Yuval Pinter

The invaluable annual report on “Freedom in the World” from Freedom House has just been published.

The bottom line is grim:

More aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes and an upsurge in terrorist attacks contributed to a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014. Freedom in the World 2015 found an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year. Nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains—61 to 33—and the number of countries with improvements hit its lowest point since the nine-year erosion began.

What is the relationship between these unhappy trends and American foreign policy? Complex question, to be sure, but the regression in freedom and the decline in perceived American power overlap. Moreover, the decline in freedom and the decline in perceived U.S. government interest in advancing freedom also overlap. Hard to believe all this is coincidence.

Two citations to make the point. Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics in his book Obama and the Middle East: the End of America’s Moment? wrote that

Obama came closer to the dominant realist approach to American foreign policy toward the region, an approach that aimed at retaining the status quo through backing pro-Western rulers and eschewing moral imperatives, such as the promotion of the rule of law and human rights.

Is that fair? In December 2014 Tom Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment write an op-ed entitled “Why Is the United States Shortchanging Its Commitment to Democracy?” There Carothers wrote this:

U.S. assistance to advance democracy worldwide is in decline. Such spending has shrunk by 28 percent during Barack Obama’s presidency and is now less than $2 billion per year. The decline has been especially severe at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which traditionally funds the bulk of U.S. democracy assistance and established itself in the 1990s as the largest source of such aid worldwide….Why this striking reduction in democracy aid? It is not a product of a broader contraction of U.S. foreign aid spending, which remains robust overall. Rather, it is a policy choice, reflecting both skepticism about the relative importance of democracy work by senior U.S. aid officials and, more generally, the muted emphasis on democracy-building by the Obama foreign policy team.

It is impossible to prove a negative–to demonstrate that had the Obama administration not shrunk democracy assistance, not adopted what it may view as a ‘realpolitik’ attitude of indifference to human rights advances, not backed so many dictators–freedom in the world would not have declined every single year that Mr. Obama has been president. But it is possible to wonder, and it is possible to wish that someone, somewhere in the White House were also wondering.

Writes Taylor in Ontario: “My parents are divorced, and I live with my mom. My dad’s parents can definitely afford to buy more appropriate cards, but they went with this one.”

related: The Happiest Place on Earth

Also, read The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.  Good stories.
Via

Eric McCready, @EVER_3V3R, asked what kind of speech act is expressed by “Fuck the haters.”

This seems like a good excuse to briefly introduce pragmatics, speech acts, and the cooperative principle.

Let’s start with an extremely important fact, the core truth of the linguistic area called pragmatics: All language is behaviour. All language is doing something to produce some kind of effect on some person(s). (This also means that one of the most false and disingenuous sentences in all of English is “I’m just saying,” but you knew that, didn’t you.)

OK, so if we’re doing something when was say something, WTF are we doing? It’s not always the same thing. And actually it’s never just one thing. We owe to J.L. Austin the idea that there are three general kinds of things we’re doing when speaking:

1. Locutionary act. We’re physically saying, whispering, singing, signing, writing, whatever.
2. Illocutionary act. We’re doing some kind of interpersonal gesture with a certain kind of intended effect. More about this below.
3. Perlocutionary act. This is sometimes called perlocutionary effect. It’s the actual effect our act of speech has. You can intend to be reassuring, but if you instead scare the shit out of the person, the perlocutionary act is scaring the shit out of them.

When someone talks about a speech act, they normally mean the illocutionary act: not the simple saying, and not the ultimate result, but what the person is doing. Analogy: locutionary act is like “mixing ingredients, pouring into pan, putting in the oven”; illocutionary act is like “baking a cake”; perlocutionary act is like “producing a lead-like indigestible burnt lump.” (Or, you know, “producing oral delight and perceptible weight gain,” if you do it right.)

What kinds of speech acts – illocutionary acts – are there? John Searle categorized them into five general types:

1. You’re committing to the truth of a proposition. Example: “I think you’re a fucking idiot.”
2. You’re telling someone to do something. Example: “Get the fuck out of here.”
3. You’re committing to a course of action. Example: “If you don’t get the fuck out of here, I swear to God I will kick your fucking ass.”
4. You’re expressing an attitude towards the proposition, such as thanks or congratulations. Example: “Thanks for making me aware of your shitty attitude.”
5. You’re actually making a change in legal or social state with the act – marriage vows and legal verdicts epitomize this. Example: “I’m breaking up with you.”

There are also indirect speech acts – for instance, “Fuck is it ever cold in here” said in a certain context to a certain person can be interpreted as an implied directive (“Close the fucking window already”).

Obviously there’s more going on than just the simple act named. There are many possible variations of tone. You’re always drawing on an participating in a definition of the relationship between you and the person(s) you’re addressing, for instance. You are often doing more than one thing at a time, too. (Actually, you’re always serving multiple ends, because that’s true with everything we do.) Clearly “I’m really sorry, I’m breaking up with you” is a little or a lot different (depending on tone) from “I’m breaking up with you, asshole.”

Speech acts can be particularly useful when analyzing sweariness, especially because quite often the syntax is not by itself a good key to the meaning. Consider the following sentences:

To hell with the haters.

God damn the haters.

The haters can go fuck themselves.

Fuck the haters.

These are all expressing very much the same attitude. But the first uses a prepositional phrase to imply an action involving the haters; the second is a clear imperative, interpretable as second person but really third-person (we would in normal English say something like “May God damn the haters” because we don’t have a proper third-person imperative); the third is an implied third-person imperative but expressed using a modal auxiliary for permission; the last has the apparent form of an imperative, but again, it’s not a literal second-person imperative.

All of the above sentences seem mighty uncooperative, but they’re all understood with the help of something called the cooperative principle. This was formulated by Paul Grice, and it defines the general expectations we have when we’re communicating using language. It’s why “Fuck is it ever cold in here” can be interpreted as “Close the fucking window already.” There are four maxims we generally expect people to adhere to reasonably, although we know they don’t always:

1. Maxim of quality. Don’t say things that you believe are false or that you don’t have good evidence for. In other words, don’t lie or make shit up.
2. Maxim of quantity. Give enough information, but don’t give superfluous information.
3. Maxim of relation. Be relevant to whatever your topic or context is.
4. Maxim of manner. Don’t be obscure or ambiguous; be coherent and to the point.

