Being Human

Today's Zits:

Rick Rubenstein wrote:

Is the usage "I can't speak to the Iranian situation" as opposed to "I can't speak [about/regarding] the Iranian situation" relatively recent (or at least recently accelerating), as I perceive it to be? I feel as though I first noticed it about a decade ago, and found it very strange. I'm now almost accustomed to it.

There's no question that "speak to (a topic)" is quite a bit more recent than "speak of (a topic)", and somewhat more recent than "speak about (a topic)". But Rick is probably not old enough to have noticed the difference.

In the OED's entry for speak, the sub-entry II.11.a. Speak of, which is glossed "To mention, or discourse upon, in speech or writing", is cited from about 825:

c825 Vesp. Psalter cxviii. 46 [Ic] sprec of cyðnissum ðinum in ᵹesihðe cyninga. c950 Lindisf. Gosp. Luke ix. 11 [He] spræcc him of ric godes. c1175 Lamb. Hom. 73 Of þe halie fulht spec ure drihten on oðer stude. c1200 ORMIN 6784 Goddspellboc ne spekeþ þ nohht Off all þatt oþerr genge. c1340 HAMPOLE Pr. Consc. 2683 Here es þe thred parte of þis buke spedde Þat spekes of þe dede. 1422 Secreta Secret., Priv. Priv. 203 Of this Spekyth the boke of Iudyth. 1530 PALSGR. 727/2, I go nowe beyondsee, but if God send me lyfe you shall here speke of me. 1603 PARSONS Three Convers. Eng. II. viii. 481, I shall haue occasion to speake againe of these heretiks in the next chapter. 1730 A. GORDON Maffei's Amphith. 58 The Theatre..is spoke of by Martial. 1818 SCOTT Br. Lamm. xviii, ‘And speaking of red-game,’ said the young scape-grace, interrupting his father. 1884 tr. Lotze's Metaph. 43 A common-place with every philosophy which spoke of Things at all.

In contrast, the sub-entry II.14.e. Speak to, glossed "To treat of or deal with, to discuss or comment on, (a subject) in speech or writing", is only cited from 1610, almost eight centuries later:

1610 J. DOVE Advt. Seminaries 42, I desire them therefore..to speake to these foure points. 1637 HEYLIN Answ. Burton 78, For your charges,..I meane to take them..in order, and speake as briefely to them, as you would desire. 1662 STILLINGFL. Orig. Sacræ II. vi. §4 Though it be a subject little spoken to either by Jewish or Christian Writers. 1706 STANHOPE Paraphr. III. 555 Part of this Scripture hath already been spoken to. 1724 SWIFT Drapier's Lett. Wks. 1755 V. II. 110 A lawyer, who speaks to a cause, when the matter hath been almost exhausted by those who spoke before. 1778 EARL MALMESBURY Diaries & Corr. I. 166 Unprepared as he was for such a proposition, he could not, he said, off-hand, speak to it accurately. 1869 Daily News 28 Apr., The report..was spoken to by the Most Rev. Chairman..and the Bishop of Derry. 1880 Ibid. 19 Mar. 2/3, I wish to call your attention..to..that allegation, and I shall endeavour to speak to it.

As for Speak about (sub-entry II.8), it's cited back to 1300 or so, validating Rick's sense of its antiquity:

a1300 Cursor M. 24795 For to spek abute sum pais. 1605 SHAKES. Macb. I. iii. 83 Were such things here, as we doe speake about? 1671 H. M. tr. Erasm. Colloq. 263 He falls on speaking about the success of their business. 1737- [see 14b]. 1843 J. H. NEWMAN Lett. (1891) II. 430 Sermons which speak more confidently about our position than I inwardly feel.

Rick also asks, "I'm also curious which side of the Atlantic this usage may have sprouted from." It seems clear from the OED entry that all the early action was on the British side of the Atlantic.

More seriously, it's quite possible that there's been a recent to-ward change in the balance of usage among the prepositions used with speak to express topic (which include at least of, about, regarding, on, upon, and to, of course with somewhat different shades of meaning and structural distributions).

Unfortunately, it's going to be a chore to test this quantitatively. One obvious problem is that there may be various things between the verb and a prepositional phrase expressing topic, e.g. "Mr. Pettijohn spoke at length regarding the Rocky Top Road issue". Another, more serious, problem is that in most instances of "speak to", the object of to is the audience, not the topic ("Palin Speaks to Investors in Hong Kong"). So (lacking an automatic classifier with adequate performance), you'd have to get a suitable random sample of instances of speak over time, and classify each one by hand. This is likely to take more work than will fit into one Breakfast Experiment™, at least with the resources now available to me.

[Note that the specific pattern "speak to the * situation" is apparently not common enough to support a trend analysis. For example, it has apparently only occurred once in the NYT news archive since 1981. So the net would have to cast more broadly in order to spot a trend, I think.]

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

Mark Liberman has been writing about the persistent misinterpretation of claims about statistical differences between groups with respect to some property — misinterpretations in which these differences (often small ones) are understood as general (and essential) differences between the groups. A little while ago, Mark suggested that reporting the differences by means of generic plurals ("Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do") promotes misunderstanding and proposed that such generic language be avoided.

In comments, Mark noted that changing the language of popular science reporting is not by itself going to fix an inclination to essentialist thinking (which is all over the place), though it might be a step in the right direction.

Mark looked at groups X and Y with respect to property P, focussing on statistical differences between X and Y. Let's say that members of X tend to have P to a greater degree than members of Y. Then there's a statistical association (perhaps a very weak one) between X and P. And most people have as much trouble understanding statistical association as they do statistical differences. Here, the characteristic error in reasoning is treating the association as invariant: all Xs have P (and no non-Xs do). Again, the error is all over the place, often showing up in objections to claims of statistical association. As in the following case from a September 30 NYT story "Dementia Risk Seen in Players In N.F.L. Study" by Alan Schwarz.

The story begins with a report of an apparent statistical association:

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

Now, the study has a variety of shortcomings, and the association can't be taken as demonstrated. but for the moment let's take things at face value.

What especially interests me in the story (though I have a long-standing interest in dementia and related conditions) is the reaction of NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, who

said in an e-mail message that the study did not diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that "there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems."

"Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports," Mr. Aiello said.

Aiello's response addresses (and rejects) claims not made in the report: that all retired players have memory problems (all Xs have P), and that no other people have memory problems (no non-Xs have P). That is, Aiello chose to treat the association as invariant, when that was clearly not what the report said. I don't see how the reporter could have averted this misunderstanding by more careful wording.

Such misunderstandings — occasioning objections much like Aiello's — arise even when claims are not couched as statistical associations. Quantified statements like "many Xs have P" will do, eliciting objections like "but I'm an X and don't have P". People reason like this all the time, and that's why there are Critical Thinking courses.

Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, commenting on my posts about a Dilbert cartoon that skewers "the vacuous way managers talk", asks "What is a 'manager' anyway?"

My only comment here is not on the Bayesian inference but rather on the idea that "managers" are dweeby Dilbert characters who talk using management jargon. I was thinking about it, and I realized that I'm a manager. I manage projects, hire people, etc. But of course I don't usually think of myself as a "manager" since that's considered a bad thing to be.

For another example, Liberman considers a "spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys" as a manager. I don't know what this person does, but I wouldn't usually think of a spokesperson as a manager at all.

