Warren Buffett Is a Better Writer Than I Am. Damn It.

March 18, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Warren Buffett

Periodically, I experience a sinking sensation roughly verbalized as, “The person who wrote what I’m reading isn’t a writer by trade, but does what I do better than I do. Damn his eyes.” When I had such a reaction to the memoirs of Alec Guinness and Bob Dylan, and the diaries of Richard Burton, I could at least comfort myself with the fact that they are, or were, creative types.

But not so with my most recent sinking feeling. It came a couple of weeks ago, while I was reading Warren Buffett’s annual state-of-Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders. The text had “clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike and avoidance of flowery speech”—to quote Mark Twain on the memoirs of another nonprofessional writer,…

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Don’t Thank Me?

March 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Satire can be so subtle. That’s what I thought at first when I read Nick Bilton’s column on digital etiquette in The New York Times. When Mr. Bilton wrote, “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says ‘Thank you’? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google? Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?” I waited for my laugh cue. Surely the “you” whose time was being “wasted” by thank-yous and voice mails was being held up for mockery. Right? Here I am, Mr. Bilton. Ready to get the joke.

But the laugh moment never arrived. Not even when Bilton went on about the difficulty of accessing voice mail. Not even when he wrote—in what I was sure was a send-up of some tech-snotty persona—

My father learned this lesson last year…

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Fair Comment and Privileged Occasions

March 25, 2013, 9:01 pm

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I’ve been interested in the linguistic aspects of defamation law for many years. Delving into the history of libel and slander uncovers all sorts of strange facts. Some are discussed in Chapters 12 and 13 of my book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, among them a case of a linguistics book that was blocked from publication because lawyers advised that the invented example sentences might be grounds for a libel action.

Under English case law, you can be sued (perhaps even successfully) for the content of interrogatives and imperatives as well as declaratives; for what is presupposed or implied as well as what is said; for statements you don’t yourself regard as defamatory; and even for words of praise if a reasonable person would think you were ironically implying something defamatory.

But there are defenses. Justifiable assertion of a provably true claim will normally not be subject…

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Guys and … ?

March 26, 2013, 9:01 pm

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When does a girl become a woman in the English language? If you spend a lot of time with college students, which I happen to do, you see them trying to navigate this question, trying to figure out what to call themselves and/or call each other. The ages of 18-22 seem to capture the girl-woman transition, at least lexically. Just think about sports teams: generally speaking, high schools have girls’ soccer, swimming, volleyball, etc.;  colleges compete in women’s soccer, swimming, volleyball, etc. Yet many college women choose not to call themselves women.

The history of the word woman over the past 100 years has been critically shaped by the feminist movement. In the 19th century, it was often viewed as the less polite way to refer to women, as compared with lady, or as a way to distinguish less refined women from more refined ladies. (See Ben and Maria Yagoda’s post “Hey, ‘Lady’…

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Mr. X

March 27, 2013, 9:01 pm

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The current issue of The New Yorker contains a very long article by Marc Fisher entitled “The Master.” It is a remarkable, scrupulous, and devastating account of many reprehensible actions of Robert Berman, a former English teacher at Horace Mann, a private school in New York City. The article alleges that in his career at the school, which started in the mid-1960s and ended in 1979, Berman sexually abused at least four of his male students. The parents of a fifth student, who committed suicide, have made similar allegations regarding their son. (The school only began admitting girls in 1975.) Berman, who is in his late 70s, denies the allegations. But the students independently told Fisher credible and strikingly similar accounts, and I cannot see any reason not to believe them.

I went to Horace Mann and Mr. Berman was my teacher. The student who committed suicide and one of the…

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Signs of the Times

April 17, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Ad from ‘The New Yorker,’ June 6, 1942

The other day, I got a message on Twitter from the writer Ruth Franklin: “Re. New Yorker book, question for you. Do you have a sense of when hotels stopped advertising as ‘restricted’?”

I didn’t know the answer, but I knew what she was referring to. In researching the prolific New Yorker short-story writer Irwin Shaw, for my 2000 book on the magazine, About Town, I’d come upon a story by Shaw, published in the August 17, 1940, issue, called “Selected Clientele.” It was about an assimilated Jewish writer named Sam who experiences an anti-Semitic incident and reflects,

The disease was growing stronger in the veins and organs of America. All the time there were more hotels you couldn’t go to, apartment houses right in New York you couldn’t live in. Sam sold stories to…

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Responding First

April 21, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Once again, with the marathon bombings in Boston, we heard a term that didn’t exist when I was growing up: first responder. The blogosphere hums with disdain for coinages of the last 50 years, so I’d like to take a moment, in the midst of our grief and bewilderment at the bombings themselves, to celebrate this one.

