Being Human

A couple of days ago, Olivia Judson discussed the effects on science writing of the execrable state of English libel law, with some details of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against Simon Singh, and a bit about Mattias Rath's case against Ben Goldacre: "Cracking the Spine of Libel", NYT, 9/15/2009. There's an excellent list of links at the end of her post.

We discussed a central linguistic aspect of the case against Singh here a few months ago ("Knowing bogosity", 4/11/2009).

Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.

The idea that the rise of something undesirable can be altered by "bending the curve" has been around for quite a while. Here is an unnamed writer in the midst of World War I, optimistically predicting that "the progress of science" will "bend the curve more rapidly toward the base line of permanent 'peace on earth and good will to men'" (where the curve is understood as a graph of the frequency of wars over time):

"The Progress of Science: Substitutes for War" (anon.)
The Scientific Monthly (Oct. 1915), p. 101
The writer of this note has determined the proportion of each century in which the leading nations have been engaged in war. The curve thus found has no great reliabilty, for it does not take into account the percentages of the peoples concerned, but its course clearly indicates that even under circumstances as they have been, wars will come to an end. And there is good reason to believe that the new condition — universal education and universal suffrage, democratic control, improved economic conditions of living for the people, the scientific attitude — will tend to bend the curve more rapidly toward the base line of permanent "peace on earth and good will to men."

Here, in a 1941 article, "bending the curve" is used to refer to a shift in popular opinion (in favor of Darwinism):

"Darwinism Comes to America, 1859-1900″ by Bert James Loewenberg
The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Dec. 1941), p. 360
Shifting values as well as scholarly approval and popular diffusion bent the curve in the direction of general assent.

And here, in 1945, a proponent of "cosmic humanism" (a precursor to
the New Age movement) says that his utopian group is "committed to the
task of bending the curve of social change into an upward-spiralling
urge toward planetary integration" (whatever that means!):

"An Institute of Scientific Humanism" by Oliver L. Reiser
Philosophy of Science (Apr. 1945), p. 51
In a real sense, therefore, we are committed to the task of bending the curve of social change into an upward-spiralling urge toward planetary integration, the attainment of which alone can satisfy man's "hunger for wholiness [sic]."

In the realm of public policy, "bending the curve" has been used for the past couple of decades to refer to how policy adjustments can help reverse unwelcome trends. Often the "curve" in question charts rising spending or costs. A few examples from the '90s:

Fortune, Feb. 8, 1993
Now Bill Clinton wants to bend the curve of spending still lower.

The Plain Dealer, Nov. 20, 1994
"We're working toward a huge gap in revenues," [Frank] Mosier said. "Unless we're able to bend the curve and increase economic development in this state … we're going to be paying big-time taxes in 10 years."

The Washington Post, Aug. 15, 1996
"The environmental community feels very strongly that we need to bend the curve" by focusing intense development near existing roads and transit lines, [Jim] Hogan said.

A 1998 study on global sustainability used the phrase in its title:

Bending the Curve: Toward Global Sustainability by Paul Raskin et al.
(Stockholm Environment Institute, 1998)
This study shows how a comprehensive set of policy reforms could bend the curve of development toward sustainability.

With respect to health care policy, "bending the (cost) curve" was already in use by congressional Republicans in 2003 to refer to their Medicare prescription-drug legislation:

CongressDaily, Mar. 6, 2003
Agreed House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., "We have to bend the cost curve as the baby boomers retire" or else Medicare could turn into Medicaid.

Washington Times, Nov. 21, 2003
Republican leaders have defended the bill as the best they could get, but also said they believe it will be enough to bend the cost curve downward.

Inside CMS, Jan. 29, 2004
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) often touted the chronic care provisions of the legislation as being key to "bending the cost curve in the out-years" when promoting the bill in Congress last fall.

The latest usage by members of Congress and the Obama administration seems to have arisen from a benchmark report published in December '07 by The Commonwealth Fund: "Bending the Curve: Options for Achieving Savings and Improving Value in U.S. Health Spending." And for more on the recent popularization of the expression in health care policy discussions, check out Daniel Libit's July 24 Politico article, "Move over, David Beckham. Bend it like Peter Orszag!"

Here's the first sentence of William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve":

Taking on the issue of the cost of health care, a Washington Post editorialist intoned recently that “knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential” — knowing about when to use a plural verb is tough, too — “but, without a mechanism to put that knowledge into action, it won’t be enough to bend the cost curve.”

The phrase in boldface blue was too much for reader Anthony Ambrosini:

Am I missing something?  Which with a plural verb just implies a plural response to the question, and I doubt he thinks that knowing should take a plural verb.  What's he on about?

