Cryptic crossword pursues rather than follows

An occasional hobby of mine is trying to get better at cryptic crosswords. I sometimes print one out from the Guardian and it takes about two weeks between two of us, but eventually we finish it and we feel like we've learnt about how the clues work.

I was stumped on one:

Party leader pursues old educational institution's growth.

Pretty quickly I spotted that 'party leader' meant 'p' – the first letter of 'party'. I also knew that 'pursues' meant that the 'p' would be chasing after the rest of the word. Already, you may notice my problem here. 

If it had said 'follows' then I'd have been looking for a pattern like ___p. The 'p' follows the rest of the word, coming at the end. No worries. But because it said 'pursues', that has a more literal or contentful meaning than 'follows' (which can be entirely metaphorical as in this case), meaning 'chase after at speed' or something. So then, somehow, my odd little mind flipped the direction from the act of writing the word (beginning at the beginning and the rest follows) to something like reading the word from left to right, where the end of the word is ahead (yet to come) and so 'pursues' means that the 'p' is behind it, at the start of the word.

So I was thinking it must be 'Palma', because of 'alma mater', but didn't see how that meant 'growth', and anyway it's clearly 'polyp' - 'poly' is an old educational institution, with 'p' following it.

Southern privilege

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I look forward to it eagerly. It's funny, but it's also clever and insightful and often poignant. This week, he threw in a comment about 'doing funny accents' that was so spot-on in its identification of the problem of centring privilege.

Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.

Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.

In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.

I stan for eponymous words

"The dark side of gay stan culture" is the subject of a Guardian article today. It's about the link between gay men and female pop star divas like Ariana Grande, Beyonce, etc, and how it's often couched in criticism, either overt or implied, of those stars' songs, attitude or appearance. Anyway, point is, it says this about the word stan:

[It's a] portmanteau of "fan" and "stalker" taken from Eminem's hit about a crazed follower.

Now then. That sounded off immediately. I can well believe it's a portmanteau of those words, and I can also believe it's from the Eminem song, but both? No. The character in the song is called Stan, and there was no suggestion that he's called that because it's a portmanteau. He just is.

Approximately one second of googling returned a link that says exactly what the Guardian says, attributed to Urban Dictionary. And Urban Dictionary does indeed say both of those things, but in different definitions. Urban Dictionary is compiled by people who submit entries, so any one word can have any number of definitions, frequently repetitive and of very variable quality. In this case, many of them say it's from the song, and one says it's a portmanteau. There's no real way to know which is true, either, though with new words like this it often is the thing that most people think it is.

I actually assumed it was from stand, with consonant cluster simplification at the end of the word, because I've much more often heard it as the verb, as in I stan (for) Beyonce. I hadn't even considered the Eminem origin, maybe because it's so long since that song (Stan was released in 2000) and I've only really noticed this word in the last year or two. But the Bustle article I linked above says that the word has actually been around since then - just not in mainstream use (it says it's been related to K-Pop, for instance). This is the recency illusion: words are always waaaaay older than you think they are.

No deal is better than a bad deal

My friend Michelle reminded me that Theresa May said this back in January, and has kept on saying it since then. Most people have been non-pedantic enough to let it go by without comment (after all, there's enough politics happening for us to talk about) but she, I and Chris Maslanka in the Guardian all noticed that it was ambiguous.

Negation, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is usually ambiguous because it takes scope over different bits of the sentence it's in. Here's Chris Maslanka's explanation of the two meanings:

Incidentally, there's a long bit in Alice Through The Looking Glass (or the other one) where a messenger pouts that 'nobody walks faster than I do' and the king says 'he can't, or he'd be here already'. Lewis Carroll was keen on logic and semantics jokes.

After some back and forth with my colleague (& friend) Christina, we think we've translated the two meanings into what looks like gibberish to non-linguists, but is actually a formal representation of the meaning. The notation explains how the bits of the sentence interact to give two different meanings from the same set of words in the same order. I've translated them underneath into increasingly more idiomatic English.

The meaning Theresa means, presumably, is this:

∀x∀y.[NO.DEAL(x) & BAD.DEAL(y) -> x > y]

(Roughly,

"For all x and for all y, if x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "If x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "Having no deal at all is better than having a bad deal".)

