Being Human

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre notes a spectacularly awkward sentence from the New Yorker and asks, "Is this a new tic of New Yorker style, or have I just begun noticing it?" The offending sentence:

“Horton, you’re one of the few people New York seems to agree with,” Tennessee Williams, another regional Young Turk who dreamed of changing the shape of commercial theatre, said.

John explains that he knows "there is a longstanding journalistic resistance to inverting subject and verb in attribution" and understands why some writers might be averse to the construction, but objects to a blanket prohibition against this inversion (known in the syntax trade as "quotative inversion"), especially when it leads to tin-eared sentences like one reporting the Tennessee Williams quotation.

It turns out that here at Language Log Plaza we've been alert to the New Yorker's anti-quotative inversion quirk from the earliest days of the blog.

Here's the history, with some digression to other blogging on the syntax of quotations.

Chris Potts was in first, with a 9/22/03 posting "A ban on quotative inversion?" (here) and a follow-up the next day, "More on the quotative inversion conjecture" (here). Then on 10/6/03 Mark Liberman chimed in (here) with a comparison of the New Yorker's awkward verb-last sentences to the verb-last sentences of German that Mark Twain complained about in his comic essay "The Awful German Language". And the next year (12/19/04, in "Diagram this", here) Geoff Pullum added a more complex example from the New Yorker. So ended the Early Years of quotative inversion in these parts.

Skip ahead to this year, and a 1/5/09 posting on my blog (here) about a report from Neal Whitman (on ADS-L) about Bill Walsh's proscribing quotative fronting (without inversion) in combination with subject omission in a following conjunct, in things like

(1) “I’m leaving,” Jones said, and walked out of the room.

Neal Whitman joined in (on his blog, here) with the reason for his query to ADS-L. He had noted that in her children's books, Beverly Cleary was a very heavy (indeed near-categorical) user of the non-repeated subject, as in (1). Neal found the usage unremarkable — until he came across Walsh's proscription, which he found puzzling.

(A digression: in her 1990 Muggie Maggie Cleary repeated the subject in these coordinations, but then seems to have reverted to her non-repetition ways in later books. The Muggie Maggie episode was probably the work of an editor who had been exposed to the "rule" Walsh cites.)

Following up on this, I posted on my own blog (here and here) on quotation fronting and quotative inversion, with links to the 2003-04 postings on Language Log about "awkward sentences that would have been much improved by quotative inversion", despite the New Yorker's aversion to it.

And that brings us up to John McIntyre.

Andrew Clegg asks "Is this true?"

I'm more familiar with a different just-so story intended to explain the same alleged generalization: infants' phonetic abilities are initially limited, and this creates pressure to develop variants of words for caregivers (and other things infants are likely to want to name) that suit their preferences.

I don't know of any non-anecdotal studies of the generalization, much less of the relative strength of parental egoism and infant incapacity in explaining it; and I don't have time this morning to search. But maybe a reader can help Andrew out.

Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano had sponsored a bill which passed unanimously granting the Port of San Francisco financial power to redevelop a former shipyard for a new neighborhood known as Pier 70.

Ammiano also had made something of a scene at a Democratic Party fundraiser early this month in San Francisco at which Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had been invited by former San Francisco mayor and Assembly speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat. This surprised many, in light of the heated budget wars between the governor and legislature.

Ammiano could be heard invoking the cry of Republican South Carolina's Rep. Joe Wilson at President Barack Obama's address to a joint session of Congress - "You lie" - as others heckled Schwarzenegger's brief speech. After the governor left, Ammiano took the stage with a rambling criticism of Schwarzenegger for a variety of offenses — among them the governor's vetoes of bills that would have legalized gay marriage.

When the governor's office delivered a veto-message for Ammiano's own port bill a few days later, on Oct. 12, there appeared to be an unmistakable hidden message within: Reading the first letter of each line of the letter's two main paragraphs:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations of probability, I'm sure we could set about refuting McLear's disingenuous response that the acrostic is merely a "coincidence." Scholars of Shakespeare have argued whether the following acrostic in A Midsummer's Night Dream, in which the character Titania spells out her own name, could have appeared by chance:

Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no,
I am a spirit of no common rate,
The summer till doth tend upon my state;
ANd I do love thee. Therefore go with me.
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep…

But I think in this case it's pretty clear that we're dealing with intentionally mischievous acrostic-making in the Governor's office. It reads very smoothly, so kudos to the writer of the veto message. Could it have been Ahnold himself? Doubtful, although he might have told someone in his office to construct the acrostic. (I wonder if whoever did it also leaked the story to reveal his or her handiwork.)

Kudos too to Mark Silva of The Swamp, for coming up with a novel taboo avoidance strategy in his headline, "Schwarzenegger to foe: (Veto) 'you'."

A few days ago, Kurt Andersen interviewed the novelist Richard Powers on Studio360. You can listen to the whole nine-minute interview here:

In the middle of the interview, Powers breaks into a sequence of declarative phrases with final rising pitch — what's sometimes called "uptalk". Before and after this sequence, which sets the stage for an account of his decision to become a writer, he consistently uses falling patterns. It seems clear that he means the rising contours to have a rhetorical effect. But it's equally clear that the intended effect is not to signal insecurity or to call into question his commitment to the truth of what he's saying. So as part of my on-going campaign to document uptalk — especially non-stereotypical examples — here's a description.

The preceding passage starts this way, with Powers describing why he left physics:

You- you mentioned the- the- the "two cultures" crisis that uh
that Snow put on everyone's agenda but uh
in fact the crisis really is the "million cultures" crisis and uh
how- however much exhilaration I took out of physics, it w- rapidly became clear to me that uh
even two physicists working in closely related fields couldn't always communicate with each other, and- and for me to make any kind of meaningful contribution
would require
a kind of intense specialization, where year after year I learned more and more about smaller and smaller domains, until I was in-
in danger of knowing everything there was about nothing.

