What Is This Thing Called, Love?

September 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Talk about sex often is often oblique and ambiguous.  In the early days of computerized content analysis, I knew some researchers who were trying to code ethnographic folk tales for sexual content.  The trouble was that pre-literate storytellers as well often preferred the vague to the explicit, much to the frustration of the researchers.  How can you  write a program that can distinguish between the nonsexual and sexual meanings of words like “it” or “thing”* (“And then he took out his thing and did it to her”)?

I was reminded of this when I read Philip Cohen’s post and N-gram graph about “make love” and “have sex.”

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

“Sex” takes off starting around 1970, “love” rises more slowly and after 1990 declines, while “sex” continues to climb. 

I don’t think Philip meant to imply that there’s has been a trend towards less love and more sex.  My guess is that what we’re looking at is the decline of “love” as a euphemism for “sex.”  Prior to 1950 or so, “make love” was an innocent or slightly naughty term without much connotation of explicit sex.  The added sexual meaning that grew in later decades made the term ambiguous.  In 1960, with Hollywood self-censorship still strong, the film title “Let’s Make Love” with Marilyn Monroe raised no eyebrows. 

 By 1974, when Roberta Flack sang, “Feel Like Making Love to You,” things were less clear.

When you talk to me
When you're moanin’ sweet and low
When you're touchin’ me
And my feelings start to show
Oo-oo-ooh
That's the time
I feel like makin’ love to you.

 The pre-1970 “make love” line of the graph is carrying both meanings,  the sexual and the romantic.  But with the sexual revolution in full swing, some of the purely sexual references shift from the “make love” curve to the “have sex” curve.

That doesn’t mean that “have sex” became the preferred term.  Even for sexual references, “make love” may still be more popular.  For some reason, that sexual meaning is clearer when the phrase is in the past tense.  “Let’s make love,” is ambiguous.  “We made love” is more explicit.  And when you compare “We made love” with “We had sex,” the winner is still love.

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*The title of this post is an old Benny Hill line (based on Cole Porter of course).  It was probably luv rather than love, but in any case, the word thing here is another example of ambiguous language when we talk – or don’t talk –  about sex.

Words - Republican and Democratic

September 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cros-posted at Sociological Images

The New York Times ran these graphics showing the word frequencies of the Republican and Democratic conventions.  I’ve added underlining on the keywords that seem to differentiate the two conventions. (The data on the Democrats runs only through Sept. 4, but it looks like the themes announced early on will be the ones that are repeated.)

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

Both parties talked about leadership, the economy, jobs, and families.  More interesting are the differences.  Democrats talked a lot about Women, a word which seems to be absent from the Republican vocabulary.  The Democrats also talked about Health and Education.  I find it curious that Education does not appear in the Republican word cloud.

The Republican dictionary falls open to the page with Business - ten times as many mentions as in the Democrats’ concordance.  If you go to the interactive Times graphic, you can click on Business and see examples of the contexts for the word.  Many of these excerpts also contain the word Success. 

You can put the large-bubble words in each graphic in a sentence that condenses the party’s message about government, though that word – Government – does not appear in either graphic.   For the Republicans, government should lower Taxes so that Business can Succeed, creating Jobs.
For the Democrats, government should protect the rights of Women and ensure that everyone has access to Health and Education. 

Perhaps the most telling word in the Democratic cloud is Together.  The Republican story is one of individual success in business, summed up in their repeated phrase, “I built that.”  The Democrats apparently are emphasizing what people can accomplish together.  These different visions are not new.  They go back at least to the nineteenth century.  (Six years ago, I blogged (here) about these visions as NFL brands - Cowboys and Steelers – and their parallels in US politics.)

(HT: Neal Caren who has posted his own data about the different balance of emotional expression at the two conventions.)

UPDATE :  The Times link above updates the data each day, so check it at the end of the convention.  The Democratic count of Women and Together will still  outnumber such references in the GOP.  The Middle Class seems to be the Democratic theme, but the Democrats still have litter to saw about  Better and Success.

Last night, Bill Clinton put in one clear sentence what the graph bubbles say with word-counts:  “We believe that ‘we’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.’ ”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/06/2987846/bill-clinton-political-magician.html#storylink=cpy

Hal David Walks on By

September 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” kept popping into my head yesterday evening. I do not like the song, though that’s irrelevant. There are other songs I dislike that frequently and against my will filter into my brain. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” even in July for example. Need I say more? But “Raindrops” is not one of those frequent unwelcome visitors to my consciousness.

So why “Raindrops” yesterday? There was no rain; I had not seen any Butch Cassidy references; nothing.

This morning, I turned on the radio (cue the “Twilight Zone” music) and heard that Hal David died yesterday.

David’s lyrics tended towards the romantic, but some of his songs are very funny, like “What’s New Pussycat,” the title song for the film written by Woody Allen. The final word of the lyric – held and extended over three notes – is “nose.”  I can’t think of any other songs that end on that word.

And then there’s a hilarious version of an originally romantic song.  “Parenthood” is a great movie, and it has many funny moments. One of them is Rick Moranis’s rendition of “Close to You.”  (The clip below gives you a sense of the context - his wife has told him she wants a divorce, which is understandable because Moranis is such a schmuck - but I strongly recommend seeing it in the context of the full movie.)

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GOP Economics - Jobs and Government Spending

August 31, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A post inspired by the speeches at the Republican convention last night.

America is the greatest country on earth. State and local government budget reductions have meant the layoff of more than 700,000 people who used to work in the public sector. You didn’t hear much about that at the convention.

I love America.  Of course, we already have too much government, and public sector jobs  – teachers, cops, firefighters, and many others – those are government jobs, so we’re better off without them.

God loves America.  The idea that government spending affects employment is one of those discredited Keynsian ideas that just gets in the way of tax cuts. 

I really, really, really love America. I thought I had finally understood the conservative economic idea that government spending does not create jobs and that cutting government spending in a recession does not eliminate jobs or delay job creation.

I believe in America. But then Mitt Romney said this to me last night.  “His trillion-dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs.”*

“His” referred to the President of the United States, who apparently does not think that America is the greatest country on earth, does not believe in America, and does not love America.

Oh, and did I forget to mention - America is the greatest country in the world.

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* UPDATE, Sept. 10:  I’ve just learned that years ago, Barney Frank coined a term for people who, like Romney, claim that government spending weakens the economy, except for military spending, which creates jobs: “weaponized Keynesians.”  As Rep. Frank put it, they believe

that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.