Another political non-lie

I've been hearing an awful lot about health care reform in the US this summer - even from British outlets. It's all a bit disconcerting, especially the riotous town hall meetings and the arguments that seem unmoored from the facts.

FactCheck.org has a nice piece debunking seven falsehoods related to this debate, two from proponents of reform and five from opponents.

I'm interested, though, in a claim that is linguistically interesting because it is not actually a falsehood, though it is not unambiguously true, either. That is, the claim that the United States has the best health care system in the world. I've heard this claim made several times in the past few weeks; I've also heard it decried as a lie. But the claim is not really a lie in the sense of a deliberate recitation of an untruth with the intent to deceive. I think that most people who repeat the claim sincerely believe it, and most who call it a lie sincerely believe that it is untrue. The problem may be that there is no shared definition of either best or health care system.

On one hand, some of the most cutting edge medical care has been developed at US hospitals. The first successful heart-lung transplant was performed at Stanford University Medical Center; the first mechanical heart implantation was carried out at Texas Heart Institute. In terms of individual medical treatments, the United States has been on the cutting edge. In 1979 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, famously insisted that his gallbladder disease be treated in the United States. While that may be old news, the elite still seem to come to the US for treatment: according to Marketplace radio, wealthy foreign patients spend billions of dollars at US hospitals each year.

On the other hand, 28,000 infants die in the United States each year; that's a higher infant mortality rate than Hong Kong, New Zealand, Cuba, or most of Europe. According to the 2008 CIA Fact Book, overall life expectancy in the US is about 78.1 years. That's higher than in many poorer countries in Latin America or Africa, but lower than the EU, Japan, Korea, Canada, or Israel. The US ranks about 30th in overall life expectancy among United Nations member states.

So, if best health care system means "most cutting-edge in terms of treatments available," then the US may be near the top. If it means "best society-wide outcomes," however, the US is not at the top and may actually be below average.

[UPDATE: Writing in the Washington Post on August 23, T.R. Reid calls the claim that "America has 'the finest health care' in the world" a myth, and states flatly, "We don't." He goes on to point out that society-wide outcomes are better in most "advanced" countries.

In the next paragraph, though, he suggests that the US has "the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, [and] world-class research".

You would think that I should have something clever to say about that. Hm.]

Eggcorns and Fuzzy Spots

The term eggcorn was coined in 2003 by linguist-bloggers Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman, and has spawned something of a cottage industry of eggcorn-hunters on the Web. An eggcorn is defined as "an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect [which] introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context." The eponymous eggcorn, for example, is used by some speakers in place of acorn. Though not standard, the substitution is easy to understand: acorns are seeds (corns) that are sort of shaped like eggs. On web sites such as The Eggcorn Database and Eggcorn Forum, Wikipedia, and various blogs, scores of amateur lexicographers (including yours truly) track and discuss the production and use of these lexical innovations.

Recently Eggcorn Forum contributor Kem Luther, noting uses of both brute and blunt in place of brunt, wrote

I'm beginning to think that people have large fuzzy spots in their brains where the semantic contents of the words "brute," "blunt," "brunt," and "butt" are stored. Speakers do not have a good handle on the meaning of these terms.

I think he is quite right. Furthermore, Kem's observation about "large fuzzy spots" has lead me to create a half-baked theory about the role of word frequency in eggcorn formation.

If, as some linguists suggest (e.g. Bybee 1995, Clark 1987, Tomasello 2005 inter alia), language acquisition and language change are sensitive to frequency, then it is unsurprising that lower frequency words should be less clearly differentiated even in the minds of adult speakers. In other words, structures that are heard more frequently will be learned faster and "better" in the sense that the hearer can use them in the standard way that other speakers do; words that are heard less frequently will be learned less well. (Such claims can be somewhat controversial for morphology and syntax, but I think much less so for words.)

Add to low frequency a competition with phonologically similar words, and certain forms seem doomed to reside in "large fuzzy spots" of the mental lexicon. Low-frequency near-homonyms are not heard often enough to be remembered clearly, and they shade into one another in the hearer's memory.

None of the words brute, blunt, brunt or butt appear on Kilgarriff's lemmatized BNC word frequency list, which means that none of them occur more than 800 times in the hundred-million word British National Corpus.^* It is therefore unsurprising that this complex is confounded for many speakers.

