Jane.eco

About seven years ago, in March 2006, I wrote a Language Log post about "the Cupertino effect," a term to describe spellchecker-aided "miscorrections" that might turn, say, Pakistan's Muttahida Quami Movement into the Muttonhead Quail Movement. It owes its name to European Union translators who had noticed the word cooperation getting replaced with Cupertino by a spellchecker that lacked the unhyphenated form of the word in its dictionary. Since then, I've had occasion to hold forth on the Cupertino effect in various venues (OUPblog, Der Spiegel, Radiolab, the New York Times, etc.). Now, Cupertinos are getting yet another flurry of publicity, thanks to a new book by the British tech writer Tom Chatfield called Netymology.

Chatfield's book is currently only available in the UK, but he was kind enough to send me a copy and I can heartily recommend it as a whirlwind tour of the latest in digital speak. His 100 bite-sized topics cover other Language Log-friendly terrain, like snowclones, but the Cupertino effect has earned a prominent place in publicity for the book. Chatfield has discussed the Cupertino effect in pieces for the BBC and the Guardian, as well as in this video.

And no doubt thanks to this renewed attention, Cupertino effect is featured today on Paul McFedries' Wordspy site. It's defined there as "the tendency for automatic spell-checking software to replace some words with inappropriate or incorrect alternatives," and I supplied the earliest known example (mentioned in my 2006 Language Log post), from the September 2000 issue of Language Matters.

The Wordspy entry also notes the use of Cupertino as a standalone noun (to describe an instance of the phenomenon) but doesn't provide any citations for it. As far as I can recall, Cupertino was first used in this way in a Jan. 12, 2008 Language Log post by Mark Liberman, "More Campaign Cupertinos: Mike Hackable, John Moccasin, Rot Paul, Chris Dodo…" In that post, Mark quotes an email from Cody Boisclair referring to "Cupertinos," and Mark followed up with the lower-case variant "cupertinos." Prior to that, I had been using the less snappy "Cupertino-isms."

(Michael Quinion also has a good discussion of the term on World Wide Words.)

Lately there's been a flurry of activity in the American press about the value (or lack of value) of science. There have also been attempts by various organizations to enhance science education.₁ Most defenders of science and science education will eventually end up trying to explain how science directly benefits the economy, usually in the form of return on investment. In other words, we need to do science because eventually the result will be used by somebody to make a profit.

I posted an example of this a few days ago [Zack Kopplin Defends Science].

I think this is a dangerous strategy. There are several ways of responding to the "what's in it for me" question without bringing up indirect economic benefit. These strategies are common when defending public support for the arts, for example. They're also used when defending research in the humanities.

Phill Plait of Bad Astronomy hits the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned [Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Member Gets Schooled on Science Funding]. His defense of science should be the primary talking point whenever anyone questions the value of learning about the natural world. Here's what Phil Plait says in response to Zack Kopplin's "return on investment" defense of science when Stephen Moore asks why the government is funding research on sex in snails.

How’s that for return on investment?

And that’s just a pedestrian, look-at-what’s-directly-in-front-of-you kind of thinking. We research the Universe around us because we are curious, inquisitive, intelligent animals. We don’t know what snail mating habits might teach us. That’s why we study it. Maybe it’ll lead into insight on how animals behave, or a new chemical secreted during the process, or to insight on the environment where snails live. Maybe none of that.

But that’s not the damn point. We study science because we want to learn about the real world. If we wanted to stick our heads in the sand, as people like Moore would have us do, he wouldn’t even have the venue he has to say ridiculous things like he just did.

Science is about exploration and discovery, and making sure we don’t fool ourselves. It’s among the noblest of all human endeavors, and something we should be both pursuing to our fullest abilities as well as defending from those who would drag it down.

Right on, Phil! Science leads to knowledge and knowledge is always better than ignorance. That's reason enough to fund science research and reason enough to support science education.

As sure as night follows day, there are going to be comments from people who advocate the "return on investment" strategy for defending science research. The argument frequently boils down to the fact that most politicians don't care about knowledge. All they want to see is how science can help business or improve the health and physical well-being of our citizens. Because these politicians are ignorant of the real value of knowledge, we must cow-tow to their ignorance and defend science on their turf.