A first responder, as we all vaguely know by now, is someone with a degree of training who arrives first on the scene of a disaster. These people might be medical personnel trained in emergency management, firefighters, law enforcement officers, bodyguards, lifeguards, and so on. In one sense, the term first responder is handy simply because it lumps all these people together and doesn’t rely on initials. But more to the point, it both designates what they really do—respond first—and suggests a level of preparedness that none of the job descriptions otherwise…

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Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

April 23, 2013, 9:01 pm

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In the undergraduate history of English course I am teaching this term, I request/require that the students teach me two new slang words every day before I begin class. I learn some great words this way (e.g., hangry “cranky or angry due to feeling hungry”; adorkable “adorable in a dorky way”). More importantly, the activity reinforces for students a key message of the course: that the history of English is happening all around us (and that slang is humans’ linguistic creativity at work, not linguistic corruption).

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang…

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The Comic Stylings of POTUS

May 5, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Obama at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “But I kid Mitch McConnell. … “

At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled. According to the official White House transcript (which includes indications of laughter and applause), the president began by telling the crowd at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

How do you like my new entrance music? (Applause.) Rush Limbaugh warned you about this — second term, baby. (Laughter and applause.) We’re changing things around here a little bit. (Laughter.) Actually, my advisers were a little worried about the new rap entrance music. (Laughter.) They are a little more traditional. They suggested that I should start with some jokes at my own expense, just take myself down a peg. I was like, “Guys…

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R.I.P. LOL

May 6, 2013, 9:01 pm

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We may be seeing the death spasms of lol, and few will mourn its passing. Emerging a couple of decades ago as an initialism for laugh[ing] out loud, it suffered misuse through most of its brief life by well-meaning parental units who construed it as lots of love. Since the millennium it has devolved through irony to sarcasm until it arrived, as Katie Hearney at Buzzfeed points out, at meaninglessness.

What’s brought lol into prominence recently is its appearance in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s e-communications, in situations where the supposed meaning of the term renders the accused bomber eerily heartless: Lol those people are cooked and the like. As it turns out, Tsarnaev was most likely referring, not to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, but to members of Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals; and the word cooked here most likely means “crazy” or “high from…

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Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?

May 8, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box:

Which UK papers are not part of the Murdoch empire?

Your results (and you could get identical ones by typing the same words in the reverse order) will contain an estimated two million or more pages about Rupert Murdoch and the newspapers owned by his News Corporation. Exactly what you did not ask for.

Putting quotes round the search string freezes the word order, but makes things worse: It calls not for the answer (which would be a list including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, etc.) but for pages where the exact wording of the question can be found, and there probably aren’t any (except this post).

Machine answering of such a question calls for not just a database of information about newspapers but also natural language processing (NLP). I’ve been…

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Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

May 12, 2013, 9:01 pm

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I promised last week that I would discuss three developments that turned almost-useless language-connected technological capabilities into something seriously useful. The one I want to introduce first was introduced by Google toward the end of the 1990s, and it changed our whole lives, largely eliminating the need for having full sentences parsed and translated into database query language.

The hunch that the founders of Google bet on was that simple keyword search could be made vastly more useful by taking the entire set of pages containing all of the list of search words and not just returning it as the result but rather ranking its members by influentiality and showing the most influential first. What a page contains is not the only relevant thing about it: As with any academic publication, who values it and refers to it is also important. And that is (at least to some extent)…

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Dueling Titles

May 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the terrific British novelist Kate Atkinson. This book is Life After Life by the terrific American novelist Jill McCorkle. A galumphing typo by the compiler of the table of contents at NYTBR? Nope. There’s the review, glowing about McCorkle’s book much as the reviewer of Atkinson’s book had glowed a mere two weeks earlier.

You cannot copyright a title, and good thing too. Otherwise, the dozen iterations of Forever that have appeared in print in the last two years alone (romance, fantasy, werewolves, YA—name your own genre) would have to resort to the thesaurus for Evermore, Ever and Anon, Till Hell Freezes Over, Semper Eadem. But although McCorkle’s and Atkinson’s publishers are…

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Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

May 22, 2013, 9:01 pm

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I have stressed that we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP). One thing that might lead you to believe otherwise is that some companies run systems that enable you to hold a conversation with a machine. But that doesn’t involve NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences. It involves automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is very different.

ASR systems deal with words and phrases rather as the song “Rawhide” recommends for cattle: “Don’t try to understand ’em; just rope and throw and brand ’em.”

Labeling noise bursts is the goal, not linguistically based understanding.

