Another take on the dynamics of political rhetoric (starting around 6:10):
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When you think about, it’s kind of surprising that there haven’t been more politicians who learned their trade as professional wrestlers.
It was recently reported that Ray McBerry, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, sent a message to his supporters reading in part:
In recent weeks, I have been personally accused of, but not limited to, the following list of absurdities: that I attempted to have an affair with my former campaign manager… when she was fired for spending unacceptable amounts of time at the Capitol in lobbying efforts during our campaign; that I somehow “stole” sole custody of my son years ago from his mother, even though she tested positive for meth use in a court-ordered screening after she had been living outside our home for nearly a year; that I have had some sort of sexual or sexually improper relationship with underaged girls; that I am no longer allowed to teach in the state of Georgia, despite the fact that I retain my teaching certificate to this very day; and now that I am somehow unpatriotic because, as a Georgian who cherishes the constitutional Republic given to us by our Founding Fathers and wishes to see it restored, I choose to salute the Georgia flag and the original Betsy Ross American flag instead of the current federal flag which represents the present unconstitutional leviathan in Washington.
This being Language Log rather than Political Scandal Log, my interest is the use of “but not limited to” with the syntactic force of “among other things”.
Such cases abandon the requirement that limited should find a syntactic partner earlier in the sentence:
Anomalies may be found during, but not limited to, the review, test, analysis, compilation, or use of software products or applicable documentation.
What Customers will Experience: Issue will affect all services which would normally be accessible for this server which may be, but not limited to; HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP and ASP.
This category consists of but not limited to handgun, rifle, and shotgun ammunition; cartridges and shells of various caliber, gauge, size and weight.
The same sort of thing happens, even more commonly, with the fuller phrase “including but not limited to”:
The user acknowledges and confirms Q-FM’s indemnity to, including but not limited to, indirect, direct, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages arising from the use of or inability to use the Q-FM site.
The Company makes no representation, warranties, guarantees, and/or conditions: as to the accuracy, reliability, quality, relevancy, and/or timeliness of any content on the Site; that the Site will be completely operational and/or error-free; that any error(s) in the Site will be corrected; that the Site will be free from including, but not limited to, viruses, hackers and/or any other malicious security threats; and, that any communication between you and the Site will be secure.
If you’re used to seeing language like this in contracts, it may not be obvious to you that a new construction has developed. Perhaps it will help clarify things to simplify them:
The user confirms Q-FM’s indemnity to including indirect damages.
The Company makes no representation that the site will be free from including viruses.
Compare
Global Early Warning System for Major Animal Diseases, including Zoonoses (GLEWS).
Police seized 40 weapons, including assault rifles and handguns, in a Thursday evening raid of 287 Hickory Street in the Township of Washington.
Functionally, “(including) but not limited to” serves to indicate that a following list is not necessarily complete. Its original syntactic structure involves apposition with a preceding noun phrase. But for people who use it all the time — mainly, I suppose, lawyers — it loses syntactic integration with its preceding context.
[Update — to clarify the political context, Mr. McBerry is one of a number of candidates for governor in the Republican primary, with current poll numbers in the low single digits. He’s also the president of the Georgia chapter of the League of the South.]
Today’s Non Sequitur:
There are many fields of study where Danae’s approach ought to work. But unfortunately for students everywhere, teachers believe that the theory of cooperative communication applies in a special way to pedagogical evaluations.
A carnivore eats meat; an herbivore eats grass; an insectivore eats insects; an omnivore eats everything; a locavore eats locally-produced food. But the latest -vore coinage, femivore, doesn’t refer to someone who eats feminists, but rather to, well, something different.
Peggy Orenstein, “The Femivore’s Dilemma“, NYT 3/11/2010:
Four women I know — none of whom know one another — are building chicken coops in their backyards. It goes without saying that they already raise organic produce: my town, Berkeley, Calif., is the Vatican of locavorism, the high church of Alice Waters. Kitchen gardens are as much a given here as indoor plumbing. But chickens? That ups the ante. Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.
All of these gals — these chicks with chicks — are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper. “Prior to this, I felt like my choices were either to break the glass ceiling or to accept the gilded cage,” says Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed-livestock farmer in upstate New York and author of “Radical Homemakers,” a manifesto for “tomato-canning feminists,” which was published last month.
[Update — more here (on the cultural rather than morphological aspects).]
JS writes:
I don’t think I used the word “sketchy” till I came to college in Virginia, but now I use it with such frequency (especially whenever a party, a city or nightlife is involved) that I am surprised that the meaning I use most for it is not included in most dictionaries. Is there a way to track the evolution of the word? How recent is it, and what its geographical distribution?
He’s talking about sketchy in a sense something like “questionable, iffy, untrustworthy, unsafe, poor quality, creepy, deprecated”.
Some examples from the web:
There’s an area near the river in town that is really sketchy: a lot of muggings and violence, and naturally lots of graffiti.
The Husband has since talked to some of the doctors who work with him now and they say this doctor and practice is really sketchy. They don’t recommend he take the job and worry how it would affect his reputation.
When you have a sketchy driving record like me, and you, just shop around, you have to go with the large outfits as they can absorb higher risk folks.
I don’t think its laced with cocaine since the guy dealing to us isn’t a sketchy guy lol.
Anyways, I wasn’t trying to compare the morals of salesmen with sketchy bankers.
hair is spilitting at the ends and bangs need a trim but dont know where to get a cheap but not sketchy haircut
The word “rise” seems to be attached to really crappy sequels and prequels: Rise of the machines, rise of the lycans, rise of the Cobra, Rise of the silver surfer, Carlito’s Way: rise to power. So sketchy.
If any of you ever see me at a show or an event, and I hand you a baked good, it’s really not sketchy. It’s simply because I’m a nice girl.
That was in the early ’90s in a sketchy building on the Lower East Side (which was still very sketchy back then and had no boutique hotels or non-dive trendy bars).