In comparison, the complex of and, ant, and amp are not confounded despite their phonological similarity, since they are the 4th, 5539th, and 5960th most frequent words in the BNC, respectively. Conversely, I would not expect moan to be part of such a complex even though it is only the 6309th most frequent word, since it has few near homophones. (Of course, having written that, I fully expect someone to find an eggcorn of moan within a few days. Comments are open.)

Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10, 425-455.

Clark, Eve. 1987. The principle of contrast: a constraint on language acquisition. In B. MacWhinney (ed) Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, 1-33. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

^* Even if the word butt is relatively common in speech, it probably occurs most frequently in the anatomical sense. A Google search for "butt of" (as in "butt of the joke" etc.) returns more than a million and a half raw hits, but "my butt" returns nearly four and a half million. On the other hand, the conjunction but is the 23rd most frequent word on the Kilgarriff list; I suspect that it is frequent enough to avoid conflation with its homophones. Speaking of homophones, by the way, Meriam Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary lists six separate head words for butt and five for but.

Media modality and word choice. Or: Is an 'emergency landing' a 'crash'?

Megan Garber, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, notes an interesting difference in the words used to describe the... event involving US Airways flight 1549 on 15 January.

Garber quotes the Washington Post as saying the flight "went down in the Hudson River," and the New York Times saying it "landed on the river." In contrast, CNN, MSNBC and Fox television anchors and commentators frequently referred to the event as a "crash" or "plane crash."

Garber allows that crash "simply flows more easily in speech," but argues that the usage here is nonetheless inappropriate. She writes, "Any event that combines the terms 'plane' and 'New York City' and 'crash' is bound to create panic, even if, in the next moment, the real situation—apparently-casualty-free water landing—is revealed."

By contrasting two newspapers with three television news outlets, Garber seems to suggest that television journalists are being more sensationalist than print journalists. This may be an unfair implication, however. The majority of online publications cited by Google News use the word crash, and most of these appear to be newspapers or wire services - though some are undoubtedly blogs or even the web pages of television stations.

"Terminology to define the terrorists"

According to the Associated Press, the US Homeland Security department has produced a report entitled "Terminology to define the terrorists: recommendations from American Muslims."

One of those recommendations is to avoid using the word jihad to describe the efforts of al-Qaeda and other declared enemies. Jihad, which translates as either 'holy war' or 'spiritual struggle,' is an important concept in Islam, and as the report points out, calling terrorists jihadis may serve to "unintentionally [legitimize] their actions."

My colleagues Becky Shulties and Aomar Boum point out that the debate over whether it is ever appropriate to call terrorism jihad has been an active one both among Muslim scholars and in the media - particularly at al Jazeera. (Al Jazeera Arabic uses the term al irhab "terrorism".)

While I'm somewhat uneasy with government-academic partnerships such as the Minerva Consortia (see also here), I can recommend that the military and intelligence agencies read published work on the subject. (With apologies to the many scholars whose work I have not linked to.)

Cross-linguistic back-formation

Today's Doonesbury comic strip includes a curious linguistic artifact. In panel two, a an engineering student describes herself and a partner: "We're engineering honchas, and the thing just sits there mocking us" (emphasis added).

The meaning of honchas is fairly clear. It is a (perhaps jocularly) feminine version of the word honcho, meaning "boss" or "hot shot". The final <-a> is an extension of the grammatical rule relating pairs of words such as Latina/Latino or norteña/norteño, where the first word in each pair is feminine and the second is masculine. All of these words are borrowed from Spanish.^* In Spanish, as in many European languages, nouns and adjectives are categorized into classes commonly called grammatical genders. While Modern English does not have grammatical gender (except, arguably, in the pronoun system), English speakers sometimes use the feminine form of loan words when referring to women or girls - particularly with loans from Spanish.

What makes this particular formation interesting, however, is that honcho is not a Spanish loan word. It comes from the Japanese word 班長 hanchou, meaning group leader or patrol leader, and was probably picked up by US soldiers during or after World War II. The OED's earliest citation (spelled hancho) is from 1947; honcho is mentioned in the journal American Speech in 1955.

1947 J. BERTRAM Shadow of War VII. i. 212 But here comes the hancho. This boat must be finished to-night. 1955 Amer. Speech XXX. 118 Honcho. 1. n. A man in charge. (This is a Japanese word translated roughly as ‘Chief officer’, brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting...) 2. v. To direct a detail or operation.

