Fritinancy

Spellbound

Here's a Halloween treat for you word nerds: the Visual Thesaurus spelling bee, an online version of the traditional American schoolroom contest. You'll need to turn up your speakers, listen to a recording of each word, refer to the definitions in the margin, then guess the spelling. After two unsuccessful guesses, you'll receive hints.

Launched in the summer, the VT Bee has already attracted 15,000 players who have attempted to spell about 500,000 words. A sophisticated algorithm adjusts the level of the challenge to the player's ability. VT's executive producer, Benjamin Zimmer, explains on the Oxford University Press blog: 

As more and more players try the Bee, the game has steadily improved based on data collected on how words are spelled. Words are being continuously reanalyzed for difficulty based on how spellers fare. Every five minutes, words are rescored for difficulty taking into account the latest data from the Bee spellers. That means there’s an increasingly better fit to different skill levels. As the player continues to spell, the quiz narrows in on his or her score, on a scale from 200 to 800. A 200-level speller will get quizzed on the easiest words, but 800-level spellers are in for a fiendish challenge[.] ...

There’s some sophisticated data analysis going on behind the scenes to score both players and words. Using intricate algorithms and curve-fitting models, the Bee is able to determine not just how difficult a word is to spell, but how well a word is at discriminating good spellers from bad spellers. That way the Bee can quickly zero in on a player’s skill level, in much the same way that computer-adaptive tests like the GRE and GMAT tailor themselves to test-takers’ abilities.

Be forewarned: even very good spellers will find themselves challenged by about the tenth word.

Anyone can play, but if you want to show up on the Top Ten list you have to be a Visual Thesaurus subscriber. (A one-year subscription costs $19.95, which also—shameless plug—gives you access to all the articles, including my own.)

Felonious Dangling

If you aren't convinced that dangling clauses can be dangerous, take a look at this statement released Tuesday by vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Her subject is the senior senator from Alaska, Palin's fellow Republican Ted Stevens:

“After being found guilty on seven felony counts, I had hoped Senator Stevens would take the opportunity to do the statesman-like thing and erase the cloud that is covering his Senate seat,” Ms. Palin said in a statement released by the campaign. “He has not done so. Alaskans are grateful for his decades of public service, but the time has come for him to step aside.”

(The quotation appears in the ninth paragraph of this New York Times story.)

Stevens, not Palin, was found guilty on seven felony counts. But that's not what the grammar of the first sentence tells us. As it's written, the sentence's subject is "I"—Ms. Palin—which means she's saying that she was found guilty. (She was found, earlier this month, to have violated Alaska state ethics laws in her handling of the "Troopergate" incident—but then, in an Orwellian feat of mental gymnastics, she claimed that the ethics panel's report cleared her of wrongdoing, which it emphatically did not. So maybe there's an unconscious mea culpa being expressed here.)

This sort of error is often forgivable in off-the-cuff spoken English, but I see no excuse for it an a written statement. It would have been clearer, and more accurate, to write, "After Senator Stevens was found guilty... I hoped [note: simple past tense] he would take the opportunity..."

As for "the statesman-like thing" and "erase the cloud"—well, maybe Governor Palin writes her own statements, possibly out of a misguided sense of thrift that would have been more sensibly applied to her wardrobe and makeup expenditures. But modeling her writing style on her speaking style? Not such a good idea.

Measuring Out My Life in Milliscobles

During the six months since I joined Twitter, the 140-character-message service, I've occasionally felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of compelling information that demands my attention NOW. So I was interested to discover Follow Cost, which tells users exactly how annoying it will be to follow (receive tweets from) any given Twitterer. And I do mean exactly. Type in a Twitter name and Follow Cost produces an annoyance score expressed in something called milliscobles, calculated to two decimal places.

What's a milliscoble? Well, it's named after technology writer and prolific Twitterer Robert Scoble. According to the Follow Cost About page, one milliscoble equals one one-thousandth of Scoble's average daily Twitter status updates as of 10:09 CST on September 29, 2008.