Powers goes on to explain why graduate school in literature was also too confining, and continues to use phrase-final falls. Then comes the story of how he decided to write a novel — and right up to the crucial moment of decision, he mostly ends his phrases with rises:

Andersen: So when you decided OK, this is I- I- I'm not gonna be
uh a scientist, I'm not going to be uh
a literature
teacher
then you- did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them? Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/
I was living in the Fens/ just behind the Fine Arts Museum/
the- the MFA in Boston/
and there was a- a retrospective exhibition
of the German photographer August Sander.
and I had no prior exposure to this work/ Andersen: The early 20th century photographer? Powers: German photographer from the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century um
and uh I remember going into this first American retrospective/
and turning around the corner and/
seeing this magnificent and haunting photograph, of these three young men
in their Sunday best, walking along a muddy road just glancing out over their right shoulder as if
suddenly surprised by the photographer.
Leaning forward, reading the caption on this photo
which read
"three– or three young Westerwald farmers on their way to a dance, nineteen fourteen"
So of course they were not on their way to the dance that they thought they were on their way to/
and just down the road was world war one. Andersen: And so you suddenly
had your mission. Powers: I did, I- I looked at that photograph/
I had an almost intact story in mind/
this was a Saturday/
on Monday I went in to- to my data processing job/
and gave my two weeks notice.

From then on, Powers reverts to falls.

Andersen: It sounds as though you had a mission for a career of fiction writing, not just a book. Powers: ((Well I'm)) I'm not sure it's a mission, I think it's simply
the shape that my own temperament takes.

I'm skeptical that there's any systematic difference between the rises often used with yes/no questions, and the rises used for various other reasons, as in Powers' story.  As an additional andecdotal piece of evidence in this discussion,  here's a comparison (at the scale of  time and pitch display) between the end of Andersen's question and the start of Powers' answer:

Andersen: … did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them/

Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/

To really address this question in a responsible way, of course, would require comparing the dynamics of  a large number of examples of both kinds, paying careful attention to the alignment of the pitch contour with the syllable sequence and with the amplitude contour. But these are among the many examples that make me doubt that there's a systematic difference in such cases (as has sometimes been suggested) between rises that start at the bottom of the speaker's range and rises that start higher.

You'd also want to try some perception experiments.

Here's the picture, "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance":

Another version of the story is here, in a 2003 interview published in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
When did you begin your writing career?

RICHARD POWERS
In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you got there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeingthe first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.

Today I got mail from the Republican National Committee — a survey they want me to fill out and (of course) an attached contribution form.   I don't know why they sent it to me, because in spite of their urging me "and other grassroots Republicans" to respond to their survey, I am not a registered Republican.   Maybe it's because my neighborhood is mostly Republican, though our nearest neighbors are bigwigs in the local Libertarian party.  In any case, many of the survey questions contain presuppositions that make them hard to answer.  They don't ask me if I've stopped beating my wife, er, spouse, but they do want to know if (for instance) I "believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate".

And they ask, "Should English be the official language of the United States?"  They don't say what this has to do with the President's agenda; it's totally irrelevant to his agenda, as far as I know.  But I don't know all that much: maybe Obama is campaigning to eradicate English from the country and I just haven't noticed?  I do know that I'm proud to belong to an organization, the Linguistic Society of America, that has come out strongly in opposition to the Official English movement.  In 1987 the LSA  membership voted to approve an eloquent Resolution to this effect, proposed by Language Log's  Geoff Nunberg (though he wasn't a Language Logger at the time, because Language Log didn't yet exist).   Read it here:

http://www.lsadc.org/info/lsa-res-english.cfm

Another notice of a recent book, this time Nathan Bierma's Eclectic Encyclopedia of English (William, James & Co.), an assortment of material from five years of his "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune (no longer a regular feature in the paper, alas). It's meant for a general audience; in fact, a number of the entries originated as responses to queries from readers.

Here's his point of view:

I used to be picky–really picky–about English grammar and usage. [illustrations of his earlier pickiness follow] (p. iv)

My new approach to language can be called joyous bewilderment. Rather than fretting about oddities, trends, and variations, I delight in them. The variation and change is exactly what makes language so interesting. I'm a work in progress, but gradually I'm learning to see quirks and changes in English and rather than respond with "How dangerous," to reply instead, "How cool!" or at least, "How interesting!" (p. viii)

I'm not exactly a disinterested party here: I supplied one of the blurbs for the book (Erin McKean and Geoff Nunberg wrote the others), I am thanked in the Introduction, and I'm quoted or cited five times in the book.

My blurb:

Bierma has been exceptionally careful in his research for stories involving language–starting by seeking out scholars who might have the information he's looking for and then actually listening. So his columns are both informed and informative. Oh yes, and entertaining.

What does "Complimentary High-speed Internet access on the lobby level" mean? You can see the phrase on the website of the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport hotel. Did you imagine it meant that if you opened your laptop on the lobby level of the hotel a wireless Internet network would come up and you could connect for free? Oh, you are so naive. You are not a sophisticated jet-setter like Robert Langdon and me.

Actually, until a few minutes ago I was like you. I imagined, trustingly, that after checking out of my room and doing my morning recording session at The Teaching Company, I would be able to sit in the lobby of my hotel and continue to work on academic and administrative tasks until my evening flight out of Dulles, and I would have complimentary high-speed wireless Internet access courtesy of the hotel. But instead the usual "Now agree to a $9.99 charge on your room bill" screen came up as soon as I pointed the browser in the direction of Language Log.

I went and asked at the registration desk. And here is what Hilton Hotels thought "complimentary high-speed Internet access" meant: if you are a guest, and you register for Internet access in your room, and agree to have the $9.99 charged thereto, then after that you can also use your laptop in the lobby for no extra charge. So if you pay $9.99 for the relevant 24 hours it's free.

I think that's a pretty weird interpretation of "complimentary". Suppose (I invited the assistant manager to imagine) they said there were complimentary apples on the lobby level, and when you went to get some they explained that they actually meant that if you went up to your room and paid for an order of room-service apples to be brought up and signed for, you could then bring one down and eat it in the lobby area. Would you not be mildly surprised? Or even modestly irked?

