The Eclectic Linda

Pay(b)ack

January 23rd, 2009

The news agency Reuters posted a story the day after the inauguration claiming:
“President Barack Obama’s inauguration generated an unprecedented 35,000 stories in the world’s major newspapers, television and radio broadcasts over the past day — about 35 times more than the last presidential swearing-in — a monitoring group said on Wednesday.”

Bloggers seem to like this story — I’ve run into it several times — but they also seem to be accepting it as legit, though the idea that the second inauguration of President Bush garnered a mere 1,000 stories is implausible on its face. Fewer than Obama? Sure, I believe that. But by a factor of 35? Not likely.

So who was Reuters relying on for what we journalists call a one-source story? Why, it was Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

He’s got form as a purveyor of dubious linguistic self-promotions. The guys at Language Log nailed him good for a series of predictions about the millionth word in English. Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor. As regular Language Log readers know, Mr. Payack has been trumpeting the arrival of “the millionth word” in English for some time now. In fact, he’s predicted that the English language would pass the million-word mark in 2006… and 2007… and 2008… and now 2009. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, the date that Payack has now set for the million-word milestone is April 29, 2009.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was “a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.” So I can’t say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack’s book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor’s word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack’s publishing schedule!

Payack calls Obama “the biggest story of the century so far,” and Reuters quotes him further:

Payack said that according to his group’s monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

The tallies were calculated using the group’s proprietary algorithm which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, the Internet and major databases.

People with editors are not supposed to fall for silly press releases.

Posted in Journalism and media, Linguistics | 1 Comment »

Differentiated instruction

January 20th, 2009

Joanne Jacobs recently posted a link to a news story about how much California teachers make. The comment thread drew predictable responses from teachers who don’t make that much, or who think it’s only reasonable for how hard they work, or — well, I bet you can recite that litany yourself.

I’ve excepted below my comments (not about pay) and the context that prompted them.

Joanne:

See how well your school district pays its teachers, writes the Sacramento Bee. California’s average teacher earned $65,808 last year, an increase of 3.4 percent from 2007, but pay varies. High school districts pay the most, unified (K-12) districts are in the middle and elementary districts usually have the lowest pay.

I noticed pay averages $93,283 at my local high school district, with a starting salary of $59,692 and top pay of $112,796. That’s the highest, especially the starting pay, in our high-cost county.

From comments:
# 30 linda seebach Jan 12th, 2009 at 7:52 am

McSwain, above (# 9 McSwain Jan 11th, 2009 at 1:06 pm), says, “With NCLB and mainstreaming, I have special ed students, gifted students, and English Learners in my classroom of 30+ kids, and I have to differentiate instruction for ALL of them. The planning time for that is astronomical, and there is zero down time in the classroom.”

Deliberately mixing academically dissimilar students in a single classroom not only requires astronomical planning time, it guarantees an unsatisfactory outcome for nearly all the students. All in pursuit of an illusory goal of “inclusion.” Wouldn’t it work better to group similar students together, so they could progress at similar rates?

Of course it would, but that’s one of the things that Cannot Be Said. Let alone done.

The system does make teachers’ jobs harder than they need to be. On the other hand, a lot of the people filling those jobs would have a hard time making the same kind of money (considering security and benefits. especially retirement benefits, as well) in other careers. They certainly wouldn’t in journalism.

# 31 Margo/Mom Jan 12th, 2009 at 8:04 am

linda–it can be said, and frequently is said–particularly by those who advocate for advantaged students. the problem is that while it appears to be “logical,” based on our post-industrial experiences, to group students by “ability” and achieve better outcomes for all, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Most research that I have seen on the topic shows that, particularly at an early age, ability grouping reinforces, rather than compensates for differences. Furthermore, mixed groupings typically produce better outcomes for those on the bottom with no harm to those on top.

