Friends

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2009/11/fox-news-a-totally-legitmate-news-outlet-.html

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/7shWUwBseVQ/we_have_a_military_based_on_ch.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/we_have_a_military_based_on_ch.php

This is a charming local story for Veteran's day. The American Legion post in Bloomington has been doing a little ceremony at the public schools for 40 years, and has also been giving scholarships to students. Last year, they surprised the school by adding a public prayer to their ritual; this year, the school asked them not to do that. Guess what their reply was?

To announce in a snit that they wouldn't do the ceremony at all if they couldn't make it religious, and that they'd also take their scholarships away.

Nice.

They have every right to do that, of course. I would have thought that they gave out the scholarships because they cared about students and wanted to help them get a good education, but I guess I was mistaken: it was really a bribe to force them to listen to Christian propaganda.

"We are not trying to push anything on kids or convert them, but we are a Christian-based country and a military based on Christian-based principles," said Selle, who was an Army medic in Vietnam. "My opinion is that this is another example of America going downhill."

Well, gosh, then…I guess Mr Selle ought to make his patriotism conditional, too, and yank away his support for America if everyone doesn't say his Christian prayer with him. And they definitely are trying to push religion on kids, using their scholarships as a stick to compel them to obey.

I do wonder about this "military based on Christian-based principles" — do they turn the other cheek? Or are these those other Christian principles, the crusading ones that "did not come to bring peace, but a sword"?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1887

From Joel Stickley at how to write badly well:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1886

Thanks to Andrew Freer for pointing out to me that the BBC has published an article in connection with its Horizon documentary about "unlocking the mysteries of speech" (they have the usual tendency to confuse talk about language and talk about speech). Simon Kirby remarked to me this morning about the documentary (which I have not seen: Barbara and I do not have TV set):

From the point of view of an insider, it was quite bizarre in some respects. The editors pulled off the frankly extraordinary feat of making it seem that everyone in the field of language evolution basically agrees. That's quite an astonishing achievement. The way they managed to do this in part was by not including any explanation of why our experiment behaves the way it does. All I appear to do is describe what happens and marvel at the wonder of it all.

I promise you that I didn't forget to explain carefully exactly why it happens, and the implications of this for our understanding of language. I guess this got cut because it meant telling a more complex story where we don't all agree. I can appreciate the decision to produce a different kind of narrative, and perhaps they are right to do so. Better a clear story that isn't as rich as the full picture, than a confused audience, they probably thought.

We know, here at Language Log, that if ever you were exposed to a disagreement in linguistic science you would immediately become so confused you would start bumping into the furniture, so we try to shelter you from any hint of discord. Not.

Would any UK Language Log readers like to comment on the program? Comments are open.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1885

Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):

I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.

In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.

My own diagnosis is that Raban got carried away with his metaphorical alignment of landscapes and languages:

[R]eading, of the kind that Empson preached and practised, doesn’t stop at books, but makes the larger world legible.

Trying to understand the habitat in which we live requires an ability to read it – and not just in a loose metaphorical sense. Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming the place as their own, and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand for ever. Later over-writing has obscured all but a few, incompletely erased fragments of the earliest entries, but one can still pick out a phrase here, a word there, and see how the most recently dried layer of scribble is already being partially effaced by fresh ink.

The resulting overdose of cross-categorial enthusiasm leads him to imply that French and German are separated by a mere 400 years "difference in experience of the world". This is preposterous to start with, but it's a fitting foundation for the equally preposterous notion that American and British English words have become as different semantically as French words are from their German counterparts.

The landscape-is-language metaphor is familiar and by now almost banal, exploited for example by Baudelaire:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Turning this trope around into language-is-landscape has gotten people into much worse trouble than Raban's silly U.S.-English:U.K-English::French:German analogy. Consider this famous passage from Roland Barthes, "De l'œuvre au texte", 1971:

Le Texte n'est pas coexistence de sens, mais passage, traversée ; il ne peut donc relever d'une interprétation, même libérale, mais d'une explosion, d'une dissémination. Le pluriel du Texte tient, en effet, non à l'ambiguïté de ses contenus, mais à ce que l'on pourrait appeler la pluralité stéréographique des signifiants qui le tissent (étymologiquement le texte est un tissu) : le lecteur du Texte pourrait être comparé à un sujet désœuvré (qui aurait détendu en lui tout imaginaire) : ce sujet passablement vide se promène (c'est ce qui est arrivé à l'auteur de ces lignes, et c'est là qu'il a pris une idée vive du Texte) au flanc d'une vallée au bas de laquelle coule un oued (l'oued est mis là pour attester un certain dépaysement) ; ce qu'il perçoit est multiple, irréductible, provenant de substances et de plans hétérogènes, décrochés : lumières, couleurs, végétations, chaleur, air ; explosions ténues de bruits, minces cris d'oiseaux, voix d'enfants, de l'autre côté de la vallée, passages, gestes, vêtements d'habitants tout prés ou très loin ; tous ces incidents sont à demi identifiables : ils proviennent de codes connus, mais leur combinatoire est unique, fonde la promenade en différence qui ne pourra se répéter que comme différence. C'est ce qui se passe pour le Texte : il ne peut être lui que dans sa différence (ce qui ne veut pas dire son, individualité); sa lecture semelfactive (ce qui rend illusoire toute science inductive-déductive des textes : pas de "grammaire" du texte), et cependant entièrement tissés de citations, de références, d'échos: langages culturels (quel langage ne le serait pas ?), antécédents ou contemporains, qui le traversent de part en part dans une vaste stéréophonie.

Here's an English translation from Josue V. Harari, Textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism, 1979:

The Text is not coexistence of meanings but passage, traversal; thus it answers not to an interpretation, liberal though it may be, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The Text's plurality does not depend on the ambiguity of its contents, but rather on what could be called the stereographic plurality of the signifiers that weave it (etymologically the text is a cloth; textus, from which text derives, means "woven").

The reader of the Text could be compared to an ideal subject (a subject having relaxed his "imaginary"¹): this fairly empty subject strolls along the side of a valley at the bottom of which runs a wadi (I use wadi here to stress a certain feeling of unfamiliarity). What he sees is multiple and irreducible; it emerges from substances and levels that are hetereogeneous and disconnected: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, bursts of noise, high-pitched bird calls, children's cries from the other side of the valley, paths, gestures, clothing of close and distant inhabitants. All these occurrences are partially identifiable: they proceed from known codes, but their combination is unique, founding the stroll in difference that can be repreated only as difference. This is what happens in the case of the Text: it can be itself only in its difference (which does not mean its "individuality"); its reading is semelfactive (which renders all inductive-deductive sciences of texts illusory — there is no "grammar" of the text) and yet completely woven with quotations, references, and echoes. These are cultural languages (and what language is not?), past and present, that traverse the text from one end to the other in a vast stereophony.

fn 1 "Qui aurait détendu en lui tout imaginaire." Imaginary is not simply the opposite of real. Used in the Lacanian sense, it is the register, the dimension of all images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined.

Seems like a harmless little flight of poetic fancy? But this seductive collection of Heideggerian ideas has ruined most of literary analysis and much of social science for going on half a century. Raban's absurd exaggeration of trans-Atlantic linguistic divergence is nothing in comparison.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/XFr0XRs5VyM/ten_questions_to_ask_your_biol.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/ten_questions_to_ask_your_biol.php

Why is it always 10 questions? Couldn't they just ask one really good question? I'd prefer that to these flibbertigibbet deluges of piddling pointlessnesses that the creationists want to fling at us. I think it's because they want to make sure no one spends too much time showing how silly each individual question is.

A few years ago, Jonathan Wells came up with his 10 questions to ask your biology teacher — they were largely drawn from his book, Icons of Evolution, and they were awful — they were only difficult to answer if you knew nothing of the science and accepted the dishonest pseudoscience Well presented as "scholarship". NCSE has all the answers you need; I think they hoped to stump a few school teachers here and there by feeding students with a collection of questions the students wouldn't understand, but that might hit a few gaps in the teacher's knowledge.

Now Dembski and some guy named Sean McDowell have a new list of Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Intelligent Design. Once again, it's mislead-and-confuse time.

1. Design Detection If nature, or some aspect of it, is intelligently designed, how could we tell?

Design inferences in the past were largely informal and intuitive. Usually people knew it when they saw it. Intelligent design, by introducing specified complexity, makes the detection of design rigorous. Something is complex if it is hard to reproduce by chance and specified if it matches an independently given pattern (an example is the faces on Mt. Rushmore). Specified complexity gives a precise criterion for reliably inferring intelligence.