My assumption (without real evidence) is that that this usage started with the sense “composed of an outline without much detail” (OED sense 2), and the figurative extension “Of a light, flimsy, unsubstantial or imperfect nature” (OED sense 3), further extended via the phonetic associations of neighbor-words like scummy, scurvy, scruffy, scuzzy, skeevy.
This usage has come up in a few LL posts over the years (e.g. “Sketchballs“, 2/18/2006; “Skeevy“, 6/22/2009), but we’ve never tried to track its origin and progress in time and space. It’s not easy to do this, because even today, the great majority of uses of sketchy are the more traditional senses.
One way past this problem is to look for particular collocations (like “sketchy guy(s)”) that are highly likely to involve the new sense. Tracking this phrase in Google books, we find this from the teen novel Brave New Girl (2001):
He looks like a crazy person, like some sketchy guy you’d see on TV. Actually, more like some stupid actor playing some sketchy guy — too good-looking to actually be sketchy.
And this from Dana Lear, Sex and sexuality: risk and relationships in the age of AIDS (1997):
He learned a year later that she’d been mostly unsafe with her previous partner, who was a fly-by-night, a sketchy guy, a businessman, …
Here’s from Betty & Pansy’s Severe Queer Review of New York City (1994):
This is where everyone goes when J’s (see Cruising, Sex Clubs) kicks you out at 8 a.m. Because it is one of the only bars open in the neighborhood at 8 am, warm, and other sketchy guys are there.
But before 1994, the Google Books trail goes cold for “sketchy guy(s)”. Turning to “sketchy street”, we find Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993):
Dickens’s depictions of Alice Marwood, the sketchy street woman, and Edith Dombey, the commodified wife, reveal how his emergent preoccupations with …
Checking out “sketchy neighborhood”, the earliest clear example is in Fodor’s Italy ’96: On the Loose (published in 1995):
The main drawback is the sketchy neighborhood; women might not want to wander around alone at night.
FWIW, my own memory is that I first heard this usage among students in the early 1990s. So I’d guess that it originated somewhat earlier, perhaps in late 1980s, and then spread through the usual youth-culture channels. I have no idea whether a particular geographical, ethnic, or affinity-group subculture was the source.
But it won’t surprise me if Ben Zimmer finds an example in Mark Twain’s letters.
[By the way, not all dictionaries are out-of-date with this one. It’s not in the OED, AHD, or Encarta, but Merriam-Webster online has
3 : questionable, iffy <got into a sketchy situation> <a sketchy character> ]
[Update — here’s another piece of evidence about the time-course. In the Switchboard corpus (2,400 telephone conversations collected in 1990-1991), there are no instances of sketchy (in either the old or the new meaning). In the Fisher corpus (11,699 conversations collected in 2003), there are 47 instances, all of them involving the new meaning.
So whenever and wherever the new sense originated, it spread through the American population at large during the 1990s. This is consistent with the evidence from Google Books, where it starts showing up in 1994 or so.]
[Update — it occurs to be that there might be some historical connection with the obsolete slang usage glossed by the OED as “A ridiculous sight, a very amusing person; so hot sketch, a comical or colourful person”:
1917 S. LEWIS Job xx. 299 You women cer’nly are a sketch! 1921 H. C. WITWER Leather Pushers x. 269 This Roberts is a hot sketch for a fighter, anyways! 1925 E. HEMINGWAY In Our Time (1926) 84 You’re a hot sketch. Who the hell asked you to butt in here? 1926 MAINES & GRANT Wise-Crack Dict. 9/2 He’s a sketch, he’s comical. 1930 J. DOS PASSOS 42nd Parallel v. 399 ‘He’s a hot sketch,’ said one of the girls to the other. 1930 J. B. PRIESTLEY Angel Pavement xi. 604 You do look a sight, Dad… I never saw such a sketch.
]
At a restaurant recently, a waiter was asked about the difference between two pinot noirs available by the glass, and responded by describing one of them as “more fruit forward”, while the other was “more reticent”. I’m familiar with fruit forward as a bit of winetalk, but this time it occurred to me to wonder where this particular construction came from, and where it’s going.
The OED has no examples of fruit-forward, but glosses fashion-forward (under the lemma fashion) as “adj. designating clothing, a person, etc., at the cutting edge of fashion” with a citation from 1948:
1948 Los Angeles Times 26 July I. 16 (advt.) Our own nylons in our own Bel-Air package..aristocratic, a product of nylon dreams..exclusive and fashion forward.
Courtesy of ProQuest Historical Newspapers, an image of the ad is here. The structure is not entirely clear, but the syntax is no doubt the same as in phrases like “She walks with queenly dignity, shoulders back and chin up” — and fashion forward… (Or, with less queenly dignity, ass backward.)
In 1948, this was presumably a regular (if metaphorical) nonce formation, with the forward part in some amalgam of its normal meanings of “towards the front, in the direction which a person or thing faces”, or “in advance, in front, ahead”, or “advanced, extreme”, or perhaps even “presumptuous, pert; bold, immodest”. But within a few decades, fashion-forward became a common and even cliched modifier. Thus Ron Alexander, “A Shoe-Sandal for Men: Surprise Summer Hit”, NYT 8/26/1979:
At Saks, Roots’s Canadian versions of the shoe (average price, $50) are selling best in taupe, sand and natural and most of the men buying the style style are described as “the younger, fashion-forward customer.”
Or again, Ron Alexander, “The Evening Hours”, NYT 1/4/1985:
“It’s not a big party, just the immediate family is here,” she said, surveying the 100 or so fashion-forward guests, including Ris e Marcade, a bartender, who wore a black leather tunic over her black rubber leggings plus a rather hefty hat of Persian lamb and seal, and a crafts shop owner, Anthony Robinson, who wore a beach towel with a red lobster on it in place of his lost scarf.
The earliest example of winetalk fruit forward that I’ve been able to find is from 1975 (Nathan Chroman, “Three Classic Examples of Different Wine Styles”, LA Times 9/11/1975):
The three wines were classic examples of differing styles. The Heitz wine was rich and round, balanced with fruit and oak. The Parducci wine was completely different, with no aging in oak and with much of the Chardonnay fruit fully forward to the taste and easy to recognize.