# 36 Tracy W Jan 13th, 2009 at 1:30 am

Margo/Mum, one of the programmes shown to be most effective at teaching students is Direct Instruction, which uses grouping by ability. See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm and http://www.aasa.org/issues_and_insights/district_organization/Reform/overview.htm

This programme focuses on grouping children by two factors – how much they already know and how much they learn. So a kid with an IQ of 120 who starts school not knowing their alphabet would be placed earlier in the lesson sequence than a kid with an IQ of 80 who starts school knowing their alphabet. Kids can and often are placed in different places in the maths and reading sequences based on their results. Replacements are frequently reviewed. And if a kid misses a chunk of school, say due to illness, they’re placed back where they left the sequence, rather than being expected to have magically learnt everything their class learnt while they were missed. There are a lot of other things that Direct Instruction does, including providing scripted lessons to teachers and providing school backup for teachers dealing with difficult students. But this brief description of how placement by ability is done in Direct Instruction indicates how difficult it is to make general statements about grouping by ability – the Direct Instruction system is very different to, say, giving kids an IQ test and then using the results of that test to assign them to one stream for all their academic lessons.

# 37 Margo/Mom Jan 13th, 2009 at 6:19 am

[To] Tracy W.
I am no intuitive fan of Direct Instruction–but I do pay attention to research and what it says, and I am aware of the research re DI and what it says and doesn’t say. The grouping used in DI is flexible ability grouping. This means that children are assessed frequently and placed in groups accordingly. These groups are used for reading instruction. This is a very different thing from ability streaming or tracking–which is what I understood to be advocated. These systems typically lack flexibility, apply across the board–so that students are abundantly clear regarding who are the smart kids and who are not, and the earlier that this tracking takes place, the less likely kids are ever to move from one group to another (particularly upward).

. . .
Early studies with school integration, in which minority students who performed less well were integrated with better performing majority students. The minority students tended to do better with no detriment to the majority students. Studies of inclusion of students with disabilities have tended towards similar results.

# 39 linda seebach Jan 13th, 2009 at 10:01 am

Margo/Mom above said, “Most research that I have seen on the topic shows that, particularly at an early age, ability grouping reinforces, rather than compensates for differences. Furthermore, mixed groupings typically produce better outcomes for those on the bottom with no harm to those on top.”

It is almost certainly correct that ability grouping reinforces differences. But that’s not a bug, as she seems to think; it’s a feature. The difference between a child with -2 S.D. IQ and +2 S.D. cannot be “compensated for;” the only thing mixed grouping can guarantee is that time does not widen it as much as should happen if every child is achieving his or personal best.

(See Malcolm Gladwell’s example of the Canadian hockey rules that inadvertently privilege young players who happen to be born early in a calendar year.)

If one child makes (or can make) two years’ progress in a school year, and her sister can make only a half-year’s progress in one year, it is immoral to hold the brighter child back so the gap between them does not grow.

And as public policy, it’s insane. If you’re worried about America’s global competitiveness, worry about the competition at the top for the best-trained brains, not the competition for slightly better performance in entry-level jobs, however important the latter is to the life chances of people who will never get much past entry-level jobs.

James Coleman explained why minority children who previously attended segregated schools did better when they began attending schools with white children; they had more effective teachers. His research was too explosive to publish at the time, he said in a lecture I heard him give much much later. So even if they did, that does not provide evidence in favor of the proposition that it was smarter *classmates* who made the difference.

Racial issues aside, I doubt that the experience of feeling that just about everybody in your class is smarter than you are confers any academic benefit. Especially if you’re right.

For that matter, neither does thinking you’re smarter than just about everybody in your class. Even if you’re right.

The research that purports to show that high-achieving children are not harmed by heterogeneous grouping is methodologically suspect. (see, e.g., the work of Deborah Ruf at wwww.educationaloptions.com/ ). She explains that most of the instruments available to researchers have rather low ceilings, so they don’t show that children above the ceilings are making slower than normal progress (for them). That’s harm, in my book.

Margo/Mom goes on to quote some boilerplate balderdash from the National Association of School Psychologists in defense of her support for “heterogeneous classrooms with instruction differentiated to meet the needs of all students.”

Trouble is, in the real world most teachers can’t provide that.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

Goldin, Katz and fans

August 1st, 2008

(Cross-posted at Kitchen Table Math, the Sequel)

Goldin and Katz make two largely correct diagnostic points in The Race Between Education and Technology; that the United States got a significant head start on economic development because it expanded access to secondary and post-secondary education sooner than other countries, and we are no longer ahead in that regard. Their prescription, however, is largely incorrect. We can’t get ahead of other countries by increasing the number of Americans graduating from college, because nearly all of the students who can do so are already trying.