That's what's happening in Canada with our Conservative government. In my field (biochemistry & molecular biology), many of my colleagues think we have to justify our research by showing how it will improve health. The current buzzword is "translational research." If you don't engage in the kind of research that Conservatives want, then you won't get funded.

Unfortunately, that may be true in today's climate. That doesn't mean we have to fool ourselves into thinking that that "translational research" be our primary goal. We recognize that the ignorance of our Conservative government is a problem, not a virtue. It's a problem that has to be fixed ... in the long term. Our goal should be to educate the next generation of politicians so we don't have to be embarrassed by them in the future. Let's at least have some people like Phil Plait who will speak out for basic curiosity-motivated research. We'll never succeed in convincing politicians and the general public of the value of knowledge if we don't even try.

Let's make sure we start with our students. Let's at least ensure that when we have them in our clutches as undergraduates we make sure that they understand science and the importance of knowledge. If we don't do that then we have nobody to blame but ourselves when future societies demand that science generate a return on investment.

Looking at my own university, it's obvious that we are not doing a very good job in our courses. I fear for the future of science.

---

1. In the USA "science" often gets lumped in with "technology," "engineering," and "mathematics"(=STEM) as though they had the same goals.

George Orwell is well known to have legions of admirers who will leap to the keyboard to attack anyone who criticizes their hero. We academics are all supposed to admire him, and especially to regard his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (henceforth P&EL) as a deathless masterpiece of political and literary insight, and to urge our students to read it. Two distinguished evolutionary biologists devoted recent blog posts to ladling renewed praises on P&EL: Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne, referring with approval to a piece by Lewis Spurgin.

Well, apologies in advance to Orwell fans, but I have always found P&EL sickening. A smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational. Let me comment on just one of its sillinesses.

Orwell famously instructs you to expunge from your prose every “metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” He thinks modern writing “consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else” because people just “use ready-made phrases” and simply paste these “worn-out” clichés together. They should instead be scrapped. Not only will this improve one’s writing, but “from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin, where it belongs.”

Take a look at just a few of the 160 words and phrases he explicitly condemns. Here are two dozen of the individual words that give him word rage attacks:

basic, categorical, clandestine, class, conclusion, consideration, dead, element, eliminate, equality, exploit, extramarital, freedom, inevitable, justice, natural, phenomenon, plastic, predict, romantic, science, sentimental, unforgettable, utilize And here are two dozen of the phrases Orwell deprecates: bear in mind, commensurate with, deserving of, explore every avenue, give rise to, in my opinion, in the interests of, in the near future, in view of, leave no stone unturned, make contact with, make itself felt, objective consideration, radical transformation, satisfactory conclusion, serious consideration, serve no good purpose, serve the purpose of, take effect, take into account, the fact that, to be expected, with respect to, would readily assent

This miscellany of locutions has nothing in common other than that Orwell hated them and (without quantitative support) thought that they were overly frequent in 1946. What conceivable importance could attach to his sundry pet hates? Why should we pay any attention to such absurd peeving, let alone foist P&EL on our students?

It would be reasonable to assume that the survival and prospering of particularly frequent phrases suggest that they are the fittest occupants of their niches. (I’m not saying they are: I’m saying it would be prima facie just as rational to assume that as to assume the opposite.) But Spurgin, calling P&EL “still the best guide to how not to write,” emulates Orwell by enumerating grouses of his own, citing raw Google Scholar hits to establish that certain phrases are overused in science articles:

Think how often you have seen phrases such as ‘cutting-edge’ (1,640,000 Google Scholar hits), ‘Achilles’ heel’ (79,300 hits), ‘shed(ding) light’ (492,000 hits) and ‘holy grail’ (82,200 hits).

He pours particular scorn on the phrase “survival of the fittest,” stemming from his own discipline. He wants us to avoid it precisely because others don’t. We shouldn’t just “borrow phrases, fill out sentences and rehash bad metaphors,” he says, even though the avoidance of such bad practices “requires deep thought and conscious effort.”

But hold on, the phrase conscious effort gets 87,100 Google Scholar hits. Oops!

Changing our writing habits, he goes on, “will take considerable time and effort.”

But wait: time and effort gets 401,000 Google Scholar hits. Oops!

Is it really sensible to think less of Spurgin’s writing because he (like everybody else) uses moderately common phrases of this sort?

Of course not. Orwell was working himself into a lather over nothing. In any statistically normal body of texts there will be some phrases that are more frequent than others. In any living language their popularity will drift up and down with changing fashions and preferences. Orwell’s ridiculous recommendation is to engage in what might be called elimination of the fittest: Find tokens of the currently most popular phrases and replace them by less frequent synonymous expressions. This tedious exercise in statistical perversity is unlikely to improve the writing of our students or colleagues.

Profmedia

In my April 4 post I called George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” (P&EL) “A smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational.” I couldn’t substantiate all these charges in one post; I dealt with just one specific piece of silliness. Let me now explain why I charge P&EL not just with silliness but with intellectual dishonesty.

Orwell affects to believe that we users of English could improve the state of the language, “if enough people would interest themselves in the job.” For example, we should be able “to laugh the not un- formation out of existence.”

He means phrases like seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley (which he quotes from an essay by Harold Laski as a typical example of bad modern writing), or phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption (which he calls “a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow”). He apparently thinks not un-X, for any adjective X, is always noxious and disreputable jargon. And he adds a footnote about it:

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

Let me explain what is so astonishingly dishonest about that footnote. The adjective-negating prefix un- is fairly productive, but by no means universally so. For example, it doesn’t occur with the most basic adjectives of approbation and disapprobation (*ungood, *unbad, *unright, *unwrong). And relevantly here, it never occurs with color adjectives (*unred, *unorange, *unyellow, *ungreen, *unblue, *unindigo, *unviolet), and it never occurs with size adjectives (*unbig, *unlarge, *unhuge, *unvast, *unlittle, *unsmall, *untiny).

What this means is that Orwell’s example has nothing to do with the not un- construction that he is supposed to be addressing. His example is ungrammatical simply because of the three illicit uses of the un- prefix on adjectives that do not allow it. Likewise *An unblack dog was chasing an unsmall rabbit across an ungreen field, which contains no instances of the not un- construction at all.

Orwell may have thought that phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption should be shunned because they needlessly and redundantly use double negation, but if so, he was wrong. Dropping the two negators from a not unjustifiable assumption yields a justifiable assumption; but that does not have anything like the same meaning. Calling an assumption justifiable suggests one can readily justify it; using “not unjustifiable” is much weaker, and merely suggests that you cannot rule out the possibility of its being justified.

In the same way, Jane is intelligent speaks positively of Jane’s intellect, placing her perhaps in the top quartile of the intelligence range. Jane is not unintelligent, by contrast, is faint praise indeed. It says she does not fall in the range picked out by unintelligent (say, roughly the bottom quartile), but it doesn’t say much more than that.

And Laski’s not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley merely connotes failure to be decisively non-Shelleyesque. That is quite different from saying like a seventeenth-century Shelley, which directly affirms Shelleyesqueness.

The not un- construction is a perfectly respectable device, semantically useful when delicate judgments of ranges on scales are under consideration. Orwell was foolish to make it one of his bugaboos. But worse than that, he used a totally dishonest argument in his attempt to get us to follow him in his peeve.

If I thought Orwell was too dim to see this, I might be more lenient. But Orwell was intelligent—not just not unintelligent. A man who can write political novels as brilliant as 1984 and Animal Farm is smart enough to know what he’s doing. He was slipping in a thoroughly dishonest argument, disguised as a humorous aside, to trick the unobservant into agreement with him.

Sitting as it does amidst so much posturing, hypocrisy, and hyperbole, that little bit of cheating makes me like P&EL even less.

Today's "Frazz" (via Ed Cormany on Twitter):

The confusion here is reminiscent of the discussion on Neal Whitman's Literal-Minded blog about the expression, "I need to pee like a racehorse." Neal explains, "This is an example of an attachment ambiguity, in that we could theoretically attach the modifier like a racehorse to the 'lower' verb phrase pee or to the 'higher' verb phrase need to pee." Thus, it's not:

I [ need to pee ] [ like a racehorse ]

but rather:

I [ need to [ pee like a racehorse ] ]

In the "Frazz" strip, the ambiguity works the other way. The teacher thinks like my dad attaches to the lower verb be:

I [ want to [ be the guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges like my dad ] ]

when what's intended is an attachment to the higher verb want:

I [ want to be the guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges ] [ like my dad ]

See Neal's blog for more examples of attachment ambiguity, many helpfully parsed with syntactic tree diagrams. And see also Arnold Zwicky on "the lure of Low Attachment" here (with links back to relevant LL posts).

