Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

• Who are the aggressive drivers?

  • Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

    That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage — by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

I think this is interesting on several levels, particularly (if you click through and read the excerpt) that it doesn’t seem to matter at all what the substance of the personalization is merely the fact that it is personalized, and the more stickers the more aggressive.  Also that it’s not whether you get angry behind the wheel, but whether you act it out.  So stay the hell away from that car plastered with "Visualize World Peace", "You Can’t Hug a Child With Nuclear Arms", "Let’s Not Elect W in 2004, Either!", "My Other Car is The Millenium Falcon" and such over every inch of the back.

It’s not clear whether removing stickers and other territorial markers from your car will make you a less aggressive driver…it could, after all, be that the type of person who is prone to territorially marking a car is the type of person who is aggressive behind the wheel (correlation doesn’t imply causation, and all that), but I can certainly envision a psychologically plausible mechanism by which choosing to treat your vehicle as an extension of your personal territory influences you to take "threats" to that territory more personally and get more angry.  In which case, you might be able to influence your future behavior and moods by deliberately choosing to downplay the personalization and emphasize the simple utility aspect: a car is just a box on wheels that takes you where you want to go.

• PC World - Business Center: Vista Security Is Annoying by Design

  • Ars picked up this tidbit at the recent RSA 2008 security conference in San Francisco, where David Cross, Microsoft’s product unit manager for Windows security, discussed the company’s security directions post-Vista. "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious," Cross is quoted as saying.

Microsoft reasons that by annoying the users every time a program requires rights that MS thinks it shouldn’t, users will put pressure on developers to fix those programs.  This ignores the fact that users will, rightly, blame Microsoft and not the particular program for this misfeature, and that if they get annoyed enough, they’ll turn off the security entirely.  Even if the user thought to complain to the vendors of the program, and the vendor jumped right on doing something about it, the lag between the time it first started annoying the user (i.e. as soon as it was installed on Vista) and when a patch would be available to fix the "problem" would encourage the user to just turn the damn security feature off.  And then, if you don’t want to be nagged incessantly to turn it back on, you also end up turning off that warning too–which requires telling the Security Control Panel not to warn you about anything.  If Microsoft didn’t have the arrogant, overbearing culture that they do, they’d have designed it the way ZoneLabs designed their popup warnings about programs trying to do things that might be dangerous: allow the user to white-list the particular program if they know it’s safe, but re-inquire if something has changed about the program (indicating it might have been tampered with by a virus or trojan), and if you didn’t care about a particular class of warning message, disable just that message.

• Language Log » Advice from numbers

  • So we can quantify Arnold’s surmise. In spoken English, even in fairly formal settings, hopefully is not ambiguous, because it’s essentially never used as a manner adverb. In written English non-fiction, the manner-adverbial use is well below 10%, and probably below 5% in most genres. In fiction, the manner-adverbial usage is common, but largely limited to a few stereotyped cases — hopeful quotatives, hopeful looks and hopeful gestures account for the great majority of examples.

Of course, it probably won’t. I notice that of the first page of Google hits, every one of them mentions the disfavor in which it’s held, though thankfully only two of them fully endorse that view. Unfortunately, those two include the only two that are obviously about style (”Hopefully or I Hope?“, and “Lynch- Guide to Grammar and Style“) the rest of the top hits being dictionaries.

Prompted by a query by one of my friends as to whether we tended to say “dumb as a bag of hammers”, “dumb as a box of hair”, or “dumb as a box of hammers” I did the following Googling on “Dumb as a X”:

• Dumb as a * : 502,000
• Bag of hammers: 30,700
• Box of hair: 2,960
• Box of hammers: 1,600
• Box of Rocks: 36,600
• Bag of Rocks: 843
• Bag of Hamsters: 2
• A Shed: 2
• A Post: 33,900
• A Stump: 35,500
• A Rock: 64,000
• A Brick: 36,300

“Dumb as an *”:21,100

• Ox: 675
• Oyster: 18,400
• Elephant: 2,860