Tag: English

Book Review: American English Compendium by Marv Rubinstein

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

As a dictionary of English vocabulary and phrases, the American English Compendium by Marv Rubinstein is satisfactory. It is 500 pages long so it covers a lot of ground. As a book of American English or Americanisms, this book is not what it seems. A brief glance at any of the pages will make you question if the entries really are words or phrases that are exclusive to American English. And a comparison to another source will most likely show that they are not. As a commentary on language, however, this book is terrible.

American English Compendium
Cover of American English Compendium by Marv Rubinstein. Published by Rowman & Littlefield. Cover design by Neil Cotterill.

The problems start on the first page of Chapter 1. The author defends the use of the term American English by proclaiming it is better than British English:

Dynamic. Versatile. Imaginative. Capable of capturing fine nuances. All these terms can truthfully be used to describe the American language. “Don’t you mean the ‘English language’?” some readers may ask. No, I mean the American language. Over many years, American English has vastly expanded and changed, a transmutation that has left it only loosely connected to its mother tongue, British English. (p. 3)

Although no one would (or should) argue that American English is a term that needs to be defended, the imaginary readers in this passage come off as more knowledgeable about language than the author. Are we really to believe American English is the only variation of English that is “dynamic” or “imaginative” or “capable of capturing fine nuances”? The problem gets compounded when the author recognizes the influence of American English in England, but seems to suggest that the reverse is not happening:

[W]hile there are numerous localisms [in countries where English is the primary language], more and more the terminology, idioms, slang, and colloquialisms smack of American English. Even in England this is slowly but surely happening. (p. 3)

And it only get stranger from there. On the next page we are told:

Things have changed so much, and the use of American English in international communications has grown so much, one can now safely say that most English speakers use (to a greater or lesser degree) Americanized English – that is, the American language. And rightly so. The American language is so much richer and more adventurous. British English neve stood a chance. (p. 4, emphasis mine)

Excuse me, Mr. Rubinstein, but H. G. Wells, J. K. Rowling, Grant Morrison, Agatha Christie and a thousand other British writers would like a word.

After this “proof” that ‘Murican English is better than British English, readers are given a “microcosm of what is happening” (p. 4) in the world. Rubinstein relates a story from an article by New York Times columnist and economist Thomas Friedman about how a senior Moroccan official is sending his kids to an American school even though he was educated in a French school. Rubinstein uses this story to claim that

There are now several American schools in Casablanca, each with a long waiting list. In addition, English (primarily American English) courses are springing up all over that country. If this is happening in Morocco, a country with long-lasting French connections and traditions, it is undoubtedly happening everywhere. The American language is becoming ubiquitous. (p. 5)

But it needs to be noted that Friedman does not claim that these English-language schools which are supposedly popping up all over Casablanca are teaching American English. Nor are readers given any proof that Casablanca is an example of what is happening around the world. I am very hesitant to believe it is. While it’s a cute story, this kind of claim needs to be backed up with evidence. How do we know that the English being taught in these schools is strictly British or American or some variation of English as an international language? We have to take the Rubinstein’s word for it, but as we have seen with his dismissal of British English, he is not to be trusted when it comes to linguistics commentary.

Further down the page, in a section titled The Richness of the American Language, Rubinstein claims that “much of the richness of the American language lies in the fact that it has absorbed words and expressions from at least fifty other languages.” (p. 5) He lists some examples, but completely fails to acknowledge the fact that many of them, such as brogue and orangutan and typhoon, were originally borrowed into British English and then used by Americans.

Rubinstein then presumes readers will ask how the American language differs from other languages, which obviously also use foreign words and phrases. But the answer given is just as confused as the question. The author states that “there is no question that American English has been like a sponge absorbing and modifying words from many other languages” (p. 7) without realizing (or reporting) that this is true of English in general, not American English in particular. This is actually true of languages in general, although English does appear to be particularly greedy when it comes to borrowing words from other languages.

Later, there is a fairly reasonable, but short and undefinitive, discussion of “Black English” (African American Vernacular English). The section unfortunately ends with this quote: “Educated African Americans, of course, use standard American English” (pp. 11–12). Well, good for them.
Things get really bonkers in the section on compounding, which includes this howler:

Compound words exist in almost all languages, but never anywhere near the extent that they do in American English. […] during the last few decades, compounding has reached epidemic proportions. The vast majority of compound words are of relatively recent origin languagewise (p. 15)

This is nonsense. Does the author know how any other languages work? Finnish compounds words much more than English does. In fact, the syntax of Finnish demands it, unlike in English where compounding is very often a matter of style. And how do we know that the “vast majority” of compound words are not old? Let’s say “the last few decades” goes back to 1960. Do you really think words such as outcast, outdoors, outlook, output, overcome, overdoes, overdue, oversee, oddball, goofball, downfall, and downhill (all words supplied by the author) were made compound words after 1960?

Here are some other WTFs in this book along with the thoughts I had after reading them:

In general [the English speakers of Australia, Canada, Guyana, India, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa] all understand each other, but, as you have seen in the previous chapter on American and British English, there are substantial differences. The same can be said of the English used in the other countries listed above. With a few exceptions, Canadian English consists of a blending of American and British English, but the other English-speaking countries have all developed their own unique and distinctive expressions (including slang and colloquialisms). (p. 267)

Hahahahaha! Fuck you, Canada! Get your own expressions, eh!

 

English is an Anglo-Saxon language with roots in Latin, the Romance Languages, and German. [No.] This means that most, if not all, English words are variations of foreign words, and such words have legitimately entered the language. (p. 281)

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THIS MEAN?!

 

The Oxford English Dictionary prides itself on keeping up to date, and it does pretty well (but not perfect) with including new words in its latest editions. Unfortunately, libraries with limited budgets these days do not always have the most recent revisions. Your best bet for researching neologisms is probably the Internet – for example, Google. (p. 403)

Because the OED is the only dictionary in the world. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: In linguistics research there is only the OED and Google. It’s a wonder we get anything done.

