Semantic Compositions

Is pseudonymy fair?

Although there's no good way to verify it, writing under a pseudonym has probably been around for just a little less time than writing at all. The Internet makes it unusually easy to publish your work, with or without a name, but also provides more ways to yank the mask off than just about any previous publication format.

This lesson was learned very painfully by Rob Neyer over the last week, which SC only learned about by reading this press release (and then this article on Neyer's infrequently updated personal site).

As Neyer's version of events makes clear, it all started when he wanted to write a negative review of a baseball book on Amazon, but not damage the writer excessively by lending the review the full prestige of his 8 years as a columnist for ESPN.com. So he picked a pseudonym -- "Ike Farrell" -- and proceeded to trash the book under that name. However, Amazon provides a way to find out the real names of reviewers who aren't smart devious enough to lie when registering, and so he was quickly exposed by a reporter for New York Newsday. There is a side story that merits additional consideration on the reliability of Amazon reviews -- Neyer probably wouldn't have been outed had he not felt compelled to respond to some clearly fraudulent positive reviews planted by friends/relatives of the author (which the Newsday reporter could verify in at least one case). Amazon apparently also has an editorial bias in favor of removing negative reviews, but not positive ones, which isn't terribly surprising to hear. On the subject of Amazon reviews, check out this review of a book by an Amazon insider who was around at the beginning and attests to the drop-off in value of reviews there, as well as this discussion of the issue from the Poynter Institute's website. Personally, SC has never bought anything on the strength of an Amazon review, and never will -- they may have new controls to minimize merely anonymous attacks/puffery, but the sort of culture that can generate 36 ratings of 4 1/2 stars for a movie that's over a year from being released simply does not encourage trust. On the subject of Rob Neyer's behavior in particular, this discussion also contains some interesting reactions and a few additional links.

Obviously, as Semantic Compositions is written pseudonymously (Mark Liberman would argue it's anonymously, and that referring to myself as SC doesn't count as a pseudonym), this is a story of more than passing interest to your host. We'll have more to say about l'affaire Neyer later, but for now suffice it to say that publishing under a pseudonym is a risky activity.

There's no "the" there

Geoff Pullum has an excellent post up at Language Log demolishing an article by Sidney Goldberg which purports to demonstrate that the New York Times' copy editors are incompetent.

But in the process, Prof. Pullum violates a style guide himself. The money quote:

Sidney Goldberg at The National Review claims that the reputed 150 copy editors over at The New York Times are either illiterate or asleep.

It's just National Review, Prof. Pullum. Not to be confused with The New Republic, which shares the same initials, but actually has a determiner in its name. We've covered this one before; it's an easy mistake to make, but particularly important to avoid when you're reaming someone else out over grammar.

Here comes the calvary!

Readers feeling deprived of their daily dose of SC on Thursday may rest assured that your host spent much of the day in synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. Actually, that's technically untrue. He spent the day in a church, albeit for the aforementioned holiday.

This is not all that uncommon an occurrence. Orange County, CA, is not exactly home to an enormous Jewish population. It's big enough to have a decent number of synagogues, but many of them are constructed according to the principle expressed in the following joke:

Q: Two Jews are stuck on a desert island. How many synagogues do they build?

A: Three. One that each one goes to, and another one that nobody goes to.

[From The Big Book of Jewish Humor]

As a bonus humorous aside, Yahoo!'s listings for temples/synagogues in the Orange County city of Costa Mesa erroneously include an upscale jeweler, Temple St. Clair, located in a big regional mall. Oops.

Back to the church, though. Because many synagogues are constructed to handle the day-to-day demands of a few hundred people at most, they often simply don't have the physical resources needed to accomodate the large crowds that show up for the High Holidays. For this reason, it's not uncommon for services on these days to be held at other venues. In the case of the synagogue to which SC belongs, that's a nearby church called Calvary which has generously shared its facilities for a number of years now.

The name Calvary is attached to many churches; it's hard to say how many just by Googling the name, but your host has seen it in enough contexts to be aware of that fact. It's not a name with any theological significance to Jews, though, so I felt obliged to look it up in preparing this post. A Catholic encyclopedia that your host has consulted on previous occasions indicatesthat it refers to a place where Jesus may have been crucified; the discussion is nuanced and covers plenty of material that SC won't even pretend to be qualified to comment on. Suffice it to say that the word is of wholly distinct etymology from "cavalry", a term referring to either mounted or mechanized infantry, of the sort commanded by General Custer.

The salience of this point comes from the utter and total inability of SC's fellow congregants to say "Calvary" today, substituting "cavalry" at every available opportunity. This struck SC as another good opportunity to talk about exchange errors in speech.