I'm just as puzzled as Anthony is. Safire's parenthetical remark is true, more or less, but the maxim of quantity dictates that it should have some minimal relevance to its context. And this would imply either that the quoted phrase (“knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential”) involves an error in verb agreement (surely false), or that the quoted phrase is a case where it's especially tricky to determine verb plurality (also apparently false, unless you're borderline aphasic).

So come on, LL readers, help us out. Is Safire starting to have problems with linguistic impulse control? Is he using the aleatoric compositional methods pioneered by John Cage and Price Stern Sloan? Or is there some simple exegesis that we're missing?

One thing about Safire's column remains consistent — the failure of his staffers to do the research that he pays them for (or his failure to pay attention to the research they do):

Why has curve-bending become such a popular sport? Because the language is in the grip of graphs. The graphic arts are on the march as “showing” tramples on “explaining,” and now we are afflicted with the symbols of symbols. As an old Chinese philosopher never said, “Words about graphs are worth a thousand pictures.”

The first straight-line challenge to the muscular line-benders I could find was in the 1960s, when the power curve was first explained to me by a pilot.

The OED has citations for power curve going back to 1908:

1908 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 207 441 When the pressure observations are plotted to a suitable scale they coincide with the integrated power curve. 1934 Times 27 May 8/7 This Riley engine in acceleration is rapid and clean, it never fusses or vibrates, and the power curve must be a good one, for the engine capacity, throughout its range.

And there are plenty of other cgraphical curve-collocations earlier than 1960, e.g.:

1886 K. PEARSON in I. Todhunter Hist. Theory Elasticity I. 503 There exist certain materials for which even in a state of ease the *stress-strain relation is not linear; that is to say the stress-strain curve..is not a straight line even for very small elastic strains.

Though in fairness, I don't think that stress-strain curve has ever had much of a second life as a metaphorical expression.

I imagined that bell curve was an old expression, but the OED's first citations are from 1970 and 1973:

1970 Balance Sheet Oct. 64/2 Research may be used to classify the effort into three basic methods:..(2) through use of the normal distribution hypothesis (*bell curve) [etc.]. 1973 T. PYNCHON Gravity's Rainbow I. 51 Exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands.

This strikes me as an opportunity for antedating, rather than a genuinely late coinage. And indeed, a few minutes of web search turns up Godfrey H. Thomson, "Interpretation of Threshold Measurements", Psychological Review, 1920, p. 304:

The way that the expression is used in that passage leaves the impression that it was already a commonplace expression in 1920.

The only example of bell curve in Literature Online is from Martin Espada's poem "Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer", 1996:

15 I was a lab coat and rubber gloves
16 hulking between the cages.
17 I sprayed down the batter of monkeyshit
18 coating the bars, fed infant formula in a bottle
19 to creatures with real fingers,
20 tested digital thermometers greased
21 in their asses, and carried boxes of monkeys
22 to the next experiment.
23 We gathered the Fear Data, keeping score
24 as a mechanical head
25 with blinking red bulbs for eyes
26 and a siren for a voice
27 scared monkeys who spun in circles,
28 chattering instructions
29 from their bewildered brains.

30 I did not ask for explanations,
31 even when I saw the sign
32 taped to the refrigerator that read:
33 Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer.
34 I imagined the doctor who ordered the sign,
35 the moment when the freezer door
36 swung open on that other face,
37 and his heart muscle chattered like a monkey.

38 So I understood
39 when a monkey leapt from the cage
40 and bit my thumb through the rubber glove,
41 leaving a dollop of blood that gleamed
42 like icing on a cookie.
43 And I understood when one day, the doctors gone,
44 a monkey outside the bell curve of the Fear Data
45 shrieked in revolt, charging
46 the red-eyed mechanical head
47 as all the lab coats cheered.

It surprised me to see no literary uses in the 1930s through 1970s of such a simple and evocative phrase for such a basic and important concept. But Herrnstein and Murray's 1994 book The Bell Curve guaranteed that this term would enter the linguistic mainstream, in a variety of more-or-less metaphorical interpretations.

The Jamaican Creole phrase often spelled batty man, pronounced ['bati'man] (also botty boy ['bati'bwai]), would be more easily interpreted by other English speakers if it were spelled botty man, since the first element is botty, a familiar British hypocorism for bottom. (My point about the spelling is not a prescriptive one; I'm merely pointing out that the first syllable sounds like Standard English bot, not bat.) The literal meaning of the phrase into American English would be "butt man" or "ass man", and the free translation is "homosexual" (trading, of course, on the juvenile assumption that all gays are ever interested in is bottoms). The phrase appeared in a note near the naked corpse of John Terry, found at his home in Montego Bay last week. It saddened me to see, in a week when one country atoned just a little for its homophobic past with a genuine apology from its government, another country continuing to forge a place for itself in the annals of intolerance and moral backwardness.