 

Chairman has become chairperson and has been further reduced to chair. But many gender-based terms remain unresolved. While, for example, policeman easily becomes police officer, other words and phrases resist change. One almost invariably hears expressions such as “Everyone to their own taste. [What? Who invariably hears this?] Grammatically incorrect [Nope!] but why risk offending potential female customers of advertised products? [Bitches be trippin’, amiright?] However, when a woman mans the controls of an aircraft, should the term be changed even though it denotes action, not identity? What should we now call a “manhole cover”? [Serious questions, you guys.] Note that we no longer have actresses; they all insist on being called actors. [How dare they?!] (p. 13)

Based on the claims about language alone, I would not recommend this book. I don’t know how someone writes a book about language and gets so much wrong. The word and phrase entries may be useful, but any online dictionary will have most if not all of them. Go there instead or get a proper reference book from a respected dictionary.

Book review: Dog whistles, Walk-Backs & Political Handshakes by McCutcheon and Mark

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

As the authors state in their foreword (pp. xii-xiii):

This book represents an attempt to defang the slang and crack the code. In writing this, we tried to think back to when we were new to Washington and wishing, like wandering tourists lost in a foreign city, that we had a handy all-in-one-place phrasebook.

I would say they have largely accomplished this. Dog Whistles, Walk-backs & Washington Handshakes is an up-to-date glossary of American political terms. I think that people interested in language and politics would find this book enjoying for a few reasons. First, the book is well referenced (always a plus). The authors are not trying to discover the first known use of some political code word, but rather to show that politicians from all sides use this type of language and that you are likely to come across it in tomorrow’s newspaper or news broadcast. So their references mostly come from very recent sources, which is refreshing. The foreword and introduction make nuanced points about language and slang, and the authors back up these points with references to reputable sources.

Dog Whistles has appeal for people who follow American politics, since although they are likely to already know some of the terms in here, they will probably find some they don’t know or haven’t thought about. That’s because the book isn’t just made up of eye-catching terms such as Overton window and San Fransisco values. Readers will appreciate the care that the authors have taken to explain each term. For example, here is the entry for the seemingly innocent term bold (p. 40):

Bold: A politician’s most common description of their own or their party’s proposals. It manages to be a punchy, optimistic-sounding break with conventional thinking and deliberately vague all at once.

Image copyright ForeEdge and University Press of New England
Image copyright ForeEdge and University Press of New England

But the book is not just for language and politics heads. In the introduction (p. ix), the authors recognize the problem that people who do not closely follow politics might have when reading about or listening to their representatives:

For most of the population – let’s call them “regular, normal people” – time spent listening to legislation, operatives, and journalists thrash over public policy on cable or a website can often result in something close to a fugue state, induced by the repeated use of words and phrases that have little if any connection to life as it is lived on planet Earth.

Later (p. 129), the authors explain the importance of their glossary by saying that:

Knowing the meanings of such specialized political terms can help cut through spin meant to obscure what’s really going on in a campaign. When politicians use the cliché, “The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day,” they really mean, “I wouldn’t win if the election were held today.”

I am all for educating people about the intricacies of language, especially when that means explaining the ways that politicians use words and phrases to trick people.
I am, however, not sure that all of the terms deserve being placed in this book. I feel like a glossary should include words that are at least nominally used by a group of people. But in their attempt to be current, the authors have included phrases such as hardship porn. This is a phrase coined by Frank Bruni of the New York Times and it only returns two hits on Google News – the July 2015 article in which Bruni coined it and an October 2015 book review in the Missoula Independent. However influential Frank Bruni is, this term has not caught on yet.

This is really nitpicking though (something us academics excel at, thankyouverymuch). I really found this book enjoyable. If you like politics, language, or both, you will probably enjoy it too. You can check out the interactive website here: http://dogwhistlebook.com/ and even suggest you own term.

 

 

References

McCutcheon, Chuck and David Mark. 2014. Dog Whistles, Walk-backs & Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech. ForeEdge: New Hampshire.

My Corpus Brings All the Boys to the Yard

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

In two recent papers, one by Kloumann et al. (2012) and the other by Dodds et al. (2015), a group of researchers created a corpus to study the positivity of the English language. I looked at some of the problems with those papers here and here. For this post, however, I want to focus on one of the registers in the authors’ corpus – song lyrics. There is a problem with taking language such as lyrics out of context and then judging them based on the positivity of the words in the songs. But first I need to briefly explain what the authors did.

In the two papers, the authors created a corpus based on books, New York Times articles, tweets and song lyrics. They then created a list of the 10,000 most common word types in their corpus and had voluntary respondents rate how positive or negative they felt the words were. They used this information to claim that human language overall (and English) is emotionally positive.

That’s the idea anyway, but song lyrics exist as part of a multimodal genre. There are lyrics and there is music. These two modalities operate simultaneously to convey a message or feeling. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, the other registers in the corpus do not work like song lyrics. Books and news articles are black text on a white background with few or no pictures. And tweets are not always multimodal – it’s possible to include a short video or picture in a tweet, but it’s not necessary (Side note: I would like to know how many tweets in the corpus included pictures and/or videos, but the authors do not report that information).

So if we were to do a linguistic analysis of an artist or a genre of music, we would create a corpus of the lyrics of that artist or genre. We could then study the topics that are brought up in the lyrics, or even common words and expressions (lexical bundles or n-grams) that are used by the artist(s). We could perhaps even look at how the writing style of the artist(s) changed over time.