The Sterling wine is closer to the Heitz in style, yet is more restrained in oak with good balance and with the fruit forward as well.
As in the case of the 1948 example of fashion forward, this looks like a syntactically and semantically productive construction. The prepositional phrase “with much of the Chardonnay fruit fully forward to the taste” is structurally similar to “with a blue baseball cap backward on his head”; and forward here presumably means that the “fruit” is metaphorically “front and center”, i.e. the characteristic taste of the grape variety reveals itself early and plainly, or in the front of the mouth, or perhaps is “extreme” or “bold”.
But again, the collocation caught on as a common and even cliched modifier. The earliest example of fruit forward in the New York Times is accompanied by a negative meta-comment (Frank Prial, “Wine Talk: In Washington, the Renegades of Cabernet”, 3/21/2001):
In Washington, the days are longer and the nights are cooler than in California. For the red wines, this translates into higher acidity and tougher tannins. Words like plump and sweet and fruit-forward (oh, execrable term!) are rarely applied to Washington cabernets.
But the execration of fruit-forward seems to have retired in 2005 with Frank Prial, and wine writers in the NYT now join their colleagues in using it freely. Thus Sarah Wildman, “Spain’s Quiet Corner”, NYT 8/26/2007:
On the banks of the Avia River, Viña Mein has been one of the leaders in the effort to reinvent Galician wines by taking what wine growers in Europe call a New World approach to creating rich, fruit-forward, easy drinking whites, planting only native vines — like savory white-wine grapes, primarily treixadura, godello and albariño.
Or Alice Gabriel, “Tastings Can Help Reduce the Guesswork”, NYT 10/28/2007:
He liked his wines big, extracted, fruit forward, and dismissed a particularly elegant French wine as meager, tight and tannic.
Meanwhile, in the world at large, X forward has become a productive construction in winetalk:
An earth forward Cabernet that features red pepper & a spicy note.
A well made Chianti with more earth forward tones.
It’s a little tight and acid-forward, though the impression is of a wine that expands into an intense mid-palate.
Crisp and acid forward wine; elegant and subtle.
While dry vermouth is crisp, angular, acidic and herb-forward, Lillet is rounder, featuring prominent orange and honey.
Very grapefruit and green grass forward.
A truly unique Merlot this wine stays fruit and spice forward all the way to the finish.
Very spice forward with heavy dark fruit flavors.
Australian shiraz tends to be more spice-forward.
Also in beertalk:
The taste was hops-forward, to say the least. It’s even hops-middle, and hops-finish, too.
Not a stout-forward imperial stout, and not an oak-forward oak-aged stout. Interesting, and quite complex, but I can’t say that I particularly like it.
This is a great beer, but I would have preferred a more vanilla forward beer.
It’s simply chocolate-forward without being ridiculous about it.
Anyway, what is your favorite way of getting a beer (stout) that is chocolate forward with minimal roasty bitterness?
And in foodtalk more generally:
He features dozens of herb-forward Italian recipes in his book.
Not every dish succeeds. An herb-forward beet and pomegranate soup fails to find the right balance of flavors; a precarious tower of ricotta and beet ravioli interspersed with scallions tumbles with the effort of cutting through the rubbery grilled onions.
This is the ideological opposite of New York pizza, thick and hearty where New York pushes thin and light, bright with fresh tomato flavor and toppings like spinach and mushroom that explode in your mouth where New York slices are often cheese-forward, bubbling crisp and deliciously greasy enough to have you reaching for a fourth napkin before you’re halfway through.
In fact, while we were immersed in working on a sliceable chocolate we completely overlooked the opportunity to make a more chocolate forward ganache and play with chocolate fillings.
Jack’s seafood fra dialblo is a spice-forward blend that includes an ocean of gifts from the sea.
It has a peppermint aroma combined with a flavor that is chocolate forward with a peppermint finish.
I haven’t seen any similar generalizations in fashion writing — searches for things like “ruffles forward” and “fur forward” don’t get me anywhere — but my ignorance of the genre may be at fault here.
Nor do I see any signs of spread to other domains. We wouldn’t normally describe an especially exuberant grammarian as being “syntax forward”, or an especially expensive government program as being “deficit forward”. Would we?
[From this quick scan of the history, it’s not clear to me whether fruit forward developed by analogy to fashion forward, though the dates mean that this is plausible. And it’s also possible, in one or both cases, that there was some influence of French “mode en avant” or “fruit en avant”, though I suspect that the French terms are calques of the English ones rather than vice versa.]
Following up on our most recent “kids today” post, I decided to spend a few minutes over lunch searching Google Books for interesting examples of the genre. Thus:
Many children today are greatly to be pitied because too much is done for them and dictated to them and they are deprived of the learning processes. We seem to have dropped into an age of entertaining, a breathless going from one sensation to another, whether it be mechanical toys for the five-year-old or moving-picture plays for the sixteen-year-old. It not only destroys their power to think, but also makes happiness, contentment, and resourcefulness impossible. At seventeen, life is spoken of as “so dull” if there is not “something doing” every waking hour.
That’s from Gail Harrison, “Modern Psychology in its Relation to Discipline“, Journal of Proceedings and Lectures 53:658-661, National Education Association of the United States, 1915.
Or this, from Edna G. Meeker and Charles H. English, “Home Play“, The Playground, 1922:
A few years ago there was no such choice of recreational activities as is offered today and the family was more nearly a unit in participation. Now there is a noticeable disintegration in interests which is a large factor in breaking down family solidarity. Parents lament their inability to understand or influence their children today. Parental respect and the bonds of fellowship and sympathy seem to have weakened. The socially-minded student points to these conditions as indices to more serious complications.
For fans of eye-dialect, here’s “Beans and Cabbage” from Donald J. Howard, Stubby Jenks, 1921
Paw sez it usta be that a Familly had about one big Pot full of Stuff like Mush or Cabbige or Beans or Sumthing and a littel Bread on the Side and the Kids wud line up along the Festive Board and Rapp there little Selfs aroudn this Stuff in grate Shape, but now Days Kids is got to be pamperd and they don’t like this hear and they dont like that their and the Cook of the House got to be a Book Keeper to get Everything strate adn be sure one of the 3 Year Old Offsprings aint going to Turn up his Noze at the Meal when its Dished out.