The LL posts in question were "Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day", 9/26/2009;  "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009; "Another nail in the ATEOTD=manager coffin", 9/28/2009; and "Memetic dynamics of low-hanging fruit", 9/30/2009.

And Andrew's comment is very much to the point.

In the original post on Scott Adams' strip, I used scare quotes in referring to "a despised minority, in this case 'managers'"; and in a later post, I referred to "the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by 'managers', however we define that much-maligned class".  Those phrases were meant as a note to myself to come back to this curious phenomenon of anti-managerial prejudice — but Andrew beat me to it.

I should start with a confession: like Andrew, I'm a manager. I've been one at least since 1980 or so, when I became a group supervisor at Bell Labs; and when I became a department head there, in 1987,  it was no longer possible to look the other way.   At my first "three-level meeting" — involving department heads and their bosses and their bosses' bosses — Brian Kernighan looked across the conference table to me and said "Welcome to the land of the brain-dead". The fact that I left industry for academia didn't save me: the organizations that I now (at least nominally) manage employ several times as many people as the Linguistics Research Department at Bell Labs did.

I suppose that as long as there have been hierarchies, bosses have sometimes been feared, resented, and disliked.  But I think it's a new phenomenon that in large areas of modern culture, managers are stereotypically regarded as stupid.  Andrew Gelman's employees surely don't think that he's stupid, and I hope that most of mine don't think I'm stupid either. But Brian's little joke reflected a now-widely-shared concern that the role of manager, like the role of parent, inevitably causes a sort of tragic cluelessness, in which you become the object of all of your own earlier upward-facing attitudes.

This is mixed up with a different idea, namely that official pronouncements are likely to be bland and even empty. This might mean that the people who craft them are actually especially crafty, but  the idea that corporate statements tend toward vacuity seems to  reinforce the idea that leaders are empty-headed.

[It's for that reason that I was disposed to accept corporate spokespersons as "managers" in the Dilbertian sense — well, that and the fact that otherwise there would otherwise have been no examples at all in the 400-million-word COCA database of "managers" using the cliche under study.  And the sex-toy company spokesperson whose quote I accepted as a possible example of manager-speak actually was a "senior buyer" — check out the original article here.]

However we decide to define "manager", this group is certainly now the object of a complex of negative stereotypes. When and how did this start?

I don't know, and I welcome suggestions.  These attitudes may be connected to the antique European aristocratic disdain for those who are "in trade", and to the (I think related) modern intellectual disdain for the world of business.  These attitudes seem to have been imported from the intelligentsia into  industry through the medium of engineers and especially programmers, who (at least at lower levels) maintain a very different culture from the "suits" in finance, marketing, product planning, and so on.

The word manager has been around for a long time, with something close to its current meaning. With the gloss "A person who organizes, directs, or plots something; a person who regulates or deploys resources", the OED gives citations from around 1600 onwards:

1598 J. FLORIO Worlde of Wordes, A manager, a handler. 1598 SHAKESPEARE Loves Labours Lost I. ii. 173 Adue Valoure, rust Rapier, be still Drum, for your manager is in loue. 1600Midsummer Night's Dream V. i. 35 Where is our vsuall manager Of mirth? What Reuels are in hand? SHAKESPEARE

In the slightly more specific sense of  "A person who manages (a department of) a business, organization, institution, etc.; a person with an executive or supervisory function within an organization, etc.", the citations start about a century later:

1682 A. WOOD Life 22 Nov., The Duke of York hath gained the point as to the penny post against Docuray the manager of it. 1705 J. ADDISON Remarks Italy 443 The Manager opens his Sluce every Night, and distributes the Water into what Quarters of the Town he pleases. 1740 S. RICHARDSON Pamela II. 341 Said he, I think that little Kentish Purchase wants a Manager.

But none of the early citations in the OED, nor the quotes that I find in LION, seem to reflect the modern Dilbertian managerial stereotype.  That stereotype clearly predates Dilbert — but when did it arise? and where did it come from?

In this context, we have to return to Andrew's question: What is a manager, anyhow?  By now, I suppose that the Dilbert empire employs a certain number of people, whom Scott Adams in some sense manages — does he thereby consider himself a "manager" in the relevant sense?

The fuzzy referential boundaries of the managerial stereotype, it seems to me, are a characteristic of social stereotypes in general. This is related to the "some of my best friends are Xs" excuse, and all the other excuses that shift the range of the prejudice away from apparent counterexamples.

[Update — John Cowan's post at Recycled Knowledge, "Why are PHBs stupid?", offers interesting and sensible answers to the questions under discussion.]

One of the most powerful pieces in the one-man exhibition of Chen Wen Ling now showing at Joy Gallery in Beijing 798 Art Zone is blandly entitled "What You See Might Not Be Real" in English, but the Chinese title is the raw and raunchy "FANG4PI4″ 放屁 ("emit gas, break wind, flatulate, crepitate, i.e., fart [v.]"). Perhaps the artist didn't want to offend the linguistic sensitivities of potential foreign customers, but I must say that I much prefer to translate the title of the piece directly as "Fart," or, with a bit of license, as "Bull Fart" because the atomic cloud depicted by the artist is coming out of the anus of an enormous bovine.

[This view comes from a story at Business Insider (Joe Weisenthal,  "Finally! Madoff Gets What He Deserves", 9/29/2009); other perspectives are available at ML Art Source and TPM.]

What we see in this impressive sculpture is a horned Bernie Madoff pinned against the wall by the rocket-propelled bull. Just from looking at the whole ensemble, it's pretty obvious what Chen is trying to tell us, but by entitling the piece "FANG4PI4," he invokes additional levels of scorn that are inherent in that term when applied to the words of others. Several of the blogs that have shown this piece claim that as slang FANG4PI4 implies "bluff" or "lie." Actually, it is more accurate to say that it means "talk nonsense," the idea being that one is comparing the words coming out of the mouth of one's opponent to a stream of farts.

Now, if one wishes to increase one's contempt for what one's opponent is saying, one may style his / her words as GOU3PI4 狗屁 ("dog fart"), as in this ringing denunciation: NI3 FANG4 GOU3PI4! (lit. "You are emitting dog farts!" = "What you say is nonsense / bullshit!"), although GOU3PI4 ("dog fart[s]!") shouted loudly by itself gets the message across clearly enough. This is an old expression that may be found as early as 1750 in the Qing Dynasty novel Rulin waishi (The Scholars). If you want to emphasize that what your opponent is saying is not only bullshit but is also completely incoherent, you may declare that it is GOU3PI4 BU4TONG1 ("dog fart not pass through").

If your adversary still does not give in to your withering denunciations, you may embellish them as follows (I shall only give a few of the possible varieties):

FANG4 GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit stinking dog fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE 4PI4 ("emit 'your mother's' fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit your mother's stinking dog fart[s]")

However, one must be careful when one gets into the territory of "your mother's" whatever, since such characterizations are considered to be extremely vulgar and, as often as not, fighting words. We all remember the "Grass Mud Horse" phenomenon from earlier this year, and a lot more could be said about this most offensive of imprecations.

