Apostrophes

July 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)


Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying “groovy” or “my bad.” And then they’re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower.

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

WER'E ??

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about “different society’s,” I have long accepted that the tide is against me. It’s like spelling a few hundred years ago – you can pretty much make up your own rules.

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the “y” in “society” to “ies” and it looks too different. “Of all the cafe’s, I like the one with lime martini’s.”

Or these:


Technically, it should be "ON DVDS." But DVDS looks like it's some government agency (“I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow”) or maybe a disease.

It’s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It’s usually before an “s.” But why does Old Navy say, “Nobody get’s hurt”?


There’s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com, that collects these (that’s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They’re fighting a losing battle.

Technology matters – I guess that’s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling.

Starting a few decades ago, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an article in the Times online, and it’s published in a similar way (and to potentially as many readers – right)  .

And now there’s texting. It’s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn’t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn’t belong.

I still can’t figure out WER’E.

Bought Sex?

July 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did you buy sex last year?

You probably said no, even if you’re a man. But wait. First look at “The John Next Door” an article currently up at Newsweek (subhead: “The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues”). It features a study by Melissa Farley called “Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Don’t Buy Sex”

No one even knows what proportion of the male population does it; estimates range from 16 percent to 80 percent.

Actually, a considerably lower estimate comes from the GSS.

PAIDSEX Had sex for pay last year: If you had other partners, please indicate all categories that apply to them. d. Person you paid or paid you for sex.

Here are the results since the GSS started asking this question..

(Click in the graph for a larger view.)

Not 16-80%, but somewhere around 5%.

Not to get too Clintonian, but it seems to depend on what the meaning of “sex” is. The GSS respondents probably thought that paying for sex meant paying someone to have sex. Farley’s definition was somewhat broader.

Buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it. The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.

So if you bought a copy of Playboy, you paid for sex. And if you looked at it twice last month, you are disqualified from the control of “men who don’t buy sex.”

“We had big, big trouble finding nonusers,” Farley says. “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”

I don’t have Farley’s data. If the control group of nonusers was 100, I assume that the user group n was the same – not really large enough for estimating the prevalence of the different forms of buying sex. How many had paid a prostitute, how many had looked at porn twice in a month? Some people probably think that there’s a meaningful distinction between those two. The implication of much of the Newsweek article is that they are all “sex buyers” and that they therefore share the same ugly attitudes towards women.

Shocked, Shocked

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.
“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

From the New York Times article about a study of disciplinary procedures in Texas schools. Thirty percent of students had been suspended or expelled; with “in-school” suspensions included, the rate is 60%.

The great state of Texas has an incarceration rate higher than that of all but a handful of states. Since the Supreme Court started allowing death penalty laws in 1976, Texas has executed four times as many people as has the next most execution-friendly state. It accounts for nearly 40% of all executions in the US.

So why should anybody be surprised that Texas schools deal with kids by punishing them? Punitiveness seems to be a fairly strong element of Texas culture. Even before today’s report, it was well known that nearly all school districts in Texas allow corporal punishment. In 2006-07, the most recent year I could find statistics for, 49,000 Texas kids were paddled in school.

As for the effectiveness of suspension and expulsion

“We see so many kids being removed from the classrooms for disciplinary reasons, often repeatedly, demonstrating that we're not getting the desired changes in behavior,” Thompson [one of the authors of the report] said. “When we remove kids from the classroom, we see an increased likelihood in that student repeating a grade, dropping out or not graduating. We also see an increased likelihood of juvenile justice involvement.” (From the Houston Chronicle)

Will the report affect state and school policies. Maybe. But I suspect that this will be another instance where values (ideas about what is good) shape beliefs (ideas about what is true). If cultural values hold that punishing bad behavior is right, people will cling to the belief that punishment is also effective, i.e., that it reduces bad behavior. People who cherish these ideas will dismiss the evidence from this report and others as wrong or irrelevant. If they refer to these studies, they will be careful to put the word in quotation marks. You might have to pay attention to a study, but you can ignore evidence from “studies.”

Tough Situation

July 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Coming in October: a conference on Jersey Shore Studies. It had to happen, right? But at the University of Chicago?? Where have you gone, Allan Bloom? (HT: Scott McLemee, who has more to say on the subject at Insider Higher Ed.)

Despite very pleasant vacations last summer at Barnegat Light and Ocean Grove, I haven’t managed to watch much of the TV show. But I did take notice back in May when my favorite newspaper ran a story about a video posted by the father of Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. Apparently, Sorrentino père has little good (and much unprintable) to say about Sorrentino fils.

The rift between the father and son started when, according to the elder Sorrentino, when his son ignored his plea for help with his medical expenses.

“I’ve been a diabetic for 25 years and my insurance was running out and I called up my son and said, ‘Listen, Mikey, I'm between jobs right now, can you help me out?’ I don’t want to lose my health coverage.”

Only in America, I thought.

Not “only in America” could a talented fellow like The Situation rise from modest circumstances to an esteemed position of wealth and fame

Not “only in America” could a father and son have a serious falling-out over money.

And certainly not “only in America” would a father make disparaging remarks about his son’s companions and co-workers.

But only in America, among wealthy, industrialized nations, would a diabetic, regardless of his son’s lack of filial financial piety, not be able to obtain the necessary treatment.

That situation, of course can be remedied. But the remedy is one form or another of what the Republicans still like to call a “government takeover” of health care. Unfortunately for Mr. Sorrentino,* that won’t happen in the US for another year or more at the earliest. And if the Supreme Court runs true to form, it might not happen for decades.

*According to a story at Trendbuzz a month later, Sorrentino the elder had switched to a cheaper diabetes med, and thanks to the side effects he wound up in the emergency room.