Semantic Compositions

Wedding bell blues

Many blogs pick names based on their focus ([or at least their authors do it for them -- ed.]), which leads to names like Language Log, Semantic Compositions, and AndrewSullivan.com (SC takes a back seat to nobody in his appreciation of AS, except for the man himself). Lately, your host could understand if readers feel that he should change this site to be Wedding Bells ([how about "Ding Dong""? -- ed.]), and he'll get off of it soon, really, he promises, but he has to bring this up.

D.F. Moore writes of not being invited to bring dates to weddings. I had intended to merely defend the right of the couple to not do so, but ended up bringing a whole host of references into it, and it turned into a post-length comment (as Dan noted in his gracious reply). Therefore, even though it's very much off-topic, my comments (minus some material relevant only in context) are reprinted below. If you feel like seeing them in toto, as well as Dan's reply, go here.

My wife and I were married in a synagogue, and held the reception there as well. It wasn't in a nightmarishly expensive area like Beverly Hills, although we did investigate that possibility as well, so what follows goes double if we had. The economics go something like this:

Band or DJ: $2k at the low end, but more like $5k for a decent band
Photographer: $2-3k depending on photos ordered
Videographer: similar to photographer
Facility fee: anywhere from $1k for a religious setting at a place in a non-expensive neighborhood to $10-15k for a Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons type of hotel
Florist: $500-1k to decorate the ceremony, $50-100 per table
Food: Minimally $30/person; if a nice place, more like $50-75. If kosher, add a $5/head penalty relative to an otherwise identical menu.

[Additional disclaimer not in original: these prices reflect economic reality in Southern California as of 2002. Your mileage may vary in other regions, and by time of year.]

So there are some pretty high fixed costs regardless of who comes, but unless you throw a cheap event, extra guests who don't know the bride/groom, and aren't likely to be part of even their friend's lives in the future, are a burden. Aside from that, I'm not aware of any wedding I've been to or discussed with other couples that hasn't been space/finance constrained. It's hard to say, "yes, let's cut some of our nearest and dearest so that my friends can have dates with strangers". It's true that it's a bit tacky for the couple to calculate whether or not guests have "paid adequately" (for the record, I would consider a wedding that was "profitable" to be insulting to the guests), but a bit of sensitivity is called for, I think. If you want to have your friends pay for your dates, at least be aware of the size of the gift you're asking them to give you.

Aside from anything economic, though, I figured I should look up what actual etiquette experts had to say, since I last consulted such works about 2 1/2 years ago. Anita Diamant and Helen Latner's books on Jewish weddings don't address the "and guest" issue, at least not in the editions I've got (not the most recent in Latner's case). Colin Cowie's secular wedding book, "For the Groom", states "it is socially appropriate to invite an unmarried, unattached person without adding 'and guest'...if a single person is on the guest list and you know he or she is seeing someone seriously, it is thoughtful to invite both". Peggy Post, daughter of Emily Post (who literally wrote The Book on this sort of thing), also calls it "not required". iVillage's wedding advice columnists also say about this situation that "the bride and groom did nothing wrong". The Knot's columnist is a bit more nuanced, but I don't think she'd agree that they did anything wrong (if/when you get married, The Knot will ruin your inbox, so pick the address you give them carefully). Here's another wedding planner with an advice site who also agrees, albeit one I didn't make use of at the time. I found a few more on the web that I hadn't consulted before, but I won't keep pasting them because there's nothing different. Suffice it to say that etiquette experts don't think it's rude not to invite "and guests".

I am mystified, however, by the reply of Will Baude at Crescat Sententia. He complains that "putting 'and guest' on an invitation is very rude". While he adduces a couple of quotes from Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, in support of this claim, it's not at all clear that she supports the extreme position that he seems to be taking: that if you're going to invite somebody to bring a date, you have to tell them far enough in advance that they can figure out who they're bringing so that you can send an invitation to that person by name. Unless they're living together (in which case you'd hope you knew that by the time you sent the invitation), that would be rather tacky in itself, assuming you put both names on one envelope. Perhaps Miss Manners' position -- and Mr. Baude's -- is actually that one should only be inviting significant others, and not generic others, but that's not laid out explicitly. Miss Manners and Mr. Baude are the only two people I've read now that think that writing "and guest" is actually rude, though -- that's a considerably different position from "not required".

