Semantic Compositions

Call me

Another Wall Street Journal story as inspiration today, this time on the travails of those who have quit on land-based phone lines in favor of using cell phones exclusively. The opening anecdote is a hysterical bit of serves-you-right schadenfreude:

As soon as she moved into her Chicago apartment two years ago, Erin Poole set up the security system, sending in the required form and establishing her password.

Then, whenever she left for a long weekend, the 27-year-old, who works in public relations, was sure to set the alarm and also tested that it worked from time to time. But one thing always struck her as odd: Why had the alarm company never called when the system went off?

Earlier this year, she got her answer. A notice arrived in the mail from the alarm company saying she needed a landline for the system to communicate with the company's monitoring center. Ms. Poole, like a growing number of people, had forgone a regular phone line and instead uses only a cellphone.

"I thought it was working the whole time," she says. "I felt pretty dumb."

Full disclosure: SC is a reasonably active cell phone user himself, but doesn't use it for web browsing, doesn't use it as an MP3 player or PDA, and hasn't spent a dime on downloading ring tones. He does use it as his primary means of placing and receiving phone calls, and has even been known to give it out as his business number (a good idea if you're rarely in your office), but the idea of not having a landline is simply incredible to him. The article lists some more problems (these are cut from different parts of the story):

For instance, not having a phone line can limit the availability of satellite television. The leading providers, News Corp.'s DirecTV Group Inc. and EchoStar Communications Corp.'s Dish Network, use phone lines to bill customers for access to premium services, like on-demand movies.

Jim Snider, a 47-year-old who works in risk management in Birmingham, Ala., recently had problems signing up for an American Airlines AAdvantage card from Citibank after moving last November and dropping his landline. After applying earlier this year, he received a rejection letter in May that read, "It is our policy that applicants must have a verifiable residential phone number. Please feel free to reapply in the future if a phone is obtained at your residence."

Until recently, most company-owned Domino's Pizza Inc. restaurants and many franchise stores wouldn't accept orders that didn't come from traditional landlines, because the chain's computer system couldn't match the caller's number to an address. The measure was intended to prevent prank calls and robberies of drivers. But over the past year, all 577 company-owned restaurants have started testing a system in which order-takers ask cellphone callers for their addresses, then call them back to ensure the proper phone number was given.

What's really going on here is a cultural shift in how we communicate. Wisecracks about "electronic leashes" have been around ever since pagers were invented, so this isn't actually a new trend so much as one which is finally hitting critical mass. Between the rise of PDAs, WiFi, cell phones, and two-way pagers, it's finally possible for a person to make very arbitrary decisions about where home is, or where the office is. And naturally, most people being prone to confuse the fact that something can be done with the idea that it should be done, almost noone will hesitate to use these things to contact you even at times or places which would never have been considered appropriate before. If SC went on vacation 7-8 years ago and somebody wanted to reach him, they'd have to leave a message at his hotel. Now, because he keeps the cell on in case of emergency while he's on the same trips, people who would never dream of turning a tour into a working vacation will happily call in the middle of what ought to be leisure activities, knowing full well that he's not really supposed to be working at the moment. Caller ID on cell phones can be used to screen out other people's inappropriate behavior, but only: 1) if they don't block it, 2) they're calling from a line you'd recognize anyway, and 3) you don't drop your cell phone and break the screen, rendering the service unusable ([confessing to something? -- ed.]).

Leaving aside the nuisances due to other people, though, the shift to cell phones really does represent a different way of thinking about speech acts. Beforehand, phone conversations were ritualized: certain assumptions could be safely made about where you were, and what appropriate discourse was. Speech could almost be considered a function of place: office talk at the office, sports at the bar, doing the dishes at home. This segmentation provided a world of useful benefits beyond speech conventions, because it was a reasonably secure way of confirming physical location, as witnessed by all the problems of the landline-free mentioned above. There could easily be breakdowns with it: SC's Vons Club card identifies him at the store as being the previous holder of his phone number (which tells you something about their database design), and 20 months after the fact, furious creditors still ring Chez SC in pursuit of that gentleman, despite the fact that when Mr. Deadbeat held the number, he didn't do so at SC's address. But for the most part, the system worked.