So, now, let’s look at “Fuck the haters” and its rough equivalents, “To hell with the haters,” “God damn the haters,” and “The haters can go fuck themselves.” The first three aren’t phrased as propositions about reality, so the maxims of quality and quantity don’t appear to come into it, except for inasmuch as they imply the existence of haters; the last one appears to be making a statement about the ability of the haters to perform autocopulation. Depending on what acts you include in “fucking themselves,” this is either trivially true for most humans or physically impossible for most humans (and thus demanding good evidence). But in the context, it is likely that a literal assertion about the autoerotic capabilities of haters will be a non-sequitur. So we will apply the third maxim: relation.

Relation is really the key here. Why are you saying this? You appear to be expressing an attitude towards the haters. You are not meaning that the haters are physically able to fuck themselves but rather that you wish they would in a more figurative sense fuck themselves (figurative uses of fuck tend to imply violence and degradation, although literal uses can include all kinds of copulation, even the most gentle). You are wishing that God would damn them, that they would go to hell. That somehow someone or something (or the fucking universe itself) would fuck them, figuratively.

As soon as we think of this as an expression of a wish that the speaker knows is literally unfulfillable, and therefore simply of an attitude of anger or deprecation, we find it readily fulfills the maxim of manner, even though it’s rather bad manners.

So, now: the speech act of “fuck the haters.” Assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarative?

1. We are not asserting a truth with “Fuck the haters.” If we said “Fuck, the haters,” it could indicate that we have just detected the presence of the haters, and in that case we could call it an assertive. But there’s no comma here.
2. We are not telling someone to fuck the haters. I mean, yes, if you were at an orgy and there were some haters there and you wanted someone to fuck them, then “Fuck the haters” would be a directive. But otherwise no.
3. We are not saying we will fuck the haters. “Fuck the haters” doesn’t mean “I’ll fuck the haters.” It’s not a commissive.
4. We are expressing an attitude, yes. But is this an expressive? It sure sounds expressive, although that could be a terminological equivocation. Consider a classic expressive: “Thank you.” Consider a similar expressive on the same model: “Fuck you.” The function of fuck here is like that of thank: it presents the speaker’s attitude. And if “Fuck you” is an expressive, it’s reasonable to say that “Fuck the haters” is an expressive.
5. If, by saying “Fuck the haters,” you were to change the legal status of the haters from “unfucked” to “fucked,” it would be a declarative. It would be a sort of “Let the haters be fucked” parallel to the grand old “Let them be anathema.” But, alas, you can say “Fuck the haters” till the cows come home and it won’t change their state from unfucked to fucked. Although, really, if they’re haters, it’s because they’re fucked in the head in the first place, right?

Again, there’s a lot more than just a single simple speech act going on, of course. By saying fuck you are breaking a taboo, and thus showing that the intensity of your feeling is such that you will break a taboo to express it. You are also breaking with regular syntax – you can’t use most verbs in that way (“Excoriate the haters” or “Defeat the haters” can only be taken as second-person commands), although you can use positive expressives, such as thank as in “Thank you” and “Thank God” (but questionably “Thank the haters”) and bless as in “Bless you” and “Bless the haters.”

And then there’s the whole question of what effect you are trying to produce on your hearer(s) when you say “Fuck the haters.” That will vary by situation, and can range from calming (“Aw, fuck the haters, I think you’re great”) to incitement (“Fuck the haters, those rotten bastards! We’ll fucking show them!”) This is an endless treasure trove of investigation. I think of it as one of the truly fun parts of language. Expect to see more about it in articles by various authors here on Strong Language.

ההסבר:



המקור:

ביום שישי 23 בינואר 2015 שודרה ביומן הערוץ הראשון כתבה עלי ועל האתר "לא רלוונטי". הכתב איתי ורד והעורכת ויקה שור הצליחו לבשל כתבה מעניינת וחיננית מנושא שלא פשוט לעביר ולהסביר.

בכתבה לא מוזכרים אתם, המשתמשים הנאמנים של האתר שבלי העידוד הקבוע שלכם לא היתה לי מוטיבציה להמשיך כל כך הרבה זמן. תודה גם לכם.



בכתבה מופיע מרואיין שבטעות לא הוזכר שמו. זה הוא ד"ר יעקב הכט, חוקר אינטרנט עצמאי שכתב מאמר מאד מעניין על האגדה הדוא"לית. בעקבות המאמר ומהיכרותי עם יעקב, המלצתי לאיתי ורד לראיין גם אותו.

אם הנושא מעניין אתכם, אני מאד ממליץ לכם לקרוא את המאמר.

 

Via

לא, אם יושבים קרוב מדי לטלוויזיה לא ״הורסים״ את העיניים.

האזהרה הזאת, החביבה כל כך על הורים, התחילה ככל הנראה לפני 40 שנה, עם כניסת הטלוויזיה לבתים. המכשירים הראשונים פלטו כמות נמוכה של קרינה אולטרה-סגולית, לכן המלצת היצרנים הייתה לא לשבת קרוב מדי למסך.

No discussion of swears and branding would be complete without a nod to Sofa King, which is at once a real brand, a parody brand, a tribute brand, a song title, the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit, and the punchline to a joke. For you scholarly types in the audience, it’s also a convenient introduction to prosody.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In the not-quite-beginning there was The Sofa King, a real furniture retailer in Northampton, UK, that opened in 2001 with a memorable tagline (or strapline, as they say over there).

 

 

 

“Our prices are Sofa King Low!”