It is only the linguistic point I am concerned with here. I had picked this hotel after reading its Internet access policies; they were important to my plans. I am a native speaker of English, and I felt that I the text they published had genuinely misled me on an important point.

I don't tell this story to criticize Hilton Hotels. The assistant manager immediately saw the force of my logic and the misleading character of the website language. What she did was to reopen my bill, get me registered as agreeing to pay $9.99 for another 24 hourse, and then she used her discretion to take $9.99 off the bill. Net money changing hands: zero dollars, zero cents. Net cost to hotel (where the wireless router is on all the time no matter what), zero. Another satisfied customer, at no expense.

But the composer of the website boilerplate really does need to be taken back to truth-in-advertising school. The notion that "complimentary Internet access" might mean "complimentary Internet access for those guests who have paid for Internet access" is going a semantic bridge too far. Isn't that right? Is it me, or is it them?

One of the key examples in Ruth Millikan's influential 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories was the "canid play bow". This piece of doggie-language, exemplified in the photo on the right, is "a highly ritualized and stereotyped movement that seems to function to stimulate recipients to engage (or to continue to engage) in social play."

I mentioned it in a LL post a few years ago, quoting from Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen, "Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play":

From the intentional stance, if a believes that b believes that a desires to play (third-order) it would seem that ideal rationality would also require that a believes that b has a belief (second-order). But from a Millikanian perspective this more general second-order belief, if it requires a to have a general belief detector, may actually be more sophisticated than the third-order belief which supposedly entails it. A general belief detector may be much more difficult to evolve than a specific belief detector, for the detection of specific beliefs may be accomplished by the detection of correspondingly specific cues.

If this is correct, then on Millikan's account Jethro (Marc's dog) may be capable of the third-order belief that (or, at least, a state with the intentional content that) Sukie (Jethro's favorite canid play pal) wants Jethro to believe that her bite was playful not aggressive, even though Jethro is perhaps limited in his ability to represent and hence think about Sukie's second-order desires in general.

And according to Marc Bekoff, "Play signals as punctuation: The structure of social play in canids", Behaviour 132:419-429, 1995, the sequence patterns of bows with other actions, observed in a study of young wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs, suggests that for canids in general,

signals such as the bow can reinforce ongoing social play when it is possible that it could be disrupted due to the aggressive, predatory, or sexual behavior of one of the interacting animals. […] Play in canids (and in other animals) requires a mutual sharing of the play mood by the participants. This sharing can be facilitated by the performance of bows immediately before or immediately after an individual performs actions that can be misinterpreted […]

(I'm adding "sharing of the play mood" to the list of inadequately investigated phenomena headed by "group glee"…  Why, amid all the thousands of flowers in the gardens of academia, are there no departments of Play Mood Studies?)

Bekoff concludes that

In addition to sending the message "I want to play" when they are performed at the beginning of play, bows performed in a different context, namely during social play, might also carry the message "I want to play despite what I am going to do or just did — I still want to play" when there might be a problem in the sharing of this information between the interacting animals.

Bekoff speculates:

How might information between sender and recipient be shared? It is possible that the recipient shares the intentions (beliefs, desires) of the sender based on the recipient's own prior experiences of situations in which she performed bows. In an important paper on human behavior that has yet to find its way into comparative ethological circles, Gopnik (1993, p. 275) has argued that " . . . certain kinds of information that comes, literally, from inside ourselves is coded in the same way as information that comes observing the behavior of others. There is a fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other." Gopnik claims that others' body movements are mapped onto one's own kinesthetic sensations, based on prior experience of the observer, and she supports her claims with discussions of imitation in human newborns.

[The reference is to A Gopnik, "Psychopsychology", Consciousness and Cognition 2(4): 264-280, 1993.]

Against this background, I was interested and slightly puzzled to read this blog post by a dog trainer, Kelley Filson, "The Play-Bow: Not Just A Cute Trick", 7/14/2009:

Many of my clients dogs have a hard time playing with and interacting with other dogs. These dogs often play well with well-known, "buddy-dogs" and demonstrates good play-skills in comfortable situations, but do poorly with new dogs or in new places.

With work the dog can learn to meet and greet the novel dogs without being inappropriate, but there is often no play. In these cases the dog-in-training often starts getting jumped by the other dogs (in a not so friendly way). This happens after the Meet-&-Greet, because the dog-in-training sniffs a hello and then just stands there stiffly. This is awkward and invites aggressiion - a sort of preemptive strike against the dog who is standing stiffly and giving everyone the willies.

In these cases teaching a PLAY-BOW can bridge the gap between meeting and becoming friends. It gives the dog-in-training something to do (besides standing awkwardly). Furthermore, despite its trained-awkwardness it gives the other dogs something to do too - they can respond with more playfulness.

"Teaching a PLAY-BOW"? Why do some dogs need to be trained to produce this instinctual signal?

The most likely explanation, I guess, is that they know how to perform it, but not when to perform it. In particular, initiating or maintaining play with unfamiliar adults is perhaps not a natural reaction, except for animals in whom the behavioral effects of neoteny are especially strong.  Or maybe animals that are mostly "only dogs", raised without much conspecific company, are inadequately drilled in the "fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other"?

In any case, dogs are not the only ones who sometimes need help with this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, not all forms of communicative training are equally effective: see, for example,  M.E. Herron et al., "Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors", Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117:47-54, 2009.

Language Log readers may recall the link I gave to the Vulture Reading Room discussion of The Lost Symbol on the New York Magazine website, where I made some comments on the extraordinarily heavy use Dan Brown's book makes of redundant (either pointless or already implicit) attributive modifiers. I illustrated from an early passage about renowned Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon's arrival at the Washington Dulles Airport: the Falcon 2000EX corporate jet, the soft leather seats in the luxurious interior, the cold January air, the white fog on the misty tarmac, the middle-aged woman with curly blond hair under stylish knit wool hat who babbles boringly to him about his own choice of attire, and then:

Mercifully, a professional-looking man in a dark suit got out of a sleek Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal and held up his finger.