John Terry was a British citizen with three children who had been separated from his wife for three years. He had lived for forty years in Jamaica, where he was an Honorary Consul to the British High Commission in the western town of Montego Bay — he was an unpaid assistant diplomat helping tourists solve their travel problems. The Queen had honored him with an MBE for this work. One night last week a young man who had gone home with him repeatedly hit him with a bedside lamp base until the sheets of his bed were spattered with his blood, and then asphyxiated him with a drawstring pulled tight around his neck. He left a note calling Terry a "batty man" and threatening all gays with a similar fate. (See this news story for a newspaper account.)

Jamaican culture is famously and murderously homophobic. In 2006 TIME called Jamaica the most homophobic place on earth. The murder rate for the country as a whole is the highest in the world, but for gays things are much worse. As recently as 2007 there was a Google-hosted Jamaican blog (gone now) called "Kill Batty Man", devoted to such themes as documenting gay-bashing on camera. Jamaican Creole has no obligatory inflectional marking of plurality on nouns, so kill batty man should probably be translated "kill homosexuals". And the proposal is not just humorous hyperbole, it seems.

Many ordinary Jamaicans actually seem proud of their attitude to gays. The YouTube video here about a crowd that gathered to beat up an inoffensive cross-dresser is neutral in its attitude, but the hostile comments below it are not. Nor are the sentiments of some of the gay-hating reggae songs by Jamaican recording artists like Buju Banton, Elephant Man, and Bounty Killer.

The poet Matt Harvey, on Radio 4 on Saturday morning, returned to the earlier story about Turing, commenting more eloquently than I could on homophobia and the prime ministerial apology to Turing (the poem was published here):

Alan Turing

here's a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we're sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
— very carefully scripted but at least it's not encrypted —
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

To a lot of people, Joe Wilson deserves credit not just for speaking his mind, but for speaking theirs. "He blurted out what many other Republicans probably were thinking,"  one commentator put it, while Rush Limbaugh said: "I was shouting, "You're lying," throughout the speech at the television.  You're lying!  It's a lie!  Joe Wilson simply articulated what millions of Americans were saying." 

Well, not quite. However many Americans were moved to tax the President with dishonesty as they listend to the speech, it's a safe bet they expressed themselves the way Limbaugh did, in the present progressive — "You're lying." Whereas what Wilson said was "you lie," revisting a use of the simple present that parted ways with ordinary conversational English a couple of centuries ago. "You lie" — it's a sentence you expect to hear finished with "sirrah," and not the sort of thing that anyone says in a moment of spontaneous anger. (–"I really meant to put the money back." –"You lie!")

I don't mean to suggest that Wilson's effusion was planned, but it's hard to believe it was unrehearsed: it has the sound of something he had imagined himself saying to the President in numerous idle reveries, maybe as he struck a heroic pose drawn from his recreational reading:

"You lie!" Jim did not draw. He stared at Hurlburt, his eyes unwavering. Louis L'Amour, Riding for the Brand 

You lie! Ben Ide is no horse thief," flashed Ina, hotly. Zane Grey, Forlorn River

But in a postmodern age, most of us associate that use of the simple present less with earnest melodrama or romance than with pastiches and send-ups of the genres. Which is why, quite independent of the generic impertinence of Wilson's remark, it sounded such a (Rocket J.) squirrely note. Limbaugh is just one of any number of people who are ready to excuse or even sympathize with Wilson's issues with impulse control, but my guess is that a lot fewer of them would want to share that particular aspect of his inner life. 

Neurocriminology is a hot topic. From Isabella Bannerman, recently published in the Six Chix series:

From Peter Nichols, "Body of Evidence: Neurocriminologist Probes the Biology of Crime", recently published in Penn Arts & Sciences magazine:

In the mid-19th century, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso was doing an autopsy on Giuseppe Villella, a notorious brigand who’d spent years in the prisons of Pavia. Peering into the dead criminal’s skull case, Lombroso thought it resembled the crania of “inferior animals,” particularly rodents. “At the sight of that skull,” he wrote, “I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal.”

Often credited as the father of criminology, Lombroso hypothesized that violent behavior could be explained by cranial, skeletal or neurological deformities. Some people were just “born criminal,” he reasoned. Biological malformations—“stigmata” he called them — suggested that lawbreakers were throwbacks to an earlier, more brutish stage in human evolution.