But if we wanted to perform an analysis of the positivity of the songs in our corpus, we would need to incorporate the music. The lyrics and music go hand in hand – without the music, you only have poetry. To see what I mean, take a look at the following word list. Do the words in this list look particularly positive or negative to you?

a

ain’t

all

and

as

away

back

bitch

body

breast

but

butterfly

can

can’t

caught

chasing

comin’

days

 did

didn’t

do

dog

down

everytime

fairy

fantasy

for

ghost

guess

had

hand

harm

her

his

i

i’m

 if

in

it

looked

lovely

jar

makes

mason

life

live

maybe

me

mean

momma’s

more

my

need

nest

 never

no

of

on

outside

pet

pin

real

return

robin

scent

she

sighing

slips

smell sorry

that

the

then

 think

to

today

told

up

want

wash

went

what

when

with

withered

woke

would

yesterday

you

you’re

your

If we combine these words as Rivers Cuomo did in his song “Butterfly”, they average out to a positive score of 5.23. Here are the lyrics to that song.

Yesterday I went outside
With my momma’s mason jar
Caught a lovely Butterfly
When I woke up today
And looked in on my fairy pet
She had withered all away
No more sighing in her breast

I’m sorry for what I did
I did what my body told me to
I didn’t mean to do you harm
But everytime I pin down what I think I want
it slips away – the ghost slips away

I smell you on my hand for days
I can’t wash away your scent
If I’m a dog then you’re a bitch
I guess you’re as real as me
Maybe I can live with that
Maybe I need fantasy
A life of chasing Butterfly

I’m sorry for what I did
I did what my body told me to
I didn’t mean to do you harm
But everytime I pin down what I think I want
it slips away – the ghost slips away

I told you I would return
When the robin makes his nest
But I ain’t never comin’ back
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry

Does this look like a positive text to you? Does it look moderate, neither positive nor negative? I would say not. It seems negative to me, a sad song based on the opera Madame Butterfly, in which a man leaves his wife because he never really cared for her. When we include the music into our consideration, the non-positivity of this song is clear.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCoGkMlfz9I]
Let’s take a look at another list. How does this one look?

above

absence

alive

an

animal

apart

are

away

become

brings

broke

can

closer

complicate

desecrate

down

 drink

else

every

everything

existence

faith

feel

flawed

for

forest

from

fuck

get

god

got

hate

 have

help

hive

honey

i

i’ve

inside

insides

is

isolation

it

it’s

knees

let

like

make

 me

my

myself

no

of

off

only

penetrate

perfect

reason

scraped

sell

sex

smell

somebody

soul

 stay

stomach

tear

that

the

thing

through

to

trees

violate

want

whole

within

works

you

your

Based on the ratings in the two papers, this list is slightly more positive, with an average happiness rating of 5.46. When the words were used by Trent Reznor, however, they expressed “a deeply personal meditation on self-hatred” (Huxley 1997: 179). Here are the lyrics for “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails:

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you

Help me
I broke apart my insides
Help me
I’ve got no soul to sell
Help me
The only thing that works for me
Help me get away from myself

I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

You can have my isolation
You can have the hate that it brings
You can have my absence of faith
You can have my everything

Help me
Tear down my reason
Help me
It’s your sex I can smell
Help me
You make me perfect
Help me become somebody else

I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

Through every forest above the trees
Within my stomach scraped off my knees
I drink the honey inside your hive
You are the reason I stay alive

As Reznor (the songwriter and lyricist) sees it, “Closer” is “supernegative and superhateful” and that the song’s message is “I am a piece of shit and I am declaring that” (Huxley 1997: 179). You can see what he means when you listen to the song (minor NSF warning for the imagery in the video). [1]

[vimeo 3554226 w=500 h=377]

Nine Inch Nails: Closer (Uncensored) (1994) from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

Then again, meaning is relative. Tommy Lee has said that “Closer” is “the all-time fuck song. Those are pure fuck beats – Trent Reznor knew what he was doing. You can fuck to it, you can dance to it and you can break shit to it.” And Tommy Lee should know. He played in the studio for NIИ and he is arguably more famous for fucking than he is for playing drums.

Nevertheless, the problem with the positivity rating of songs keeps popping up. The song “Mad World” was a pop hit for Tears for Fears, then reinterpreted in a more somber tone by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews. But it is rated a positive 5.39. Gotye’s global hit about failed relationships, “Somebody That I Used To Know”, is rated a positive 5.33. The anti-war and protest ballad “Eve of Destruction”, made famous by Barry McGuire, rates just barely on the negative side at 4.93. I guess there should have been more depressing references besides bodies floating, funeral processions, and race riots if the song writer really wanted to drive home the point.

For the song “Milkshake”, Kelis has said that it “means whatever people want it to” and that the milkshake referred to in the song is “the thing that makes women special […] what gives us our confidence and what makes us exciting”. It is rated less positive than “Mad World” at 5.24. That makes me want to doubt the authors’ commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Another upbeat jam that the kids listen to is the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”. This is the energetic and exciting anthem of punk rock. It’s rated a negative 4.82. I wonder if we should even look at “Pinhead”.

Then there’s the old American folk classic “Where did you sleep last night”, which Nirvana performed a haunting version of on their album MTV Unplugged in New York. The song (also known as “In the Pines” and “Black Girl”) was first made famous by Lead Belly and it includes such catchy lines as

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

And

Her husband was a hard working man
Just about a mile from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found

This song is rated a positive 5.24. I don’t know about you but neither the Lead Belly version, nor the Nirvana cover would give me that impression.

Even Pharrell Williams’ hit song “Happy” rates only 5.70. That’s a song so goddamn positive that it’s called “Happy”. But it’s only 0.03 points more positive than Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”, which is a song about the death of Clapton’s four-year-old son. Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” was voted the fourth saddest song of all time by readers of Rolling Stone but it’s rated 5.55, while Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” rates 5.63. So they are both sadder than “Happy”, but not by much. How many lyrics must a man research, before his corpus is questioned?