Joanne Jacobs posted on this in the context of David Brooks’ NYTimes column and I left this comment there:

>>>>
If no European country in 1950 had more than 30 percent of its older teens in school, that was an inefficiency that the United States could exploit to its advantage. But if every young person who can benefit from staying in school long enough to graduate is already doing so, there’s nothing further to exploit.

We can argue about what the ideal high school graduation rate should be, that is, what the criterion for graduation should be, and what needs to be done to ensure every child who is capable of meeting the criterion has resources and opportunity to do so. But it is delusional to believe that we can have both a meaningful criterion for graduation and a 100 percent graduation rate.

I suspect the true graduation rate should be between 80 and 85 percent. Maybe we could push it to 90, subject to the law of diminishing returns, if we poured every possible dollar into the last few marginal students — though, as James Heckman has demonstrated, we’d get much higher returns if we invested the money in them when they were little.

Something similar operates all along the line of returns to increasing education. There are non-economic returns to more education, but they don’t depend on credentials. If everyone who is capable of benefiting economically from higher education is already able to earn a degree, there is no further inefficiency for the U.S. to exploit.

If other countries have larger percentages of their populations who are capable of benefiting from more years of education than the U.S. does, well, what are we supposed to do about that?
>>>>

Brooks cites economist James Heckman in support of early intervention, but Heckman’s point is not that early intervention is a panacea, but that whatever it can accomplish will be most effective if it’s done early rather than late.

I haven’t read the Heckman paper Brooks is citing, but Heckman has said — very circumspectly — that African Americans and Hispanics begin school with similar performance deficits, but that Hispanics are much more likely to make them up.

From a column I wrote:

. . .
“Our analysis of the Hispanic data illuminates the traditional study of black-white differences and casts doubt on many conventional explanations of these differences since they do not apply to Hispanics who also suffer from many of the same disadvantages.”

I know this is contrary to just about everything you’ve heard or read, so you’re asking, “Who are these people?” They’re Pedro Carneiro, University College London; James J. Heckman, University of Chicago, American Bar Foundation and University College London (and winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in economics for developing the kind of technical statistical analysis that undergirds this paper) and Dimitriy V. Masterov. The paper was written for the Institute for Labor Market Policy Evaluation, a part of the Swedish Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, in Uppsala, Sweden.

The paper is “Labor market discrimination and racial differences in premarket factors” and it’s at www.ifau.se/swe/pdf2005/wp05-03.pdf on the Web.

Steve Sailer has written about the Brooks column. See also this post at the population genetics blog gnxp.

(For a bonus, the immediately preceding gnxp post dissects the media coverage of the math/gender study.)

Posted in Education, Science and technology | 1 Comment »

Journalism in decline

July 23rd, 2008

Yeah, they’re always saying that, but the ways in which they get it wrong are fascinating.

Someone posted to the list serve for the National Conference of Editorial Writers a link to a screed by Chris Hedges in the declinist genre. He said:

Subject: Newsrooms Article
This is a terrific, if scary, commentary about our business.

Erm, “terrific” isn’t the word I’d choose. “Terrible,” yeah. I wrote:

This is a piece of meretricious claptrap, endless cliches tossed together without thought, all in order to lead up to the concluding line, a ringing affirmation of the author’s Bush Derangement Syndrome:

“And the citizens in these degraded societies, [Cicero] warned, always end up ruled by a despot, a Nero or a George W. Bush.”

This deserves a full fisking, but I’m taking a break from deadline so this’ll have to do (still long, though).

The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

For those of you who missed the memo, Noam Chomsky has been mewling about the rise of the corporate state for decades. Hedges never minded that at all because the corporate state’s agenda was aligned with his. What needs explaining is why the corporate state, in the form of big media companies, used to coin money and now is hemorrhaging it. To dismiss the relevance of the Internet in this context is obtuse.

The loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world.

As far as I can tell, Rupert Murdoch is every whit as driven by civic and public responsibility as Pinch Sulzberger. He’s certainly a more successful entrepreneur. (Which direction they’re driven, and whether you like it, is a separate question.)

Some 6,000 journalists nationwide have lost their jobs, news pages are being radically cut back and newspaper stocks have tumbled. Advertising revenues are dramatically falling off with many papers seeing double-digit drops.

