Semantic Compositions

The world's longest ellipsis

Two or three months ago -- SC wasn't paying especially close attention at the time -- Los Angeles started sprouting video-based billboards all over the Westside, many of which seem directed to pushing as many movie review quotes at drivers as possible. Given typical traffic around here, your host has idly wondered why they don't simply put up full reviews -- there's often enough time to read them all. But maybe he's got an answer.

One movie's advertising has been bugging SC in particular, and it's not because he was otherwise inclined to go see it. Live Free or Die Hard, the movie in question, has been occupying plenty of these billboards, and one of the review quotes contains a most disturbing ellipsis. The quote in question is attributed to the New York Daily News' review, penned by Jack Matthews (formerly with the L.A. Times). By itself, it reads:

"Amazing!
Hysterically...funny."

That ellipsis bothered SC because hysterically ought to be directly modifying funny, and yet clearly does not. Of course, there's potentially a good explanation -- it could be short for "hysterically entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny", right?

Or it could be the case that there are 270 words between those two, and that overproduced is actually the word that follows hysterically, and that there is no plausible way to quote Mr. Matthews as calling the movie "Amazing!", either. SC has no particular brief for or against Live Free or Die Hard -- he just has a limited appetite for sequels, especially if he feels burned by previous entries (movies based on the Star * universes excepted)-- but that ellipsis was just begging for scrutiny. 270 intervening words? 10 complete sentences? If that's not a record, SC is dying to see what beats it.

How long is thirty minutes?

Radagast has put up a worthwhile summary of an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association supporting the idea that some exercise is better than none, even you don't make the mythical 30 minutes five days a week (I seem to recall reading three times a week in the past, but his link goes right to an official U.S. Government source, so who is SC to argue?). The study demonstrates -- at least in the case of postmenopausal, overweight women -- that even getting half as much exercise as is allegedly necessary has significant health benefits. So go get on an exercise bike while you read the rest of this post.

Now, the study doesn't actually measure things in terms of "minutes per week", except incidentally (not that the figures weren't tracked, but that's not how exercise regimens were prescribed). As you can see in the graphs Radagast put up, the groups in the study were segmented by the number of calories per kilogram per week that each person was assigned to burn. So a person weighing 170 pounds (77 kilos) would have to do 308 calories worth of exercise if they were in the 4 kcal/kg group, 616 in the 8 kcal/kg group, and so on. Keeping in mind that the 8 kcal/kg group is the one corresponding to 100% of the recommended weekly exercise, that means that our hypothetical 170 pound person would have to work out at a rate of 246 kilocalories per hour if they were to exercise for 30 minutes 5 times per week. That's not an especially hard workout. And frankly, even if you cut it to 3 times per week, that only gets you to 412 kilocalories per hour, a rate which only moderately impairs SC's ability to simultaneously carry on a phone conversation. On the other hand, who said you should be able to talk on the phone while working out?

That brings us to the point about language here. Before writing this post, your host discussed with Radagast the problem of specifying just how hard the workouts are. The phrasing of exercise requirements in units of time obscures the fundamental issue about how many calories one actually is burning, a number which is admittedly hard to measure directly (that's a point Radagast encouraged your host to make). SC has used numerous exercise bikes from different manufacturers, which vary by as much as 20-30% in their estimates of caloric expenditure for what feel like subjectively similar intensities. So the number you get from the equipment may not actually be all that useful as a guide, and telling people to work out for a certain amount of time might be about the best you can hope for. On the other hand, it's also painfully clear from SC's daily trips to his gym that his idea of a 30 minute workout is very different from many other people's. It's not uncommon for your host to brutalize himself at rates that his preferred bike estimates at 700+ kilocalories per hour, only to look down the aisle and see other people merrily plugging away at the lowest setting the bike has to offer while yapping on their cell phones or reading a book.

This problem of specifying amounts of exercise in terms of time reminds SC of another of his great pet peeves about indirect measurement in English. If someone tells you that a hotel is "15 minutes" from an airport, you have no way of being sure if they're adjusting appropriately for local traffic conditions. 15 minutes might be 15 miles in Flagstaff,  5 miles in Las Vegas, and about 1.5 miles in Los Angeles. It is your host's opinion (unsupported by anything beyond subjective impression) that people often implicitly use an estimate of 60 miles per hour when making such statements, since that neatly converts into 1 minute per mile.

None of this is to say that the scientists involved set out to be misleading when they reduce their exercise recommendations to units of time. As we've discussed, it's hard to be sure of exactly how hard a workout you're doing, and it certainly isn't reasonable to expect every gym to have a physiologist on staff to take accurate measurements of your oxygen uptake levels. But the fact that calorie burning is hard to measure directly doesn't mean that it's hard to figure out whether or not you're doing a serious workout. The next time you tell yourself that 30 minutes ought to be enough, ask yourself just one question -- are they 30 minutes worthy of the name?

Megatron's language acquisition problem

Last night, SC went to see the new Transformers movie, which he had been waiting for nervously ever since the trailers first came out last year. The nervous part came mostly from the involvement of Michael Bay, who has somewhat less than a stellar reputation for story and character development, albeit a great reputation for explosions. He lived up (or down) to many of these expectations, but in a surprisingly pleasant way, and your host has no patience for all of the "he's ruined my childhood" laments to come out of some of the more obssessive fans of the original series (although SC confesses to having feared such things going iin). If you doubt the obsessive nature of the fans involved, have a look at the Wikipedia entry for the movie, and ask yourself, "Why does this article have so many more references than Wikipedia's entries on quantum mechanics, the Protestant Reformation, and the Battle of Hastings? Combined? Times 10?"

Rather than providing a spoiler-laden review, though -- which is not to say that spoilers don't follow, and you've been warned -- SC wishes to focus on a language acquisition issue which is never properly addressed in the movie -- and the movie does address language acquisition, as Optimus Prime is asked how the Autobots (incidentally, given a retconned etymology) learned English. His reply, "From the World Wide Web". While no explicit learning mechanism is provided, it's fair to assume that robots that have already mastered interstellar flight and the ability to reconfigure their bodies to imitate any object they happen to scan have long since figured out grammar induction from unlabeled data (and maybe they happened across the Penn Treebank during their studies).

No, the real problem comes with the question of specifically how Megatron learned English. It's no great spoiler to mention that unlike all of the other Transformers, he's been kept on ice -- literally -- all the way up until he is freed to take place in a climactic battle near the end of the film. And yet, moments after being thawed out, he is able to announce "I am Megatron!", which requires at least some knowledge of English (shortly afterward, he utters something less corny, and considerably more classic to fans of the original series, which SC will only note demonstrates that he's aware of time expressions as well).

Here's what we know:

1) The movie subscribes to the modularity of mind, as demonstrated by the fact that Megatron's navigation systems are able to be woken up without activating the rest of him.
2) He has been around humans speaking language (they've been studying him daily for 70 years), but this does not preclude arguments about poverty of the stimulus, because the humans were all grown adults, who presumably rarely if ever critiqued each others' language use. (SC does not buy into POTS himself, but it's unarguable that Megatron has been receiving only a very specialized sort of linguistic input.)
3) He has almost certainly not been plugged into any sort of network connection (no definitive statement is offered, but great measures are taken to keep him frozen and unpowered), and so even if his language module was adequately powered and functioning, he did not have access to a text corpus like the Autobots did.