Corpus linguistics is not just gathering a bunch of words and calling it a day. The fact that the same “word” can have several meanings (known as polysemy), is a major feature of language. So before you ask people to rate a word’s positivity, you will want to make sure they at least know which meaning is being referred to. On top of that, words do not work in isolation. Spacing is an arbitrary construct in written language (remember that song lyrics are mostly heard not read). The back used in the Ramones’ lines “Piling in the back seat” and “Pulsating to the back beat” are not about a body part. The Weezer song “Butterfly” uses the word mason, but it’s part of the compound noun mason jar, not a reference to a brick layer. Words are also conditioned by the words around them. A word like eve may normally be considered positive as it brings to mind Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, but when used in a phrase like “the eve of destruction” our judgment of it is likely to change. In the corpus under discussion here, eat is rated 7.04, but that doesn’t consider what’s being eaten and so can not account for lines like “Eat your next door neighbor” (from “Eve of Destruction”).

We could go on and on like this. The point is that the authors of both of the papers didn’t do enough work with their data before drawing conclusions. And they didn’t consider that some of the language in their corpus is part of a multimodal genre where there are other things affecting the meaning of the language used (though technically no language use is devoid of context). Whether or not the lyrics of a song are “positive” or “negative”, the style of singing and the music that they are sung to will highly effect a person’s interpretation of the lyrics’ meaning and emotion. That’s just the way that music works.

This doesn’t mean that any of these songs are positive or negative based on their rating, it means that the system used by the authors of the two papers to rate the positivity or negativity of language seems to be flawed. I would have guessed that a rating system which took words out of context would be fundamentally flawed, but viewing the ratings of the songs in this post is a good way to visualize that. The fact that the two papers were published in reputable journals and picked up by reputable publications, such as the Atlantic and the New York Times, only adds insult to injury for the field of linguistics.

You can see a table of the songs I looked at for this post below and an spreadsheet with the ratings of the lyrics is here. I calculated the positivity ratings by averaging the scores for the word tokens in each song, rather than the types.

(By the way, Tupac is rated 4.76. It’s a good thing his attitude was fuck it ‘cause motherfuckers love it.)

Song Positivity score (1–9)
“Happy” by Pharrell Williams 5.70
“Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton 5.67
“You Were Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson 5.63
“Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin 5.55
“Closer” by NIN 5.46
“Mad World” by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews 5.39
“Somebody that I Used to Know” by Gotye feat. Kimbra 5.33
“Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips 5.28
“Milkshake” by Kelis 5.24
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Nirvana 5.24
“Butterfly” by Weezer 5.23
“Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire 4.93
“Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones 4.82

 

Footnotes

[1] Also, be aware that listening to these songs while watching their music videos has an effect on the way you interpret them. (Click here to go back up.)

References

Isabel M. Kloumann, Christopher M. Danforth, Kameron Decker Harris, Catherine A. Bliss, Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2012. “Positivity of the English Language”. PLoS ONE. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029484

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Eric M. Clark, Suma Desu, Morgan R. Frank, Andrew J. Reagan, Jake Ryland Williams, Lewis Mitchell, Kameron Decker Harris, Isabel M. Kloumann, James P. Bagrow, Karine Megerdoomian, Matthew T. McMahon, Brian F. Tivnan, and Christopher M. Danforth. 2015. “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias”. PNAS 112:8. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2389

Huxley, Martin. 1997. Nine Inch Nails. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

If you’re not a linguist, big deal! (We have cooties and are into weird stuff anyways)

Joe McVeigh4 Comments

Last week I wrote a post called “If you’re not a linguist, don’t do linguistics”. This got shared around Twitter quite a bit and made it to the front page of r/linguistics, so a lot of people saw it. Pretty much everyone had good insight on the topic and it generated some great discussion. I thought it would be good to write a follow-up to flesh out my main concerns in a more serious manner (this time sans emoticons!) and to address the concerns some people had with my reasoning.

The paper in question is by Dodds et al. (2015) and it is called “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias”. The certainty of that title is important since I’m going to try to show in this post that the authors make too many assumptions to reliably make any claims about all human language. I’m going to focus on the English data because that is what I am familiar with. But if anyone who is familiar with the data in other languages would like to weigh in, please do so in the comments.

The first assumption made by the authors is that it is possible to make universal claims about language using only written data. This is not a minor issue. The differences between spoken and written language are many and major (Linell 2005). But dealing with spoken data is difficult – it takes much more time and effort to collect and analyze than written data. We can argue, however, that even in highly literate societies, the majority of language use is spoken – and spoken language does not work like written language. This is an assumption that no scholar should ever make. So any research which makes claims about all human language will therefore have to include some form of spoken data. But the data set that the authors draw from (called their corpus) is made from tweets, song lyrics, New York Times articles and the Google Books project. Tweets and song lyrics, let alone news articles or books, do not mimic spoken language in an accurate way. For example, these registers may include the same words as human speech, but certainly not in the same proportion. Written language does not include false starts, nor does it include repetition or elusion in near the same way that spoken language does. Anyone who has done any transcription work will tell you this.