Indeed, compelling evidence of rising influence.

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust.

If newspapers are a public trust, they are so without regard to whether they are “well run.”

They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life.

They can, I suppose, though the extent to which they ever did is debatable, but so can other media, including the Internet, where even non-citizens can be engaged.

When I began as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow.

I can’t claim Hedges’ antiquity, having first walked through a newsroom door as an employee on the last day of 1988. But I doubt this was ever true to any significant degree. Because of the vast distances in America, newspapers moved toward reliance on wire services for coverage of international, national, and often state news in the middle of the 19th century — the AP dates from before the Civil War. Such “major city papers” as had foreign bureaus were mostly the flagship papers of chains that financed them through their wire services.

Reporters and photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders looked, thought and believed.

Some of them, sometimes. Others, not so much. Consider Duranty on the Soviet Union, or the remaining American reporters and photographers in Iraq, who’ve stopped reporting or come home now that there’s good news to report.

Anyway, why would we need them there now? You want to know how the world beyond our borders looks, thinks and believes, read the Economist or the Guardian or both. Not to mention Al-Jazeera and Xinhua. Put your subscription money in a tipjar for Michael Yon, or Michael Totten. You want engaged, you’ve got it.

News-gathering will continue to exist, as it does on this Web site and sites such as ProPublica and Slate, but these traditions now have to contend with a new, widespread and ideologically driven partisanship that dominates the dissemination of views and information, from Fox News to blogger screeds.

Nothing new about “widespread and ideologically driven partisanship,” he merely notices now because his ideology no longer has a monopoly. Otherwise, why cite Fox News but not CBS and 60 Minutes?

The filtering of information through an ideological lens, which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t care what you think.

Ideally, yes, but unfortunately it is very difficult to perceive information that contradicts what you think. Opinion journalists who know that can be far better reporters than journalists who imagine themselves above bias.

To this crowd, I think I can safely observe that people whose job is putting opinion into their writing are better at keeping it out than people who fondly believe they never do that.

Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit errors. . . . Facts, for many bloggers, are interchangeable with opinions.

Established reporters, and their editors, and their publishers, have to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit errors. Case in point: the Rocky Mountain News, where I used to work, has said at least five separate times this year that the Republican National Convention will be in Minneapolis. No, it’s St. Paul, and yes, I told them. They’ve promised not to do it any more, but I don’t think any of the stories have been corrected.

The line between fact and opinion is not so bright as people think, and when you spend all your days in the company of people who share the same opinion it comes to look very much like a fact. (Is it a fact, or an opinion, that the Earth is 6,000 years old?)

When there is a long piece on the Internet, most of us have to print it out to get through it.

By “most of us,” Hedges means “I.” Even if what he says is true, how would he know?

Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think.

“Whaddya mean ‘we,’ white man?”

And news that does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing.

“News that does not . . . challenging the status quo is not worth pursuing.” Let’s run that through the syntax machine one more time.

Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters.

According to Hedges, supra, corporations’ turn away from what he thinks is “real news” is responsible for the free-fall in their stock prices. So which narrative is he plugging here?

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies.

In what imaginary golden age did any democracy depend for its survival on “trustworthy and impartial sources of information”? The Roman Republic did not decay, nor the Empire fall, for lack of crusading newspapers or from the popular taste for spectacles in the arena. Ruinous taxation or the debasement of the currency contributed, but then as now those ills are to be laid at the feet of government. Not corporations, as none then existed.

And in conclusion, to return to my starting place:

And the citizens in these degraded societies, he warned, always end up ruled by a despot, a Nero or a George W. Bush.

Apart from the ludicrous anticlimax, it is improbable that Cicero warned anybody about Nero, as he died many years before that notorious emperor was born. He was, however, a defender of the Republic in its last days, and lost his head for picking the wrong side. They knew how to do despotism right in those days.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jim Miller for the link from his blog Miller on Politics

Posted in Journalism and media | 2 Comments »

Linguistics by amateurs

July 7th, 2008

I was reading Romenesko’s journalism blog at the Poynter institute website, and well, one link led to another, and I found myself reading Roy Peter Clark’s bleg for the book he’s writing, The Glamour of Grammar.