(No, I don't know which finger.) Well, by a weird coincidence (truth is stranger than even very strange fiction), last night I myself was flown into Dulles Airport at the invitation of people I have not met. And guess what…

I didn't come in on a corporate jet (though I did upgrade my scheduled flight from economy to a sort of extra-legroom enhanced economy, and that helped). And I wasn't actually greeted planeside by a personal greeter in a stylish knit wool hat. But I'm here to do a trial video-recording of a lecture on grammar for The Teaching Company, and (as my Language Log colleague John McWhorter promised) they treat their professors very well. As I emerged from the hell of the Dulles baggage hall (and my god, it was third-world chaos in there), I noticed, mercifully, holding up not a finger but a sign saying "GEOFFREY PULLUM", there was a professional-looking man in a dark suit, and yes, he had a Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal! Whoa, I'm Professor Robert Langdon, arriving at the nation's capital in a professionally-driven limo!

And you know, I couldn't help noticing that it was sleek.

Just like Dan said. That is the problem with his over-use of attributive modifiers, of course. He tells us things we knew. Lincoln Town Cars are always sleek. That's the whole point of them. Sleek things to park near terminals so that professional-looking men in dark suits can collect professors and senators in them. That's what they are. There aren't any chunky, boxy little Lincoln Town Cars, like glassed-in 1948 Studebaker pickup trucks. Sleekness is of the very essence, and we all know that. The modifier served no purpose at all.

I should add that my visit is so far going much better than Robert Langdon's visit to Washington in The Lost Symbol. He is whisked to the Capitol to give a lecture, but it is a total bust (there is nobody there; it was a trick to get him to come to Washington), and almost immediately he encounters the severed hand of a beloved friend and mentor in the middle of the floor of the Capitol rotunda.

I have been much luckier. No mutilated mentor. And I am quite sure that there is no modifier-bestrewed, hideously tattooed, multi-disguised, Arabic-named, masonically-inducted, revenge-driven, symbolic clue-dropping, sadistic torturer tracking my every move in or under the city… Wait a minute, there's someone at the door.

In the days following my accidental Annie Lennox sighting in Edinburgh, a gorgeous picture of the honoree in her doctoral robes was published, and I have added it here; don't miss it. And (returning to phonology) Julian Bradfield (who normally studies things like fixpoint logic and concurrent programming, and teaches operating systems and programming, in Edinburgh's School of Informatics) gave a talk on the phonology and phonetics of the utterly spectacular Khoisan language sometimes known as "Taa" but more usually referred to (at least by those who can pronounce the voiceless postalveolar velaric ingressive stop [k!] followed by a high tone [o] and a nasalized [o], which Julian can) as !Xóõ (the ASCII spelling is !Xoon).

This language, Julian quietly remarked, "knocks Dinka into a cocked hat" — by which he meant that the Nilotic languages of the Dinka group, such as Thok Reel, have less complex systems of vowel contrasts (despite the 3-way length contrasts of Dinka et al.). Vowels in !Xóõ can be plain, murmured, pharyngealized, epiglottalized, or nasalized, and some of the vowels can combine some of these effects. There seem to be at least 31 vowel phonemes in the East !Xóõ dialect. Plus !Xóõ has a consonant system so world-famously complex that its very existence suggests there is something wrong with our phonological theories. And Julian suggested a way to reduce the apparent complexity very dramatically. It was exciting.

Meanwhile, the Linguistics and English Language program of which I am the head advertised what we believe may be the first job in the history of the world to be explicitly advertised as Lecturer in Language Evolution. Yet more excitement.

It was all so exciting that I was almost reluctant to throw my things into a suitcase and rush to the airport on a trip to Washington DC, where I am now. About 17 hours from Edinburgh (one on the plane to Heathrow; many hours of waiting around in Heathrow's Terminal 5 sneaking laptop power from unobserved electrical outlets near gates with no current flight departure; seven hours on the plane to Dulles Airport; much waiting in chaotic baggage area) was decidedly dull compared to being back at work. Though when I got out of customs and immigration at Dulles, there was one thing that happened that was sort of exciting, in fact almost sort of creepy… I wish I had time to tell you about it. Maybe later on, OK?

Geoff out.

Before there was yaourter, there was Prisencolinensinainciusol, an amazing 1972 double-talk proto-rap by Adriano Celentano, channeling the Elvis of some parallel universe:

Here's the earlier (?) black-and-white sound-stage version, with a nice harmonica solo at the end:

And a more recent TV version, in which Celentano's hair has considerably receded, and there is some discussion (in Italian) afterwards:

Sasha Frere-Jones ("Stop making sense", The New Yorker, 4/29/2008) suggests: "[M]ore classroom settings for pop stars to parse their own material, please. An hour a month would be enough."

[via MetaFilter]

Yesterday, most of the comments on The communicative properties of footwear dealt with the gender associations of the word cute. This linguistic stereotype is often used as the basis of comic-strip humor, frequently in the context of shopping, as in this Foxtrot strip from a few years ago:

And (with a twist) in this Preteena from 6/24/2009:

But in fact, the word cute really is used much more often by women than by men, in modern American culture.

In a study based on a sample taken in 2004 (and described in "What men and women blog about", 7/8/2007), cute was the tenth most feminine word (as quantified by information gain), after hubby, husband,  adorable, skirt, boyfriend, mommy, yummy, kisses, and gosh. But male bloggers in that sample still used cute with a frequency of 83 per million words — it's just that the female bloggers used it with a frequency of 232 per million words — about 2.8 times more often.

In a large corpus of American English telephone conversations, the apparent femininity of cute was somewhat greater, at least as measured by the ratio of female use to male use — it was used 974 times in 15,685 female conversational sides, and only 214 times in 12,589 male conversational sides, for a ratio (corrected to account for the different numbers of conversational participants) of about 3.65. In comparison, the corrected ratio for shopping was only 3.01, and pink was only 2.12. (These transcribed conversations were mostly collected in 2003, but a significant minority were collected in 1990-91.)

