Yuval Pinter

The top Palestinian negotiator with Israel, Saeb Erekat, spoke about the recent war in Gaza this week. He made two claims: that 12,000 Palestinians had been killed, and that 96% of them had been civilians.

Some web sites suggest that he merely misspoke about the number 12,000, and meant to say 2,000–the usually accepted number in the press and the United Nations. Perhaps; let’s grant him that.  What of the 96% figure?

Well, he made it up. Even the UN, with its hostility toward Israel, only claimed the number was 69%. The number put forth by the government of Israel and the IDF is about 50%. The New York Times analysis noted this:

The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.

So, given that even Hamas never claimed that 96% of those killed were civilians, where–again–did Mr. Erekat get this number? Again, we must admit that he simply made it up.

This is not exactly the first time: Mr. Erekat was one of the inventors of the “Jenin Massacre” in 2002. In fighting in Jenin, 52 Palestinians were killed–and 23 Israeli soldiers. Yasser Arafat claimed at the time that the “Jenin Massacre” could only be compared to the siege of Stalingrad in World War II. Erekat himself said of the Israeli campaign in the West Bank that “the numbers of killed could reach 500 since the Israeli offensive began. Thousands of wounded. The Jenin refugee camp is no longer in existence, and now we’ve heard of executions there.”

There was considerable destruction in parts of the camp, but at no time did it cease to be in existence. He made that up. Does any of this matter? It does. Negotiations between the two parties would be difficult enough in the best of circumstances and with a high level of trust among the negotiators. When the top man for the PLO keeps making things up out of whole cloth and “revealing” them to the press, talks become even harder and less productive.

From David Donnell:

"Not for nothin'," as the native NY'ers say, but I saw this commercial on the idiot-box tonight and was tickled by the play on words. Surprised to google and discover "half-fast" has been around for some time. But the TV ad still makes me laugh!

Dedicated to reader Stacey R. – happy birthday Stacey!!

To celebrate Stacey’s birthday, I’ve brought back the character I created for her birthday two years ago, Cat Plumber!

A few months ago, I posted here (and on Slate's Lexicon Valley blog) about PangramTweets, a bot created by Jesse Sheidlower that combs Twitter for tweets that include all 26 letters of the alphabet. I mentioned that it would be interesting to see if PangramTweets turns up any particularly short "pangrammatic windows," i.e., pangrammatic strings in naturally occurring text. At the time, the shortest known example was 42 letters long, in a passage from Piers Anthony's Cube Route:

"We are all from Xanth," Cube said quickly. "Just visiting Phaze. We just want to find the dragon."

My post inspired Malcolm Rowe, a software engineer at Google, to set about finding short pangrammatic windows in an automated fashion, first on the Project Gutenberg corpus and then on the megacorpus of web pages indexed by Google. (Let's hear it for Google's 20 percent time!) On his blog, Malcolm now reports on his findings, including the discovery of a 36-letter pangrammatic window that appeared in a review of the movie Magnolia on PopMatters:

Further, fractal geometries are replicated on a human level in the production of certain “types” of subjectivity: for example, aging kid quiz show whiz Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) and up and coming kid quiz show whiz Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) are connected (or, perhaps, being cloned) in ways they couldn’t possibly imagine.

Malcolm also found a couple of 38-letter specimens:

So…..i accidentally microwaved my q10. Just bought a z10. Liking it so far except for the typing. (CrackBerry Forums)

That's not the only ballroom dance. I take lessons too. There's Salsa, Tango, Waltz, Vienese Waltz, Quick Step, Jive, Swing, Foxtrot, Lindy Hop, Mambo, Cha-Cha, and Merengue. There are obscure ones too. (Yahoo Answers)

The first one, as Malcolm notes, loses style points for its use of the product names "Q10" and "Z10." The second one is a bit better, even if it's just a list of dance styles. But the pangrammatic window in the PopMatters review is a real gem, consisting of nothing but lucid, coherent prose. Congratulations to the reviewer, Todd Ramlow, who had no way of knowing that he was inadvertently setting an obscure linguistic record.

I highly recommend Malcolm's series of posts if you're interested in the programming that went into his search: "Pangrammatic windows" (June 2), "Pangrams in C" (June 6), "Pangrammatic performance" (Sept. 6), and "Pangrams on the web" (Oct. 4).

Here are more endangered species.

English Literature, University of York.

אז ב-"מי נגד מי" השבועי לאביב הורביץ מגיב בן כספית (בפעם הראשונה מתוך שתיים באותו טור, בחיי שההורביץ הזה נודניק חסר תקנה) ארוכות, ומסיים פסקה כך:

להפוך את זה לאיזה סוד כמוס שהוסתר מקוראיי התמימים זה פחות ממגוחך.