Acknowledgment from an anonymous doctoral dissertation in the University Microforms International database:

If I had a dime for every time my wife threatened to divorce me during the past three years, I would be wealthy and not have to take a postdoctoral position which will only make me a little less poor and will keep me away from home and in the lab even more than graduate school and all because my committee read this manuscript and said that the only alternative to signing the approval to this dissertation was to give me a job mowing the grass on campus but the Physical Plant would not hire me on account of they said I was over-educated and needed to improve my dexterity skills like picking my nose while driving a tractor-mower over poor defenseless squirrels that were eating the nuts they stole from the medical students’ lunches on Tuesday afternoon following the Biochemistry quiz which they all did not pass and blamed on me because they said a tutor was supposed to come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and I am supposed to thank someone for all this?!!

(From a UMI press release, quoted in The Whole Library Handbook 2, 1995)

Author : David Stevenson

A yellow flashing beacon. Another package spinning through space. I reach out and snag the drag line carefully. The beacon is attached to one end of a line, at the other end is the supply crate with another flashing beacon. It’s a lot easier to catch a line than a small mass, but in this gravitational field the tides are fierce, and if I try to grab a line being spun round with a weight at either end I could lose an arm.

Maybe I’ll do that sometime; might be a quick way to go. For now I snag the line using a crude hook I keep for this purpose.

Power cells; food blocks; fresh water; filters for the suit; all the usual suspects. That’s entropy staved off for another while. I tie these supplies onto the raft of similar crates floating in space beside me. I’m much more interested in the datapod, if there’s one there.

There always is. I take the datapod, and I plug it into my suit. Some virtual reality recordings of classical music. Good. A month’s worth of current events newscasts. That’s alright, but I’m out of sync. These are from last year and I’ve already seen more recent ones. Another bunch of letters and videos from friends and family. Not sure whether to start with those or leave them until last.

I remember the first pod I found, and the letters it contained. All the first 50 or so pods had the same message in them. They were all sent at the same time and they had no way of knowing which one I would encounter first. I still occasionally pick up one of the first batch.

“If you’re reading this then you didn’t plunge to your doom on the neutron star.” That’s Steve’s sense of humour for you.

“We think the accident blew you into a stable orbit that’s high enough up that it won’t immediately decay.” Correct. Not high enough up that they can rescue me, of course. Any ship coming this low would be ripped apart by tidal forces.

“We can’t transmit through the radiation, but we can send these pods into the same orbit as you and you can pick them up.” Ah yes, that radiation. The radiation that would kill me if it weren’t for my suit and the medical nanochines repairing the damage.

“We have to take the ship back to Earth now, but we’re leaving a field manufacturing unit in the asteroid belt. It’s going to scavenge matter and it will keep on turning out these pods and inserting them into your orbit. We can communicate with the factory and send new data to be forwarded.” Great. I can’t even die of boredom.

I have a virtually endless supply of consumables, both for me, and the suit. The medichines will keep me alive indefinitely. My suit needs a lot of fuel to keep my orbit from decaying, but they make sure to send me plenty.

So, I have a choice. Staying here forever orbiting a neutron star wearing only a spacesuit until I die of old age, or explosive decompression and a quick death.

I’m going for the third option. I don’t know if I’ll still be in one piece, or if I’ll be ripped apart. I don’t know if I’ll be conscious, but if not then the suit will keep my feet pointing towards the star. I’m burning all my fuel, I’m going in, and I’m going to be the first man ever to stand, just for a microsecond, on the surface of a star.

 

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As anyone with seasonal allergies to tree pollen knows, allergy season has begun. Aside from the sneezing, itchy eyes, nasal congestion, and general sense of being ill, is there anything good about this springtime immune system dysfunction? I came across some evidence that might slightly relieve that annual sense of “suffering” – having allergies of […]