The next assumption made by the authors is that their data is representative of all human language. Representativeness is a major issue in corpus linguistics. When linguists want to investigate a register or variety of language, they build a corpus which is representative of that register or variety by taking a large enough and balanced sample of texts from that register. What is important here, however, is that most linguists do not have a problem with a set of data representing a larger register – so long as that larger register isn’t all human language. For example, if we wanted to research modern English journalism (quite a large register), we would build a corpus of journalism texts from English-speaking countries and we would be careful to include various kinds of journalism – op-eds, sports reporting, financial news, etc. We would not build a corpus of articles from the Podunk Free Press and make claims about all English journalism. But representativeness is a tricky issue. The larger the language variety you are trying to investigate, the more data from that variety you will need in your corpus. Baker (2010: 7) notes that a corpus analysis of one novel is “unlikely to be representative of all language use, or all novels, or even the general writing style of that author”. The English sub-corpora in Dodds et al. exists somewhere in between a fully non-representative corpus of English (one novel) and a fully representative corpus of English (all human speech and writing in English). In fact, in another paper (Dodds et al. 2011), the representativeness of the Twitter corpus is explained as “First, in terms of basic sampling, tweets allocated to data feeds by Twitter were effectively chosen at random from all tweets. Our observation of this apparent absence of bias in no way dismisses the far stronger issue that the full collection of tweets is a non-uniform subsampling of all utterances made by a non-representative subpopulation of all people. While the demographic profile of individual Twitter users does not match that of, say, the United States, where the majority of users currently reside, our interest is in finding suggestions of universal patterns.”. What I think that doozy of a sentence in the middle is saying is that the tweets come from an unrepresentative sample of the population but that the language in them may be suggestive of universal English usage. Does that mean can we assume that the English sub-corpora (specifically the Twitter data) in Dodds et al. is representative of all human communication in English?

Another assumption the authors make is that they have sampled their data correctly. The decisions on what texts will be sampled, as Tognini-Bonelli (2001: 59) points out, “will have a direct effect on the insights yielded by the corpus”. Following Biber (see Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 59), linguists can classify texts into various channels in order to assure that their sample texts will be representative of a certain population of people and/or variety of language. They can start with general “channels” of the language (written texts, spoken data, scripted data, electronic communication) and move on to whether the language is private or published. Linguists can then sample language based on what type of person created it (their age, sex, gender, social-economic situation, etc.). For example, if we made a corpus of the English articles on Wikipedia, we would have a massive amount of linguistic data. Literally billions of words. But 87% of it will have been written by men and 59% of it will have been written by people under the age of 40. Would you feel comfortable making claims about all human language based on that data? How about just all English language encyclopedias?

The next assumption made by the authors is that the relative positive or negative nature of the words in a text are indicative of how positive that text is. But words can have various and sometimes even opposing meanings. Texts are also likely to contain words that are written the same but have different meanings. For example, the word fine in the Dodds et al. corpus, like the rest of the words in the corpus, is just a four letter word – free of context and naked as a jaybird. Is it an adjective that means “good, acceptable, or satisfactory”, which Merriam-Webster says is sometimes “used in an ironic way to refer to things that are not good or acceptable”? Or does it refer to that little piece of paper that the Philadelphia Parking Authority is so (in)famous for? We don’t know. All we know is that it has been rated 6.74 on the positivity scale by the respondents in Dodds et al. Can we assume that all the uses of fine in the New York Times are that positive? Can we assume that the use of fine on Twitter is always or even mostly non-ironic? On top of that, some of the most common words in English also tend to have the most meanings. There are 15 entries for get in the Macmillan Dictionary, including “kill/attack/punish” and “annoy”. Get in Dodds et al. is ranked on the positive side of things at 5.92. Can we assume that this rating carries across all the uses of get in the corpus? The authors found approximately 230 million unique “words” in their Twitter corpus (they counted all forms of a word separately, so banana, bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s! would be separate “words”; and they counted URLs as words). So they used the 50,000 most frequent ones to estimate the information content of texts. Can we assume that it is possible to make an accurate claim about how positive or negative a text is based on nothing but the words taken out of context?

Another assumption that the authors make is that the respondents in their survey can speak for the entire population. The authors used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crowdsource evaluations for the words in their sub-corpus. 60% of the American people on Mechanical Turk are women and 83.5% of them are white. The authors used respondents located in the United States and India. Can we assume that these respondents have opinions about the words in the corpus that are representative of the entire population of English speakers? Here are the ratings for the various ways of writing laughter in the authors’ corpus:

Laughter tokens Rating
ha 6
hah 5.92
haha 7.64
hahah 7.3
hahaha 7.94
hahahah 7.24
hahahaha 7.86
hahahahaha 7.7
ha 6
hee 5.4
heh 5.98
hehe 6.48
hehehe 7.06

And here is a picture of a character expressing laughter:

Pictured: Good times. Credit: Batman #36, DC Comics, Scott Snyder (wr), Greg Capullo (p), Danny Miki (i), Fco Plascenia (c), Steve Wands (l).
Pictured: Good times. Credit: Batman #36, DC Comics, Scott Snyder (wr), Greg Capullo (p), Danny Miki (i), Fco Plascenia (c), Steve Wands (l).

Can we assume that the textual representation of laughter is always as positive as the respondents rated it? Can we assume that everyone or most people on Twitter use the various textual representations of laughter in a positive way – that they are laughing with someone and not at someone?
Finally, let’s compare some data. The good people at the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) have created a word list based on their 450 million word corpus. The COCA corpus is specifically designed to be large and balanced (although the problem of dealing with spoken language might still remain). In addition, each word in their corpus is annotated for its part of speech, so they can recognize when a word like state is either a verb or a noun. This last point is something that Dodds et al. did not do – all forms of words that are spelled the same are collapsed into being one word. The compilers of the COCA list note that “there are more than 140 words that occur both as a noun and as a verb at least 10,000 times in COCA”. This is the type/token issue that came up in my previous post. A corpus that tags each word for its part of speech can tell the difference between different types of the “same” word (state as a verb vs. state as a noun), while an untagged corpus treats all occurrences of state as the same token. If we compare the 10,000 most common words in Dodds et al. to a sample of the 10,000 most common words in COCA, we see that there are 121 words on the COCA list but not the Dodds et al. list (Here is the spreadsheet from the Dodds et al. paper with the COCA data – pnas.1411678112.sd01 – Dodds et al corpus with COCA). And that’s just a sample of the COCA list. How many more differences would there be if we compared the Dodds et al. list to the whole COCA list?