All of this would seem to indicate that it is impossible for Megatron to speak English, at least immediately on waking up. And yet he does. There is one remaining possibility that explains this. The other Decepticons are shown communicating in a language we are given to understand is Cybertronian (although not explicitly labeled as such), and they are also clearly able to communicate with each other by radio (such a discussion is shown in the movie). It is entirely possible that one of them, after establishing the needed radio connection to Megatron, simply uploaded the needed configuration parameters (thanks, Chomsky, now look what you're responsible for) for his language module to him, although why they would expect him to care about communicating with humans is a mystery with no obvious answer of its own.

Of course, thinking about such things loses what makes the movie so much fun: giant robots beating the crap out of each other and destroying much of downtown Los Angeles in the process. SC is eternally grateful to Michael Bay for that glorious sequence, which was far more plausible (and desirable) than the similar (but thoroughly ludicrous and unfortunate) destruction of downtown San Diego by dinosaurs in the second Jurassic Park movie. Now, let's get started on the really important details, Mr. Bay. Where's Laserbeak? And Frenzy isn't a boombox. And Devastator isn't a tank...

What was your first clue, lady?

Once upon a time, your host applied to a graduate school and requested that he be considered for a position teaching Spanish as part of the aid package. He then discovered that they had a particularly effective strategy for figuring out just how good his Spanish really was: one morning, he received a call which woke him up, from a lady speaking only in Spanish. Being groggy and annoyed at being woken, poor SC proceeded to flub the interview, which largely consisted of trying to elicit a conversation from him in Spanish. Oops. In retrospect, SC has mixed feelings about this as an interview strategy -- it weeds out the non-fluent quite well, but it doesn't really account for the possibility that someone might not want to be cooperative for reasons having nothing to do with their fluency, and everything to do with getting what sure sound like wrong-number calls from strangers at inconvenient times.

However, SC has lately tried to be more accommodating of people who call speaking a language other than English. In the last 24 hours, your host has received a veritable flood of phone calls looking for someone who obviously: 1) speaks primarily Spanish, and 2) is in something less than the good graces of the people inquiring about his availability. Victor Whatever-your-last-name-is, you are so dead when the people calling for you catch up -- good thing they keep getting someone who has never made your acquaintance instead.

What these events have in common is the bizarre conversation that just occurred, and which SC has thoughtfully transcribed for your amusement:

SC: Hello? [no answer] Hello?
Caller: Hola?
SC: Yes?
Caller: Hola?
SC [now impatiently]: Yes, hello, what do you want?
Caller: No habla español? (Don't you speak Spanish?)
SC [getting it now]: Sí, yo hablo español, pero no es mi lengua primera. (Yes, I speak Spanish, but it's not my first language.)
Caller [angry]: Perdona? (Excuse me?)
SC [otra vez, con enfasis]: Sí, yo hablo español, pero no es mi lengua primera. (Excuse you!)
Caller: [click]

Based on the increasingly enormous call volume in Spanish in the last 24 hours, your host is reasonably sure that the lady on the other end would have liked to speak to Victor. SC would also like to speak to Victor, and would probably do to him for free whatever these folks are being paid for. But the fascinating thing about this call isn't that it was an obvious wrong-number issue (well, a fraudulently given number, not so much a wrong one). It's that rather than trying to ask for Victor, the lady on the other end tried to figure out whether or not SC might be hiding him by determining whether or not his language use marked him as the sort of person Victor would be associating with. Caller ID tells SC that this wasn't the first time this particular person has asked SC about Victor -- at some point, shouldn't she figure out that if the person on the other end of the call doesn't sound like Victor, and doesn't behave like Victor, it probably isn't Victor?

Clicheighty

In one of the bigger hints your host will drop this month, he spent much of Wednesday at an event titled "Managing Innovation", sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council. It was a highly worthwhile use of his time, and he learned a lot about things that you ought to do to make your colleagues happy, productive, and most importantly, creative. Much, much more to say on these topics later.

However, the linguistic tic of the day was a cliche that perhaps doesn't quite rise to the level of snowclonehood, although it's working on it: the flagrant abuse of the number 80. If you haven't heard of the mythical "80-20 rule", it's a business cliche derived rather spuriously from an observation by the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto's observation was that 80% of Italian wealth was concentrated in 20% of the population. The problem is not with Pareto's observation, which was derived from actual data, but with the cliche-driven thinking of business types who like round numbers, and who then advance spurious (and as far as SC knows, experimentally unsupported) claims like "80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers" or the computer science version, "80% of the work can be done with 20% of the effort". As a number of writers point out, the fact that the numbers add up to 100 is responsible for a lot of sloppy thinking. After all, there is no reason whatsoever that 80% of effects couldn't come from 5 or 10% of causes just as easily.

One example of this sloppiness came today in a question-and-answer session. During the panel discussion leading up to the session, a CEO of a small business mentioned that his investors wanted him to apply an "80/80 rule" to his development budget (i.e., target the top 80% of product features wanted by 80% of his potential customers). This led to a questioner asking him why he was willing to only go after 64% of his market -- clearly the result of multiplying the 80s together thoughtlessly. That's nonsense. The proper interpretation of the 80/80 rule is that you pursue 80% of your potential market, but deliver a product that customers will want to see upgrades to. The CEO got this; the questioner was in the grip of the idea that these rule-of-thumb numbers were both meaningful and additive, and could not be convinced of the error of his thinking.

That last link demonstrates just how broadly the 80/20 cliche has impacted people's thinking; a list of other applications found there includes the ideas that you should lose weight by eating until you're 80% full and eat what you should 80% of the time (and what you want 20%), that 80% of horse races are won by 20% of jockeys (this one is at least backed by some data, but not enough to convince SC of its broad applicability), 80% of the effort you put into a job search is wasted, a good job (as in employment, not as in congratulations) should be acceptable to you 80% of the time, and so on. This is largely nonsense, not backed by anything remotely like the economic data that triggered these claims to begin with.

Contrary to what you might think, though, SC isn't most bothered by the superficial similarity of these "rules" to the species of jokes that run "50% of all statistics are made up". It's more the intellectual laziness of attributing actual meaningfulness to these idly thrown-about numbers. It wouldn't be hard to write a similar post, with a little more research, about the miracle number 3, and how all successful business strategies are apparently built on 3 principles (not the same ones -- it's just that many people seem to like to put triangles on slides, label each edge with a word or two, and declare this to be insight). There's no deep meaning to the repetition of 80% or 3 in business-speak; they're just numbers that the community of managers have agreed are safe examples, and if you use them, nobody will question your judgment -- even though using them mindlessly might be the best sign that "your" judgment is something of a misnomer.

Holy expressions of surprise!