Paw sez what the Spoild Kids Today needs is a Chance to get Hungrie and it wuddent be long till they wuz Cryin for there Cabbige and boilt Potatos. that mite be the rite Dope but the Cabbige wud boit till it wuz Black in the face before i wud Cry for it on ackount of me not liken it a tall.
Going back a bit further, Emiel Eyben, Restless Youth in Ancient Rome, writes:
[The 4th-C. sophist Libanius] described the unmannerly behaviour of his pupils during a solemn lecture, a presentation to which a wider audience was admitted. He had ordered a slave to call the students in. They hardly budged, continuing to chat, laugh and sing the top hits of the day. Finally, they condescended to enter the hall, yet their lackadaisical attitude roused the ire of those already present and made them resentful. Finally the lecture could begin. The students, however, were winking at one another, were talking about this, that and the other, about charioteers, mimes, horses, pantomimes, and fights among students. Some students lolled about like statues, arms folded, while others picked their noses with both hands at once, remained utterly unmoved while everyone applauded, forced enthusiastic members of the audience to fit down. Their behaviour could be even more disgraceful: they clapped at unsuitable moments, prevented others from applauding, strutted ostentatiously through the lecture-theatre and tried to lure as many people as possible out of the hall by concocting false messages or by spreading round invitations to the baths.
Connoisseurs of the genre will also appreciate Farnsworth Crowder, “Our Parasitic Children“, The Rotarian, May 1940.
[For a more systematic and high-minded account of some of the associated themes, see Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History.]
There are some nice examples in Leah Rozen, “Hey, Ryan, Talk to the Dress“, NYT 2/10/2010:
RYAN, Ryan, Ryan. It’s Journalism 101: who, what, when, where and why, as in, “Who are you wearing?” […]
Susan Kaufman, editor of People StyleWatch, said she lost it when Mr. Seacrest didn’t immediately quiz an elegant-looking Sandra Bullock — who would later win as Best Actress — about her shimmery frock (by Marchesa). “I’m screaming at the TV: ‘Ask her who’s she wearing!’ ” Ms. Kaufman said. “I was so angry, my husband was laughing at me.”
Different versions of the same question come up in Elizabeth Wellington, “Mirror, Mirror: So, E!, whatever happened to ‘Who are you wearing’?“, Philadelphia Inquirer 2/10/2010:
Erica Salmon, president of Mullica Hill-based Red Carpet MVP (formerly the Fantasy Fashion League), wholeheartedly agreed. In the online game that mirrors fantasy football, points are awarded for how many times designers’ names are mentioned by the media during red carpet season. The Oscars are the championship game.
“We can’t just use E! anymore,” said Salmon, who has been forced to use InStyle.com because E! didn’t give her players enough information. “Sometimes I wish I had a direct line to Ryan’s mike and I’d say, ‘Dude, please ask who are they wearing?’ ” Salmon said. “That’s what we need to know.”
And dozens of other news outlets are discussing the same question, as they’ve been doing more and more often over the years (about 35 times more often than “Who are you reading?”, apparently). The earliest example in Google’s news archive is “Red Carpet, Big Smiles, Tight Security”, San Jose Mercury News, 3/26/1991:
Peggy Lipton, Dianne Wiest and a buxom Egyptian model named Kelli fielded the evening’s most pressing question: “Who are you wearing?”
However, a search in ProQuest’s Historical Newspaper Archive turns up Genevieve Buck, “Chili, Bud kick off Chicago fashions”, Chicago Tribune 4/11/1984:
“Who are you wearing?” turned out to be the game of the evening.
So (pending Ben Zimmer’s discovery of a citation in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s diary) it appears that this is an expression that emerged in the 1980s in a general fashion-show context, and became a touchstone of Oscar-night reportage at some point over the past decade or two.
It also turns out that Who Are You Wearing? was a reality TV show, as of a couple of years ago. Somehow, I managed to miss it.
[Update: more here.]
More rhetorical analysis-by-synthesis here.
“Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text“, The Onion, 3/9/2010.
Then again…
Gene Buckley quoted this sentence from James R. Glenn, “The Sound Recordings of John P. Harrington: A Report on Their Disposition and State of Preservation”, Anthropological Linguistics 33(4): 357-366, 1991:
[NAA] also anticipates that, once data editing is complete, information about both the Harrington sound recordings and photographs will be available on INTERNET, to which the Smithsonian recently subscribed.
Gene noted that the use of INTERNET with no article is an interesting relic of 1991 usage, and observed that for him, ARPANET never made the transition to usage with “the” (or, apparently, to lower case).
I remarked idly that “on INTERNET” is like “on Facebook”, “on Google”, or “on Language Log”, and that when some elderly politician talks about looking something up “on the Google”, you know that he doesn’t quite Get It.
Geoff Pullum observed that
So Google, Language Log, and cyberspace are like Amsterdam and Vanuatu, while the Internet is like the Hague and the Solomon Islands. As I put it back in 2007 “Language Log is strong“.
Now, my default hypothesis is that this is a genuinely arbitrary syntactic distinction. There’s no explanation; the functionalists who (doubtless) will run around in circles trying to find a subtle semantic link between all strong proper names, and a subtle distinction between them and weak proper names, will be wasting their time. “The Internet” is a weak proper name, so the definite article is obligatory. End of story.
The question is whether anyone can propose anything to be said about this topic that can enliven my (admittedly rather dull) description and give it some semantic rationale or explanatory oomph. I am betting (though only a modest amount) that the answer is no.
Comments are nevertheless open.
[Further LL discussion can be found here, here, and here. And here.]
[And even if the distinction is an arbitrary one, there may be something to be learned by documenting the process by which recent words changed category, as internet apparently did.]