I haven't yet figured out how this knowledge will improve my life. However, thinking about milliscobles led me to thinking about other invented units of measurement. The one I remembered was millihelen, the amount of beauty required to launch just one ship. It gets its name, of course, from Helen of Troy, whose face was said to have launched a thousand ships.

(The millihelen is not related to the millihenry, an actual unit of inductance equal to one one-thousandth of a henry. You'll have to look up the definition of henry for yourself, although I'll tell you that it's named for the American physicist Joseph Henry, who specialized in studies of electromagnetism.)

After millihelen, though, my mind went blank. So I turned to Obscurity Central, a k a Wikipedia, where I discovered this list of humorous units of measurement. Bingo! Did you know that the smoot is the unit used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge? Or that a donkeypower is equal to 250 watts, about a third of a horsepower?

More favorites:

MegaFonzie: measures an object's coolness; invented by Professor Farnsworth in the animated series Futurama (which itself measures at least 1,000 MegaFonzies). One Fonzie equals the coolness of the Happy Days character of that name, played by Henry Winkler.

Rictus Scale: a spoof of the Richter Scale, which measures earthquakes. A Rictus magnitude of 0 to 3 is the equivalent of small articles in local papers; when the meter registers 6.5 to 7.5 Rictus, " network correspondents sent to scene; president visits area; commemorative T-shirts appear."

Sheppey: seven-eighths of a mile, "the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque."

Hobo Power: measures how bad something smells. (30 hobo: "the smeller must vomit.")

The article includes a link to a list of real but unusual units of measurement, which in their way are even more fantastic and entertaining than the made-up units. For instance:

Mickey: the smallest detectable movement of a computer mouse; named after Mickey Mouse.

Barn, Outhouse, and Shed: all actual units of area used by nuclear physicists.

Shake: used by nuclear engineers to measure "a conveniently short period of time," generally translating to 10 nanoseconds. (Source: "two shakes of a lamb's tail.")

Warhol: unit of fame or hype, named in honor of famous artist Andy Warhol's famous dictum that "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." One kilowarhol equals 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days (or, as Wikipedia puts it, "a sort of metric nine-day wonder").

In related wonkitudery, here's a master list of Twitter tools and applications, 60 in all, to make your Twitter experience the all-consuming time suck it was meant to be. (Hat tip: Rivenhomewood.)

 

On Isms and Code-Switching

About a week ago, a reader of this blog asked me to write something about the peculiar use of socialism in Republican rhetoric during this campaign season. I begged off, protesting that it was (as someone else put it) above my pay grade. Fortunately, linguist Geoff Nunberg has ridden to my rescue with an analysis of this word and related ones, such as reactionary and class warfare. Here's the long version of "The Ism Dismalest of All"; the audio version, recorded for NPR, will be available on the Fresh Air website later today.

And speaking of rhetoric, here's an interesting post by Anil Dash—the ultra-smart co-founder of Six Apart, which hosts this blog and many others—about "What Sarah Palin Is Saying" when she accuses Barack Obama of, for example, "palling around with terrorists." In describing Palin's strategy, Dash uses the term code-switching, which is linguistics jargon for the use of multiple languages or dialects when addressing different audiences:

 

Where John McCain used the phrase "straight talk" in his 2000 campaign to represent the idea of telling the unvarnished truth, without regard to the actual grammar of the statements themselves, Palin has changed the meaning of the phrase slightly. In her formulation, "straight talk" is not so much about the clarity of the points being made, but rather a signifier of the dialect in which she is offering up her talking points.

(In related news, a friend of mine picks up extra cash reading fortune-telling cards for tourists at San Francisco's Pier 39. That's right: I pal around with Tarotists.)