“He was fascinated by the idea that there was a biological brain difference between criminals and the rest of us,” notes neurocriminologist Adrian Raine. From that day on, Lombroso took careful measurements of faces, jaws, heights, weights and other physical traits to gather data in support of what he called his “revelation.” […]

“Lombroso’s theories sound a bit ridiculous to us,” Raine comments, “but in a way he was right.” With the emergence of new and powerful imaging technologies, scientists can see detailed pictures of the brain and trace activity along its neural networks. “The brain was forgotten until neuroscience techniques evolved to a level where we could, for the first time, really look at brain structure and function,” he says. “And from then on, we found that there’s certainly a brain basis to crime—that the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us.”

We're a long way from thinking-of-parking tickets.  But if it's really true that "the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us", it's logical to ask whether some sort of diagnosis and mandatory treatment is appropriate.

As I understand it, the American legal system doesn't in general permit us to directly criminalize a mere statistical disposition towards criminal behavior.  However, there seem to be several cases where something very much like this has happened in matters of public health (like mandatory treatment of tuberculosis or the involuntary commitment of lepers) and in sentencing for certain types of crime (like "Megan's Law" registration and tracking of sex offenders).

I don't know much about this, and would appreciate historical, legal and philosophical instruction from those who do.  But the topic of this blog is linguistics, not legal theory or moral philosophy, and so my point is a linguistic one.  I propose a voluntary ban on the use of generic plurals to express statistical differences, especially in talking to the general public about scientific results in areas with public policy implications.

In other words, when we're looking at some property P of two groups X and Y, and a study shows that the distribution of P in X is different from the distribution of P in Y to an extent that is unlikely to be entirely the result of chance, we should avoid explaining this to the general public by saying "X's have more P than Y's", or "X's and Y's differ in P", or any other form of expression that uses generic plurals to describe a generic difference.

This would lead us to avoid statements like "men are happier than women", or "boys don't respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls", or "Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do" — or "the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us".  At least, we should avoid this way of talking about the results of scientific investigations.

The reason? Most members of the general public don't understand statistical-distribution talk, and instead tend to  interpret such statements as expressing general (and essential) properties of the groups involved. This is especially true when the statements express the conclusions of an apparently authoritative scientific study, rather than merely someone's personal opinion, which is easy to discount.

Now, there are obviously cases where group differences rise to the level where generic plurals are appropriate. Is one of those cases the distribution of anatomical and physiological differences in the brains of criminals? I invite you to read Adrian Raine, "The biological basis of crime" (in Wilson and Petersilia (Eds), Crime: Public Policies for Crime Control, 2002) and decide for yourself. I'll give you my opinion in another post.

Griffy and Zippy experience whateverism of an extreme sort:

The Valley in question is the San Fernando Valley of southern California, home of Valspeak, a sociolect made famous by the 1982 Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" (as performed by his daughter Moon Unit Zappa) and the 1983 movie based on it. The song is packed with linguistic features that are (or have become) stereotypes of the variety (especially as used by affluent upper-middle-class young women), but whatever isn't in the song.

In fact, whatever has come to be seen as a mark of disaffected young people all over the U.S., conveying apathy, dismissiveness, and a variety of related attitudes (lack of commitment, refusal to make discriminations, and so on) that draw scorn from all sorts of sources. Predictably, some of these sources grossly exaggerate the prevalence of whatever, as in this Urban Dictionary entry from 2003:

Word all too often used by Americans to connotate a feeling of apathy. The fact that it's used in almost every sentence is not as alarming to many as it should be.

Language Log has looked at whatever as a symptom of what's wrong with young people — "whateverist nomads" — these days: first in a critique by Geoff Pullum of Naomi Baron's alarmist outcries about the dire effects of cellphones, texting, and the like; then in light-hearted follow-ups by Roger Shuy (it's not electronic media that are at fault, but crossword puzzles) and Mark Liberman (in the comics: is youth slang the death of us?).

[Ben Zimmer notes an earlier Language Log posting on whatever — Mark Liberman on wev as a short version of it.]

[Bob Ladd writes to say that the usage is all over the Anglophone world. I posted only about the part of it that I thought I knew, making no claims about usages I didn't know about.]

Yilise Lin kindly called my attention to this article entitled "is hokkien my mother tongue?"  (Hokkien consists of a number of topolects belonging to the Southern Min branch of Sinitic.  They are spoken in Taiwan and in parts of the province of Fujian [on the southeast coast of China], and widely throughout Southeast Asia by overseas Chinese.)  The article was written by a well-known Singaporean Malay playwright named Alfian Sa'at (he also call himself "Naif" and writes a blog under that name).

