polyglot conspiracy

Say you’re a professor in America today, and you want to help your students improve their English grammar. Do you:

a) Assign lots of small papers and stock up on red pens
b) Hint to your classes that the campus writing center has really good coffee, maybe they should check it out sometime
c) Launch a public crusade to villainize word processors’ grammar checkers for not doing their job
d) Launch a public crusade to villainize public school English instructors for not doing their job
e) Blame it on the internet

(Okay, so e was just for fun.)

A marking and e-commerce professor at the University of Washington has decided on a version of option c. Sandeep Krishnamurthy has been running tests on MS Word to demonstrate its grammar checker’s inadequacies, ever since a student turned in a terrible paper which she swore had been grammar checked. MSNBC has the story (originally in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but that link will probably run out in a few days):

The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.

“If you’re a grad student turning in your term paper, and you think grammar check has completely checked your paper, I have news for you — it really hasn’t,” he said.

The articles (and Krishnamurthy’s website) are quick to point out that this isn’t just Microsoft’s problem - every word processor’s grammar checker is inadequate - and that the task of making a sufficiently human-like processor is just plain really, really hard. I don’t know much about natural language processing programs, but I can only imagine the difficulties of getting them to interpret grammaticality (which, let’s not forget, is different in important ways from everyday notions of grammar) with the same level of nuance that a human being does. And so can MS:

Microsoft calls that the fundamental issue. Responding to an inquiry about Krishnamurthy’s examples, the Microsoft Office group said in a statement that the grammar checker “was created to be a guide and a tool, not a perfect proofreader.” Microsoft also makes that point in Word’s product documentation.

The statement added, “It is possible to list a number of sentences that you would expect the Word grammar checker to catch that it doesn’t. But that doesn’t represent real-world usage. The Word grammar checker is designed to catch the kinds of errors that ordinary users make in normal writing situations.”

It would be possible to “dial up the sensitivity” of the Word grammar checker to catch more errors, the company said. However, that could also cause it to flag sentences considered correct in colloquial usage.

Dude. If there’s a problem here, it’s not that grammar check is inadequate, it’s that we have access to grammar check. This is an obvious point: we come to rely on the machine to fix our crappy prose for us. This is an interesting case of blame on technology, because this viewpoint isn’t anti-technology; it’s, like, hyper-pro-technology, asking more of technology so we can use it even more. But it is really misplaced blame, and it brings up some important issues about technology and language. If we hold Microsoft accountable for having an imperfect grammar checker, don’t we admit to our reliance on it? We relinquish trust in our own intellects and abilities - and isn’t developing those the ultimately edifying, self-satisfying part of the process of learning to write and communicate? It seems that making grammar check better will just make us more incompetent than we already are by removing any impetus to improve. [Note: There are also obvious issues to discuss here regarding prescriptivism (i.e., Whose grammar?), but I'm not going there for now. Comments?]

I admittedly come from a middle perspective: I learned to write before word processors were standard, indispensable tools, so I learned to edit myself; yet, I’m young enough to have had computers completely integrated into my life by the time I hit college. I’ve had it both ways. But critically, I was a decent enough writer at a young enough age to understand that many of the things my word processor told me were wrong were actually exactly right for my purposes (e.g., Word’s annoying insistence on the active voice). So even if someone told me, “Your word processor is 100% accurate,” I would not have believed them, and I would never, ever hit “accept all changes.”

I recognize that not everyone has a natural tendency toward well-formedness. According to Krishnamurthy, those people are the ones who get really screwed by Grammar Check:

As a result of my testing, I am convinced that this feature works well for good writers and not for bad ones. Good writers follow most of the rules and this feature can help them on the margins. If you are a bad writer with a poor understanding of the rules, this feature will not help you at all. This is, clearly, a problem. The feature does not help those who can most benefit from it.

No offense, but - duh. If you don’t write well, no machine is going to fix it for you - there’s simply too much to be done. If you do write well, you either a) don’t need the machine, or b) know how to negotiate the machine. Krishnamurthy’s site includes a handout on “Top Writing Mistakes Made By My Business Students,” in no meaningful order. Number 11 reads, “Assuming that Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check will solve all writing problems.” Perhaps the list should be de-randomized with that as Number 1. Krishnamurthy is definitely right that MS has a business stake in improving its grammar checker, because wouldn’t we all be flocking to Word then even more than we already do?

It seems that a better use of our time would be to invest in multiliteracy projects - not just to teach “grammar” better, but to truly start educating students about the complex relationship between language, speech, writing, in/formality, grammaticality, grammar, and technology. Then they’d have the wherewithal to know when to use Grammar Check and when to turn it off, when to “accept changes” and when to “reject.” And who knows, maybe their writing would even go up a few notches on that handy dandy Flesch-Kincaid reading level scale thingy (stay tuned - that may be the next victim in this battle).