OK, so? Give me an independently specified pattern created by intelligent design to match against, say, a beetle. I can compare Lincoln's face on Rushmore to photos, paintings, and death casts of the real person's face, and can say that there's sufficient similarity on all details to rule out the possibility that Rushmore is a natural accident. Where's the design template for Odontolabis femoralis?

2. Looking for Design in Biology Should biologists be encouraged to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not?

Scientists today look for signs of intelligence coming in many places, including from distant space (consider SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Yet, many biologists regard it as illegitimate to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems. Why arbitrarily exclude design inferences from biology if we accept them for other scientific disciplines? It is an open question whether the apparent design in nature is real.

Nobody says you can't look for signs of design in biological systems; so do it already, creationists! Of course, you have yet to explain where you're going to find that independently given pattern that specifies Odontolabis femoralis. You haven't even explained yet what artificial/design mechanisms were used in the construction of that beetle. The natural explanation has the advantage that it only postulates mechanisms that we've seen to operate; we don't have to imagine a magical gene lathe operated by an invisible man.

I wouldn't encourage a grad student to waste his time looking for design in biology because the concept is so vaguely defined and so malformed to be useless. Productive science is about getting results, and I don't see any path given to generate useful data from this design hypothesis.

3. The Rules of Science Who determines the rules of science? Are these rules written in stone? Is it mandatory that scientific explanations only appeal to matter and energy operating by unbroken natural laws (a principle known as methodological naturalism)?

The rules of science are not written in stone. They have been negotiated over many centuries as science (formerly called "natural philosophy") has tried to understand the natural world. These rules have changed in the past and they will change in the future. Right now much of the scientific community is bewitched by a view of science called methodological naturalism, which says that science may only offer naturalistic explanations. Science seeks to understand nature. If intelligent causes operate in nature, then methodological naturalism must not be used to rule them out.

Who? Man, these guys have got intent and agency etched deep into their brain, don't they?

The rules of science are entirely pragmatic — we do what works, defined as a process that produces explanations that allow us to push deeper and deeper into a problem. That's all we care about. Show us a tool that actually generates new insights into biology, rather than recycling tired theological notions, and some scientist somewhere will use it. We're still waiting for one.

I am amused by the use of the word 'bewitched' to categorize people who don't invoke magical ad hoc explanations built around undetectable supernatural entities, however.

4. Biology's Information Problem How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems? What is the source of that information?

The central problem for biology is information. Living things are not mere lumps of matter. Life is special, and what makes life special is the arrangement of its matter into very specific forms. In other words, what makes life special is information. Where did the information necessary for life come from? Where did the information necessary for the Cambrian explosion come from? How can a blind material process generate the novel information of biological systems? ID argues that such information has an intelligent source.

We know that chance and selection can generate information. This is not a problem at all.

ID can argue that Bozo the Clown put the information there. It doesn't make it true.

5. Molecular Machines Do any structures in the cell resemble machines designed by humans? How do we account for such structures?

The biological world is full of molecular machines that are strikingly similar to humanly made machines. In fact, they are more than similar. Just about every engineering principle that we employ in our own machines gets used at the molecular level, with this exception: the technology inside the cell vastly exceeds human technology. How, then, do biologists explain the origin of such structures? How can a blind material process generate the multiple coordinated changes needed to build a molecular machine? If we see a level of engineering inside the cell that far surpasses our own abilities, it is reasonable to conclude that these molecular machines are actually, and not merely apparently, designed.

No, the molecules in cells do not resemble human-made machines, except in the sense that they use the forces of physics and chemistry to do work. I notice that our own machines do not require supernatural forces to explain them; why should cellular machinery demand them?

Notice the sleight of hand there: they say we see a "level of engineering" in cells, therefore they are designed. They beg the question. Cells are not engineered. We have an alternative explanation, that they are evolved, which does not require conjuring up unknown forces.

6. Irreducible Complexity What are irreducibly complex systems? Do such systems exist in biology? If so, are those systems evidence for design? If not, why not?

The biological world is full of functioning molecular systems that cannot be simplified without losing the system's function. Take away parts and the system's function cannot be recovered. Such systems are called irreducibly complex. How do evolutionary theorists propose to account for such systems? What detailed, testable, step-by-step proposals explain the emergence of irreducibly complex machines such as the flagellum? Given that intelligence is known to design such systems, it is a reasonable inference to conclude that they were designed.