In fact, cute was the most female-associated adjective among several candidates that I tried:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio cute 974 214 4.55 3.65 adorable 57 13 4.38 3.52 gorgeous 241 76 3.17 2.55 lovely 168 57 2.94 2.37 pink 74 28 2.74 2.12 beautiful 1378 865 1.59 1.28 little 21017 15490 1.36 1.09 strange 1176 921 1.28 1.02 big 11500 9761 1.18 0.95 weird 1451 1731 0.84 0.67 cool 4951 6207 0.80 0.64 tough 1307 1765 0.74 0.59 lame 40 67 0.60 0.48

(The raw ratios of counts are multiplied by 12589/15685 in the column labelled "corrected ratio", in order to get the ratio of rates per conversation. The average number of words per conversational side was nearly the same for the sexes, with men being about 6% talkier, so to get per-word ratios, another small correction would be needed, which would raise the corrected ratio for cute to about 3.87.)

The gender divergence was greater for several nouns, with husband being more than 15 times commoner in the women's speech, and wife about 5 times commoner in men's speech:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio husband 9168 484 18.94 15.20 boyfriend 1080 129 8.37 6.72 babies 570 122 4.67 3.75 shopping 1140 304 3.75 3.01 clothes 731 309 2.37 1.90 dinner 1093 507 2.16 1.73 shoes 608 382 1.59 1.28 baseball 1691 1720 0.98 0.79 dollars 6788 7880 0.86 0.69 cars 791 972 0.81 0.65 beer 230 388 0.59 0.48 girlfriend 612 1044 0.59 0.48 man 2889 5204 0.56 0.45 beers 25 75 0.33 0.27 wife 925 3786 0.24 0.20

[Update — Kenny Easwaran asks

[W]as there any interesting difference in use of these words based on the gender of the other conversational participant? It seems plausible that "cute" may be used more often with a female conversational partner than with a male one.

The answer:

female interlocutor male interlocutor female speaker
762 in 10784
(7.06 per 100) 212 in 4901
(4.33 per 100) male speaker 103 in 4901
(2.10 per 100) 111 in 7688
(1.44 per 100)

In other words, when a female speaker had a female conversational partner, there 762 instances of cute in 10,784 conversations, for a rate of 7.06 cutes per 100 conversations. And so on…

So indeed, both women and men tended to use "cute" somewhat more often when talking with a woman than when talking with with a man.]

Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:

The last time I posted one of Cathy Guisewite's strips, a reader muttered something about "drivel" and suggested that "for the love of all that is just and holy" we immediately read David Malki's essay on the topic — which struck me as a well-written and carefully-sourced explanation of something that's not exactly a secret, namely that Cathy is mostly about gender stereotypes, and especially stereotypes about consumption.

So to underline the scientific character of my interest in these documents, I'll point interested readers to Andrew's Wilson's home page, which includes this passage:

The Linguistic Construction of Cultural Meanings -
"The Language of Shoes"

In the context of an ongoing research project, known for convenience as "The Language of Shoes", I am attempting to approach the cultural system of footwear fashions from the twin orientations of onomasiology and cultural studies - in other words, I want to find out which terms languages use for footwear styles and what associative meanings these words and objects have within a culture. I see this work as an extension of the Wörter-und-Sachen paradigm pioneered in the early twentieth century, which married onomasiology, etymology, and cultural studies - "from the trivial to the sublime" (Hüllen 1990: 141) - within a strongly object-oriented linguistics. However, my work gives much more emphasis than did the original Wörter-und-Sachen scholars to value judgements and to the constructivist nature of culture.

I'll also link to a few publications from this project: Wilson and Moudraia, "Interactive effects of shoe style and verbal cues on perceptions of female physicians' personal attributes", 2003; "Business organizations' awareness of the communicative properties of footwear: results of a pilot survey on the regulation of footwear with female employee uniforms in a major Polish city", The Language of Shoes Project Working Paper, 2004; "Corporate Values and Cultural Discourses of Footwear : The Case of Female Flight Attendants", Empirical Text and Culture Research, 2009; "British military women in civilian knee-high dress boots : a neglected episode in women's uniform history", Minerva Journal of Women and War, 2009.

However, the key collocation "cute shoes!" doesn't seem to occur in Wilson's oeuvre, so Cathy still has something to contribute to the discussion of onomasiological performativity.

Yesterday's lecture in Linguistics 001 included some discussion of irony, and afterwards, a student asked a good question:

I just wanted to ask something that has been nagging me since your lecture today on Semantics. I was wondering whether irony and sarcasm are universal across all languages, and if so, could we then suppose that it were a selected trait in language–that is, something that we evolved? I have been trying to think whether there is any evolutionary benefit–or even linguistic benefit–to the development of sarcasm and i cannot think of any. On the other hand, if sarcasm and irony are not universal, then are they considered just a cultural phenomenon? If so, how likely is it that so many different cultures could have developed it? has anyone ever tested this by finding a cultural group that does not use sarcasm or irony, shown that group examples of it, and seen whether the group recognized it?

Although cultures stereotypically differ in their affinity for irony, I've never heard or read that any group completely lacked the capacity to produce and understand it.  And for the past three decades, there's been a special reason for this question to matter, because the alleged universality of irony is part of a well-known argument about theories of how people communicate.

First, let's clarify the terminology. For the purposes of this discussion, irony means "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used", and not  "dissimulation of ignorance as practiced by Socrates in order to confute an adversary". My guess is that Socratic irony is less likely to be a cultural universal — it seems to have caught the attention of Socrates' contemporaries as something new and unexpected — but in any case, this is a different question.

And I want to focus specifically on cases like "Wonderful!" as a response to something unwanted, or "Good job!" as a comment on culpable failure, leaving open the question of whether things in the ironic penumbra — e.g. dramatic irony, "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs" — are the same thing as irony in the more narrow sense.

