computational linguistics".

High school students from across the U.S. won individual and team honors last week at the seventh annual International Olympiad in Linguistics held in Wroclaw, Poland. The results reflect U.S. competence in computational linguistics, an emerging field that has applications in computer science, language processing, code breaking and other advanced arenas.

The U.S. fielded two teams at the Olympiad, which featured competitors from 17 different countries, including Australia, Germany, India, South Korea and Russia. Rebecca Jacobs of Los Angeles took the highest individual honor of any U.S. competitor with a silver medal, while John Berman of Wilmington, N.C., Sergei Bernstein of Boston, and Alan Huang of Beverly Hills, Mich., each took home bronze medals. Morris Alper of Palo Alto, Calif., Daryl Hansen of Sammamish, Wash., Anand Natarajan of San Jose, Calif. and Vivaek Shivakumar of Arlington, Va. received honorable mentions for their work. Berman and Huang were also recognized for their solutions to specific problems.

The U.S. Red team, comprised of Alper, Huang, Jacobs, and Natarajan took home the gold cup in team competition.

Further information about the team is here, including this important background:

While the linguistics competition is fun, it also requires dedication and hard work by many people, all of whom are volunteers. The organizing committee is headed by Professor Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan) and Professor Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University), and it also includes Mary Jo Bensasi, Eugene Fink, Adam Hesterberg, Patrick Littell, Ida Mayer, James Pustejovsky, and Amy Troyani. The program committee includes twenty more people, who create new competition problems and judge the performance of contestants. The other volunteers are high-school teachers and college students who help to organize and proctor the event.

It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden and Holland, news anchors are (or were) called "Cronkiters." I investigated the claim in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which led to an appearance on the NPR show "On the Media" over the weekend.

Earlier today, in an admirable display of media self-criticism, the Associated Press set the record straight in an article by the very same reporter who filed the Cronkite obituary. (The AP also issued a formal correction.) And from all this, I've somehow ended up as Keith Olbermann's second best person in the world today — just edged out by some entertaining crackpot whose faulty Bible translation "proves" that Obama is the Antichrist. It's been a fun ride, but I think the debunkorama is finally drawing to a close.

Yesterday, in a post about a traffic sign, I momentarily mistook the phonophore YOU3 酉 (calendrical symbol) for QIU2 酋 ("chief") in the character JIU3 酒 ("beer").  It turns out that YOU3 and QIU2 are both semantically, graphically, and phonetically related to JIU3 ("beer, alcohol").

YOU3 酉 is actually the original form of JIU3 酒; it depicted a jar full of beer (imagine the bottom as tapered rather than squared).  YOU3 酉 was subsequently borrowed to indicate the 10th of the 12 Earthly Branches (DI4ZHI1 地支, calendrical symbols), with the bleaching of the original meaning ("jar [full of beer]").  But as late as the Shuihudi manuscripts (late 3rd c. BC), the pictograph YOU3 酉 by itself could still signify JIU3 ("beer").  In these recently discovered manuscripts, which include laws of the Qin Dynasty, there are prohibitions against the brewing of beer by peasants.

QIU2 酋 originally signified the person in charge of apportioning beer among a group of individuals.  The character was composed of  two strokes at the top signifying "to divide" (cf. FEN 分 ["to split, divide"], where we have the same two strokes at the top with a knife at the bottom dividing the two halves above) plus 酉 (the jar of beer which was the original form of JIU3 酒, before the water radical got added to disambiguate it from the semantically bleached or attenuated Earthly Branch).  The resultant QIU2 酋 ("chief") was the person in charge of distributing the alcoholic beverage in the jar, i.e., he divided up / \ (–> \ /) the beer (in the jar) YOU3 (= JIU3) 酉 to those who were drinking, hence he was the QIU2 酋, the "beer-divider."  That must have been an important position in ancient society, because "beer-divider" later came to mean "(tribal) chief."

In the Kangxi system of 214 radicals, the "three-drops-water" at the left side of JIU3 酒 is no. 85.  There are well over 500 characters that have the "three-drops-water" as their semantic classifier.  All sorts of characters having to do with aqueousness, liquidity, moisture, and so forth are classified under this radical.  It is interesting that the phonophore for JIU3 酒 ("beer"), namely YOU3 酉, is also itself a radical, no. 164.  There are probably over 200 characters that have 酉 as their radical.  Some examples:  ZHUO2 酌 ("pour beer"), CHUN2 醇 ("mellow [of beer, tea]"), SU1 酥 ("flaky [of crust, cakes, biscuits]"), LAO4 酪 ("cheese, curds"), JIAO4 酵 ("leaven, yeast"), SUAN1 酸 ("sour, acid"), CHOU3 醜 ("ugly"), YUN4 醞 ("brew, ferment"), YI1 醫 ("medicine [as a science]"), and so forth.

