Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

• 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.

I got this a little while back, and while it was enjoyable enough, I found it a bit repetitive. If you know anything about linguistics (even as little as I know), there’s not a lot here that will be new to you…I’d guess that you’d be able to outline the main argument of each essay if not all the details just from the title. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was encountering a myth that I’d never even heard before, that “In Appalachia They Speak Like Shakespeare.”

Possibly the most eye-rolling bit is treating all black people regardless of time or geography as belonging to the same culture in “Black Children are Verbally Deprived” (so the oratorical traditions that gave rise to Kwame Nkrumah, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or Desmond Tutu, or even Frederick Douglass are somehow supposed to count as part of the culture of African-American inner-city children); it would have been better to stick to Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King as examples of the richness of at least semi-current African-American oration. But, beyond the question of whether the examples are actually relevant, the structure of the argument is off. Nobody would accept that inner-city African-American children aren’t economically deprived just because they’ve come from a culture that’s given rise to the multi-millionaires Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and so forth. The rest of the essay goes on to do a much better job, but it’s a really weak opening.

I’d say my favorite essay was “English Spelling Is Kattastroffik.” I think it’s the juiciest, with the most concrete examples, and so probably the only one I would have referred back to later.

I passed this book along yesterday via Bookmooch, so even though I wasn’t blown away by it, I hope its new owner finds it informative and useful.

Wild and Crazy WTF « Literal-Minded

On the very first page, though, I found this strange passage:

…the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.

How could a sentence that sounds so wrong have survived numerous rounds of revision and editing to end up in the final product?

1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”, by Laia Hanau
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.

2. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.

3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method - George Polya
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career

4. How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).

5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar - Huddleston & Pullum
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.

6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated - Judith Martin
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.

7. Historian As Detective - Robin Winks
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.

8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space - Gerard K O’Neill
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.

9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain - Antonio Damasio
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)

10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement - Milton and Rose Friedman
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.

11. The Substance of Style - Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.

Of course, the tool this came from gives no indication whatsoever of what method it uses to determine readability, and sneakily inserts a link to an advertiser in the html they give you to copy, so caveat lector.

Update: After Googling around a little, my guess is that the tool uses the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability test, both because it delivers the results in categories that roughly correspond to grade level, and because it’s a test that’s simple enough to calculate with a tiny program.  The formula (from the Wikipedia article) is:

 

It’s my infatuation with sesquipedalian verbiage I tells ya.

Here’s the result of a poll I took on one of the boards I frequent (a board for a group of City of Heroes players). Comments on the poll were disallowed, to try to prevent people from influencing each other’s views, though many eagerly shared their opinions with me via private message. It’s interesting how well this matches up to the 146,000 vs. 49, 300 Google Hits observed on Language Log.

You’ve got another X coming
Which sounds right? >You’ve got another thing coming [ 37 ] [78.72%] >You’ve got another think coming [ 8 ] [17.02%] >Both sound right to me [ 2 ] [4.26%]
Total Votes: 47

Language Log: Another thing coming

Google has 146,000 hits for “another thing coming”, most of which are not the Judas Priest song, vs. 49,300 for “another think coming”, which I’m pretty sure is the original expression. (Arnold Zwicky observed thing’s internet victory back in June of 2004 — though the totals were much smaller then, 21,400 to 5,830.)

This came up the other day in the car, when we were listening to the Judas Priest song, and it turns out that neither my fiancée nor my old college friend recall having ever even heard it as “you’ve got another think coming.” Moreover both were convinced, at least initially, that “another thing” just made more sense than “another think.”

Main Page - NLTK

NLTK — the Natural Language Toolkit — is a suite of open source Python modules, data and documentation for research and development in natural language processing. NLTK contains Code supporting dozens of NLP tasks, along with 30 popular Corpora and extensive Documentation including a 360-page online Book. Distributions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux are available.

I ran across this the other day, and I was just blown away by it. I’m a big fan of Python (and use it whenever I get a chance professionally) as well as being interested in linguistics, so being able to write Python code to manipulate this stuff was just…so…cool. It’s startling how much time I can waste just counting things in the provided corpora. I’m really looking forward to playing with it more, and using it to teach myself about Natural Language Processing as well as new bits of Python that I haven’t fully come to grips with yet (e.g. the generator functions). It really pushes all my ooooh! Shiny! buttons.

I’ve successfully installed it and got it to run some of the examples (including the graphing demo) on my Windows box and my Mac OS X laptop. As is unfortunately typical, although it seems to run better on the Mac, installing it on Windows was actually a quite a bit easier. Yeah, yeah, pre-compiled binaries are the work of the devil, but for Joe end-user–even for a relatively sophisticated Joe end-user–it’s a pain to get partway through, realize that it won’t compile because it’s missing some compilers, have to go get the developer toolkit and install that, and then get back to building the thing you were trying to get to work in the first place. I didn’t have any particular problems, other than the time it took to download 183 mb of stuff that I’ll probably barely use, but it was pretty painful compared to double-clicking on an exe and then clicking a couple of buttons. I’m sure hard-core Mac users are so used to the pain that they don’t even perceive it as pain, and I’m certainly not saying that the developers of the NLTK ought to devote any time at all to improving the installation, but if you’re thinking of playing with this and you aren’t a hard-core Mac user, I’d suggest that if you have access to both kinds of system, at least to get your feet wet you should try it in Windows first. You’ll be messing around with the actual NLTK code a lot faster.

Parting is such sweet sorrow. I love the OED Online, and I don’t quite know what I’m going to do to replace it, but I don’t quite love it enough for $395 a year for an individual subscription. You folks with your fancy institutional subscriptions don’t know how good you’ve got it. So when I got the notice that my subscription was expiring and they were going to charge me for another year, I bit the bullet and canceled.

Actually what really irks me is that I have the OED 3.1 on CD-ROM, but it stopped working one day, as their asinine anti-copying protection scheme (which calls for relicensing the software every 90 days) screwed up and made the program unlaunchable.

Computational Resources for Linguistic Research

Bill Poser, who posts at Language Log, maintains a page of goodies for computers and linguistics, with lots of links to freeware that runs on Unix systems. Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much abandoned Linux (gave away my spare computer that was running it to a friend in need), and I’m not sure how much of it will run on OS X. I know that at least one project to do GTK on OS X was abandoned, and another is in pre-alpha…

Alan Wood has a Unicode Resources Page with various utilities for Unicode on Mac OS X, some free, some not, but I’m not sure there’s anything exactly equivalent to the BabelMap or gucharmap utilities. The best bet may be the builtin Character Palette, though it seems to be limited in the scripts it has available (Ethiopic, for instance, is listed, but seems to be empty, but Gujarati is there). Still it’s pretty cool to be able to look up Japanese by Radical.