While SC is in the computer science business, and generally friendly to technological change, the cell phone shift is something he is not exactly sanguine about. Cutting the land line means that you can't ever forget to recharge your batteries. It means that you had better not have an emergency in a location with poor reception, so you had better not live in one. And it means never forgetting whether it's on or off.

Inevitably, cell phone usage will spread to the point where landlines won't be expected as identifying information, in order to avoid the howls of protest from people who imagine they're being persecuted for voluntarily choosing to withdraw from widely accepted conventions. Then we can get to really personal things, like social security numbers for everything, or maybe mandatory biometrics, presently required in civil society only to identify criminals. Won't that be wonderful?

As a side note about dialect, it's interesting to observe that the article consistently refers to the devices under discussion as cell phones (sometimes without the space), as do all of the end users interviewed -- but the industry spokespeople cited uniformly say "wireless phones". This attempt to rename phones not directly connected to the existing copper networks dates back to the introduction of digital transmission schemes, but strikes SC as unlikely to ever be accepted outside of phone company-speak. Your host can understand wanting to get rid of the negative connotations of analog cell phones, especially the spotty reception, but as far as he's concerned, "wireless" is what Guglielmo Marconi invented, and a "cell" is the phone in his pocket.

Something to declare

Here's one for Neal Whitman, from Jay Nordlinger's offbeat "Impromptus" column in National Review Online:

This mid-teenager is in France, for a month's stay. When he got there, he said to his father, via cellphone, "Dad, you don't know how much French I don't know."

But that's not the delicious part: He arrives at the airport and stands in the wrong customs line. He's in the line for those having something to declare. The customs official says, "So, you have something to declare?" The boy looks puzzled. The guy, more frustrated, says, "Do you have something to declare — a statement?" The boy thinks quickly, suspecting a trick, and says, "Long live France!"

What's in a name? Brand equity

In today's Wall Street Journal, there's an article on the annual Harris Interactive poll of "best brands". Since the article requires a subscription, we'll just reproduce the list, and then continue:

1. Sony 2. Coca-Cola 3. Dell 4. Kraft 5. Toyota 6. Ford 7. Honda 8. Procter & Gamble 9. General Electric 10. General Motors

The question that generated this list is simply: ""We would like you to think about brands or names of products and services you know. Considering everything, which three brands do you consider the best?". For completeness, here's the article's description of the polling technique:

Methodology: This poll was conducted online in the U.S. between June 10 and 16, 2004, among a nationwide cross section of 2,136 adults. Figures for age, sex, race, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online. In theory, with probability samples of this size, one could say with 95% certainty that the results have a sampling error of ±2 percentage points of what they would be if the entire adult population had been polled with complete accuracy.

Although SC is often critical of specific facts about advertising, this is ultimately what it's all about. Every name on that list conjures up a whole host of properties, a few of which might even accurately be ascribed to them. Having taken a number of marketing surveys as part of a regular panel of volunteers, it's not hard for your host to imagine some of the word associations thatmight come up: "trustworthy", "innovative", "reliable", "quality", "a good value". Every one of these associations is worth billions, and has been hard-won.

In many ways, it would be quite erroneous to confuse this list with representing companies that are the best at what they do. While Kraft is one of the world's largest producers of processed cheeses, even the most casual cheese eater would likely admit that the equally mass-production Tillamook or Land-O-Lakes cheddars taste better than Kraft 2% milk singles. For the price, though, you could easily do worse. And so it goes through a variety of categories: Dell is simply the lowest-cost assembler of mostly generic parts (the obvious exceptions being the processor and video card), Coca-Cola produces a drink that most people think is worth no more than 60 cents a serving, but is good enough that they'll hand over $2.00 in the right contexts, and as for General Electric's presence on this list, suffice it to say that the poll considers GE an electronics company, and they haven't even made any of the clocks, radios or TVs sold under their own name in years. It wouldn't be wrong to say that this list represents the world leaders in "good enough".

