Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

April 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Be Positive. That’s one of the rules I try to follow in writing (in life, it’s even harder). Phrase things in the affirmative rather than in the negative. It’s especially important in constructing true-false and multiple-choice items for exams. I don’t want to force students into the knotty logic of double negatives.

In prose as well, those multiple negatives get confusing. And negatives take many forms besides variations on no, not, and never. Think of those Supreme Court summaries in the newspaper. “The court failed to overturn a lower-court ruling that denied a request to reverse . . .”

And now this just in from the world of football and guns.

”Plaxico’s contribution to our championship season in 2007 can never be underestimated or undervalued,” Giants coach Tom Coughlin said. “He displayed tremendous determination throughout that season.”

Get it? His contribution can never be undervalued. That means that no matter how little a value you place on Plaxico’s contribution, that value can never be so low that it’s beneath its true value. So that true value must be very low indeed.

The literal meaning of the coach’s remark is just the opposite of what he means and what most people will hear. (And this wasn’t just some off-the-cuff comment. It was a written statement for the team’s official Website.) But the logic of the double negative – never and undervalue – is too difficult to unravel.

I realize that only a handful of tight-assed writers or logicians will be concerned with this technical error. Most people, they could care less.

Update. I e-mailed the Coughlin quote to Mark Liberman at The Language Log, and he has now posted about it. (Apparently, Prof. Liberman either has no hat to tip or is a habitual reader of Giants press releases.) Coach Coughlin, Liberman points out, is not alone. “Cannot be underestimated” to mean the opposite of its literal meaning is fairly common. Googling the phrase gets returns in six figures. I tried a Lexis-Nexis search for the last two years, and it offered its maximum of 1000 hits, including at least one headline. Liberman’s post, with links to earlier Language Log posts is here.

Just a Sample

April 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Obama has nominated a sociologist to head the census bureau, Robert Groves (summa at Dartmouth, degrees in statistics and sociology from Michigan, where he is now a professor). According to the New York Times, the choice of Groves, “instantly made Republicans nervous.”

The problem is scientific sampling, also known as the possibility that we might actually get an accurate count of the kinds of people the census usually undercounts.

Republicans expressed alarm because of one of Mr. Groves’s specialties, statistical sampling — roughly speaking, the process of extrapolating from the numbers of people actually counted to arrive at estimates of those uncounted and, presumably, arriving at a realistic total.

The Republicans favor a census that tries to count each person individually, an obvious impossibility with a systematic bias in favor of people who are in places that make them easy to count.

I remember an anecdote from a book on sampling – I wish I could remember the author and title – about a social scientist who had done some research on soldiers and was presenting his finding to a general in the Pentagon. The officer questioned the idea of sampling. How could you know about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the military by talking to a couple of thousand. How many should we talk to, asked the sociologist. “You gotta do ’em all,” said the general.

“General,” said the sociologist. “When you go to the doctor, he takes a little tube of blood to find out how much cholesterol and other things are in your blood. That’s a sample. Do you tell him that if he really wants to know the true amount, he has to take it all?”

Joseph and Pharaoh Are Now Friends -- Small Worlds and Networks

April 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I checked my Facebook page – something I do regularly once a month or so – and discovered that Anomie* had posted a link to The Facebook Haggadah by Carl Elkin. The Passover story written as a series of Facebook messages (“Pharaoh has taken the Which god are you? quiz” “25 things you didn't know about me by God. 1. Guilty pleasure: Smiting people. . . .”) And so on.

I sent the link to a few people, including my niece. She e-mailed me back:

Not only is that hilariously funny, I KNOW the guy who did it! Carl Elkin lived in my room in my old apartment before I did. Now he's married to a girl I knew from Amherst. Small world. . .

My first thought was that it wasn’t really so surprising. How many degrees of separation should I expect between me and the author of the Haggadah? He’s considerably younger, but we live in the same geographic area (Northeast urban corridor) and in the same social-cultural world. If there isn’t someone we know in common, then I probably know someone who knows someone who knows him. Two degrees of separation.

That’s the way it usually works. It’s not that the world is small but that it’s organized in a way that makes for shorter paths connecting people.
The connections run through a few people who are connected to a lot of people. I may not be connected to very many people, but at least one of my connections will be one of these “nodal” people (the brightly colored dots on the central line running through the diagram**). Think of it in Facebook terms: I have only 18 Facebook friends. But I can be easily connected to someone else because at least one of my friends is one of those nodal people with 850 friends (what my son calls “a Facebook whore.”)

But my niece was right. This connection was a surprise because it didn’t followthe usual network pattern of going up to a well-connected person. Instead, it was more like what we mean when we use the phrase “small world.” The world of East Coast academia and related areas just isn’t all that big, with a relatively small number of student apartments to move in and out of and a relatively small number of possible marriage partners (especially if you limit your choices by religion and that religion is Judaism – even in the Northeast Academic Corridor).

*Anomie credits Eszter, who posted the link at Crooked Timber.

** The diagram is from Wikipedia.

Faisez-moi la grammaire

March 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The French don't care what they do, as long as they pronounce it correctly.” The line is from “My Fair Lady,” by Lerner and Loewe, and I remembered it well on my first trip to France, when people kept pretending not to understand what I was saying. I’m sure I’ll never be able to get directions to Neuilly.
But it’s not just pronunciation that the French care about. Lerner should have added something about spelling and grammar.
In March, we have NCAA basketball. The French have the national dictée, a spelling challenge that millions of people take – and take seriously – but which only a handful do perfectly (because of all those damn accent marks probably).
We Americans have a friendly and accommodating view of language. When our highest elected official constantly contorts the English language, it’s a matter of amusement, not concern. If a French candidate blows the subjunctive, he may find his gaffe used as the entire text of an attack ad.
A friend lives in a Paris building that has one of those little cage elevators. If someone doesn’t close the door firmly, the elevator won’t move from that floor. A sign reminding tenants to be sure “que la porte est fermée” hadn’t been posted for more than a couple of hours before someone had corrected it: “que la porte est SOIT fermée.”
British author Anthony Burgess wrote of eating in a family restaurant in the countryside. When the waitress, the fourteen-year-old daughter, asked, “Et comme dessert?” Burgess answered, in French, “Fruits.”
“Des fruits,” she noted, correcting a man three times her age. In France, the customer is not always right, especially when he omits the partitive article.
Now there’s this.

(Update, April 2012.  Unfortunately, the original video has been replaced with this version which has been edited to report on the response to the original.)
At first, it looks like a typical, moderately sexy music video. She strokes the naked fesses of a statue and sings, “Faisez-moi l’amour.” But wait. Even I know that faisez is wrong. It should be “faites-moi l’amour.”
It turns out the video is a bit of viral marketing for a company, Bescherelle, that sells grammar books and other language materials (including dictées). The video is full of grammatical errors, and French youth rose to the challenge to find them all. In the first week or so after its release, it had taken second place on MySpace TV, a record number of “don’t miss” designations, and 18,000 downloads.
You can find lots of grammatical errors in US music videos, but that’s not why kids watch them.
(Full story here; corrected grammar in the video here.)