The Science of Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example:

A man catches a little fish.

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

Another example (actual one I collected):

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

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

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

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

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

Not the news, the nooz.

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

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

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

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

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

Related Language Log posting here.

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

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

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

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

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

Excitement piled on excitement.

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

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

But yes, I'm still complaining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I'm happy to hear other nominations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This GEICO commercial reinforces the general impression that a southern accent is intrinsically amusing:

And here's a tree limb from New York City (?):

At least, it's from somewhere r-less with æ-raising before nasals (e.g. wham) but not before voiceless stops (e.g. happening)…

These are the only ads that I've seen featuring talking road hazards with cute accents, but surely there must be others: a roofing nail from Boston? A clogged fuel line from Minnesota?

Of course, GEICO's public face for years has been a spokes-gecko who speaks Estuary English:

Recently arrived in the mail: an advance copy of Jan Freeman's

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The celebrated cynic's language peeves deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st-century readers [NY: Walker & Company, publication date November 19]

(The subtitle of Bierce's 1909 booklet is A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, which should give you an idea of the tone of the thing.) Jan takes on WIR, item by item, with extensive annotations for each item, looking at the background for the proscription (in many cases its later history as well), trying to work out Bierce's motivation for it, and assessing the state of actual usage.

Jan wears her scholarship lightly, but it's considerable. In particular, she gives a lot of 19th-century (and sometimes 18th-century) background for Bierce's usage advice, and her discussions of usage and judgments on it are illuminating. All this in her usual commonsensical and often entertaining voice (p. 78, on Bierce on fix 'repair, prepare', which he reviled: "This is just loony.").

There are some themes that run through the book. Bierce was committed to a strong version of One Right Way with respect to word meanings; again and again, he insisted that expressions should be used only in what he believed to be their original meanings, and again and again he rejected extended and metaphorical senses of items, admitting only literal senses. (See, for instance, the discussion of dilapidated on p. 58.) He also defended what he took to be elite usages; he detested vernacular variants, and he had a special animus against expressions with a whiff of business and commerce ("trade") about them.

Some of his peeves — expressed in High Curmudgeon — were conventional ones at the time, but many were eccentric to the point of idiosyncrasy, and on these the Bierce-Freeman exchanges are especially delightful.

(And the back cover has fine blurbs from Steve Pinker, Erin McKean, Barbara Wallraff, and this parish's Geoff Pullum.)

Weasel-speak, as featured in today's Tank McNamara:

There's clearly money in it — and quite a bit of training material out there.

The new Freakonomics book is about to come out (called Super Freakonomics, natch), and Marginal Revolution thinks it's great: "a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say." So does Bryan Caplan at econlog: "Overall, it's better than the original." Time Magazine thinks it's "very good — jauntier and more assured than their first".

But not everyone is convinced: negative voices include Ezra Klein, "The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics", WaPo, 10/16/2009; Matt Yglesias, "Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt [sic] and Dubner", 10/16/2009; Bradford Plumer, "Does 'Superfreakonomics' Need A Do-Over?", 10/16/2009; Andrew Sullivan, "Not So Super Freak", 10/17/2009.

Ezra Klein sums up the general complaint: "The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one." Specific points of contention include a shaky statistical argument in favor of drunk driving (they claim that it's safer than drunk walking), and an allegedly superficial and misinformed treatment of climate change.

I'll withhold judgment until I've read the book. But based on my experience with one particular story featured several times in Freakonomics columns over the past few years, Ezra Klein's evaluation rings true to me.

A few days ago, the NYT Freakonomics column featured (my Penn colleague) Justin Wolfers defending a study first promoted by Freakonomics in 2007 ("Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich", 10/14/2009).  For my own take on the associated media circus, with an excessive number of additional links, see "The Happiness Gap is back is back is back is back", 9/20/2009. Summing it all up, at the risk of oversimplification, a 2007 academic study by Stevenson & Wolfers argued that

By most objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to male happiness. […] Our findings raise provocative questions about the contribution of the women's movement to women's welfare and about the legitimacy of using subjective well-being to assess broad social changes.

It's possible to quibble about how meaningful the female-happiness changes are — they're small relative to the yearly noise in the General Social Survey, for example — but I gather that Stevenson and Wolfers'  questions are plausible ones for those who think that economic "utility" ought to translate straightforwardly into "happiness".  However, from the beginning, the mass media presented these "happiness gap" results in a spectacularly misleading way.  And by "mass media" I don't mean Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Rather, the guilty parties have included David Leonhardt, Steven Levitt, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, and Arianna Huffington.