As for "bull," that is NIU2 牛, although I did mention in an early January post that "Happy NIU2 Year" was the most popular STM New Year's greeting in China this year, I have not yet found the time to explore the full range of nuances of NIU2 in current usage ("balls, guts, spunk, awesome, formidable," and so forth). Particularly when combined with "B," viz., 牛B (often written as NB), then we begin to combine all of the androgenic qualities of NIU2 with the estrogenous implications of what "mother's" refers to, resulting in an explosive combination. To do full justice to this aspect of NIU2 would require a modest (or perhaps I should say "immodest") treatise, one that I have not yet found the opportunity to compose. Someday.

[Hat tip to Benjamin Zimmer.]

Commenting on a post about Dilbert's take on "the vacuous way managers speak", Garrett Wollman wrote:

I remember, or at least think I do, when "low-hanging fruit" was not yet vacant managerese. Is there any epidemiological data to suggest when this transition occurred?

I'm not convinced that "low-hanging fruit" is accurately described as "vacant managerese" even now. But let's leave that point aside while we consider the epidemiological data on the rise of this cliche among all classes of users, which suggests an index case in the late 1980s, with the main contagion starting in the mid 1990s:

This graph is based on data from the New York Times archive, and is derived from the counts in the following table, which tracks occurrences of "low-hanging fruit" and four other cliches, namely "easy pickings", "shooting fish in a barrel", "easy as pie", and "a piece of cake":

TIME LHF EPick SFB EPie PCake 1981-1985 0 23 4 11 72 1986-1990 2 17 11 6 90 1991-1995 4 33 15 5 67 1996-2000 34 34 21 12 84 2001-2005 74 32 16 7 78 2006-2009 78 14 17 5 41

In order to correct for possible changes in number of words indexed per time-period, I've added up the counts for the four other cliches, and graphed the ratio of "low-hanging fruit" to that sum. Obviously, in this case, a graph of the raw LHF counts would show a similar pattern.

Garrett added:

I also remembered when other geeks recommended Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point to me, which now seems to be exclusively marketed to management types who understand it not.

The "marketing types" here at Penn are Wharton students, whose level of technical understanding is second to few, I think.  (Though I certainly recall from my years in industry that developers viewed "marketing types" as being an especially clueless subspecies of "suits", less actively evil than finance types, but stupider.  I'm sure that the feelings were reciprocated, mutatis mutandis.)

But in any case, since Gladwell's book was published in 2000, well into the spread of the LHF epidemic, I don't think that he deserves either any blame or any credit for the process.  Another clue to his innocence is the fact that the string "low-hanging fruit" (with or without the hyphen) doesn't occur anywhere in the book. (Nor, for  that matter, does "at the end of the day"…)

[Note — the OED's earliest citation is

1990 N.Y. Times 16 Aug. D1/3 We've picked all the *low-hanging fruit when it comes to fuel efficiency.

That's indeed the earliest citation in the NYT's archive. It's not hard to back that up by a bit, e.g. Brenton Schlender, "Some U.S. Makers of Semiconductors Are More Optimistic", WSJ 2/17/1987:

I expect that (figurative) examples can be found from several years earlier — the phrase in its literal meaning, of course, goes back hundreds of years. The earliest literal use I've found is from Adam Bede, 1859:

He could see there was a large basket at the end of the row: Hetty would not be far off, and Adam already felt as if she were looking at him. Yet when he turned the corner she was standing with her back towards him, and stooping to gather the low-hanging fruit. Strange that she had not heard him coming! perhaps it was because she was making the leaves rustle. She started when she became conscious that some one was near—started so violently that she dropped the basin with the currants in it, and then, when she saw it was Adam, she turned from pale to deep red. That blush made his heart beat with a new happiness. Hetty had never blushed at seeing him before.

But I think it would be surprising if there weren't earlier examples as well.]

[Update — Jesse Sheidlower sent in an earlier use as an explicit simile:

1968 P. J. Kavanaugh in _Guardian_ 12 July 6/3 His work is so appealing to me that I feel almost bashful praising it… He is gentle and stoic and simple, his rare images are picked aptly, easily, like low-hanging fruit, and though he appears to move short distances slowly he really moves far and fast.

Jesse's find suggests looking for even earlier active similes and metaphors, perhaps with slightly different wording, and indeed there are many. Thus Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Griselda (1914):

57   For we, in truth, were no wise company,
58   Men strong and joyous, keen of hand and eye,
59   And shrewd for pleasure, but whose subtlest wit
60   Was still to jest at life while using it,
61   And jest at love, as at a fruit low hung
62   To all men's lips, no matter whence it sprung.

Or George MacDonald, To Any Friend (1893):

9   At home, no rich fruit, hanging low,
10      Have I for Love to pull;
11   Only unripe things that must grow
12      Till Autumn's maund be full!

Or Dora Sigerson, My Darling (1893):

5   Oh, Life came over the meadows,
6      And the song of her coming was sweet;
7   The streams leaped joy-mad down the mountains,
8      Flowers bloomed 'neath her dawning feet.
9   The trees bent their branches fruit-laden,
10      So low as her soft hands' hold;
11   And the harvest rose up like an army
12      Of kings in their harness of gold.

Or Edmund Gosse, VIllanelle I (1879):

1   Wouldst thou not be content to die
2      When low-hung fruit is hardly clinging,
3   And golden Autumn passes by?

Or Herman Melville, Clarel (1876):

3919   Estranged, estranged: can friend prove so?
3920   Aloft, aloof, a frigid sign:
3921   How far removed, thou Tree divine,
3922   Whose tender fruit did reach so low—
3923   Love apples of New-Paradise!

OrAaron Hill (died 1750), Sareph and Hamar:

42      Refresh'd by sleep, he rose serene and gay,
43      And walk'd abroad to see the breaking day,
44   With dawning lustre, thro' the boughs, in trembling sallies play.
45      Where-e'er he pass'd, the golden fruit hung low
46      And dancing, wanton, bow'd to court his hand,
47      Proud of the native charms they had to show;

Or  Charles Goodall, To Mr. R. Smith of King 's Colledge in Cambridge (1689):

33   The barren Tree can in the Desarts spread,
34   And threaten Heaven with its luxurious head:
35   Whilst others low, and laden with their Fruit,
36   With bended Branches touch their very root.

Or Henry Reynolds' 1628 translation of Torquato Tasso's Aminta:

Being but a Lad, so young as yet scarse able
To reach the fruit from the low-hanging boughes
Of new growne trees; Inward I grew to bee
With a young mayde, fullest of loue and sweetnesse,
That ere display'd pure gold tresse to the winde;

In fact, you could say that LHF was a poetic cliche long before it came to be a cliche associated with any other group. And I wouldn't be surprised to find the metaphor in Homer, or the Bible.]

On a very interesting and informative blog called "This is Xinjiang", we find the following sign over the entrance to an Ürümchi restaurant:

The blogger, an anonymous "foreign university teacher in China's western frontier", captions the photograph thus:

The diverse number of scripts found on Xinjiang signs — Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian — often present a bewildering challenge to Westerners who are used to the Latin alphabet. Here, no one writes English in public places. But Xinjiang's multilingualism can even mislead the locals. For example, this restaurant, located in downtown Urumqi, advertises "Pancakes, Hamburgers, Porridge" in Chinese characters. Unfortunately, the Uyghur "translation" written above that is: ngngoongngkngngnglng.

Who's pulling whose leg?  It is evident that, in this case, the "Uyghur" language written in Arabic script is there for purely decorative purposes, reminiscent of the mirror-reversed Chinese characters in a New Yorker ad sponsored by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism that I wrote about here, or the Hong Kong strip-club flyer used to decorate the cover of a China-themed issue of MaxPlanckForschung.

