Semantic Compositions

That's fine

SC and Mrs. SC went to dinner this evening at a trendy pan-Asian restaurant. To be frank, it was just OK. But as your host devilishly remarked as he signed the bill, "I may not have gotten a good meal out of this, but I'm getting a post!". What caused this comment?

Mrs. SC only ate about half of her meal, and requested a box for the remainder. When she did so, the waiter replied, "I can box it for you". Mrs. SC then told him, "That's fine". Upon the waiter's return to the table, he handed her a box and left. Mrs. SC was surprised.

"Wasn't he going to box it for me?", she asked. "No, you told him not to", replied SC.

The confusion stems from the ill-defined polarity of the phrase "that's fine"; we've addressed this before with regard to the question, "do you mind?". There are two possible interpretations, which we might expand like so:

1) That's fine, I would appreciate it.
2) That's fine, I can do it myself.

To your host, the second one is the more natural interpretation of the isolated "that's fine", but that intuition is certainly open to debate. Similarly, it seems to me that a falling intonation indicates (2), but again, introspection is not necessarily a reliable guide. A flat or rising intonation doesn't strike me as conveying (1) particularly strongly.

Pursuing my own intuitions further, it seems likely that if I wanted to say (1), I would actually say "that would be fine", and that this latter phrasing would never mean (2). But (1) is not an unreasonable interpretation of Mrs. SC's original utterance; had she said "that's fine with me", (1) would be clearly understood, and it's easy to imagine that she could have produced "that's fine" through ellipsis.

Of course, there's an easy way to avoid problems of ambiguity, whether one word is at issue, or the syntax of the entire sentence: just say something that disambiguates it. But if we all spent enough time trying to compute the potential interpretations of what we want to say before we say it, I'd be writing about the waiter who ran off in frustration rather than the ambiguity of words without explicit yes/no polarity.

A blog-a-rific post

In the interests of not making every post here about media bias this week, and keeping with the nascent SC tradition (anything less than a year old just doesn't really seem to merit the t-word) of blogging about fast-food language, your host will mention a sign seen tonight at Jack-In-The-Box:

Aroma-licious! Bean-tastic! Java-rific! Coffee so good, we had to make up new words for it.

Since these aren't really morphemes on their own (cran, cran, cran, cran...), SC couldn't resist trying out the endings to see how readily they were adopted by other people. As usual, all hit counts are Google's, the second-favorite search engine of SC (his favorite remains the one he helped design, even if it never made it out of the lab).

"rific": about 25,000 hits, including such gems as ""Tour-rific", "Spa-rific", "Tigger-rific", and "Tea-rific". "Tour" and "tea" work particularly well in this case, for obvious reasons. Your host was only mildly surprised to learn that "rrific" with two "r"s is nowhere near as popular (about 3,000 hits); although "ter" isn't a morpheme, either, and he might have expected the double consonant to be carried over to parallel the appearance of "terrific", we don't start many words with two of the same consonant (the British name ffolkes being a rare exception, and the name of a very funny movie).

"tastic" is far more popular than "rific", pulling in some 130,000 hits. This is true even when you pull out the too-easy pun "fun-tastic" (also minus "fan-tastic with a '-'), with 91,000 hits. Inspection of the first few pages of results indicate that pornographers seem to have a special affection for "tastic", a fact which I cannot explain and don't care to try.

"licious" turns out to be as popular as "tastic". It comes in with fewer hits in isolation; only about 114,000. But if you pull out the most obvious hit again, "dee-licious", you get as many hits as "tastic". Unsurprisingly, it finds use primarily in food descriptions; "pawlicious" for a line of dog snacks, "maui-licious" barbeque sauce, and "vegan-licious" (a vegan cookbook) were typical results.

Searching for morphemes like this presents a special problem. The results above all depended on people singling out the usage they were coining by using a space or hyphen between the stem and the affix in question. If someone wrote "mauilicious", though, it would skip right by Google. So the above estimates are only a very rough guide to the productivity of the morphemes involved, although it's hard to believe that the relative frequencies would change all that much.

