The power of word choices

In What We Are, also published in the Guardian on 5 October 2016, George Monbiot reviews Democracy for Realists, published earlier this year by the social science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels. The authors argue that the “folk theory of democracy” — the idea that citizens make coherent and intelligible policy decisions, on which governments then act – bears no relationship to how it really works. Or could ever work. Hence Monbiot's kicker: Democracy cannot work as it is meant to; human nature does not allow it.

While Monbiot's review is fascinating but depressing, the point of my post today is to draw attention to the following passage:

We are suckers for language. When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% of them agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on “welfare”. In the approach to the 1991 Gulf War, nearly two thirds of Americans said they were willing to “use military force”. Fewer than 30% were willing to “go to war”.

I have seldom read anything on the power of language and word choices that makes the point so clearly and convincingly.

Capital offenders

On 4 October 2010, production editor of the Guardian until August 2016 and leading contributor to the Guardian's "much admired, occasionally followed" Style guide, published

Capital offenders: the case against uppercase, subtitled 

IT'S OFFICIAL: CAPITAL LETTERS CAN BE DANGEROUS.

As a long-time defender of the 'min-caps' faith, I was delighted to discover, even belatedly, this article and the following gems by such an acknowledged expert:

At least, that's what the US federal highway administration believes. According to the New York Post:

"Studies have shown that it is harder to read all-caps signs, and those extra milliseconds spent staring away from the road have been shown to increase the likelihood of accidents, particularly among older drivers."

It won't surprise regular Guardian readers that I agree with them. The Guardian style guide has long encouraged the gradual move away from capitals. So do other newspapers and websites, although some venerable style guides are still agonising over whether to lowercase internet and world wide web. (Be assured they will do so, perhaps in time for the 22nd century.) 

In part, the switch from capitals reflects a society that is less deferential than in the days when the Manchester Guardian would write something like this: "The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER, Mr LLOYD GEORGE, presented the Naval Estimates to Ministers and Members of the House."

Most readers seem comfortable with a less formal style.

Capitals do have their uses, of course. As the Urban Dictionary puts it: "Capitalisation is the difference between 'I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse' and 'I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.'"

(Note carefully the three punctuation marks there at the end. I approve, indeed, Love it!)

****

Moving on now to another DAvid Marsh article, this one entitled
Capital letters out, swearwords in: one journalist's legacy, in which ‘The man responsible for the spelling mistakes in the Guardian’ looks back on a 42-year career that ends today. But first an delightful little aside:

You didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway: my favourite entry from this two-decade labour of love remains
meat loaf ... sings

meatloaf ... doesn’t sing.

Now, back on topic and to conclude:

If I have had any impact at all in my time at the Guardian, it’s a reduction in the incidence of capital letters.

OSASCOMP in the news #2

On 24 September, Johnson, The Economist's celebrated language columnist, wrote about OSASCOMP under the heading Hidden in plain sight, with the subheading Most people don’t know they know most of the grammar they know. He used the illustration below. (Note, however, that the graphic artist used a slightly different formula, OSSCOMP instead of OSASCOMP, because the illustration omits the second item in the longer list, namely 'age'.

Johnson made several good points, including:

Mr Forsyth may have exaggerated how fixed adjective order is, but his little nugget is broadly true, and it has delighted people to examine something they didn’t know they knew.

Clearly, then, the discipline of linguistics needs a marketing overhaul, because this is exactly what linguistics consists of: describing the rules, many of them hidden and not obvious, of the human language ability. Given how eagerly word-nerds recently shared this tit-bit about adjective order on social media, the lecture-halls for linguistics classes should be crammed to the rafters.

There are hidden rules not just in grammar, but at every level of language production.

This implicit grammatical knowledge overwhelms, in its intricacy and depth, the relatively few rules that people must be consciously taught at school. But since the implicit stuff is hidden in plain sight, it gets overlooked. It is cheering to see that things like the adjective-order rule can go viral on social media. Perhaps it can make people more likely to associate “grammar” not with drudgery, but with fascinating self-discovery.

OSASCOMP in the news

OSASCOMP: Applied analysis is by far the most popular post on this blog.
Today OSASCOMP made, if not the front page of the Guardian, at least Tim Dowling's Reference and languages Notebook under the heading Order force: the old grammar rule we all obey without realising followed by:

I had no idea there was a specific order for adjectives until I read a viral post.

The viral post focussed on the following quote:

from  a book called The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth.

Extracts

The paragraph concerned the order of adjectives – if you’re using more than one adjective before a noun, they are subject to a certain hierarchy. You know it’s proper to say “silly old fool” and wrong to say “old silly fool”, but you might never have thought about why – or if you did you probably imagined it was just some time-honoured convention you picked up by rote. But it isn’t. There’s a rule.

Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots. 

In a piece for the BBC, ... Mark Forsyth examines a rare exception to the adjectival hierarchy: the Big Bad Wolf. Bad is opinion, and should therefore come first. However, as Forsyth points out, this phrase is too busy obeying another rule I’d never heard of: the rule of ablaut reduplication.

Other examples of the rule in action include chit-chat, singsong, flipflop and hip-hop. When you shift vowel sounds for effect this way, the vowels always follow a specific order: I, then A, then O.

If you’re a native speaker, the hierarchy is ingrained in you.

With moderation

Broadly I agree with everything both Dowling and Forsyth say and am very pleased to see that the topic is winning increased attention as it is often especially important to into-English translators and more particularly to those who translate technical journalism. I'm also pleased to have learned about the exception attributed to ablaut reduplication.