 

Tank Think

No doubt you've been reading a lot of headlines like these lately:

U.S. stocks tank again; Dow point drop second-biggest ever (MarketWatch, Oct. 15, 2008)

eBay issues gloomy forecast as tech stocks tank again (CNet, Oct. 15, 2008)

Stocks Tank After Wall Street Shake-Up (CBS, Sept. 15, 2008)

"Tank" is a vivid, headline-friendly of saying "plunge" or "drop precipitously." But then there's this expression:

Is Ben Bernanke in the tank for Obama? (Blogging Stocks, Oct. 21, 2008)

In the Tank for Ethanol: GM Takes Its Case to China (Wall Street Journal's China Journal, Oct. 20, 2008) 

A Debate 'Moderator' in the Tank for Obama (Michelle Malkin, Real Clear Politics, Oct. 1, 2008)

That last reference is to NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill, who moderated the vice-presidential debate; right-wing commentator Malkin, fulminating over Ifill's forthcoming book about race and presidential politics, fired this zinger: "She's so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out."

And then there's this less-frequent variation¹:

Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Disgracefully in the Tank with Big Biotech (Secondhand Smoke, a bioethics blog, Sept. 29, 2008)

Veep Debate Moderator in the Tank with Obama (Advance Indiana, Oct. 1, 2008)

"There are seven sharks in the tank with the economy" (Kevin Phillips, guest on "Bill Moyers Journal," Sept. 19, 2008)

So ... what is this tank, and what's it filled with? Water? Gasoline? Ethanol? Or is it "tank" as in "slang for prison"? What does it mean to be "in the tank for" someone or something? How is that different from being "in the tank with" someone or something? And what does this "tank" (noun) have to do with "to tank" (verb)?

Unfortunately, I could come up with only some general conclusions, none of what clarify the difference between "for" and "with."

Back in April, language guy William Safire (who, let the record show, is in the tank for McCain), wrote about in the tank in his New York Times Sunday Magazine column:

The primary meaning is evident from the context: to be in the tank is to be “lovingly enthralled; foolishly enraptured; passionately bedazzled.” A more sinister meaning, however, hovers in the shadows: “self-interestedly involved; surreptitiously supportive” and in extreme cases “corruptly influenced.”

Although the phrase has proliferated during this campaign season, it isn't new; Safire provides a 1992 citation from President George H.W. Bush: “My opponent’s [i.e., Bill Clinton's] campaign is being backed by practically every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer. He’s not in the ring with them; he’s in the tank.”

That apposition suggests that the term comes, like much of our slang (knockout, in my corner, on the ropes), from the world of boxing. Safire consulted a sports-slang maven, Paul Dickson, who followed that thread back to a 1930 story in the Los Angeles Times, about a boxer who admitted to taking a dive--an expression that, like in the tank and to tank, suggests deep water. Here's Safire:

A tank was the 19th-century term for what we now call a swimming pool; the metaphor evoked a picture of diving to the ring’s canvas-covered floor — as if into a pool — to feign loss of consciousness. “By extension,” Dickson reports, “when a fighter or anything else (including a stock) takes a nose dive he or she has tanked.”

Eric Zorn, blogging for the Chicago Tribune, rounded up a bunch of links to analysis of in the tank and concluded that the boxing connection was legit. But the boxing term is in the tank, not in the tank for. Could there possibly be another etymology?

Here's a little background. The word tank came into English in the early 17th century from Portuguese tanque, "reservoir," which is either a borrowing from Gujarati tankh, "cistern," or the source of the Indian word. (The Portuguese, you will recall, spent about four centuries on the Indian subcontinent as colonizers.) Tank became the term for "fuel container" around 1902; tanker, for "ship carrying oil," emerged around the same time. The military adopted tank in 1915 as a code name for armored vehicles that resembled benzene tanks, and the code name slipped into general usage. A tank suit (1920s) got its name because it was worn in a swimming tank, or pool; today tank-type apparel can be any sleeveless, scoop-necked garment.