SC really likes these constructions. Coinages of this sort represent a search for something which is not merely a superlative, but conveys excitement and enthusiasm as well. Yes, it's easy for them to be trite and cheap; there's a reason the "tastic" count went down so spectacularly without the two most obvious variations. And writing like this in serious genres would come off stylistically as more juvenile than clever. Still, in appropriate contexts, these words are good for at least a fleeting smile and a brighter mood, and it's not too often you can get that from just one word anywhere.

Isn't comment spam wonderful?

SC has never in his life engaged in 1337-speak ([j00 /\/\34/\/ sp33k? -- ed.]) but finds himself oddly tempted to either reply "j00 suxx0r" to the latest comment to show up here, instead of just deleting it.

It's at moments like this that I'm more prone to understand why so many bloggers have either quit on comments or gone to elaborate methods of validating users. It wasn't that long ago that your host threatened to move -- and he's planning to at least get some version of an "SC.com" domain in the near future, as step one towards such a move. In the meantime, though, I think I'll settle for a heavier hand on the "delete" button.

Back to the convention

[7:30] SC, stuck working late again, tunes into John Edwards' speech on the radio while driving home.

[8:00] On the Alan Colmes radio show, Jack Kemp praises the speech as outstanding.

[8:10] SC gets home and starts flipping through the cable channels. MSNBC and Fox News are carrying a simply ludicrous count of the votes towards Kerry's nomination. The suspense is killing SC -- will Kerry get enough delegates? Stop me before I say "duh" again.

[8:20] The broadcast networks have better things to do with their time. On CBS, "60 Minutes". On NBC, "Extra". On ABC, Jeopardy -- in reruns. SC silently gives thanks for 24-hour cable news, and also for satellite TV because of how much he despises his last cable company.

[8:23] Fox is replaying part of Al Sharpton's speech. Carl Cameron says, "perhaps a little more partisanship than John Edwards and John Kerry would prefer". Not an especially partisan comment in light of the fact that Kerry's preference to minimize Bush-bashing was well-reported in the days just before the convention.

[8:25] Chris Matthews on MSNBC has the same panel on he's had for the last two days: Mitchell, Fineman, Brown and Scarborough. Andrea Mitchell is talking about a girl (Edwards' daughter?) who was hit by a hockey stick that fell in the Fleet Center sometime this afternoon. Little commentary about the speeches themselves. Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, says that Zell Miller's probably getting his talking points from the Republican National Committee. Howard Fineman expresses surprise that John Edwards talks about "destroying" terrorists, saying that he compares unfavorably to Dick Cheney on that score. Matthews' prompt? "Talk about Edwards' speech". SC sorely regrets missing Keith Olbermann, who is increasingly standing out as the only non-opinion journalist to really say anything all that partisan.

[8:30] Mrs. SC requests that your host detach himself from the TV.

So that's that for this evening's convention. I wonder if Kerry will have been nominated when I wake up tomorrow. Aside from that, though, it's fascinating to see how cautious the journalists often accused of being on any side in particular are being. Perhaps there's something to the arguments that the success of Fox News has forced the other channels to be less partisan to keep viewers. Or perhaps the accusations of partisanship are a matter of conflating each network's opinion crew with their news team. It is getting disappointing; SC longs for the 1800s, when papers were 10x more numerous, and 100x more recklessly opinionated. At least they weren't boring.

Someone needs to fire their fact checkers

Alas, the demands of a job 70 miles from home intruded on SC's ability to sit on a couch and stare at a TV for 3 hours. Such backwards priorities.

However, your host has been busy collecting articles from four major newspapers: the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Also two newswires, Reuters and the AP. Some slight amount of editorial judgment is going into the construction of a corpus; no effort has been made to save editorials, copies of speech transcripts (or excerpts thereof), web-only articles, or anything judged to be "content-free" (TV listings and such). That's not to say that some columns might not be less suitable for study than others. It's not at all clear that Howard Kurtz's media criticism column in the Post (for example, it's nothing against Kurtz) counts as theoretically objective journalism, so columns like that might end up being culled out.