"Irreducibly complex" systems exist in biology. The catch is that they can be easily generated by natural processes, and IC does not imply intent or design. We explain complex organelles like the flagellum by looking in the cell for related structures that show potential paths to the structure; we know of natural processes, like gene duplication, cooption and exaptation, and coevolution that can produce features that exhibit irreducible complexity in the final state.

That last sentence is a classic non sequitur. We know that human beings build penis-shaped objects; that does not imply that Bill Dembski's penis is made of silicone and has an on-off switch, let alone that someone made it in an injection-molding machine.

7. Similar Structures Human designers reuse designs that work well. Life forms also reuse certain structures (the camera eye, for example, appears in humans and octopuses). How well does this evidence support Darwinian evolution? Does it support intelligent design more strongly?

Evolutionary biologists attribute similar biological structures to either common descent or convergence. Structures are said to result from convergence if they evolved independently from distinct lines of organisms. Darwinian explanations of convergence strain credulity because they must account for how trial-and-error tinkering (natural selection acting on random variations) could produce strikingly similar structures in widely different organisms and environments. It's one thing for evolution to explain similarity by common descent--the same structure is then just carried along in different lineages. It's another to explain it as the result of blind tinkering that happened to hit on the same structure multiple times. Design proponents attribute such similar structures to common design (just as an engineer may use the same parts in different machines). If human designers frequently reuse successful designs, the designer of nature can surely do the same.

Camera eyes evolved independently multiple times because there are a limited number of ways to build an image-forming light-detection device. An eyeball with a light-sensitive sheet on the back (a retina) and a lens in front is a natural way to do it. When we look at the octopus and human eye, though, we also see a host of differences: the octopus eye has a more efficient retina that puts the light collectors at the front of the light path, and instead of channeling all the outputs from the photoreceptors into a single point that creates a blind spot, the output neurons project in a diffuse array out the back of the eyeball.

They also use different molecular pathways to generate a response — we have ciliary photoreceptors, they have rhabdomeric photoreceptors. Why, it looks as if both lineages have been carrying out blind tinkering to produce something functional, and the there are deep differences under the superficial similarities!

So, why didn't the designer use similar eyeball modules in humans and octopuses? You don't get to argue that the designer used the engineering principle of recycling similar modules in different lineages while ignoring the fact that there are substantial differences between those two kinds of eyes.

8. Fine-Tuning The laws of physics are fine-tuned to allow life to exist. Since designers are capable of fine-tuning a system, can design be considered the best explanation for the universe?

Physicists agree that the constants of nature have a strange thing in common: they seem precisely calibrated for the existence of life. As Frederick Hoyle famously remarked, it appears that someone has "monkeyed" with physics. Naturalistic explanations that attempt to account for this eerie fine-tuning invariably introduce entities for which there is no independent evidence (for example, they invoke multiple worlds with which we have no physical way of interacting). The fine-tuning of the universe strongly suggests that it was intelligently designed.

Oh, please. I'd be more impressed if the constants of nature were not calibrated for the existence of life, and we were here anyway. Now that would be eerie. That the universe has laws that are consistent with our existence does not in any way imply that it was designed.

9. The Privileged Planet The Earth seems ideally positioned in our galaxy for complex life to exist and for scientific discovery to advance. Does this privileged status of Earth indicate intelligent design? Why or why not?

Many factors had to come together on earth for human life to exist (chapter 9). We exist in just the right place in just the right type of galaxy at just the right cosmic moment. We orbit the right type of star at the right distance for life. The earth has large surrounding planets to protect us from comets, a moon to direct important life-permitting cycles, and an iron core that protects us from harmful radiation. Moreover, the earth has many features that facilitate scientific discovery, such as a moon that makes possible perfect eclipses. Humans seem ideally situated on the earth to make scientific discoveries. This suggests that a designer designed our place in the world so that we can understand the world's design. Naturalism, by contrast, leaves it a complete mystery why we should be able to do science and gain insight into the underlying structure of the world.

Isn't this the same concept as 'problem' 9? We belong to a scientific/technological society; it is unsurprising that we live on a world in which that is possible. Again, I'd be more baffled if the features of this planet conspired against scientific discovery, but we made them anyway.

10. The Origin of the Universe The universe gives every indication of having a beginning. Since something cannot come from nothing, is it legitimate to conclude that a designer made the universe? If not, why not?