To sum up, the authors use their corpus of tweets, New York Times articles, song lyrics and books and ask us to assume (1) that they can make universal claims about language despite using only written data; (2) that their data is representative of all human language despite including only four registers; (3) that they have sampled their data correctly despite not knowing what types of people created the linguistic data and only including certain channels of published language; (4) that the relative positive or negative nature of the words in a text are indicative of how positive that text is despite the obvious fact that words can be spelled the same and still have wildly different meanings; (5) that the respondents in their survey can speak for the entire population despite the English-speaking respondents being from only two subsets of two English-speaking populations (USA and India); and (6) that their list of the 10,000 most common words in their corpus (which they used to rate all human language) is representative despite being uncomfortably dissimilar to a well-balanced list that can differentiate between different types of words.

I don’t mean to sound like a Negative Nancy and I don’t want to trivialize the work of the authors in this paper. The corpus that they have built is nothing short of amazing. The amount of feedback they got from human respondents on language is also impressive (to say the least). I am merely trying to point out what we can and can not say based on the data. It would be nice to make universal claims about all human language, but the fact is that even with millions and billions of data points, we still are not able to do so unless the data is representative and sampled correctly. That means it has to include spoken data (preferably a lot of it) and it has to be sampled from all socio-economic human backgrounds.

Hat tip to the commenters on the last post and the redditors over at r/linguistics.

References

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Eric M. Clark, Suma Desu, Morgan R. Frank, Andrew J. Reagan, Jake Ryland Williams, Lewis Mitchell, Kameron Decker Harris, Isabel M. Kloumann, James P. Bagrow, Karine Megerdoomian, Matthew T. McMahon, Brian F. Tivnan, and Christopher M. Danforth. 2015. “Human language reveals a universal positivity bias”. PNAS 112:8. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2389

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Kameron Decker Harris, Isabel M. Koumann, Catherine A. Bliss, Christopher M. Danforth. 2011. “Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter”. PLOS One. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026752#abstract0

Baker, Paul. 2010. Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/paulb/socioling.htm

Linell, Per. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Oxon: Routledge.

Mair, Christian. 2015. “Responses to Davies and Fuchs”. English World-Wide 36:1, 29–33. doi: 10.1075/eww.36.1.02mai

Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Volume 6: Corpus Linguistics as Work. John Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/scl.6/main

Autocorrected

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James Gleick has a recent article in the New York Times about Autocorrect (“Auto Crrect Ths!” – Aug. 4, 2012), that bane of impatient texters and Tweeters everywhere. Besides recounting some of the more hilarious and embarrassing autocorrections made, he very poignantly tells how Autocorrect works and how it is advancing as computers get better at making predictions.

But in the second to last paragraph, he missteps. He writes:

One more thing to worry about: the better Autocorrect gets, the more we will come to rely on it. It’s happening already. People who yesterday unlearned arithmetic will soon forget how to spell. One by one we are outsourcing our mental functions to the global prosthetic brain.

I don’t know whether Mr. Gleick’s writing was the victim of an editor trying to save space, but that seems unlikely since there’s room on the internet for a bit of qualification, which is what could save these statements from being common cases of declinism. Let me explain.

“People who yesterday unlearned arithmetic” probably refers to the use of calculators. But I would hesitate to say that the power and ubiquity of modern calculators has caused people to unlearn arithmetic. Let’s take a simple equation such as 4 x 4. Anyone conducting such an equation on a calculator knows the arithmetic behind it. If they put it in and the answer comes back as 0 or 8 or 1 or even 20, they are more than likely to realize something went wrong, namely they pressed the minus or plus button instead of the multiplication button. Likewise they know the arithmetic behind 231 x 47.06.

Mr. Gleick writes implies that the efficiency of calculators has caused people to rely too much on them. But this is backwards. The more difficult that calculations get, the more arithmetical knowledge a user is likely to have. Relying on a machine to tell me the square root of 144 doesn’t necessarily mean I “unlearned” arithmetic. It only means that I trust the calculator to give me the correct answer to the equation I gave it. If I trust that I pressed the buttons in the right order, the answer I am given will be sufficient for me, even if I do not know how to work out the equation on pen and paper. I doubt any mathematicians out there are worried about “unlearning” arithmetic because of the power of their calculators. Rather, they’re probably more worried about how to enter the equations correctly. And just like I know 8 is not the answer to 4 x 4, they probably know x = 45 is not the answer to x2 + 2x – 4 = 0.

Taking the analogy to language, we see the same thing. Not being able to spell quixotic, but knowing that chaotic is not the word I’m looking for, does not mean that I have lost the ability to spell. It merely means that I have enough trust in my Autocorrect to suggest the correct word I’m looking for. If it throws something else at me, I’ll consult a dictionary.

If the Autocorrect cannot give me the correct word I’m looking for because it is a recent coinage, there may not be a standard spelling yet, in which case I am able to disregard any suggestions. I’ll spell the word as I want and trust the reader to understand it. Ya dig?

None of the infamous stories of Autocorrect turning normal language into gibberish involve someone who didn’t know how to spell. None of them end with someone pleading for the correct spelling of whatever word Autocorrect mangled. As Autocorrect gets better, people will just learn to trust its suggestions more with words that are difficult to spell. This doesn’t mean we have lost the ability to spell. Spelling in English is a tour de force in memorization because the spelling of English words is a notorious mess. If all I can remember is that the word I’m looking for has a q and an x in it, does it really mean I have unlearned how to spell or that I have just forgotten the exact spelling of quixotic and am willing to trust Autocorrect’s suggestion?

Learning arithmetic is learning a system. Once you know how 2 x 2 works, you can multiply any numbers. The English spelling system is nowhere near a system like arithmetic, so the analogy Mr. Gleick used doesn’t really work for this reason either. But there is one thing that spelling and arithmetic have in common when it comes to computers. Calculators and Autocorrect are only beneficial to those who already have at least a basic understanding of arithmetic and spelling. The advance of Autocorrect will have the same effect on people’s ability to spell as the advance of calculators did on people’s ability to do arithmetic, which was not really any at all.