(Don’t bother asking. Obscure Scottish etymological link, stretched to a faretheewell.)

Happens, I was a grad student in linguistics (Minnesota, 1988-1992), and I know when I’m reading balderdash. I am not, however, sufficiently current to explicate authoritatively in what way it is balderdash.

So I called in heavy air support, offering as fisk bait to the denizens of Language Log plaza this inimitable sentiment:

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read “A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world.”

Mark Liberman of UPenn sliced and diced this inanity, and summed up,

“So I’d advise Prof. Clark to remove the whole paragraph that starts “Articles are slippery”. The only trouble is, that leaves the rest of the essay.”

Oh, I wish I’d written that.

Liberman also eviscerated Clark’s take on Noam Chomsky.

The thing is, I’ve heard Clark speak several times at writing seminars — the Poynter Institute puts them on around the country. I thought he was pretty good. Maybe the sloppy thinking slides past because if you’re listening to a speech you don’t have time to process the analytical details and what comes through are the telling anecdotes.

But in general, writing seminars for journalists are about as useful as professional development inservice for teachers, where they learn about paper folding and multiple intelligences.

Posted in Linguistics | Comments Off

Guesstimates

May 5th, 2008

Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution points to a new book by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam, Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin.

Cowen asks a sample question: How many people are airborne over the United States at any given moment?

Leaving aside for the moment the obvious fact that it matters whether the moment is mid-morning or middle-of-the night, the first thing that occurred to me was that there were around 6,000 planes in the air when the FAA grounded them on 9/11, so — very roughly — 600,000.

One of the commenters at MR also started with the 9/11 figure, though he recalled it as 4,000. Others explained their estimates reasoning from different assumptions; how many runways active at the several NYC airports, how many daily flights out of Logan airport, how much time does the average American spend in the air in a year?

The thing is, that faced with a blank cocktail napkin, you have to start somewhere, and that means having a mind already well furnished with estimates of other numbers that can be combined to come up with a plausible answer for a novel question.

And it’s not just a parlor game. One of the commenters, giving no rationale, said merely, “10,000.” That isn’t plausible — not if you’ve ever been in a major airport on the day before Thanksgiving, or for that matter ever seen pictures of one on the evening news. People in a democracy are constantly being asked to estimate the plausibility of some policy proposal or other, or to judge the credibility of some politician’s estimates. If they have nowhere to start, their judgment isn’t worth much.

Co-author Weinstein dropped in to the MR comments with a couple of other questions:

How big a landfill would we need to store all our trash for the next century? (And what fraction of the US landmass is that?)

Compare the waste generated per kilometer of horse-drawn carriages and of automobiles.

Cowen says, “This book isn’t for everyone but if you think you might like it you probably will.” Sounds about right.

Posted in Science and technology | No Comments »

Free-speech award

April 27th, 2008

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced earlier this week that Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, would receive one of four 2008 Bradley awards for his work defending students’ right of free expression. (The link doesn’t seem to be working, but a Google cache is here).

I first encountered Kors when I was a grad student at the University of Minnesota, working for the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, and was assigned a story about university speech codes (around 1990). Since people in favor of speech codes were thick on the ground, I needed someone who thought they were pernicious, and I called Kors because he was quoted in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He was extraordinarily gracious to a student journalist calling him out of nowhere, and he was also passionate about the issue. So much so, that even if I hadn’t already agreed with him, I’d likely have been persuaded to change my mind.

I wasn’t surprised when I learned later that he’d emerged as the faculty advocate for a Penn student named Eden Jacobowitz, who was hauled before a kangaroo court for shouting at a noisy gaggle of drunken sorority women outside his dorm in the middle of the night, “Shut up, you water buffalo!”

The women, being black, took this rather improbable insult as racist, although at its source in Hebrew it’s about as racist as “dodo.” Well, I guess “dodo” is more closely African than “water buffalo,” although neither of them is black.

What Kors learned about campus judiciary systems during the water buffalo case eventually impelled him to write a book, The Shadow University, with co-author Harvey Silverglate, about the due-process violations implicit in many campus judiciary systems.

The examples the authors collected during the writing of the book led to the founding of an organization, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (here), dedicated to preserving the rights of students and faculty sucked into the gears of their university’s thought police. FIRE is not, you need to understand, ideological in choosing the people it defends. If the people it defends are more often on the right than the left, as seems to be the case, that is only because the right is mostly where the university thought police seek their victims.