For most of world history, scientists believed the universe was eternal. With advances in our understanding of cosmology over the last forty years, however, scientists now recognize that the universe had a beginning and is finite in duration and size. In other words, the universe has not always been there. Since the universe had a beginning, why not conclude that it had a designer that brought it into existence? Since matter, space, and time themselves had a beginning, this would suggest that the universe had a non-physical, non-spatial, and non-temporal cause. A designer in the mold of the Christian God certainly fits the bill.

Question begging again? Is this the only trick they know?

How do you know that something cannot come from nothing? Here, take an hour, and a physicist will explain that you can get a universe from nothing. Physics is stranger than creationists can imagine, and it's always irritating to see incompetent ignoramuses like Dembski and McDowell think they can bamboozle us by invoking a physics they don't understand.

(I showed this video before, so it may be familiar to you.)

The Christian god was a god-man who had a distinct and transient anthropoid form. I don't see how the origin of the universe in some kind of quantum foam points to a dead Hebrew rabbi.

Ho-hum. Another collection of bad questions that assume what they intend to demonstrate, and another uninteresting exercise in tired apologetics from the Discovery Institute con artists.

http://aldaily.com

Jane Austen was such a subtle reader of her characters' manners, flaws, and virtues, yet was herself a mysterious presence, hard to imagine in the flesh... more

The Peloponnesian War can be used to guide thinking about our own problems of peace and war, argues Donald Kagan. He might be right... more

After events like Fort Hood, why do public officials have to sound like college diversity deans? As though Americans will be hanging Muslims from lamp posts? Why not honesty? ... more ... more ... more

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/R2DDSTCFUV0/truth_is_paina_poll.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/truth_is_paina_poll.php

Apparently still smarting from the trouncing Catholics received from Hitchens and Fry, a site called Catholic Truth Scotland is trying to recoup some dignity…by running an online poll? We could tell them that that won't work.

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world

True [70.6%]
False [29.4%]

I fear those numbers are about to change in a way that will make them very unhappy.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1884

Answering a reader's question about somebody vs. someone, Arnold Zwicky speculated yesterday that "you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on".  In the comments, Jerry Friedman suggested that "the -one words all sound more formal to me than the -body words", and he provided some evidence in the form of the ratio of Google Books counts for the words themselves and for the words combined with albeit.

This is a great topic for a Breakfast Experiment™, and despite several overdue work-related commitments, I couldn't resist.

Fairly direct evidence is available from Mark Davies' COCA corpus, which shows (for example) that the ratio of somebody and everybody to someone and everyone is much greater in spoken transcripts than in academic writing:

The same thing is true in the British National Corpus:

There also appears to be a secular trend in favor of the __one forms. We can see this in apparent time in the the counts from the LDC's collection of transcribed telephone conversations:

Thus younger people have lower __body/__one ratios than older ones. The data in detail for somebody/someone:

And for everybody/everyone:

As usual, it's not clear whether this represents a linguistic change in progress, or a stable fact of individual life-cycle development. But in this case, we have some real-time evidence: the Time Magazine corpus at BYU suggests that it's a culture-wide lexicographical drift, with the relative frequency of somebody and everybody decreasing, relative to someone and everyone, roughly since the end of WW II:

The data from the BYU COCA corpus is also generally consistent with a trend away from the __body, details aside:

Thus in this case, contrary to the usual "kids today" dynamic, it seems that the language as a whole is moving in the direction of more formal registers.

Returning to the LDC conversational transcripts, I note that the tendency to generalize (at least using the words in this set) decreases with age: in the younger group, the ratio of (somebody+someone)/(everybody+everyone) is about 1.20; in the middle-aged group, it's 1.47; in the older group, it's 1.66. But in this case, the real-time trend in the Time Magazine corpus goes in the opposite direction — the relative frequency of the some__ words has been increasing:

On the basis of a quick scan in the LDC conversational transcripts, I didn't find very large effects of sex, educational level, or region: for example, the overall somebody/something ratio for males was 1.44, and for females 1.46. But the various demographic features are by no means orthogonally sampled, so it would be better to do a large multi-level regression in order to check on these effects.