All those meanings provide plenty of potential clues to the meaning of in the tank. One of Zorn's commenters said the expression comes from commercial fishing: "Nothing is guaranteed until the day's catch is 'in the tank' -- meaning permanently 'hooked'." Someone else thought it meant "in the gas tank." And one commenter came up with a clever suggestion that clarifies the political connection: "I thought 'in the tank' meant someone who actively supported Dukakis even after this photo was published":

 

It was this failed photo op, some of you may remember, that turned Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential bid into joke material. If "Dukakis in the tank" is shorthand for bad political PR, perhaps in the tank for means, by extension, "willing to go to embarrassing lengths, even at the risk of compromising one's dignity, to further a cause." And while in the tank for suggests overt advocacy, in the tank with seems to indicate only correlation. Those "sharks in the tank with the economy" are swimming around together, but they haven't made an endorsement.

At least that's how I see it. Any other ideas? Tanks in advance.

UPDATE: In a comment, Grant Barrett referred me to an explanation of "in the tank" that he'd written for the discussion forum of his radio show, A Way with Words. He also included a link to a Slate.com article, published just a few days ago, about the expression, for which Barrett contributed research. His conclusion, as summed up by Slate: "Aquatics by way of pugilism"

____

¹ Many hits for "in the tank with" turn out to be links to Sea World or to plumbing how-to sites.

Nicely Named: The Bassment

Lately I've focused a lot on bad brand names. That gets depressing after a while, even for a fault-finding critic like me, so this week I'm recognizing some names that get it right.

Like this one in downtown Berkeley:

The Bassment is a book and record store located, as you might guess, in the basement of the Jazzschool. It's a clever choice but not a strained one, and the soft-focus image of the stand-up bass drives home the association. I like the typeface choice, too—the slanted horizontal line on the A is especially nice.

Word of the Week: Grimoire

Grimoire: A book of spells, lore, and divination used by a witch, wizard, or magician. Pronounced greem-WAHR.

Grimoire is directly related to Old French grammaire ("learning"), from the Greek grammatikos ("related to letters"). In Middle English, gramayre signified learning in general, including astrology and magic. This association with the occult arts is responsible for grammar's evolution into the Scottish word glamour.

Image from the home page of Grimoire: The Magazine of Haunting Terror, published (on a printing press) in Warren, Rhode Island. From the writer's guidelines:

GRIMOIRE seeks the classic type of horror fiction which means NO slasher/gore/erotic horror stories. Think Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson and you'll know what we're looking for. We want original horror fiction stories of around 3,500 words. If your story is over 3,500 words, please query before sending it.

October Surprises

Stop the presses! (Stop the press's?)  Bill Brohaugh has alerted me to this unexpected campaign development.

And Karen Wise is keeping a low profile because of this shocking news story, dated November 7.

Doing the Right Thing

I'd been nibbling at the edges of a couple of blog posts about language and names, but last night I read an essay by one of TheAtlantic.com's bloggers, and it stopped me in my tracks. So I'm going to send you over there to read what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about Barack Obama's Kansas grandparents. Take a minute to study the photo of them, taken (I'm guessing) in the late 1940s, just an average young white couple in the middle of the century, in the middle of the country.

Think about that country's history. About families. About race. About what doing the right thing means.

Think about the fact that it wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Loving v. Virginia decision (yes, Loving was the plaintiffs' surname), struck down the "anti-miscegenation" laws that prohibited interracial marriage. (California was slightly more advanced. Our state's Supreme Court made such unions legal in 1948.)

Coates writes:

What should be remembered is that, though our racial history is mired in utter disgrace, though the deep cowardice of post-reconstruction haunts us into the 21st century, at any point on the timeline, you can find ordinary white people doing the right thing.

Ordinary people of all colors, I would add.

Be sure to read all the comments, too.

Since he posted it yesterday, Coates's short essay has been flying around the Internet. Read what Orange Tangerine and Too Sense have had to say.

Here's my own take. Unlike most of the adults I associate with today, I went to a high school (large, public, big-city) in which white kids were the minority group. Most of my classmates were African-American; many were Asian-American. Some classmates spoke heavily accented English. I knew guys who looked a lot like Barack Obama and who, like him, went on to law school and public-service careers. One of my closest friends was a light-skinned black girl whose darker-skinned father, a doctor, sometimes accepted chickens as payment from his patients. In homeroom I sat behind a mocha-skinned boy who shared my surname; at a class reunion years later I asked him about it, and he told me the name came from a German-Jewish ancestor named Friedman who had immigrated to Louisiana, where he bought a plantation and took a slave "concubine," as my classmate put it.