As for sarcasm, although it's often used to mean something like "irony with an edge",  I'll take it here to mean "A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt" — thus irony may or may not be sarcastic, and sarcasm may or may not be ironic. I'm pretty sure that sarcasm in this sense is a cultural universal, though the cultural meaning of gibes and taunts can vary quite a bit, from provoking conflict to establishing and maintaining friendship. (See Francisco Gil-White, "Is ethnocentrism adaptive", for some illustrative anecdotes from Central Asia.)

Now for the claim of universality. This line of argument starts with Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, "Irony and the use-mention distinction", in P. Cole (Ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 1981; but I'll quote a version of it from Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, "Relevance Theory", in G. Ward and L. Horn (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics, 2005 [emphasis added]:

In Grice’s framework (and indeed in all rhetorical and pragmatic discussions of irony as a figure of speech before Sperber & Wilson 1981) the treatment of verbal irony parallels the treatments of metaphor and hyperbole. For Grice, irony is an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness, and differs from metaphor and hyperbole only in the kind of implicature it conveys (metaphor implicates a simile based on what was said, hyperbole implicates a weakening of what was said, and irony implicates the opposite of what was said). Relevance theorists have argued against not only the Gricean analysis of irony but the more general assumption that metaphor, hyperbole and irony should be given parallel treatments.

Grice’s analysis of irony as an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness is a variant of the classical rhetorical view of irony as literally saying one thing and figuratively meaning the opposite. There are well-known arguments against this view. It is descriptively inadequate because ironical understatements, ironical quotations and ironical allusions cannot be analysed as communicating the opposite of what is literally said. It is theoretically inadequate because saying the opposite of what one means is patently irrational; and on this approach it is hard to explain why verbal irony is universal and appears to arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned (Sperber & Wilson 1981, 1998b; Wilson & Sperber 1992).

Moreover, given the relevance-theoretic analysis of metaphor and hyperbole as varieties of loose use, the parallelism between metaphor, hyperbole and irony cannot be maintained. While it is easy to see how a speaker aiming at optimal relevance might convey her meaning more economically by speaking loosely rather than using a cumbersome literal paraphrase, it is hard to see how a rational speaker could hope to convey her meaning more economically by choosing a word whose encoded meaning is the opposite of the one she intends to convey (or how a hearer using the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure could understand her if she did). Some alternative explanation of irony must be found.

In this post, I'm not going to engage their explanation for why "verbal irony is universal and appears to arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned" — the only point, for now, is the claim of universality.  And I'm also side-stepping their view that "ironical understatements, ironical quotations and ironical allusions" are instances of the same category — they may well be right, but such a broad definition will make it very hard to judge whether a culture lacks verbal irony.

So here's a question for LL readers: Has anyone ever described a culture in which verbal irony, in the narrow sense, does not "arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned"?

Given the fact that Sperber and Wilson's claim has been out there since 1981, without (as far as I know) being challenged, I suspect that there are not any obvious counterexamples. But absence of evidence is not a substitute for evidence of absence, here as always.

I should note that the Sperber-Wilson theory, right or wrong, answers the student's question about the "evolutionary benefit" of verbal irony by claiming that it's a sort of free bonus, a necessary consequence of the general principles that make [our form of] communication possible.  On this theory, irony is not only universal, it's inevitable. It seems to me that Grice's theory of irony has the same property, if we ignore the question of whether it works.

[A list of some earlier LL posts on irony and sarcasm can be found in "Locating the Sarcasm Bump?", 5/29/2005.]

[Update — a commenter asked "Do Pirahã speakers use irony or sarcasm?"  I referred this question to Dan Everett, who answered "yes", with these examples:

Example:

A man catches a little fish.

He gets back to the village.  Another man says "mh. Xítiixisi xoogiái gáihi" 'Wow that's a big fish!'

Another example (actual one I collected):

Q: Do women nurse all animals (after seeing them nurse peccaries, dogs, and monkeys)?

A: Yes, and piranhas. Wait, no, not piranhas.

The second one might be more hyperbole than irony, but I'm not very confident about locating the boundaries. ]

Problems with Google's metadata are a recurrent theme here on Language Log. Now on his blog Stephen Chrisomalis reports a stunning cascade of screw-ups that led to Google Scholar producing the following citation:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

Not the news, the nooz.

Joshua Walker (Stanford '05) points me to this wonderful story in the Onion of October 21:

Report: 65% Of All Wildlife Now Used As
Homosexual Subculture Signifier

PALO ALTO, CA—A study released Tuesday by the Stanford University Department of Linguistics revealed that nearly two-thirds of all animal species have been adopted to describe various gay subcultures. "Many know that bears are large hairy gay men, and that otters are homosexuals who are smaller in stature but still hirsute," said Professor Arvid Sabin, lead author of the study, which also clarifies such denotations as wolf, panda bear, dragonfly, starfish, trout, and yeti. "But do they know, for instance, that 'chicken' is used to describe a thin, inexperienced 18- to 29-year-old gay male? Before long, we could see homosexuals referring to one another as pelicans or even Gila monsters." The study concluded that if immediate conservation measures are not taken, all animal species will be exhausted by 2015 and the gay community will have to start dipping into the plant kingdom.

As it happens, I have two gay male friends who are pandas. They're both Canadian, but I don't think that's significant.

I myself am both a penguin and a wool(l)y mammoth.

Related Language Log posting here.

People probably imagine that the life of a linguistics professor is moderately dull. Think about language; sit at desk, type stuff; go to classroom, teach stuff; go to lunch, eat stuff; repeat… But no, in actual fact my life as a professor at the University of Edinburgh is one of thrills and excitement. Yesterday, after teaching my undergraduate class on English grammar in the David Hume Tower, I walked to the nearby Chrystal Macmillan building to hear a talk on phonology, and as I entered the building I realized there was something really special going on. Tea had been laid out in the public area of the ground floor; two security men lurked in the shadows; the room seemed tense, but somehow it was in a pleasant way; university people who were extremely smartly dressed were standing around, and all were looking in the same direction. I followed their gaze, and there, a few yards away from me, stood Annie Lennox.

