soccer vs. football

Too late for The World Cup, but thanks to Stan Carey at Sentence First, I only just now discovered that we Yanks are not the only English speakers who use soccer to refer to, ya know, that game where you can't touch the ball with your hands (tennis? no... the one that Ronaldo plays). In fact, there are about 74 million OTHER English speakers in this world who use soccer to refer to Ronaldo's game too. Add the USA's 308 million, and it is almost certainly the case that more English speakers use soccer than football. With that, I say thppppt to the English...

(image from Wikipedia)

UPDATE [3:38PM eastern]: reader vp points out the following passage from the same Wikipedia article the image came from: several official publications of the English Football Association have the word "soccer" in the title. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski write that soccer was the most common name for the game in Britain from the 1890s until the 1970s, and suggest that the decline of the word soccer in the UK, and the incorrect perception that it is an Americanism, were linked to awareness of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

plagiarism and n-grams

Big media plagiarism is once again in the news as ESPN has suspended an on-air host for plagiarizing three sentences from a newspaper columnist. The on air host has admitted the plagiarism*, issued an apology, and asked for forgiveness.

The multiple and confusing ethical standards for plagiarism has have been the subject of of several LL posts (recently here) and this led me to wonder about what counts as plagiarism in the first place. Clearly a three sentence, 45 word passage, almost word for word identical with another, in the same semantic domain with the same referents, is a case of plagiarism. But what about a 20 word passage? 10 word? 4 word**?

Many short phrases are highly frequent, right? You couldn't felicitously accuse me of plagiarism for using the phrase "I am going..." could you? Even though, there can be no doubt, that someone else before me used it first. Yes, I know you can find guidelines for plagiarism in college student handbooks and such. I dealt with those for years when I taught college writing courses (and I recall flunking at least three students for plagiarism, but those were whole papers, really stupid stuff).

But I wonder, now that we have a 500 million word corpus available to us, couldn't we simply compare all n-grams to discover how likely it is that any given 5-gram is repeated? I'd prefer to do this up to 20-gram and such, but wouldn't we predict that there comes a point at which the likelihood that a particular phrase was plagiarized (given that we had found two alike) would be based solely on the general likelihood that n-grams of that size are repeated. The situation would be this: you discover that a particular 11 word passage has an identical twin from 2 years ago. Without bothering to look into whether or not the author had access to the previous work, you simply look up the likelihood that any 11-gram passage is repeated and discover that there is a 0.0002% chance that a phrase that long will be repeated.

With some effort, you could then derive predictions for near identical passages (using WordNet and similar resources)....

..just thinking out loud...


*I am ignorant of the role ESPN's producers play in the writing of on air speeches, but the quote seems clearly to have been written on a teleprompter at the time of speaking, which means someone else was involved, even if unwittingly. Nonetheless, the host is taking the fall willingly.

**Excluding obviously famous phrases like Ich bin ein Berliner.

does asbestos really mean 'unquenchable'?

Yes, at least etymologically. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its etymology this way:
...from O.Fr. abeste, from L. asbestos "quicklime" (which "burns" when cold water is poured on it), from Gk. asbestos, lit. "inextinguishable," from a- "not" + sbestos, verbal adj. from sbennynai "to quench," from PIE base *(s)gwes- "to quench, extinguish" (cf. Lith. gestu "to go out," O.C.S. gaso, Hittite kishtari "is being put out") (emphasis added).

Like people, every word has lived its own peculiar and unique life. Riffing on my post below regarding words that have the opposite meaning of their etymology, my friend Andy (who did graduate work in Classics, and hence, actually reads Greek) challenged me to help him understand why the word asbestos, whose etymology literally means 'unquenchable' is used today to mean a substance that cannot burn.

With some Googling, I found this (PDF):  "First mention of asbestos appeared in the Greek text On Stones, written by Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s students. Theophrastus referred to a substance that resembled rotten wood and burned (right) without being harmed when doused with oil."

So, Ol' Theophrastus kept pouring oil onto this stuff, but it never burnt, so he kept pouring, but the stuff was never quenched by oil/fire. Hence, it was unquenchable. That's my story and I'm sticking to it (for now).

Andy did some follow-up of his own and provides the following:
Yes, that's one of the more likely explanations. In my research I came across the use of asbestos as permanent wicks in lamps, but never noted the bit about being unquenchable with oil.  That Theophrastos citation really belongs in the dictionary entry below, as it's the only cite that explains the meaning under A.  The lexicon below is massively comprehensive (if you couldn't tell) so it's odd they missed Theo.

The other possible explanation is II. or "unslaked lime", as quick lime burns underwater.  This was a key component in later "Greek fire", but so far I haven't been able to find any ancient source that cites an unquenchable substance (Greek Fire dates to 500 AD, white phosphorus, which also burns underwater, dates to 1600 AD, and sodium, which explodes on contact with water, dates to 1800 AD).

