Journalism, science, grammar

An interesting but annoying column in the NYT's Style section on Sunday sheds some light on the odd little Twilight Zone where journalists decide how to talk about the empirical world (thanks to Pam for the steer-in, but: Pam, what is this "trouble" business?). One Bob Morris, who apparently writes something weekly called "The Age of Dissonance," has found him a Trend, and it's Young People Taking Up For Grammar. In a way, he's actually talking about the great journalism-and-science question, but it's almost Halloween, so let's let him dig his own ghastly hole:

Not long ago, an elderly friend and grammar stickler stopped me midsentence. I had just said, “They gave it to him and I,” when it should have been “him and me.”

“You have to keep in mind the object of the preposition,” she gently told me.

I felt ashamed, but also grateful to be corrected.

“And now you won’t embarrass yourself in front of someone else,” she said. (Don't touch that dial, Elderly Friend! He's fixin' to, whether he gets his cases confused or not!)

She isn’t the only one wagging a finger or a pencil these days. Bring up the topic of grammar at any party and you’re likely to be hit with a tirade. (Which is your first signal of how much original thinking and footwork went into this column.)

But then, this is a time when e-mail messages, hip-hop slang, and a “decider” president who said that “childrens do learn” are chipping away at good grammar.

OK, stop the tape. By this point, Bob has covered the spectrum of Meedja Bias. He's managed to capture both the barely veiled racism of the knuckle-dragging right ("hip-hop slang" is coming right at your white girls grammar!) and the twee self-righteousness of the Salon Set left. As in, does the Times no longer stock dictionaries, or does it just not keep the sort that would tell you that "decider" has been hanging around as an English noun for four centuries now, or do Style columnists simply not have to have the faintest freaking idea what they're talking about? Or how English forms nouns from verbs? Like, if you had to call a columnist a really, really bad name and your dialect didn't yet have a noun for, like, when this dude and this goat ... fine, you get the idea.

But that's not the point. This is the point:
“Unfortunately, using poor grammar comes off as less pretentious,” said Sharon Nichols, a 22-year-old law student. “Everything is just so calculated in politics.”

Ms. Nichols is one of many young people throwing off her generation’s reputation for slovenly language, and taking up the gauntlet for good grammar.

Hold that thought. No, not the one about the comma before the coordinating conjunction in a compound of two, which for future reference we'll call the "ham, and eggs" comma. The one about the inevitable next sentence:

Last year, after seeing a sign on a restaurant window that said “Applications Excepted,” she started a grammar vigilante group on Facebook, the social networking site, and called it “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar.”

That's why we call it "shoe-leather reporting," kids. When you read a column that appears to result from one possibly apocryphal encounter with an elderly acquaintance, one hypothetical party and one afternoon on Facebook, you take off a shoe and hit yourself on the head until shards of leather form a pile at your desk.

Rather than looking for all the inanities in of this column (what kind of world would we have if everyone let grammar continue its drunken, downhill slide?), let's try to put them into some sort of context. Bob's making a lot of statements about how the world is. Grammar's going downhill. It's worse than it was. It's threatened by technology, colored people contemporary dialect, Republicans and wh0 knows what-all. But young people are standing up! They're taking up our quarrel with the foe! All of which are things we can isolate and measure and discuss, should we be interested. But we don't seem to be. We'd rather proclaim.

Here's an item for contrast: Mark Liberman over to the Log, checking in at last on the "workplace cussing is good for you!" study. And he has a good trick that we might ought to consider adopting on the desk: Read the methods section and see what the study actually did:

... The data collection for this study was conducted while the second author was employed in a temporary position in a mail-order warehouse.

Mark's translation into the active voice: In other words, Jenkins had a part-time job, and made some observations about cussing in that context.

Yep. And is there a lesson for the people who wrote the stories, or slapped them on the front, or had to write heds for them?