My guess is that even someone who doesn't know Arabic script or Uyghur language would be suspicious of the numerous repetitions of just a few letters.

Such signage is supposed to be supervised by the official Working Comittee for the Languages and Scripts of Minority Nationalities (少数民 族语言文字工作委员会 Az sanliq milletler til-yeziq xizmet komiteti).

And this is another way to "read" the Uyghur letters: ng_ng_o_o_ng_ ng_k_ng_ng_ ng_lng.  Try it without choking!

… or something very close to it, under the heading

Proposal for a new kind of slang following the pattern "metal fork" for "metaphor"

The idea is to replace boring abstract words with very specific concrete things that sound pretty close to the original word. I'd like to build on the single example of "metal fork" for "metaphor."

This idea is based on a recent mishearing. Did I hear "metaphor" and think I heard "metal fork" or was it the other way around?

Here the re-shaping began with a mishearing, which Althouse then reproduced deliberately. When such a re-shaping happens without conscious design, we have some sort of malapropism, and when the re-shaping yields something that seems (to some people) to be especially appropriate semantically, we have an eggcorn (hundreds of examples on the Eggcorn Database).

I've written about deliberately invented examples under the name mock, or play, malaprops. See my posting on "mock eggcorns and their kin", with examples of several sorts.

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Some people are hard to persuade. In response to my post "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", Peter Taylor commented:

I argue that the first question to ask is whether hearing someone use the phrase "At the end of the day" conveys information on whether they are likely to be a manager…

Well, a definitive determination of the information gain involved, aside from its limited general interest, would require more resources than I can bring to bear over my morning coffee. But we can make a plausible guess, and the answer turns out to be that the "information gain" is probably pretty small, and is just about as likely to point away from the conclusion that the speaker or writer is a manager as towards it.

The information gain associated with an observation y is

In the current case, this cashes out as the probability that someone is a manager given that we've added to our background knowledge the fact that they said or wrote "at the end of the day"  — call it p(manager | ATEOTD,I) — multiplied by the base2-log of the ratio between this same term p(manager | ATEOTD,I) and P(manager | I), which is the probability that they're a manager given only our background knowledge I. We should sum this quantity over the alternatives in the distribution under consideration, here x=manager and x=not-manager.

Based on the distribution of this phrase in Mark Davies' COCA corpus, p(manager | ATEOTD,I) seems to be about one in a hundred, 0.01. (In other words, out of a hundred speakers or writers of the phrase "at the end of the day" in its figurative meaning, one is a manager, on average. See below for details.)

What about the probability that someone is a manager given only the background distribution, symbolized p(manager,I)? We don't want to use Census Bureau statistics, since being the source of speech or text in the COCA sample is already going to be highly skewed relative to the occupational distribution of the general American population, regardless of what phrases are used.

Before even trying to estimate this quantity, we can look at what the information gain would turn out to be, for a variety of values for this background proportion of managers. If one in a hundred sources of speech or text in COCA is a "manager", then the information gain is 0.01*log(0.01/0.01) + 0.99*log(0.99/0.99) = 0 bits. If it's one in a thousand, the information gain is 0.01*log(0.01/0.001) + 0.99*log(0.99/0.999) = 0.02 bits.

But I'd be very surprised if the proportion of "managers" in the COCA sample was even as low as one in a thousand — and it might very well be more than one in a hundred, not less.

If we search COCA for the phrase "in the final analysis", for example, the first 100 hits include four clear examples of a managerial source, and two other marginal ones. If the actual value of p(manager) is actually .04, then the information gain associated with saying or writing "at the end of the day" will be 0.01*log2(0.01/0.04) + 0.99*log2(0.99/0.96) = 0.024 bits, but tending towards the conclusion that x=not-manager.  Thus if this estimate of p(manager | I) is accurate, use of "at the end of the day" is a small piece of evidence against the hypothesis that the speaker or writer is a "manager".

Unfortunately, I don't see a good  way to get a representative random sample of COCA sources, which we would need in order to estimate p(manager | I) properly. But I invite readers to try to sharpen up these estimates, if they're interested — I've satisfied myself that saying or writing "at the end of the day" provides no useful evidence that someone is a "manager", and may in fact count as a small piece of evidence in the opposite direction.

And for those social scientists still reading this (if any), let me point out that setting up to do this sort of analysis in a more systematic way would provide an interesting laboratory for investigating the quantitative relationship between stereotypes and reality.  The comments on earlier posts in this series make it clear that many Americans are absolutely convinced that "at the end of the day" is manager-speak.  My guess remains that most linguistic peeves associated with despised groups will turn out to be similarly unsupported by evidence.

Details:

In Mark Davies' COCA corpus, there are 2,438 examples of "at the end of the day' in 400 million words, for an overall frequency of 6.1 per million words. The frequency is greater in "spoken" material (basically news interviews) than in other genres:

Size (MW) Freq Freq per MW SPOKEN 81.7 1078 13.2 FICTION 78.8 281 3.6 MAGAZINE 83.3 518 6.2 NEWSPAPER 79.4 409 5.2 ACADEMIC 79.3 135 1.7

And the rate of use has nearly tripled over the past couple of decades:

Size (MW) Freq Freq per MW 1990-1994 103.3 355 3.4 1995-1999 102.9 484 4.7 2000-2004 102.6 689 6.7 2005-2009 93.6 910 9.7

Checking the first (most recent) 200 COCA hits for this phrase, I determined that 51 of them were literal references to the end of daylight, or the end of a working day, or the end of a 24-hour period. That left 149 figurative uses, meaning something like "in the final analysis". Of these, just one was spoken or written by someone I would call a "manager", namely the spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys (Jessica Rae Patton, "Make Love, Not Waste: Bringing Environmentalism into the Bedroom", E: the Environmental Magazine, Sep/Oct 2008):

Day says, " We are working on reduction by offering products in larger quantities–lubricant in a 16-ounce bottle, for instance. Dildos that are glass or wood… will eventually go back to the earth, and if used as they're meant to be used, will last a very long time. " The store no longer carries products containing phthalates. " We offer a huge selection of rechargeable vibrators, " she says, but acknowledges, " At the end of the day, it is still a manufactured product that will eventually end up in the dump. That's the grim reality. " Day notes that the adult product industry hasn't yet figured out how to address this waste. " It's only a matter of time before that person comes forward who figures out how to recycle sex toys. Trust me, every company in the adult industry will use that service! " she says.

The only other source that was close to being a "manager" was a fashion designer ("Hottest, Newest, Latest", Harpers Bazaar, June 2009:

His strong, architectural silhouettes come together to compose a collection of 21 looks, including everything from a modernized interpretation of a tuxedo to a feminine white blouse made of frothy embellished flowers (at right) to exquisite column evening gowns. All in a primary palette of red, white, and black (with some touches of fur detailing), the pieces will be sold at such stores as Bloomingdale's in New York and DNA in Saudi Arabia. " At the end of the day, I didn't know what the reaction would be, but I'm a firm believer that if you do something with pure integrity, you'll find an audience, " Gurung says. Well, this audience is still applauding.

So depending on how you count, we get an estimate of 1 or 2 in 149, or about 0.0067 to 0.013 — let's call it one in a hundred, 0.01.