Summing up:

In both the U.S. and the U.K., someone and everyone are more formal than somebody and everybody. Despite this, in the U.S. at least, someone and everyone are gaining overall market share relative to somebody and everybody. This is indicated by both apparent-time evidence in conversation (older people in the LDC conversational transcripts have relatively higher rates of __body usage) and real-time evidence in text (__body/__one ratios decline with publication date in both the Time Magazine corpus (with the trend visible from 1950 onwards) and (for a shallower time depth) in the COCA corpus.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1883

Reader David Landfair writes to ask about someone vs. somebody (and, by extension, other indefinite pronouns in -one vs. -body):

A friend was looking over something I'd drafted this morning and corrected "there's somebody here" to "there's someone here," citing a "rule" that someone is subjective case like he/she/who, while somebody is its objective case correlate. He couldn't cite any authority on this, not even Strunk & White, who seem to only mention someone in their verb agreement section.

I've never heard of this rule, and frankly, it seems preposterous, but I've been wrong before. Is there maybe a regional usage (or British?) that he might have grown up with or read somewhere? I had always thought that someone and somebody were universally identical in both meaning and grammar, with perhaps a preference for someone in more formal registers.

Well, yes, it is preposterous.

I'm not sure if we've talked about -one/-body here on Language Log — it's obviously hard to search for — but here's what MWDEU has to say:

Copperud 1980 has a curious note to the effect that it is a superstition that someone in preferable to somebody, and a similar notion is mentioned in Shaw 1987. Somebody and someone are of the same age, according to the OED, and when the OED came out, somebody was much better attested. In the 20th century, however, someone has come on strong, and we seem to have slightly more evidence now [1989] for someone than for somebody. But both, of course, are equally standard; use whichever you think sounds better in a given context.

You could check out corpus studies on the two sets of indefinite pronouns, and, as I recall, you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on. But these differences, however fascinating, represent ordinary sociolinguistic variation, not any kind of categorical distinction, much less one tied to syntactic function (subject vs. object, in particular).

My guess is that Landfair's friend had, somewhere along the line, been instructed by someone who believed, in the strongest possible way, that different variants must be strictly distinguished functionally, and had fixed on subject vs. object as the most obvious basis for a distinction (possibly influenced by case distinctions in the definite personal pronouns). So far as I can tell, there is absolutely no factual backing for this "rule", nor have I seen it advanced by any usage writer.

But if you really, really want there to be a rule, then this is the sort of thing you can end up with. Or you could, as MWDEU suggests, just go by your ear in cases like this.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/Ea1nX-7hc6k/mr_deity_and_death.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/mr_deity_and_death.php

It can't be that bad a job, can it?

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1249

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Brain saver" - originally published 11/9/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2009/11/randy-ingram-cd-launch-tonight-at-the-cornelia-st-cafe.html

Randy Ingram, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

My friend Randy Ingram's debut CD, The Road Ahead, is out today.

The CD launch is tonight at Cornelia St. Cafe - 8:30 PM.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/YYlXIr6JVMg/an_interesting_offer_from_aspe.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/an_interesting_offer_from_aspe.php

I had my doubts about this; I got an offer from ASPEX corporation to let people get free scanning electron micrographs of just about anything. They make a desktop SEM, and all you have to do is fill out a form and mail it in with your sample of a dead bug or a microchip or bacon, and presto, within a few weeks they'll have it scanned in and the image available on their website.

I asked them if they knew how many readers I have, and they said no problem, they can handle it.

Huh.

Well, you heard them. Scavenge your trash cans, dig into your local sources of vermin and oddments, and send them in. I'm thinking this could be really fun for any school teachers out there — you could have the whole class looking for interesting specimens to zoom in on. You can see their current galleries for ideas.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/O4ubklEw8WA/simmer_on_low_heat_stir_occasi.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/simmer_on_low_heat_stir_occasi.php

That's my recipe for dealing with crackpots; feel free to use it, it's easy.

You all may remember Vincent Fleury, the French fellow who ascribes developmental processes to swirls of cellular movement in development, who wrote a peculiar paper in a European journal of applied physics (which I mocked mercilessly), and who then went crying to fringe journalist Suzan Mazur, and then demanded withdrawal of my review and an apology. He's done it again. I just received a copy of a letter from France, which was also sent to the vice chancellor of academic affairs of my university, demanding that I be gently chastised. He claims he is the "victim of a fierce attack". If you really must know all the details, here are some scans of the letter.

Just a gentle hint for future complaints: the vice chancellor's name is Cheryl Contant, not "Content", and she should be addressed as Dr Contant, not Mrs Content. You're welcome.