The ironic thing is that pretty much all the reporters writing stories about this research, and most of the people reading those stories, have had at least this wide a range of experience of cussing in the workplace, and probably almost as much experience of swapping stories about cussing among different groups.

Thus they have roughly as much empirical basis as Baruch and Jenkins for evaluating hypotheses about how workplace swearing works and what its positive and negative impacts might be. But because this is a "study" presenting the results of "research", the journalists and their readers are all solemnly considering it as testimony of a qualitatively different character from their own life experience.

So how do we bring this all together? Maybe when we write about stuff in the observable world, we should assume that people are going to ask us how we know it. And we could assign different values to different sorts of claims about truth. And people who had more evidence to support what they said would get better play, and people who were just blowing smoke would be consigned to the far outer circles of hell. Or something.

Think it'll work? Or do "Grammar! You Kids Are Ruining It!" and "Cussing! It's Better For You Than You Thought!" just have so much appeal that we'll never stop them?

Grammar by thunderbolt

Here's how life looks from the vantage point of the reporting textbook:

The readers of one newspaper once confronted the following one-sentence paragraph:

"Paradoxically, cancer-causing mutations often result from the repair of a cell by error-prone enzymes and not the 'carcinogenic' substance's damage to the cell," Abe Eisenstark, director of biological sciences at the university, said at a meeting of the Ad Hoc Council of Environmental Carcinogenesis Wednesday night at the Cancer Research Center.

If there is a message in those 53 words, it would take a copy editor, a lexicologist and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to decipher it. The message simply is not clear.

It's fun to be part of your own Dan Brown novel, isn't it? Oops, left the lexicologist behind somewhere along the Friedrichstrasse! Depending on what kind of science the "Nobel Prize-winning scientist" does, I'm not sure we need her either, because I'm not sure whether the problem -- whatever it is that makes this message so "not clear" -- is in the sciency part of the sentence or the J101 part.

The first half seems pretty straightforward: Weird as it may seem, sometimes the problem isn't the cancer-causing substance but the well-meaning efforts of your damn bumbling enzymes to fix the damage. (Honk if those enzymes have worked on your car at some point.) As long as you don't mind a few words like "carcinogenic" (you are reading an article about cancer, after all) and "paradoxically" (since the speaker is introducing a bit of a paradox), it's hard to see why this bit would be singled out.

Now, granted, we have a 53-word sentence here (counting the hypenated compounds as two words each), and it weights in at 27.9 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale that Microsoft kindly provides. But most of those words come after the science part ends -- in other words, the part where it starts sounding like a news sentence piling in everything it can.* Pretend for a moment that it's two sentences:

"Paradoxically, cancer-causing mutations often result from the repair of a cell by error-prone enzymes and not the 'carcinogenic' substance's damage to the cell," he said.

Abe Eisenstark, director of biological sciences at the university, spoke at a meeting of the Ad Hoc Council of Environmental Carcinogenesis Wednesday night at the Cancer Research Center.

The first gets a 16.8 on the grade level scale, and the second an 18.9; as a paragraph, they land at 17.8. I'm not going to suggest that we follow Flesch and Kincaid off into the sunset, but I think we could reasonably hope to hack our way out of a prepositional thicket like that one without invoking lexicology and Science.

What actually sent me off to the bookshelves for that particular text was this sentence in Monday's fishwrap:

It has been assumed that Ilitch, the owner of the Red Wings and Tigers, would buy the Pistons ever since he entered into an exclusive 30-day negotiating period early last month with Karen Davidson and Palace Sports & Entertainment to buy the franchise that Forbes values at $479 million — although it’s believed the eventual purchase price will be lower.

Like the first, it requires you to bring a little knowledge to the table before you start: how an "exclusive 30-day negotiating period" works, for example. And there are a couple of passive verbs -- one of them following an especially ill-turned restrictive clause -- that demand a lot of trust in the writer. All in, it's only fractionally lower on the Flesch-Kincaid scale (26.4) than the sentence that required a whole legion of superheroes.