We take a break from doing posts which hint at what's coming next to present the first-ever SC blog post written specifically for the purpose of entering a contest. Specifically, the contest can be found here, or could when it was open (having closed one minute before this entry went up), and is in regard to the Sam and Max series of video games -- quite simply the best thing to happen to PCs in the last year. The only rule of the contest is to produce something creative relating to the first season of games (season is an appropriate term here; rather than releasing one big game that took 20-30 hours to finish, Telltale Games developed 6 short ones that each took 4-5 hours). While they expect most of their fans to produce video clips, drawings, or other typical fan art, that's not the SC style, and so we now present: "Holy Dog and Rabbity-Thing!: A Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Analysis of Expressions of Surprise in Sam and Max, Season One".

In the 1960s, long before it could be terrorized by a giant robotic Abe Lincoln, the nation was introduced to expressions of surprise of the form "Holy [Noun Phrase]" via the Batman television series. Batman's sidekick Robin would utter these expressions, followed by an announcement of something terribly obvious to the viewer (technically speaking, "Holy Toledo!" preceded the series, as demonstrated by the Greater Toledo Vistors' Bureau, and was as humorous as anything Robin said, as the notion of Toledo being holy could only be a joke). In this essay, we analyze expressions of surprise across Season One of Sam and Max, in order to demonstrate how Sam's humor transcends that of the Batman series which inspired these expressions. Both in order to control for context, and because the author did not have the foresight to prepare transcripts of the entire series before this contest was announced, we will examine expressions of surprise that occur in the opening dialogue of each episode, during the sequences where Sam and Max receive their assignments through phone calls with the faceless commissioner.

Syntax: Expressions of surprise in the original Batman series always took the form "Holy [Noun Phrase]!" One website providing quotes from the series lists 356 examples (and warns that it may not be an exhaustive listing), including "Holy jelly molds," "Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods," and "Holy contributing to the delinquency of minors!" These expressions would often be followed by some additional sentence to state the obvious; for example, "Holy Alps!  I'd better brush up on my geography!" after realizing he doesn't know where Mount Gotham is.

In contrast, Sam's expressions of surprise do not generally include an explicit "holy" (although he does utter "holy cow" in Episode 3), and generally take the form of a complex noun phrase consisting of a name followed by a locative prepositional phrase. These phrases became progressively more complex over the duration of the series. Whereas Episode 1 featured the simple "Jiminy Christmas in a padlocked sweatbox" and "Great gouts of steaming magma on a beeline for the orphanage!" (both as part of the same phone call sequence), Episode 4 stepped up to the very complex (and highly alliterative) "Sweet suffering Saint Sebastian on the Sousaphone in a short story by Susan Sontag!". While both Sam and Robin clearly make use of a grammatical template that provides a repeatable underlying structure for their utterances, Sam's syntactic creativity clearly exceeds that of Robin.

Semantics: While Robin shamelessly attempted to curry favor with future linguists studying his work, uttering the phrase "holy semantics" in one episode, he ruined his credibility by using it to describe a conversation that had just taken place regarding an issue of phonetics. Otherwise, Robin's semantics are largely uninteresting, as his statements usually simply reference something in the immediate visual context of the show. By contrast, Sam makes repeated references to objects without clear meanings, which force the gamer to stretch his imagination. For example, in Episode 2, he states "Sweet mother of double jeopardy backstroking in butterscotch!" which is suggestive of phrases used to refer to the Virgin Mary, as well as the legal concept of double jeopardy (legal concepts being something that a freelance policeman would be at least marginally acquainted with). It is not actually clear what the mother of double jeopardy would look like, though, nor how she gave birth to double jeopardy, nor what she would be doing in a pool of butterscotch. Sam's semantics impose demands on the gamer which again make for a more rewarding experience than Robin's statements.

Pragmatics: Philosopher Paul Grice defined four maxims for communicative effectiveness, which we may summarize as "be truthful", "make your statements as informative as necessary, no more or less", "be relevant", and "be clear". Robin's statements are usually clear, at least marginally relevant, not obviously false, but never informative. Sam is willing to go to greater lengths for his humor. Episode 3's statement of "Holy cap-wearing catfish flopping a crime beat!" is not obviously true (there are not likely to be any cap-wearing catfish), informative (not related to any facts of the case), relevant (ditto) or clear (huh?). In fact, Episode 6's statement, "By the Greek goddess Selene in a chariot with dual overhead cams and "Silver Foxx" mudflaps!" references a moon goddess, which is the only time any of his statements obey even one of the Gricean maxims. While faithfulness to these rules makes for productive conversations, it makes for lousy humor, and thus we see that Sam once again outworks Robin in the pursuit of humor.

In conclusion, in every dimension of linguistic analysis we might bring to expressions of surprise, Sam is just flat-out funnier than his predecessor, Robin. Also, Max threatened to shoot me if I didn't reach that conclusion.

A taxing argument

Something feels a little off today. It's the deadline for filing tax returns in the United States, but it's not April 15th. Not that taxes have been due on April 15th fo eternity -- for the first half of the 20th century (well, that part of said first half after the income tax was first imposed), it was March 15, only becoming April 15th after Congress changed it in 1955. According to the IRS, whenever April 15th falls on a weekend or Federal holiday, you have until midnight of the next business day, a fact which pushed taxes to April 17th just last year. No, it's the April 17th-is-a-Tuesday part which makes it feel off, due to the fact that Washington D.C. now has a holiday on April 16, and again according to the IRS, if D.C. wants to nap, we're all going to take a snooze. Wait, that's not exactly how they put it (and in all seriousness, it's actually a good reason for a holiday).

Tax day has a tendency to bring out SC's inner libertarian, especially since the mortgage deduction didn't apply to him this year (oh, how bitterly he's missing Chez SC right about now). And that brings us to a phrase with a surprisingly contested meaning, "Tax Freedom Day".

The basic concept is simple enough -- if you consider the part of your earnings that you get to keep every year after taxes to be what you've earned after you've made enough to pay your taxes, then simply multiplying your effective tax rate (what you actually pay, not your marginal rate, which only applies to a portion of your income) by 365 tells you how many days you had to work to pay your taxes. One could quibble with certain issues there -- salaried employees don't generally get paid for weekends, there are a variable number of holidays depending on where you live -- but the calculation wouldn't change overly much even if you did correct for these things.

There are good reasons why you wouldn't want to publish your personal tax freedom day given the above methodology, though, which is that it's a handy way for people to figure out roughly what you earn. With the exception of people whose salaries are required by law to be published, this is generally Not Anyone Else's Business (except for the IRS). So the Tax Foundation, which holds the copyright on this idea, publishes an aggregate figure for the U.S. as a whole, as well as state-by-state. And every year in rebuttal, an organization called the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities publishes an argument that the figure is misleading ((the first two pages of the Google link will suffice to get you the last decade's worth of press releases). The argument seems to revolve around the meaning of the word "average". On one side, the Tax Foundation computes total tax receipts divided by total income; on the other side, the CBPP argues that the average person falls in the middle quintile of taxpayers, and since those people don't pay anywhere close to the effective tax rates implied by the Tax Foundation figures, the notion of tax freedom is highly misleading. You can read last year's version of the argument here (the Tax Foundation side) and here (the CBPP side).

Arguments about the right choice of statistic to mean "average" have been going on forever. The Tax Foundation clearly would prefer that you think of the arithmetic mean; the CBPP would prefer that you use the median. There are enormous policy consequences that follow from your choice in this regard, as the former is useful for arguing that taxes are too high, and the latter for arguing that they're either too low, or at any rate, not onerous (the question of what the money is being spent on is certainly related, but separable for our purposes). SC is sure of one thing, though, which he'll bet both sides can agree on: when the mean and median taxpayers get in line at the post office today, they'll both be grumbling.

A bit of Passover lexicography

Your host has written himself into some awkward situations in the past when discussing elements of the Passover holiday, but this year, before it's over, he wants to wade into something Passover-related anyway.

The subject this time mercifully takes place completely in English, so no translation issues are involved. In particular, it revolves around one of the very few Passover foods SC is willing to eat year-round without any hesitation. No, not Joyva Ring Jells -- per the links above, SC does not consider them Passover food anymore (although he plans to eat some after the holiday). In this case, SC speaks of the least prototypical food ever to wear the name of cookie, the tricolor:

(Picture borrowed from Gothamist.com; if they object, SC will take it down.)

A truly prototypical cookie is round, features bits of the filling (if any) interspersed throughout the dough, and is frosted one side at most. The tricolor breaks all of these rules, and is assembled like a layer cake -- if "snack cake" wasn't a coldly corporate phrase suitable only for printing on Twinkie wrappers, it would probably be the right descriptor for tricolors.

Now here's the linguistic hook. Of all the bakeries he's ever tried, SC feels that the best tricolors are made by the Beverlywood Bakery (sorry, no website -- they just started taking credit cards last year), in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. SC held this view long before he actually moved to Los Angeles, and it isn't just something that's developed of convenience. However, the Beverlywood Bakery does something that just about no other bakery does in making tricolors -- they add a fourth layer, tinted with brown food coloring.

The hyper-logical Mrs. SC has been all over this one, saying that there are but two reasonable linguistic behaviors for your host to pursue. One is to acknowledge the impossibility of calling the Beverlywood cookies by the tricolor name, and to refer to them as tetracolors. The other would be to adopt the name actually used by the Beverlywood employees, and call them rainbow cookies.

While SC has had to adopt the Beverlywood nomenclature for purposes of orrdering, both of these proposals strike him as unacceptable. Tetracolor is fish food (and yields no hits for the phrase "tetracolor cookies" in Google; ditto for "quadricolor", in case that crossed your mind). As for "rainbow cookies", well...this guy gets it just about right. Rainbow cookies just seem so lacking compared to the mystique of the tricolor (not quite his point, but read the post).

Having said that, we're all about hard linguistic science at Semantic Compositions, and the usage evidence is more than a little in Mrs. SC's favor, as often happens precisely at those moments when your host's neck is most stiff. "Rainbow cookies" stomps all over "tricolor cookies" by a 130:1 margin, dropping to 20:1 if you add the hyphenated version of tricolor. This result holds up even more graphically (pardon the pun) when you use Google's image search; you get just four genuine hits for "tricolor cookies" there, but valid results can still be found for "rainbow cookies" into the fifth page. Against that, your host can only hold up the argument that "rainbow cookie" also pretty clearly refers to a bunch of cookies which bear no relationship at all to the type under discussion (see the aforementioned image search results), and the comment of the author of The Pop View, who indicates that he knows the cookies in an Italian guise as tricolore. OK, there's also an appeal to etymology; one of the commenters in the Gothamist post linked above writes:

i knew the "rainbow" cookie debate would eventually rear its head. my position is that these cookies should only be called "tri-colors" because they are based on the Italian flag- a flag that is often referred as a the italian tri-color.  calling them rainbow cookies is like calling a hamentashen a "triangle" cookie- it doesn't do justice to the history.

But SC can't really hang an argument about what to call a food produced for a specifically Jewish context on what the same thing is called in an Italian context. Can he?

The ultimate Natural Language Processing-based scheduler

SC has long been plagued by the boring tedium of the scheduling tools built into Microsoft Outlook. Every day, he'll get a half-dozen identically written meeting requests, all automatically generated from a couple of safe, inoffensive templates. These things all tend to run together after a while, but they work because businesspeople have discovered a powerful method for manipulating other people -- if you place a little automatically-generated reminder in other people's calendars (assuming they let their lives be dictated by a single piece of unimpressive, buggy proprietary software), they will robotically show up for meetings, call into teleconferences, or otherwise do what you want. The downside is that in order to make it effective, you need to set the alarms on the reminders to go off just minutes before the intended event, and the illocutionary force of "Please call into 500-555-1234, passcode 5678" is rather limited.

Nobody knows better than linguists that speaking the right language to people can improve the success of your communicative goals, and so your host decided to apply his knowledge of both linguistics and Java to create the world's first scheduling program fully backed by the power of natural language processing. Behold -- the iNag!

iNag starts with helpful user-nameable contact names that will never be reproduced in your e-mail, so you can group people into the mental categories you actually file them under. iNag will integrate these names with names in your Outlook address book so that "The Ones You Invite To Social Events Or Else" never know that you feel that way about the Vice President of Operations and the annoyingly chatty secretary down the hall.

But iNag is so much more than a tool for commerce -- the real power behind it comes from the REiterating Mail INtegration Device (REMIND), a sophisticated natural-language generator that not only can adopt your persona, but customizes reminder messages as important events grow closer. To demonstrate, we'll walk through an example useful for business and personal life -- sending a birthday card.

You begin by selecting from a library of personas appropriate to business or personal life:

Then you set the event type that you're going for, a date, and reminder notices, just like in any other scheduling application. iNag will then produce a customized set of notifications and escalating reminders. If the message recipient doesn't get their task done, iNag will automatically send out escalating reminders as the deadline gets closer. Here's how iNag would remind your recipient to send a birthday card, in a couple of styles.

First, the Jewish Mother:

The default manager persona:

And former coach of the Minnesota Vikings and Arizona Cardinals, Dennis Green:

iNag with REMIND technology -- coming soon in the Home and Office Productivity aisles of fine retailers like Staples, Office Depot and Best Buy near you (just as soon as Semantic Compositions Software can get some venture funding).

*-berry

Oh, how work has been an annoyance lately. But interesting things are coming, most especially for what your host likes to think of as the Official Holiday of Semantic Compositions (hint: that's soon). In the meantime, though, a note on a culinary morpheme that's sweeping Los Angeles.

Once upon a time, an entire continent discovered it was lactose-intolerant, and thus was invented soymilk. This actually isn't relevant to the story on its own, but it makes the fact that a Korean entrepreneur hit it big in his home country by selling frozen yogurt just a little stranger. That yogurt, called Red Mango, was quickly imitated by a Korean immigrant to the United States who opened up a store in West Hollywood to sell frozen yogurt under the name Pinkberry, and therein lies our tale.

As detailed in this 2006 LA Times story, Pinkberry frozen yogurt attracts diehard fans, of which SC is emphatically not one. On a winter night around 10:30 p.m., SC walked by the Pinkberry location in Westwood, where he likes to go to the gym. The line was 20 people long. Since this was actually half the length of the lines he'd seen during the daytime on other days, he got in line and proceeded to be robbed of $5 for the most nauseatingly disgusting yogurt he'd ever eaten. Let's just say that it's not sweetened according to American tastes. Not a bit. However, SC nevertheless admires the clever packaging of the stores, which look exactly like what you'd imagine if Sanrio had been contracted to produce a business for Hello Kitty to run (Hello Kitty being the most hopelessly, irresistibly cute character ever drawn).

Pinkberry's success has spawned a wave of imitators, and now we come to the linguistic hook. Just as the '80s craze for drive-through taco stands in San Diego spawned a wave of "Bertos" (Roberto's, Alberto's, Aliberto's, Aiberto's, Gilberto's -- SC can't make this stuff up), there are now hordes of berries you never knew existed. While the LA Times story references a copycat called Kiwiberry (and spelled it wrong), there's now an Iceberry (which may or may not be a local outpost of a Korean chain by that name), Snowberry, and even a kosher imitator in Jewish L.A. called Berri Good. Little Tokyo features yet another knockoff which didn't pursue the "berry" morpheme, but nevertheless used a name suggestive of something floral/fruity, Fiore. There are probably more, but these are just the ones that your host has passed by in person to know about -- one of the annoying habits of the imitators is that they don't list themselves by these names in the Yellow Pages (and probably haven't registered fictitious business names ending in "berry" to avoid lawsuits).

Your host has seen this story play out before, and it generally ends badly -- a chain called Penguin's had Pinkberry-style success in the '80s (you'd get a taco at Roberto's, then go to Penguin's for dessert), and the quite professional website obscures the fact that the last few stores just closed late last year. For that matter, many of the Bertos haven't survived (although the original continues). So eventually, there won't be as many *berries as there are today -- but SC bets that before that happens, there will be plenty more.

SC's boondoggle-ridden childhood

Catching up on some of the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day e-mails which had been accumulating in the SC inbox, your host noticed a surprising definition for boondoggle:

boondoggle   \BOON-dah-gul\   noun
     1 : a braided cord worn by Boy Scouts as a neckerchief slide, hatband, or ornament
    *2 : a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft

No, number 2 was not the surprising definition. Having been a Tiger Cub, Cub Scout, Webelos (the most awkward acronym ever coined), and a Boy Scout (albeit only attaining the rank of First Class), this was news. It appears the current standard Boy Scout neckerchief slide hasn't changed much since SC last wore one, but the Scout catalog doesn't call it a boondoggle. For that matter, none of the available slides are called boondoggles in the catalog. Then again, all of them are basically napkin rings by a different name, and not "braided cords" per the definition. SC is actually hard-pressed to remember ever wearing anything that meets the "braided cord" description, although perhaps the object used for holding Webelos awards comes close.

A bit of further digging indicates that this is not unknown in the archives of Scouting. From an article prepared by the Scouting organization in Great Britain:

In the early days of the Scout Movement in Great Britain, the Scout scarf used to be tied loose knot at the neck and naturally became very creased. However it was known the Americans were experimenting by using a ring made from bone, rope or wood to keep their scarves together. Bill Shankley, aged 18 and one of two permanent camp site employees at Gilwell Park, had the job
of running the workshop and coming up with ideas for camping equipment. He found out about the American rings and decided to try and go one better. After various attempts with different materials he finally made a Turks Head knot - adopted in the days of sailing ships when seamen developed decorative forms of rope work
as a hobby - made from thin sewing machine leather belting. He submitted this to the Camp Chief and, no doubt, the Chief Scout, for approval and had it accepted.

The American rings were called 'Boon Doggles', most probably because they were made of bone, and the name was a skit on 'dog bones'. To rhyme with 'Boon Doggle', Shankley called his creation a 'Woggle'. An article in The Scout on 9th June 1923 by 'Gilcraft', called 'Wear a scarf woggle' made reference to the idea of having become very popular among Scouts who had been quick to imitate the fashion set by the Ist Gilwell Park Scout Troop (i.e.: Wood Badge
holders).

A woggle is apparently (at least as originally coined) a wood version of the device in question; the article goes on to mention that Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, eventually standardized the use of the term in the 14th edition of the Boy Scout Handbook (called "Scouting for Boys" at the time):

The word 'woggle' was used by Baden-Powell in the 14th edition of Scouting for Boys (1929): It (the scarf) may be fastened at the throat by a knot or woggle, which is some form of ring made of cord, metal or bone, or anything you like. The 13th edition (1928) merely uses 'ring'. The standard World Brotherhood edition used the wording of the 14th edition but put woggle in inverted commas.

Based on this history, the Merriam-Webster definition would appear to be a little more vaguely worded than desirable. The original British boondoggle/neckerchief slide was made of braided leather, but into a ring shape, rather than a lanyard. This would explain the look of the neckerchief slide of today, which may only be molded, but nevertheless simulates the look of being made from rope. As for the boondoggle as hatband? Well, there are some 280-odd Google hits suggesting that, but almost every one repeats the definition from above, and given the history presented by the Scouts, it's hard to imagine that the uniform device crossed over from the neck to the head in any obvious way. The web is hardly the best place to investigate events of the 1920s and 1930s in detail, but suffice it to say that there would have to be more evidence for SC to buy the "hatband" definition.

Left unexplained is how such a useful device could have ended up lending its name to disastrous wastes of time and money. Maybe gangsters paid Bill Shankley to come up with that rather than doing KP?

You can't say that about work

Roger Shuy posted on Language Log this evening about Fish and Wildlife Service employees being forbidden to talk about polar bears in an official capacity, regarding this as an example of taboo speech (although in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion). SC recognizes that deference to one of the great sociolinguists of the 20th century is a wise course of action, but he must register respectful disagreement nevertheless.

Organizations routinely control the dissemination of their public positions; that's the whole point of employing spokesmen. One reason that your host does not discuss his employer, except to disclaim any representation of their positions, is that they have a communications department which has sole authority to communicate official views to the public. This is fairly standard practice in both industry and government, and actually goes a lot further into organizations than that. It's typically the case that for any government contract, individuals designated as the official points of contact are the ones you go to -- and the only ones you go to -- to discuss contracting both before and after receiving an award. (A few minutes browsing FedBizOpps should satisfy your curiosity on this point; just pick a Cabinet department, put it in the search box, and you're all set to browse the solicitations.) In the past, SC has worked on contracts for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and he would never dream of contacting so much as the heads of the offices overseeing his projects, never mind anyone titled Secretary -- the contact would almost certainly not be authorized, unless it occurred in some formally scheduled meeting.

Given the tightly prescribed nature of communications day-to-day in government business, it would be rather strange for Federal employees to have more freedom to deliver unapproved messages in occasional, highly public forums, than they do in everyday work. Unapproved should not be seen as meaning that sinister commissars are brutally beating down courageous dissenters -- it simply means anything that has not been through the exhaustive review process up the management chain. Is it the case that some of the higher-up types are Civil Service employees or political appointees who may not actually have the expertise to make scientific judgments? Sure. But it's just as true that folks with B.A.s in communications routinely exercise a prerogative regarding public statements over Ph.D.s in private industry, and everyone involved understands that's just the process. In a public forum, when the scientists involved are speaking as representatives of the Fish and Wildlife Service, they are subject to the same constraints that they are in their daily work.

This is clearly not the same situation that academics are subject to, and it's easy to understand how they might see censorship where  SC sees standard operating practice. But while academics certainly borrow the prestige of the institutions they're affiliated with when they speak -- how interesting would it be to conduct a conference where names and affiliations were stripped off the abstracts in the conference program, and see how it affected attendance? -- nobody is under the impression that they are making official policy for anyone. If Prof. Shuy declared tomorrow that all sentences should end "...with polar bears", even if his audience believed the administration of Georgetown University to be prepared to do whatever he said, nobody would seriously expect that this statement had come from the university president's office, much less the government. The same is true of professors who teach at public universities -- George Lakoff and John McWhorter don't speak for the State of California or Governor Schwarzenegger when they make pronouncements on even the least politically charged issues. As Federal employees, though, Fish and Wildlife Service scientists presenting papers do speak for the government, and they are most definitely not authorized to make policy on their own, for the simple reason that only one person in the government holds a power even remotely like that.

SC is not inclined to debate Prof. Shuy on the specifics of the scientific question at hand; neither of us are experts in wildlife management. However, he would note two pieces of evidence that tend to support his view that this is just usual business, and not any sort of ideological campaign. On the science front, the evidence of a global population decline appears to be fairly mixed, and with an open public comment period for making policy in effect at the time of the conference, it would be particularly inappropriate for Federal employees to be making statements that suggested policy had already been set. On the personnel front, Prof. Shuy's article quotes the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service as stating:

The prohibition on talking about these subjects only applies to public, formal situations, Hall said. Private scientific discussions outside the meeting and away from media are permitted and encouraged, he said.

This sounds pretty much like the normal state of affairs to SC. If credible evidence existed that scientists were being told to avoid discussing these issues altogether, that would be another story, but your host hasn't seen anything produced to that effect. Working for a government agency or commercial organization means accepting terms of employment that say that you don't get to make policy statements that may differ from the organizational consensus, and that appears to be exactly what's going on in this case. Is the process for setting that consensus perfect? Hardly. But tenure and academic freedom aren't the standards under which anyone accepts employment in non-academic contexts, and SC finds it hard to spot a scandal in established communications practices.

 

Get a grip on yourself

Having gotten over the flu, your host went to dinner with Mrs. SC and his parents recently, and got more than just a steak -- he got a particularly annoying earful of the morpheme "-self" to use as a topic.

To set the menu stage, the restaurant in question is the Coronado Boathouse, a steak and seafood business in the scenic Coronado resort area in San Diego. SC readers in the area may wish to attempt to experimentally confirm his observations by going for dinner and listening to the waiters.

At first, your host thought that he was listening to a simple speech error; when our party was seated, the waiter went around the table handing out menus and saying "Here's a menu for yourself". SC's inner prescriptivist, a generally powerless individual unable to enforce illogical rules of English punctuation (witness the placement of the period in the previous sentence), found this irksome but said nothing.

However, at some point during the meal, it became clear that this was not a simple error, but the product of either affectation or training, as unbound exemplars of "-self", with nary a discourse antecedent, continued to crop up. When, exactly, you ask? Maybe it was during the actual ordering, when the waiter asked "What will yourself be having for dinner?", or maybe it was the waving around of a peppermill to the tune of "Pepper for yourself?". Or maybe the light really went on with the gratuitously tacked-on, albeit grammatical, usage in "Would you like more iced tea for yourself?". (One could argue that the pepper was grammatically OK, being a phonologically-reduced version of "Would you like some pepper for yourself?" -- but surface forms have to count for something, and both the pepper and the selves were vigorously grating by that point.) By the time we exited the restaurant, SCself could barely be restrained from bursting out with, "Were yourselves annoyed by that waiter?".

Clearly, something other than reflexive usage was going on with all of the "yourself" utterances. There's no reason for the "self" to show up since it doesn't corefer with a previously mentioned subject, a point which Geoff Pullum has expressed with characteristic forcefulness before (albeit for a not-quite parallel usage). This can be done in the case of logophoric pronouns, as has been discussed on Language Log a number of times (for a history of it, see this Arnold Zwicky post), but logophoric is a fancy word for pronouns being used to attribute words to someone else, which isn't going on here, either.

Then SC stumbled across this Linguist List discussion of the phenomenon, which despite being over a decade old, manages to precisely anticipate what bothered "himself" about this usage. After demonstrating that unbound reflexives similar to the waiter's have a certain amount of historical legitimacy (Thomas Malory and Edith Wharton make appearances), it is revealed that the specific usage above is today the province of waiters and salesmen, and it gets chalked up to your choice of hypercorrection or politeness, depending on context. The author correctly (in SC's opinion) diagnoses the irritation felt by SC as being due to an "inappropriate" emphasis on status (that word strikes your host being exactly what's annoying here -- the pervasive use of "self" draws attention to the fact that the waiter is trying to be deferential). It seems likely that there's a more principled explanation of this phenomenon available by now, and hopefully your host will find some time to dig in to reflexivity literature and report on it to yourselves.

On a linguistically unrelated note, the restaurant features a "baseball top sirloin", which SC has long found a puzzling name. It's not particularly baseball-shaped, and it's not five ounces (the official weight of said ball). A brief Google search turns up 135 hits, at a variety of restaurants which don't appear to share common ownership. Actually, many of the steaks appear to be 10 ounces, which would be two baseballs, but the "Bag of Balls" cut might not sell too well. The closest thing to an explanation seems to be in this commercial butcher catalog, where the picture on page 27 shows a piece of meat which looks a lot more like a cube than the rest of the sirloin once they've been separated. SC supposes that's close enough to looking like a baseball, but considering the part of the cow that actually goes into making said balls, perhaps it's not the best choice of steak names from a marketing perspective anyway.

Is it a typo if you didn't know it was a word?

SC was IM chatting with a coworker today when he (the coworker) suddenly let it be known that a certain situation had him so frustrated that "I could screak". Since the coworker in question usually follows typos with the intended word shortly thereafter, when no correction followed, your host assumed there must be some new word in play. So he looked it up:

Pronunciation: 'skrEk
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse skrækja to screech
: to make a harsh shrill noise  : SCREECH (from Merriam-Webster)

After finding this, your host mentioned that it was a new word to him, and was told that, from his coworker's perspective, it was a typo. In this case, though, it's a typo that may have actually been a step up in communicating the intended thought.

 

Junior league

While your host has no credibility making this statement, he really isn't at all interested in college football. By "not at all interested", he means "does not read about recruiting classes except on the days they're finally announced". Thus, two names of apparently prestigious recruits jumped out at him while perusing ESPN's list of the top classes.