In the most recent ethnic violence in Nigeria’s Plateau State, the victims were “members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogona Hauwa” (Adam Nossiter, “Clashes kill dozens in central Nigeria“, NYT 3/7/2010, update with fuller casualty count here), and the perpetrators were “Fulani herdsmen”.
Some excellent background on this conflict can be found in a report by Roger Blench, “Access Rights and Conflict over Common Pool Resources on the Jos Plateau, Nigeria“, Report to the World Bank on Jigawa Enhancement of Wetlands Livelihoods Project, 9/13/2003:
Plateau State is distinctive for its high level of ethnolinguistic diversity, and it is populated by a great variety of small groups living in hamlets, with a complex clan organisation and ritual kingship systems. This has ensured that no one language or people is dominant, although the largest ethnic groups are probably the Berom, Ngas and Tarok. Gunn (1953) gives a useful overview of the main ethnic groups of the Plateau region.
Fulɓe movement into the lowland regions is less well chronicled, but it is generally more recent than the movement onto the Plateau. A low human population, low levels of tsetse and mosquitoes and unlimited grassland drew Fulɓe pastoralists from all over the semi-arid regions. Fulɓe established themselves in all parts of the Plateau and originally lived alongside cultivators with minimal friction. To judge by interviews, Fulɓe settlement began in the late nineteenth century but was given a great boost by the end of warfare consequent on colonialism (Morrison 1976). [links added]
This suggests a cowboy-vs.-farmer range war, of the kind that forms the background for Shane, Oklahoma! and many other works. And indeed Dulue Mbachu, “Death Toll in Nigeria Sectarian Attack Near 500“, Business Week 3/8/2010, writes that
Fulani herders say scores of their kinsmen were killed and they lost 216,000 head of cattle in the fighting in January, according to [Shehu] Sani [of the Civil Rights Congress in Jos].
The Blench and Dendo report clarifies some of the pressures behind this conflict, while making it clear that the general ethnic-religious situation in Plateau State is quite complicated:
[T]he last thirty years has seen a significant change in the farming systems, with important
implications for the economy of the Plateau, as well as for the interaction between pastoralists and farmers. Dry-season, or lambu, farming was probably brought to the peri-urban regions of Jos in the mid-1960s by migrants from Hausaland. They initially cultivated vegetables, typically peppers and potherbs, using the shaduf lift. At this period, the mine-ponds and river valleys were virtually unused and there was no competition for the land. Shortly afterwards, the dry-season cultivation of sugar-cane and potatoes was introduced, perhaps through agricultural extension. At any rate, in many areas this was remembered as the first impetus towards dry-season gardens. However, the cultivation of vegetables soon became more profitable, as the expatriate population expanded in the 1970s and regional products began to be shipped long distances within Nigeria. Migrant Hausa appeared in greater numbers, but, perhaps surprisingly, many of the settled Fulɓe began to buy or rent land and began gardening. Uptake by the indigenous farming populations was much slower, but by the 1970s it had begun in villages close to Jos. Since then it has been gradually spreading throughout the Plateau, with remoter communities only adopting it in the late 1990s. A major change in the production system occurred in the early 1980s when small pumps for lifting water became available. These were distributed by the ADPs in Bauchi but seem to have been available on the open market in Jos. Even those who could not afford pumps hired them from entrepreneurs thereby expanding then potential size of plots and making possible large-scale commercial market-gardening.
[…]
The Fulɓe have historically depended on riverine grazing for part of the year and indeed they regarded this as land over which they had some rights. But as more and more land has been turned to gardens, this not only has the effect of blocking access to water for their stock, but reduces the basis for interchange between farmer and herder. Vegetable residues are typically fed to goats and pigs and farmers are not willing to allow Fulɓe to enter the plots; indeed they try very hard to exclude the cattle. Effectively, in many areas, Fulɓe have accepted that all they can hope to retain are access tracks, and even these are in danger of being encroached. For this reason, herders now only leave the bulk of their herd on the Plateau for a relatively short time every year. [..]
There has thus been a major shift in migratory patterns among pastoralists. They originally established bases on the Jos Plateau because its high-value grasses and presumed their large herds could pass the majority of each wet season there. They began to farm and indeed took on many of the values of their agricultural neighbours. However, as the density of farmed land increased it became necessary for the cattle to spend longer in the dry season grazing areas off the Plateau and only return during a specific window when the rain has fallen but the crops were not yet above ground. As it became more and more difficult to remain on the Plateau as the wet season advanced, most pastoralists began sending their herds to Bauchi, more particularly the open and still sparsely populated areas off the eastern edge of the Plateau. This also required more labour since the herds had to be managed while in movement for most of the year and thus the pastoralists had to hire increasing numbers of herdboys from other tribes. The situation is now that most herds make a brief visit at the beginning and end of the wet season but essentially live elsewhere for most of the year.
Another source of background information is Roger Blench, “The Expansion and Adaptation of Fulɓe Pastoralism to Subhumid and Humid Conditions in Nigeria“, Cahiers d’Éudes Africaines 34(133/135, 1994.
You might think from all of this that Roger Blench is a political scientist or sociologist, but in fact his Wikipedia page describes him as “a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist”, and a scan of Google Scholar, or the materials available on his web site, suggests that he probably has done as much work as a linguist than in any other area. (Though he’s done enough for several people in each of several areas.)
I first ran across his work about fifteen years ago, when we studied Eggon in a field methods course that I taught. With respect to the linguistic background of the situation in Plateau State, I’d like to draw your attention to two of his works: “Recent research on the Plateau languages of Central Nigeria“, 2004; and “Nominal morphology chaos in Plateau languages: trees versus networks“, 2006.