By the way, I once looked up took (meaning the past tense of take) in a dictionary because after writing it I was sure that wasn’t the way to spell it. And that’s my memory getting worse, not my Autocorrect unlearning me.

[Update – Aug. 6, 2012] If our spelling really does go down the drain, it should at least make this kind of spelling bee more interesting (if only it were true).

Write as Elmore Leonard Says, Not as Elmore Leonard Does

Joe McVeigh3 Comments

Speaking of how to write well, Dangerous Minds contributor Paul Gallagher has posted Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules for Writing Fiction.” The list is from a 2001 New York Times article and it goes like this:

1. Never open a book with the weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

I commented that Leonard breaks at least two of these rules in his books. That knowledge came from five minutes worth of what us in the business call “using the internet.” I’m not going to spend more time on this, but I wanted to relay another comment by witzed that had me rolling:

A lot of people don’t know it, but Elmore Leonard is also an architect, and he has some really good rules for that, too.
1) Do not start with the roof.
2) Make sure there is another room on the other side of the door.
3) Carpeting must always face left.
4) No boilers in the elevator!
5) All arbitrary lists must have at least ten items.
6) A bedroom is not a bowling alley.
7) Make up your mind: shoes or no shoes.
8) Think first: Is this supposed to be a bathroom?
9) Pay attention to the stuff everyone can see.

Remember, folks, the best players often make the worst coaches. For more hilarity, check out the contest held by the National Post and CBC Radio. The contest is closed, but you can check the comments.

Warning! Assholes are Closer than they Appear!

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Geoffrey Pullum and I have not always agreed on everything. I like to comment, and he hates comments. But in a recent language log post, Mr. Pullum mentioned talking to his son about “the ghastly crew of obnoxious multi-millionaires who dominate the newspapers, and how they keep threatening to achieve success even in the political arena.” And that’s when his son turned him on to the fact that we are living in “the age of the assholocracy.”

At first, I thought I agreed with Pullum. It really does seem like there are a ton of assholes in power these days. And it seems there are even more assholes vying to get into power. It’s easy to believe that the age of the assholocracy is upon us.

But then I realized that we’ve always been living in an assholocracy. Assholes in power has long been the rule, not the exception. Just open a history book. Those things are chock full of assholes. It’s a wonder there’s room for anyone else. Or, even better, go ask someone who’s not a white middle-class male. They’ll tell you all about the assholes in power.

Mr. Pullum uses Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, and Vladimir Putin as examples of the assholocracy we’re living in. But these people are downright pussies (to continue the anatomical analogies) compared to previous media moguls and Italian or Russian leaders. Is it possible we’re at the end of the assholocracy and the start of the pussypublic? You wish. (Again, just following the anatomy metaphor.)

Instead, I think these assholes are starting to be assholes to their own kind – the other white middle-class males – at an equal rate that they historically were assholes to other kinds of people. The assholocracy has gone into self-destruct mode, or what political scholars refer to as a dicktatorship.

Dear (Language Maven/Concerned Citizen/Just Another English User)

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

In order to make your (job/life/peeving) easier, I, Dr. Joe McVeigh, have decided to create this simple form. Whenever you come across an example of the English language (deteriorating/going all to hell/just simply changing), just circle the appropriate word or phrase in this form, send it off to me and I will forward it to every major newspaper and dictionary in the English-speaking world.

Just the other day I noticed a couple of (teens/colleagues/talking parrots) using too many (adverbs/passives/cheifs, not enough Indians). I nearly (had a heart attack/shit a brick/stopped caring about this). These (people/Neanderthals/birds) were unaware that the sharp ears of the English language’s (arbiter/guardian/inquisition) was listening.

I just have to (speak my disapproval/lodge a formal complaint/foam at the mouth) at such (idiotic/rude/innovative) use of (the English language/my language/their language).

If such practices are allowed to continue, I fear our language may be heading down a dangerous path. Why, in no time at all we may be speaking (a different language/like primitives/English still).

I just can’t stand it anymore and I have to speak up. The correct way to do it is (blah/blah/blah). Please distribute my (opinion/judgment/ranting and raving) to the masses, so that they may (one day be/get guilt tripped into/still not care about) speaking like me, the (greatest/most pretentious/Grade A asshole) of the English language.

Sincerely,

_______ _________

p.s. We all know the English language was perfected (when I graduated high school/when I graduated college/sometime last week).

English Words with No Equivalents

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

You’ve seen the lists of words with no English equivalents and you’ve seen really, truly the utmost very best that English has to offer, but have you ever wondered what words are particular to English? I’m talking about words that have no equivalents in other languages.

Well, friends, wonder no longer. I have compiled a list for you. Now you can marvel at the intricacies and quirks of the English language. What does it tell about English speakers and their culture that they had to invent words for these strange things? Your guess is as good as mine. On to the list!

1. a, the, in, on, for, to, from – These simple words have no equivalents in Finnish. The poor Finns are stuck putting suffixes on words. It’s a shame really. How do they manage?

2. never – Never mind prepositions and determiners, the helpless Finns are also stuck without a word for never. The closest they have is ei ikinä, which roughly translates to “not ever.”

3. yesterday, today, tomorrow – While we’re up in the Nordic countries, can you believe that Danish and Swedish have no word for yesterday, today, or tomorrow. That’s right. Instead their stuck with i går, i dag, i morgen. Time must move so slow for them!

4. please – Ever wonder why French people are so rude? It’s because it takes them three times as many words (s’il vous plaît) to say please than it does for us. Spanish speakers are in the middle with two – por favor.