Just as I was about to post this, in a follow-up post, Mr. Baude appeals to the desirability of having etiquette authorities, and notes that Miss Manners' particular opinions are not necessarily dispositive. This is good, because he also makes clearer that his position really is extreme. Admittedly, I've never been invited as someone's date to a wedding, but I don't really understand how a person who was called up and told "I've been invited to a wedding; would you like to be my date?" could really claim to take offense. In a situation like that, it's not the case that the host "can't take the trouble to learn their names", it's that he's offering a friend the gift of an evening out with a date (and as I demonstrated above, it really is a gift). Someone called up and informed of this circumstance ought not have any illusions that the host is trying to comemmorate his relationship with them. Fortunately, English contains a word which perfectly captures the nature of someone who goes ahead and takes offense anyway in this situation -- hypersensitive.

Gorked

Yesterday, Mrs. SC came home quite irritated over a new development at the hospital she presently works at. She's spending the month doing inpatient pediatrics, which tends to mean three things: 1) kids with severe/chronic illnesses, 2) kids who have been in accidents, and 3) victims of child abuse.

It's that last category that we're going to take a second to focus on. Mrs. SC is at one of the larger hospitals in our area right now, and states that there are 4 teams attending to patients in the pediatrics ward. Each team gets an abuse victim who needs to be checked in every week, so at 4 per week, that's over 200 kids a year. And the cases they see are just the ones where the parents know that the children might die if not attended to.

For example, a 2 month old baby that was brought in yesterday, with the parents claiming that it had fallen out of a carseat proved to have not only a dislocated leg, but a broken thigh and three fractured ribs. While the leg dislocation is plausibly explained by the story, and perhaps even the thigh, SC is informed that the rib injuries are far more consistent with shaking the baby than with the other explanation. Further indicating this was the presence of bruises spaced as would be expected if grabbed by human hands about the sides.

Another baby seen yesterday has a half-paralyzed face, and has limbs contorted into various highly unnatural positions, which tend to change only when the baby has seizures. This occurred as the result of being strangled by the umbilical cord, causing grossly inadeuate flow of oxygen to the brain, and resulting in the death of crucial neurons. In the best case, the child will grow up like any other victim of cerebral palsy, able to function normally, but treated poorly by people who mistake the physical symptoms for retardation. In the worst case, the child will fail to resume normal development, and will end up permanently institutionalized.

It's hard not to cry when confronted with the viciousness of supposedly human beings towards someone so helpless and innocent. Or with the sort of cruel accidents that leave a child scarred for life from the very beginning. Unfortunately, perhaps as a defense mechanism, some of the medical personnel have taken quite a different tack. What brought Mrs. SC home upset was that for the first time, she was introduced to the word "gorked". Originally, it was apparently slang for someone who was anesthetized, but it now is used to refer to someone with brain damage, or who has been significantly mangled; one personal account of hearing it applied to loved ones can be found here. The problem with it is not so much that there is a slang term for these conditions, but that, as attested by Mrs. SC, it's used in a derisive fashion to joke about the patients.

Slang is something which inevitably arises in just about any field of endeavor. The computing field is particularly rich in that regard. However, there is hardly any reason that slang should be wholly incompatible with etiquette, or at least some very basic human compassion. SC is sure there's some sociolinguistic work out there -- not that he's familiar with it -- examining the correlation between slang terms and social distance, respect, or other ways of defining attitude. It's not hard to understand how "gorked" might have come up as shorthand, if only because "anesthetized" and "brain-damaged" both are formal and not conducive to casual speech (if there's any sound symbolism, it's lost on your host, but he's not expert in this area) -- but that's not at all a reason to stop trying to empathize with patients, or to treat them with something less than human dignity.

Ergophobia

SC has long been a big fan of Dilbert, but since he doesn't subscribe to a print newspaper, sometimes forgets to check it out on a daily basis. Having just read it, your host thinks the strip from Wednesday, June 2nd is worth linking to.