[For more perspectives, also see Linguist List, the AoIR list, Slashdot, and A Capital Idea.]

I have found (thanks to Phonoloblog) possibly the most brilliant blog posting ever: Heidi Harley (at HeiDeas) has compiled a list of linguistically-related Simpsons content. Simply excellent.

Last night I had the pleasure of viewing two back-to-back films of a rather interesting sort, and with a definitely interesting couple of titles: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2. Both are directed by William Greaves; the point of and relation between them is more complex than I want to go into, but you can read about it here.

So whence that crazy title that made my friend and I jokingly refer to it as “Psychosymbiosisplasmoidictaxidermy”? Take 2 1/2 shows Greaves informing an audience, which had just viewed Take One at Sundance, that he took the term symbiotaxiplasm from philosopher Arthur Bentley. An NYT article by Maria San Filipo explains:

The title of Greaves’ film refers to a term coined by social philosopher Arthur Bentley in his essays on social theory. Bentley used the term “symbiotaxiplasm” to refer to all the elements and events that transpire in any given environment, which affect and are affected by human beings.

Here’s a quote from Bentley’s Inquiry into Inquiries:

A symbiotaxium would be any society. Symbiotaxiplasm, or more simply taxioplasm, would be the mass of men… and assimilated things which forms the society, regarded as matter. Symbiotaxis would be the social process or function, regarded as such. The effectiveness of such a terminology ought not to be difficut to see. For example, there is no word existing to designate exactly the mass of material things which have been taken up by socially organized men and incorporated in their common life: matter that is transformed into clothes, food, tools, playthings, etc.

Greaves inserted the -psycho- to affirm

more aggressively the role that human psychology and creativity play in shaping the total environment – while at the same time, these very environmental factors continually affect and determine human psychology and creativity. Thus everything that happens in the [Symbio] environment interrelates and affects the psychology of the people and, indeed, the creative process itself. [from the San Filipo article, from another book quoting Greaves]

One has to wonder why Bentley’s term never took off…um, ok, not a mystery: no one can remember that word. If you’re going to develop a new term, don’t just compound all the multisyllabic words/roots that represent separate aspects of the concept - the meaning doesn’t even remain obvious once all the elements are put together. Think of something more succinct!

This is a trailer for Star Wars, fittingly captioned in 1337 (Leet). Overall it could be 1337-ier, it’s by no means the 1337iest of 1337, but it’s hilarious nonetheless. My favorite part is when Yoda says:

A dirty haXX0r that Anakin punk is!

(Translation: “Twisted by the dark side, Young Skywalker becoming.”)

[link via Zack]

*”One neat Leet treat”

Here’s another Crystal/Baron/Herring/Yates story about IM, Netspeak, etc. [thanks Jordan!] (see previous posts here and here). This one is less factually accurate than the Wired one and a good deal sloppier; but, it is actually longer, so if quantity’s your thing, there you go.

And while we’re at it, here’s a quickie, this time from the UK:

THE INTERNET’S digital dialect is not harming the English Language, according to a Welsh University boffin…He said that the Interweb was fostering new kinds of creativity through language. He thinks that it is a new stage in the evolution of the written language and a fresh motivation for child and adult literacy.

I’ll save you the trouble of looking up boffin (from MW):

boffin
chiefly British : a scientific expert; especially : one involved in technological research

I guessed it was related to buffoon and therefore derogatory, but apparently not. Wait…gasp! It IS somewhat derogatory, according to the OED:

2. A person engaged in ‘back-room’ scientific or technical research.

The OED says that any etymological conjecture remains just that. My hunch for buffoon thus remains uncorroborated but at least not demonstrably implausible. Also see Italian buffo and related boffo.

I’m fond of the term digital dialect (I’ve never liked netspeak even a bit), but I am not fond of the term Interweb. For a sort-of-explication of interweb (whose ass internet kicks predictably hard in a Googlefight), go here. But most first Ghits for interweb produce commercial names, so it’s curious that that would be the headline term of choice, unless there’s something about the UK’s internet onomastics that I don’t know.

[Dear readers: If you are getting increasingly annoyed (as I am) by my alternating use of italicization, bolding, and "quotes" to indicate words, "phrases," concepts, etc., please suggest some kind of stylistic "solution." Because "I" am really just all over the place with "them."]

A NYT Circuits article from yesterday about Skype, an internet telephony-messaging system which uses VoIP technology and sounds basically like your traditional dating site, but with phone instead of text-based capabilities. From Skype’s website:

Skype is for calling other people on their computers or phones. Download Skype and start calling for free all over the world.

The article’s author signed up and immediately started getting interesting calls from exotic locations.