Alfian Sa'at's insights on the close relationships between what he correctly terms Southern Chinese languages (such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese) and Malay are very interesting. His observations on how there are almost no similar connections between Mandarin Chinese and Malay are quite thought provoking.  In other words, Alfian Sa'at is saying that Mandarin is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the region and that the inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not have any deep affinity for it.

As one example of the intricate linguistic interactions discussed by Alfian Sa'at, let us take the durian.  (The first time I smelled the stench of this foul fruit permeating an entire, huge Hong Kong supermarket, I nearly vomited.  Never mind that some people consider the durian's powerful odor to be fragrant, I find it to be overpoweringly repulsive and sickening — akin to a fetid, putrid petroleum sump full of dead rats.)  The name durian comes from the Malay word DURI ("thorn") followed by the nominal suffix -AN.  This is a tropical plant, so the Chinese in their homeland would never have had a chance to see it before emigrating to Southeast Asia.  Hokkien speakers who encountered the fruit borrowed the name durian as LOOLIAN.

Later, European travellers brought the soursop (a fruit indigenous to South America) with them to Southeast Asia.  Since it looked a bit like the durian (green with spiky exterior and custard yellow flesh), Hokkien speakers called it ANGMO LOOLIAN ("foreign durian").  Alfian Sa'at doesn't explain how ANGMO (also spelled ANGMOH) came to mean foreign, but I surmise that it is the same word as that pronounced HONG2MAO2 紅毛 in Mandarin, viz., "red hair."  This was an old word for the Dutch, who were among the first Europeans to engage extensively in trade in the Far East.  Later, ANGMO / HONG2MAO2 was used to refer to all Europeans and, by extension, anything novel or foreign that came from the West or was brought by Westerners (e.g., ANGMO KIO ["'Dutch' eggplant," i.e., "tomato"]).

Malay speakers, on the other hand, called this new fruit the DURIAN BELANDA (again, the "foreign durian").  It is noteworthy that the Malays, like the Hokkien, used a word referring to the Dutch (BELANDA = Holland) to signify things that were foreign (e.g., AYAM BELANDA ["'Dutch' chicken," i.e., "turkey"]).

Alfian Sa'at provides numerous examples of the interpenetration of Malay on the one hand and the Southern Chinese languages on the other hand.  He laments the imposition of the locally deracinated Mandarin as the official standard for Chinese in Singapore (English is the main working language of the nation, while Malay and Tamil are spoken widely).   And I love it when Alfian Sa'at, in his ardent defense of the "Southern Chinese languages" spoken in Singapore declares:  "I refuse to call them 'dialects'."  That's telling it like it is.

In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret ("I'm sorry it all happened"), or grudging self-exculpatory conditionals ("If some people think I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry they were upset"), it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

That's how to say it (ignoring the punctuation error — the missing comma after work): not a bunch of evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple "We're sorry."

Turing did indeed deserve so much better. He created modern theoretical computer science; opened fundamental new areas of mathematical logic; made very important contributions to other areas of mathematics (e.g., the technique known as Good-Turing frequency estimation in statistics); and most importantly, he gave up his academic work during the Second World War to work at Bletchley Park on the extremely difficult task of decrypting German communications encrypted with the Enigma machine. The Bletchley Park team did succeed, and thus the Royal Navy became able to read the content of all the Nazis' messages to U-boats in the North Atlantic. It was a crucial turning point in the war. But a mere seven years later, a young man shared Turing's bed for the night in Manchester, and later helped someone burgle the house, and Turing naively reported the theft to the police. The police reaction was to arrest Turing, because they guessed what had been going on. "Gross indecency" was the charge (it is the British legal euphemism for cocksucking). Turing had a choice between serving prison time or agreeing to chemical castration, a medicalized "cure" for his presumed abnormality. He bore the latter for two years and then took cyanide. The way British mid-20th-century sex law drove him to suicide was genuinely something for the country to be ashamed of. It was good to see the official apology (which hundreds of eminent scientists had asked the Prime Minister to express).

In the context of concerns about declining civility in American political discourse, Victor Steinbok points to a post at Vukutu on Australian Political Language, which quotes from "Mungo MacCallum’s great book, How to be a Megalomaniac, … a list of the terms of abuse which [former prime minister Paul] Keating  had used against his opponents duing his time in politics":

“harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth.”

"MacCallum notes that this listing is only of terms which Keating used in Federal Parliament, which of course has rules of decorum not applying in the rougher world outside."