The other sources for ATEOTD in this sample are pretty diverse — a TV journalist, a rescue hero, a basketball player, a rapper, a country singer, a primatologist, and so on:

Let me press down on that. At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency, some kind of a grand bargain?

Mr-COLLIER: At the end of the day it worked for us and we did what we had to do. Mr-ELLIS: Having got those people off were, particularly in this case, nobody else could have gotten them out. Mr-COLLIER: It' s very satisfying.

Yeah, I mean, Shaq, you know, Kobe does really recognize that Shaq helped him to get three titles and Shaq got another title on his own without Kobe, but at the end of the day, both of them realized that they missed out on opportunities to do something special and - you know, when you' re a little bit younger, you' re a little bit immature and then when you get old and wiser, you reflect on things that would' ve - could have happened.

The rest of Relapse is even more grim. Many of Eminem's new songs depict his drug years in terms that seem to alternate between raw honesty and wild hyperbole. And though rumors have spread that his estranged and reportedly ailing mother, Debbie Nelson, is eager for a reconciliation, a song titled " My Mom " takes aim at her as viciously as ever. (" Don't get me wrong, " he said during last week's Sirius XM interview. " At the end of the day, she is my mother and I do love her. ")

When all this role-playing is over, the wife of country legend Tim McGraw and mother of three girls (Gracie, 12, Maggie, 10, and Audrey, 7) has no problem snapping back to reality. She washes her face, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and slips back into those sweats. Has she discovered anything from stepping into such glamorous shoes? " At the end of the day, for me beauty has a lot to do with comfort and being around my family. And, " she says with a laugh, " most likely no makeup! " Then, with a big hug and a cheery " Thank you! " to everyone on set, she's off to meet Tim at the girls' school for a basketball game.

" It's hard to say what exactly precipitated this behavior, " said Colleen McCann, a primatologist at the Bronx Zoo. " At the end of the day, they are not human and you can't always predict their behavior and how they or any other wild animal will respond when they feel threatened. "

As for "in the final analysis", the four manager-sources in the first 100 hits were:

("Constellation calls off deal with Buffett unit", Business News, Dec. 2008) " In the final analysis, we concluded that the EdF investment represents significant enhanced value for our shareholders and serves the best interest as well of our customers, our employees, our regulators and the communities we serve, " Mayo A. Shattuck III, chairman, president and chief executive of Constellation Energy, told analysts on a conference call.

("Are you paying yourself enough?", Inc magazine, Nov. 2004) And that's something to keep in mind. In the final analysis, says Driskill, whatever you don't take from your company today should eventually come back to you. " Really, when I'm ready to retire, the compensation issue becomes moot, " she says, " because theoretically I will sell the company back to my employees. That's the nice thing — it all becomes your money in the end. "

(" In U.S. Plants and Wallets, The Other Iraq Standoff ", WaPo, Feb. 2003) " The Gulf War triggered a relief trade in equity markets and a brief surge in consumer business confidence, but in the final analysis, we didn't have a normal, self-sustaining recovery until' 93, " said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch &; Co. in New York.

(" An Experimental Examination of Information Technology and Compensation Structure Complementarities in an Expert System Context. ", Journal of Information Systems, Spring 2003) Prendergast (1999) suggests that about one-third of the increase in performance attributable to PC incentives arises from attracting more skilled workers, with the remainder attributable to increased effort. In the final analysis, it is the combination of skill and effort that leads to task performance.

William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences. Grant Barrett has written about his generosity of spirit, and I too was touched by his personal kindness.

I'll be posting a longer remembrance tomorrow in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, but for now I'd like to note one example where Safire, despite his occasional prescriptivist predilections, showed a willingness to heed the work of descriptive linguists. In a 2006 column, he described political "template phrases" such as "No X left behind" and "We are all X now." At the time, I was disappointed that he was unfamiliar with the work of Language Loggers on snowclones. But earlier this year, when Safire approached me for my thoughts on the expression "I don't do X," I nudged him to an appreciation of snowclones, and of Language Log. He followed up the column with another one ("Abbreve That Template") explicitly acknowledging Language Log's pioneering work in snowclonology. Even at the end of his prolific career, he was eager to learn something new.

[Update, 9/28: My Word Routes remembrance is here.]

Today's Dilbert:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

I'm not going to quibble about this one.

In 1989, shortly before I left the industrial research job that I had held for the previous 15 years, corporate headquarters appointed me to a committee to decide on a procedure for evaluating methodologies for prioritizing follow-up actions in the wake of a "technology portfolio fair" where researchers had explained new technologies to heads of product development in various branches of the company.

We weren't authorized to decide what to do, nor even to suggest priorities for alternative actions, nor yet to suggest a methodology for assigning priorities to alternative actions, nor for that matter to evaluate alternative methodologies for assigning priorities to alternative actions. Instead, we were tasked with designing a procedure for evaluating methodologies for assigning priorities to possible decisions.  From a certain perspective, the mere ability to conceive and communicate such a task was a triumph of the human intellect.

My level of admiration for this achievement was not unconnected to my decision to move to academia.  But my feelings of awe had no linguistic focus — it was the content, not its expression, that was awful.

Not, that is, unless you think that typical contemporary exponents of this linguistic register are Dick Cavett, Glamour Magazine, and Michael Bérubé.

I noted this morning that Scott Adams is far from the only one to suggest that "at the end of the day" (in the meaning "when all is said and done" or "in the final analysis") is typical of "the vacuous way managers speak".  This phrase is often cited as  "over-used" as well as "irritating", and  I did a little lunch-time experiment™ earlier today suggesting that over the past 30 years or so,  it's indeed been taking over its rhetorico-ecological niche from competing cliches.

However, an unsystematic scan of my searches seemed inconsistent with the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by "managers", however we define that much-maligned class.  I speculated that this might be another example of the common process of stereotype-formation, where some behavior perceived as annoying comes to be associated with a class of people who are also perceived as annoying, and the association is then repeatedly strengthened by confirmation bias. (See "The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007, for some discussion.)

Several commenters were not persuaded to abandon their prejudices, and so I decided to do a slightly more systematic check across sources, by comparing the frequency of "at the end of the day" to the frequency of "in the final analysis" in texts on the sites of 13 business, finance or management magazines, and 21 other diverse kinds of magazines and weblogs.

Here are the results, sorted by the ratio of "at the end of the day" to "in the final analysis":

SOURCE "end of day" "final analysis" RATIO 0 Dick Cavett (blog) 112 0 INF 1 Glamour Magazine 1160 1 1160.000 2 Michael Berube (blog) 1240 2 620.000 3 US magazine 242 4 60.500 4 Freakonomics (blog) 233 4 58.250 5 Management Today 284 8 35.500 6 People 324 10 32.400 7 Vanity Fair 96 3 32.000 8 The Valve (blog) 54 2 27.000 9 Black Enterprise 107 5 21.400 10 CIO Magazine 171 8 21.375 11 Andrew Sullivan (blog) 57 3 19.000 12 Columbia Journalism Review 110 7 15.714 13 Sporting News 1490 103 14.466 14 The New Yorker 99 7 14.143 15 Volokh Conspiracy (blog) 617 75 8.227 16 The Atlantic 122 15 8.133 17 Harpers 21 3 7.000 18 Fast Company 620 92 6.739 19 Business Week 2070 355 5.831 20 Business Finance 46 9 5.111 21 Red Herring 450 99 4.545 22 Forbes 1060 239 4.435 23 Psychology Today 143 40 3.575 24 HBS Working Knowledge 126 45 2.800 25 Government Executive 192 70 2.743 26 Foreign Policy 268 110 2.436 27 Inc 250 105 2.381 28 Workforce Management 263 130 2.023 29 Talking Points Memo 754 471 1.601 30 Crooked Timber (blog) 147 96 1.531 31 Chief Executive 321 260 1.235 32 Oprah.com 692 1860 0.372 33 Stanley Fish (blog) 75 421 0.178

Note that the top 10 end-of-the-day-users include just two likely outlets of management-speak (Management Today and Black Enterprise), whereas the bottom ten include five (Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Government Executive magazine, Inc magazine, Workforce Management magazine, and Chief Executive magazine.