It felt like the early days of AOL, another environment in which people contacted others randomly. But voice brings to life the other person in a way that typing cannot, like hearing Mr. Einkamerer [the anonymous caller] laugh at my jokes. The instant-messaging environment is anonymous; with voice, you cannot hide from the other person.

The claim is that this kind of phoning provides just the right mix of intimacy and anonymity. Says one user:

“It’s like a long over-the-ocean flight where the other guy starts telling you stuff that you’re astonished to hear and you start talking about stuff you’re astonished to say.”

And according to the article, the quality of voice transmission is superior to that of traditional phones - so, not only are you conversing with a stranger, but you’re actually hearing them better than you would on the regular phone. Will instant telephony be the new instant messaging? My bets are no - too many people are adamantly “not phone people.” There’s something really alluring about text-based communication, not because of the anonymity but because of the apparent lack of pressure exerted by the mode. So we’ll see if this takes off, whether people prefer to meet random others online through primarily textual or aural verbal means.

This headline on BoingBoing yesterday caught my interest:

PEZ MP3 players are go!

I had a decidedly WTF reaction to the use of “go” without “a,” as in I really wanted it to be:

PEZ MP3 players are a go!

Like, “It’s a go! Let’s start selling!” At first I thought, ok, this is just happening because it sounds weird to use the singular a go with the plural subject players. But no, here it is in the singular, in the post itself:

The PEZ dispenser/MP3 player is go!

So then I thought, ok, this is just happening because the post itself is being written in terse headline style, thus omitting unnecessary articles. Like, “Bird eats nut” instead of “A bird eats a nut.” But it still sounds really, really wrong to me. Why?

This must be because I only think of go, when it’s not being a verb, as being a noun. According to MW, go the noun is:

1 : the act or manner of going
2 : the height of fashion : RAGE [elegant shawls labeled ... "quite the go"]
3 : an often unexpected turn of affairs : OCCURRENCE
4 : the quantity used or furnished at one time [you can obtain a go of brandy for sixpence]
5 : ENERGY, VIGOR
6 a : a turn in an activity (as a game) [it 's your go] b : ATTEMPT, TRY [have a go at painting]
7 : a spell of activity [finished the job at one go]
8 : SUCCESS [made a go of the business]
9 : permission to proceed : GO-AHEAD [gave the astronauts a go for another orbit]

In all those examples, it’s preceded by a determiner of some sort. And if I were to make headlines including similar usages, here’s what they’d sound like:

Elegant shawls labeled quite go
Wino obtains go of brandy for sixpence
Child has go at painting
Family makes go of business [Interestingly, this would be okay by me if it were "Go made of business"]
Dude finishes job at go
Houston gives astronauts go for orbit

Of these, only the final one sounds even close to ok to me, even if I’m thinking in headline terms, when it’s followed by a PP.

So so much for go the noun. The BoingBoing headliner must have meant to use go the adjective:

functioning properly : being in good and ready condition [declared all systems go]

It would make perfect sense, in the adjectival meaning, that PEZ MP3 players should be go (grammatically, at least!). I suppose I’m so unaccustomed to hearing go as an adjective, apart from the idiom all systems go, that I didn’t even realize it was an adjective in such a way.

Some time ago, Seth D. provided me with some blog fodder (blodder?) which I was saving up until I did some background research or had something to relate it to. Well, I couldn’t find evidence of this particular online-to-offline phenomenon out on the internets or in the world, nor has anything similar come up in the past few weeks. So, I’ll let it stand solo. In his words:

[A] student at our show in Maine the other night said that the teenagers she works with will occasionally say “send” at the end of things they say, as though they were using IM rather than speech. This conversation came up because she said, jokingly, “OMG. Send - did you get it?”

If anyone else has witnessed this [note: Do you work with teenagers?], PLEASE share. It’s quite an interesting little practice indeed. For one thing, it’s not a replication of something you actually type when you’re IMing, like heart/ ♥ or OMG are: You just hit the send button; you don’t type out the word send. And usually you don’t even hit the send button; you simply hit the enter key [Q: Is this key still called return ever? Or only enter now?]. So it might make more sense to me if they lexicalized “enter.” As in, “I’m going to the mall later. Enter.” Or would that be, “I’m going to the mall later. Enter?” as in, “Get it?” or “Right?” or “Yeah?” But no, it doesn’t seem like the intonation would rise, because “send” doesn’t really mean “Do you read me?” it just means “Now you can read me.”

Actually, I do have something to relate to this. I’ve been learning a lot about TTY (teletypewriters), and the more I learn about it the more it seems mechanistically like something of a forerunner to IM. In particular, TTY conversation has developed its own system of abbreviations, acronyms, and punctuation conventions to accommodate to the medium and expedite the process of communicating. What send reminds me of is the convention in TTY to type GA at the end of a turn - meaning “Go Ahead,” which signals to the other person that it’s their turn to talk now.

