The Science of Language

The next-to-latest xkcd:

There must have been many SF stories based on the premise that searchers for ET signaling Just Don't Get It, but I can't think of any.

Probably related: I can't think of any scientifically-plausible way to cash that premise in, other than dull things like really slow-moving sentients using nanohertz-range modulation of a spectrally prominent carrier.

No doubt some readers can remedy these deficiencies of memory and imagination.

[Update — I didn't mean stories about how ETs might actively prevent us from seeing their signals, or the signals of others; nor stories about how ETs might be so alien that communication would be impossible, so that even when we find their signals, we can't make sense of them, or perhaps completely misunderstand them. Those are both good themes, found in lots of stories that I can think of, and no doubt many more that I don't know.

What I had in mind was something more strictly analogous to the plight of the ants, who have looked carefully for chemical signals, but (presumably) have failed to consider the intrinsically implausible hypothesis that an intelligent and social species might make use of frequency-and-amplitude modulation of air-pressure variation at time scales of a hundred microseconds to 10 seconds or so.]

Normal 0 0 1 572 3263 27 6 4007 11.1282 0 0 0

I got a nice email from Joshua Fruhlinger about my post on Harper’s denial about having any content in their magazine. It seems that I’m a bit in the dark about how this word is being used in the tech industry these days, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Here’s what Joshua wrote to me:

The ad is a somewhat cheeky response to a particular way that the word “content” has come to be used in the publication industry in the last decade or so. As the internet has become the main (or at least the most novel and talked about) publishing platform, the tech folks who are designing the new infrastructure tend to label and lump together as “content” the stuff that isn’t in their department – the actual text, video, audio, or what have you that various exciting new publishing platforms are designed to present.

I see, so the tech folks think of “content” as the stuff that’s not in their infrastructure. So far, so good. Joshua continues:

Some people whose job it is to create that content sort of see this terminology as a symptom that the shoe is on the wrong foot.

I can certainly understand that reaction. Joshua explains more:

Web sites can become well known and get venture funding because they’re designed or structured in some exciting way, and are sold around the design and structure, because the people who designed them and structured them are the ones selling them. The people in the traditional media would normally be thought of as the whole purpose and selling point of the exercise – and the writers or filmmakers or artists are just called “content providers,” and are something of an afterthought.

It’s something of a specialized debate, and it was probably a more keenly felt issue back during the first dot-com boom, when people were really trying to sell web sites just because they were web sites, without regard for what information they actually conveyed. But Harper’s is basically saying that, for them, the actual writing is at the forefront of their enterprise; they’re not focusing on improving the packaging of some “content” they’re buying from the lowest bidder.

If I understand this properly, Harper’s wants to tell us that what really matters is the original content that is in the magazine, not the way the magazine is packaged and not the content that they could (but don’t) buy from others. So why then, does the ad tell us that Harper’s has no content? Why not tell us that it contains only original content written by their good writers? But the really interesting part comes next in Joshua’s email:

You have to be a little involved in the industry to get the nuance, which is always a mistake for an ad. People who write ads assume their readers are going to be just like them.

Ah-hah. Now we may be getting to the problem. Insiders use language the way other insiders use it. It’s efficient and appropriate for medical specialists to use shorthand terms, abbreviations, and terminology among themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as they don’t expect outsiders to understand them. The same goes for many lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, and, I hate to admit it, linguists.

The ad writing team may have used the meaning of “content” in the way those in the design and packaging business use it – to mean the opposite of content packaging. But, like Joshua, I wonder if Harper’s thought it was using “content” to mean original writing rather than stuff purchased from outside sources. The problem with both senses is that most of us (I think) don’t even know about the specialized meaning of “content” held by the packaging industry and we can be equally confused if Harper’s really meant that they use only original material. Either way, by advertising that Harper’s has no content, many readers are likely to be mystified.

Insider words can get you in trouble. Good ads see life from the perspective of their readers. Like Joshua, I still believe this ad didn’t do this.

In response to my (admittedly feeble) garden-path post a couple of days ago, Tim Leonard writes:

Ha!  That's not a garden-path sentence.  This is a garden path sentence:

"Police in Washington state captured a schizophrenic killer who had escaped during an outing from the mental hospital where he had been committed to a state fair."