But it's still early to talk about a study where the data is barely available for collecting as yet, never mind anything like a methodology firmly settled on. A few interesting tidbits stood out, nevertheless.

From the New York Times: "Mr. Gore's experience may have given him latitude denied to others: while Kerry advisers vetted all speeches for egregious Bush-bashing, they did not change a word of his."

From MSNBC: "That could already be affecting tonight's headliners: last night, Al Gore's speech was basically torn up, according to two sources, and is now being rewritten, presumably to fit more closely with the party line."

So what happened? Did Al Gore's speech get rewritten or not? It's not clear that this exemplifies any sort of bias -- would it be positive or negative spin to maintain that the speech was rewritten, and from whose perspective? -- but somebody has their facts wrong. Or maybe the anonymous sources behind both versions were just having fun with the media.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note early on is the disparity in the depth of coverage. The Wall Street Journal had only 10 articles even touching on the convention enough to pass the screening criteria, and some of them were "roundup"-type articles. The Washington Post had something like 30 articles on their website, but no more than half of them appeared in the actual newspaper, and some of those that did failed the criteria above; the rest were online chats or snippets from blogs. Your host pulled 15 articles from the L.A. Times, and 20 articles from the New York Times. It's not surprising to see that the Wall Street Journal's coverage is shallower than other national papers, given their primarily economic focus; otherwise, the coverage was fairly comparable.

The one thing your host did make sure to watch was a replay of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore's catfight interview. SC can't remember seeing any talk show host ever grant an interview with the explicit condition that the guest gets to ask questions back. That alone made it mildly interesting, but neither of them said anything you wouldn't guess from seeing them elsewhere.

Perhaps SC picked a good day not to telecommute after all. Dan Rather obviously would rather have taken the night off, a point he's making to anyone who asks. One of the stories of the conventions this year is the decision of the major networks to cut coverage to one hour a night at both events; in Rather's words "if we were on for three hours a night, in a lot of places a test pattern would get better ratings". That's not entirely fair to test patterns; your host owns 2 DVDs full of them, and watches them with disturbing regularity. In all seriousness, though, Rather may be onto something; if the media has decided that the conventions are basically a waste of good advertising time, does it really matter what they say about them?

Hill 'n' Bill

[6:45] Dan Rather is running a pre-taped interview with Hillary Clinton as part of general news coverage leading up to CBS' official campaign coverage. "Have you ever thought about being President? isn't exactly tough. Actually, the emerging theme on the first evening of the Democratic convention isn't media bias; it's just shameless sucking up to the players. Come on. George Mitchell and Bob Dole have been out of the spotlight for a while; I can't believe they wouldn't be willing to deal with a lot more just to get face time on TV. And the rest of these people are at least as eager to get an opportunity to get name recognition. This isn't a partisan observation, it's true about politicians across the board.

[7:00] I'm not going to take Glenn Close seriously. The official SC policy on political pronunciamentos by entertainers can be inferred from here.

[7:10] No comments on September 11 survivors, either, but not for the same reasons.

[7:30] Hillary Clinton is speaking. If I was recording this all, I'd sit down with a copy of Praat later and pull out some intonation contours; she prolongs primary stress in some odd places. Since Bill is coming on right afterwards, there won't be any commentary between the two.

[7:40] I can't be the only one who noticed that Bill said, "I'm pleased to share this podium with my senator", not "my wife". Interesting lexical choice.

[7:45] Bill Clinton is giving easily the most engaging speech of the night. It's not hard to see why; the crowd went wild for him in a way they didn't for Gore, Carter, or any of the other speakers so far. Bill Clinton manages to exhort and bang on the podium without sounding shrill or forced. That's not trivial. It'll be interesting to see if the post-speech commentary catches his most remarkable oratorical achievement; have a look at the transcript, at the point where he gets the delegates into a series of call-and-response chants in praise of Kerry: "Send me!". Oddly, I can't find the transcript on any of the network websites, or the official convention site, even thought Hillary's speech is available; is there an embargo on it? (Update: I don't know why it took 2+ hours to go up, but here's the transcript.