I'm not going to claim that "managers" and other coporate types are actually less likely to use the expression "at the end of the day" than (say) liberal intellectuals and fashion- or gossip-magazine writers are — but this tabulation certainly gives no comfort to those who hold the opposite view.

[Caveat — these numbers were gotten from Google searches using the "site:" feature, and may be subject to some of the notorious numerical inaccuracies of that company's search results.]

Following on the critiques of the faulty metadata in Google Books that I offered here and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Jacso of the University of Hawaii writes in the Library Journal that Google Scholar is laced with millions of metadata errors of its own. These include wildly inflated publication and citation counts (which Jacso compares to Bernie Madoff's profit reports), numerous missing author names, and phantom authors assigned by the parser that Google elected to use to extract metadata, rather than using the metadata offered them by scholarly publishers and indexing/abstracting services:

In its stupor, the parser fancies as author names (parts of) section titles, article titles, journal names, company names, and addresses, such as Methods (42,700 records), Evaluation (43,900), Population (23,300), Contents (25,200), Technique(s) (30,000), Results (17,900), Background (10,500), or—in a whopping number of records— Limited (234,000) and Ltd (452,000). 

What makes this a serious problem is that many people regard the Google Scholar metadata as a reliable index of scholarly influence and reputation, particularly now that there are tools like the Google Scholar Citation Count gadget by Jan Feyereisl and the Publish or Perish software produced by Tarma Software, both of which take Google Scholar's metadata at face value. True, the data provided by traditional abstracting and indexing services are far from perfect, but their errors are dwarfed by those of Google Scholar, Jacso says.

Of course you could argue that Google's responsibilities with Google Scholar aren't quite analogous to those with Google Book, where the settlement has to pass federal scrutiny and where Google has obligations to the research libraries that provided the scans. Still, you have to feel sorry for any academic whose tenure or promotion case rests in part on the accuracy of one of Google's algorithms.

Following up on this morning's post about phrases that some people find irritating, I thought that I'd take a look at the recent history of one of them, "At the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's 2004 "most irritating phrase in the language". Geoff Pullum ("Irritating cliches? Get a life", 3/25/2004) took this phrase to "have a meaning somewhere in the same region as after all, all in all, the bottom line is, and when the chips are down", and he observes that it "may shock people by its complete bleaching away of temporal meaning", resulting in things like "at the end of the day, you've got to get up in the morning".

A Google News Archive search for "at the end of the day" shows a rapid recent rise in hits from around 1985 onward.  But so do some similar phrases, like  "when all is said and done", which doesn't seem to have incurred the ire of peevers to nearly the same extent. So I thought I'd look at the relative frequency of four phrases with similar meanings: "in the last analysis", "in the final analysis", "when all is said and done", and "at the end of the day".  I queried the Google News archive in 5-year increments from 1951 to 2009.

The raw counts are here, and a plot of proportions shows a striking increase, from about 1975 on, in the frequency of "at the end of the day" relative to the other alternatives:

it's nice to see that peevers like the PEC are responding, even if irrationally, to a genuine change in their linguistic environment, rather than amplifying purely internal psychic noise.

[Update — The OED has an entry for the "hackneyed phrase" glossed as "eventually; when all's said and done", with citations only from 1974:

1974 H. MCKEATING God & Future vi. 96 Eschatological language is useful because it is a convenient way of indicating..what at the end of the day we set most store by. 1976 South Notts. Echo 16 Dec. 1/4 ‘At the end of the day,’ he stated, ‘this verifies what I have been saying against the cuts in public expenditure.’ 1978 Jrnl. R. Soc. Arts CXXVI. 213/2, I want to make a number of points to you, which we believe invalidate..the recommendations they make at the end of the day. 1982 B. BEAUMONT Thanks to Rugby iii. 39 But, at the end of the day, it is an amateur sport and everyone is free to put as much or as little into the game as he chooses. 1986 Independent 17 Nov. 4 At the end of the day businessmen can talk to the city in a way chief executives cannot.

1974 is way late for the first "hackneyed" usage — was this phrase born hackneyed?

It's easy enough to antedate it — W.H. Auden wrote in Passenger Shanty (from Poems 1936-39):

8 The passengers are rather triste ,
9 There's many a fool, and many a beast,
10 Who ought to go west, but is bound for the East.

11 Mr. Jackson buys rubber and sells it again,
12 He paints in oils and he drinks champagne,
13 Says: 'I should have been born in Elizabeth's reign.'

14 His wife learns astrology out of a book,
15 Says: 'Your horoscope's queer and I don't like its look.
16 With the Moon against Virgo you might be a crook.'

17 The planter tells us: 'In Malay
18 We play rugger in March and cricket in May
19 But feel starved for sex at the end of the day.'

20 The journalist Capa plays dicing games,
21 He photographed Teruel Town in flames,
22 He pinches the bottoms of all the dames.

23 The Dominican monks get up with the sun,
24 They're as fond of their dinner as anyone,
25 And they have their own mysterious fun.

Though perhaps Auden's planter meant that literally, I'm not sure.

Another, even earlier, ambiguous antedating — a poem by William Canton with the title "At the end of the day", 1902:

1   Two on a moor befogged I found. One sat,
2      Hunched on a stone, beside a burnt-out fire.
3   One posed with drabbled peacock-feathered hat.
4      And both were old, starved, squalid in attire.

5   "You seem," said I to him upon the stone,
6      "Old friends new met in unexpected woe."
7   "Yes," sighed the man; "my name is Had-I-known ."
8      "And his?" "Oh, his!" he laughed—" I-told-you-so ."

Completely unambiguous is Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 1916 The Things That Count:

1   Now , dear, it isn't the bold things,
2   Great deeds of valour and might,
3   That count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day.
4   But it is the doing of old things,
5   Small acts that are just and right;
6   And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say;
7   In smiling at fate, when you want to cry, and in keeping at work when you want to play—
8   Dear, those are the things that count.

Maybe this phrase was "born hackneyed" after all?

Even earlier is Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 Tancred:

As for Keferinis, although he was very conversable, the companions observed that he always made it a rule to dilate upon subjects and countries with which he had no acquaintance, and he expressed himself in so affected a manner, and with such an amplification of useless phraseology, that, though he was always talking, they seemed at the end of the day to be little more acquainted with the Ansarey and their sovereign than when Baroni first opened the subject of their visit to Darkush at Damascus.

]

Today's Dilbert:

This strip's first panel displays a number of stock items from the inventory of peevology, fixed-expression department.  For example, "at the end of the day" was at the top of the Plain English Campaign's 2004 list of the "most irritating phrases" in the language.