In it, SC's hero Wally demonstrates that, like SC, he likes to discover new words. Since all Dilbert links go bad after 30 days, the key word is "ergophobia".

Fake dialogues with fake people

SC prides himself on a certain amount of Internet savvy. More than a few books and recordings in the SC collection have been bought entirely through Internet-based transactions. The wedding trip? Booked online. Ditto for a cruise and trip to Jamaica last summer. Not all SC commerce is conducted online (he'll never buy a car that way), but enough of it is to recognize some patterns. This one is especially annoying:

Some companies doing business with SC feel obliged to create human faces for themselves, "signing" e-mails with names and job titles of people who are completely fictional.

For example, since 1999, SC has regularly taken online market surveys administered by this company. Although some very nominal compensation is involved, your host is mostly just interested in taking them to get insight into how other people think they can manipulate opinions. Truly, some of the polls are a garden of linguistic delights, trying (for example) to get the subject to endorse the idea that a cardboard box for beer bottles will not only perform a useful function, but will make the beer somehow taste better, and the carrier look more hip and with it ([a phrasing which shows that you're not -- ed.]).

In order to coax SC to take these polls, communications from the company are all wrapped in the guise of originating from a mildly attractive woman in her late-30s named "Lauren", a set of biographical/physical facts themselves likely to have been selected through focus group testing. In the 6 years that your host's been at these things, her picture has never changed once (or rather pictures; they show several different poses on different pages of the site). Even the lowest-budget online magazines that feature pictures of contributors update every year or two. Not having ever had any customer-service issues, SC can't say if e-mails requesting help are answered by "Lauren", but he strongly doubts that she's anything more than some clip art and a few templates for e-mail messages.

Another person SC is convinced doesn't exist goes by the name "Chris Monroe", purported to be an "online travel advisor" working for Travelocity. Every 2-3 weeks -- and substantially more often if SC's got an upcoming trip -- e-mail arrives with some offer or other "signed" in a vague, cursive-like squiggly line which is theoretically Mr. Monroe's signature. Oddly for a real human being, Mr. Monroe never answers replies to his e-mail, suggesting further that he occupies that ontological realm where Pegasus and the present King of France have been dwelling for quite some time now.

Assuming that neither of these people are anything more than friendly faces designed to make advertising look personal, the question of why this is necessary arises. SC will take a wild leap of faith and guess that the web browser the reader used to get to this page does not include such a chatty, fake-person user interface, and yet it was no obstacle to having a look around. Despite the fact that Macintosh computers smile at the user when turned on (at least in OS 8, still used by Mom SC), neither those machines (nor Windows) go to such great lengths to act as though they had human personalities, the laughable Microsoft Office Assistants excepted. For that matter, when Microsoft tried to bolt a friendly, human-like interface onto Windows, it was an unmitigated disaster.

SC has done some work on user interfaces, specifically in the context of designing a natural-language search engine ("building" would be too strong a description for the status of the project when it was snuffed out by management). While the amount of resources available to study user preferences for interacting with the system was limited, it doesn't take a genius -- or even your host -- to figure out that people like Google's interface, which is the opposite of chatty, human-centered, and anything else that describes dialogue. A coworker who SC esteems quite highly argues that we don't treat computers anthropomorphically because they don't look the part, but that we'll want to deal that way with robots if they ever get at least to the C-3PO stage, or at least Number 5. Or even ASIMO. Which makes all of this work by the companies discussed above to pretend that you're dealing with humans quite silly in the here and now.

Is political discourse that bad?

I had been working on this one before leaving for the trip. Rather than update all the time expressions, I've simply finished it.