That Annie Lennox. Possibly the most brilliant singer-songwriter and recording genius I could name. She was educated in classical music at the Royal Academy of Music, and I had admired her through the days when she was 50% of the Eurhythmics down to the extraordinary accomplishments of her more recent solo career. She is surely one of Scotland's greatest contributions to popular music. My old friend Pete Gage, with whom I worked in the pop music business many years ago, analyzes three different tracks of hers in his course on layering and texturing in record production at a college in Sydney, Australia, and he tells me that her album Bare has been in his CD stacker continuously since 2003.

Annie had been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh, conferred at a ceremony earlier yesterday afternoon. She was now about to go into a nearby large classroom to speak at a session of a conference on social-work aspects of AIDS care and launch the publication of a new report on the topic — this being the issue to which she has devoted her most serious public advocacy and humanitarian work (the honorary degree was probably awarded for this rather than for her musical creativity).

For a minute, I stood transfixed, just thrilled to be so near the woman who wrote, produced, and sang the extraordinary album Diva. It was a moment of genuine excitement. Too much excitement for one middle-aged blond woman to bear, apparently: she broke from the crowd of respectfully watchful academics and threw herself into Annie's arms and kissed her repeatedly. Annie coped with the situation very gracefully. Nonetheless, I elected not to risk doing likewise. I absorbed the experience of seeing Annie live in closeup, savoring the pleasure of the moment, and then turned away to slip downstairs and arrive slightly late at a presentation by Tatiana Reid on an undocumented Nilotic language, Thok Reel, spoken in the south of Sudan.

A language with a remarkable system of three vowel lengths, four tones, and three phonation types (laryngealized, murmured, and plain), which means, in non-technical terms, that there are 36 distinguishable ways to say bab. There are nouns for which the difference between the singular and the plural is signalled only by the difference between short and medium vowel length; and there are verbs for which the only difference between 1st person and 3rd person is the difference between medium and long vowel length.

Excitement piled on excitement.

In an earlier post, I observed that the phrase "the United States" — regardless of whether it is treated as singular or plural — seems to have become more likely, over time, to occur in subject position ("The United States as a subject", 10/6/2009).  My (admittedly slim) evidence for this hypothesis came from some searches in newspaper archives, where the process of gathering data is painfully slow, because I was forced to search interactively via a web interface, and to check out the grammatical status of hits by wearing out my eyes on the article images that are returned.

Historians may find this complaint churlish, since they're used to an even more painful process. Traditionally, scholars have needed to travel to the local of a physical archive, and to read every dusty document as a whole in order to find the relevant pages.  (Well, maybe in recent years the process might involve reading dusty microfiche cards in some slightly more convenient location.)  All I have to do is to open a web browser, run a text search to find the relevant articles, and examine the page images that are returned!

But yes, I'm still complaining.

That's because it's easy to speed the process up by several more orders of magnitude. Say that there are a thousand hits a year for each of 100 years, and it takes me a minute to scan each article returned for the characteristics of interest to me (here the grammatical role of the phrase "the united states"). That's 100,000 minutes, or 208 8-hour days, or about a person-year of work.

With full access to the underlying texts, a trivial program can pull out the relevant sentences or paragraphs (which already saves a lot of time).  A slightly less trivial program can categorize most if not all of the instances automatically, with an error rate that's likely to be better than that of human annotators doing the same tiresome task. And then, if I want to ask the same question about other words and phrases (e.g. France, Great Britain, Spain), or a related question about the same phrase (how does the distribution of prepositional uses change — of X, to X, by X, etc.?), this requires only a small change to the program and a little computer time, not another year of tiresome labor.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to get my hands on the underlying text for any 19th-century newspaper archives.  But thanks to Jerry Goldman of oyez.org and Tim Stanley of justia.com, I recently got a nearly-complete archive of U.S. Supreme court opinions (and other related documents) in html form. After a bit of hacking, I wound up with 30,846 dated text files, from 1759 to 2005. (The documents in this collection from before 1789 are of course from other American courts. Those after 2005 are in a different format, which I haven't processed yet.)

The plan is to parse the collection, so that the correlations among grammatical and political histories can be conveniently explored.  Meanwhile, I decided to try a few small explorations where I classify the grammatical role of hits by hand, to evaluate both the plausibility of my grammatico-historical hypothesis  and the quality of my text preparation.  Note that this is already much less tiresome than reading web-archive hits, since I need only look at the relevant bits, which I present to myself in a "keyword in context" array that is relatively easy on the eyes.

So how does the United-States-as-subject hypothesis fare in the SCOTUS texts?

I started by checking out the 26 texts dated 1800, in which "the United States" occurs in 55 sentences (at least as my sentence-division algorithm judged things). One of these instances is in (conjoined) subject position, for a rate of 1.8 per 100 sentences:

4  37: The United States and the French republic are in a qualified state of hostility.

In the 39 texts dated 1810, "the United States" occurs in 144 sentences, of which 5 were in subject position, for a rate of 3.5 subjects per 100 sentences. For example:

10  53: The States of Virginia and Maryland having, in the year 1789, offered to the United States a cession of territory ten miles square for the permanent seat of government, the United States, by the Act of Congress of 16 July, 1790, vol. 1, p. 132, entitled "An act for establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the government of the United States," accepted the same and authorized the President to appoint certain commissioners for the purpose of carrying the act into effect.

In 1850, in 164 texts there were 1495 sentences containing "the United States".  I checked a random sample of 100 of these sentences, and found 7 instances of the phrase in subject position, for example:

49  451: Admitting that anything had occurred as you state, has not the United States received the same amount there from its land as it has elsewhere?

In 1900, in 232 texts there were 2154 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 7 subjects, e.g.

179  494: And as the United States does not complain of the decree in favor of the latter Indians awarding to each 160 acres of land, the only question that remains to be considered arises on the appeal of the Wichita and Affiliated Bands — namely whether the court below erred in not decreeing those Indians to be entitled to the proceeds of the sale of such of the lands in question as may be left after making the allotments in severalty required by the act of Congress.

