Car Talk Goes Linguistic (kinda)

If you listened to this week's Car Talk, you heard the answer to last week's puzzler, which contained a semi-linguistic related brain tease. Unbeknownst  to the Tappet Brothers was the fact that there were a few extra puzzles hidden within their main one. First, the puzzler as it was presented on the show:

This was a puzzler that I'm stealing from the late Martin Gardner. I'm going to give you a number and you're going to tell me what's unique about the following number: 8,549,176,320. Now if you want a hint, I'll point out that there are 10 digits in that number. The question is, what's unique about this number? 

The answer requires some linguistic gymnastics. The extra puzzles are somewhat hidden until the first puzzle is solved:

Linguistic Dodge-ball

The playful linguists at University of Essex have wisely decided to give in to the football/soccer hype and link their great online linguistics game Phrase Detectives to The World Cup in South Africa with a new Dodge The Ball competition:

If you've had enough of the football coverage already, maybe you would be interested in the our Dodge the  Ball competition. Simply play the University of Essex's Phrase Detectives game between 11 June and 11 July and you could be selected to win a prize everyday. Now you have something better to do than watch 22 men kick a pig's bladder around a field.

Pssst, you can play the game and watch football simultaneously too. Now go play the game!

Is Arabic The Least Positive Language? (hint, no) ... sigh

Sometimes bad science reporting is a function of bad science. Garbage in, garbage out.

There's been some buzz about new research regarding the bias of negative and positive words in English as well as cross linguistically. I have refrained from commenting because it sounded like typical bad reporting and misunderstanding of academic research. Then Andrew Sullivan got involved. Sigh. Sullivan has his strengths and weaknesses as a blogger. His strength shone brightly last summer when he helped publicize the Iranian green movement. His weakness, however, peeps out anytime he blogs about anything remotely related to science or academics (see HERE and HERE). His most recent silliness has the title The English Language Is An Optimist. His megaphone is so big, I feel someone must clear up the foggy facts and murky interpretations currently being disseminated.

To begin, the research under question is from Rozin et al., U Penn psychologists who appear to be focused on emotion research (full citation below). As far as I can tell, no linguists were involved (and boy oh boy, they should have been. Ya know, Penn has a linguistics department that is, let's just say, above average). The basic point of the research cited is this: Positive events are more common (more tokens), but negative events are more differentiated (more types).  Sullivan simply posts a quote from another blog which regurgitates the research as if it were true with no ciritical analysis on anyone's part. I will offer the much needed critical analysis here.

Here are the four facts about English that everyone seems to find so fascinating:

War on Americanisms???

The Twitter world is abuzz with retweets of articles by UK journalist Mathew Engel who has published a few rants railing against the degradation of The Queen's English (see HERE for retweets; Engle's rants can be found HERE and HERE). Consisting mostly of whiny British self-pity (the Empire is dead, get over it!), Engel and his readers whimper about the bully Americans and our "useless", "infuriating", "ugly", and "witless" sayings.

Some choice samples of Engle's whimpers:

• The battle is almost uncertainly unwinnable but I am convinced there are millions of intelligent Britons out there who wince as often as I do every time they hear a witless Americanism introduced into British discourse.
• British English is being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mindless Americanisms
• Americans rarely hear any of our words, let alone adopt them.
• But we are so overwhelmed by everything American that the British have lost their grasp on the difference between our form of English and theirs. This is the reality of cultural imperialism.
• ‘Speciality’ (with the i) is a lovely word, full of rolling syllables. His version is the kind of usage that comes out of the mid-Atlantic and needs to be dropped back there, from a great height.
• And there is widespread loathing of the verbalisation of nouns: incentivizing and all that rot.

Cheers mate.

The Linguistics of a "Perfect Game"

Full disclosure: I am not a baseball fan*.

It seems to me a curious thing, this kerfluffel about the blown "perfect game" because it is an example of bizarro linguistics**. Despite the fact that incontrovertible evidence exists that proves the game does in fact meet the requirements of a "perfect game," the refusal of MLB to officially sanction it as a "perfect game" has caused a titanic uproar amongst fans. Why? We all know it really was a perfect game. Why does anyone care about the label that MLB puts on it? We care because they have been granted, by convention, the right to determine what counts as a "perfect game" and what doesn't. We could call it a "perfect game" amongst ourselves, but it just wouldn't be, because MLB has the ultimate say so. It's like Pete Rose. We all know he's a hall of famer, but he just isn't. Because MLB says he isn't. This is the opposite of the way linguistic items generally form their meanings. Generally if enough people agree that "wug" means X, then that's what it means. But not in this case. 300 million Americans (and several million Japanese, Cubans and Venezuelans) all agree that Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game, but we are linguistically overruled by a governing body, and that's that.

This strikes me as a variation on Putnam's semantic externalism whereby speakers assume that a word's meaning is determined by someone else. We don't naturally see our own role in determining meaning. If there is a clearly defined group, like MLB, then it's even easier to surrender our contribution, even when our own intuition about the meaning is so acute.

It's also interesting that almost nothing rides on this label. They won regardless of what you call it; it doesn't affect the team's record at all.  That label will not likely affect the team's season, except perception. The pitcher might have been able to use a "perfect game" as a negotiating tactic to get more money, but few fans care about that. He would have gotten his name in the record books, that's tangible, but again, it does nothing for the team.

*I was a wrestler for 14 years; if there's no blood, it's not a sport.
**I invented that term, patent pending, all rights reserved.

Friday Funnies

For your linguistic comedy pleasure, click HERE for 5 comedy videos on language (from ALTA Language Services, via Twitter #linguistics).

Personal Fav, the ever awesome, Catherine Tate:

Infixation FAIL

(image from Huffington Post)

No sir, this just doesn't work. They violated the prosody. See here.