Semantic Compositions

Cheers to the Chief

Long-suffering martini purists long ago recognized that any old drink that happened to be served in a martini glass would be given that name, however undeserving, but stand firm on the classic recipe nonetheless:

[A]s a result of the publication of this monograph, I shall be offered innumerable Martinis. I also know that most of them will be downright poisonous or otherwise unacceptable...
In the first place, the Martini on the rocks is an abomination, and must be classed with fast foods, rock and roll, snowmobiles, acid rain, polyester fabrics, supermarket tomatoes, and books printed on toilet paper as a symptom of anomie. My Martini shall be served "straight up" in a thoroughly chilled, stemmed glass. The gin, but not the vermouth...shall have been chilled before mixing, and the gin and vermouth shall be shaken or stirred -- I don't care which -- with good ice. "Good" means made from spring water, or failing that, Perrier or the like. (Lowell Edmunds, "Martini, Straight Up", Preface to the First Edition, 1979)

SC confesses, before preceding further, that he is a vodka martini drinker, not a gin martini drinker, and has a taste for many of the adulterated concoctions that earn Dr. Edmunds' disapproval. Nevertheless, a short sampling makes reasonably clear that -tini is now simply a suffix meaning "served in a martini glass, possibly containing vodka or gin":

• A partial selection from the Cheesecake Factory (click on "From the Bar"; formatting per original):
  

  TROPICAL MARTINI
  Absolut Vodka Shaken with Passion Fruit, Mango and Pineapple

  BIKINI MARTINI™
  Malibu and Cruzan Pineapple Rums with Pineapple Juice.
  Delicious!

  ASIAN PEAR MARTINI
  Absolut Vanilia Vodka, Pear, Sake and Passion Fruit

  RED RASPBERRY MARTINI
  Stoli Raspberry Vodka, Chambord and Fresh Raspberry

• A couple from the Ruth's Chris Steak House drink menu (formatting largely per original):
  

  Fusion Martini                
  The ultimate fusion of Belvedere Lemonessence &
  Belvedere Vodka with a touch of fresh lemon sour. Served up.

  Pear Twist Martini                
  Belvedere Lemonessence is "twisted" with
  Absolut Pear Vodka and fresh lemon sour. Served up.

So when SC saw the following show up in an e-mail from the Patina Group this afternoon, he wondered what was particularly Obama-related about an "Obamatini":

Alas, no information is available from the company's website, so SC set out in search of Obamatinis to see what other people thought might be characteristic; recipes from the first 4 pages of Google results are shown:

• Chocolate vodka, Frangelico and Chambord (link)
• Zodiac vodka, Blue Curacao, sour mix and blueberries (link)
• Godiva white chocolate liqueur and vodka (link)
• Rye (eww), cardamom vodka (double ewww), various fruit juices and grenadine (link)
• Ciroc (a grape-based "vodka" only dubiously entitled to the name), lemonade and Chambord (link)
• Vanilla vodka and Godiva dark chocolate liqueur (link)
• Self-consciously avoiding "race-based liqueurs", Grey Goose, blueberry juice and Chambord (link)

The obvious choices are things that link Obama to his party (Blue Curacao, blueberry juice) or are suggestive of physical appearance (the various selections of chocolate vodka), but the recurring Chambord was a total surprise -- nothing whatsoever obviously links the President-Elect to raspberries generally or Chambord in particular (including several pages worth of Google results for each pairing).

A final note of linguistic observation: SC was surprised it was "Obamatini" instead of "Obamartini", as the latter seems like the obvious choice from an orthographic standpoint. However, Obama and -tini are clearly the morphemes available for combination (when it isn't a Baracktail instead), and so the morphologically expected result is observed instead.

 

Paging "Ironhead"

SC flew back home from LSA earlier this week just in time to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers ruin what had only lately become a decent season for his beloved Chargers. While he can take warm comfort in the fact that everyone in Pittsburgh woke up to 16-degree Fahrenheit temperatures while he resumed his comfortable temperate-zone lifestyle, the Terrible Towel wavers get to contemplate the prospects of a Super Bowl if they take care of the Baltimore Ravens.

And it's that Ravens part that is precisely the problem for Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl, according to this story from ESPN. Callers to a local radio show apparently have persuaded him to file -- but not pay the fee to finish the job -- an application for a name change to Luke "Steelerstahl". You can see a picture of Mr. Steelerstahl filling out the paperwork in this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Legitimately asked by the Post-Gazette is whether or not this could actually have legal ramifications (because the mayor is signing documents under a pseudonym if he uses Ravenstahl, presumably):

Left unanswered: Whether official actions, like vetoes of council legislation, could be challenged legally if the mayor's name is in limbo. "You'd have to ask the legal folks that question. I guess there's no truth to the rumor, either, that [Council President] Doug Shields came down and applied to be Luke Ravenstahl now that I've given up my name."

Also left unanswered: whether the home team missed an opportunity twenty years ago to draft University of Pittsburgh star Craig Heyward and get him to change his nickname to "Steelhead".

A word for our grandchildren

SC attended the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote at the LSA conference this past weekend, together with the Tensor and Russell Lee-Goldman, and wishes to add a few things that aren't made clear simply by reading the press release.

1) The voting is quite informal, more so than the apparent exact counts would indicate. If something was an obvious winner on a show-of-hands, an appropriately large number was simply estimated.

2) Fish pedicures are new to SC. They were also new to a woman in the crowd who stood up right before the vote on "most outrageous word" to ask, "Is this a hoax?". After half the crowd responded with an enthusiastic no, she sat down with a look of horror that was completely understandable, but also the funniest moment of the event.

3) "Category" is a rather flexible notion. For example, the category of "Election-Related Words", which the Tensor theorized was intended to be a catch-all in an attempt to avoid having the whole event be about the election, 7 of the 11 election-related words to show up in the nominations (excluding the "word of the year" category itself, which consisted of nominations made after all other categories had been voted on) were outside the election category.

4) "of the year" is also rather flexible. "-licious" has been around for a while, a fact which actually caused the person who nominated it to withdraw it. "[name] the [job]", a category meant to encapsulate "Joe the Plumber" and his numerous namesakes, is a pattern going back decades as the other bloggers present observed (think "Rosie the Riveter" and "Bob the Builder", which both add a phonological constraint of alliteration). John McCain has been referred to as a "maverick" countless times over more than a decade, and "lipstick on a pig" is attested repeatedly in business contexts predating Barack Obama's 2008 use of it (here's one from 2000, and another from 2007). 

Despite the hiccups, SC actually thinks the right word of the year was picked, that being "bailout". Unless there is a stunning and permanent change in the way the United States' government finances its operations and prints money, it is highly likely that bailout funds spent today will still be part of the national debt 30 years hence, and as much a part of the conversation about solvency as any entitlement program that exists today. Thus, your host will be rather surprised if his grandchildren don't end up griping about financing "The Great Bailout", as he suspects it will be known by then. Also, as the chair of the voting pointed out, it would be a lot easier to explain picking "bailout" than picking "Barack Obama" as a pair of combining morphemes (think "Barack star" or "Obamanation"). So well done, American Dialect Society -- bailed out by the bailout.

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.