That's not to say that each of these companies hasn't demonstrated a capability to produce products which are world-class in other respects (nor should the manufacturing capabilities that allow such cheap mass production be dismissed as trivial accomplishments). One of the terms of art frequently used by marketers is the notion of a "halo" product, something incredible that gives the brand status on the assumption that everything else in the product line is somehow related to it. This is especially an issue in the automotive industry, which is why Ford resurrected the Thunderbird, and then decided to bring back the GT-40 when the new T-bird didn't quite live up to that role in the press. It's why Toyota needed to create Lexus, and why Honda created Acura. It's why Sony originally created their "ES" electronics, even though they then quickly brought them right back down to the manufacturing standards of their regular products. Not everyone needs a "halo"; Dell gets by just fine without one, but that's as much because nobody would have any idea what the difference was between a luxury computer and a regular one as anything about the company.

Another study which focuses more on specific products, and which also is considered to be a benchmark for positive name associations, is the annual J.D. Power vehicle dependability survey, the 2004 edition of which just came out a week and a half ago. In some ways, the methodology is absolute garbage: although the company collects more detailed data from consumers, the reported statistic is "problems per 100 vehicles", which aggregates transmission leaks, buttons that fall off the controls, and comsumer disappointment that they're not getting quite as high gas mileage as they expected into a single nebulous category (a fact which explains Hummer's perennial ranking at the bottom of the initial quality survey). The results demonstrate that "dependability" is only really a factor in reputation for brands which have little else to go on. Lexus tops the most recent list, BMW is only slightly above average, and Mercedes-Benz is far below average, and yet the evidence from annual sales indicate that consumers are willing to in fact tolerate a lot more of the same problems out of the German brands listed here than they will out of domestic Lincolns or Cadillacs. The associations of other positive properties with the BMW propeller or the Mercedes star -- better performance, more luxurious interiors -- don't even have to be true at present because of the enormous contributions of history and advertising to the meanings of the names.

The problem with studies like these is that what's being measured is very slippery. In the case of J.D. Power studies, "problems" clearly have very little correlation with brand prestige, and fare only somewhat better in relation to sales rankings. And the Harris question provides absolutely no basis for justifying the opinions expressed by the people being surveyed. But these facts merely help us to understand that the relationship between experience and language is complicated. Is Sony better at cranking out CD players than Coca-Cola is at making soda? SC would wager that the people who ranked them 1-2 have no idea how they would answer that question, and might not even recognize that they had made such a statement. Similarly, statistical evidence of the sort found in the J.D. Power survey appears to have no impact whatsoever to people who insist on the superior quality of imported over domestic vehicles. Advertising and the historical experience of the 1980s are adequate to maintain those associations well after the facts that supported them have changed. Somewhere within the complicated mix of experience and advertising lies an opportunity to make a name as valuable as the products themselves, and the Harris poll shows that, this year, Sony has done it better than anyone.

In principle

Some time ago, commenting on SC's writings about Camille Paglia, Mark Liberman introduced your host to the genre of Radio Yerevan jokes, which go like so:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.

SC couldn't help but be reminded of that upon the occasion of seeing this transcript of CNN's Aaron Brown, discussing the selection of John Edwards as the Democratic VP nominee:

We begin tonight with a confession: I dated John Edwards' wife. Well, not dated like plural, dated like singular. We went out to dinner. Well, we didn't actually go out to dinner. We went to a dinner, just the two of us -- and 2,000 other people.

It was one of those correspondents dinners in Washington where you get all gussied up in a tux and pretend to enjoy yourself, and she was my date. Everyone brings a date to these things. Greta brought Ozzy Osbourne, but I'm not that cool, so I asked Mrs. Edwards.

Again, not exactly linguistically salient., but: Ozzy Osbourne and Greta van Susteren are both married to other people (SC has no idea about Mr. Brown's marital status). Is there some kind of rule that to go to these dinners, you have to look like you're cheating?

How the Russians invented baseball

SC was 14 when the Cold War ended, and so, despite having decent recall of the 1980s, he was still confused when he read this offhand comment by Mark Liberman:

Chervel's essay is an instance of a familiar European hand-wringing type. It's reminiscent in some ways of American political self-loathing, but a closer analogy might be traditional American "missile gap" or "Japanese challenge" jeremiads. Or the old Soviet propaganda about how it was Russians who invented baseball, ice cream and electricity.

