Being Human

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?

Last year I posted about a wonderful film called The English Surgeon, a sublime documentary about the work of neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. It turns out you can now watch it for free online at the PBS website until 9th October.

As I mentioned last time "to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a cliché."

As far as I can work out, it should be available wherever you are in the world.

By the way, it turns out that Henry Marsh is the husband of social anthropologist Kate Fox who wrote the book Watching the English that we discussed earlier, so interesting to see that Marsh embodies many typical English traits.

Link to The English Surgeon online (via @mocost @balajajian).

Yesterday, I received this message from a young person who has been corresponding with me about ancient DNA and the movements of peoples across Eurasia during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age:

The police reaved my computer due to I reprinted a news report of US about the National Day of China yesterday. I came back home from police department just now. They said they will check my computer exhaustively. I'm afraid about my thesises on each area. It is not constitutional to do like that. All acts in violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated. But this is in China. I doubt [VHM: he means "I suspect / fear"] that they will install a detectaphone on my computer and destroy my essays. I feel like crying but shed no tears. The only feeling is indignation for an intellectual.

Although the young man's English is generally quite good, my immediate assumption was that the third word of his message was a typing error for "removed" or that he simply misremembered some other word meaning "seize." However, considering that quirky archaisms are rampant in Chinese use of English, a phenomenon that I have often documented on Language Log, e.g. here and here, I thought that I had better give the young man the benefit of the doubt, so I trudged over to my dictionary and looked up "reave."

Sure enough, there it was: reave "to seize and carry off forcibly". That immediately led me to think of "bereave," which comes from the same Germanic root (< IE reup- / reub- "snatch"), and then I remembered William Faulkner's novel The Reivers, based on another spelling of the same root, meaning "the robbers".

But where had my young Chinese correspondent unearthed this archaic term? Surely any Chinese-English dictionary worth its salt would offer for QIANG3ZOU3 搶走, which is the Mandarin term he must have been thinking of, something like "take away by force." However, when we turn to Kingsoft, which is far and away the most popular translation software in China, this is what we find:

It seems that my young Chinese correspondent avoided the first definition proffered by Kingsoft, "go off with," because it didn't sound forcible enough for what the police did to his computer. Moreover, the phrasal verb "go off with" primarily means "elope" or "run away with someone," though it could also signify "leave with" or "steal." None of these are satisfactory for what my young Chinese correspondent wanted to express.

He then would have turned to "rap," the second suggested translation for QIANG3ZOU3. Being in his early twenties, he is certainly aware of rap music, which is extremely popular in China, so he would shy away from that translation too. Not what happened to his precious computer! Nor is "rap" appropriate in its primary sense of "hit or strike sharply."

"Rap" in the sense of "seize" is either the present tense or a back formation from "rapt" (past participle), which indicates that one's soul or spirit has been carried away. The American Heritage Dictionary appendix of IE roots lists "rapt" as deriving from a separate IE root, rep-, meaning "snatch," but I'd wager that it is from the same root as "reave" (IE reup- / reub- "snatch").

Poor young man! Kingsoft left him with no other choice to represent QIANG3ZOU3 in English but as "reave." Why couldn't they have given correct, accurate, appropriate English terms such as "confiscate, appropriate, seize," and so forth? Remember, this is the same ubiquitous software that spawned the epidemic of mistranslations of GAN1 ("dry") and GAN4 ("do") as "fuck."

Listen, if someone with computer skills and linguistic acumen is out of work and / or wants not only to become fabulously wealthy but perform the humanitarian service of rescuing China from embarrassment and English from abuse, I suggest that he or she create a credible, reliable alternative to Kingsoft. I'd be happy to serve on your board of advisers / trustees and invest several thousand dollars to boot — for a fair return!

[Hat tip to Stefan Krasowski for the screen shot].

[Update — The three definitions, or rather English translations (1. go off with, 2. rap, 3. reave), for QIANG3ZOU3 offered by the current version of Kingsoft must be considered by the proprietors to be an improvement over the 2002 version, which has "rend away":

I find "rend away" primarily in Biblical contexts with the meaning of "tear away," i.e., (forcibly) detach. ]

The BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live recently had a segment on the UK Government's belated apology to Alan Turing for his 1952 conviction for homosexuality. The programme's resident poet, Matt Harvey, penned this short but poignant poem to mark the occasion:

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

Link to programme details. Scroll down for poem.

A crash blossom, you'll recall, is an infelicitously worded headline that leads the reader down the garden path. Here's a fine example from today's Associated Press headlines:

(Hat tip: Stephen Anderson via Larry Horn.)

