Pater Familias

“COAT-TRAILING”.

Philip — Sun, 19 May 2013 23:52:41 +0000

“COAT-TRAILING”. My father used to tell us every St. Patrick’s Day about our ancestor who kept a long coat which reached the ground and which he wore only on St. Patrick’s Day. He would walk the streets of Chicago until somebody, in my father’s words, “stepped on the tail of me coat. And then he’d start a fight.”

On the last page of the TLS for May 3, J.C. answers a letter from an American, who says: “For the second time in two weeks I have encountered ‘coat-trailing’ in the TLS. Is this a Britishism? What does it mean?” One of those previous TLS usages referred to some one with a grievance who had a “coat-trailing manner”. J.C. looks the word up in Chambers and finds: “trail one’s coat (tails) (orig. Irish) to be aggressive, pick a quarrel” J.C. concludes: “Not a Britishism, but an Irishism.”

THE “SHORTAGE” OF TOILET PAPER IN VENEZUELA.

Philip — Sat, 18 May 2013 23:50:27 +0000

THE “SHORTAGE” OF TOILET PAPER IN VENEZUELA. I posted here six years ago about Venezuela’s use of price controls and pointed out that “shortages and price controls are two sides of the same coin.” This article in USAToday by Peter Wilson describes the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela. Wilson says: “Venezuelans have grown accustomed to food shortages over the past decade as the result of the country’s foreign exchange and price controls.” He lists some of the products for which there have been shortages in Venezuela in the last ten years, including milk, butter, tooth paste, sugar, and soap. Now it’s the price of toilet paper that’s too low to clear the market.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BARK.

Philip — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:07:59 +0000

THE IMPORTANCE OF BARK. It was surprising to see the word “bark” in the list of words that survived because they were used frequently. David Brown cites the explanation given by Mark Pagel, who headed the study which arrived at the list of 23 words. Pagel says that anthropologists say that: “…bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers….Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation and consumed as medicine.” Of course. Bark must have been important. The word evokes a way of life.

THE 23 WORDS THAT MAY BE 15,000 YEARS OLD.

Philip — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:43:43 +0000

THE 23 WORDS THAT MAY BE 15,000 YEARS OLD. This analysis in the Washington Post by Wilson Andrews and David Brown graphically presents the 23 words that researchers have identified as “ultraconserved”, having persisted approximately 15,000 years. Cognates for these words—words with roughly the same sound and meaning— can be found (after projecting backwards in time) in at least four of seven major language groups. Words that are used a lot are more likely to persist. Here are the words:

thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

HOW LONG DO WORDS LAST?

Philip — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:54:46 +0000

HOW LONG DO WORDS LAST? Lee Bryant sent me this article by David Brown in the Washington Post about the persistence of words. Researchers have taken the controversial position that they have identified 23 words that have survived for 15,000 years. The position is controversial because most historical linguists don’t think you can go that far back. In this article in the Guardian, Ian Sample says: “Most words have a 50% chance of being replaced by an unrelated term every 2,000-4,000 years.”

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF “SWELL”.

Philip — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:41:59 +0000

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF “SWELL”. Megan Garber’s article called my attention to a wonderful resource, the Corpus of Historical American English, which can be found here. The Corpus is a data base of 400 million words. You can use it to find the frequency of word usage in each of the 20 decades in the Corpus (1810s-2000s). As an example, I posted here about how I once said to a friend who was going on vacation: “Have a swell time” and was met with gales of laughter. I recognized that my use of “swell” came from my father and that his use of “swell” came from his youth. Using the Corpus for “swell” leads to a chart which shows that “swell” was used 1.08 times per 1 million words in 1870. Its use per million words rose to 5.42 from 1910 (when my father was 7) to 1920 (when my father was 17); rose to a peak of 19.51 in the 1930′s; and fell to below 1.60 from 1980 to 2010.

IS “WHOM” DOOMED?

Philip — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:01:40 +0000

IS “WHOM” DOOMED? Megan Garber had an article in the March Atlantic about the future of “whom”. Google’s collection of digitized books shows that the use “whom” has been declining since 1826. Says Garber: “Articles in Time magazine included 3,352 instances of whom in the 1930s, 1,492 in the 1990s, and 902 in the 2000s. Garber concludes: “Whom…is doomed.” One reason that Garber gives for the decline of “whom” is that people are unsure of correct usage and so avoid it. Garber thinks that the most important reason for the decline of “whom” is that informality is increasingly valued in prose, and “whom” is inconsistent with a conversational tone.

COMPETITIONS AMONG WINE TEAMS.