First up, LSU has landed an offensive tackle named T-Bob Hebert, the son of former NFL player Bobby Hebert. At first, SC thought this was evidence of some kind of screwball humor on the elder Hebert's part, but it turns out that this is actually a productive naming process in Louisiana:

Moments after his birth, Bobby Joseph Hebert III got the distinctive name he still goes by in everyday life.
His great grandmother, a true Cajun, made the call. Birdie Hebert, a fur trapper and a shrimp fisherman in her time, decided the family’s newest offspring would have a very fitting name for Louisiana natives who follow the Acadian culture.
So she dubbed him T-Bob, a shortening of the Cajun French word, petite, which translates to tiny or little. The name didn’t sound so unusual to T-Bob’s father, NFL quarterback Bobby Hebert, a Cut Off, La. native who had friends growing up named T-Mel, T-Doug and T-John, usually sons who took their father’s names.

Now, SC was a little suspicious that there might be a put-up job going on here, since the story was told to an out-of-state paper, so he went looking for more confirming evidence, preferably from a Louisiana source. And he found some (from a New Orleans sportscaster's blog):

T-Bob (which for those of you who don't know is the cajun way to say Bobby Jr.)  is rated as the #2 center is America.

Then came evidence of a T-Doug. SC tried looking for T-Mel and T-John, but Google thinks every instance of "isn't Mel" or "wasn't John" is a valid hit, and there's only so much sifting that your host is prepared to do. Suffice it to say that, invoking SC's favorite phonological principle (once is an exception, twice is a rule), he'll consider this sufficient evidence of a real phenomenon.

Incidentally, "petite" Bob is about 5 inches taller and 80 pounds heavier than SC, benches twice as much, squats three times as much, and yet runs the 40-yard dash a half-second faster (T-Bob's stats available at the link; you'll have to take SC's word about himself by comparison). So in case you're reading this, T-Bob: Best. Name. Ever.

A more familiar pattern of nicknaming due to being #2 to carry a name comes from Michigan recruit Junior Hemingway. With a name like that, SC couldn't help but scan the list of Michigan recruits to see if Hemingway might not line up next to a Scotty Fitzgerald. Don't look at me like that -- there's precedent.

Voltaire's laundry room

Voltaire would have been greatly vexed by the unusual term that SC's grandmother-in-law uses for her laundry room. She calls it a "service porch", which would have caused the philosopher to remark that it neither provided services, nor was a porch. SC does not generally identify with Voltaire, but on this point would find much happy agreement with him. In the past, though, your host has always written off this term as some archaism from the Chicago of 70 years ago (that being where said grandmother grew up).

Last night, this theory was subjected to a stunning reversal. The phrase was spoken -- completely spontaneously, and as a wholly natural reference in the course of conversation -- by a doctor who works with Mrs. SC. Your host could not help himself, and immediately asked, "were you raised in Chicago?". The doctor replied that in fact he had lived in Southern California his entire life, and that his parents (immigrants to the U.S.) had not lived in the Chicago area, either.

Today, this sent SC scurrying to dictionaries, where he was in for something of a surprise. Your host could find no evidence that this phrase occurs in any of: the Oxford English Dictionary, the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, or the American Heritage Dictionary. Wikipedia's list of architectural elements includes a regular porch, but no service porch. Lexicographers agree with SC -- this phrase should not exist. And yet, two users of it do (and more, as we'll see shortly).

Oddly, prior to this episode, SC had never bothered to check Google for usages of the phrase; there are 873 of them. In the conversation SC had with the aforementioned doctor, it was explained to your host that the "service" did not originate with any sort of laundry (a-ha!), but rather with it being a place at the back door where milkmen and grocers could make deliveries. This accords with a few usages found online, in particular from a book called "TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes" where it is said of the Cleaver household:

A windowed service door near the breakfast table opens to a service porch (for milk delivery), two trash bins and the garage, where Ward stows his Ford Fairlane, as well as a set ... (emphasis in original, due to highlighting by Amazon)

That's about as concise a definition as could be hoped for, and agrees with this lengthier description involving milkmen and icemen (and SC doesn't mean Yetis). Another reference, from Sunset Magazine (dated 1987), indirectly establishes that this normally refers to an actual outdoor porch:

The new living space became a sunroomwith desk, dining table, and room for casual seating. The kitchen, which expanded to enclose the service porch, opens to the new room along its entire south side, thanks to a wide beam that replaced a portion of the old exterior wall. A similar arrangement opens the sitting room side. (empahsis added)

And again, from a blogger named Will Duquette, dated 2004, establishing a linkage between the outdoor porch and laundry room usages, while explicitly noting the inexact transfer of meaning across usages:

That is, the main line from the street to the water heater and service porch (well, it’s not really a service porch, and it’s not really in the house, but it has a washer-driver and a half-bath in it, and the distinction isn’t worth going into) has been replaced with copper; the second half will be done in a month or so. (emphasis added)

The famous lyricist Stephen Sondheim knows the word, too, and thinks you wouldn't want food out there (establishing that it was known in New York of the '30s, when/where he grew up, and isn't just a Chicagoism):

I would be so perturbed that I would immediately go into the service porch and take a bite out of the hanging salami.  I knew that would annoy my parents right back, because they hated when we kids would just take a bite out of the hanging salami.  That would just gross the parents out no end, this hanging salami with a bite out of it.  Of course, we won't mention the grossness of just having a salami hanging in your service porch.  When company would come over they would always remark "Why is there a hanging salami in your service porch" to which my parents had no answer.

Alright, Service Porch English speakers (that's regular English modified to include the lexical item "service porch"), SC concedes defeat. Once upon a time, this was a well-known term -- albeit not well-known enough to make it into any dictionary. But the milkman and the iceman AREN'T COMING ANYMORE. Get with the times -- and the grocery store -- already.

You don't have to be so schneid about it

Jim Cramer, writing yesterday about the possibility of another stock market rally (subscription required) in the near term:

But it will not run unless two things happen: Google finally takes off and Apple gets off the schneid, a term sports fans will know means "finishes that losing streak." (emphasis added)

SC knows that Bob Kennedy wrote about this word a little over a year ago, and found that it was a term borrowed from gin (the card game, not the drink), but what actually caught your host's attention was Cramer's suggestion that this should be known to sports fans generally. Since Cramer's speech is liberally salted with a variety of neologisms and local coinages, this piqued SC's curiosity: could he isolate where this word is actually in common use? Perhaps the Philadelphia Inquirer? (Cramer lives in Philadelphia.) Or one of the New York papers? Was it at all possible that this word even shows up in West Coast papers? Prof. Kennedy's original example came from a game played in Denver, Colorado, but it was a wire-service story, which doesn't say much about its regional character.