Barbara Ehrenreich accuses Arianna Huffington of reviving the Happiness Gap circus in order to use her site as "a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham", Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, by "[giving] Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign".

This shouldn't surprise us, it seems to me. Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It's interesting stories, not accurate ones, that pump up ratings for Beck and Limbaugh.  But it's also interesting stories that bring readers to The Huffington Post and to Maureen Dowd's column, and it's interesting stories that sell copies of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics.  In this respect, Levitt and Dubner are exactly like Beck and Limbaugh.

We might call this the Pundit's Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the player's best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn't just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.

In the end, scientists usually over-interpret only a little, and rarely cheat, because the penalties for being caught are extreme.  As a result, in an iterated version of the game, it's generally better to play it fairly straight.  Pundits (and regular journalists) also play an iterated version of this game — but empirical observation suggests that the penalties for many forms of bad behavior are too small and uncertain to have much effect. Certainly, the reputational effects of mere sensationalism and exaggeration seem to be negligible.

[For an interesting take on the history of the freako trend within academic economics itself, see Noam Schieber, "Freaks and Geeks; How Freakonomics is ruining the dismal science" TNR, 4/2/2007.]

[Update — Andrew Gelman, who also hasn't read the book, strikes me as right on the money in this pre-review:

The interesting question to me is why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest? Based on their writings in Freakonomics 1 and their blog, Levitt and Dubner strike me as open-minded political pragmatists, so it's not that I think they have a big political agenda.

It's possible to write things that piss off conservatives while still retaining an edgy, transgressive feeling–take a look at Nate Silver (or, to take a less analytical example, Michael Moore)–but I think it's a little harder to do. Flouting liberal conventional wisdom is funner somehow. As I said, I think there's something more general going on here but I don't feel I have a full picture of this phenomenon.

Freakonomics 1 was based on Levitt's previous research, which was all over the map, whereas in Freakonomics 2 the authors got to choose ahead of time what to be counterintuitive about. […]

If they're not careful, this book will send them from the "popular science" to the "political punditry" category, with no turning back. Perhaps Freakonomics 3 will have a chapter explaining why evolution is just a theory, not actually proven at all?

I guess that it tells us something about the Zeitgeist that there's apparently no space for a left-wing Freakonomist.  And maybe it tells us something about me, that I was taken slightly aback by Andrew's suggestion that Freakonomics had not been "political punditry" all along… (An update from Andrew is here.)]

[Update #2 — Paul Krugman has three posts on the global-warming chapter: "A counterintuitive train wreck"; "Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1"; and "Weitzman in context". His verdict, in three words: "snarky, contrarian games". Or at greater length:

… what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. Ann Coulter is making sense! Bush is good for the environment! You get the idea.

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop.

And here's an in-depth discussion of the scientific and rhetorical issues by Joseph Romm, who is inspired to coin a new acronym:

In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I’m gonna call them F.A.K.E.R.s — Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled?  I'm still working on this acronym].

Another negative review of the climate stuff is here. I'm looking forward to some evaluations of the other chapters.]

[Update #3: Climate Progress on "It takes a village to debunk their anti-scientific nonsense, but why did they stop Amazon from allowing text searches?"; Brian Dupuis, "FAIL: Superfreakonomics", 10/17/2009; Brad Delong, "Six questions for Levitt and Dubner", 10/17/2009;  P. O'Neill, "Freaky Gurls", 10/18/2009 (critique of the prostitution chapter); Gavin Schmidt, "Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering and why they are wrong", RealClimate, 10/18/2009.

And Stephen Dubner's response to critics: "Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear", NYT, 19=0/18/2009. He gives a lot of explanations, but doesn't seem to me to address the core criticisms. Brad Delong's (earlier) exchange of emails with Dubner is here. Nate Silver weighs in here.]

[Email from Andrew Gelman: "Things get interesting when a scholar steps over the line and moves into pundit territory.  All of a sudden the scholarly caution disappears.  Search my blog for John Yoo or Greg Mankiw, for example…"

Brad Delong writes "*Sigh* Last Post on Superfreakonomics, I Promise", and concludes with " a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize".

And Paul Krugman ("Superfreakingmeta") suggests an answer to  Andrew Gelman's question about why pissing off liberals is fun while pissing off conservatives isn't:

Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended.

Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing (as Dubner and Levitt are in the process of finding out), but it’s been that way for a long time.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber posted about "How SuperFreakonomics killed contrarianism". The discussion there reminded me of the role of Irwin, the secondary-school history teacher in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, who teaches his students that in answering examination questions, “the wrong end of the stick is the right one”. In his memoir Untold Stories, Bennett describes his own discovery that the route to an Oxford scholarship was “the alternative journalism of a lowlier sort”, which attracts the interest of graders bored with mere competence by “turning a question on its head”.

Bennett describes his Finals at Oxford as “the last and most significant examination in my life, and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that took me to Oxford in the first place.”

“I was not dishonest; I kept to the rules and didn’t crib, and nobody else would have called it cheating, then or now, but it has always seemed so to me. False pretences, anyway.”]

Ellis Weiner has a very funny "Shouts and Murmurs" feature in The New Yorker this week (October 19): it's an imagined memo from a marketing assistant at an understaffed publishing company, laying out a marketing plan for a new book. Those who have published books and filled out author's marketing questionnaires will smirk at slight exaggerations of things they actually recall reading ("We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author's Questionnaire"); but there is worse to come.

This marketing department is into viral marketing. The author has had a Facebook account set up for him, and is advised to start a personal blog and feed its content to everyone he knows:

We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met… [M]ake sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.

Pure gibberish, but cleverly suggestive of the sort of real geekspeak that makes you feel you have stumbled in on a newly evolved language, related to your own but not nearly closely enough. Or stayed away from the computer support staff for too many months and then stopped by to find that the "software solutions" they are now supporting are so alien that you don't even know what problems they are supposed to be the solutions to…

Michael Quinion reports in his latest World Wide Words (#661, October 17):

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE TWINK  It's amazing what you can learn from e-mail error messages. The issue last week was blocked by one site in the UK because it had a rude word in the message body. Do you recall reading any rude words? I don't remember writing any. It transpired that the offending "word" was in the title of a nursery rhyme I listed: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The filtering system spotted the first five letters of the first word and pounced. I had to look it up: TWINK is gay slang (I quote Wikipedia) for "a young or young-looking gay man (usually white and in his late teens or early twenties) with a slender build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair."

From the Wikipedia entry, it's hard to see why anyone should treat twink as a rude word. In current gay slang, it labels one of a number of recognized "types" of gay men: twink, bear, clone, prep(py), leatherman, queen, jock, etc. Each is associated with a stereotype involving physical appearance, attitudes, and presentation of self, through dress, bearing, gesture, speech, and so on; there is a weak, but only a weak, association with preferences for sex acts and roles. The set of types is not a taxonomy of gay men; a great many gay men don't fall clearly within one of the types.

Within the world of gay men, the labels are taken seriously as social identifiers, but as is common with labels associated with social stereotypes, they're often used in a mildly mocking (even self-mocking) fashion.

But things are more complex than that.

Believe it or not, the OED (additions series 1993) has an entry for uses of twink, and twinkie as well, with reference to gay men. The etymology of twink is uncertain, though the OED hesitantly suggests a relationship to twink 'twinkling', and it notes a popular association of twinkie, and so twink as well, with the snack cake Twinkie (the OED doesn't go so far as to record jocular references to twink(ie)s as being, or getting, filled with cream).

Uses of twink(ie) with reference to gay men are fairly recent. The OED's first cite for twink is from 1963, but it's in an American Speech article reporting on word uses, so that the word surely has an earlier history. The first cite for twinkie is from 1980, again in a report on usage, this time in Maledicta.

The earliest uses are (mildly or strongly) derogatory, and seem to come mostly from straight people. The American Speech article glosses twink as 'an effeminate young man, a sissy', and gives it in the list of alternatives

pansy-ass, petunia, punk, swish, weenie

Eventually, we get to Armistead Maupin, a gay man, using twink non-derogatorily, as a label for a gay male "type". From More Tales of the City (1980:85):

I found this gorgeous twink carpenter in the Mission.

The OED glosses twinkie as 'a male homosexual, an effeminate young man; also, a child or youth regarded as an object of homosexual desire'. The cites are all at least mildly derogatory in tone, though by 1988 we get an American Speech article in which twinkie and clone refer to gay male "types".

NOAD2 lacks twink, and, like the OED, treats twinkie as a general term for 'a gay or effeminate man', but adds a more specific (perhaps too specific) gloss describing a "type":

a young gay male who is meticulous about his dress, hair, weight, and other aspects of his personal appearance

What's new in NOAD2 is a usage label, "informal offensive"; the OED merely labels twink and twinkie as "U.S. slang".