I would never presume to know what it's like to live in the United States as a dark-skinned person. But I do know what it's like to live around people of all skin colors and all kinds of family stories. And I know a bit about racism. I had white friends whose parents lied about their street addresses so the kids could attend the mostly white high school in the next district. (Those oh-so-genteel parents referred to the black kids at my high school as "the element," as if they were argon or calcium rather than actual people.) I also had black friends whose parents warned them not to accept invitations to parties at white kids' houses. (My black friends ignored the warnings. We had some excellent parties.)

So when I think about Barack Obama and his ordinary extraordinary life, I don't think in abstractions. I think about people I've known and cared about. And I am pretty damn excited about what this country just might be on the verge of. Or, in fact, has already achieved.

Aesthetically Correct

There's been plenty of ugliness in the current presidential campaign, but I've also found examples of beauty, humor, and creativity. Here are a few recent sightings.

I love "Bark for Barack!" and the Constructivist look of this poster from Obama Dogs Unite, a project of a Richmond (California) dog day-care and boarding business. I suppose people who mistakenly maintain that Obama's a socialist (where is that coming from? Cold War nostalgia?) will consider this poster Exhibit A. To which I say: lighten up! And talk to some Europeans!

(They could have taken it a step further: "YES WE CANine.")

As we know, cats tend to register as Independents, but partisan felines have their own nicely executed icon:

   

(From Modern Cat; hat tip: Laurie Chapman.)

Karen Wise, posting on Twitter, pointed me to Design For Obama, created by two Rhode Island School of Design students with the support of the influential design blog Design Observer. I like this concept:

 

... but oh, how I wish the designer hadn't used a backward apostrophe. (This computer-generated error happens to be a pet peeve of mine. It shows up in the Bark for Barack poster, too. Grrr.)

I spotted this bumper sticker, a witty bilingual portmanteau, in the parking lot of my gym. It's a blend of "Obama" and "vámonos," Spanish for "let's go." (In Spanish, v and b are pronounced identically.)

 

I tried to find equally elegant artifacts from the McCain-Palin campaign, but had little luck. I did find some clever wordplay and design from Schlafly Beer in St. Louis, via Serious Eats:

I like the copy for "Baracktoberfest":

This full-bodied, deep reddish-amber lager is strong and malty with a distinctly hopeful aftertaste.

And for "Palin Ale":

You betcha, this amber-colored, medium-bodied British-style ale is delicious. With a smooth, mildly-hoppy, folksy character; this beer pairs well with grilled meats such as beef or..... moose.

(To answer your question: Yes, brewery owner Tom Schlafly is related to right-wing activist and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly— he's her nephew—but she isn't involved in the business.)

I also discovered ThoseShirts, whose merchandise represents an ideology that's conservative-trending-to-Neanderthal (e.g., a T-shirt that reads "I'd Rather Be Waterboarding") but whose slogan made me laugh out loud: Effing the Ineffable Since 1991.

I did a little research, and it turns out that the phrase "effing the ineffable" produces more than 4,000 Google hits. (ThoseShirts doesn't show up on the first three pages.) In fact, the first person to use the phrase ("I'm in the business of effing the ineffable") may have been Alan Watts (1915-1973), noted Zen Buddhist, experimenter with psychotropic drugs, and hero to a generation of hippies. Politically, Watts was a libertarian, which may be why ThoseShirts felt a kinship.

P.S. In his blog, The Name Inspector writes about the linguistic qualities that make Obama "one of the most rhymed- and punned-upon names in the history of U.S. presidential candidates":

The light, open sound of Obama seems to support the message of change that the campaign has highlighted. This is a case of serendipitous sound symbolism. Even the depiction of the “O” as a rising sun in Obama’s official campaign logo seems to delight in the very vowelicity of it all.

Vowelicity: new word of the week!