Why does one sentence call down the wrath of the academy while the other is (pretty literally) journalistic business as usual? I think, again, that it goes back to some fundamental misunderstandings about how we teach "grammar" and the related arts. "Clarity" isn't a property that mere mortals can achieve by themselves, perhaps by identifying a train wreck of prepositional phrases and diverting some of the subsequent traffic elsewhere. There's nothing you can take away for next time: no indication of what makes "the message" of a sentence unclear, no hints for how the novice might look for ways to cluster all those grammatically correct chunks of information elsewhere in less obtrusive ways.

I think we need to bring "clarity" down from the mountaintop and show people how to make use of it on the ground. The gods are having a lot of fun hurling thunderbolts, but they aren't contributing much to the cause.

* Aw, go ahead and guess what textbook J-students at "the university" use.

Today in framing

Granted, there's lots of other Fox stuff to talk about, and lots of other framing stuff, and no shortage of grammar stuff either. But the morning's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network really captures the essence of how framing works -- and how it doesn't.

Got the difference? The hammer hed goes from "Rahm's Spendy City" (captured at 9:24 a.m. Eastern) to "Spendy City," with no change to the Photoshopped image,* a minor trim to the deck, and no mention -- still -- in the 519-word text of the guy in the image (much less "debt-plagued" or "blue stronghold," but that's piling on).

That elision isn't a problem if you're a Fox reader. Rahm Emanuel is in that rare category of Fox villains who can summarize a lead story just by illustrating it (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also comes to mind). When you say "Rahm" (or when, on reconsidering, you merely show him), you've said not just "Chicago" but all the related things that set your Fox audience to gibbering in fear: big cities, black people, feckless liberals, random violence, brown people, Obama, crooked politics, "the Chicago way," black people and the grasping hand of socialist big government. Sounds like a pretty good ROI.

That's the point of framing: "To select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described" (Entman, 1993). Properly done, an image can do all those at once without breaking a sweat -- for the right audience. If you're not a regular Fox reader, one or all of those primes might have blown right past you.** Framing is a contingent theory, not a magic-bullet theory; moral evaluations can be a feature of the message (hence Ahmadinejad could be a "dictator," even though the Iranian presidency is too constrained to allow for effective dictatoring), but they're more likely to arise from the context in which the message lands.  

Whatever else might be going on in the world, you can see why "Spendy City" is the top story: You can't take your eyes off these people for a moment, or they'll be back to digging away at the foundations of everything that made America great. And the great man's triumphant meeting with the Russian tyrant? It didn't have the right definition and interpretation*** until about noon:

Got it? This will be on the final.

If you find Planet Fox a confusing place, be reassured. Here's how A.J. Liebling described a similar planetfall in 1950:

The visitor to Chicago, awakening unalarmed in his hotel room and receiving the Tribune with his breakfast tray, takes a look at the headlines and finds himself at once transported into a land of somber horror, rather like that depicted by the science-mystery magazines. ...  As he turns the pages of the Tribune, the stranger is likely to get the feeling that some of the people and events he is reading about superficially resemble people and events he remembers having read about in the world outside, but he never can be sure.

... The effect on the adrenal glands of the morning dip into the Tribune's cosmos is amazing. The Tribune reader issues from his door walking on the balls of his feet, muscles tense, expecting attacks by sex-mad footpads at the next street corner, forewarned against the smooth talk of strangers with a British accent, and prepared to dive behind the first convenient barrier at the sound of a guided missile approaching -- any minute now -- from the direction of northern Siberia.

Should you be wondering how the Tribune treated the president's role in US-Russia relations in the good old days (Nov. 10, 1941), the cartoon is by Carey Orr. Photoshop, you have to admit, is weak tea in comparison.