The latter paper is presented as a provisional draft, but since Blench has made it available on his web site, I’m going to go ahead and quote a particularly interesting passage:
The proposal to be launched in this paper takes a radical approach to Plateau internal classification: that none of [the traditional] groups exist and that they are simply artefacts of fragmentary language data and an inappropriate approach to classification. This idea develops from some key observations;
a) loans of even fundamental vocabulary are extremely common between adjacent languages
b) there is no reliable method for recognising such loans
c) loans usually include morphological elements, notably in nominal and verbal plurals
d) a consequence of this is extreme complexity and diversity in morphology even within one language
e) this leads to waves of simplification or regularisation of morphology often only partially completed
f) roots often incorporate fossil morphology
g) speakers disagree about the ‘correct’ plural pairing of verbs or nouns
h) some strategies for regularising morphology spread across regions, rather than being adopted simply within individual languages
i) sound-correspondences always exhibit numerous ‘aberrant’ cases
The paper draws principally on unpublished sources to suggest that Plateau would be better analysed as a ‘network’, as a set of languages linked by innovations, but for which a single common innovation cannot be established because of the historical pattern of interaction of these languages. This study focuses on nominal morphology simply because the data is considerably richer than for other areas of the lexicon. Concord systems show comparable diversity, but less adequate data suggested that they are best excluded from the discussion at present. However, the same demonstration could be made for other elements of morphology, notably verbal extensions. The paper also suggests some sociological correlates of the linguistic situation.
[Note that the herders’ language is a variety of Fula, spoken widely across the region of Africa just south of the Sahara, and not one of the the Plateau languages that Blench is writing about here.]
[Guest post by Richard Sproat]
I was spending a pleasant portion of a Sunday morning reading a shocking article in The Economist on The Worldwide War on Baby Girls. One of the sad conclusions of that article is that the preference for male babies, which in some parts of the world is driving the ratio of male to female births to as high as 130 male births per 100 female, is actually getting worse as education gets better in some parts of the world. One of the points made is that “[i]n China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio.”
I was curious to see how this trend fared worldwide. I have data on literacy and other socioeconomic factors that I collected from the United Nations Human Development Programme‘s set of economic indicators, which I had collected for my forthcoming Oxford University Press book Language, Technology, and Society. Data on sex ratios is available from the CIA World Factbook.
The literacy data is for adults, defined as those 15 and over. A variety of sex-ratio data is available from the CIA page: I chose the ratios for the population 15 and under, as reflecting sex biases integrated over the past 15 years. Per The Economist, this underestimates the ratio for recent in several parts of the world, where things are only getting worse.
The data, for 176 countries, is plotted below. On the horizontal axis is the sex-ratio for the population under 15, with the higher numbers meaning more males per females. Bear in mind that a ratio of between 1.03 to 1.06 male/female is considered biologically normal. On the vertical axis is the literacy rate for those 15 and over. Note the positive correlation of 0.51: a higher literacy rate correlates with a higher male/female ratio.
For the raw data, sorted by decreasing male/female ratio, see the table.
To put this in perspective, the correlation for the percentage of the population employed in agriculture and literacy is -0.62: this is expected since in many parts of the world agriculture is highly labor-intensive, and children are often employed in agriculture at the expense of schooling. So this strong negative correlation is expected. The almost as strong positive correlation in the new data is both unexpected, and shocking. Note also that none of the countries with a male/female ratio of above 1.1 have a literacy rate that is less than 60%. Indeed, only India has a literacy rate that low; all the other countries with high male/female ratios have literacy rates above 90%. Indeed, as The Economist points out: “In India, some of the most prosperous states—Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat—have the worst sex ratios.” So one suspects that if one were to plot these data not by country, but with finer-grained information at the state level (unfortunately I do not have those data) then the correlation would be even stronger.
Obviously literacy (and education) does not cause this trend. What it does suggest though is that if the social structure is in place to favor boys over girls, and if the economic means are there, then a better educated population is actually more at risk. This is surprising: one would have thought that a higher literacy rate (and thus better education) would correlate with a more enlightened attitude towards females. Sadly, this seems not to be the case.
[Guest post by Richard Sproat.]
Matthias Mehl et al., “Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations“, Psychological Science, published online 18 February 2010:
Is the happy life characterized by shallow, happy-go-lucky moments and trivial small talk, or by reflection and profound social encounters? Both notions—the happy ignoramus and the fulfilled deep thinker—exist, but little is known about which interaction style is actually associated with greater happiness. In this article, we report findings from a naturalistic observation study that investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the amount of small talk and substantive conversations they have.
The method:
Seventy-nine undergraduates (32 males, 47 females) wore the EAR for 4 days (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). The EAR recorded 30 s of sounds every 12.5 min, providing 23,689 waking recordings (M = 300 per participant). For each recording, coders identified whether the participant was alone or talking with other people, and whether the conversation consisted of small talk or substantive discussion. Small talk was defined as an uninvolved, banal conversation (i.e., only trivial information was exchanged; e.g., “What do you have there? Popcorn? Yummy!”). A substantive conversation was defined as an involved conversation of a substantive nature (i.e., meaningful information was exchanged; e.g., “She fell in love with your dad? So, did they get divorced soon after?”). […]
We assessed well-being with several methods. Participants completed the Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; α = .93) and a single-item happiness measure (“I see myself as someone who is happy, satisfied with life”) twice, 3 weeks apart. The single-item self-report of happiness was combined with reports from two to three informants per subject on the same measure, α = .80. (For details on the recruitment of these informants, see Vazire & Mehl, 2008). To obtain a multimethod well-being index, we combined (i.e., averaged) the self- and informant-based happiness measure with participants’ self-reported life satisfaction.
The results:
Here’s a graphical presentation of what correlations like r=-0.33 and r=0.28 mean:
Scatterplots and linear trends for the association between participants’ well-being and aspects of their daily interactions; Panel A: Percentage of time per day spent alone and talking to others; Panel B: Percentage of conversations that were small-talk and substantive conversations.
Note: N = 79; the z-scores for the well-being index ranged from z = -2.02 to z = +1.57; for ease of graphical presentation, two data points outside of the depicted [-2.0; 1.5] range are omitted.
However, as results in social psychology go, correlations of 0.30 or so are much better than usual. Here’s a figure that I’ve reproduced a couple of times before (from F.D. Richard, C.F. Bond, and J.J. Stokes-Zoota, “One hundred years of social psychology quantitatively described“, Review of General Psychology, 2003):
Their conclusion:
Naturally, our correlational findings are causally ambiguous. On the one hand, well-being may be causally antecedent to having substantive interactions; happy people may be “social attractors” who facilitate deep social encounters. On the other hand, deep conversations may actually make people happier. Just as self-disclosure can instill a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a sense of meaning in the interaction partners. Therefore, our results raise the interesting possibility that happiness can be increased by facilitating substantive conversations. Future research should examine this possibility experimentally.
Remarking on Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Dennett (1984) wrote, “The overly examined life is nothing to write home about either”. Although we hesitate to enter such delicate philosophical disputes, our findings suggest that people find their lives more worth living when examined―at least when examined together.
A nice piece of work, nicely presented.
Needless to say, the journalistic uptake is another story. With some honorable exceptions, the articles tend to ignore the ambiguity of causation, and the headlines jump in several different misleading directions:
“How small talk can make you feel miserable”; “Idle chit chat can make you unhappy”; “Unhappy? Maybe it’s too much small talk”; “Chit-chat can leave you miserable”; “Why too much talking can make you unhappy”; “Happy people have the gift of gab”; “Talking to others can keep you happy”; “A happy life is filled with earnest talks”; “Can you talk your way to happy?”; . . .
Geoff Maynard’s (mis-) take in the Express is especially funny:
BAD news today for ladies who lunch. It seems that a life of idle chit-chat can make you unhappy.
I would have thought that the topic of the conversation among the “ladies” in the accompanying illustration was likely to be right in the sweet spot of Mehl et al.’s definition-by-example of substantive conversation (“She fell in love with your dad? So, did they get divorced soon after?”).
It’s been a while since I complained about the way that some journalists use real people as if they were hand puppets. (See here, here, here and here for a sample, from the good old days before bashing the Main Stream Media became one of the favorite rhetorical strategies of dishonest people.)
So it’s a pleasure to link to this elegant rant by Jerry Coyne, “Ken Miller can’t win? P.Z. and me gets pwned“. The offending journalist, one David Sharfenberg, published the offending piece in the Boston Phoenix, which is not exactly the New York Times or the Washington Post. But the theory is the same, however main the stream.
A New York Times Room for Debate piece on “Killing Pythons, and Regulating Them” (3/5/2010) supplies another piece of anecdata for my on-going quest to document the North American varieties of uptalk. This one is from the sound track of a YouTube video about a python wrangler in central Florida.
At the beginning, there’s a passage with a long sequence of final rises, ending with a final fall:
so we’re going to go see if we can find this guy /
uh there’s a main area that’s he’s been seen over and over again /
and usually with pythons /
they stay in one area /
they’re- they are territorial /
unless it comes time /
for breeding season /
so I’ve been out there once before /
and now we’re going to go out again /
and see what we find.
After he wades out into the swamp and wrestles the python into submission, his explanation also starts with a couple of final-rising declaratives. Then for comparison, we get some yes-no questions, which are also rising — in pretty much the same way as the statements, though ending a bit higher. And then he ends the segment with a fall again.
that was a burmese python /
very mad, very angry snake /
have you seen my face? /
and look how much he has on me? /
you see that? /
that’s from that little piece
right there.
As I’ve noted with respect to other examples in the past, there’s no reason to think that these final rises are always (or often, or perhaps ever) indications of feminine insecurity and need for reassurance.
[Update — Ben Zimmer notes another set of examples, in Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interview with William Hurt (audio here, transcript here). For instance, here is Hurt’s description of his role in The Yellow Handkerchief:
um
my character is blue collar /
um
originally from probably Kentucky /
uh ran into trouble /
um
works as a steam-fitter /
on oil rigs /
and um
moved to Louisiana after he ran into drug trouble /
tried to make a new life / met someone, fell in love with them /-
got into an accidental bit of trouble which put him in prison for a long time and he takes a road trip
with some young people after he gets out.
Again, a series of final rises, ending with a few transitional phrases and ending low. Hurt uses similar patterns now and then elsewhere in this interview, e.g.
um and I spent one night in- in- in maximum security there /
uh I think I’m the only person who electively has done that /
I think someone else tried to but
screamed and gave up at midnight /
um I spoke with every member on that- on that row /
um who’s incarcerated in an eight foot by four foot cell twenty three hours a day for the rest of their lives /
But it’s by no means his default approach — compare this interview with Chuck The Movie Guy.
Nor do other Americans generally use non-terminal rises. There are none, for example, in the long monologue attributed to the Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, who uses final falls throughout, e.g.
The door is open for studies of who (among speakers of North American English) actually uses which kinds of final rises when.]
Today’s Sally Forth:
And yesterday, there was a relevant lolcats posting:
“Awkward” as a comment on a socially embarrassing or interpersonally uncomfortable situation is an entirely regular and straightforward use of a word that’s been around in this sense since the early 18th century. And preceding “awkward” with the interjection “wow” is similarly regular. Still, I have the impression that these are recently fashionable idioms.
It’s not easy to check whether this is really true, or just another instance of the Recency Illusion. But here’s some evidence, focusing especially on the “Wow, awkward.” (or “Wow. Awkward.”) variant.
There’s a “wow, awkward” web site, with an associated twitter feed, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since August of 2009.
All the examples of “wow awkward” from a Google Books search seem to be fairly recent, e.g. Cylin Busby’s 2007 juvenile fiction The Campfire Crush:
“Wow, awkward,” Eric says under his breath.
The earliest instance of “wow, awkward” in a Google Groups search seems to be from 10/12/2007 in forums.xkcd.com. And the earliest genuine example in a Google News Archive search is from 2/7/2007.
Moving backward in time, Matt Hutson led a 10/8/2006 blog post with “Wow. Awkward.” (Hi, Matt!) Matt was close to the leading edge, but the very earliest instances in a Google Blogs search seem to be from December of 2005.
So pending Ben Zimmer’s arrival with an example from Emily Dickinson’s diary, I’m going to go on thinking that “Wow. Awkward.” is indeed a newly fashionable locution; and that simple “Awkward.” probably is as well.
[Update — see this discussion of the “awkward turtle” gesture, which was new to me:
Being ‘awkward’ was so in last year in the States. Everything was awkward. Getting to class late was called awkward. Things that were ironic (bitchy chick getting ass handed to her on Finance exam) were mislabeled as awkward. Embarrassing moments (not remembering how it is that you ended up naked at Tavers) were called awkward. And actual awkward moments (saying/doing the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person) were called out and reveled in – as if calling a moment awkward brought great communal catharsis. It’s like you actually wanted awkward moments to happen so that you could call them awkward – and when none happened you called all other occurrences awkward. If I recall correctly, it was kind of fun.
Thus, the emergence of the lastest Generation Next meme: The Awkward Turtle. The Awkward Turtle is a gesture (see video) that’s performed when an awkward moment happens. Rather than just saying ‘awkward’ in a sing-song voice, you (you being a college sophomore) put your hands together and move your thumbs to make the Awkward Turtle swim.
Apparently it’s, like, awkward that I didn’t know about this, because Matt Yglesias blogged about it, citing a 2/2006 article in the Brown student newspaper, and it was in the Washington Post and everywhere. ]
I wouldn’t have predicted that this would work as well as it does:
Sinewave synthesis (Robert Remez et al. “Speech perception without traditional speech cues”, Science 1981) pointed the way, but this is pretty far down the road. Now I want to hear the string orchestra and brass band versions.
Of course, the apparent intelligibility is mostly a function of knowing what was “said”. But still.
[Hat tip: Aengus.]
According to William Heuslein, “The man who predicts the medals“, Forbes Magazine, 1/19/2010
Daniel Johnson makes remarkably accurate Olympic medal predictions. But he doesn’t look at individual athletes or their events. The Colorado College economics professor considers just a handful of economic variables to come up with his prognostications.
The result: Over the past five Olympics, from the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney through the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, Johnson’s model demonstrated 94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts.
First question: what do you think it means to “demonstrate 94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts”?
If you guessed that it means “the predicted number of medals matched the actual number of medals 94 times out of 100″, I’m sorry, you’re wrong.
The next sentence of the Forbes article suggests what it really means:
For gold medal wins, the correlation is 87%.
And we can confirm from reading one of the papers cited on Johnson’s web site (Daniel Johnson and Ayfer Ali, “A Tale of Two Seasons: Participation and Medal Counts at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games”, Social Science Quarterly 85(4) 2004) that “94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts” means that “the vector of predicted numbers of medals by country has a correlation of r=0.94 with the actual numbers of medals by country”. (N.B. the text between the double quotes there is my summary, not Johnson & Ali’s wording. And if you’re a bit rusty on what correlation actually means, the wikipedia page is not bad; or just keep in mind that if you can turn one sequence of numbers into another by some combination of adding constants and multiplying by constants, their correlation will be “100%”.)
This still sounds like pretty impressive predicting, but it could be true without any of the medal-count numbers actually coinciding. I wonder what proportion of Forbes’ readers understood that? In fairness, Heuslein did slip in that “correlation”, but then at the bottom of the piece, he lists what he calls the “Accuracy rate of Johnson’s predictions” for the summer and winter games from 2000 to 2008, which (for total medals) vary from “93%” to “95%”.
Anyhow, how well did “the man who predicts the medals” do this time around?
Forbes gives Johnson’s “In Depth: Medal Predictions for Vancouver“. And now that the Olympics is over, we can compare them with the actual medal counts, as documented by the New York Times. So I entered the data into a table, and calculated the correlations using this trivial R script:
X <- read.table("Olympics.table", header=TRUE)
totalcor <- cor(X[,"PredictedTotal"],X[,"ActualTotal"])
goldcor <- cor(X[,"PredictedGold"], X[,"ActualGold"])
The correlation for total medals? 0.625. The correlation for gold medals? 0.279.
How did 94% and 87% turn into 63% and 28%?
I’m not sure, and I don’t have time this morning to nail it down — I’ve got to finish my laundry, and hike over to the train station to catch the 8:30 Regional Rail for NYC, where I’m giving a talk at noon. But four possible explanations come to mind, all of which might simultaneously be true:
(1) Scribal error. Maybe Forbes’ list of Johnson’s predictions is wrong, or the NYT list of medal totals is wrong, or I made a mistake copying the numbers into my table. If so, someone will probably tell us in the comments.
(2) Regression to the mean. Maybe Johnson’s luck ran out, like a mutual-fund manager whose string of good years was based more on good fortune rather than good information.
(3) False advertising. Maybe the 94% correlation only applies to Johnson’s predictions if you include not only the 13 countries in the Forbes list, but also all the other countries in the world, most of whom can trivially be predicted to win no medals at all, or almost none. If so, then r=0.94 may not really be very impressive.
(4) Overfitting. Although the cited paper does claim “out of sample” predictions — that is, they calculate the model parameters on historical data, and then looks at the fit to recent data which was not used in “training” the model — it’s possible that they made some adjustments in the model structure in order to get it to work well, and perhaps a different set of adjustments would be needed to make it work well for this year’s data.
My prediction: some combination of (3) and (4). With respect to (3), note that just padding the medal vectors with 70 zeros brings the total correlation up from r=0.63 to r=0.91:
padding <- vector(mode="numeric",70)
totalcor1 <- cor(c(X[,"PredictedTotal"],padding),c(X[,"ActualTotal"],padding))
My tentative conclusion: this is more evidence that when an economist is talking about numbers, you should put your hand on your wallet.
And, of course, when a journalist is interpreting a press release about a technical paper, you may need both hands and some help from your friends to avoid getting intellectually mugged.
[Via Phil Birnbaum, “An economist predicts the Olympic medal standings“, Sabermetric Research 2/18/2010]
Stefano Bertolo points us to Rob Cottingham’s latest Noise To Signal:
Rob’s comment:
You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership?
I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades – even centuries – for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.
But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic.
Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?
Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation… in 140-character increments.
Yet another opportunity for in silico social science…
[And just in case you were wondering, this is not the first example of the construction “earworm its|their way into __”.]