5. fuhgeddaboudit – can you believe that Italian doesn’t have a word for fuhgeddaboudit? I thought it was an Italian word! I thought it was passed down through generations of guidos and paisans. Who knew? I guess it’s Jewish.

This is just a sampling of words that English has been blessed with. When faced with such intricate and novel ideas as the ones expressed by the words in this list, other languages are at a loss.

Not a Him or a Her, Not a Madam or Sir

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

This is a post which elaborates on a comment I left on the Macmillan Dictionary blog. The post (by Stan Carey) discussed the nature of gendered pronouns in English and the ways people have tried to invent a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. It’s worth a read (as are the comments in this post, where Stan was kind enough to indulge my ramblings). I tried to be very concise in my comment, but I feel like the point I tried to make deserves more attention (and page space) than is usually permitted in comments. So I’m making a post out of it.

My comment was this:

I’m going to try my best not to be too vague or overarching, but I wonder if the use of gender-neutral pronouns to point out chauvinism in language is anything like restructuring the history class curriculum to not be just one war after the other. The idea is that making war a priority in the history classroom perpetuates its priority in students minds year after year and so shapes the world they live in. Changing the curriculum would be interesting, but at the same time, war has been a major part of history and humans will always the capacity to be violent on a large scale.
What I’m trying to get at is the ways in which we are able to recognize and assess our own biases and the point at which we start fighting against our nature. Pronouns are learned first and then sexist meanings are attached to them (in varying degrees, I assume). But there’s no doubt that people distinguish between genders. I wonder how long it would take – or if it’s possible at all – to break down all the sexist meanings attached to our gendered pronouns. Just like how many years would it take to strip war of its priority in students minds?
Certainly experiments like the Egalia school’s will lead us to better understand how our brains relate natural necessities (like pronouns) with nurtured meanings (like equality or sexism), right? It should help us see whether finding a gender-neutral pronoun is a step in the process of breaking down inequality or if it’s a necessity, depending on how deep in our minds sexism lies and the ways in which it is learned.

That wasn’t too confusing, was it? Am I grasping at straws here or applying too much meaning to aspects of language?

The idea of using language in a different way in order to eliminate inequality in society is very interesting, especially when it involves pronouns because of their necessity in language. Racist words, for example, could arguably be removed from the language, but pronouns can not. If we removed one, it would need to be replaced. And that’s where things get tricky.

In the comment, I mentioned a post about how teaching history as being one war after another may be perpetuating the importance of war in young students’ minds. So, while war was a major part of life and possibly even a necessity in the past, it doesn’t need to be anymore (and shouldn’t). But if we keep teaching history in the way we have been, we may be creating a future where war is a constant. Changing the curriculum may be able to stop this, but there is no denying that humans have (and probably always will have) the ability to be violent.

In a similar way, racist words have been a part of languages, but no longer need to be (and should have never been). Removing them may sound fine to some, but racism and its motivations run deeper than the language we use. Remove one racial epithet and you’re liable to end up with another one just as quick (assuming you could even remove a word from the language, which you can’t). And yet, teaching people to not use racist words goes a long way in teaching them to not be racist, simply by bringing the effects of such words to the forefront. We can’t remove the violent nature of humans or the importance of war in the past, but we can possibly change how war is viewed today, just like we can change how people of other races are viewed. And we can do it (at least partly) by changing the ways we use language.

But pronouns and their entanglement with sexism is a whole different beast. We can’t do without pronouns – gendered or not. We can, however, do without the sexist meanings attached to them. From experience, I have noticed that children have no trouble learning to use gendered or neutral pronouns. My son is a bilingual speaker of English (gendered third-person pronoun) and Finnish (gender neutral third-person). To the best of my knowledge, he is not a chauvinist. Then again, he’s only two. Later on, as his vocabulary grows, the third-person English pronouns that he uses will acquire more meaning as he differentiates between men and women more and is influenced by other speakers. This is where sexist or chauvinistic meaning may come into play. And this is why people have tried to use gender-neutral pronouns in English – in order to raise people that do not place so much weight on the differences (real or imaginary) between genders. A similar motivation inspires changing the teaching of history. And yet, adults are the ones who recognize the sexist meanings that our pronouns carry. Our vocabulary includes those meanings, the vocabulary of children does not. And using gender-neutral pronouns is not guaranteed to make people less sexist. As I said before, Finnish has a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun and Finns can be just as sexist and chauvinistic as English speakers (no offense, mun Finnish veljet). What I’m saying is that gender bias and sexist meanings are at play in Finnish society. So is it even worth using only gender-neutral pronouns around our children?

I think there are two ways in which it’s worth it. First, English speakers may be at an advantage when compared to Finnish speakers. If we were to use gender-neutral pronouns, we would be bringing the sexist nature of gendered pronouns to the forefront, much like not using racist words brings the ugly nature of them into people’s minds. In English, we can compare pronouns to lessen sexism in society. Presumably, Finnish speakers can not do this. How ridiculous would it be for them to invent gendered pronouns to compare to their non-gendered ones? But this learning by comparison requires speakers to have the knowledge of sexist meanings, which is something that children do not have. So in order to teach them why the words he or she are sexist, we must first teach them sexist notions of gender. And we’re right back to square one.

Or are we? Because the second reason I think such a debate is important is that experiments such as the teaching of gender-neutral pronouns to children may lead to a better understanding of how much of our biases come from nature and how much come from nurture – just like the changing of the history lesson might give insight into how violent humans really are or how much they need war. Of course, it may be that we can never know how ingrained our biases or desires are, but impossibility has never stopped science from trying before.

Sorry for the serious post. I’ll return to the mindless drivel that normally makes up this blog soon. Just had to get these thoughts out on paper and decided to share them. I’m interested in hearing what you, dear readers, have to say on this matter, especially if you can point me to certain studies or books that relate to it. I don’t know of any off the top of my head or have the time to look any up, but I’ll try to update this post as I come across them.