[8:00] Dan Rather is speaking over Patti LaBelle, but just promising more coverage. Over on Fox News, Fred Barnes is praising the brilliance of Clinton's speech in contrast to everything that came before this evening, and cracking wise about it being "the shortest speech I've ever heard him give". Mort Kondracke says that the Democrats have done quite well to take advantage of Bush's 2000 campaign line "a uniter, not a divider". NPR's Mara Liasson is similarly praising Clinton's speech; the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol is impressed by Clinton's comments emphasizing that the Democrats are a "party of strength". Right now, it's a little hard to detect the outrageous right-wing bias that supposedly characterizes Fox News.

[8:08] Tom Vilsack is getting grilled on MSNBC about the story circulating about his wife, who reportedly made some rather intolerant comments about the language skills of blacks and Southerners. Vilsack is brushing it off as "politics of personal destruction" rhetoric, and denying that the story is in context, but the reporter isn't letting up on him; does he think the story cost him the VP slot on the Democratic ticket? Outside of Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC crowd has been pretty much serious and fair-minded.

[8:13] I spoke too soon about MSNBC. Tom Brokaw and Jon Stewart are gushing about how wonderful Clinton's speech was. Now, your host agrees that it was effective, but this is a bit much from Brokaw, who's supposed to be "objective"; Stewart gets a pass as a comedian, I suppose, but he's not being very funny. Tim Russert reports that Al Gore had to cut a joke out of his speech, an old chestnut about a drunk looking under a streetlight for his keys. The punchline is "because that's where the light is". Ugh. Stewart seems to have noticed how lamely partisan he's been, and just tried to make up for it with something ridiculous about Jimmy Carter running around knocking houses down so he can make a show of putting them up. Why is the Daily Show so popular?

[8:17] Aaron Brown's floor reporter, Kelly Wallace, is either not up on the current polls, or has an axe to grind. She just said that the trend in opinion polling on Iraq shows that more people believe that it's going badly than before; the latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows a big trend in Bush's direction in that regard. Maybe CNN has different numbers. Oops, they don't.

[8:25] Back to Fox News. Carl Cameron, reporting from the floor for Greta Van Susteren, comments that "whether you're a partisan Republican or a Democrat, you can't deny that Clinton gave an electrifying speech. Major Garrett, another floor reporter, just made a point of replaying the "send me" line and commenting on its rhetorical brilliance.

[8:40] That's enough for now. More tomorrow, although my schedule may preclude live blogging of the commentary.

[Edited on 7/26/04 at 10:33 p.m. to add link)

Jimmy Carter's public panic

[6:15] Jimmy Carter's speech just wrapped up, and was focused largely on foreign policy (also on Kerry's military service). Chris Matthews asked his panel: "What was this speech?", a not terribly partisan question. Then he put on Tad Devine, one of Kerry's senior campaign managers, and hammered him on the question of whether or not Bush is creating "public panic" (Carter's phrase). Devine wouldn't answer until the third time the question was asked, and then still carefully avoided saying the word "yes", although his response certainly indicated agreement. Credit to Matthews for not letting up; despite his background, he's not lobbing softballs.

[6:20] CNN has put Larry King on this answer. John Kerry's daughters Vanessa and Alexandra are his guests. It's not even worth talking about bias when Larry King is on; the man is such a vapid interviewer as to defy belief. Among the questions: "Will this be a hard campaign?", "Are you close as a family?", and "Have you seen your dad's speech?". Must...change...channel...so sleepy...

[6:25] Half of Hannity and Colmes -- and I don't mean the Sean Hannity half -- is interviewing Rahm Emanuel, Congressman from Chicago. Unlike Matthews, Mitchell, Russert, etc., Colmes is an opinion journalist; his questions are things like "wouldn't you agree that the Republicans are on the defensive?", but it's no sign of media bias for a man paid to represent one side of a political debate to do so. SC catches the interview late, and doesn't hear much interesting, but Colmes mentions that Ann Coulter will be up as a guest to discuss why she's been dropped by USA Today as a campaign commentator. The column they'll be discussing can be found here, along with what Coulter claims are the comments she received from editors. If they're for real, the editors must be the only people in America not to get the jokes, whether or not they find them funny. Judging by their official comments, SC hopes the squabble was really about money or something else private -- did they really not know that Ann Coulter likes to be sarcastic? Hannity and Colmes are bringing on Jerry Springer next, and I'm not going to bother with that.