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has just had an excellent programme on 'the singularity', the idea that at some point in the future computer power will outstrip the ability of the human brain and then humanity will be better off in some sort of vague and unspecified way.

The idea, is of course, ludicrous and is based on a naive notion that intelligence can measured as a type of unitary 'power' which we can adequately compare between computer and humans. The discussion on All in the Mind is a solid critical exploration of this wildly left-field notion as well as the community from whence it comes.

It's a popular theme among transhumanists who, despite seeming to have a mortal fear of human limitations, I quite like.

Transhumanists are like the eccentric uncle of the cognitive science community. Not the sort of eccentric uncle who gets drunk at family parties and makes inappropriate comments about your kid sister (that would be drug reps), but the sort that your disapproving parents thinks is a bit peculiar but is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas.

They occasionally take themselves too seriously and it's the sort of sci-fi philosophy that has few practical implications but it's enormously good fun and is great for making you re-evaluate your assumptions.

By the way, there's loads of extras on the AITM blog, so do check it out.

Link to All in the Mind on 'the singularity'.
Link to extras on AITM blog.

According to Michael Goldstein, writing one of the opinion pieces in the NYT's 9/22/2009 symposium on "National Academic Standards: The First Test":

The politics has changed. All governors now recognize a problem: incentives to set low passing scores. Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version, he would fail.

You could add a resumptive pronoun: "a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version [of it], he would fail".

For some background, read "Ask Language Log: Gapless Relatives" and "More gapless relatives", 10/14/2007. This case is especially interesting because it might alternatively be construed as having a gap after fail, though that would seem to make the sentence self-refuting.

Please note that the Fellowship of the Gapless Relative, like the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct, is devoted to celebrating the glories of English syntax through contemplation of especially interesting examples of certain constructions, not to censuring any particular choices that speakers and writers may make.

I've just found a brief but interesting study finding that migraines are much more common in neurologists than the general public which inspired an interesting reply by Oliver Sacks.

The prevalence of migraine in neurologists

Neurology. 2003 Nov 11;61(9):1271-2.

Evans RW, Lipton RB, Silberstein SD.

To assess the prevalence of migraine among neurologists and neurologist headache specialists, the authors performed a survey of neurologists who attended a headache review course. The 1-year and lifetime prevalences of migraine in the 220 respondents were as follows: male neurologists, 34.7%, 46.6%; male headache specialists, 59.3%, 71.9%; female neurologists, 58.1%, 62.8%; and female headache specialists, 74.1%, 81.5%. Migraine is much more prevalent among neurologists than in the general population.

Sacks later wrote to the journal to mention an earlier study finding much higher levels of migraine-related visual disturbances in doctors than other people. He also wonders:

Speculating on the possible reasons for the prevalence of migraine in neurologists, and particularly headache specialists, Evans et al. wonder, among other possibilities, whether "a personal history of migraines might stimulate an interest in neurology and headache as a subspecialty." For myself, with a personal history of classical migraines (and, more often, isolated visual ones) going back to childhood, the extraordinary phenomena of the aura (which for me included transient or partial achromatopsia, akinetopsia, as well as visual agnosias, alexias, etc), excited an interest in the brain, and especially in visual processing, at an early age. These migraines were certainly one of the reasons I was attracted to neurology, why I chose migraine as the subject of my first book, and why I devoted a large part of this book to illustrating the varied presentations of visual auras in my patients

However, he gets short shrift from the researchers who curtly point out that their survey asked whether neurologists' experience of migraine had influenced their career choice and they said no, so it can't be true.

This is clearly not the finest psychological reasoning in the world and I remain fascinated by whether personal experience shapes the specialisation of clinicians.

It only happens in some cases of course. It's probably rare that neurologists had their interest sparked after major brain damage or oncologists after experiencing cancer.

We do know, however, that psychiatrists are more likely to have experienced mental illness than other doctors and I wonder how many other links between clinical speciality and illness experience there might be.

Link to PubMed entry for study (via @anibalmastobiza)

One is in favor of diversity in the blogosphere, of course. And yet somehow, when one learns that there now exists a blog entirely devoted to pictures of signs in which quotation marks are used incorrectly (used as if they were some sort of special font face like italics), one is somehow tempted to think that we are in danger of running out of words like esoteric and arcane. Still, check it out. Some of the pictures are quite astonishing. Keep in mind that in many cases people paid good money to have these signs made. They may even have paid a dime or two extra per quotation mark. Or "quotation mark", as they would put it. All one can tell you about one's own reaction is that one found some of them jaw-dropping. One's jaw actually dropped.

[Memo to self: NEVER get stuck in a clause sequence using indefinite-reference one. There is no way out. One ends up sounding like an inexperienced member of the royal family being interviewed on TV. And one hates that.]