Source: Dean Schabner, "Escaped Insane Killer Captured After Four-Day Manhunt", ABC News, 9/20/2009.

And for lagniappe, I don't think we've previously noted the "That's not a ___, this/that is a ___" phrasal template, which (I think) originated with this passage in the movie Crocodile Dundee:

What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time. The first gust front of commentary blew in with David Leonhardt in the NYT Business Section in September of 2007, echoed a few days later by Steven Leavitt in the Freakonomics blog. In May of 2009, Ross Douthat's NYT column recycled the same research for another round of thumb-sucking. And the same material has just been promoted again by Arianna Huffington ("The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling", "What's Happening to Women's Happiness?", etc.), with an assist by Maureen Dowd ("Blue is the New Black", 9/19/2009).

Ms. Huffington tells us that

According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.

And it's not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women's happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men — who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.

MoDo chimes in:

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

People love this story. They love to speculate about the reasons for the trend — the favorites are variants of "too much feminism" and "not enough feminism" — and to tell us about their own happiness or lack thereof. Tens of thousands of readers, across the repeated reprises of this story in the mass media, have commented on various newspaper and weblog sites.  In a certain sense, this tidal wave of response validates the story, which clearly resonates with something in the spirit of the times.  But in fact, the empirical basis for all this fuss is so thin as to be practically non-existent.

I'll focus on the General Social Survey results, since I've looked into them in detail, but the rest of the worldwide background is similar.

One way to see what's happening is to look at this graph of General Social Survey results, from the preprint that kicked it all off in 2007:

Those who prefer tables may like to see it this way (taken from an earlier post on the subject):

If we sum up all the GSS responses across years, we get these proportions of answers to the question "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.2% 56.7% 12.1% Female 32.4% 55.1% 12.5%

In the responses for 1972, 1973, and 1974 (the earliest dates available), the overall proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.9% 53.0% 15.1% Female 37.0% 49.4% 13.6%

In the responses for 2004, 2006, and 2008 (the most recent dates available), the proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 29.8% 56.1% 14.0% Female 31.2% 54.9% 13.9%

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men … have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause.

Past LL happiness-gap posts:

"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics" (9/26/2007)
"Gender-role resentment and Rorschach-blot news reports" (9/27/2007)
"Why are economists so misleading?" (10/1/2007)
"The gender happiness gap: statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007
"The happiness gap returns" (7/26/2008)
"The happiness gap is back" (5/26/2009)
"Women's happiness and pundits' accuracy" (5/27/2009)

Also maybe relevant, if you're not completely sick of the whole topic:

"Myth is truth (p < .05)" (12/23/2007)

If you want to do your own modeling, a csv file of the GSS happiness answers is here (some background on the data is here).

[I also note a certain lack of journalistic courtesy — Douthat didn't mention that Leonhardt and Leavitt had covered the same material a year and a half earlier, and Huffington doesn't mention Douthat, Leavitt or Leonhardt.  I know that journalists don't need footnotes, but if a pundit reprises a story that's previously been featured by other pundits, doesn't journalistic etiquette suggest a tip of the hat to the earlier authors? Dowd does cite Huffington, which seems like the normal practice.]

That's not a-the-indefinite-article, it's a-the-immediate-future-marker, as in Kanye West's infamous "I'm a let you finish" interruption at the MTV awards. Steven Poole at Unspeak has a poll, where you can register your preference for how to spell it. (So far, "I'ma" has a plurality of 45%, with "I'm'a" next at 20%.)

Steven links to the discussion that Ella and I had about this back in 2005.

Garden-path photo caption of the day:

Reading this, I spent a few seconds trying to figure out how fans could catch a walk, off a home run or in any other circumstance.

I knew the phrase "walk-off home run", meaning a home run that puts the home team ahead in the bottom of the final inning of a baseball game, and thus permits them (and everybody else) to walk off the field without any further game-play. But by the time my on-line sentence processing system got to "off", it was too late.

A hyphen in "walk-off" would have helped.

Commenters on this blog and others, and many of my correspondents, have been asking: "Where is Pullum?"

I am on a train in England, using unspeakably slow wireless Internet. And I have a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol cradled in my palms.

Yesterday's 9 Chickweed Lane:

And today's strip:

Read the whole sequence (to date): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I especially like this exchange:

Juliette: Your only actual qualification is one of manifest insanity.
Thorax: "Broad experience" would be the term then.

I'm not usually on the Dan Brown desk here at Language Log Plaza — that's Geoff Pullum's domain — but this one came to me (from Bruce Webster). By Tom Chivers on the Telegraph's site:

The Lost Symbol, the latest novel by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has gone on sale. We pick 20 of the clumsiest phrases from it and from his earlier works.

Chivers quotes Geoff P. on Brown's writing. And there's space for comments and for nominations of further regrettable quotes from the Brownian oeuvre.

Recently, we've been talking, here and here, about the choice of preposition to go with the adjective bored: the older with (or by) or the innovative (and now spreading) of. Commenters added some other choices of of where another preposition might have been expected: with the adjectives concerned, embarrassed, and fed up; and with verbs in appreciate of and succumb of. There are several possible routes to these usages — analogy with P choice for semantically similar words (bored of on analogy with tired of), blending (bored of = bored with x tired of), and reversion to of as the default P in English — but the cases are at least superficially similar (though they are probably not related at a deeper level; people with one of these usages can't be expected to have any, or all, of the others).

And then a commenter (on the first of these postings) moved to a very different case; dw asked about off of, adding, "It drives me nuts". The only thing that this case — of what some handbooks term "intrusive" of in combination with certain prepositions — has to do with things like bored of is that the word of is involved. Still, people like dw, and a great many usage critics as well, are inclined to "bundle" disparate phenomena under a single heading for no reason beyond the involvement of a particular word. As I said recently, people are inclined to "blame it on a word".

I'll say a bit about "intrusive" of in a moment, but first another case of P choice in which of is one of the possibilities: in time expressions like a quarter to/till/before/of 2, discussed on Language Log a couple of years ago. (Here, of is a distinctly American option.) But I don't see that there's any relationship between this case and P choice with adjectives and verbs.

On to "intrusive" of. Here, many commenters bundle P + of (in alongside/inside/off/out/outside of) together the of that appears in one variant of exceptional degree modification (the much-reviled too big of a dog as an alternative to too big a dog), but the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another beyond that of.

There's extensive discussion of the five P + of cases above in this course handout of mine. For these, there’s a separate story for each one (though some handbooks recommend against P + of in general): plain out is extremely restricted; outside of is not colloquial (except in one sense); off of is somewhat on the conversational side; etc. Off of is the combination that gets the heaviest criticism, though I don't think that on the evidence of actual use, it can be classified as non-standard — on the colloquial side, but not non-standard.

My 2007 posting on prepositions in time expressions went on to unearth some genuinely non-standard occurrences of P + of (underneath of and others) and to examine a relatively extreme case of bundling, in Rudolf Flesch's entry for of in The ABC of Style. Flesch sternly pronounces that "of is a weed that should be pulled out of all sentences where it doesn't belong" and gives a series of examples, of three very different sorts (though Flesch doesn't label them): repeated partitives ("Of all the objections, not one (of them) was cogent"; of with superlatives ("one of the most hazardous (of) medical episodes"); and of in WH-clause complements of abstract nouns ("the issue (of) whether such behavior is permissible"). Details in the 2007 posting.

This is beautiful work, showing that certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon "light up" when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces:

More amazing still is the fact that the fish performed this task while dead. Specifically:

Note that SPM ("statistical parametric mapping"), the analysis software used, is pretty much the standard way of determining significance thresholds in fMRI studies.

The first author, Craig Bennett, has a blog at prefrontal.org, where you can find some further discussion, including the raw data from this experiment.

[Hat tip: Stefano Bartolo, also Neuroskeptic, who also cites a representative recent paper that fails to do the recommended multiple-comparison correction.]

Following up on this morning's "bored" post, I wrote a little script to query the NYT's index for the number of uses of "bored of" vs. "bored with" from 1981 to the present. Although the number are fairly small and thus somewhat unstable (in 1981 there were 72 instances of "bored with" and none of "bored of"; in 2008 there were 48 instances of "bored with" and 12 of "bored of"), the results lend further plausibility to the idea that there's a change in progress, with of gaining ground on with during the past decade:

[Update — Ray Girvan has supplied a table of numbers from  NewsBank (UK and Ireland newspaper online archive), which shows much the same pattern as the NYT, but with an apparently faster rate of change. (Or perhaps an earlier onset — the data is noisy enough that it's hard to tell…)

It's not clear whether this reflects a difference in regional varieties of English, with the UK and Ireland in the lead on this change, or a difference in local copyediting practices, with the NYT's copyeditors more conservative or more careful. I'm inclined to think that it's a genuine geographical difference — comparison with another U.S. paper, or a collection of papers, would help.]

Additional evidence for a change in progress comes from an examination of apparent-time effects in the LDC's collection of conversational telephone speech:

"bored of" (count) "bored with" (count) Young speakers (20-39) 9 16 Middle-aged speakers (40-59) 12 70 Old speakers (60-69) 0 5

In this case, males seem to be leading the change (though I haven't verified that the effect is not due to a difference in age distribution in the fairly small subset of speakers who used either of these sequences — maybe younger men and older women are more likely to express boredom…):

"bored of" (count) "bored with" (count) males 14 36 females 8 55

It might be interesting to take a look at some other sources with reliable dating.

[Update — as evidence that the (perception of) change is a both-sides-of-the-Atlantic thing, here's a paragraph from a long "kids these days" groaner in the (London) Times, "A levels: what is behind the falling standards?", July 10, 1976:

And Literature Online turns up 257 instances of "bored with", compared to only 6 instances of "bored of", three of which are bogus — Henry Howard Brownell's 1866 poem Lines, Kimposed A Bored of a Californy Male-Steemer. By a Parsinger., a mention elsewhere of "the most bored of women", and a 1991 poem containing this passage:

25   You'll fear some stroke has left me dumb,
26   bucolic, inward-looking, glum;
27      irrelevant, to boot.
28   It seems some others think this too;
29   each morning brings some short review,
30      bored, of my selected
31   verses, calls them 'quiet', 'true',
32   a man who woos a rural muse
33      and suitably dejected.

But one of the 3 genuine hits for "bored of" is Ezra Pound ranting about politics, from Redondillas, or something of that sort:

36   I demonstrate the breadth of my vision.
37   I am bored of this talk of the tariff,
38   I too have heard of T. Roosevelt.
39   I have met with the "Common Man,"
40   I admit that he usually bores me,
41   He is usually stupid or smug.
42   I praise God for a few royal fellows
43   like Plarr and Fred Vance and Whiteside,
44   I grant them fullest indulgence
45   each one for his own special queerness.

The date of composition is not clear, but the first cited copyright is 1926. (Pound also used "bored with" 7 times in other poems.)

The other two genuine "bored of" hits are a 1991 poem and 1994 novel.

This evidence, though thin, is consistent with a long-standing low rate of usage, whether by analogy to e.g. "tired of" or by reversion to the unmarked preposition "of", followed by recent vernacular change that started to leak into the written language in the 1990s. ]

I was surprised when the mail brought me my October issue of Harper's, where on page 43 was Harper's full-page ad, defining the word, "content," in what seemed to me to be an unusual and counterproductive way.

The ad says:

WARNING! Harper's Magazine is 100% Content Free! Everybody gives you "content." But you'll never find that in Harper's Magazine. Instead, you'll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper's Magazine can tell it. Subscribe today and join the thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content.

After telling readers how to subscribe, the ad then says:

HARPER'S  Proudly "content free" for more than 150 years!

All these years I've been using and understanding "content" to mean substance, the matter being dealt with, information and details about topics that matter. You know, like Language Log. And I've been reading Harper's because I thought it contained the very things it now denies. But being a thoughtful, skeptical, and sometimes witty person, maybe I'll need to rethink my subscription. Or buy a better dictionary. Or something.

What will ad-writers think of next?