Whereas the meaning that's much more salient to me, and which made the sentence seem quite bizarre, is this one:

 ~∃x.[DEAL(x) & ∃y.[BAD.DEAL(y) & x > y] ]

(Roughly,

"There is no x such that x is a deal and there is some y such that y is a bad deal and x is better than y"
or "There is no deal which is better than a bad deal"
or "A bad deal is the best deal".)

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that this particular type of negation scope ambiguity is regional - it seems less obvious to US speakers (see this post and the comments). But that's a purely anecdotal observation so do let me know if you have anecdata to add to that.

Linguistics of 'Arrival'

In this post I slightly spoil some of the funny bits and a lot of the linguistics in the film, though probably not the crucial bits, I don't think. Stop reading now if you want to play it safe.

Excitingly, I managed to get invited to a screening of Arrival last week, a good six weeks before it's due out on general release. I went with a handful of other linguists, so we enjoyed the complimentary booze with a bunch of (we assume) critics and then settled down to watch a film that we were somewhat trepidatious about. The main character in this film is a linguist, and this doesn't always give a terribly accurate impression of our business. However, some of my companions had read the short story it's based on, The story of your life by Ted Chiang, and were hopeful that the film would do this story justice.

It did, as it happens, and I'd recommend it if you like thoughtful scifi with aliens, stern US military types and a romantic side-plot. Personally I'm not a huge fan of all these things; the romantic side-plots can do one as far as I'm concerned, but in this film it worked well and contributed to a really clever twist to the story.

Right. David Adger has written a nice post about the language of the aliens and how 'alien' it really is. I'm going to focus on a few points where linguistics was a focus of the film and how it was treated.

The language in the film, Heptapod (the aliens have seven tentacle-feet things), is a visual language. There is a spoken language as well, but the linguist protagonist, Dr Louise Banks, decides that the visual language is the one she can work with to communicate with them. I can't remember why she thinks that, now, but it probably would have been harder to synthesise the spoken language to communicate with them (and she certainly couldn't produce it herself). (Note to self: don't try and write film reviews after having seen them and then drunk lots of wine a week previously.)

This language is formed by the heptapods squirting a sort of squid-ink-type substance in circular shapes with irregular edges, like coffee cup rings. These irregular bits are not actually irregular, of course, as they are what conveys the meaning. Each ring is a sentence (I don't know if we found out if they have complex sentences, with more than one clause). These symbols (the Independent calls them a 'complex form of hieroglyphs', though I'm not sure why) are holistic: they're produced as a whole, not made up of obvious parts. This is important to the story, as it is representative (in fact the cause) of the way the heptapods see the world: time is non-linear to them. However, they're not inseparable. In translating the language, with a good deal of computer analysis, the scientists identify tons of nodes in the rings that map onto meaning. When Louise talks to the heptapods, she creates rings from four or five segments. Clearly, there is combinatorial stuff going on here. I think the story talks more about how it works, so I'll know more about that once I've read it.

I liked the way Louise and her job are portrayed, for the most part. She is called a 'linguist', not any other job title, and she really is one. Near the start of the film, we see her giving a lecture on comparative romance linguistics. She employs what are, as far as I'm aware, linguistic fieldwork methods in her efforts to understand the heptapod language (she proceeds very quickly, but maybe that's because she has the US military and its computers behind her). Linguistics is referred to as a science and compared favourably to maths at one point by the theoretical physicists (not sure what he was there for).

***slight spoilers***
At one point, she told the kangaroo story, which Wikipedia relates like this:

Cook and Banks were exploring the area when they happened upon the animal. They asked a nearby local what the creatures were called. The local responded "Kangaroo", meaning "I don't understand you", which Cook took to be the name of the creature.

The row of linguists sat in stony silence at the punchline. However, when she reveals it not to be a true story a moment later, we had the last laugh.
***spoiler over***

Some things were a little bit less accurate. For one thing, her house was amazing. What mid-career female linguist is paid that much money? Perhaps she was well-paid for the work she'd done when seconded to the army previously.

She also speaks all the languages. I mentioned at the start that she was lecturing in comparative romance linguistics. Perhaps this isn't her specialism; heaven knows I lecture in all kinds of things that I don't know an awful lot about. But we do know that she was able to help the military with some Farsi interpreting. When the Colonel turns up on her doorstep and asks 'Do you speak Mandarin?', the answer is apparently 'yes'. There's possibly an explanation of this later in the film, but at that point it feels like a very lucky coincidence and playing into the stereotype of what linguists do (i.e. speak all the languages).

At one point, it seems that she is going to be unsuitable for the work they want her to do. She asks them if they're going to see some other guy next (let's call him Linguist B as I didn't make notes) and says, 'Ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation' (which as my colleague noted doesn't make much sense, but I guess I know what they meant). He comes back and says that Linguist B said it means something violent, and what does she say it means? She says 'a desire for more cows'. A quick internet search shows that this is generally known, although I'm afraid I lack the desire to fact-check it. This plays into the Sapir-Whorfianism that runs throughout the film, whereby language shapes the way you think. It doesn't actually make much sense to say the Sanskrit word for 'war' means 'a desire for more cows'. Either it literally means that but is used to mean 'war', in which case it means 'war', or else it isn't the word for 'war'. Sanskrit speakers definitely have the ability to wage war, so it's not that they don't have a concept of it due to the lack of a word for it.

But still. At one point she is explaining why she needs to go through a ton of basic stuff like pronouns when all they want to know is 'What is your purpose on earth' and we get a great linguistic explanation of everything that's involved in understanding and therefore answering that question. We also get a nice 'problem of translation' point when it hinges on whether a certain word means 'weapon' or 'tool' (and the answer to which it is is pretty cool by the way).

I'm happy with it, as a linguist and as a scifi fan. Go and see it. It's good.

Aside: Reviews are less linguistically well-informed. Apart from the aforementioned use of 'hieroglyphs' in the Independent, the Guardian says this:

Why, you ask, did they not approach Noam Chomsky, with his understanding of “deep structure” in language? Perhaps Prof Chomsky did not care to help America’s military-intelligence complex.

I assume they've said this just to make a sort of political joke, but this is such a stupid question it should never have been asked. I also have an understanding of 'deep structure' in language, having studied it for 12 years or so now, and I can assure you it doesn't give you a magical ability to understand unfamiliar languages. If anything, it might make him less able to work with a language that may not conform to this deep structure (see David's post linked earlier). Linguistic fieldwork is a fiendishly difficult task that takes years of training and practice to do well, and it's something that Chomsky has not specialised in. In fact, he's often criticised for doing precisely the opposite.

I were saying I wa'

It's National Grammar Day! Sadly this isn't as fun as it sounds due to the idiots on the internet. However, here is a thing I have learnt. Jeremy Butterfield wrote an article about how linguists and other people have different ideas about what grammar is, and in the comments someone mentioned the famous(?) Dennis Skinner complaint about being misquoted as saying I were. It's mentioned at the bottom of this link.

As he says there, he's not saying I were, because that would be 'grammatically incorrect'. He's saying I wah, as in dropping the 's' from was, and it just happens to sound like I were. Someone from Yorkshire in the comments agreed with him:

This is fine, I suppose, except that I really want it to be I were. It's a nice symmetrical counterpart to the We was found in many other places. Both are examples of levelling of verb forms, and I  teach it as an example of how levelling is something that tends to happen, but that it's more or less chance what form is chosen in what dialect. If it's not levelling, then that means the the levelling only takes place in some dialects, and it's always towards was.

On the other hand, if it is a phonological reduction of I was, then there's other interesting questions to answer. Why don't these dialects level? Do other dialects actually have I were? If not, why would there be a preference to level towards was? How can we tell, for sure, that it's I wa and not I were?

Obviously

In the Guardian, ages ago now, Stephen Poole defended 'basically' against the charges brought against it by Harris Academy in Upper Norwood:* 

The case of "basically" is similar to that of "obviously", also regularly dismissed as vapid huffery. I once worked at a newspaper where an editor sought to eliminate all use of "obviously" from the pages, on the grounds that, as he wrote: "If it's obvious, there's no need to say it."
This sounds pithily convincing until you consider common rhetorical strategies. Very often, it helps to state the obvious before moving on to more debatable claims that you will argue follow from it. To signal this, one may preface the statement with the word "Obviously", as an economical way of saying: "I know you know this, for it is obvious, and you are no fool, but the rest of my argument depends on our agreeing on this, so I beg your indulgence for stating it at the beginning; if you can be patient just a little longer, I promise I will at length have something more interesting to say." In this way, the use of "obviously", like that of "basically", is a little show of deference, a drop of conversational lubricant.

This kind of thing catches my eye when I mark essays. I always, without fail, cross out words like basically, obviously and so on, for the same reason Poole attributes to his editor. In my opinion (and it is just my opinion, as it's a style choice, even though I'm obviously right), these words do not belong in formal academic writing at all. I wonder if this is a reflection of linguistic style. In some disciplines, I think rhetorical flourishes are prized but linguistics likes a very pared-down, spare style, with no fiddle-faddle. To linguists, elegance means simplicity. That means that everything included is there for a reason, and so you don't need obviously in the way Poole describes it.

*For a comment on the idiotic and unnecessary re-spelling of woz in their poster, see this post.

Most tastiest

This story recently appeared in the Guardian newspaper, about a schoolboy who bullied Tesco into changing some 'ungrammatical' wording on its juice cartons. As you can probably tell, I'm (unusually) on Tesco's side here, or rather I would have been if they hadn't caved in instantly and completely.

Here's what happened: this 15-year-old boy noticed that his orange juice was described as being made with the 'most tastiest' oranges, and he felt that it should be either 'tastiest' or 'most tasty'. He felt this so strongly that he wrote first to Tesco customer services, and then to the Daily Mail when he didn't get a reply. And he wrote a real letter, with a stamp, not an email, which is how you know he was incandescent.

To clarify: yes, it 'should' be one of the two options he provided. The superlative doubling that he objects to is a very common feature of everyday speech, and I hear it approximately once a day (I listen out for it because I like it). In writing or formal speech it is considered wrong, and any piece of writing such as an essay should not include this construction. I'm very pleased that the standard of education in our schools is such that this child not only knows this, but cares about it. He sounds utterly insufferable, but I'm sure I was also insufferable at his age, so I'll let him off with that.

I do, however, want to suggest a better way for Tesco to have responded (rather than sending a grovelling letter promising to change the wording). The wording was probably carefully selected by a copy writer who knew exactly what they were doing, picking a construction that's frequent but not prescriptively correct, in order to come across as informal, friendly and possibly more eye-catching. Innocent, for example, while not using any 'ungrammatical' constructions that I can see, do their utmost to make their blurb informal, using no capital letters, lots of contractions ('we're', etc) and words like 'stuff', none of which would be acceptable in formal writing.

It's OK to use non-standard language if you know what you're doing and it's for a particular effect. As the saying goes, you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. Had Tesco been a linguist (and perhaps their copywriter is - lots of our students go on to do jobs like that) they might have responded to this young pedant with some facts about the frequency of use and the contexts in which superlative doubling is found, to demonstrate that it is not in fact ungrammatical, but merely register-specific. Then they could have explained to the young man that this wording was intentionally chosen to give the impression of a nice, friendly orange juice seller that you can trust, to mitigate the fact that you're buying concentrated orange juice from a huge corporation that probably pays its orange growers virtually nothing (I don't know this - just guessing).

Actually, the text from which this doubled superlative is taken is not specially informal, so it probably was an oversight. But there we go. I do think it's important not to always uphold the 'rules' of grammar, as being prissy about it is what causes people to dislike grammar when really it's such an interesting and fun thing, if you just look at it in the right way. I'm much more concerned about the genuinely ungrammatical things people (=students) write. If they'd never say it, why do they write it? But that's another rant for another day.

Live Latin speakers wanted

Two weeks ago in the Guardian magazine, Mary Beard (who is becoming nearly as much of a regular on this blog as Marcus du Sautoy) said that if she could bring one thing back from extinction, it would be a 'live Latin speaker'. This week, a reader called Brian Bishop wrote in and said she needn't go that far: there are lots of them and Beard would be welcome at any of their 'Latin speaking weeks'.

Well. This does somewhat miss the point of why she wanted to bring this Latin speaker back. Beard is a classicist, which is not the same thing as a linguist, and she would have her own reasons which would be very different from the reasons I would give for bringing back a Latin speaker, I'm sure. But I think we would overlap in one opinion, which is that it really isn't the same thing at all!

I should think that Beard probably speaks Latin herself. If she doesn't she could of course learn it, if she wishes to hear it spoken so much. The main problem with this is that she is not a native speaker of Latin, and neither are any of the people at these 'Latin speaking weeks', unless any of them were brought up bilingually in Latin by extremely keen parents. (Incidentally, googling 'Latin speaking weeks' does not find any relevant results other than very dodgy-looking Latin summer schools.)