These dictionaries don't distinguish out-group and in-group use, but that's clearly significant. There's also variation in in-group uses; as is usually the case with social labels (and categories), attitudes towards the words (and the referents) differ from person to person. Here's a site (with descriptions of gay slang) that makes both of these points:

Twinkie or its more common abbreviation twink, are used as generic derogatory terms to describe a weak or effeminate male. In gay slang, twink is a term that describes a young or young-looking male, usually of slender build, only slightly muscular, with little to no body hair (often referred to as a "swimmer's build"). Often they are described as bleach-blond. To many gay men, the term is pejorative and implies shallowness and stupidity. There are also allusions to the Twinkie pastry, due to the analogy of the creme filling to a young gay male. Twinks are typically contrasted with bears. (link)

Note that twink(ie) picks up aspects of the "dumb blonde" stereotype.

None of this, of course, would justify filtering out e-mail that has the word twinkle in it, on the grounds that twink is a "rude word". Even if twink counts as taboo vocabulary in current English — a very dubious claim, it seems to me — the automated searching that picks out twinkle as a problematic word is inexcusable (another instance of the baleful Scunthorpe effect).

Yesterday in the Journal of Biology, the editor introduced a new series (Miranda Robertson, "Ockham's broom"):

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham's broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

Robertson points out that sweeping things under the rug is often a necessary condition for scientific progress:

While Ockham's razor clearly has an established important and honourable place in the philosophy and practice of science, there is, despite its somewhat pejorative connotations, an honourable place for the broom as well. Biology, as many have pointed out, is untidy and accidental, and it is arguably unlikely that all the facts can be accounted for early in the investigation of any given biological phenomenon. For example, if only Charles Darwin had swept under the carpet the variation he faithfully recorded in the ratios of inherited traits in his primulas, as Mendel did with his peas, we might be talking of Darwinian inheritance and not Mendelian (see [3]). Clearly, though, it takes some special sophistication, or intuition, to judge what to ignore.

Her reference [3], by the way, is Jonathan C Howard, "Why didn't Darwin discover Mendel's laws?", J Biol 8:15, 2009.  Howard argues that  Darwin failed to discover the "laws" of (Mendelian) inheritance because he was unwilling to sweep under the rug the complexities that he observed in his genetic experiments — many of which involved, like most genetic phenomena, non-Mendelian inheritance. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that R.A. Fisher ("Has Mendel's work been rediscovered?" Ann. Sci. 1:115-137, 1936) made a detailed argument that Mendel's results must have been fraudulent (or, as Fisher quaintly put it, "are the product of some process of sophistication"), given how close they were to the expected values of the random process involved even in "mendelian" inheritance. Here's one of the summary tables from Fisher's argument:

As Fisher explained, "Fictitious data can seldom survive a careful scrutiny, and, since most men underestimate the frequency of large deviations arising by chance, such data may be expected generally to agree more closely with expectation than genuine data would. "

Arthur Koestler (in The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1971) suggested that perhaps Mendel explained his theories to the monks who were tasked with carrying out the experiments, and they simply reported back the results they understood him to want, rather than actually carrying out the onerous task of hand-pollinating numerous plants according to a complicated schedule.

Sydney Brenner's comment, I've heard, was that Mendel "didn't invent the numbers, but he certainly knew when to stop counting". I haven't been able to find out where that quote comes from either, so perhaps it's from the same source as Ockham's broom.

Meanwhile, though I've failed to find either of those citations, reading through Brenner's old "Loose Ends" columns at Current Biology led me to some other gems, such as his innovative solutions to various problems of "Academic dynamics", including the Pharaoh Configuration:

This is a scheme which offers a solution to the fundamental problem of all scientific departments, which is how to get rid of the old — both people and science — and create space and resources for the young and the new. Our elegant answer is to treat all scientists as Pharaohs; thus, when a senior scientist retires, he and all of his research associates, post-docs, students and technicians are sacrificed and buried in a specially constructed pyramid, together with all of their equipment to enable them to continue research in the after Life Sciences. At one blow, space would have been created for a new professor and a new group, without any arguments and with none of the rancour that usually accompanies such events.

It is obvious that this needs to be carried out only once. Thereafter, all that would be required at the appropriate time is for two men to arrive, equipped with surveying equipment and tape measures. A new pyramid would be laid out in plain sight of the present occupants, who would instantly vacate the premises.