I would, however, like to make a couple of qualifying statements:

1. The statement "If you’re a native speaker, the hierarchy is ingrained in you" sometimes fails when the OSASCOMP categories are difficult to assign or the subject matter is beyond the writer's comfort zone (as occurs often when good into-English translators tackle subjects they don't fully understand). On other occasions, OSASCOMP-attentive readers will observe that even good writers do occasionally slip up for whatever reason.
2. For technical writers and translators, OSASCOMP is difficult to apply (a) because the categories are difficult or impossible to assign, or (b) because the challenge is to combine one or more adjectives with other types of qualifiers. This applies especially to noun qualifiers and things like prices or values combined with units of measurement as qualifiers.

Does '12-metre' before 'boat' or 'US$4-million' before 'ship' follow the rule as if it were a 'size' adjective?

I will follow this up with examples of (a) OSASCOMP slips by mother-tongue writers and journalists and (b) OSASCOMP challenges encountered in technical communication and the translation of technical journalism.

4 April 2017

Tweet:

Steven Pinker‏Verified account @sapinker  54m54 minutes ago54 minutes agoMoreOld language FAQ: Why Big black dog not Black big dog? New article, but answer goes back to 1950s "Vendler's Law."

English should have a word for ...

Here are two suggestions from The Atlantic's What Concept Most Needs a Word in the English Language? column:

We need a word for the mental suffering that results from someone else’s misuse of a word or phrase in one’s presence, the distress being magnified by an abiding sense of politeness that precludes correcting the other person—coupled with an intensifying melancholy about the confused changes that so many words are undergoing as a result of mass indifference to linguistic tradition. I suggest wordschmerz.
Bryan A. Garner, author, Garner’s Modern English Usage 

The fallacy of attributing every unfortunate outcome to deliberate intent,and neglecting the possibility of incompetence, unplanned by-products, or entropy.
Steven Pinker, author, The Blank Slate

Workflow for low-tech .doc or .docx to .idml, #2

Since posting Workflow for low-tech .doc or .docx to .idml in July, I have an opportunity to put my own suggested workflow into practice.

It's certainly a pity we didn't follow step 1 to the letter.
After laying out far too many Word documents in InDesign, we noticed that the non-breaking hyphens (aka NBHs or hard hyphens) had apparently disappeared in InDesign.

McKee (@MacKeyComp), author of Moving Text From Word to InDesign, explained that, when importing a Word document into InDesign, NBHs are not recognising as such. Indeed, in his testing, they are treated as Bookmarks. If you open the Bookmarks Panel, you’ll likely find Bookmarks with names like “_GoBack” in place of where the NBH was entered in Word. You can’t search for Bookmarks in InDesign’s Find/Change, but you can use the Bookmarks Panel to go right to it and enter it manually. It helps if you have Type > Show Hidden Characters on in InDesign.

Jamie also reminded me that, had I wanted to, I could also have made changes to the Word documents already drafted with NBHs all over the place using Word’s Find and Replace to search for “^~”.

The next step was to ask Stanislav Okhvat, the developer of TransTools, about batch processing Word files. He's planning on adding this capability to his product, but it's not available yet.
He suggested two options:

• a freeware Word add-in by Funduc Software (see here) for one replacement at a time in multiple files, and
• for multiple replacements according to a replacement list, try Batch Replacer for MS Word, a shareware product that neither Stanislav nor I have tested to date, but which looks promising.

Latest

Jamie's finding (Word NBHs become bookmarks) only applies, apparently to certain combinations of hardware and software on the different computers.

Tests I conducted showed that on other occasions Word NBHs simply disappear into the ether leaving the InDesign document with the hyphenated elements contiguous.

Such is life!

Anyone out there got any workarounds?

Le FMI juge incompréhensible le langage du gouvernement français

Thanks to Cath Cellier-Smart ‏@Smart_Translate  for flagging the following article in Le Figaro économie: 

Le FMI juge incompréhensible le langage du gouvernement français

One extended quote says it all:

Ces deux expressions (Crédit d'Impôt pour la Compétitivité et l'Emploi et Pacte de Responsabilité et de Solidarité) figurent bien sûr nommément dans le rapport d'une soixantaine de pages du FMI, mais elles n'ont pas été traduites en anglais. Et pourtant il s'agit de mots simples, «crédit, impôt, compétitivité, responsabilité, etc.». Leur équivalent anglais ne pose aucune difficulté. Il n'y a vraiment aucune complexité ni finesse littéraire qui serait impossible à retranscrire dans une autre langue. Mais les économistes de Washington ont préféré renoncer. Et on les comprend assez bien.

A quoi bon aurait servi de traduire «Pacte de responsabilité et de solidarité» par «Solidarity and Responsability Pact»? Le lecteur anglophone n'aurait pas mieux saisi ce que cela signifie dans sa langue, car cela ne veut en réalité rien dire. C'est de la langue de bois, ampoulée et opaque, qui ne se comprend pas mieux d'ailleurs en français qu'en anglais. Que veut dire «responsabilité», «solidarité» dans un tel accouplement? Il faut deviner les intentions, plus ou moins démagogiques, de leurs auteurs qui sont derrière. Mais à la lettre, de tels assemblages de mots n'ont aucun sens. De même la mélasse sémantique que renferme le CICE est incompréhensible et donc intraduisible.

Writing to impress rather than express I'd say!
Wonderful, however, that Le Figaro wrote this up in this way and agreed in full with the IMF's views.

For more information or to download the report entitled France: Selected Issues; IMF Country Report No. 16/228; June 24, 2016, go here.