This turns out to be another tricky case where Google's results need to be interpreted with care. The raw, unmassaged hit count for "off the schneid" is about 56,000. Clicking through to the point where Google claims it is filtering out duplicates yields an estimate of 467 uses (your host isn't sure if this is a better way of reporting results yet, but he's playing with it) -- certainly, a large number of hits appear to be spurious due to the fact that a blog written by Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Troy Schneider is titled "Off the Schneid" (the link is to Google's cache of the page, as the site itself demands registration). Suffice it to say that SC is willing to believe the number of actual distinct uses recorded by Google falls somewhere between 467 and 56,000.

The question then becomes how to determine the regional character of the phrase. Given the extremely low likelihood of any linguistic atlas recording this one, and with only Google to go by, your host concocted the following methodology. Proposals for refinement are quite welcome. Starting with this list of the top 150 newspapers by audited circulation, he searched the top 10 papers by circulation by three regions, arbitrarily defined as East (roughly anything east of the Appalachian Mountains), West (using the Rocky Mountains) and Central (in between). USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are excluded a priori on the grounds that they are written for a national audience, and the goal here was to catch papers with primarily local sports coverage. Each newspaper name is linked to a Google search for the phrase, followed by two counts, one labeled "use" (for actual uses by the paper's writers), and one labeled "mention" (for quotes from athletes, forums hosted by the paper, or reprinted content from wires/other sources). Where Google has concealed hits, the expanded result list has not been used -- if it comes back with 3 links and promises 12, only 3 were checked. Lexis/Nexis would probably be a better search tool due to the vagaries of content being obscured behind registration requirements, but Google's what we've got to work with here. Finally, a little subjectivity has gone into this; for example, the New York Post is shown with one use, because their writer Phil Mushnick criticized someone else for misusing "off the schneid", although he didn't use it spontaneously -- nevertheless, he wouldn't have written about it except to demonstrate his familiarity with it, and so a judgment call was made to count that as a use.

Newspaper	Use	Mention
New York Times	0	3
Washington Post	0	5
New York Daily News	0	0
New York Post	1	1
Philadelphia Inquirer	1	0
Boston Globe	3	3
Newark Star-Ledger	2	7
Atlanta Journal-Constitution	1	11
Long Island Newsday	1	11
St. Petersburg Times	4	2

                   

Newspaper	Use	Mention
Chicago Tribune	0	10
Houston Chronicle	2	9
Minneapolis Star-Tribune	1	1
Cleveland Plain Dealer	0	7
St. Louis Dispatch	0	4
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel	9	1
Kansas City Star	1	0
Indianapolis Star	0	4
Detroit News/Free Press	2	3
Columbus Dispatch	0	0

       
         

Newspaper	Use	Mention
Los Angeles Times	3	5
Denver Post	1	0
Arizona Republic	0	0
San Francisco Chronicle	2	5
Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer	1	10
San Diego Union-Tribune	2	13
Portland Oregonian	0	7
Orange County Register	0	0
Sacramento Bee	0	1

Obviously, this isn't a very common phrase, to put it mildly. Most, not to say all, of the mentions are a result of papers affiliating with a wire service called The Sports Network, which seems to have 2-3 writers who like the phrase. Many of the remaining hits come from message boards hosted by the papers -- most of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hits are the result of one user who really loves the phrase (and hence why it's helpful to segment it into a "mention" category). The numbers are too low for it to mean anything significant, but for the record, 7 East Coast papers show actual uses by their staff, versus only 5 apiece for the Central and Western papers. SC is mildly embarrassed that the most hits anywhere come from his hometown paper, and he didn't see it coming, but almost all of those are from their message boards, which he doesn't read (phew!). Suffice it to say that, based on the evidence at hand, Jim Cramer is just flat-out wrong -- sports fans could not reasonably be expected to know what "off the schneid" means, at least not by the measure of whether or not it shows up in their local newspapers.

Nonce sense (but no reference)

Rarely has SC's day been so brightened by receiving the Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day as it has this morning. That's because today he learned something about a word he thought he knew, a word familiar to everyone who's ever taken an introductory linguistics course, nonce. Never having had occasion to look it up, SC had long thought it was a derivative of nonsense, and just meant "made-up". Nope:

"Nonce" first appeared in Middle English as a noun spelled "nanes." The spelling likely came about from a misdivision of the phrase "then anes." ("Then" was the Middle English equivalent of "the" and "anes" meant "one purpose.") The word was especially used in the phrase "for the nonce," meaning "for the one purpose," as in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prologue" of _Canterbury Tales_: "A cook they hadde with hem for the nones / To boille the chiknes with the marybones." The adjective "nonce" did not exist in print until the publication in 1884 of the _New English Dictionary on Historical Principles_ (which later became the _Oxford English Dictionary_). The editor of that dictionary, James Murray, created the term "nonce-word" as a label for "words apparently employed for the nonce."

How many words does one language need?

SC has written before, in loving detail, about his favorite linguist of all time, the fictional Dr. Unne from the original Final Fantasy. Today, while catching up on the last few weeks of his favorite web comic, the Final Fantasy-inspired 8-bit Theater, he saw that the adventurers have finally reached the town which inspired Dr. Unne's studies, Lefein. As has been noted here before, the original game didn't provide much by way of native Lefeinish vocabulary:

8-bit Theater runs with this, as "lupa" is the only word the party hears. The protagonist usually perceived to be the stupidest, named Fighter, promptly develops a theory of lexical tones, whereby "Lefeinish consists entirely of a single word...but that word can mean different things depending on the intonation and whatnot". This is not actually a wholly ridiculous theory, but in order to have a single morphological word, there would have to be thousands of semantically distinct two-symbol sequences of tones, and SC isn't aware of any language that makes more than a 5-way distinction (that's all that Chao letters encode, at any rate).

Needless to say, Fighter's attempt to chat up a local girl with his newfound insights ends in a pratfall. As she storms off, the skeptical Red Mage proclaims, "The odds of forming a complete sentence at random are astronomically rare". Given the hypotheses developed above, the Red Mage couldn't be more wrong, and the strip ends as the girl comes back with a small army of local policemen.

With the benefit of a few more strips' hindsight, it's clear that the party will escape the situation in their usual manner -- by using magic to blast everything around them, no matter how helpful it could be later, into smoking rubble. But Fighter recognizes, correctly if ineptly, something that the rest of his party doesn't, even after they've landed in jail:

Fighter: We'll be okay, just let me do all the talking.

Black Mage: Fight, you can't speak their language, okay?

Fighter: Well, obviously. But they don't know that!

Of course, the party would be much better off if they did.

Downsizing is so passe

Geoff Pullum offers some speculations on Lanuage Log about the meaning of the word "downsize". Prof. Pullum is not wrong about the use of the word "downsize" to refer to firings, although SC thinks he is mistaken about it only having achieved that meaning as an extension of the original semantics by people who had been laid off at companies where it was said to occur. As far as SC knows, "downsize" has always meant something like "shrink headcount without shrinking duties carried out" (with the added kicker that it means the survivors hate their jobs more).

But regardless of whether or not the managers who coined the term originally had mass firings in mind, they're certainly aware of the association. And that's why those of us who live in industry don't quake so much at the term "downsizing" anymore, because it long ago took second place to the less threatening-sounding (and therefore more pernicious) "