The usual complaint is that these phrases violate Orwell's injunction  to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print". But the complainers, in the very text of their complaints, generally use their own collection of common "metaphors, similes, or other figures of speech", which typically occur in print even more often than the phrases that they're complaining about.

In this Dilbert strip, Scott Adams suggests two different reasons for irritation. One is that the offending phrases are stereotypically associated with a despised minority, in this case "managers". That's clearly a central part of the picture ("The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007) — but as we'll see below, it's not clear that these stereotypes are fair ones.

The second charge is that the offending phrases are part of a broader pattern of linguistic crime, here "the vacuous way that managers speak". And again, the validity of this charge is not clear.

In the first place, each of the peeve-provoking phrases has apparently inoffensive counterparts, which are more or less equally frequent, and neither more nor less vacuous: "From now on, we'll skim the cream when all is said and done". This isn't stereotypical manager-speak, but it's not much of a contribution to corporate strategizing either.

But also, if we look at how the constituent clichés are used in real life,  we don't see a preponderance of  managers — at least not corporate ones — and we do see reasonable contributions to non-vacuity.

Moving forward: As an adverbial meaning "from now on; in the future as distinct from the past", going forward seems somewhat commoner than moving forward. And on 1/2/2009, Toni Monkovic identified "going foward" as her "pick for cliche of 2009″ in football, using the criteria that is has to be "essentially meaningless, exhaustively overused, and I have to really really hate it", thus validating Scott Adams' ear for irritants. There are certainly plenty of examples in the world of football, like Kellen Clemens' comment on the Jets' decision to start Mark Sanchez ("Going forward it is Mark’s job and I’ll support him"), or Roger Goodell's statement on Michael Vick's reinstatement (“I’m a believer personally that if somebody recognizes either mistakes in judgment or things, they can do better going forward, that the general public will recognize that and give people an opportunity to prove themselves").

But going|moving forward seems to be more commonly used by politicians and journalists than by corporate types or sports figures.

Barack Obama and his administration seem to be especially fond of it: "Going forward, we cannot tolerate the same old boom and bust economy of the past"; "Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course"; "Going forward, we can make a difference on several fronts"; "And going forward, we can build a lasting relationship founded upon mutual interests and mutual respect as Iraq takes its rightful place in the community of nations"; "Going forward, my administration will continue to consult closely with Congress and with our allies as we deploy this system"; "The biggest concern that I have moving forward is that the toll that job losses take on individual families and communities can be self-reinforcing"; …

But the Republican National Committee is almost as committed: "…concerned about the current negotiations and feel that it is necessary to restate our strong position on several issues and provisions going forward"; "This is a subject that needs to be focused on going forward"; "But from that point going forward, I felt it was best to stand on principle"; …

The Freakonomics blog is also a fan of this phrase: "Going forward, we’ll be cross-posting Robin’s Freakonomics-relevant blog entries here on the blog"; "I do not think this has a negative impact on lending going forward because everyone knows the rules of how things work in bankruptcy reorganizations, especially these days when lots of folks who made secured loans to pretty iffy organizations will have to take haircuts"; "If anything, we anticipate them taking a larger and more direct role going forward"; "And the questioner explained that her friends were thinking that going forward, these foreign locales were likely to be much more economically successful than the West"; …

And so is Thomas Friedman: "But going forward, if peace talks get under way, there are a few style points Mr. Obama should keep in mind"; "But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down"; "The big question I have going forward in Iraq is this"; "And the question I have going forward is whether that will be the case with President Bush"; "Tell the American people how you would deal with Iraq going forward"; "But going forward, this will be less and less true"; …

Low-hanging fruit: There were only 29 instances of this phrase in the NYT's archive for the past year. Of these, seven were about business and finance (mostly about the recent financial crisis), five were about energy use and climate change, four were about public health, and two were about sports. None seemed especially vacuous: "A variety of experts […] have long recognized that, compared with other tacks like building solar farms and extracting oil from algae, improving efficiency across all sectors, from transportation to housing, is low-hanging fruit"; "the Obama administration cannot overlook the low-hanging fruit — the gains to be had from making existing technologies more efficient"; "reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called "low hanging fruit' — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming"; …

At the end of the day: There were 408 instances of this phrase in the NYT over the past year. Of the 46 in the past 30 days (some of which were used literally, rather than in the metaphorical sense of "in the final analysis" or "when all is said and done"), sports (10) and politics (9) were commoner contexts (for the metaphorical examples) than business (7). And again, the uses didn't seem especially vacuous: "Again, at the end of the day, it's about how we can get the last six or nine outs"; "“You can try to work walks. But at the end of the day, if you can hit home runs, you want to hit home runs"; …

But even if these phrases are usually non-vacuous and non-managerial, they've certainly become more common. Thus "at the end of the day" has 14,452 hits on Google News this morning, compared to 539 for "in the final analysis", 28 for "in the last analysis", and 1,376 for "when all is said and done". The ratio of  "at the end of the day" to its common alternatives seems to have become quite a bit greater in recent decades — this morning's ratio is 14452/(539+28+1376) = 7.44, compared to the ratio for the Google News archive from 1950 to 1960 of 1750/(2750+1660+304) = 0.371.

This order-of-magnitude increase in relative frequency is no doubt the real source of the irritation, with vacuity and source statistics being secondary (or entirely imaginary) factors.

[Update: more here and here.]

The comments on my post "The inherent ambiguity of WTF" drifted to other possible expansions of WTF, like the World Taekwando Federation. That reminded me of something I saw back in July on the blog Your Logo Makes Me Barf, mocking the abbreviatory logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. The ridicule got some attention from local Wisconsin media, such as Kathy Flanigan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979.
But now that it's been pointed out, the lobbying coalition might want to rethink using an acronym in the logo. To anyone online, WTF has a different meaning these days. And it's not the kind of thing you want visitors thinking about when they think Wisconsin.

I decided to check out the tourism board's website, and lo and behold, they've bowed to pressure and changed their name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. The old logo lives on, however, at the Internet Archive. Compare:

      

The transition isn't quite complete yet. The URL is still witourismfederation.org, and "WTF" survives in the menu directly below the logo on the home page!

      

I'd like to echo Arnold Zwicky's praise for the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's fan-fucking-tastic dictionary, The F Word. (See page 33 to read the entry for fan-fucking-tastic, dated to 1970 in Terry Southern's Blue Movie. And see page 143 for the more general use of -fucking- as an infix, in use at least since World War I.) Full disclosure: I made some contributions to this edition, suggesting possible new entries and digging up earlier citations ("antedatings") for various words and phrases. I took a particular interest in researching effing acronyms and initialisms. For instance, I was pleased to contribute the earliest known appearance of the now-ubiquitous MILF — and no, I'm not talking about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. (For the record, a Buffalo-based rock band adopted the name MILF in early 1991, based on slang used by lifeguards at Fort Niagara State Park.) Another entry I helped out on is the endlessly flexible expression of bewilderment, WTF.

Anyone who has encounted WTF in the wild probably knows that its primary meaning is "what the fuck," but the W can also stand for various other question words. When I started trawling through early examples in the archive of Usenet newsgroups, I was surprised to discover that this inherent ambiguity has been present in WTF all along, since its first popularization in the mid- to late '80s. Here are the earliest examples I've found for the different possible expansions:

WTF = "what the fuck"
1985 "Ramblings 5/85" net.micro.mac (18 May) I asked myself, "W.T.F.?"