If I had the time and language skill I used to have I would search my CD of all Greek text up to 600 AD for cites of asbestos and then comb thru them, but that would be a day's worth of work  I'm pleased that we got close to the meaning in online research and I'm not sure that looking up every instance of asbestos would change anything.

Andy also provided the following reference

ἄσβεστος , ον, also η, ον Il.16.123:—

A. unquenchable, inextinguishable, “φλόξ” Il. l. c.; not quenched, “πῦρ ἄ.” D.H.3.67, Plu.Num.9; “κλέος” Od.4.584; “γέλως” Il.1.599; “βοή” 11.50; “ἐργμάτων ἀκτὶς καλῶν ἄ. αἰεί” Pi.I.4(3).42; ἄ. πόρος ὠκεανοῦ ocean's ceaseless flow, A.Pr.532 (lyr.); πῦρ, of hell, Ev.Marc.9.43.

II. as Subst., ἄσβεστος (sc. τίτανος), h(, unslaked lime, Dsc.5.115, Plu.Sert.17, Eum.16; “ἄ. κονία” Lyc. ap. Orib.8.25.16.

2. a mineral or gem, Plin.HN37.146. ἀσβεστώδης: tofus, Gloss.

Henry George Liddell. Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1940.

etymologists , unite!

A buddy wrote me an interesting question (to which I did not have an answer):

It's been driving me crazy, is there a term of art for when the etymological root of a word is the opposite of the word's modern meaning?  For example, asbestos means "an unquenchable fire"; philander means "a lover of men" etc. Cheers, A.,

Anyone know this?

dialects map

Extremely detailed North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns. The site could use a bit of a web re-design ... looks circa 1999. Anyone care to offer free web design help to clean up this otherwise useful resource a little?

not any or not one??

The NYTs recent The Number of None grammar blog post brings up an interesting question: is none semantically closer to not any or not one? And what should its morphosyntactic agreement be, singular or plural?

The Times takes the not any, plural position, but I am inclined to disagree based on my intuition about substitution. Below are the two sentences the Times uses to illustrate:

• None of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
• None of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

Now, with the substitutions and my personal acceptability rating (where * means mildly unacceptable/not sure and ** means completely unacceptable).

• Not one of the interim employers or temporary agencies has contributed to a 401(k)
• Not one of the works has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• **Not any of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
• **Not any of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• Not one of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
• Not one of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• **Not any of the interim employers or temporary agencies has contributed to a 401(k)
• **Not any of the works has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

The above ratings suggest that I make no distinction in acceptability between none has and none have. But wait, there's more. Let's remove the lengthy PP and see how this pans out:

• *Not one of them has contributed to a 401(k)
• *Not one of them has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• **Not any of them have contributed to a 401(k)
• **Not any of them have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• Not one of them have contributed to a 401(k)
• Not one of them have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• **Not any of them has contributed to a 401(k)
• **Not any of them has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

I seem to slightly prefer the singular reading when the word none is close to the verb but with a plural noun heading the PP. But this is not true if we delete the PP altogether:

• Not one has contributed to a 401(k)
• Not one has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
• *Not one have contributed to a 401(k)
• *Not one have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

It would appear I have an incoherent grammar (surely this is true as I believe all grammars are, in some way, incoherent. As Sapir said, all grammars leak). But, there's at least one other factor muddying the linguistic waters. The fact that one also acts a pronoun as in one does one's duty. When acting as a pronoun, it takes 2nd pers, SG agreement, as in one has to do one's duty (think he has to do his duty), not *one have to do one's duty. It may be that this pronoun agreement is interfering with my reading when one occurs right next to the verb. Also, I did this pretty fast, so I wouldn't be surprised if I change my mind by COB...

Of course, how could I resist:

I believe I got the full paradigm:

• not one of them has
• not one of them have
• not any of them has
• not any of them have
• none of them has
• none of them have
• none has
• none have

It appears as though none have had a hell of a start to the 18th 19th Century, but got killed off along with the Buffalo.

refudiate, the word that won't die

Thanks in no small measure to the Oxford University Press naming refudiate its Word Of The Year plus The Daily Dish rekindling its favorite topic, we have a new round of he-said-she-said to deal with. Made famous by Sarah Palin this past summer (see Liberman's original post here, and others here), it is yet again the object of speculation as to why Palin used the form to begin with.

Palin herself poured fuel on this fire two days ago by tweeting that it was a typo. Liberman thinks that explanation didn't hold water the first time around because she first said it aloud on teevee: the original example [on teevee] wasn't a slip of the tongue, but a symptom of the fact that Ms. Palin had a blend of repudiate and refute as a well-established entry in her mental lexicon [note added].

Why the fuss? There's nothing particularly interesting or telling about the linguistic blending of repudiate and refute. Everyone does this kind of thing now and again and sometimes it sticks. Some people like to beat up on public figures any time they can, so something like this is a target. But the more serious speculation is that the Palin Camp's public responses expose something important about Sarah Palin's inner circle and consultation. I'll leave it to the political pundits to fight that one out.

For now,