Andrew Ferrier

Good to see Hampshire County Council are spending my taxes wisely. In the propaganda brochure accompanying their latest letter demanding 800 pounds for rubbish collection and clogged roads, I find this item:

These pages have been checked for clarity by Plain Language Commission [sic].

Sometimes I’m ashamed to live in a socialist country.

I’ve been interested in languages for a few years (despite only being able to speak one with any fluency) and consider myself a bit of an amateur linguist. It’s long been a standing question as to how to determine ‘correct’ English. Linguists divide grammar into two competing factions: descriptive (30% people speak like this, 70% people speak like that) and prescriptive (thou shalt speak in this way, as others have since time immemorial). It’s not hard to see that this concept could be – and probably has been – extended to spelling.

I’ve found it hard to have sympathy with the prescriptive camp. Of course there is a place for clear writing, and I strongly believe that well-studied punctuation, spelling, and grammar makes communication clearer at best, and even a good impression at worst. Nevertheless, prescriptive diktat is everywhere, and often with little justification. As an example, despite being British, I’m a big fan of American English – which is often ridiculed and misunderstood by many British people.

As such, I’m going to propose Ferrier’s Rule of Common Language Usage, #1:

Any describable linguistic construction used by a majority of the population should be prescribed where relevant.

(by ‘where relevant’, I’m talking about language education in schools, etc.)

I think this would greatly help language develop – it ain’t static; get over it – and make language richer and more interesting. What do you think?

A quick Google search for “common myths about” turns up ~315,000 hits. Apparently, there are a lot of myths about:

• Sex
• Atheists
• Copyright
• Science
• Gifted Students
• The Apple Mac
• Web Design
• Earthquakes
• West Nile Virus

The last one is the most surprising. I’m not even sure what the West Nile Virus is. Perhaps that’s why there are myths about it. But at least as regards the other subjects, it seems to be a slight cheat, and writing cliché, to ‘correct’ a set of myths without demonstrating that they exist. For example, here are some alleged myths concerning the subjects above:

• Married couples have less sex [if I might be slightly glib, this sounds a bit like the argument that crime rates go up when you jail more criminals].
• “If it doesn’t have a copyright notice, it’s not copyrighted.”
• Atheists have no sense of morality, since morality comes from God.
• Scientific knowledge can only be discovered by highly trained professional scientists.
• Gifted students do not need help. If they are really gifted, they can manage on their own.
• Quitting [smoking] is just a matter of willpower.

Does anyone really believe any of this stuff anyway, or are these myths mythical?

Marchitecture. I shamelessly stole this from a presentation I attended the other day (names withheld to protect the innocent). If it resonates with you, it probably doesn’t need explaining, but marchitecture is IT architecture that is used for marketing reasons rather than technical ones. Sometimes the marchitecture looks the same as the ‘real’ architecture, sometimes not. Wikipedia’s definition seems a bit narrow (I’m not sure what electronic architecture is anyway), but hey. No original research seems to one of the more widely violated Wikipedian principles.

(Using big words gives me a cheap thrill).

Has anyone else noticed that the word ‘expert’ is changing its meaning, becoming more generous? It seems like the bar for becoming an ‘expert’ is lower than it once was (good examples can be found on the 6 o’clock news). Of course it’s hard to measure this other than empirically, but it’s fun to play the mental exercise – are you an expert in anything? I’m going to assert arbitrarily that unless you know more about a subject than 95% of the people who are in some way experienced in the field in question (by the most narrow definition feasible), then you’re not an expert. I think this approximates to the definition of ‘expert’ most people used to have, but not any more (I’d postulate the figure is now drifting in the 60% region). My strict definition of ‘expert’ means I’m not one in economics, film, libertarianism, SOA, or a variety of other fields I’m interested in. I don’t find this depressing, though – I think it just makes the word more useful. A vague definition is the enemy of precise language (something Strunk and White advocated). Unfortunately, most dictionaries are vague on expert, only hinting towards a ‘high degree of skill’. This is why I felt it might be better to put numbers on it (even if the domain can still be vague).

I’d be interested to hear your empirical observations.

Economists often use words differently from other folk. Words such as ‘profit’, ‘wealth’, ‘rent’ and ‘cost’ all have subtle, but important, differences from the way many of the general public use them. Such words can easily get tied to particular value judgements or politics – for example, the word ‘profit’ conjures up images of fat cats and greedy people in the minds of many. In the minds of economists, profit is almost always a good thing – partly because they don’t tie the word just to money.

Another example: I’m a vehement libertarian, and we think about concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘profit’, and ‘property’ differently from the way many people do. When I tell people we don’t live in a democracy, they think initially I’ve gone off my rocker (I’m not talking here about minor inequities in vote distribution etc.). I have to explain that I have quite a different definition of democracy to them before we get back on track.

So this poses a dilemma, and it extends beyond these economic and political concepts: should one always use these words as they ‘should’ be defined, or is part of the persuasion process thinking up new words and phrases that make concepts more readily graspable? I’m not suggesting that these concepts are difficult: but it’s always easier to have a discussion when you’ve defined your terms: when people have a pre-judged notion of what terms mean, but then they are re-defined, suddenly it gets a lot harder. Are there things you have trouble explaining because people already have ideas about what the words involved mean?

Sometimes I think it’s OK to alter your terminology. It feels bad, though, when you feel like you’re giving in to established usages that you feel are ‘wrong’. I don’t like flip-flopping back-and-forth between definitions of democracy, for example, but I do it – to facilitate discussion. I think these are hard decisions to make.

Kleptocracy – where government steals from the public purse.

I came across this term the other day in a podcast from Econtalk in which Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discussed his most recent book, The Logic of Political Survival – a cynical look at how and why governments stay in power. It’s well worth a listen.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically states that there is a relationship between the language that a person uses and the way they think about the world. Although it’s controversial, many linguists believe there is at least some truth in it: as Wikipedia says, ‘The opposite extreme—that language does not influence thought at all—is also widely considered to be false’. The theory has implications, such as that the value of improving one’s vocabulary or learning another language are even greater than they would be otherwise.

The hypothesis has also been extended to programming languages. Essentially, the theory here is that certain types of language are more suited to solving certain problems, and programmers who aren’t aware of these types may not be able to solve some problems in the most effective way. I think this is borne out by empirical evidence: there is a noticeable difference in the way those who have been trained in declarative programming (such as functional and logic programming) solve problems, even in when writing in traditional procedural languages (for example, C), from those who are only trained in those procedural languages. This is important for some types of problem, such as writing compilers or parsers, which are well suited to declarative programming.