[6:40] Larry King has George Mitchell and Bob Dole, both former Senate majority leaders on, and is wasting a golden opportunity as usual, with questions like, "Tell me about the importance of family in campaigning". SC is beginning to regret committing to watching so much Larry King, but didn't think this through beforehand. Chris Matthews is still going on with his panel of Scarborough, Mitchell, Willie Brown and Howard Fineman. Not exciting. Actually, they're all just wasting time at this point. More after Bill and Hillary speak.

Muffins and Michael Moore

[5:20] Between the Gore and Carter speeches, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC discussed the Teresa Kerry "shove it" story; Fox News was busy covering the Lori Hacking story, and the major networks won't pick up until Bill Clinton's speech. Olbermann's choice of topics certainly doesn't reflect any particular bias, but he did refer to the Pittsburgh newspaper in question as "ultra-conservative", and mentioned that the reporter involved didn't deserve the treatment he received "even if he's from the Beijing Fascist Times". That's an odd choice of terms, considering that Beijing is controlled by Communists, not Fascists. Pat Buchanan and Bill Press ([it didn't work at CNN; why is MSNBC wasting their time with these two? -- ed.]) are on with Olbermann to comment. Or would be if Press' satellite connection worked.

[5:35] Over on CNN, Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and another reporter whose name SC didn't catch, are talking with Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan. Blitzer couldn't resist asking if Granholm, a Canadian by birth, would like to see an amendment allowing naturalized citizens to run for the presidency. Sucking up isn't exactly bias, but it was painful to watch. Fortunately, Governor Granholm was having none of it. Nothing all that terribly exciting, though.

[5:45] Bill O'Reilly is finally covering the convention, and has Ralph Nader on. Nader's not looking very amused; Gore just basically told the audience where Nader could go (without mentioning him by name). O'Reilly's pressing him on foreign policy, though, not convention-specific material. O'Reilly: "Last question, Ralph. Do you think Osama likes you? [emphasis in O'Reilly's intonation]". Considering that a frequent GOP talking point is the idea that bin Laden and associates would consider a Democratic win (or at least a Republican loss) to be a victory for themselves, a la Spain, the topic isn't unreasonable to broach, but that phrasing is, as O'Reilly says about something at the end of every show, ridiculous.

[5:50] Keith Olbermann, breaking from the convention to cover other news for a minute, announces that the exciting news of the day is that...Saddam likes muffins. I'm not making this up. He's trying to be funny, but his delivery is awful. Go back to ESPN, Keith, you were much better on SportsCenter.

[5:55] O'Reilly shows footage of himself having it out with Michael Moore in a Boston parking lot over Moore's refusal to come on the show. With cameras rolling, Moore and O'Reilly agree on a format and a length of time (about 8 minutes). SC will have to catch this tomorrow.

[6:00] Chris Matthews is asking Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough about the grist for the base coming out tonight. Consensus answer from them is that they have to get past tonight to start focusing on their actual agenda; tonight's just to get the already-committed riled up. Can't transcribe all of the dialogue quickly enough, but Matthews' questioning doesn't strike me as especially partisan. Jimmy Carter's about to speak, though, so that'll wrap the comments for now.

Announcing the first SC live-blogging event

Nobody who uses TypePad, at least at the most basic level of service, is ever going to be accused of breaking any new ground in the technical implementation of blogs. No subscriptions to just one category of posts, no user logins for comments (yet), nothing fancy. Like Porsche drivers, another class of individuals attempting to cover for a particular inadequacy, SC thus feels compelled to occasionally try to break new ground in content. One case where your host feels like he succeeded at least a little was in doing a series on bilingual issues, including a book review, a writing form which doesn't seem to have caught on among linguistics blogs.