 * Given the role of the 1A editorial cartoon in Chicago journalism history, I'm disappointed.
** WAKE UP, AMERICA!!1!1!!!!!!!!!!!!
*** I yield to none in my disdain for heds that play on proper names, but you have to admit a certain appreciation for "Vlad the Emailer."

Res ipsa loquitur

Much as the Language Logsters suggested, almost any bit of public huffing about language, even if "deeply and bizarrely confused," will generate approving keep-up-the-fight replies. So it seems here in Collegetown as well, where the plaudits for an earlier column in one of the two dominant Sunday papers have now given rise to a second column.

There's not really much new in here, but one point is worth noting.

I have received dozens of e-mails from disgruntled language buffs each voicing disdain regarding one or more linguistic sins committed by the unknowing or uncaring people in this country.

My problem is with "sins," because the complaints that follow -- speech habits, regional and cultural variants in pronunciation, even regularizing irregular verbs -- hardly seem to reach that level. Not that I don't believe in linguistic sins; I do. But I tend to score them differently.

Not being able to tell pronunciation from grammar and usage, for one. "Git" is not a "misuse of the word 'get'"; it's a fairly common vowel variant. It has nothing to do with the personal dative "git me a new car." And those who would spend too much time on the high horse about others' vowel variants had best be careful, lest the One Great Scorer plunk them down in a region where their version of "aunt" is low-class rather than high-class. It's not just rude, it's risky.

I'm tempted to call the pseudo-science of "I agree with her, but I thought that pronunciation ["git"] was only prevalent in the Midwest" a linguistic sin too. No. Get/git is an example of what's often called a "pen/pin merger"; it's most likely before nasals (hence "pen/pin") and an introductory textbook will suggest it's Southern in origin*. You want a Midwesternism, here's one from today's Missourian: "It’s kind of a standard thing, anymore,” he said. The point is that there are ways to talk rationally about how language works, and to learn cool stuff therefrom, but bitching about vowel mergers with your friends ain't one of them.

Dangling modifiers? I wouldn't call those a "linguistic sin." Grammatical sin, fine. They're on the J4400-nee-110 list of deadly sins, and they're going to stay there. But not linguistic sin. Unless, that is, somebody catches you at it, and you note the catch approvingly, and you turn right around and do it again:
One reader’s skin crawls when hearing, “I could have went …”
That's a different category of sin, and you aren't going to find any indulgences here.

Bill Safire. I think he's a linguistic sin, but that's because he makes stuff up. See "Nomicsnomics" in his June 5 column:

Here's my advice to White House aides of all stripes: If your president's name ends with an n, brace yourself for an -omics branding. Thus did we have Nixonomics, Reaganomics and Clintonomics. We did not have Fordonomics or Carternomics or Bushonomics, nor would we have had Dukakisonomics or Gorenomics or Kerrynomics. It has nothing to do with politics; it's the elision quality of the last letter of the president's last name.

Criminentlies. We did too have Carternomics, though a few minutes in a database would make clear that we didn't have nearly as much of that as New Zealand did of "Rogernomics." And "Bushonomics" seems to have a good bit of currency. Safire's passing off a WAG as if it were a law with some basis in either observation or phonology. A cat with a search engine and an OED could do better.

If I were in the business of testing linguistic hypotheses (as opposed to spouting self-serving ex cathedra bilge), I'd start with the idea that what makes a good "-nomics" word is not the final consonant but the trochaic dimeter. That's why "Rogernomics" works, why "Bushonomics" needs an extra syllable, why "Kerrynomics" would have been fine and why -- to pick a really good potential president -- "Yossarianomics" would never happen, despite the final nasal.

Well, enough of that. Let's give the last word to the eloquent Mark Liberman:

It's a bit depressing that so few people ever pay careful attention to the language that they've heard all their lives. It's nothing short of outrageous that those who can't spare the time to listen to how people talk are nevertheless so happy to carry on at length in public about it.