We noted Keating's way with words a few years ago ( "A tale of two Dons", 12/22/2003), and cited the Paul Keating Insults Page, which offers useful context for a large collection of insults, and also must be one of the few accessible pages that can trace a continuous history back to 1995.

Following up on last summer's discussion of Yaourter, Jonathan Rabinowitz sent a pointer to Garance Doré's post "Hello Sunshine" (9/9/2009), which begins

Londres, ville tropicale. Envoyez les ventilos. Il fait un temps splendide. SPLENDIDE !

and ends

Puis je suis montée sur mon échelle avec mes crayons de couleur, j’ai vu mon dessin prendre forme petit à petit, j’ai mis de la musique, et chanté Phoenix en yaourt pendant des heures. Et je n’ai même pas vu la nuit tomber.

In her English version (9/10/2009):

Welcome to London, center of the tropics. Get out the fans. It is splendid outside. SPLENDID!

[…]

Stepping up on my ladder with my colored pencils in hand, I saw my drawing begin to take form, little by little. I put on some music and sang Phoenix en yaourt***** for hours and hours. I didn’t even see night fall.

[…]

Translation : TIm Sullivan

***** So here’s the translation of Garance’s explanation of en yaourt (in yogurt) that she sent me, “en yaourt, it means in a faux english where you don’t understand anything at all, like ‘I waanagain nanana yes loveeee (you know, like I do all the time.)”

Is there any German compound that has motivated more English-language wordplay? Not recently, anyhow. Schadenfreudelicious is not new, but Josh Marshall saw a particularly apt target for it in the misadventures of Michael Duvall ("Late Boffo Scandal Update", 9/9/2009):

The big news of the day was President Obama's address to Congress. But we cannot forget the schadenfreudelicious scandal that got the day off to a roaring start. As you'll remember, California state Rep. Michael Duvall (R-Yorba Linda), a married champion of family values and traditional marriage, was picked up on a live mic at a committee hearing graphically boasting of his sexual encounters with not one but two mistresses (one of whom is a lobbyist with business before his committee).

After first insisting that he thought he was having a "private conversation", which one imagines is true, Duvall resigned his office shortly after noon California time.

As Victor Steinbok has pointed out to me, Rep. Duvall's earlier statement was also a classic non-apology apology:

I made a mistake and i sincerely apologize. I deeply regret the comments I made in what I believed to be a private conversation. This is a private matter and I ask that everyone respect the privacy of all involved.

The fact that the lobbyist involved has denied ever having had sex with him raises a technical question in the calculus of immorality: does Duvall come out better as a hypocrite, or as a hypocrite and a liar?

The current Questionable Content:

Previously attested schadenfreude portmanteaux include podenfreude, spitzenfreude, googlefreude, etc.

[Hat tip: Alex Baumans]

Last week, in the comments to Mark Liberman's post on the mystifying reggae chant at the beginning of Scotty's "Draw Your Brakes," I asked:

Now that we've looked into "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" and this one, what's the next impenetrable pop lyric/chant we should tackle?

KCinDC promptly responded:

How about "goo goo g'joob"? Is it the same as "coo coo ca-choo"?

Ask and ye shall receive. Just in time for the rollout of the Beatles remasters and the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game, my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus takes on "goo goo goo joob" (that's how it appears in the Magical Mystery Tour lyric sheet), "coo coo ca-choo," and, for good measure, "boop-oop-a-doop."

(I'll leave it to Mark to provide the requisite study in syncopation.)

I'm in Brighton for InterSpeech 2009, but unfortunately duties in Philadelphia made it impossible for me to make it here in time to act as a human control in the 2009 Loebner Prize competion, the annual administration of the "Turing Test". As the ISCA Secretariat put it,

We are seeking volunteers to pit themselves against the entries — and prove to the judges just how human they are!

The test involves using a computer interface to chat (type messages) for 5 minutes with a judge, who does the same with the program, not knowing which is which. The judge has to determine which is the true human.

It's no accident that the next-to-last xkcd strip dealt with a version of this problem:

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

I've looked around, and asked around, but if the chat logs for this year's competition have been posted, I can't find them.

But there's actually an xkcd VK testing site (that's a reference to the Voight-Kampff machine from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner). For more discussion, see the xkcd blag:

I hope no hearts out there are broken, but it’s important to know these things. Bots can handle thousands of connections at once, so you don’t know who else your internet partner is chatting with. There’s nothing worse than a Turing Test coming back positive for chlamydia.

[Update — Shalom Lappin responded by email:

Sorry I missed you at Interspeech. I was one of the judges for the Loebner prize. The contest was organized locally by Philip Jackson of the University of Sussex, and he might be able to provide you with the transcripts of the interactions.