Virginia Heffernan writes about the evolution of the word bitch on TV.

[T]he new “bitch,” in a usage that has become popular on network television, refers not to dogs or women, but to men. And while parody and overuse are taking the misogynistic sting out of the old one, this new bitch is just getting its claws.

She talks about the curiosity of bitch being allowed without a second thought on network TV in this new usage, to refer to a weak or dominated man - which has violent and arguably racist overtones (due to its history in prisons).

And so the word that once defined a misogynistic double standard (”If a man is assertive, he’s called ambitious; if a woman …”) now defines another: If a woman’s called a bitch, she’s powerful, formidable, a winner; if a man’s called a bitch, he’s shamefully weak.

I’m not sure about that - I still hear bitch used pretty demeaningly toward women, particularly powerful women. And, as she points out, bitch among women can mean not so much “powerful” as “womanly” or “girlie,” in a chummy way, nowadays - as in her example of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie using it to cutely say goodnight to one another.

Mentioned as evidence of a reclamation phenomenon is the knitting book Stitch’n'Bitch by Debbie Stoller (which I proudly own), but interestingly not mentioned are some late-90s bitch-embracing cultural products: the 1996 inception of the woman’s magazine Bitch, Meredith Brooks’ 1997 song “Bitch,” or Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1998 book Bitch. [Addition: recall Joey Lauren Adams' character in the 1997 film Chasing Amy, affectionately calling her fellow lesbian friends "bitches."]

[Thanks to Ashley for the heads up! And also see The Language Guy's commentary on this and other favorite insults for effeminacy.]

While the average American probably doesn’t know what a blog is, they can undoubtedly name you their five favorite celebrities. Well, maybe the blogosphere should embrace the proliferation of celebrity blogs as a way to introduce the concept of blog to the layperson - and then steer them our way. (Can we get a celebrity-normal person mentoring program? Like, Big Brothers/Big Sisters? [Big Bloggers/Big Celebs?])

Anyway, here’s a Salon article about celebrity blogs, offering a typology of sorts.

Celebrities are different from you and me, and their blogs are different, too, if only because they open additional windows onto people we already assume we know. …For those who have become tired of celebrity overload (although the ever-increasing glut of big-pictures-no-text celebrity-poop magazines suggests that there might not be many who are), celebrity blogs are a welcome antidote — they put us, the consumer, in the driver’s seat. No one is flashing melaniegriffith.com in our face; if we find ourselves going there, it’s our own damn fault.

(Btw, I went there, and it’s like LOTR on heavy doses of estrogen.)

But here’s something more interesting: the author (Stephanie Zacharek, whom I really like) says about Moby’s blog:

While I’m only a moderately enthusiastic Moby fan, I’m delighted to report that his blog is a model of good grammar, spelling and punctuation (by blog standards, at least) and is marked by a casual, friendly tone (despite Moby’s notorious stridence about some of his favorite causes). (emphasis mine)

Let’s have a look at that model, “by blog standards.” Here’s the excerpt she gives from Moby’s blog:

in other news, my days are now spent in hotel rooms and tv studios and airplanes. which is ok. the biggest negative is that i can’t remember the last time that my lungs were filled with non-recycled air. today, for example, i woke up in a hotel room, did interviews in a hotel room, got into a car, drove to the airport, got on an airplane, drove to another hotel, checked in, and now here i sit, in another hotel room.

Good grammar? There’s an unnecessary, muddling that, a run-on sentence (or at least a portmanteau one), and a stand-alone nonrestrictive relative clause. Good spelling? Ok, I’ll give him that. But good punctuation? The excerpt contains an overabundance of commas, not to mention a blatant lack of capitalization.

I say this neither to demean Moby’s command of written English nor to question Zacharek’s lionization of it. [Nor to invite readers to cutely point out the shortcomings of my own prose, for that is far beside the point. Or maybe that is the point. I dunno.] I say it to point out an amazing transformation. This excerpt counts as a model for good composition? There’s a lot of linguistic attitude packed into that judgment. On the one hand, if Moby can provide a model without capitalization, we must not be worried about such things as capitalization anymore. (In fact, I would guess most people would instinctually claim the excerpt as NOT a model of good anything, and the lack of capitalization would be the first thing they seize as evidence.) And if that’s the case, then a) maybe writing on the internet is changing our standards, but b) maybe we don’t so much care. On the other hand, the qualification of “by blog standards” indicates that maybe we do REALLY still care about written standards, but we’ve decided to exempt bloggers from them because it’s hopeless to expect any strict adherence by nonrefereed writers.

[Third hand/Devil's advocate's hand: Maybe instead of "by blog standards" it should've been "by celebrity standards." That was implied anyway - note Zacharek's "delight" in reporting Moby's goodness.]