מחשבה ראשונה: וואלה, יש כאן שלילת חסר! הביטוי המקובל הוא "לא פחות ממגוחך", וכספית איכשהו הצליח לוותר על הלא. בניגוד לשלילת-יתר, שם מוסיפים נדבך שלילתי כלשהו כי שפה אנושית דבר קשה.

מחשבה שניה: אולי כספית כן יודע למה הוא התכוון, ופשוט יש כאן סקאלה פחות סטנדרטית אבל לא מופרכת שלפיה טענות עומדות על איזשהו רצף סבירוּת שבמקום די נמוך בו נמצאת השֶּׁנֶת "מגוחך", וכספיתוש מתכוון שמה שהורביץ טוען יושב אפילו מתחת לזה על הסקאלה דנן. אז כמו שאמרנו, לא בלתי סביר, אבל כן בלתי סטנדרטי. כמה בלתי סטנדרטי? ובכן, לפי גוגל, "פחות ממגוחך" (בתוספת הליטרל "-לא") מופיע בפסקי דין וחוקים.

גמר חתימוש לכולם!

In December 2012, the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee announced a major new housing project. In an area of east Jerusalem called Givat Hamatos, 2600 units would be built. Of some significance, half would be set aside for Jewish residents and half for Arab Jerusalemites.  Last week, just before the New Year’s holiday, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem signed an order described as “symbolic,” continuing official approvals of the work.

(Background: Givat Hamatos means “Airplane Hill” in Hebrew, and was named that after an Israeli jet crash landed there in the 1967 war. It is mostly barren land, and has been used in the past to house poor Ethiopian and Russian immigrant families. More details here.)

This became an international incident thanks to the clever folks at the Israeli group called “Peace Now.” The fact of the deputy mayor’s action had been in the press but attracted little notice until Peace Now gave it great publicity–which played right into the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. This is what led the President to order his spokesman to say the following:

This development will only draw condemnation from the international community. It also would call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.

Jerusalem’s mayor Nir Barkat responded:

I will not freeze construction for anyone in Israel’s capital. Discrimination based on religion, race or gender is illegal in the United States and in any other civilized country. 2,600 apartments in Givat HaMatos that we approved two years ago will enable more young people from all sectors and religions to live in Jerusalem and build their future here, thereby strengthening the capital of Israel. We will not apologize for that.

The administration reaction is curious given that this is not new news, given that Arabs and Jews will live in this housing, and given the remarkably negative speech that Palestinian president Abbas gave to the UN last week. The State Department rejected that speech as “offensive” and “deeply disappointing.” I suppose it’s possible that the President thought this had been too tough, and now wanted to “balance” things by tough words for Israel.

But if this was a victory of sorts for Peace Now, it was no victory for the Obama administration or for those who seek peace negotiations. Building new housing for Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem does not in fact “call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians,” the foolish and extreme phrase of both the White House spokesman and the State Department. Mr. Obama asked Netanyahu to “think outside the box” during their meeting. But calling upon Israel to stop housing construction in its capital city is not realistic. And what’s worse is that Washington apparently thinks housing construction for Arabs is fine and only condemns new housing for Jews; and by singling out neighborhoods appears to be saying that certain neighborhoods must not be allowed to become mixed ones and must remain free of Jewish residents. If that’s “out of the box” thinking, let’s get back in the box.

More conformity.

The current BBC home page has some breaking news about Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond:

My first thought on reading this was that it's rather late in the day for Salmond to be going after the No vote, considering No already won handily. Then I realized it's not go after as in "pursue," but rather go + after — he's going (resigning) subsequent to the No vote on the referendum.

I had another moment of crash-blossom-inspired confusion on seeing this Politico headline earlier in the week:

Why would Politico be saying of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz that Democrats turn her on? But no, in actuality, the Democrats are turning on her. Those tricky phrasal verbs.

After forty years, UN forces meant to separate Israel and Syria have fled their posts–fled into Israel, for safety. Here is the account from The Tower web site:

The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which was established in 1974 to “[m]aintain the ceasefire between Israel and Syria” and … “[s]upervise the areas of separation and limitation, as provided in the May 1974 Agreement on Disengagement,” withdrew its peacekeepers from Syrian territory today because “the situation has deteriorated severely over the last several days.”

Reuters quoted United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric:

“Armed groups have made advances in the area of UNDOF positions, posing a direct threat to the safety and security of the U.N. peacekeepers along the ‘Bravo’ (Syrian) line and in Camp Faouar,” he said, adding that all U.N. personnel in those positions have been moved to the Israeli side.