None of the judges had any difficulty in distinguishing human from non-human interlocutors after the first or second turn in the conversation. The two main features which allowed me to identify a human vs. a non-human agent are (i) capacity for fluent domain general discourse marked by frequent and unpredictable changes in topic, (ii) willingness to allow the judge to take over the conversation, (iii) capacity to handle ellipsis, pronouns, and non-sentential fragments, and (iv) typing errors and corrections in human but not program contributions. The relative absence of progress in developing general purpose conversational agents contrast sharply with the substantial progress of the past 10-15 years in task driven, domain specific dialogue management systems and other types of NLP.

]

Another Zits cartoon on teenspeak:

And no, I can't make out what he is saying, though I could catch a few words.

[Addendum: Dhananjay Jagannathan writes to say that he has decoded what Jeremy is saying as: "I'm going over to Hector's house and I don't know if I'll be back in time for dinner so start without me." ]

(Part of) today's Non Sequitur:

I have the impression that this sort of thing ("He can now clearly see that there were going to be a lot more questions") happens a lot with the historical present, but I don't have any other examples at hand.

My post about Google's metadata problems, along with a similar piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, got a lot of people talking about the problem in the press and the blogs. (I even ran into an allusion to it in a La Repubblica piece on the Google Book Settlement when I arrived in Rome yesterday morning.) A number of people passed along their own experiences with flaky metadata. Others criticized me on grounds that could be broadly summed up as "Don't look a gift horse in the server," "It's better than nothing," "Who needs metadata anyway?," "Just give them time," and "Why concentrate on trivialities like metadata while ignoring the real perils of corporate monopoly" (as in "serving as a consultant for monitoring the proper temperatures of the pitchforks in hell").

This is all to the good, if it helps move up the metadata issues in Google's queue. I do think this will get a lot better as Google puts its considerable mind to it. But there was one other aspect of the metadata problem which I hadn't noticed or even thought about, but which in its own small way was unkindest cut of all. It was noticed by the children's book author Ace Bauer, who was prompted by my account of the metadata problems to check his Google Books listing:

Turns out my review rating ranked only one star out of 5. That's dim. But see, the review upon which they based this ranking was Kirkus's. Kirkus loved the book. They gave it a star. One star. That's all they give folks. It's considered a major honor.

Indeed it is, and actually the falling-star glitch affects a number of writers, for example Roy Blount, Jr., the president of the Author's Guild, who is has been an enthusiastic backer of the settlement. Google Books assigns a one-out-of-five star rating to at least two of Blount's books on the basis of their starred Kirkus reviews, Crackers and First Hubby, and visits similar review rating downgrades on books by Guild vice-president Judy Blume and Guild board members Nick Lemann, James Glieck, Oscar Hijuelos, among others.

 I don't know exactly what the Google people will say when they cotton to this one, but it's a good guess the first sentence will begin with "oy."

It's got to be a frustrating if very minor gaffe, particularly given the trouble Google went to to reach an accord with the authors. Of course it isn't hard to see how it could have happened, and it probably won't be that hard to fix, but it underscores the usefulness of having book-savvy people looking over your shoulder when you're setting up your metadata, whether you generate them yourself or get them from a provider. There's a transitivity to cluelessness. If you pass on obviously broken data, whether about starred review rankings or the quarter of a million Portuguese language books all dated 1899, you're apt to look foolish yourself, the same  way you do as soon as you put on the dumb t-shirt your grandmother sent you from Atlantic City. 

Added 9/7: On reflection, this feels like piling on. I do think Google wants to get this stuff right, and in this particular cases, "right" isn't as complicated as it can be elsewhere.

So Roy Ortega thinks that the Spanish-language media in the U.S. have an obligation to become "more proactive in encouraging [their] audience to seek full fluency in the English language". (Immediate side note: why do people seem to tend to write "the English language" instead of just "English" when making pronouncements like this?)

But let's not get Ortega wrong here. "By no means [is he] a rabid advocate of the English Only or English First movements. [He] certainly [doesn't] support declaring English as the country's official language and [he is] not calling on anyone to forsake their fist [sic] language." He's simply observing that "English is the dominant language of the U.S. and should be spoken by all of its citizens", that "[w]ithout adequate English-speaking skills, few can expect to achieve the highest levels of success in U.S. society", that "far too many adult immigrants and legal foreign residents living in the U.S. have failed to master the English language despite some having lived in this country for decades", and that "[m]any simply don't recognize fluency in English as an important part of their personal development".