It's a bit tough to be sure of what kind of error we're talking about here, as there are two varieties of disfluency that could be involved. On the one hand, it could be a word-internal exchange of phonological material, with two sounds slipping positions. Or it could be a lexical exchange where people with both words in their vocabulary simply are having trouble recalling the right one (especially since neither of them are likely to be high-frequency items among this crowd). Examples of these sorts of errors, not to mention a useful example of the experimental protocols for studying them, can be found in this paper by Rachel Walker and a couple of her students. A nice background presentation on speech errors also can be found through this (Google-cached) handout by Bruce Tesar (SC only found this on the web by searching for more examples, although sometime he'll have to talk about Prof. Tesar's book on learnability, which he absolutely loved). While we're at it with course materials found through Google, check out the discussion of Freudian slips in this set of lecture notes by Mark Liberman and Bill Poser's colleague Gene Buckley. Prof. Buckley appears to have the sense of humor that ought to be on display in Language Log

It's hard to imagine an experiment that would conclusively demonstrate whether the Calvary/cavalry error is lexical or phonological. One way to eliminate the lexical hypothesis might be to have groups of Jewish and Christian test subjects read aloud sentences containing the words, and see if there's any significant difference in the error rates for the two words. Of course, such a study would be filled with all sorts of background problems, most notably controlling for the actual world knowledge of the Jewish test subjects. And if the error rates were similar, you wouldn't have any new knowledge about where in the speech production process things were going wrong. The services for the second day of Rosh Hashanah will be held in the synagogue (attendance figures for day 2 are usually lower), so that means he's got until next Friday night (read: Yom Kippur) to come up with an experimental protocol to use on his fellow congregants.

Se habla something or other

In the recently-arrived October 2004 issue of Stereophile Ultimate AV, formerly known as the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, there's a quite worthwhile article about setting up an antenna to get over-the-air HDTV broadcasts. This is something that your host could go on about at length, and probably will in November for reasons which will become clear then, but for the moment, there's something quite funny in the article to pass along.

Editor Tom Norton lives in the Los Angeles area, which is home to a wide variety of Spanish-language stations. Some of them have made the transition to simulcasting in HDTV (which all stations were supposed to have done by 2005, but that's not happening). The article details his (or rather, a competent installer's) efforts to correctly position the antenna on his roof. As the installer writes:

Fortunately, Tom could already get KNBC HDTV (as well as Fox's KTTV) via his cable system. Even more fortunately, he can now watch HDTV programs on UPN, WB, ABC, PBS, and CBS, none of which is currently available via Charter.

Now here's the punchline, an editorial aside by Mr. Norton, reproduced exactly as it appears in the magazine:

[I can pick up several other DTV stations as well, but no habla Español! -- TJN]

He sure got that right. Speaking for himself, it ought to be no hablo Español. The broadcasters at the Spanish-language stations probably speak the language just fine.

The English Civil War...is over

Or at least, it is to everyone not named Andrew Sullivan. SC hasn't had reason to quote the estimable pundit in a while, partly due to his annual August hiatus, and partly due to his inexcusable failure to make any comments about language use so that your host will have something to talk about. But today he's got an amusing choice of words that can't go unremarked:

The roundhead right's anti-gay constitutional amendment doesn't seem to be gaining traction in Michigan.

As students of English history know, the Roundheads were the Puritan faction led by Oliver Cromwell. Their opponents were known as the Cavaliers, and the sides were distinguished as much by their hairstyles as their ideologies. Of course, in this context, Sullivan simply is looking to say "Puritan", with a bit more emphasis on militant than Mayflower. But when you search for "roundheads" without Cromwell, the English Civil War, or Doctor Who, you go from nearly 60,000 Ghits to about 6,000. And a good number of those are for a band, as well as for a strategy game called "Royalists & Roundheads" (hmm, wonder what battles they could possibly be simulating?) It's just not all that commonly used these days, but SC imagines that Mr. Sullivan is quite taken with his display of erudition.

International in one country

Yet another trip to the ESPN well, courtesy of a sentence featuring a historical semantic error that has bugged SC for years.

First, the background. Canada just won the World Cup of ice hockey. This is expected to be the last NHL-caliber game played for a while, as there is about to be a bitter strike/lockout while the owners and players haggle over how to divide the money in the one major league that really does struggle to stay profitable (soccer fans, I don't want to hear it -- there isn't a first-division team anywhere in MLS, and I'm not sure there's a second-division team, either). Anyways, the sentence:

But with the NHL lockout looming on Wednesday, how will its country cope when it's done cheering?

Now, what the author means to say is that Canada is the country of the NHL. This is true in some metaphysical sense; the Stanley Cup originated in Canada, ice hockey is the Canadian national game in much the way that baseball is for the United States, most of the best NHL players are from Canada, etc.

But here's a list of all the NHL teams. It's hard to tell, because they're all identified by logo, but there are in fact only 6 Canadian teams: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. A not-entirely sarcastic case can be made that the Detroit Red Wings, the official hockey team of Semantic Compositions, are actually #7, but considering that there are 30 NHL teams, and only 20% of them actually play in Canada, saying that the "National" in NHL refers unambiguously to Canada is a bit of a stretch. Your host would like to take a moment to note that he would be thrilled if the Colorado Avalanche went back to Canada, but not to Quebec. Saskatoon would be a better location for them. Or maybe Baffin Island; why shouldn't Nunavut have a real pro team? Also, Avalanche players should have to walk to away games.

Now, contrast the "National" Hockey League's membership with the last lineup of teams in the now-defunct "International" Hockey League. Funny, out of 11 teams, not one was based outside of the U.S. The "International" name was false, too -- as long as you require international to mean at least two nations are involved, there's no interpretation satisfied by the IHL as it was.

Of course, the names are what they were/are because of history as much as anything else. And because all of the other top-tier leagues have names that start with either "Major" or "National". There's no way that the NHL is ever going to adopt the name of a league that went bankrupt. Even if, from a semantic standpoint, it's the name they always should have had.

Floccinaucinihilipilificatory

Reader ACW makes use in a comment below of a word your host hasn't seen before, "floccinaucinihilipilificatory". Google reveals a mere 2 hits for it, but also suggests a spelling correction to a noun which presumably means "one who has the quality of being floccinaucinihilipilificatory".

But then I came across this online text of a novel by Robert Heinlein. Who says open access isn't useful? ([Uh, you -- ed.]) Here's our answer, provided in gloriously Heinleinian context:

Digby was a floccinaucinihilipilificator at heart-which is an eight-dollar word meaning a joker who does not believe in anything he can't bite.

SC feels vaguely ashamed for not having known this.

Really random referrals

Every now and then, something pops up in the referrals which is too hilarious not to share. While having a look at who's been having a look, I discovered that if you want to have a look, this is the place to be.

Check out this Swedish search engine (warning: explicit material), and note from the URL that the category of results is "dating Russians". What categorization scheme places that post of mine at #3?

I protest!

Geoff Nunberg comments on a headline that reads "Vietnam Veterans Protest Kerry", saying that "most people reserve the verb for objects that denote events or states of affairs". While SC loves the Rambo allusion that this turns out to be an opportunity to reprint (someday, your host will find a way to work the very best movie speech of all time into a post), he's not so sure about the empirical syntactic claim. In particular, it strikes your host as fairly common for "protest" to be followed by the name of a person. As usual, off to Google, 'cause this punk is feeling lucky:

"protest Ashcroft": 327 hits
"protest Bush": 54,700 hits
"protest Cheney": 655 hits
"protest Clinton": 906 hits
"protest Kerry": 1,350 hits

Now, a number of prominent political names failed to register more than a few dozen hits, which were largely syntactically irrelevant. Plugging Dole and Edwards into the phrase got virtually nothing, and trying Reno and Kennedy produced more hits, but almost all of which met the conditions laid out by Prof. Nunberg (i.e. "Reno's speech" or "Kennedy appearance").

And plenty of the hits in the searches linked above also meet Prof. Nunberg's criteria. Google will happily return any page where the string is found, even when you don't want anything to follow it in a sentence (which is why we can't get the Linguist's Search Engine to replace it quickly enough). But browsing the results turns up plenty of additional examples of a person as the object of "protest", at least in headline contexts:

(link) "Tens of Thousands Protest Bush in NYC"
(link) "200,000 in NY Protest Bush"
(link) "Campus Conservatives Protest Clinton"
(link) "Hundreds Protest Clinton at Florida Fundraiser"
(link) "Sierra Club to Protest Cheney"
(link) "Libertarians Protest Kerry"

Of course, in the absence of a more linguistically sophisticated search engine, there's no way to conveniently answer the question of whether "most people" (or perhaps better, "most instances") combine "protest" with event objects. But as the data above illustrate, it's not hard to find contemporary examples, so we can answer the (quite possibly rhetorical) question that ends his post: it's not likely that the headline writers are alluding specifically to Stallone's speech in First Blood, since the examples come from a wide spectrum of publications and political views. Then again, they're also all headlines, so perhaps these uses are elliptical references to the events that would normally accompany "protest", and Prof. Nunberg's analysis of the verb stands.

Coloratura donnas

In the previous post, your host had thought he was coining a sardonic reference to an egotistical singer by terming him a "coloratura bass". Afterwards, SC decided to have a look around and see if anyone else had done similarly. Surprisingly, while there are a few tokens of the phrase floating around, none of the 16 apparently distinct uses of it carried the "prima donna" wisecrack that your host was trying to imply.

Perhaps your host has the wrong view of coloratura sopranos? Searching for "soprano" with "prima donna" turns up some 6,700 hits; making it "coloratura soprano" cuts that figure by more than half, to 2,780. A cursory inspection of the resulting hits suggests that for the most part, "prima donna" is used to mean "leading lady" with no overtones of the hysteria or ego that Webster's calls sense #2 of the phrase. Either your host has been wildly misled for the past quarter-century...or musicians and critics the world over don't want to risk the possibility that their local prima donnas will read what they're thinking on the Internet.