The Early Middle Sinitic (ca. 600 AD) pronunciation of the three main characters discussed above are:

YOU3 酉  juw'
QIU2 酋  dzuw
JIU3 酒  tsuw'

In Old Sinitic (ca. 600 BC), all three of these words would have ended in a velar or glottal stop.

These terms are all close cognates and fall into the same phonetic series.  See Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 1096, where early forms of 酉 (as a beer storage vessel) may be seen, and Axel Schuessler, Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese:  A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa, 13-36.

It is just as well that — in a moment of graphic inebriation — I innocently confused 酉 and 酋.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to mature these mellow mullings (puns intended)!

Oh, I almost forgot.  Last Thursday at the Beer Summit, President Obama demonstrated why he's the real chief in Washington DC.

From Monday's NYT (Neil Amdur, "Asperger's Syndrome, on Screen and in Life", 8/3/2009):

“I wanted to tell a film about my friend,” Mr. Elliot, now 37 and an award-winning writer and director, said in a phone interview from Australia, where “Mary and Max” has grossed more than $1 million since its opening in April. “Asperger’s is a part of him; it’s the way he’s hot-wired. If I had ignored him, it would have offended him.”

Adam Elliot is Australian, and thus r-less. Neil Amdur is "a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.", and thus r-ful. "Strine" also has other phonetic differences from American English. So it's likely that the Australian filmmaker said "hard-wired" into the phone in Melbourne, and the American journalist heard and transcribed "hot-wired" at the other end of the line in New York.

Then again, maybe Mr. Elliot said "hot-wired", and Mr. Amdur accepted this without correction. However it happened, this looks like one for the eggcorn database.

Back in the old days, it used to be possible to "hot-wire" a car, i.e. start it without the key, by "connecting the two wires which complete the circuit when the key is in the 'on' position (turning on the fuel pump and other necessary components), then touching the wire that connects to the starter".

The OED traces this use to 1947:

1947 Frederick (Maryland) Post 12 July 1/2 The woman ‘hot wired’ the ignition system of a 1947 model automobile.
1949 Los Angeles Times 7 Nov. I. 10/1 After ‘hot-wiring’ the coupe to start it, the pair continued their roving junket.

The earliest citations for figurative uses are from 20 or 30 years later (though I'd be surprised if there weren't some earlier ones):

1968 R. BRAUTIGAN Pill versus Springhill Mine Disaster (1973) 17 You hotwire death, get in, and drive away.
1977 Time 29 Aug. 24/1 His high school classmates..watched, stunned, as their shy schoolmate hot-wired a class amateur show.

But hot-wiring won't work with newer cars, since 1985 or so, because of additional anti-theft safeguards in the form of steering-wheel locks and transponder circuits built into keys. So there's not much left but the metaphors. Thus Betsy Sholl's 1992 poem The Red Line:

… nothing the nuns ever said could answer the way
that boy's tongue hot-wired me.

And now that it's cut loose from its electromechanical origins, hot-wired is available for re-analysis, just like unbridled, free rein, and other horse-harness metaphors.

Similarly, in the olden days the cheapest way to make a machine respond in a complex way, or differentiate among complex alternative inputs, was to use hard-wired control: some clever circuit design (whether analog or digital) designed to respond to the right inputs or produce the right outputs. The OED's earliest citation for hard-wired is 1969:

1969 Mechanised Accounting Nov. 54/2 Central to the entire System 21 structure is the microprocessor and its various hard-wired microprograms.
1973 Sci. Amer. May 11 (Advt.), It computes in totally algebraic logic and is equipped with immediate-response hardwired functions.

1969 seems very late to me — but in any case, the term made sense only after there was an alternative in the form of stored-program (or plugboard?) control, so it couldn't have originated before the late 1940s.

Whenever it started, this term again led to an ample space of figurative usage, especially as a way of talking about instinctive behavior. The OED's first citation is from 1971:

1971 New Scientist 16 Sept. 615/2 These cells are hard-wired and ready for action as soon as the kitten opens its eyes.
1975 Sci. Amer. June 87/3 The product of ‘hard-wired’, or fixed, visual pathways originating at the retina and terminating in the cortex.

These days, it's almost always cheaper to use a general-purpose digital processor, and create the cleverly customized behavior with software. Still, the metaphorical usage remains alive and well:

… a woman uses about 20,000 words a day due to the fact that talking actually activates the pleasure centres in a woman's brain whereas men use only 7,000 because they are programmed to be laconic […]  if a woman's brain has unique chemical and structural characteristics that underpin traits such as compassion, empathy and loquaciousness, then one might have to consider the possibility that the modern male is struggling to be caring and empathetic because he is 'hard-wired' to be emotionally reserved and uncommunicative. [Rebecca Feasey, Masculinity and Popular Television (2009), citing Louann Brizendine]

Both hot-wired and hard-wired are floating free, released from their real-world roots. So it's not surprising that an Australian filmmaker and and American journalist might get confused, individually or together, about whether someone's metaphorical wiring is hot or hard.

[Hat tip: John V Burke]

[Update –  a bit of web searching was able to antedate "hard-wired" a bit, to 1966 Aero/space Computer Symposium, October 24-25, 1966, Miramar:

The memory system is a partially hard-wired, partially scratchpad, 18 bit, 5 microsecond cycle time, ferrite core type. This memory can be assigned to varying ratios of scratchpad versus fixed as required by the individual task. It is currently half hard-wired and half scratchpad. It is convertible to a 512 scratchpad and 3584 words of hard-wired core (or anything between).

The metadata is a mess (as is all too typical of Google Books, alas) but the title seems to make a date of 1966 pretty clear. And a search for the combination of "patch panel" and "hard-wired" turns up a likely (but restricted candidate) that Google Books amusingly classifies under "religion":

Unfortunately, the date of 1948 is no more trustworthy than the classification is…

This document apparently antedates hard-wired to 1964:

It is proposed in this report to build a square-root digital computer for a hard-wired special purpose airborne application where speed and simplicity are prime in importance

But the lack of quotation marks suggests that the term was then already in common use. ]

[Update #2 — a search of Google's patent database turns up Edward C. Dowling, "Sequential bit binary detector circuit and system", assigned to AMP corporation, filed Nov. 6, 1963, which uses "hard wired" several times, e.g.

…it is to be understood that with certain types of components such as transistors or magnetic cores, the units 76-82 may be dispensed with and hard wired conductive paths linking the bit positions to accomplish either a ONE or ZERO input may be employed.

No earlier patent texts seem to use this term (leaving out one hit allegedly from 1903, which turns out to be faulty metadata again, having really been filed in 1968).]

[Update #3 — the earliest legal citation for hot wired that I could find in LexisNexis was Brubaker v. United States, August 10, 1950:

While seeking to arrest defendant's companion on an unrelated charge, police saw the two men park a car at a tavern in Tennessee. Closer inspection revealed that the car had no ignition key. When approached in the tavern, defendant and his companion denied any knowledge of the car or each other. Defendant also denied any knowledge of two revolvers found in a suitcase in the car. After police determined that the car had been hot-wired and was stolen from its owner in California, defendant was charged with violating the Dyer Act. The evidence at trial included, inter alia, the guns that were found in the car.

So I'm tentatively convinced that the term hot wired was invented in the late 1940s. This seems a bit surprising, given that cars were made with self-starters and (I believe) ignition locks from 1920 or so onwards.]

Every so often, here at Language Log Plaza we come across usage advice that's new to us. Today's find comes from Tim Moon, who's working on my OI! project at Stanford this summer. It's from Robert Burchfield's The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), on the expression by the hundreds and the like:

the unidiomatic with plural; either by the hundred or by hundreds (p. 775)

Notice the usage label: "unidiomatic". Where does this come from? Not from a search of texts, to see which variant is most used, especially by "good writers". Instead, this is an expression of Burchfield's personal taste in the matter (a lot of usage advice is expressions of personal taste). As it happens, this is not Tim Moon's taste, or mine; both of us judge by the hundreds to be the most natural of the three, though all of them are acceptable. We now have some evidence that there are others agree with us, and have so far been unable to find any other handbook that takes a position — any position — on the matter.

Tim started by doing a crude Google search on the competing expressions, getting the numbers:

by the hundreds: 3,300,000
by hundreds: 2,400,000
by the hundred: 267,000

That is, by the hundreds comes out on top (at least on the web), with more hits than the other two variants put together. However, each of these searches is going to pick up some irrelevant hits. So I tried a more constrained search, and got the same results:

came by the hundreds: 11,200
came by hundreds: 6,600
came by the hundred: 1,990

I see no easy way to do such searches on "elite writers", and merely polling random people for their opinions is unlikely to give interpretable data. (I'm allowing comments, in the hope that someone can report some usage adviser other than Burchfield with a published opinion in the matter. But I'm asking people not to just post about their own personal tastes, entertaining though that might be.)

I have wondered if there's anything behind Burchfield's taste. Note that the idiom by the hundreds has the article the of the idiom by the hundred and the explicit plural of the idiom by hundreds, so it's possible that at some level Burchfield was thinking of by the hundreds as redundantly marked, maybe as a result of blending the other two variants (which would make it an inadvertent error that then spread to wider use). In that story, the other two idioms would have to have been the historical originals, with by the hundreds an innovation.

This is all speculation. I have no evidence about the history, and I can imagine other plausible stories. By the hundreds (and the like) could have been the historical original, with the other two variants arising as simplifications of it. Or, of course, the variants could have arisen independently.

"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.