The contradiction is outstanding — unless you take Ortega to mean that he is, in fact, an advocate of the English Only and English First movements (just not a "rabid" one) and that he supports English as the official language of the U.S. (he just doesn't support "declaring" this).

And please don't buy the I'm-only-saying-this-for-their-own-good platitude that Ortega is selling here. Actual research on the topic of English language adoption among immigrant populations in the U.S. has repeatedly found what Calvin Veltman is often credited with finding in an article entitled "Modelling the Language Shift Process of Hispanic Immigrants" (International Migration Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 545-562; published by The Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc., 1988). Here's the article's abstract; you can read a more detailed abstract via PubMed here.

This article provides a longitudinal interpretation of the 1976 Survey of Income and Education data on the linguistic integration of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. The assumptions required to sustain such an analysis are examined, followed by the presentation of data suggesting that age at time of arrival and length of residence in the U.S. largely explain observed patterns of language shift. The analysis shows that movement to English is extremely rapid, occurring within fifteen years of arrival in the U.S. Further, most of the younger immigrants make English their preferred personal language.

The body of research that has been produced on this topic consistently finds rapid language shift across generations, from monolingual Spanish (or whatever the non-English immigrant language may be) in the first generation, to some level of bilingualism in the second generation, to monolingual English in the third generation — a remarkably stable observation generally referred to as the "three-generation rule", and if anything, the trend has been for this shift to speed up towards becoming a "two-generation rule". Ortega is thus not completely off-base in saying (in more provocative words) that many adult immigrants do not learn English, either because they don't feel the need to or for some other reason; these are just overwhelmingly likely to be first-generation immigrants whose children and grandchildren are speaking more and more English, at the expense of Spanish — an unfortunate breakdown in intergenerational communication that the Spanish-language media could arguably be helping with by encouraging bilingualism rather than language shift, as Ortega would have it.

Back in July, the New Scientist's Feedback page reported that

THE powers that be at Guy Robinson's place of work insist that employees tell the office if they're "working from home". Human laziness being what it is - sorry, we meant to say "the employees being committed to maximising productivity in a forward-looking sense" - the welter of emails on Monday mornings got shortened to the three letters "WFH". Then someone was stuck working at an airport and sent the message "WFA".

Then, given the insistence by the virus that is language on mutating whenever possible, the changes poured in and escaped the limitations of the alphabet: "WFT" working on a train, "WF\__" working from a sunlounger (not being smug or anything) and "WF\_O__/" working from a plane (ditto).

Guy's colleagues suggest "WF#" for "working from prison", but they have not needed to use this, yet. Feedback suggests a few others: "WF=====" for working at a linear accelerator and "WF() - -()" for working in a laser lab (with lenses).

The Feedback editor suggested that

Now the phenomenon just needs a sciency name. It has to be "ergotopography", from the Greek words for "work", "place" and "writing".

and called for more examples from readers. A couple of days ago, the results were reported:

Unsurprisingly, we received a number of suggestions that are unprintable - either because they use characters or symbols our printers don't have, or because they would make the magazine illegal in Herat and/or Houston. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the former were also the latter.

Another which may cause the typesetters pause is John Harvey's "WF    " for "working from space". It will also probably stretch your manager's credulity, unless your business cards bear the words "Space Agency".

Among the remainder, we would thank Philip Ritchie for WF(O<-<) for "working from the bath", if it weren't for the office health and safety supremo standing over us, shrieking: "Don't do that!"

Jeremy Bailey claims to be working from a flat-bottomed boat with an outboard motor: WFgl___/, whereas Tom Hasker's boat has an entirely more serious propeller: WF§-\___/, and Mike Forsyth claims to be on a sailboat: WF~~~4~~~.

And, oh, all right then: following enthusiastic lobbying by several mums in the New Scientist office, here is one that Feedback had at first put in the unprintable category. It comes from Belinda Anyos, who suggests that an obstetrician writing from a labour ward might want to send: WF/\(☺)/\.

I don't know Greek well enough to tell whether combining the roots of ergon and topos to mean "place of work" is plausible or not, but at least according to LSJ, no classical author seems to have tried it. Nor does the OED know of any English coinages starting with "ergotopo-".

A more authentic word for workplace might be ἐργᾰστήριον, but ergasteriography is only a little less awkward than ergotopography. And anyhow, πόνος "toil, labor" might be a better choice for the "work" morpheme in this case.

Still, an awkward and perhaps inauthentic neologism is a good fit for a concept whose instances, as the New Scientist's feedback editor admits, "appear, in the words of one contributor's confession, to have been 'bred in captivity'".

In any case, I'm WF here: