The Conversation tweeted about an article way back in 2018, when things like the World Cup still happened, and included the phrase could have costed (it's also in the article itself):
Watching the #WorldCup during working hours could have costed as much as US$10.4 billion in lost production time (in 2010).
In Standard English that would be could have cost – cost is irregular and has cost as its past participle as well as the bare form. In fact, costed isn't even the simple past tense of this version of the verb, as that's also cost:
It costs
Present
It cost
Past
It has cost
Perfect
and so on.
I say 'this version of the verb' because there's another version of cost that does have costed as the past tense: the one that means 'estimate the price of' rather than 'have a price of', as in We costed the new plans and decided that they were not viable. So there is this form costed that exists, and that you might have heard just as recently as the form cost, and you might reach for that when you're looking for the relevant form to follow the perfect auxiliary have. And then that makes it nice and similar to all the other regular verbs like could have washed, could have dusted, could have wasted, etc.
I predicted that this mistake would be much less likely to occur with did instead of could have. While could have requires the past participle (actually it's have that requires it, so you'd also get it has lasted us ten years, and by extension possible it has costed us a fortune), did doesn't – it requires the bare form of the verb: Did it last long? rather than Did it lasted long? and so presumably you would expect Did it cost a lot rather than Did it costed a lot?
Well, never make predictions about what kind of variation people will produce. I'll leave the actual numbers to someone else, but a google search for "did it costed" brings up results, and not just people asking if it's correct to say that (though they're the top hits). There are also examples where it's used as the simple past form, as in I wonder how much that upgrade costed.
It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.
Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.
In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:
OMG ikr Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday
I'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:
a vocative (Yo dude)
subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
question inversion (r u rather than u r)
a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
present tense (r rather than were)
progressive aspect (coming)
pre-verbal adverbial (still)
knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)
It also has 100% correct spelling, if one allows that r u is an abbreviation rather than an error.
Update: Since I wrote this, there's been more discussion on Twitter, with some people thinking that linguists just don't want other academics stepping on their toes. That's definitely not the case! Other suggestions are that linguists have been trained to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything Sapir-Whorfian. That probably is true for a lot of people (including me, actually, which is why I try to be aware of that), but I hope it's clear below that that isn't my problem with this article.
There has also been an open letter started and signed by many linguists asking for the paper to be retracted. I think this is a mistake; there is nothing fraudulent or ethically wrong about the paper. It's just not a very good paper, in a not very good journal. Asking for it to be withdrawn sounds a bit like censorship to me. The review process is where crappy work should be stopped, and that process failed here, so it's worth bringing that to the journal's attention, but seeing as this publicity will have brought them many more readers I doubt they're too bothered about fixing it for the future.
Anyway, here's the post as I wrote it before I thought about all these things.
===
Linguists love it when economists do linguistics. Linguist Twitter was a super fun place to be when this article came out. It argues that languages that can leave out pronoun subjects (like Spanish), are spoken by people that have lower levels of education due to their more collectivist culture. I know right?
The thing is, it's actually not unreasonable to write articles like this. There are a lot of very credible papers that show that our attitudes are easily influenced by factors like what our language encodes. There's ones about noun gender affecting how elegant or sturdy we think bridges are, directionality affecting our ability to orient ourselves in our environment, and so on. And psychological experiments seem to show that it only takes a bit of a reminder that we're female to make us do worse on maths tests, etc. Some of these studies maybe are not as robust as they look, and I don't know about the reliability of the psychology ones, but the point is they are by linguists and psychologists and they look credible. So why wouldn't you write an article showing how some facet of language influences your behaviour?
Well, perhaps if you're not only not a linguist, but you also don't know anything about language and don't ask anyone who does, and you don't do it very well.
I don't know the economics dataset that the author uses, but I do know the linguistics dataset very well. It's the World Atlas of Language Structures, which I love very much. This author, Feldmann, uses it because it "provides the most authoritative information on a large number of languages". It does indeed cover a large number of languages, but there is no reason to say it is "the most authoritative". It's compiled from published grammars. Many of those are careful, detailed, accurate descriptions of the language; others are a hundred years old, written by someone who didn't necessarily have much linguistic training. You have to be careful and check those sources out. His only reason for saying it's "authoritative" is that an economics reference says it is, using that same word, and then he cites them with a glaring error in a Spanish example ("yo ablo").
Another thing is that it doesn't control for languages being closely related unless you ask it to, and to do that you need the CD-ROM version, not the online free version, and there's not indication of the method the author used so we don't know if he did that. He just says that he looked at 103 languages. 711 have this information in the free version; I can no longer use my CD-ROM copy as I don't have a CD drive in my computer any more :( so I don't know what subset he took. For example, if you take all the languages spoken in Northern Europe, it's not so surprising if most of them require pronominal subjects, because they're all related. It's better to take a genus of language to avoid skewing your results. Maybe he did this; we don't know.
His citation is poor; his linguistic sources are old or eccentric or missing or simply odd choices. They look like the citations of someone who hasn't read the linguistics literature or asked anyone who has. He doesn't give any sources at all for his claims about collectivist cultures not wanting girls to be educated, which is a big claim and one that really needs backing up.
Go ahead; make claims about culture based on linguistics. They don't tend to stand up to much scrutiny, but maybe yours will. But don't exoticise those people because of it, and don't base those claims on superficial data with no referencing or linguistic research.
I wrote a piece for The Conversation recently, which I'm reposting here just in case you haven't seen it yet.
Language: 'untranslatable' words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures
Say what?
ShutterstockLaura Bailey, University of Kent
When the word “hygge” became popular outside Denmark a few years ago, it seemed the perfect way to express the feeling of wrapping yourself up in a crocheted blanket with a cosy jumper, a cup of tea and back-to-back episodes of The Bridge. But is it really only the Danes, with their cold Scandinavian evenings, who could have come up with a word for such a specific concept? And is it only the Swedes who could have needed the verb “fika” to describe chatting over a coffee?
The internet abounds with words that lack a single-word English equivalent. In order to be really lacking an English equivalent, it must be a single, indivisible unit of meaning, as phrases are infinitely productive and can be created on demand by combining different words. Take, for example, the claim by Adam Jacot de Boinod in I Never Knew There Was A Word For It, that Malay has a word for the gap between the teeth that English lacks: “gigi rongak”. Well, this appears to be a phrase, and it translates literally as the perfectly cromulent English phrase “tooth gap”.
In fact, English even has a single-word technical term for a gap between the teeth: “diastema”. Okay, that’s actually a Greek word, but it’s in use in English, so it’s also an English word. Does that matter?
Where we get our words from tells us something about our history. Take, for instance, Quechua – the language spoken by people indigenous to the Andes and the South American highlands. The Quechuan word for “book” is “liwru”, which comes from the Spanish word “libro”, because Spanish colonisers introduced written forms of language to the people they conquered. In fact, English does now have a word for “hygge” – it’s “hygge”.
Cultures in language
It is often said that Eskimos have 50 words for snow, but it’s a myth that has been comprehensively dismantled, probably first of all by Laura Martin in 1986. “Eskimo” is a somewhat meaningless term anyway, but the structure of the languages spoken by peoples such as the Inuit or Aleut in the Arctic Circle are very synthetic, meaning that each “word” may comprise many parts or “morphemes”.
Entire phrases can be contained within words in these languages – a single “word” may literally mean “fallen snow”. For that reason, “having 50 words for snow” in these languages is about as remarkable as having 50 sentences to talk about snow in English.
The ‘50 words for snow’ fallacy is a perfect example of misreading a culture.Shutterstock
And yet the myth and others like it snowball, because we are fascinated by the idea that language reveals something about our psyche – or perhaps even determines it. The economist Keith Chen has devoted some considerable effort to demonstrating that speakers of languages that grammatically encode the future and the present separately behave more recklessly with respect to their health and money. He argues that it shows that overt future tense marking makes a speaker more aware of the future as a separate time from the present and thus more distant, which has a corresponding effect on behaviour.
Many linguists have some reservations about his conclusions, but the main claim hit the news and people were intrigued by the idea.
False cultural judgements
While careful experimentation has shown that having words for concepts makes them easier or faster to name, it is not true that lacking a concept means you cannot conceive of it, and vice versa. For instance, many languages have gender-neutral pronouns (the same word is used for he and she) but are spoken in cultures with very poor levels of gender equality.
This might seem obvious – it’s Orwell’s Newspeak (from 1984) in action. In Orwell’s dystopia, the word “free” was stripped of all meaning of individual freedoms and could be used only in the sense of a dog being free from lice, which in turn was supposed to remove the ability of the citizens of Oceania to conceive of such freedom. But it is not just science fiction. There is an important note of caution that linguists are always aware of: making claims about other cultures risks “exoticising” them.
A mural depicting indigenous people in Arizona.Shutterstock
At worst, this results in racism. The Hopi people of Arizona, who are sometimes claimed to have no way to express time based on a misunderstanding of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work on their language, were assumed by some to be incapable of following bus timetables or arriving at work on schedule, a mistaken belief that led to obvious problems.
But even an apparently benign conclusion about how some Australian languages encode space with compass directions (“north”) rather than ego-relative position (“my left-hand side”) suggests English speakers often miss out on knowledge about language and cognition because they are busy measuring things against an arbitrary English-centric benchmark. Different language conventions are usually not exotic or unusual; it’s just that English speakers come from a position of very great privilege because their language is the default. People who speak other languages are seen as different, as outsiders.
I’m not a total killjoy. I still delight in “untranslatable” words. It’s something special to learn a word and along with it make concrete a nebulous but recognisable concept like hygge, or indeed its wonderfully chilling opposite, uhygge. I just suggest a position of healthy scepticism when you meet claims that a language has “no word for X” or “50 words for Y”, or, as the internet recently got excited about, that “tag” stands for “touch and go” (sorry folks, it doesn’t). Laura Bailey, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, University of Kent
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Or not. As usual it's a Daily Mail article ranting about something that has no substance and which it knows nothing about in any case. It's published an article saying that using Twitter and Facebook make girls, especially, speak in a 'curt' manner with 'terser sentences'. Actually, it doesn't even say that. It says that this phenomenon applies to young people's languge generally, but that it's more evident in girls because they 'communicate more'. Oh, and it's not a linguist who's said that, it's Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign (no, no idea what it's got to do with them - they campaign for removing jargon and legalese from public communication).
We should be clear: before I point out that this claim has no basis, the Mail basically does that itself by using the phrases 'it is claimed' and 'research shows', but never actually saying who claims it or what research it was. The Telegraph is even worse, repeating the story by quoting the Daily Mail, and saying 'experts believe'. All of this is clear indication that the journalist or some news/publicist person has made it up.
Let's begin. Citing Twitter and Facebook as being the culprits of degrading young people's language is dubious to start with. Young people use other types of online communication far more than these largely adult media. What you mean is 'whatever online communication young people use these days'.
Using 'terser sentences' or being 'curt' may well make a person appear 'aggressive'. But what are the measures by which these girls' speech is being judged as 'terser' or 'curt'? Shorter, maybe? Than what?
Marie Clair says this:
To any outsider, there aren’t those pleasantries that there were when you wrote a letter to someone.
No - because we've all worked out that it's a bit daft writing 'yours sincerely' in a facebook comment. It's all about register. If these girls don't know how to write a letter properly, well, that's another problem and one that should be addressed, but it's not Twitter's fault.
Apparently girls 'communicate more than males'. Well, I've no idea if that's true. Seems like one of those claims that doesn't really stand up, but maybe it's true. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say it is. (Still doesn't excuse the use of 'males' when she means 'boys'. They're not animals.) But I think 'Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford' (gasp! they asked an expert!) is more likely to be right when she says, in a different part of the article,
The teenage years are a period of life where you find linguistic innovations of all kinds, and girls are generally ahead of the curve. People often put down as ‘girls’ language’ something that’s actually going to spread through the whole speech community.
The article also says this:
Professor Cameron said it could be right that teenagers’ language styles in general are getting more aggressive, however there is no ‘hard evidence’ of this at present. Hard-core swearing is still most associated with adolescent and young adult, working class males.
So what she basically said was 'no, there is no evidence for this claim'. Which actually entirely contradicts the whole message of the article, but what the hell, let's include it anyway - no one will notice (and actually the commenters don't notice).
Anyway, let's all calm down with this article which says that there is no evidence that texting harms spelling, and might even be good for it, and this one in which Carol Ann Duffy says texting is good for poetry.
There's been a Marmite spill on the M1. This has led to many, many jokes about sending soldiers to clean it up, etc. The way that Independent article reported it though was a bit odd.
Now, for what follows you need to know that Marmite is a spread, and its generic name (i.e. what the supermarkets have to call their own brand) is 'yeast extract'. It's apparently similar to Australian Vegemite, but not to NewZealand Marmite, which has a different flavour, according to Wikipedia. It is a very dark brown, sticky goo and has a very strong flavour. I can't really describe the flavour but it's what they use to make roast beef flavour crisps. It's basically pure umami and I love it, but their slogan in 'Love it or hate it' because some people can't stand it. My mother won't have it in the house. At my grandma's 90th birthday party earlier this year, me and my dad and my uncles and cousins were all standing around eating Marmite on toast and I think my mother left the room and started thinking about disowning us.