Philip — Sun, 12 May 2013 04:06:46 +0000

COMPETITIONS AMONG WINE TEAMS. Lettie Teague in the Wall Street Journal (May 10) had an article about the competition in wine expertise that will take place in Bordeaux in June among teams from universities from all over the world. The prize is the Left Bank Bordeaux Cup. (The Left Bank is not the one in Paris, but the one in Bordeaux, where the Gironde River separates important vineyards). The team from Yale Law School beat out teams from Stanford, Wharton, Columbia and Harvard to qualify for the finals. Sample questions that teams will have to answer in blind tastings require the identification of the vintage or the subregion of wines. Yesterday’s post about wine experts is fun, but I know there is wine expertise and that there are people who derive great enjoyment from the subtleties of wine. I know some of them.But I am happy enough with my own ignorance.

WINE EXPERTS FAILING TESTS.

Philip — Sat, 11 May 2013 20:20:10 +0000

WINE EXPERTS FAILING TESTS. Here is the link to the post on the io9 blog that Nick sent me (Lee Bryant sent me a link to a similar, but shorter, blog post one day earlier.) The post describes failures by wine experts in various tests. Here are two of them:

Test “A” was a blindfold test consisting of three tastings—from the same bottle of wine! Says the post: “Incredibly, the judges’ ratings for the tastings [of the same wine] typically varied by ±4 points on a standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100.”

Test “B” was the Frederic Brochet test from 2001 in which he sought opinions from 54 wine experts on the merits of two glasses of wine—one white and one red. The trick was that the wines were the same; the red wine was the white wine with food coloring added. None of the 54 experts noticed that the “red wine” was actually a white wine.

“TO BE A HEDONIST WITH BAD TASTE…”

Philip — Fri, 10 May 2013 23:52:36 +0000

“TO BE A HEDONIST WITH BAD TASTE…” Nick sent us a link with the caption “A Validation Of Dad’s Philosophy On Wine”. I knew what he had in mind before I opened the link. I know little about wine. (For that matter I once read a quote from a marketing executive for either Coke or Pepsi that almost half the people in the country can tell Coke and Pepsi apart; I am one of those who can’t.) I know that Nick remembers the times I have said to the family that I am happy enough not to be able to make subtle discriminations among wines, that it’s a good thing for anybody “to be a hedonist with bad taste”. It’s a lot easier to find things that please you.

CHANGING THE RISK-REWARD RATIO FOR BIG HITS.

Philip — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:05:33 +0000

CHANGING THE RISK-REWARD RATIO FOR BIG HITS. Nicholas Cotsonika had a follow up article on hockey’s new system for imposing penalties. Cotsonika says that it is now risky to make a high hit because of the greater risk of being suspended. He argues that even if you think your hit is legal, the risk of being penalized is too great to make it worthwhile. Since I believe that intent should not be a factor in assessing penalties, I was pleased to see this quote from the Detroit Red wing coach on trying to cut down on head injuries: ” I don’t think it has anything to do with intent. Did you hit him in the head, or did you not hit him in the head?”

The success of the NHL efforts is shown from this quote from a defenseman: “”The risk-reward of trying to make that huge hit just isn’t there….There’s no point.” Interestingly, the quote implicitly acknowledges that for many years, the risk-reward ratio did favor the big hit.

WHAT HOCKEY GETS RIGHT ABOUT DANGEROUS PLAYS.

Philip — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:54:51 +0000

WHAT HOCKEY GETS RIGHT ABOUT DANGEROUS PLAYS. This article by Nicholas Cotsonika about the thought process underlying a penalty imposed on a player for an illegal check which caused an injury illustrates several things that the National Hockey League does that other sports should imitate.

First, there is an explanation of why the penalty is imposed. The league disciplinarian in this case gave an explanation on a “suspension video”.

Second, if an injury occurs as a result of an illegal action, then the severity of the injury is taken into account in imposing the penalty. Other sports do not take the seriousness of an injury into consideration, but in life outside of the arena, we take for granted that the extent of harm affects the extent of liability. (For example, a punch is thrown. If the victim strikes his head on pavement and dies, the liability is greater than if the victim lands on soft ground.) This gives a player an incentive to avoid dangerous plays that can injure another player.

Third, if there is an injury, an absence of intent to injure is not a complete defense. In this case, Cotsonika discusses how the player received a two game suspension even though his check was borderline illegal and another player who deliberately elbowed an opponent in the head received only a one game suspension. The injury here consisted of “a broken nose, facial fractures and a concussion”, warranting a two game suspension (hockey is a dangerous sport).