A few days ago, Rachel Shallit lamented the knee-jerk nature of political discourse, and comments that "There is no real analytical thought involved in the process. It's just the opposing sets of prejudices allowed to spew hate at one another." Since Rachel was clearly nervous about attracting flames, SC decided to refrain from commenting. But that's different from saying that your host had no opinion, and given the fact that talk about one politician in particular has suddenly become hot at Language Log [or at least was at the moment; see here and here] here's the official SC position on political discourse. But first, a personal statement:

From the beginning, I've tried to keep Semantic Compositions a nonpartisan blog, which is very different from saying that I'm nonpartisan or apolitical. It's just that, as I wrote early on, "opinions are like indices; everybody has one". Since there are enough blogs about opinions, but not yet enough about indices, I figured that it would be easiest to take on political topics only when some linguistic point or cheap joke could be made (the only mention of John Kerry is here; George W. Bush has been mentioned here, and here, both apolitically -- politically here, but in a nonpartisan fashion). When I've referenced overtly political publications (such as this discussion of repeated determiners or this one about April Fool's jokes), I've tried very hard to keep the numbers balanced, and keep anything that might be interpreted as a cue to my views out. Having said that, I've also taken on some more overtly political topics lately, and will be continuing to do so in the near future (there's still more to say on bilingualism, language policy, and national security). Rachel wrote that "whenever I hear or read political speech, I can almost always tell which camp the speaker belongs to, even if the statement isn't that politically charged", and I would extend this to say that most people probably feel the same way. Judging by the fact that I've gotten no feedback in comments or e-mail taking me to task from either side, I think I've done a pretty good job dealing with this issue.

With my own politics out of the way, I'm simultaneously both very optimistic and very pessimistic about political discourse in America. First, the pessimistic case. Rachel is discouraged that American politics is dominated by "the adversarial spirit, the 10-second sound-bite politics", and there's certainly plenty of that to go around. I suspect that if one was to go hit up Lexis/Nexis and do a search on "red meat" in newswire stories, the frequency doubles in off-presidential election years, and maybe doubles again in presidential years (it certainly seemed to be the phrase du jour in 2000 political reporting). Visits to both the Republican and Democratic National Committee websites show that they both lead with fairly personal attacks, rather than positive messages about the candidates' agendas (the candidate websites are a bit better in this regard; perhaps it's best to divide the work a bit, so as not to overtly associate the negative style with the candidates). This is just the nice, official side of political discourse; for real venom, it's easy to go find things like "Bush or Chimp?", or the "Clinton Body Count". If the phrase "black helicopters" means anything to you, then you know I've hardly scraped the bottom of the political speech barrel. Rachel also expresses concerns that the two major bodies of opinion are no longer listening to each other, a point which would seem to be borne out by this graph of books bought by the same people.

Now, the optimistic case. How bad can it be when two of the most respected magazines of political opinion, on opposite sides of the aisle, can get together to launch a wonderfully civil point-counterpoint website to present their views? As for whether or not the shrillness is emblematic of something deeper, I'll offer the hypothesis that iit's due to the needs of political organizations, more than it is to any coarsening of the culture. I spent a bit longer than I really wanted to looking for voter registration data, with no success, so I'm not going to provide any hard data here, but my understanding is that both parties have got somewhere around 1/3 of the vote locked up as their "base", and that with turnout having stabilized around 50% of eligible citizens (and about 60-65% of registered voters), a certain amount of shrillness and hysteria is needed to scare the bases into turning out for voting. The fact that political ads can be quite nasty is therefore more a function of the fact that so many people choose not to participate in the voting process than it is of any inherent evil in politics (which is not to say it's all sweetness and light).

As for the community of linguists, I feel that the field has generally been pretty good about keeping politics separate from academic work and professional opinion. Geoff Pullum is no fan of George Bush, and by his own admission isn't afraid to inject a few partisan"should"s into classroom teaching, but he's also above giving professional imprimatur to shots about Bush's pronunciation "issue", as he demonstrates here. Mark Liberman has been a literal "army of one" on the subject of Bushisms as well (and this story of his sets a tone we would all do well to emulate). Not all writing by linguists on politics has been so free of tendentiousness, though; this article by George Lakoff has long struck me as an egregious misuse of otherwise solid research (so says me) to bolster his political views. I'm not much more of a fan of the book.

Finally, as a matter of lexical semantics, a commenter at Rachel's site identifying himself as "your uncle" (I assume Jeffrey Shallit, who has been so identified before), writes:

I think we *do* know from experience that certain forms of government are superior to others, in the sense that they guarantee more happiness and prosperity for more people. (Of course, if one doesn't think these are desirable goals, then we can't advance past square one.) I think we *do* know now that societies that respect individual rights, that provide for due process, that allow citizens to choose their representatives, work better than those that do not.