The award is richly deserved (and it’s worth $250,000, which is not too shabby either). The intriguing thing is, why is what Kors has done — following his conscience, and damn the consequences — so rare among academics as to merit a prestigious and lucrative award?

University professors with tenure, after all, enjoy about as much personal and professional security as life affords anyone in this uncertain universe. Are they afraid that if they utter an impious truth, the president won’t invite them for tea again? Sometimes the truth is impious, but must be said.

Posted in Education, Politics | Comments Off

View from the flight deck

April 23rd, 2008

P.J. O’Rourke gets a whirlwind tour of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt–the “Big Stick”– and writes,

I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn’t get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that’s longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world–86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.

But more to the point, since P.J. took the trip because he wanted to write about John McCain, he says:

I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

He concludes:

A strange flight it is–from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters–who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick–presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

(HatTip Instapundit)

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

Linguists get peevish too

February 8th, 2008

Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen wrote about a few of his pet grammatical peeves last week, and like many people who have never studied linguistics and don’t know what it’s about, he managed to embarrass himself.

Rocky edit page editor Vincent Carroll asked if I wanted to respond, and I did.

For some reason, sportswriters and broadcasters have lately taken (I know, that’s a split infinitive, but I allow myself some of those) to writing or saying, “four RBI,” leaving out the “s.” They may believe they’re being grammatically correct but they’re wrong on two different levels.

Mike Rosen is quite correct (“The trouble with English,” Feb. 1) that there is nothing grammatically incorrect about a “split infinitive,” despite what Mrs. Wellington used to say in my seventh-grade English class, back in the prehistoric era when teachers still believed that it was a good idea for children to be taught the basics of English grammar.

However, the example he generously allows himself, “have lately taken,” is not an infinitive of any kind, just a verb form containing more than one word, and an adverb in its usual and customary place after the first of them.

An infinitive expresses the part of the meaning of a verb that is independent of person, number, gender and tense, as you likely know if there was a Mrs. Wellington in your past. Like “to take,” or “to be,” as infinitives are written in English. In Latin, they’re single words — esse — whence cometh the peculiar idea that they shouldn’t be split in English.

The rest of Rosen’s column illustrates another peculiar phenomenon — that people who know nothing at all about linguistics assume they do because they speak and write a language, and in absence of actual knowledge they just make stuff up.

“The election of the first woman or black president of the United States would surely be an historic event.” No it wouldn’t! But it would certainly be a historic event. Putting history and politics aside, let’s focus on the grammar.

This happens to be one of my pet grammatical peeves. I suspect it’s because people somehow feel “an historic” sounds more elegant than “a historic” that they break a fundamental rule in this case. If you aspirate the “h” at the beginning of a word — that is, if you can hear the “h” — you precede it with the article “a.” If you don’t hear the “h,” you precede it with “an.” So you eat a hot dog or you’re an heir to an estate. You wouldn’t say, “he hit an home run,” so why would you say “it’s an historic event?” (Don’t ask me about “herb;” that’s pronounced both ways.)

There are principles that govern the alternation of “a” and “an,” but they’re phonetic, not grammatical, and not as Rosen describes them. “A hot dog,” but “an uncooked hot dog” and “a delighted heir.”

First, sports jargon is often granted special exemption from the rules of grammar, as in expressions like “he went yard” or “you the man.” It’s a cultural thing.

Granted by whom, hmmm? I’m surprised he didn’t complain about the “passive tense.”

Secondly, “RBI,” in this case, is a compound noun treated as a unitary term. Hence, even though you’d say four “runs batted in” if you spelled out or spoke all the words, when you use the abbreviation as a term, you say four “RBIs.”

I’d probably say “four RBIs,” as Rosen prefers, but whether and where to put the “s” in an acronym is very idiosyncratic, and often different for abbreviations.

Or how about “height” pronounced, “hieth?” The only correct pronunciation is “hite.” Check the dictionary. “Weight” is spelled much the same way and you wouldn’t pronounce it “wayth.” “Height” ends in a “t,” not an “h,” like the word, “length.” It’s not spelled, “heighth.”