So, what the Independent said was this:
A large-scale clean-up operation is under way after a tanker carrying more than 20 tonnes of yeast extract - believed to be Marmite - overturned on a busy motorway.
So it is probably Marmite, OK? But later in the article they quote the South Yorkshire police spokeswoman:
We were called at 10.15pm yesterday to reports of a tanker, which was carrying 23.5 tonnes of waste yeast, overturning.
Now it's waste yeast? Marmite was originally a by-product of the brewing industry. This means that technically, it's not much different from waste yeast. But it is different, in the crucial sense that you can't just eat waste yeast, and I imagine that there is a fairly complicated (but secret) manufacturing process to obtain one from t'other.
Newspaper articles often end up using a lot of synonyms or near-synonyms because they value variety of expression over clarity. This can lead to phrases like 'the busty blonde, 23' or 'the former banker' which, while adding extra information, are often superfluous. I think that's what's caused the problem here. But waste yeast and Marmite are NOT synonyms. As Lynneguist said over on Twitter:
Britain, a land where 'waste yeast' and 'food' can be considered synonyms
Anyway, to finish all this up, here's Nigella's Marmite spaghetti recipe, which is surprisingly delicious (though you do have to like Marmite; it's not going to convert any haters):
Cook spaghetti.
Melt 50g butter and Marmite (as much as you like - a big spoonful or so) and add the drained pasta.
She suggests serving with parmesan - we didn't have any and it's fine without, but adding it would add to the immense umami overkill.
Normally when I write of linguistics being in the news, what I mean is that there is a news item with a linguistic angle that I can write about, or that some news item is about language and I can discuss the 'proper' linguistics behind it. This time, the BBC has attempted a genuine linguistics item.
David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster seems to have put his foot in it yet again. After he got into a spot of bother at Jamie's Dream School by insulting one of his teenage pupils in what seemed a largely unprovoked attack, he's done it again, and worse this time.
He was on BBC2's Newsnight, and gave an odd speech saying that he thought the problem was that "the whites have become black", and that the fact that young people are using "this wholly false language" of Jamaican patois means that this is "a foreign country". Here's Geoff Pullum at Language Log to deal with this properly.
They call the police 'feds', obviously borrowed from US TV and films, where it's been used for ages to refer to the FBI. Of course they know the metropolitan police are not the FBI, but the term seems to have been adopted and broadened to refer to police officers.
They talk of defending your 'yard', apparently a West Indian term for your home (presumably after the government yards in trenchtown, as sung about by Bob Marley, and the origin of the term 'yardie'). The BBC attributes this mix of slang to Multicultural London English, a mixture of the cultures that are either found in the city or enter consciousness through the media.
There are two terms cited that I don't know at all:
Another, widely reported in the aftermath of the chaos, urged everyone to "up and roll to Tottenham [expletive] the 5-0". There were myriad references as well to the "po po".
Is 'the 5-0' a reference to Hawaii 5-0? Seems unlikely somehow, given how long ago that was on TV, but Urban Dictionary tells me this is the correct derivation.
'Po po' I'd never heard, but the BBC article says it's from The Wire. I've never seen The Wire, because I'm an idiot, and because I was busy watching Battlestar Galactica when it was on, so there's a lot of Baltimore street slang that I'm not aware of. This is my own failing, and I freely admit it. Urban dictionary just says it means police, though one entry does suggest that it means 'pissed off police officer'. I'm not sure I'm buying that, though; it smacks of folk etymology.
The Guardian newspaper has an article about the word the media is using for the rioters currently causing havoc in some of the UK's cities. I used the word 'rioters' - it seems quite neutral to me, as they are undoubtedly rioting. But the controversy the Guardian describes (or creates?) is over the use of the term 'protesters'.
Apparently the BBC was calling them protesters early in the proceedings, and this is fair enough because after the first night, it still seemed like it was a protest that had gone too far. It began over the shooting by police of a man called Mark Duggan, a shooting which we still know nothing about (why it happened, whether it was unlawful etc.) because it's still being investigated by the IPCC so no one can talk about it. Some people in Tottenham took to the streets in protest, and somehow it became a rioting-and-looting.