Amazingly, this family-owned business got away with it for 11 years. “Police investigated complaints in 2004,” the BBC reported, “and no action was thought necessary, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received more complaints.”And so, in 2012, the ASA upheld the objections of some upright citizens “because the phrase could have been interpreted as a derivative of a swear word.” They were so fucking right. Despite owner Mark Kypta’s furious protests (“The public are behind us and think it’s crazy”), the ads came down, although the strapline still flourishes on the Sofa King website.*

But “sofa king” as an alternate rendering of “so fucking” had already been kicking around the playground for some time before Sofa King sold its first sectional. On the Straight Dope bulletin board, the first post under the header “I’m sofa king stupid” was published on January 11, 2000. A month earlier, someone had posted “I’m sofa king crazy” on the same bulletin board, and elaborated with a now-classic bad-taste joke:

I we Todd did.
I sofa king we Todd did.
hehe hehe , (read slowly and and think stupid)

Fucking  and retarded – a double whammy! It was only a matter of time and e-commerce before variations on the meme appeared.

 

 

 

 

 

Source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source.

The line was used in a 2004 episode of the animated TV series “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” (“Repeat after me: I Am Sofa King We Todd Ed”), and was picked up by Danger Doom for the group’s 2005 song “Sofa King.” (Lyrics and “Aqua Teen” clip here.) It’s worth noting the ambiguous foreign accent and awkward stress patterns of Billy Witch Doctor in the cartoon (so-fa king is not the same as so fuck-ing), which makes the joke a) odder and b) funnier once you get it. There’s that prosody—the technical term for the rhythm of speech—that I promised you in the first paragraph. You’re welcome.

Various amateurs had their fun with Sofa King ad concepts—here’s a video from 2006, and here’s another one from the same year—and then, in April 2007, Saturday Night Live turned it into something both cruder and more polished. (The video isn’t embeddable, but you can but you can watch it here.)

The SNL “Sofa King” ad starred Fred Armison and Maya Rudolph as unibrowed foreigners of indeterminate provenance (Kazakhstan, maybe? This was, after all, just a year after the release of the Borat movie) touting their wares. (“Sofa King great!” “Sofa King comfortable!” “Sofa King cheap!”) In a Language Log post published shortly after the episode aired, Eric Bakovic analyzed the sketch’s linguistic and dramatic devices:

Every time “Sofa King” is mentioned in the sketch, a “Sofa King” logo appears on the screen.

“Sofa King” is always pronounced “Sófa Kíng” — that is, with the first and third syllables distinctly stressed — as opposed to “so fúcking”, where the second syllable is the stressed one. [Ed.: Prosody again!]

The characters in the sketch all speak with a discernible (but not explicitly identified) foreign accent.

And just in case you really like having jokes explained to you:

The play, of course, is on how “Sofa King” sounds like “so fucking”, and it works because “Sofa King great” can mean something like “great in the way that only Sofa King can make it” (kind of like “Army strong”, as discussed here**) while “so fucking great” means something like “(so) amazingly great”.

But wait! There’s more!

Inspired “in part” by the SNL sketch, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, restaurateur opened Sofa King Juicy Burger in late 2012. There’s a sofa inside the restaurant, and the website’s home page is papered with furniture ads from circa 1961. There was equal parts pearl-clutching and befuddlement among locals when the opening was announced, but everyone seems to have settled down.

I also discovered:

• Sofa King Good restaurant in Jalisco, Mexico (!).
• Sofa King Stew Ped hot sauce
• Sofa King hot sauce (sans “stew ped”)
• Sofa King Bueno wine (“so fucking good”), a Syrah-based blend from Chronic Cellars in Paso Robles, California. (Chronic is, among other things, a strain of cannabis, which this wine does not contain.)

And yes, there is a whole subcategory of Pho King names—a minor subcategory, which is why I’ll dispense with them here rather than devoting a whole post to them.

Pho (or phở) is a Vietnamese noodle soup; the vowel is pronounced as a schwa, more or less: fuh. So naturally there is a Pho King Delicious in Northridge, Los Angeles County; and a Pho King Good in—I kid you not—Beaverton, Oregon; and a plain old Pho King in Oakland, California. And here, knock yourself out with a whole bunch of creative pho restaurant names. They are sofa king funny.

__

*I pause here to remind you that the international fashion brand French Connection, which is also based in the UK but is much bigger than Sofa King, has been known as fcuk (yes, lower case) since 1997. “The fcuk brand was dreamed up in-house,” The Guardian reported in 2001. “The company used to send faxes back and forth between its London and Hong Kong offices using the abbreviations FCUK and FCHK. ‘There was no thought of it being rude,’ insists [company owner Stephen] Marks, but advertising executive Trevor Beattie picked up on the abbreviation and came up with the ‘fcuk fashion’ slogan.”

**Or “Ford tough.” Brand name + adjective is a fairly common trope in advertising copy.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."

אני מתנצל, נפתלי. סליחה. טעיתי. אני מקווה שתמצא מקום בלב המ״פ שלך לסלוח לג׳ובניק כמוני. אני מדמיין איך שמעת על הציוץ שלי בחצות, כמה כאב גרמו לך 140 התווים הללו בטוויטר בה העזתי לצטט איש צבא בכיר שהטיל ספק בקור הרוח שלך בלילה ההוא ב 1996 (במקרה שמע יחד איתי את אותו בכיר גם עוד […]

ג'ון סטיוארט צירף את ישראל לרשימה לא מכובדת של ארצות שצנזרו, היכו וכלאו מאיירים בשל איוריהם. על מה הוא מדבר?

 

 

התכנית The Daily Show של ג'ון סטיוארט היא מהנצפות והפופולאריות ביותר בארה"ב. סטיוארט נחשב לאחד מסוכני הדעה המשפיעים ביותר בארה"ב, במיוחד בקרב קהל הצופים הצעיר, ולעיתים קרובות מונולוגים שלו הופכים לויראליים במדיה החברתית. השבוע, הגיב סטיוארט בציניות האופיינית לו לשאלה: מדוע ארה"ב לא שלחה נציג רם דרג לעצרת התמיכה בנפגעי הטרור בפריז (כאן, החל מדקה 4:38):

 

סטיוארט שאל/לעג מדוע שארה"ב תצטרף לשורה של מנהיגים שארצותיהם שלהם מצנזרים, כולאים ומכים עיתונאים ומאיירים. ברשימה הלא מכובדת של מדינות חשוכות אותן הזכיר סטיוארט, כיכבו רוסיה, טורקיה, מצרים, ערב הסעודית וגם…ישראל.