Rosen is correct that pronouncing height as “hithe” instead of “hite” is wrong, but so is explaining why by recourse to “weight,” which would argue just as cogently for “hayt.”

Then there’s the annoying use of the word “problematic.” It’s a great word as shorthand for describing some thorny issue or predicament that’s unsettled, uncertain, debatable, indeterminate, baffling or difficult to get your hands around. I don’t like it when broadcasters, reporters or analysts casually use it to describe something that’s merely troublesome or just a run-of-the-mill problem, as in “the snowstorm has made the rush hour drive problematic.”

Stick to politics, Mike. It’s less problematic, because in politics nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Linda Seebach, a former Rocky editorial writer, is a resident of Northfield, Minn.

Predictably, someone in the comments complained about “nobody . . . they”

Posted by Old_Grouch on February 7, 2008 at 6:20 a.m.

“Ms. Seebach might want to look at the principle of grammer that holds a singular noun — “nobody” — takes a singular pronoun — “he”, or “she”, NOT the plural, “they”. However . . . !

“One might ask if anybody at the RMN, really knows what he, or she, is talking about, in or out of ‘politics’.”

I used to write to OG back when I was moonlighting as the letters blog [Hall Monitor], and replied:

Posted by lindaseebach on February 7, 2008 at 10:11 a.m.

@Old_Grouch
As I noted, people who don’t know anything about linguistics often incorrectly believe they do. The so-called “principle of grammer” (sic) that “nobody” is always a singular noun (or “they” always a plural pronoun — it can be analyzed either way) allows for a variety of exceptions, going back to the King James Bible and earlier. See, for example, numerous posts on the linguistics Weblog “Language Log.” *

How would OG complete the tag question, “I guess nobody liked the dessert, did ____?”

And someone else, perhaps mildly irony impaired, informed me:

“Linda,Nobody granted the sports writers an exemption, because there never was a central authority in England to mandate correct grammar and pronunciation, as there was in France and Spain. This situation has led to centuries of bickering. If sports writer jargon is understood and accepted by sports fans, so be it. Just avoid using sports writer jargon in a scholarly article”

People really get into this language stuff.

* See, for instance, Mark Liberman’s post on syntactic and notional number, citing research indicating that pronouns tend to agree with a speaker’s meaning, while verbs are more likely to reflect the form of a noun such as “nobody.”

Posted in Journalism and media, Linguistics | 1 Comment »

The Veepstakes

February 8th, 2008

Michael Graham asks who should be at John McCain’s side come November.

Here’s my three-point test. The VP nominee must:

1-Be perceived as “ready to be president” immediately. One of the major issues of the ‘08 general election will be John McCain’s age. That Washington Post story about McCain being required to get a special life insurance policy will come back in the fall, I guarantee.

2– Add a state to the GOP column. If the GOP has any hope of holding the White House, it will likely involve state by state fighting and getting smart, lucky or both in one or two key states. A Great Lakes state maybe, or Florida. . . .

3–Be a woman or a member of a minority group. It’s tragic but true. 2008 is the year of identity politics. It is dominating the political conversation this year.

To me, #1 and #3 add up to Condoleezza Rice.

She has more foreign policy experience than the two surviving Democrats together. Hillary Clinton’s experience jet-setting around to feel-good conferences as her husband’s stand-in counts for nothing, and Obama knows as much about foreign policy as you would expect from someone who apparently thinks all he needs to know he learned in kindergarten.

None of them has significant executive experience, but Rice was the provost at Stanford, and the Stanford faculty are a lot harder to manage than the hand-picked members of Hillary’s health care task force, and we all know how well that turned out.

Fortunately.

A Republican black probably will not trump a Democratic black, given that blacks are going to vote overwhelmingly for the Democrat anyway, whoever it is. But a black candidate might shift a few of them.

A Republican woman may not trump a Democratic woman, but Rice should be competitive, and there’s the further point that if she runs, win or lose, she’ll be a stronger contender for future presidential nominations.

The Republicans can wait to name their VP candidate at their convention in St. Paul, after the Democratic nominee is chosen, whether at the convention in Denver or before. If Rice were not available, it might be prudent to delay until they know who they’re running against. But there she is. McCain doesn’t need to wait.

(H/T Instapundit)

Posted in Politics | 6 Comments »