Otherwise, there's nothing in his letters that I think needs to be answered.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1882

This story ("What's wrong with 'meep'? It's all in how you say it", 11/10/2009) comes from a real newspaper rather than from the Onion, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

[Phonetic and sociolinguistic update — As you can hear, Beaker's vocalizations are more like /mi/ than /mip/, though they are conventionally transcribed "meep":

Apparently the 'p' is silent.

As for Road Runner, his vocalizations are often transcribed "beep beep" (as here), but sound (and look) much more like "meep meep":

And as for the "disruption some students were planning online", there are several meep or meepmeep groups on Facebook, but none of them appear to pose a clear and present danger to the pedagogical environment of Danvers High School. But I gather that behind the scenes, social media were being used to plan mass meepage in the hallways, which might indeed threaten the mental equilibrium of an unpopular teacher, whose classroom door was apparently due to be the meepological epicenter prior to the principal's stern meeplomatic warning. I'm looking forward to the movie version.]

[Update #2 — there are some good jokes on this topic at jezebel.com, including reference to the dire possibility that young meepers may move on to harder stuff, like bork or manamana:

A commenter there also predicted t-shirts reading "Meep is murder".

The story has been picked up by UPI, but without any additional reporting. ]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/wB1MYrMEiAA/i_think_ill_cancel_my_boating.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/i_think_ill_cancel_my_boating.php

Larry Moran reminds us that today is an infamous day in the upper midwest.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/Pn9fca8jxKM/death_state_update.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/death_state_update.php

The sentencing of a convicted murder, Khristian Oliver, should be an embarrassment to the state of Texas; the jurors consulted the Old Testament to see what should be done with him, found a bible verse they liked — "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death" — and sentenced him to be executed.

Well, that was just fine with Governor Rick Perry. Oliver has been killed. Isn't it nice to have the importance of biblical morality affirmed for us once again?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/YeUsw3tn2bA/my_insane_weekend.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/my_insane_weekend.php

The mild nausea I mentioned earlier? Gone now, it seems to have vanished as soon as I disposed of the wretched rag Answers in Genesis sent me. It's a good thing, too, because I have a frantic weekend ahead of me.

Today and tomorrow, I'm pounding the keyboard to prepare a couple of talks. At least one I can borrow liberally from the book-in-progress (yeah, I'm still working on that, too).

On Thursday, I'll be giving a public lecture at Purdue University. I'm cutting it close on this one; my plane gets into Indianapolis a mere 2 hours before the talk, so if I'm late, feel free to leave scurrilous slanders on the blackboard for me. The talk is at 6:00 in the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall Room 224. It should be fun. My trip in is tricky in timing, but afterwards, my time is unrestrained, and I think we're getting together to shoot the breeze that evening. If you're somewhere near West Lafayette, Indiana, stop on by.

On Friday, I'll be at this evo-devo meeting:

This is not a public event, but a serious science conference with registration fees and all that. It should be fabulous, even if it does have some nattering nobody for a keynote speaker. Expect heavy real-time science blogging all day Saturday and Sunday morning. I might get out for a wild night in Bloomington on Saturday, though, we'll see.

Finally, on Monday, I'm lowering myself from the glories of real science to a debate with a flaming creationist on the St Paul campus at 7:30pm. Show up! I'm sure the creationists will be trundling in their bible-clutching faithful to boo, even though the subject is nothing about god or religion — it's simply "Should intelligent design creationism be taught in the schools?" The answer is "no," if you're at all confused.

Tuesday I'm sleeping in late. Don't bother me.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1880

A few weeks ago, we featured Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty, authors (according to Google Scholar) of The Linguistics of Laughter:

Now, thanks to research by Steven Landsburg and Aaron Mandel, we're proud to introduce you to the prolific writer "Ass Meat Research Group", who is listed at amazon.com as the author of 88 books:

His (their?) frequent collaborators include  "Frozen Horse", who has written 23 books, and "Chilled and Frozen Hors the Fresh", who has written 24. The same circle of writers includes Sheep the Edible Offals of Bovi, and a number of others; we leave the full analysis of this social network to future literary scholars.

Steven's post explains how (most of) this probably happened.  It's clear that there's still some room for improvement in algorithms for automatically parsing biographical records.

[Update: this one has been rattling around the blogosphere for a few years, unknown to me — interesting to see that it still hasn't been fixed.]