The Science of Language

… or something very close to it, under the heading

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

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

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

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

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

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

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

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

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

The information gain associated with an observation y is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's Dilbert:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

I'm not going to quibble about this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe this phrase was "born hackneyed" after all?

Even earlier is Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 Tancred:

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

]

Today's Dilbert:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Update: more here and here.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then it began to be used attributively:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Website for the book here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ]

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.)

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.

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.]

Today's Sally Forth:

Negative polarity items have been extensively studied, but I invite readers to point us to studies on phenomena of the type displayed in the last panel.

[Update — some of the examples of "just croak already" from the web:

So Fidel, please - do us all a favor and just croak already so that Cuba may live again.
I sometimes wish she would just croak already…!
Will you just croak already?
It's his fault I'm in this mess to begin with — is it any wonder sons wish their fathers dead? Why can't he just croak already? (from a translation of Molière's L'avare)
Oh, just croak already, you evil repuglican financier.
Yeah, I was actually hoping Big Boss would just croak already…a few times I thought he was gone.
I wish old Teddy would just croak already!
Amy do us all a favor and just croak already.
Why don?t Cheney just croak already? I have never said that about anyone but he has done enough already to bring this country down.
why can't Kim Jong Il just croak already?
Ultimately, though, the show had me fervently wishing that Floyd would just croak already: not exactly a glowing recommendation.
I'm sorry folks, I just have to say it: When will this guy just croak already??? What a bunch of white bread garbage!!!
Given by the same dull principal (why couldn't he just croak already?), in the same, bland auditorium.

Imperatives and "will you __" constructions; complements of wish, hope, etc.; "why doesn't/couldn't/can't" constructions. Commonly used for political leaders, parents, other authority figures. ]

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

We know we are fueling the eternal flame that keeps the Dan Brown pot boiling. But we just can't help ourselves. We have the willpower of a bunch of butterflies. Stop us, someone, before we write again. Because I'm sure we will.