WTF = "why the fuck"
1985 "Proline C preliminary review" net.micro.cbm (26 May) WTF do I need a C primer if I am buying the compiler for the language?

WTF = "where the fuck"
1988  "sgipie.ps (file 2 of 5)" comp.windows.news (28 Aug.) wtf did all that junk on the stack come from?

WTF = "whatever the fuck"
1990 "Ageism, Lookism, straightism, Eeekism[tm]" soc.motss (15 Mar.) i don't believe the 'gay community' (wtf that is…) has formal input in this process.

WTF = "who the fuck"
1990 Jargon File, Version 2.1.5 (28 Nov.) WTF: The universal interrogative particle. WTF knows what it means?

The last example from the Jargon File is wonderfully self-referential, forcing the reader into the who interpretation and thereby illustrating how you can only know what the abbreviation means by judging the surrounding context. Absent from these early examples (at least the ones I could glean from Google's not-terribly-reliable Usenet archive) is WTF with an expansion of "when the fuck," but rest assured, that's attested in later sources:

2002 "More ELF buggery…" bugtraq mailing list (26 May) cathy, wtf are you coming over for beer?

2004 ""Fraser and Weiz won't be in Mummy 3" rec.sport.pro-wrestling (21 Feb.) So…wtf will the story be around?

2004 "Comment on *Fangfingers's profile" deviantART (15 May) DAMN, man! Wtf are you gonna FIX that thing!!

By the early '90s, the abbreviation had become so entrenched in online lingo that it also came to be used as a noun with various meanings:

1990 "One hell of a screwwed up article" rec. humor (30 Mar.) This may have been funny had it required a bit less translation from WTF to english.

1991 "Devil bunnies! I snort the nose,Lucifer!" alt.fan.monty-python (12 Oct.) All I get is a couple nominations for a Rory and a WTF!

And then it began to be used attributively:

1994 "sendmail: how is | (pipe) supported?" alt.fan.warlord (1 Feb.) I'm glad that barphic is clearly labelled, otherwise this would be a WTF? post.

The attributive usage took off especially in the expression "WTF moment." Here on Language Log, "WTF moment" begat "WTF grammar" in a March 2005 post by Mark Liberman, shortly followed by "WTF coordinations." (See here for links to other WTF posts on Language Log Classic, and here for more recent posts.)

Just to cover my bases, I'll note that WTF spelled backwards is FTW, a popular online abbreviation standing for "For the Win!" Fittingly, FTW! is quite the opposite reaction to WTF? And if you want to know the history of another expansion of FTW, namely "fuck the world," go get the new edition of The F-Word and turn to page 68.

The third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's dictionary The F Word is now out, to much (and much-deserved) acclaim. The book has a scholarly introduction (of 33 pages) on the etymology of fuck; its taboo status; its appearance in print (including in dictionaries) and movies; euphemism and taboo avoidance; and this dictionary and its policies. The many uses of fuck are then covered in detail in the main entries.

There's an excellent review of the book by slang scholar Jonathon Green on the World Wide Words site. From Green's review:

… as a fellow lexicographer (and, I must admit, a friend — slang is a small world) what impresses me most is the excellence of the overall treatment. The subject happens to be fuck, but this is how any such study should be conducted and sadly so rarely is. Not via the slipshod infantilism of the Net’s Urban Dictionary, but disinterestedly, seriously and in depth. The F Word, I would suggest, is a template that we would all be wise to follow.

Website for the book here.

Kevin Drum recently laid out a long-standing unsolved problem, one that has preoccupied such luminaries as Paul Krugman, James Fallows, and Glenn Beck ("Saving the Frogs", Mother Jones, 9/23/2009). The problem is that there's no good substitute for the over-used and untrue story about how a frog, if placed in a pot of gradually heated water, will eventually allow itself to be boiled without jumping out.  And since this is a rhetorical problem, Drum describes the failure as a linguistic one:

So here's what I'm interested in. The boiling frog cliche is untrue. But it stays alive because, as Krugman says, it's a useful metaphor. So why aren't there any good substitutes?

This is very strange. Most useful adages and metaphors not only have substitutes, they have multiple substitutes. "Look before you leap" and "Curiosity killed the cat." "Fast as lightning" and "Faster than a speeding bullet." Etc. Usually you have lots of choices.

But in this case we don't seem to have a single one aside from the boiling frog. Why? Is it because it's not really all that useful a metaphor after all? Because the frog has ruthlessly killed off every competitor? Because it's not actually true in any circumstance, let alone with frogs in pots of water? What accounts for this linguistic failure?

Yesterday, Jonathan Lundell sent me a link to Drum's article, with the comment "Sounds like a job for Language Log". That was almost enough to make me move on immediately: when Geoff Pullum and I started Language Log, I promised myself that if it ever got to feel like a job, I'd quit.

But this morning, after half a cup of coffee, I realized that Jonathan's remark was just an instance of the conventionalized phrasal template "sounds like a job for ___". And this one usually refers to the super-activities of superheros, which are by definition superfluous to their day jobs.

Thus this Non Sequitur strip from 8/23/2009:

So let me start by noting that the frog-boiling business is a very different kind of cliche from the other ones that Drum cites. "Look before you leap", "curiosity killed the cat", etc., are fixed phrases, involving not only a conventionalized metaphor but also a specific string of words. The frog story has no standard linguistic form — it's a conventionalized metaphorical narrative, not a conventionalized metaphorical phrase.

In that respect, it's like the original snowclone, which involves explaining that since the Eskimos have some large number of words for snow, so the members of some other group must have even more words for some substance, activity or concept believed to be typical of them. You can explain that in any words that you like, and it still works as a rhetorical gesture, as long as your audience doesn't object to the fact that its premise is untrue.

And as far as I know, there isn't really any suitable overall substitute for this linguistic abuse of Eskimos. The 18th-century version about Arabs and lions is extinct, and my suggestion about Somalis and camels has never caught on. Similarly, I can't think of any substitute for the false story about the Chinese characters for "crisis".

So there you are: perhaps it's a rhetorical generalization that conventionalized metaphorical narratives are both false and unsubstitutable. This would follow from a couple of facts: people like to embellish stories to improve their fit to particular rhetorical circumstances, and rhetorical value is uncorrelated with truth (or perhaps negatively correlated).   Based on those premises, you can show that Really Useful Stories will almost always be false, and also that Really Useful Stories will be the end point of a process of invention and memetic selection that's not easy to equal by mere intelligent design.

So what about substitutes for the frog-boiling narrative? Am I going to undermine my point by offering some?

Yes, sort of. There's the Niemöller "first they came" passage; but this is specific to the gradual spread of tyranny, and yet is unlikely to appeal to Glenn Beck, who appears to be the only pundit who has actually boiled a frog on television. There's the introduction of wide-band noise in Tinnitus retraining therapy, which must be gradual and carefully calibrated so as to avoid triggering aversive limbic responses. This is (I think) a valid instance of the false "frogs won't get upset if increases in water temperature are gradual" concept; but it's too complicated, and the result of gradual stimulus increase is good rather than bad, and anyhow curing people of annoying imaginary sounds doesn't have the emotional impact of boiling frogs. See?