Russians inventing baseball? It's true that Abner Doubleday didn't actually do it, but the idea that baseball was a Russian game first was just too silly for SC to believe. However, since it's a real slow linguistics day for your host, and watching baseball is about the best use of SC's time that he can imagine for 6 months of the year ([AHEM -- Mrs. SC]), it seemed like it might be fun to track this down.

A quick search on Google turned up the word "lapta" within the first page, as well as a book of satirical essays by U.S. News columnist John Leo, called How the Russians Invented Baseball and Other Essays of Enlightenment. Lapta turns out to have some fairly strange rules:

Russians would divide into teams of five to ten players on a natural field. One player would throw a ball toward a member of the other side, who would try to hit it with a lapta stick and then run to the opposite side and back before the thrower's team could retrieve the ball and hit him with it. "Games resembling lapta, such as cricket and baseball, also exist in a number of foreign countries," notes an old Soviet encyclopedia.

SC has no idea what's going on in cricket games, but is pretty sure that the batter (or is it "batsman"?) spends some time running back and forth after hitting the ball. There certainly are visible similarities, but that hardly proves that baseball or cricket was actually copied from lapta. As for the encyclopedia mention, the closest that SC could come to verifying it was this secondhand citation:

According to the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3 p.43), the American game of baseball is closely related to the Russian game lapta. Other "varieties of baseball" apparently include softball (which is popular in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), cricket and pesäpallo in Finland.

Your host had a good chuckle over this fanciful essay, which imagines that Leon Trotsky was a frustrated lapta player who could have had a successful baseball career. As a story idea, it's not entirely original; the claim that Fidel Castro failed at a baseball career has been floating around for years, but it's not true. SC would love to know if there was ever any parallel fiction in the Soviet Union, perhaps suggesting that JFK or Ronald Reagan never would have opposed them if they had been successful at lapta.

Apparently, the idea that Russians invented baseball still has some cachet in Russia; this 2003 article from an English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg suggests they're not over it yet.

Literal-Minded

SC doesn't know how he missed it, but Neal Whitman has broken free of guest-blogging at his brother Glen's Agoraphilia, and started a new linguistics-focused blog called "Literal-Minded". Neal has been writing on some of SC's favorite topics, including autism and pragmatics. That last one is especially poignant to SC, because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing he does all the time.

Best of luck, Neal, and up on the blogroll you go.

Sincerely, Nobody

Over the weekend, Mr. and Mrs. SC took the opportunity to go shopping for a new coffee table. Despite a general tendency to overthink any purchase which materially changes the appearance of Chez SC, we managed to come to agreement surprisingly quickly, and ordered said new table yesterday.

Before going on with the rest of this story, an important caveat. At no time during the shopping process did we prevail on a salesman from the store we ultimately bought the table from for help. This matters because we ultimately ordered the table through the store's website, where they were charging less for the same table. Your host feels very strongly that it is unethical to make demands on a salesman's time and then deprive him of a commission (assuming you intend to buy whatever it was they spent the time demonstrating to you).

In any event, since SC wasn't assisted by a salesman at the store, he left the field on the order form blank requesting the name of any salesman who did provide service. Thus, he was quite amused by the e-mail that showed up today:

Thank you for allowing me to help you with your recent purchase from Levitz Furniture. It was a pleasure assisting you, and I hope your selection brings you years of pleasure. We stand behind our commitment to excellence and make every effort to assure that our customers are satisfied with their choice and their shopping experience. If you have any questions regarding your purchase, or need further sales assistance, call me at (number removed).

After this, a number of links follow in case there are any other questions, and the e-mail concludes with: "Sincerely, (blank space) Levitz Sales Associate".

SC isn't silly enough to believe that order confirmation e-mails are all personally composed by individuals at the retailer end of the transaction, but this is a gross sort of oversight. It's at least mildly disconcerting to read a purportedly personal message that makes repeated references to "me", when "me" doesn't happen to actually refer to a specific individual. There's also something more than a bit insincere about a note signed "sincerely", but with no name. A little common sense is all that's really needed here, not a sophisticated consulting job from a linguist (although SC is available at a specially discounted $200/hour corporate consulting rate). Just put together an alternate e-mail message that goes out when no salesman is credited, and it wouldn't feel so much like the note is coming from the Ghost Host.