האיזכור של ישראל מתבסס על דיווח של רשת אל-ג'זירה בו נטען כי המאייר הפלסטיני מוחמד סבעאנה הוכנס לכלא בגלל איור שצייר:

His work also landed him in an Israeli prison for five months. He was charged with "collaboration with a banned political party" after publishing caricatures in a book his brother, a member of Hamas, an Islamist political party banned by Israel, wrote about Palestinian prisoners

תרגום:

איוריו גם הכניסו אותו לכלא הישראלי למשך חמישה חודשים. הוא הואשם ב"שיתוף פעולה עם ארגון פוליטי אסור" לאחר שפרסם קריקטורות בספר שאחיו, חבר בחמאס, ארגון פוליטי איסלאמי המוחרם/אסור על ידי ישראל, כתב אודות אסירים פלסטינים.

האם אכן כלאה ישראל מאייר פלסטיני רק בשל איוריו? המקרה של מוחמד סבאענה לא זכה להתעניינות רבה בתקשורת הישראלית, למעט דיווח בתחילת הפרשה בעיתון 'הארץ':

הארגון הבינלאומי "עיתונאים ללא גבולות", הפועל לקידום ושמירת חופש העיתונות, גינה בסוף השבוע את מעצרו של הקריקטוריסט הפלסטיני מוחמד סבעאנה (Sabaaneh) על ידי ישראל, וקרא לרשויות בישראל לפרסם את האישומים נגדו. כך לפי ידיעה שפירסמה סוכנות הידיעות AFP. עוד נכתב כי סבעאנה, בן 33, נעצר לפני כשבועיים, כשרצה לעבור בגשר אלנבי מירדן לשטחי הרשות הפלסטינית [...]  תגובת גורמי הביטחון הישראליים למעצרו של סבעאנה לא הגיעה עד שעת סגירת הגיליון.

כמו כן, אתר 'העין השביעית' עקב אחר פרסומים זרים אודות מעצרו של סבעאנה.

אלא שלפחות בדיווח אחד נחשפה סיבה אחרת – שלא קשורה לאיורים – בנוגע להאשמות כנגד סבעאנה. באתר "Cartoon Movement" צוטט עורך דינו:

According to his lawyer, Mohammad is accused of accepting money in Jordan for his brother Tamer, a member of Hamas who is currently in an Israeli prison. Mohammad denies this, and claims he handed the money to another person while still in Jordan, because he suspected the funds were linked to Hamas.

תרגום:

לפי עורך דינו, מוחמד נאשם בכך שקיבל כספים בירדן עבור אחיו טאמר, חבר בארגון החמאס אשר נמצא כעת בבית כלא ישראלי. מוחמד מכחיש זאת, וטוען שהעביר את הכספים לאדם אחר עוד בהיותו בירדן, בגלל שחשד שהכספים קשורים לחמאס.

אם כן, לא איורים ולא אומנות, על פי הודאתו של סבעאנה עצמו, הוא נעצר בכלל שנתפס מעביר כספים לארגון טרור. אבל כנראה שלתחקירנים של ה-Daily Show היה מסובך מדי לברר את העובדות. הרבה יותר פשוט לצטט מכלי התקשורת הפרו-ציוני אל-ג'זירה, ולהכפיש את ישראל ברבים.

(תודה לבלוג Elder of Ziyon)

 

Dave Davies, "Clarke out of Philly mayor's race — Butkovitz in?", newsworks 1/13/2015:

Butkovitz made it clear months ago he wanted to run for mayor. He engaged an experienced campaign team, but found it hard to raise money, particularly from unions, as long as there was a chance Clarke might run.

In November, Butkovitz called the whole thing off, said he wasn't running. But he said yesterday Clarke's announcement might change his thinking.

"The phone is ringing off the hook today," he said. "There's a large number of people, contributors, activists, calling up and asking me to get into the race. We're going to have to put a barometer into the water here and figure out what the lay of the land is."

Audio for the quote:

A deft combination of barometer as an instrument for checking atmosphere conditions, and therefore as a metaphorical measure of public opinion; toe in the water evoking the process of checking water temperature in a gingerly way before diving in, and therefore a metaphor for gauging public reaction; and lay of the land as a way of referring to the local topography, and therefore a metaphor for "the disposition of circumstances which one is considering" (as Merriam-Webster has it).

This gives us air, water, and earth — could he have added a fire-related metaphor, say "put a barometer into the water and figure out the lay of the land, so we can strike while the iron is hot". That's not quite right — can anyone think of a fire-related metaphor for evaluating circumstances before making a decision?

אתה מבין קארל?

תודה לבן מאירי ואיתי חורב

From the Hackney Gazette:

In some other place and time, perhaps there was a headline "Missing moonshine still discovered".

h/t Anton Cox, who wrote:

Although I am a big fan of Language Log, I may be too much of a Brit to get much from most of the crash-blossom posts (I never read them the wrong way in the first place). But this seems a bit special.

In other news, the Mirror achieved a nine-noun pile-up:

(For the back-story, see "Class war skimishes in England", 11/26/2014.

באזור הדמדומים שבין תל-אביב לגבעתיים נתקלתי בפוסטר הבא:

נתקלתי ונאלמתי דום, משום שלא הבנתי מה הקשר בין השאלה לתשובות. למעשה, לא הבנתי האם ועד כמה דיסקונט גנבים. אסביר.

הכרזה מכריזה: "סקר לציבור הרחב יקבע האם דיסקונט גנבים?" ומבקשת "סמן X לתשובה הנכונה". עקרונית סימן השאלה מיותר, שהרי מדובר בציטוט עקיף, אבל לא נורא. מה שחשוב הוא שעל פניו, יש לנו עסק עם שאלת כן/לא: או שדיסקונט גנבים, או שדיסקונט לא גנבים (יש טיעונים לכאן ולכאן, ומכיוון שאנחנו בלוג הבלשנות דגש קל ולא בלוג הבנקאות כסף קל לא ניכנס אליהם).

אלא שהתשובות האפשריות הן:

(1) הרבה מאוד גנבים
(2) המון גנבים
(3) רק גנבים
(4) כל התשובות נכונות

בואו נראה מה בעצם אומרות התשובות האלה. (3)-(1) הן קביעות לגבי כמות הגנבים מתוך עובדי בנק דיסקונט וכולן מעלות את השאלה הבאה — מה אחוז הגנבים מתוך כלל עובדי בנק דיסקונט כך שהתשובה תהיה נכונה? למשל, ניתן להניח שאם 20% מעובדי הבנק הם גנבים, זה אחוז שערורייתי. במקרה כזה גם (1) וגם (2) נכונות. למעשה, לא ברור מתי יש הבדל בין (1) ל-(2): מה בעצם ההבדל בין הרבה מאוד ל-המון? רק עניין של משלב?

את (3) קל יותר לכמת: 100% מהעובדים צריכים להיות גנבים כדי ש-(3) תהיה נכונה. ברגע שעובד אחד אינו גנב, אי אפשר לומר שבדיסקונט עובדים רק גנבים.

תשובה (4) אפשרית ומהווה דוגמה למה שנקרא אימפליקטורה סקלארית: אני יכול לומר שבדיסקונט יש הרבה מאוד או המון גנבים, בהתאם לתשובות (2)-(1) — ואז תחשבו שיש אולי 20% או 60% — אבל להמשיך ולומר "בעצם, כולם שם גנבים" בהתאם לתשובה (3). לא ממש סתרתי את עצמי: כשאמרתי שיש "הרבה" גנבים (20%) השתמע שאין מספיק בשביל "רק" (100%), אבל המשכתי על הסקאלה עד שהגעתי ל-100% של "רק".

עד כאן הכל טוב ויפה, הבנו מה ההבדלים בין התשובות השונות ואפשר לעצור כאן. אבל לי עלתה מחשבה אחרת: שאנחנו בכלל לא מדברים על כמות כאן, אלא על אופן או מידה. במילים אחרות, השאלה היא לא "כמה מעובדי בנק דיסקונט הם גנבים", אלא "אנחנו יודעים שהבנק הוא ישות גנבה, עכשיו בואו ניתן לגנבוּת שלהם ציון". הפירוש הזה מתאים יותר לשאלה המקורית בכרזה, ופרגמטית נראה לי שזו היתה הכוונה. הבעיה היא שזו תחושת בטן שקשה למצוא לה סימוכין. דמיינו שהשאלה היתה "האם דיסקונט הגונים?" והתשובות האפשריות היו:

(5) מאוד הגונים
(6) נורא הגונים
(7) הכי הגונים
(8) כל התשובות נכונות

תשובות כאלה אפשריות מפני ש-הגון הוא שם תואר (או שם עצם, תלוי) שאפשר להגביר באמצעות תארי פועל כמו מאוד, נורא, ממש, קצת וכן הלאה. אם ננתח כך את "גנבים" ניאלץ לומר שני דברים. ראשית, ש-גנב הוא שם תואר במקרה הזה, ושנית, ש-הרבה מאוד, המון ו-רק יכולים לשמש כתארי פועל. מתחשק לומר שהראשון לא נכון והשני לא יהיה, אבל בואו נראה.

לא יהיה בעייתי מדי לפרש את גנב בתור תכונת אופי, להבדיל ממקצוע. השאלה היא אם יש סקאלה של גנבוּת. שוב, תחושת הבטן שלי היא שכן אבל לא מצאתי דוגמאות טובות ברשת. לגבי הנקודה השנייה, גם הרבה מאוד וגם המון אפשריים כלוואי לשמות תואר בעברית עכשווית. ההדגשות שלי:
"עצוב וזהו. הרבה מאוד עצוב, בלי עצות, בלי השגות, בלי "אבל מה עם…?". ככה. זה מה יש." [מקור]
"ראיתי אתמול את ההקרנה (לנשים, אצלנו הגבילו כניסה מגיל 18). מטלטל, עוצמתי, מרגש (והמון המון עצוב), ובעיקר יוצק אמונה בכמויות." [מקור]

חיפשתי בינתיים רק עם התואר עצוב ויהיה מעניין לראות אם התופעה מתפשטת לתארים אחרים (עוד על שילובים מפתיעים בין שמות ולוואים כאן וכאן). השורה התחתונה היא שאפשר לדעתי לומר על אדם מסוים שהוא לא סתם גנב, הוא המון גנב או הרבה מאוד גנב או קצת גנב. אני חושד שזה הרעיון שניסוי להעביר בכרזה, אבל בגלל שעדיין מדובר בשימוש לא נפוץ בשפה, קשה לי להגן על הניתוח הזה כרגע.

אז מה המסקנה מכל הדיון הזה לגבי סקאלות ותארים? הכרזה מכמתת גנבים או מאייכת גנבוּת? כל התשובות נכונות.

תויק תחת:מהנעשה בעירנו, סמנטיקה, עברית, עריכה לשונית בחינם, פרגמטיקה

Via

אחד העיתונאים העזתים שהרג צה"ל במבצע "צוק איתן" היה ככל הנראה פעיל ג'יהאד

Andy Bodle, "Sub ire as hacks slash word length: getting the skinny on thinnernyms", The Guardian 12/4/2014 ("Headlinese is a useful little language – but it shouldn’t creep into the rest of the story. If front pages baffle you, read on for my jargon-busting thinnernymicon"):

A stranger arriving in this land, English diploma clutched tightly, might be forgiven, on catching sight of a newspaper stand, for throwing up her hands and turning homewards. “Kendra hubby’s rage at ‘sex pest’ Jake”. “Panic room bed tax victim taken to court”. “Ox aye the Roo!”

The orthography is recognisably English, but the order is all wrong; the tenses work differently, and some of the words – well, they’re in the dictionary, but that’s about the only place you’ll find them. This is because headlines don’t use English at all, but a language all their own.

Bodle provides a syntactic sketch, covering points such as:

• Articles and possessive pronouns are practically nonexistent
• All forms of the verb “to be” are similarly superfluous
• The past tense is replaced by the more concise present simple
• The future tense, meanwhile, is rendered by the infinitive
• Noun modifiers are rampant
• Prepositions are often coopted to do the work of verbs

And he ends with "The Thinnernymicon", with entries like

Dub = describe as, label, nickname
Eye = consider, contemplate
Face = is in line for; faces the prospect of; must prepare for; is threatened with

For some amusing examples of the results, see the posts archived under our "crash blossoms" category — and John McIntyre's original crash blossom post.

איגוד יועצי התקשורת ויחסי-הציבור בישראל דורש מ"העין השביעית" למחוק מאמר ביקורתי, לא למתוח יותר לעולם ביקורת דומה על יחצנים, מאיים בתביעת דיבה ודורש פיצוי כספי; מכתב ההתראה הגיע לאתרי הברנז'ה עוד לפני קבלת מכתב תשובה

For those who don't know, I've been doing bonus updates over at The Nib for a good while now. Today I've uploaded 6 of my favorites. Just press Z to go back and check them out!

The Omnibus Appropriations bill recently passed by Congress contains an interesting provision regarding the support for terrorists and their families by the Palestinian Authority:

The Secretary of State shall reduce the amount of assistance made available by this Act under the heading “Economic Support Fund” for the West Bank and Gaza by an amount the Secretary determines is equivalent to that expended by the Palestinian Authority in payments to individuals and the families of such individuals that are imprisoned for acts of terrorism or who died committing such acts during the previous calendar year.

The intent is clear: Congress was aware of the PA’s practice of rewarding individuals who had committed acts of terrorism with direct financial support or financial support for their families while they remain in prison. And Congress wants to be sure that aid from the United States isn’t paying for this, so for every dollar the PA spends we will reduce aid to the PA by the same amount.

Good idea, long overdue– but the language quoted above won’t achieve that goal. First of all, why only acts committed “during the previous calendar year?” Does that mean that payments to someone who committed an act of terrorism two or five or ten years ago is exempt? Does that clause about “the previous calendar year” modify “imprisoned for acts of terrorism,” or “who died committing such acts,” or both? Or does it modify all “payments,” which would be the logical meaning: the amount of U.S. aid is to be reduced by the amount of all payments made in the prior year? Sloppy, last minute drafting of this provision is the culprit.

The United States reduces the amounts of loan guarantees available to Israel by the amounts Israel spends on settlement construction in the West Bank. There is a procedure in place, whereby Israel tells the United States how much has been spent, State Department or USAID officials verify the amount, and then Israel is informed about the deduction.

There’s no procedure in place, as far as I can see, to implement this new provision. The new Republican-led Congress should rewrite the above provision to clarify its meaning and establish some procedures. For example, the State Department should keep a running tally of all PA expenditures on behalf of all convicted terrorists and their families, and report it to Congress twice a year. As a condition of receiving any aid, the PA should pledge to keep a tally itself and report it to the United States. Once a year, State should report to Congress the amount it has actually deducted from aid to the PA, and announce this publicly.

But meanwhile, American officials dealing with the PA–in the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem–should tell the PA the intent of Congress is clear. For every dollar they spend rewarding terrorists, their aid will be cut by the same amount–starting now.

 

[This is a guest post by Eric Price.]

I was at NIPS (one of the two main machine learning conferences) in Montreal last week, which has a really advanced format relative to the theory conferences. The double blind reviewing, rebuttal phase, and poster+lightning talk system all seem like improvements on the standard in my normal area (theoretical computer science), and having 2400 attendees is impressive and overwhelming. But the most amazing thing about the conference organization this year was the NIPS consistency experiment.

A perennial question for academics is how accurate the conference review and acceptance process is. Getting papers into top conferences is hugely important for our careers, yet we all have papers rejected that we think should have gotten in. One of my papers was rejected three times before getting into SODA — as the best student paper. After rejections, we console ourselves that the reviewing process is random; yet we take acceptances as confirmation that our papers are good. So just how random is the reviewing process?  The NIPS organizers decided to find out.

The NIPS Experiment

The NIPS consistency experiment was an amazing, courageous move by the organizers this year to quantify the randomness in the review process. They split the program committee down the middle, effectively forming two independent program committees. Most submitted papers were assigned to a single side, but 10% of submissions (166) were reviewed by both halves of the committee. This let them observe how consistent the two committees were on which papers to accept.  (For fairness, they ultimately accepted any paper that was accepted by either committee.)

The results were revealed this week: of the 166 papers, the two committees disagreed on the fates of 25.9% of them: 43. [Update: the original post said 42 here, but I misremembered.] But this “25%” number is misleading, and most people I’ve talked to have misunderstood it: it actually means that the two committees disagreed more than they agreed on which papers to accept. Let me explain.

The two committees were each tasked with a 22.5% acceptance rate. This would mean choosing about 37 or 38 of the 166 papers to accept¹. Since they disagreed on 43 papers total, this means one committee accepted 21 papers that the other committee rejected and the other committee accepted 22 papers the first rejected, for 21 + 22 = 43 total papers with different outcomes. Since they accepted 37 or 38 papers, this means they disagreed on 21/37 or 22/38 ≈ 57% of the list of accepted papers.

In particular, about 57% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second one and vice versa. In other words, most papers at NIPS would be rejected if one reran the conference review process (with a 95% confidence interval of 40-75%):

  Most papers accepted by one committee were rejected by the other, and vice versa.

This result was surprisingly large to most people I’ve talked to; they generally expected something like 30% instead of 57%. Relative to what people expected, 57% is actually closer to a purely random committee, which would only disagree on 77.5% of the accepted papers on average:

If the committees were purely random, at a 22.5% acceptance rate they would disagree on 77.5% of their acceptance lists on average.

In the next section, I’ll discuss a couple simple models for the conference review process that give the observed level of randomness.