While it is common for languages to borrow words from other languages, borrowing grammatical rules is less common (but certainly not unheard of). That seems to be the case here. The Spanish rule that a masculine noun or adjective ending in -o can be made feminine by changing that ending to -a is borrowed and applied to a non-Spanish word in English.

^* Interestingly, in each case the Oxford English Dictionary cites an earlier date for the masculine version (Latino in 1946, norteño in 1953) than for the feminine (Latina 1972; norteña 1978).

What 'Representation' Represents

The Economist magazine's Democracy in America blog cites The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal ("An Overrepresentation of Factual Presentations"), which links to the on-line magazine Grist, which features an interview with Al Gore.

(Whew! It's hyperlinks all the way down.)

In the Grist piece, David Roberts asks Gore how he balances fear with hope in talk about global warming. Gore responds that, given denial about the possibility of global warming,

I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Commentators at Grist, Opinion Journal, and Democracy in America have all seized on the phrase "over-representation of factual presentations," and are debating what it could possibly mean.

James Taranto at Opinion Journal seems to understand the phrase as meaning something like "exaggerate those facts that support one's side of an argument." He compares this to discussion of Weapons of Mass Destruction during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

"An over-representation of factual presentations of how dangerous it is." Isn't that what people accused President Bush of offering vis-à-vis the erstwhile Iraqi regime? Didn't this lead a certain former vice president to thunder, "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!"?

An anonymous contributor (all contributors to The Economist are anonymous) at Democracy in America sees this as even more ominous.

Whoops. "An over-representation of factual presentations". You can see what he means, and why that may well be the right strategy. But it doesn't sound like the right thing to be caught saying. Better at such times to praise the intelligence of the public and their capacity to recognise the wisdom of your argument, than admit that you plan to bombard them with "over-representations" of your case until you scare the pants off them.

For the Democracy in America writer, "over-representation" seems to be not only frightening ("scare the pants off them") but dishonest (not "the right thing to be caught saying").

Clearly, it is possible to interpret "over-representation" to mean "exaggeration" or even "lies" (of a certain type). I don't think that is the most common definition of over-representation, though.

As a native speaker of English, I would define "over-represent" as something like "include a disproportionate number of a particular type." For instance, we might say that non-Hispanic white students are over-represented at my university, the University of Colorado. While the University says "13.8 percent (4,043) [students] are minorities," the US Census reports that 72.1% of Colorado residents are "White persons not Hispanic." Thus, at 86.2%, they are somewhat over-represented in the student body.

A cursory glance at Google search results for the term "over represent" suggests that (once we throw out references to Al Gore's own usage) this usage is common.

"the overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish students and the underrepresentation of the white, non-Jewish majority [is a problem at Harvard]"

"[Lists of physician groups] tended to over-represent "large" groups (>69 physicians)."

"With the exception of the Hispanic category, books with human characters that feature only one ethnic (non-white) group over-represent that ethnic group’s distribution in the US population."

Translating from the common, statistical sense of "over-represent" to a sense relevant to discourse, what should we assume that "over-representation of factual presentations" means?

If we assume that there is some ideal ratio of problem-talk to solution-talk (an assumption that may be hard to support, but go with me here), then talking more about problems than solutions would be an over-representation. For example, if it is ideal to spend the same amount of time talking about problems and solutions, then spending, say, twenty minutes talking about the threat of global warming and only five minutes talking about potential solutions would be an over-representation of the problem within the 25-minute discourse.

This, in fact, is the meaning that interviewer Roberts attributes to Gore, in the comments section of the Grist piece.

By "an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is" -- an admittedly inelegant phrase -- I think he meant that at this point, people talking to American audiences need to spend more time convincing them that global warming is dangerous, relative to the amount of time they spend talking about solving the problem.

If this is, indeed, what Gore meant, is he advocating lying? No - at least, not necessarily. He is advocating talking a great deal about the problem of global warming, relative to the amount of talk about solutions. This talk can, and presumably should, be entirely true.

Is Gore advocating exaggeration? Not necessarily. What he seems to advocate is a great deal of "problem-talk," which might be inflated relative to "solution-talk," but which need not be exaggerated at all relative to the actual problem.

At that point, though, we move beyond discourse to empirical facts about global warming - an area in which I have no particular expertise.