Current ASR systems cannot reliably identify arbitrary sentences from continuous speech input. This is partly because such subtle contrasts are involved. The ear of an expert native speaker can detect subtle differences between detect wholly nitrate or holy night rate, but ASR …

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Machine Translation Without the Translation

May 30, 2013, 9:01 pm

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I have been ruminating this month on why natural language processing (NLP) still hasn’t arrived, and I have pointed to three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging its development. First, enhanced keyword search via Google’s influentiality-ranking of results. Second, the dramatic enhancement in applicability of speech recognition that dialog design facilitates. I now turn to a third, which has to do with the sheer power of number-crunching.

Machine translation is the unclimbed Everest of computational linguistics. It calls for syntactic and semantic analysis of the source language, mapping source-language meanings to target-language meanings, and generating acceptable output from the latter. If computational linguists could do all those things, they could hang up the “mission accomplished” banner.

What has emerged instead, courtesy of Google Translate, is something…

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When Fizzling Was Taboo

June 4, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Reviving obsolete meanings of words is largely a futile business, but with the verb fizzle, it just might be worth the effort. At least it’s worth a chuckle.

My own discovery of this word’s history happened two years ago with an innocent question. A friend called me up and asked me about the etymology of the word sizzle. (Yes, my friends really do call me up with these kinds of questions.) The answer to my friend’s question is not all that interesting: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb sizzle is probably imitative (of a hissing sound). But the OED’s etymology of sizzle cross-references the verbs sizz and fizzle—and I figured as long as I was in the OED, I might as well look up fizzle.

An etymological jackpot. When I saw the earliest meaning of fizzle in English, I thought, “How did I not know this before? Why isn’t this gem in every history of…

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Dying Is Easy

June 9, 2013, 9:01 pm

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Tobias Fünke (David Cross) on “Arrested Development”: “This is ripe for parody. This is ripe!”

Last week I wrote a piece for Slate about how the TV comedy Arrested Development–canceled by Fox in 2006, now streaming a remarkable new season on Netflix–resurrected a long-demeaned sitcom trope, the catchphrase. That’s the tagline we’re always waiting for a character or performer to come out with: Jackie Gleason’s “To the moon!”, the Fonz’s “Ayyy,” Maxwell Smart’s “Sorry about that chief,” and so many more. As the examples suggest, the catchphrase was a trademark of early TV comedy. The modern sitcom (more or less post-Mary Tyler Moore) has tended to dismiss this as too cheap and broad a laugh. Michael Scott’s tagline on The Office–“That’s what she said”–served mainly to illustrate the cheesiness of Michael’s…

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Sight for Sore Eyes

June 17, 2013, 9:01 pm

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When I stopped by a friend’s office the other day, he said, “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” I responded, “I trust you mean that in the positive sense!” And he looked at me like I was from Mars. “What other sense is there?” he asked.

There is another sense, which came to my attention three years ago when a student confessed, in class, that she had been using the phrase “wrong” her whole life.  She explained that she had just recently learned that a sight for sore eyes was a good thing. I immediately polled the class, and it turned out that she was far from alone: at least a quarter of the other students thought a sight for sore eyes was a bad thing: a thing that makes the eyes sore. An eyesore.

I have polled several classes since. In each, while more than half the undergraduates welcome a sight for sore eyes, a significant percentage uses the phrase to…

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In Polite Defense of ‘No Problem’

June 30, 2013, 9:01 pm

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In last Sunday’s “Social Q’s” column in The New York Times, Jennifer from Waccabuc, N.Y., described a man correcting her son for not saying “you’re welcome” after the man had thanked him for holding a door. Her question: Is it rude not to say “you’re welcome”? In response, Philip Galanes noted that “you’re welcome” nicely completes the “arc of politeness,” but that no one should correct and thereby embarrass another person—let alone one who happens to be an adolescent—who has just done a polite deed.

Now, what if the young man had said, “no problem”? Would the adult walking through that open door have corrected him for being rude?

When people tell me about their gripes about the English language (which happens with great regularity—it comes with my profession), they often bring up young people accepting thanks by saying “no problem.”…

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‘The New Yorker,’ on Index Cards

July 1, 2013, 9:01 pm

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If you go to The New Yorker‘s Web site, find an article or story you’re interested in, and click on it, you will be presented with a page the top of which looks something like this:

If you are a subscriber, you can make additional clicks and see a facsimile of this short story—the top of which is visible at the bottom of this screen shot—as well as the entire issue of January 31, 1948, including cartoons and ads. But the text and image, as shown, are available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

The image is the cover of the issue. What about the text? If you’ve read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” you’ll know that it’s a précis of Salinger’s story. But what an odd précis it is: present-tense, dispassionate, almost journalistic in its reluctance to claim too much knowledge (“He seems to get along perfectly with the child”). It is Salinger’s story…

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