The failure of this force in the face of a deteriorating situation raises a question, and Yossi Klein Halevi put it squarely to his fellow Israelis:

During the recent failed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Secretary of State John F. Kerry suggested that Israel yield control over the West Bank border with Jordan to an international peacekeeping force. Yet last week hundreds of U.N. peacekeeping troops on the Israeli-Syrian border barely escaped into Israel after Al Qaeda forces overran their position. Who should we rely on to protect us if not ourselves?

International forces in the West Bank are an old nostrum, but the failure of UNDOF is a reminder that it won’t work. Until the region is at peace and all terrorist groups defeated, or the Palestinian Authority is clearly able to defeat terrorism and assure law and order, the only thing that prevents a powerful terrorist presence in the West Bank is the Israeli military. What ought to be better appreciated is that not only Israelis, but also Palestinians and Jordanians, depend on the IDF to prevent groups like Hamas, al Qaeda, and even ISIS from gaining ground in the West Bank. UN forces in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) have been unable to control Hezbollah and unwilling to challenge it, and UNDOF has fled in the face of terrorists; the same outcome is entirely predictable in the West Bank today and tomorrow should Israeli forces leave.  To admit this is not to hope for permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, but surely any hopes or plans for peace must be based in reality.

As Yossi Klein Halevi said in the article quoted above, Israelis’ views of these questions are based in a tough assessment of their situation:  “Israelis watch the fate of the Yazidi and Christian minorities in the Middle East and tell each other: Imagine what would happen to us if we ever lowered our guard.” That guard, essential for their safety and for that of Palestinians and Jordanians, cannot be replaced by an amorphous international or UN force that, judging by experience, will shrink from confrontations and flee in the face of real danger.

International Conflict Analysis, University of Kent 

"Catch Me If You Feel Like It: Universal Jurisdiction Legislation and the Prosecution of Rwandan War Criminals"

I had just gone into labour (to have a baby) when a regular client called with some last-minute and typically urgent editing he needed done. It was 10pm on a Friday night.

I explained that I was in labour and that we would be heading to the hospital.

Client: But I heard labour can take anywhere from 10-14 hours, so you should have enough time to do this edit quickly. Please?

אז יהיה משאל עם בסקוטלנד בשבוע הבא. משמעותה של הצבעת "כן" – עצמאות לסקוטלנד, כלומר פירוק הממלכה המאוחדת.

עורך עמוד השער של המוסף השבועי של "ישראל היום" הבין את המילה "כלומר" כ-"או".

כי למה לחשוב עשר שניות לפני שכותבים כותרת למוסף השבועי היחיד בעיתון

We have not discussed any examples of nerdview on Language Log for a while. But Bob Ladd told me of one the other day. He was at the Edinburgh Airport dropping someone off, and pulled up next to the ticket dispensing machine for the short-stay car park. He pushed the button, but no ticket appeared. Instead, the display screen of the machine showed a message: "OUT OF FAN-FOLD TICKETS".

Not having encountered the term "fan-fold" (I guess he never owned a tractor-feed printer in the 1980s), he was momentarily flummoxed. What the hell was a fan-fold ticket, and what was he supposed to do, given that there apparently weren't any, and he had to take one to make the white bar lift up so he could go in?

After a while he decided to forget about the message, and act the way you would if the machine had burst into flames when you pressed the button, or if the lane had been marked as closed: he backed up out of the entry lane (luckily there was no one behind him) and drove in via a different lane with a working ticket machine. But eventually he realized that the message simply meant (for him) that the machine could not issue a ticket.

What makes this a case of nerdview is that it was totally unnecessary for him ever to know that inside the machine the tickets were stored in a long stack folded back and forth like old-fashioned fan-fold printer paper. (As Bob notes, it's more reminiscent of an accordion than of a folding fan; but regardless, it's no business of his how the ticket stock looks inside the machine.)

The engineers who built and programmed the dispensing machine knew that some maintenance person would need to know when the long ticket strip had run out, and would have to get a new box of fan-fold ticket stock and load it into the machine. But the engineers didn't distinguish the viewpoint of the user (the driver wondering what he is supposed to do about getting into the parking structure) from the viewpoint of the attendant (the maintenance person charged with opening up the machine and loading a new strip of blank ticket paper).

The other puzzling thing is that the attendant would surely not typically engage in pressing the button, like an arriving driver wanting a ticket. The two roles had been hopelessly confused. Drivers don't need to know that tickets originate as segments of a long fan-folded strip that they will never see, and maintenance attendants don't typically push the button.

Nerdview comes in many forms, sometimes quite subtle (as with the case of the "MIXED CARDBOARD ONLY" sign); but it is ubiquitous, and this case is crashingly obvious compared to some. Nerdview stems from a failure of something fundamentally human and highly relevant to linguistic communication: to do linguistic communication you have to appreciate that the other human has a viewpoint, a perspective, and it may not be the same as yours. You have to be able to think about things from their point of view.