This has since escalated, and on the second night it was clear that people weren't protesting about this shooting, they were just taking the opportunity to loot shops of expensive clothes and electronics. You don't protest about a shooting that you don't know anything about by stealing yourself a new hifi. And they came out dressed for crime, in balaclavas and so on.
So, not protesters then - now they're definitely rioters.
By the third night, things had really got scary. Police stations in Nottingham had been petrol-bombed, shops in several cities had been emptied of all their stock, burnt out, and otherwise destroyed. People were terrified. In Salford they shut the shops on the fourth day and boarded up the windows, because they were scared of being looted and burnt down.
So - are they now terrorists? Some Tweeters have being saying so, but that's Twitter: you can always rely on finding some nutters to quote. Other choice terms include 'scum', 'thugs', 'criminals' and so on. 'Criminals' is certainly accurate, as there's no doubt crimes have been committed. Hundreds of people have been arrested and many charged. The UN, as the Guardian says, defines terrorism as:
"acts ... designed to create a state of terror in the minds of a particular group of people or the public as a whole for political or social ends". (The UN also makes clear that "having a good cause" makes no real difference).
Whether there's a deliberate aim to create a state of terror or not, I don't think it's for 'political or social ends' (vague as that is, I don't think wanting free stuff counts as social ends). You could say it's making a point against the police, because people feel like they have no rights or whatever, but it seems like that's an excuse for a lot of these people. They do hate the police, but this isn't an organised campaign, just an opportunity to cause trouble. Not terrorists then.
The media all seem to have settled on 'rioters' as a name which is accurate (unlike 'protesters' and 'terrorists') and not subjective or heavily value-laden (like 'thugs' or 'scum').
I'm sure this is just a case of very bad reporting. I'm sure that this scientist is not crazy.
The link is to a Sarawak Star article about a Dr Francine Neago, who wants to set up a centre to teach language skills to orang utans. Nothing new here, no. But the article says things like "Dr Neago said it would take a few months for the orang utan to learn English", and "tests had proven that a primate could acquire sign language and phonetic spelling skills". She clearly doesn't mean that tests have shown that a primate can fully acquire language, as it then says "she taught a one-year-old orang utan named Bulan to express itself through the computer by learning to use up to 150 words", and 150 words is not 'sign language'. But this really is quite spectacularly sloppy reporting, even for a local paper.
The Daily Mail has a story today about a Hollyoaks actress who learnt sign language after her father, who was deaf, died. It's a nice story, she wanted to help others who suffered as he did from being unable to communicate easily, so she qualified as a BSL interpreter.
But the caption under the photo is bizarre:
Handy skill: Actress Rachel Shenton signs learned sign language after her father became death
It says "Actress Rachel Shenton signs learned sign language after her father became death".
The first weirdity, "signs learned sign language", is almost understandable - she is signing the sign language that she has learnt. But, I mean, obviously she learnt it, you don't need to distinguish between learned and unlearned sign language, usually. Seems like a straightforward cut-and-paste fail: they started out saying what she's signing, and then changed it to "learned sign language" and just botched it.
The second weirdity is interesting: "after her father became death". Now you might think it's just a simple substitution of "death" for "deaf" - it means after her father became deaf. But in fact, she didn't learn it after he lost his hearing; she learnt it after he died. So it really does mean death. But you can't say that he "became death", of course. So what's happened here? Did the sub-editor think to themselves, "no, it was after he died, not after he became deaf", and then have a total language malfunction? Is it really a typo and just a coincidence that it reflects the facts? Either way, I think I shall refer to people becoming death instead of dying from now on.
By the rule of Muphry's Law, this Daily Mail article ought to be chock-full of errors, as should the comments. It's about 'Grammar Man', who has been taking a white marker to the graffiti in Kent, correcting the punctuation and grammar. Here's the example all the papers have been using:
The article notes that Grammar Man is himself committing an error by using a capital L in the phrase 'English Language', and unnecessary capitals throughout his corrections.
Muphry's Law states that if you write anything criticising editing, proof-reading, and general lapses in writing skill, there will be an embarrassing error in what you've written. Grammar Man has indeed fallen prey to it, but it's somewhat astonishing that not only is the article itself clean, as far as I can see, but so are the comments (apart from deliberate errors for 'comedy' effect). One commenter does think that 'misspelled' in the headline ought to be 'misspelt', but I think that's allowed variation.
We must conclude that Muphry's Law is not universally true. More on the news story here.