This is not an appeal for deference to experts. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that the many people who are so passionately interested in speech and language should be offered a basic education in the methods of linguistic description and the habits of analytic observation, so that they can explore and express their passion in an informed way.



* Wolfram, W., and Schilling-Estes, N. (1998) American English, is terrific reading, by the way

More from the science front

Couple thoughts occasioned by the morning's fishwrap* and its handling of the World of Empiricism:

One, cheering in the press box:

Vitamin study disappointing
C, E supplements don't give protection in pregnancy, experts say
A disappointing new study found that vitamin C and E supplements given to healthy pregnant women do not reduce their risk of developing preeclampsia, a complication that can be lethal to both expectant mother and child.

Unless you're in the vitamin supplement business and have just bought up a boatload of C and E supplements, it's hard to see why this study is "disappointing." (Yes, the judgment is the AP writer's fault, but the desk amplified it instead of deleting it.) That really isn't what the whole research thing is about. What happens, or what's supposed to happen, is that somebody develops a hypothesis, figures out a way to test it and reports the results. So we'd have a null hypothesis:

C and E supplements don't affect the risk of preeclampsia

and a unidirectional research hypothesis:

C and E supplements reduce the risk of preeclampsia

So women in their first pregnancies were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and the study found no significant differences on preeclampsia or several other risks. Is that disappointing? Yes and no. We know (or we have a pretty good idea; research can produce false negatives as well as false positives) that the treatment doesn't seem to affect this group positively. That might mean eliminating an unnecessary treatment with potential downsides of its own. We know something we didn't know before. And studies are continuing on other groups. Recommendation: Leave out the opinion and let the data speak for themselves.

Two, stories that aren't stories:
Oxford database hits 1 billion words
Research tool scours Internet, print sources for language trends
LONDON - A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as "podcast" and "celebutante" to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.

In its favor, you can say this isn't completely fabricated -- like, say, the algorithm that tells us English is going to hork up its millionth word ANY DAY NOW.** But it's right next door to meaningless. For one thing, a billion is a big number, but it's an easy one to reach if you pick the right units. If you drove from HEADSUP-L Manor to the in-laws', you'd hit the billion-millimeter mark somewhere southeast of Lansing.

At least that's a real measurement, though. A billion mm is twice as much of the distance to the northern marches of Detroit as half a billion mm. But as the story clearly notes, this milestone isn't the result of adding stuff like "celebutante" to the dictionary. It doesn't measure words in play. It measures all the words in sentences and examples that define the words in play. If all the usage examples for "inner child" and "gabfest" were a word or two shorter, we'd still be stuck God knows how many tens of millions short of this milestone.

Which brings us to the last complaint: Faux language magic. The only excuse for passages like

As hybrid words such as "geek-chic," "inner-child" or "gabfest" increase in usage, Pearsall said part of the research project's goal is to identify words that have lasting power.

is to let the reporter trot out some silly words. There's no reason to believe that "hybrid words" are on the upswing in usage; hell, "gabfest" has been around since the late 19th century, and even "inner child" is now an inner 43-year-old.*** Nor is there any logical link between the reporter's suppositions about compounds and the research project's goals.

Conclusion: This ain't a story. Don't waste space on it.

I still don't know quite what to make of the bird grammar story. I'd really like to like it, and I've read it half a dozen times in an effort to do so, and somebody still seems to have not quite figured out where the thing is supposed to be going. One of the pros has taken it apart pretty skilfully, and I'm delighted to refer you to him.


* I am seriously going to hate it when "fishwrap" goes the way of "broken record," by the way.
** H1: Journalists set the BS barrier significantly lower when the person offering the bogus story has a degree from Harvard. Design a study to test this hypothesis and explain the methods you would use to analyze the results.
*** With enough "lasting power" for the OED. Reporters who refuse to use the dictionary should be cudgeled with it. If you're getting to the dictionary online, use your keyboard.