Linguists do lots of different types of research, but almost all of it involves finding out how people speak, recording that and using the resulting data to test a hypothesis. Some linguists use their own intuitions as data, some use other people's intuitions, and some use other people's natural speech.

Let's say I wanted to find out about the use of Isn't he not? and Isn't he? in the Geordie dialect, and what the differences are in the use of each. I might try to record some people's natural speech, and I might do some kind of survey where I asked people what sounded most natural to them. I might use my own intuitions to start me off, but I wouldn't rely on them, because I wasn't born and brought up in Newcastle so my intuitions might not be reliable.

When I wrote my PhD thesis, I needed to know facts about a lot of different languages. I used books for this, grammars that describe how the language works. That meant that I didn't have to spend a lot of time and money travelling around the world finding people to record. But these books can only take you so far. There are two problems with them: the first is that they might not be reliable. Modern descriptive grammars are good, thorough and accurate, written by linguists with a lot of training. The grammars written by missionaries from the SIL are generally very good, too. But an old grammar might be written by any unqualified person with little training, and with who-knows-what purpose. And grammars are almost never written by a native speaker of the language, so even with the best intentions they don't always know for sure that what they're being told is accurate: perhaps their consultants are subconsciously telling them how they should speak - like if you told a linguist that every sentence has to have a subject and then went off and said 'Don't know what he wants all this information for', without using a subject.

The second problem is that they can never tell you absolutely everything about a language. Hardly any of the grammars I looked at for my PhD could tell me if the question particle could be used in embedded questions. Therefore, I had to supplement this knowledge with intuitions about some of the languages. Obviously I don't speak these languages, so I couldn't give the intuitions, so I asked native speakers of those languages. And it is important that they are native speakers. Just because someone has learnt a language doesn't make them capable of making subtle judgements about what is and isn't grammatical, especially when you get into non-standard forms.

There are some linguists who can't ask people about their language because there aren't any people to ask. These are the historical linguists. Someone studying Old English can't ask a speaker of Old English what the language is like, but fortunately there are some texts written in Old English that still survive. Without those, we'd have no idea beyond the reconstructive work that can be done based on regular changes over time. There is a massive amount that can be learnt from historical texts, and historical linguists do some truly amazing things. But it is limited to what exists already, whereas a living language is infinite and can constantly provide new data.

Latin, similarly, has no living native speakers. It has evolved and become the modern Romance languages, but these are not the same as Latin any more than present-day English is the same as Old English (the language of Beowulf). There are living people who speak it, but they are not native speakers, and more than I'm a native speaker of French because I learnt it at school. In fact, these people are even further removed from being native speakers of Latin because they didn't even learn it from a native speaker (in fact, I didn't learn French from a native French speaker, but that's beside the point). There are lots of things we don't know about Latin, and those are the things linguists might be interested to find out, and there's no way we can find them out from modern Latin speakers because their knowledge of Latin is based only on what we already know, not their native competence. We aren't going to get very far trying to find out what we don't already know if we ask people who only know what we already know.

So whatever reason Mary Beard has for bringing back a real live Latin speaker, perhaps for the sheer pleasure of hearing them speak, I too would like to bring one (or ideally, several) back, so that I could do research on their language without having to rely on written sources.

Stuffed monkey

In the Guardian at the weekend, Jane Goodall did the Q&A regular feature. One of the questions is 'What is your most treasured possession?', and she answered: 

My mascot Mr H, a stuffed monkey that I have had for 19 years.

Generally, 'a stuffed monkey' means something like this:

But is that what 'stuffed monkey' means here? It could also be this: 

Given that Goodall worked with chimps in Africa, it's entirely possible that she has an actual monkey that has been stuffed, perhaps a favourite pet. It wouldn't be a chimp, because as an expert she would not call a chimp a monkey, but still a possibility, no? 

This ambiguity is not normally present, because the first meaning is so much more accessible, so this is an example of how context can make a big difference to the salience of a secondary reading. 

In case you're curious, it is a toy:

And she made no mention of whether she made the chimps work in a diamond mine, as her fictional counterpart did in the Simpsons.

Rioters, terrorists, protesters, whatever

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').