Models for conference acceptance

One rough model for paper acceptance, consistent with the experiment, is as follows:

1. Half the submissions are found to be poor and reliably rejected.
2. The other half are accepted based on an unbiased coin flip.

This might be a decent rule of thumb, but it’s clearly missing something: some really good papers do have a chance of acceptance larger than one half.

The “messy middle” model

One simple extension to the above model is the “messy middle” model, where some papers are clear accepts; some papers are clear rejects; and the papers in the middle are largely random.   We can compute what kinds of parameters are consistent with the NIPS experiment.  Options include:

1. The above model. Half the papers are clear rejects, and everything
   else is random.
2. The opposite. 7% of all papers (i.e. 30% of accepted papers) are
   clear accepts, and the  other 93% are random.
3. Somewhere in the middle. For example 6% of all papers (i.e. 25% of accepted papers) are clear accepts, 25% of submitted papers are clear rejects, and the rest are random.

The “noisy scoring” model

As I was discussing this over dinner, Jacob Abernethy proposed a “noisy scoring” model based on his experience as an area chair. Each paper typically gets three reviews, each giving a score on 0-10. The committee uses the average score² as the main signal for paper quality. As I understand it, the basic committee process was that almost everything above 6.5 was accepted, almost everything below 6 was rejected, and the committee mainly debated the papers in between.

A basic simplified model of this would be as follows. Each paper has a “true” score drawn from some distribution (say, ), and the the reviews for the paper are drawn from . Then the NIPS experiment’s result (number of papers in which the two committees disagree) is a function of the ratio . We find that the observation would be consistent with this model if is between one and four times :

Once the NIPS review data is released, we can check the empirical and to see if this model is reasonable.

One nice thing about the noisy scoring model is that you don’t actually need to run the NIPS experiment to estimate the parameters. Every CS conference could measure the within-paper and between-paper variance in reviewer scores. This lets you measure the expected randomness in the results of the process, assuming the model holds.

Conclusions

Computer science conference acceptances seem to be more random than we had previously realized. This suggests that we should rethink the importance we give to them in terms of the job search, tenure process, etc.

I’ll close with a few final thoughts:

• Consistency is not the only goal. Double-blind reviewing probably decreases consistency by decreasing the bias towards established researchers, but this is a good thing and the TCS conferences should adopt the system.
• Experiments are good! As scientists, we ought to do more experiments on our processes. The grad school admissions process seems like a good target for this, for example.
• I’d like to give a huge shout-out to the NIPS organizers, Corinna Cortes and Neil Lawrence, for running this experiment. It wasn’t an easy task — not only did they review 10% more papers than necessary, they also had the overhead of finding and running two independent PCs. But the results are valuable for the whole computer science community.

Footnotes

1. The committees did not know which of the ~900 papers they were reviewing were the 166 duplicated ones, so there can be some variation in how many papers to accept, but this is a minor effect.
2. They also use a “confidence-weighted” score, but let’s ignore that detail.

טילים שמטרתם לפוצץ טילים אחרים לפני שיפגעו במטרתם.

המונח נשען על הדמיון המצלולי ל-”תילי תילים”.

“הרבה מהתקציב של השנה האחרונה הלך למערכת הביטחון למטרת הגדלת ארסנל טילי הטילים שלה.”

נתרם ע”י: Hallo.
מקור: מסרים נסתרים מהדגים הקוסמיים.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

In researching my Wall Street Journal column on the history of the die-in, I turned up all sorts of related protest terms modeled on the sit-in. After the sit-in became a high-profile protest strategy in the civil rights movement in 1960, the X-in template proved to be an irresistible source of lexical productivity. Some X-ins of the ’60s counterculture were more serious than others: socially conscious types earnestly engaged in teach-ins, pray-ins, talk-ins, and think-ins, while the hippie spirit infused be-ins, love-ins, and bed-ins.

By the time Kelsie B. Harder looked into X-in formations for American Speech in 1968 (“Coinages of the Type of ‘Sit-In’”), the situation had gotten a little out of hand. Harder pointed to two examples from the pages of The Realist, that bastion of ultra-profane satire, to illustrate the extreme edges of X-in neologizing. The May 1967 issue is most notorious for a piece of fiction posing as unpublished excerpts from William Manchester’s The Death of a President, culminating in LBJ fucking the bullet wound in JFK’s corpse. But that same issue contained another beyond-the-pale provocation: “The Realist is organizing a rape-in. We plan to have volunteers sexually assault the wives of all those legislators who vote against the abortion reform bill. Our purpose: mass impregnation.”

Harder quoted the rape-in passage without comment, and then followed up that doozy with another Realist specimen from the September 1966 issue. A piece titled “The Scholarly and the Scatological” told of an anti-draft protest in Minnesota in which “Barry Bondhus dumped two buckets of human excrement into the files of his local draft board.” “A number of logical questions leap to mind,” The Realist wrote. They saved the best for last: “Was he charged with holding an illegal shit-in?”

Guy Tabachnik alerted me to a more consequential appearance of shit-in from earlier in the ’60s. Famed community organizer Saul Alinsky told the story in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals and then again the following year in an interview with Playboy. In 1964, Alinsky and Chicago’s The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) wanted to spur Mayor Daley into following through on some commitments for poor blacks on the city’s South Side. They decided to target O’Hare Airport, “Mayor Daley’s pride and joy.” From the Playboy interview:

Some of our people went out to the airport and made a comprehensive intelligence study of how many sit-down pay toilets and stand-up urinals there were in the whole O’Hare complex and how many men and women we’d need for the country’s first “shit-in.” It turned out we’d require about 2500 people, which was no problem for TWO. For the sit-down toilets, our people would just put in their dimes and prepare to wait it out; we arranged for them to bring box lunches and reading material along to help pass the time. What were desperate passengers going to do — knock the cubicle door down and demand evidence of legitimate occupancy? This meant that the ladies’ lavatories could be completely occupied; in the men’s, we’d take care of the pay toilets and then have floating groups moving from one urinal to another, positioning themselves four or five deep and standing there for five minutes before being relieved by a co-conspirator, at which time they would pass on to another rest room. Once again, what’s some poor sap at the end of the line going to say: “Hey, pal, you’re taking too long to piss”?