In 1950, in 102 texts there were 750 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 12 subjects, e.g.

340 54: Standard answered that the United States, as insurer of the tanker, would, in view of the nature of the collision, have to reimburse Standard for any loss it sustained in the suit.

In 2000, in 85 texts there were 658 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 19 subjects, e.g.

529  89: The United States did not participate in these cases until appeal, and resolution of the litigation would benefit from the development of a full record by all interested parties.

So the results from this rather sketchy sample are consistent with the hypothesis:

YEAR Rate per 100 1800 1.8 1810 3.5 1850 7 1900 7 1950 12 2000 19

(The "rates" represent the number of instances of "the United States" as the subject of a tensed clause, divided by the number of sentences in which this phrase occurs, all multiplied by 100. In the years 1850 through 2000, I checked a random sample of 100 such sentences — obviously a different random sample would have a different result. This being a Breakfast Experiment™, accuracy took second place to velocity.)

Of course, even if more complete and careful evidence continues to validate the hypothesis, this leaves open many alternative explanations. Perhaps, over time, the federal government has been doing more and more things that would naturally be described by referring to it in subject position. Perhaps the court has gradually shifted from longer and more specific phrases (e.g. "the government of the United States" or "the Solicitor General of the United States") to plain "the United States". Or perhaps, as I suggested in my earlier post, there's been an increasing tendency, even among careful legal thinkers and writers, to exhibit the grammatical consequences of considering "the United States" to be a quasi-animate agent.

My guess is that all of these explanations are likely to be simultaneously true, to some extent. Luckily, it's easy to imagine ways to test them — if you've got access to the full text archive.  And if everyone has access to the same text archive, then others can check, challenge or extend my results.

While people are discussing the label polymath in another thread (which reports that the polymathic Noam Chomsky has been cited as, in descending order, a philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, and author, but not as a linguist), a letter to the New York Times Magazine (October 18, p. 12, from Andrew Charig of Middlefield, Mass.) laments the death of William Safire, "who most likely was the foremost expert on the American language". Expert?

Ben Zimmer made note, in his "On Language" piece on Safire (on October 11), of Safire's "acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise". Bill never called himself an expert, or a linguist for that matter, and rightly so. He was a journalist who wrote enthusiastically about the English language (getting his information from references, his mail, and the work of his assistants) and expressed opinions about English usage, but he was no kind of scholar and didn't pretend to be one.

(A side point: "the foremost expert on the American language" is unanchored in time. I assume that Charig meant merely that at the time of his death, Safire was the foremost expert on the American language, but he could be construed as saying that Safire was the foremost expert of the late 20th century, or of the whole 20th century, or of all time.)

Now, a question for the readers: who would you nominate as the foremost expert on the American language (in one or another of these time periods)? An obvious candidate is H. L. Mencken, author of The American Language (originally published in 1919, with revisions and weighty supplements over the following decades).

Mencken is an interesting case. Like Safire, he was (proudly) self-taught and strongly opinionated, and journalism was the center of his working life. Mencken, however, developed his enthusiasm for American English beyond the writing of columns, to a systematic survey of the language, thus making himself into a kind of expert, though without an academic association.

Moving to more recent times, we'd want someone who was an expert in all aspects of American English: lexicon, pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), morphosyntax, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, and the historical developments in all of these areas. There are first-class experts in each of these areas, sometimes covering two or three, but covering them all is a hard row to hoe; there is just so much known now in each of them. Bill Labov is probably as close as it gets.

But I'm happy to hear other nominations.

Paul Krugman, "The Banks Are Not Alright", NYT, 10/18/2009:

Mr. Summers still insists that the administration did the right thing: more government provision of capital, he says, would not “have been an availing strategy for solving problems.”

Use of "availing" in this way struck me as a new linguistic strategy.  But the OED gives availing as a participial adjective meaning "Advantageous, profitable; of beneficial efficiency", with glosses back to the 15th century:

c1420 Pallad. on Husb. I. 562 To faat hem is avayling and plesaunte. 1850 MRS. BROWNING Substitution Poems I. 327 Speak Thou, availing Christ! 1862 RUSKIN Unto this Last 118 A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength.

And availingly is glossed as "In an availing manner; so as to avail or profit", with citations back to 1853:

1853 FABER Ess. Lives of Saints 116 Its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters.

A check at Literature Onine reveals that availing-the-adjective was a favorite of the Methodist leader Charles Wesley, whose hymns included phrases like "the much-availing prayer", "his all-availing prayer", "his blood's availing plea", "my faith's availing cry", and so on.

However, the string "an availing" is not otherwise found in the NYT's index since 1981; nor is "availing strategy". Nor is it found in the current Google News index, other than in Krugman's column and in Ronald Orol, "Summers: 'Time has come' for deep change for banks", MarketWatch, which quotes Summers at greater length:

Responding to a question about whether more capital should have been injected into banks during the height of the crisis, Summers said there is no evidence now that the U.S. should have poured larger amounts of capital into banks. He argued that the government's massive capital injection into American International Group Inc., a $190 billion injection in exchange for an 80% government stake, was not a model for troubled banks.

"Whatever you thought about actions of last spring, now you have to be more comfortable that the right thing was done," Summers said. "I am not struck by anything we have observed [since the Spring] that a systematic government effort to do for more financial institutions like what was done for AIG - and to do that as a matter of choice rather than as a matter of necessity - would have been an availing strategy for solving problems."

Nor is "an|the availing" found in the 100-million-word BNC corpus, nor in the 400-million-word COCA corpus.  However, I did find an example of "an availing" in a 1922 letter to the editor of the NYT about faith healing:

This work is not at all in conflict with that done by physicians. Not until every living soul has an availing faith can doctors be safely done away with.

So where has availing-the-adjective been keeping itself for the past 80-odd years? And how did it make the transition from faith to finance? Has Larry Summers been reading himself to sleep with the Lives of the Saints? Or is "an availing strategy" an availing collocation in the upper reaches of finance, education, or government, at levels so rarefied that mere journalists have missed it until now?