However, thanks to the glories of wireless networking, office productivity software, and raw self-promotional behavior, we're going to try another innovation around here. As anyone with even the most fleetingly passing of interests in politics knows, the Democratic National Convention is this week, and the Republican convention follows a month later. Admittedly, the actual news value of both conventions will be low, but for committed junkies, watching the rhetoric and spluttering at the TV is nevertheless fun.

So what's the linguistic spin on this? Well, Geoff Nunberg has written some highly critical commentary on the notion of media bias. Much of said commentary focuses on the questionable statistical methods used to back up these assertions. Since the topic nevertheless remains an interesting one for linguists to focus on, and since the conventions present a temporally circumscribed pair of more-or-less identical events, it might be quite interesting to address the question of bias by examining the coverage.

Thus, your host is going to try his hand at running live commentary on the (prime-time) convention coverage. In addition, we're going to be collecting the transcripts from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC as available for all four days, and the major networks for the parts that they ultimately carry (since they won't be doing as much). I can't post commentary quite in real time, but we'll be putting up notes on the events -- and on the coverage -- as they occur, along with daily post-mortems of the coverage. With a little more time, we'll solicit community feedback for marking up the transcripts and related news stories, to allow for some more objective computational analysis. All files that come out of this project will be made freely available.

Right now, SC is watching Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Given Russert and Matthews' employment history as press secretaries for Democratic officials, does it count as media bias for them to be talking about what the Democrats need to do to win? That's a tough question that doesn't really get answered by counting up tokens of "liberal" or "conservative" in transcripts, and so we're going to spend some time working through answers to that over the next few days.

What's in a stock symbol?

Today, Google announced the details of their upcoming IPO. The company plans to trade under the symbol GOOG, which isn't quite what SC would have guessed (his money, metaphorically speaking, was on GOGL -- at the proposed initial valuation, nearly as big as Yahoo or Amazon to start, his actual money won't be anywhere near this one). Since this is something of an event, here's a little riff on stock symbols and their communicative functions.

There's informational value in the length of the symbol alone. A New York Stock Exchange-listed company, whether foreign or domestic, can use a symbol of anywhere between one and three letters. Surprisingly, not all of the one-letter symbols are taken: H, I, J, M, P, U, W, and Z are all available. Admittedly, there aren't likely to be quite so many takers for Z as any of the others, and it's an open secret that the NYSE has been trying for years to get Intel and Microsoft to take two of them (SC will trust you to figure out which two), but this is still an interesting demonstration of the fact that being short isn't the only criteria of a symbol's desirability. Any symbol which is four letters represents a company which trades on the NASDAQ; any symbol of five letters not only means that the stock trades on the NASDAQ, but depending on the specific fifth letter, may either be a foreign listing or a special circumstance. One example of an circumstance that isn't a big deal is the dual listing of Comcast shares as CMCSA and CMCSK; the fifth symbol in these cases denotes voting and non-voting shares respectively. A symbol like SOLUQ.OB is one to avoid; not only could the company cease trading at any time, since they're bankrupt (indicated by the Q), but the OB tells you that the company's stock is trading in a market known as the "bulletin board", where the rules are rather less stringent than they are on the NYSE or NASDAQ.

Aside from the length, the symbol can tell you something about the company's name, by being an abbreviation. CSCO (Cisco) and MSFT (Microsoft) are well-known examples of that style. Or it can tell you something about the company's products; Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser, trades under BUD, while Starwood Resorts, owner of Sheraton Hotels, trades under HOT (as in hotel). Some companies have a bit of a sense of humor about it; Brinker, a Texas-based casual dining operation, is listead as EAT, and Southwest Airlines trades under the symbol LUV.

Some companies know that their symbol is associated with a poor public image, but because they've got a heavy investment in the symbol, they can't change; MO, long known to the rest of us as Philip Morris, today is the symbol for "Altria", a disastrous idea for a loosely Latinate name (see if you believe their story about the derivation). Other companies never quite got the bad karma associated with their symbol, and aren't around to worry about it anymore; the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel was a notable example.