I respect the intuition being advanced here, but I would argue that "we" know no such thing. Why? Because many of us disagree on what many of these things mean. The last one, about choosing representatives, isn't subject to terribly much argument anymore -- but it did take about 180 years to reach that point. As for what constitutes "due process", we have quite an argument going on at the moment (please, no comments attempting to settle this point) over the extent to which various categories of people held as military prisoners are entitled to access to our civilian legal system. The argument is complicated, and turns on questions involving the rules of evidence (which could potentially compromise intelligence-gathering techniques), the interpretation of treaties (particularly whether or not the Geneva Conventions do, or should, apply to people not fighting as army regulars), and the interpretation of our own Constitution (which addresses treason, but doesn't lay down explicit guidelines for the situation of a Jose Padilla). Perhaps it would be better to say that we agree on a right to due process, but we have strenuous disagreements over what that means. Personally, I feel that the public airing of these disagreements is a healthy thing. Rachel's objection strikes me as more of a lament about partisanship, which does tend to obscure the fundamental disagreements under layers of namecalling. Which isn't to say that it's pleasant to hear regular denunciations of various people as ready to do everything up to and including eating babies for breakfast, but at least many of the people who engage in that sort of talk know deep down that there really is a distinction between ideas and party membership.

English trivia

A friend sends along this link to a page of trivia about things like letter ordering, and using all the possible pronunciations of some sequence (like "-ough") in a sentence. The sources are all footnoted, but not necessarily all reliable.

Watch this

Another amusing anecdote from SC's trip actually predates his adventures in Fair Park. On the way to Dallas, your host flew through Las Vegas ([where he also dropped $15 on the way back, low-roller that he is -- ed.]); during the course of his time in the airport, he was introduced to the wares of a company called OurVersions. Like many companies in the business of hawking trinkets to distracted and bored tourists, OurVersions specializes in the gimmick of offering what are purported to be reliable imitations of products selling for more from famous brand names. However, they offer a unique twist on this game which relies on a psycholinguistic trick.

When selling imitations of perfumes, the company is on safe ground saying things like "Inspired by Carolina Herrera" or "Inspired by Poison", because the line "inspired by" gets them off the hook for any sort of trademark violation. The alternate names provided are designed to sound like the names of the well-known products in question, but there's clearly enough differentiation to survive any sort of legal challenge.

Fake watches, however, are a different story. No small part of the prestige of a watch comes from the fact that the name is often (not to say always) plainly visible somewhere on the face or band. The Rolex crown commands a considerable premium, as does the Ulysse Nardin anchor, the Omega Greek letter, or the TAG Heuer shield. Reproduction of these names or their accompanying logos would be, to put it mildly, illegal. (Here's an interesting guide to spotting fake Rolexes; apparently, fakes have their own hobbyist culture, with elaborate grading schemes and things that only a connoisseur would know to look for.)

In any event, the OurVersions folks aren't looking to break any laws, but they still need a way to make their customers think they're putting a fast one over on more expensive watch brands (and their retailers). So they advise their customers to compare their watches to "famous name designers" like "Gianvianca", "Nicollé", "Courtier", "Artifacts", "M. Röthchild", "Ricci" and a few others SC didn't bother to write down.

The joke is, not one of these is the name of any company which could reasonably be construed as manufacturing a famous watch brand. However, "Courtier" sounds like "Cartier", "Artifacts" might be reminiscent of "Fossil", and "Ricci" could lure the unsuspecting into mistaking it for either "Gucci" or cosmetics name "Nina Ricci" (which is licensed out for real designer watches).