Now, imagine for a second the catastrophic consequences of this tactic. Constipated and bladder-bloated passengers would mill about the corridors in anguish and desperation, longing for a place to relieve themselves. O’Hare would become a shambles! You can imagine the national and international ridicule and laughter the story would create. It would probably make the front page of the London Times. And who would be more mortified than Mayor Daley?

The shit-in never happened, because even the threat of one was enough to get the attention of City Hall. “There were warm handshakes all around, the city lived up to its word, and that was the end of our shit-in,” Alinsky said. “Most of Woodlawn’s members don’t know how close they came to making history.” (A proposed “fart-in,” targeting the Rochester Philharmonic as a protest against Eastman Kodak, also remained in the realm of Alinsky’s imagination.)

The O’Hare shit-in must have seemed like a quaint idea by 1968, when countercultural politics became more radicalized. In the “Paris Postscript” (dated May/June 1968) appended to his article “On the Necessity of Violation,” Jean-Jacques Lebel had a different idea of what a “shit-in” would entail, inspired by the excremental attacks of Japan’s radical student group Zengakuren:

But enough political shit. Back to the linguistic shit.

And instead of political liberation, consider linguistic liberation… in the form of “libfixes,” Arnold Zwicky’s term for “liberated” word parts that yield new word-forming elements. In the early blossoming of a libfix, we often see a kind of blending that involves a small phonological change to a single syllable. So, for instance, fantastic got reshaped into fun-tastic and spectacular into spook-tacular before -tastic and -tacular could stand on their own as libfixes.

It’s only fitting, then, that shit-in was an early spinoff of sit-in and may have helped pave the way for other X-ins. It’s understandable, though, if this bit of scatological morphology is left largely unmentioned in the annals of the ’60s protest movement.

Here’s a thought: when American scholars disagree with foreign officials, they should join together to try and ban those officials from entering the United States or any country in the European Union. Moreover, they should seek a freeze on any assets those officials may have–a bank account in the United States, for example.

Of course, those scholars would likely start with Iranian officials–right? They would seek to bar entry to Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers complicit in murder, torture, and terrorism, and responsible for the lack of free speech or academic freedom in Iran. They would seek to bar officials from China who crush the Tibetans, and the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang, and who run the gigantic system of Chinese prisons. They would try to act against officials of the Assad regime in Syria, of course, barring any of them from coming to the United States or Western Europe. They would certainly want to move against the Russian officials responsible for the invasion of the Ukraine. They would seek out repressive regimes all around the world, and apply their new approach. Right?

Wrong, of course. This new idea is to be applied only to Israel. Here’s part of the account in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

A nascent group of well-known academics is calling on the U.S. government and European Union to impose personal sanctions on four prominent Israelis “who lead efforts to insure permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and to annex all or parts of it unilaterally in violation of international law….” “We chose four Israeli leaders and public figures to start with because they stand out by working to make the occupation permanent and irreversible,” said Gershon Shafir, a professor of sociology at University of California San Diego, who came up with the concept. These four “were particularly dismissive of Secretary of State Kerry’s peace-making efforts….The call’s 20 signatories include several well-known academics from UCLA to Boston College and Columbia University, including renowned political theorist Michael Walzer, professor emeritus of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. All the signatories to SIP’s call are Zionists, Walzer said in an interview, and are deeply opposed to academic boycotts.

They are opposed to academic boycotts, but surely we can all agree that those who commit the crime of being dismissive of the Kerry efforts must be barred from setting foot in America. Who could disagree with that?

This embarrassing episode is yet another that brings to mind Orwell’s comment about some ideas being so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. Three of the four Israeli individuals in question are members of the Knesset, duly elected in a democracy. So the brilliant idea of these intellectuals is to ban from the United States democratically elected parliamentarians with whom they don’t agree. Or with whom they really, really don’t agree, seriously, a lot!

How international relations could be conducted if this principle of “personal sanctions” were to be implemented widely is not of great interest to these scholars. The point apparently is that they are right, certainly right, obviously entirely correct, in their political views, so people who think they are wrong can’t be allowed to travel. The “Kerry test” is an interesting one, and applied more broadly would mean that those who are dismissive of any American secretary of state cannot be allowed into our country. Presumably the French would bar those who are dismissive of M. Fabius, the Germans would not allow in people dismissive of Herr Steinmeier, and so on. Perhaps no EU country would allow in people dismissive of the efforts of EU High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. But so many people have over time been dismissive of one or another High Representative that this might interfere with tourism, and perhaps we should not go this far.

In any event these scholars do not dream of applying their new rules to any other country on the face of the earth but Israel.

The scholars defend themselves from criticism. They are moderates, you see:

The…call for personal sanctions very specifically opposes wide boycott efforts and its backers are not worried about being lumped together with the BDS proponents who are widely regarded as working toward Israel’s destruction. It is “utterly different than anathematizing an entire category of persons like the academic boycott efforts,” Gitlin said. “In this case there is a proper target, people whose activity is toxic and we think they need to be named.” “This would provide a way of mobilizing votes against blanket boycotts but equally against the attempts to make the occupation irreversible,” Shafir said. “It would allow us to find a place in the middle and remain distinguished from but remain part of the ongoing dialogue in a productive way that is protective of Israel’s ties with the U.S., the world and liberal intellectuals.”

They have a place in the middle, you see. “Liberal intellectuals” from Israel can travel, and this group of scholars will protect Israel’s connection to liberal intellectuals around the  world. Elected officials who do not share their liberal views (and actually may not even be liberal intellectuals at all!) have no such right to travel.

Nothing will come of this ludicrous idea, but it worth noting and thinking through. Here is a group of intellectuals who wish to apply this test to one single country on the face of the earth, Israel, a democracy– but think themselves are in the “middle” and are “protective” of Israel.

As the saying goes, with friends like these….

 

חשיפת ההצבעה של עיתונאים בבחירות לכנסת רק תקצין ותפלג את העיתונות