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.

• 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.

Candidates Face the Changes - CollegeHumor video

Another amusing CollegeHumor video.  Make sure you watch to the end

TNR gets taken down a peg by Ann Althouse over the snobbery and sexism that it displays in its anti-Kindle editorial

Althouse: I get pissed off at TNR.

The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn’t. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms.

No, you’re not a snob. Oh, no, no, no.

There is a kernel of a point in TNR’s rant: there are sensual enjoyments in reading physical books that are not reproduced when you read electronic versions. But to say that reading Life of Johnson on an iPhone isn’t really reading Life of Johnson is the stupidest thing I’ve read all month, possibly all year. And, really, unless you’re the type of person who will sit down and spend hours leafing through a book written in a script you can’t even decipher, I’d suggest that even if you believe strongly in the weaker version of the claim, you’re probably overrating the sensual enjoyment of handling books just because up until now it’s always occurred in conjunction with the extremely pleasurable experience of reading. I’d bet that there are hardly any people, among the vast numbers who find reading a chore, who nonetheless really enjoy handling a book. I’d further bet that if the form-factor of the Kindle lasted long enough that people grew up reading on it and associating the very act of reading with handling it (admittedly doubtful) in the future we could look forward to paeans praising the sensual enjoyments of the lightness of the tablet and the satisfying clicking of the thumb-button.As to TNR’s sexism (which occurs later on in the editorial), I don’t really have anything to add to what Althouse says, except to say she certainly seems to have a point.

Testing the latest WP bugfix release.