While we're on the topic, when did the name "coffee table" get replaced by the name "cocktail table" for what appears to be functionally the same piece of furniture?

Pay no attention to the club card behind the curtain

SC has remarked before on the totemic status of linguistic objects; the truth is, though, that for almost anything one can imagine, someone will make it an object of worship. Two thousand years ago, human beings worshiped idols. In the eighteenth century, some of them decided to start worshipping abstract reason instead, and commandeered a cathedral for that purpose. A few years ago, it was demonstrated to SC's satisfaction that we now worship coupons instead.

This isn't entirely as flip as it sounds. The study linked to above is one of many demonstrating that consumers actually prefer the tedious task of searching through advertising sections, clipping coupons, and waiting for the cashier to scan them, to simply receiving lower prices in the store. All sorts of complicated economic models have been proposed to explain this behavior, but your host thinks that it's simply a matter of human beings as creatures of habit. We've always clipped coupons; why shouldn't we always clip coupons? If SC was pressed to advance a more serious theory to explain this preference, it would be a matter of rewards given for tasks. Perhaps some sort of psychological satisfaction is derived from getting a discount as a reward for finding and turning in the coupon; combined with the sense that this somehow means that one is coming out ahead of those who value their time over the marginal pennies (yes, I know they can add up, but any one coupon is still grossly inefficient), the psychological value of coupons outweighs the time cost of using them.

This fact about coupons applies largely to individual manufacturers; the price incentives offered by stores to shop at one of them as opposed to another don't really depend on any one product. Instead, it's necessary to build a reputation as standing out in some category in order to attract customers. For most stores, this means coming up with some slogan like "the low price leader", but it's also possible to successfully compete on a reputation for better quality or a broader selection. In the cases where stores choose to compete on price, they're then faced with the question of how to deliver the perceived savings. Over the last decade, this has resulted in the rise of the "club card" (all the while protesting that this is not like Costco, BJ's, or Sam's Club).

Club cards raise concerns about privacy, as the persistent association of bar codes with individuals allows the gathering of extensive data on each person's buying habits. So while some national chains (Ralph's, Kroger, Vons, to name a few) adopted club cards early on, and promoted them as the means to certain getting additional discounts not available merely with coupons, other chains (particularly Albertson's) made their lack of cards a point of pride.

However, club cards have become as much a part of the shopping experience as coupons, and so earlier this year, Albertson's simply pretended their prior anti-card advertising never happened, and introduced their own card. Local California chain Stater Brothers held out, or so it seemed, until this week.

That's when SC went to his nearest Stater Brothers, and saw the most remarkable sign: "Stater Brothers -- Savings without a club card. Pick up your new Stater Brothers key tag today!". The program is so new that SC can't provide an Internet link, but your host assures you that it is exactly like all the others: a bar code which allows long-term tracking of individual buying habits in exchange for price concessions.

Of course, every other club card that SC has is issued in two forms: as a card to sit inside wallets, and as a tag to put on keychains. Your host is rather amused at the linguistic sleight-of-hand involved: by referring to it as a "key tag", they're hoping you won't notice that it is, in all ways that matter, a club card. The term of art that applies here is "semantic bleaching", the gradual loss of some semantic feature from a word's meaning, and what the Stater Brothers marketers are hoping is that they can make customers accept a club card by removing the psychological negativity associated with the term. Unless they're sitting on market research showing that Stater Brothers gained meaningful market share every time a competitor introduced a club card, this seems like a fairly silly project.

Only in America

The proverbial line about things being characteristically American is to compare them to "mom, baseball, and apple pie". It wouldn't be much further off to add Fourth of July barbeques to that list, and it's perhaps almost descending into parody to mention that we like them big.

Thus, while there's no linguistic hook, SC can't resist mentioning the annual Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs barbeque (if they're not famous to you, you probably haven't been to Coney Island or New York City more generally), an event for the 4th that celebrates speed-eating as well as the tradition of grilling.

Perhaps surprisingly, a Japanese man named Takeru Kobayashi has a stranglehold on the contest, having now won four in a row. Kobayahi has a gift of sorts -- a frequent champion of sanctioned speed-eating, he's also famous for eating nearly 18 pounds of cow brains at one sitting.