So what OurVersions' display racks are relying on is the possibility that, given a relatively inattentive observer, spelling or phonetic cues will fool them into thinking that a fake designer name is actually a real one. Psycholinguists (not "psycho linguists") have something to say about this; in a model like this one by Mark Seidenberg and Laura Gonnerman (see also Prof. Seidenberg's extensive publications list, for plenty of further elaboration), the fact that both spelling and pronunciation cues are presented by these fake names ought to be enough to at least stimulate the thought of real designer names. This isn't to say that all psycholinguists would agree that this trick should work; the influential (albeit rather outdated) Cohort and TRACE models would likely predict that the differences are great enough that almost nobody would bite it, especially in cases where there's no sound similarity (like "Artifacts" vs. "Fossil"). Readers who may not have much familiarity with psycholinguistics, but recognize the Steven Pinker brand name in popular psychology might wish to get ahold of this position paper that he wrote for Science; suffice it to say that Pinker probably also would dismiss the possibility that the OurVersions people are onto something. (For the record, his examples all deal with verb morphology, but the model he proposes, and still defends today, denies that bundles of phonetic/orthographic/meaning cues could retrieve words only vaguely related to what's heard.)

SC couldn't help but feel that he had missed an opportunity when he saw this one. In order to drive site traffic, your host should have come up with a name that advertises how he might be compared to Famous Brand Name language bloggers. So maybe this site will reopen shop someday as Lingualog or Conversation Chapeaux.

Inflectin' Texan

As promised, it's Tuesday and we're back in business.

SC was at a wedding in Dallas this weekend, where he had the distinct privilege of serving as a groomsman to a friend he's known for nearly a decade. Since the affair was held on Saturday, this gave your host a bit of time to wander around Dallas on Sunday, which he happily did along with Mrs. SC, as well as Radagast and SO. Our travels took us to Fair Park, a Dallas landmark constructed in 1936 as the home of the Texas Centennial Central Exposition. The centerpiece of Fair Park (aside from the Cotton Bowl) is a wonderful building called the Hall of State. Inside, one can find murals depicting the history of the state, artifacts from the original Indian settlements through the Spanish missions, all the way up to Texas' annexation to the Union -- and at least two ways, other than "Texan", to inflect the word "Texas" to form a new word meaning "having the property of being from/associated with Texas".

Chronologically, the first form appears to be a coinage due to an early tourbook, and popularized by Mirabeau Lamar, president of the Texas Republic which existed in the interim between independence from Mexico and accession to the Union. It's Texian, and despite the latter link's apparent claim that it's in some way an Anglicization of Tejano, it looks to SC as though it was derived by analogy to other "-ian"s, like "Norwegian", "Virginian", and "Californian". Given that two of those end in "ia" in their non-inflected forms, it's an odd derivation from "Texas", especially since "-an" has a pretty good claim to being the underlying orthographic form for the English morpheme that adds the "having the property of being from X" meaning. With no "y" to be spelled as an "i" in this form (contrast with Kentucky/Kentuckian), "Texian" is rather anomalous, so SC isn't surprised it died out.

The second form is even rarer, and appears to have been used only once, in a law passed by the Texas legislature to commission the design and construction of the Hall of State. Noted on the plaque at the entry to the hall is the following text (see link here; it's row 4 of the spreadsheet):

Construction of this building, which served as the focal point of the 1936 Texas Centennial Central Exposition, was approved by the State Legislature to be "Texanic in proportion and centennial in character." Designed by a team of Dallas architects, it is built of native Texas materials with ornamental representations of commerce and history. Completed during the 1930s Depression, it is one of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in Texas. [emphasis added]

SC loves this one: "Texanic" is morphologically redundant (the "-ic" serves the same function as "-an", so far as your host can tell), but it carries the sound of "titanic" as well. This fits beautifully with Texas' reputation for being a big place, where everything is a bit larger than life. It's very much a current notion, with some amusing evidence from Google:

"Texas sized": 19,800 hits
"California sized": 755 hits
"Alaska sized": 327 hits
"Montana sized": 282 hits
"New Mexico sized": 14 hits

"as big as Texas": 5,030 hits
"as big as Alaska": 688 hits
"as big as California": 589 hits
"as big as Montana": 138 hits
"as big as New Mexico": 13 hits

Why these 5 states? They're the 5 biggest by total area. Many of the hits for the four non-Texas states aren't used as idioms, just as straight comparisons. It's only Texas that has a unique hold on the American imagination as meaning "big", and so if something is meant to be really big ([aside from Priceline -- William Shatner, filling in for the editor]), it's fitting that it be not merely Texas-sized, but Texanic.

[Edited at 12:49 a.m. on 6/1/04 to correct typographical errors]