Tag Archives: word

We Are Programmed to Receive

by VRBSanorabni Posted on September 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s Saturday, and I am oh-so-tired of Donald Trump. (The latest: he finally coughed up his favorite Bible verse, but it doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Bible. Since this was an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he knew this had to be coming but still didn’t bother to look up a genuine verse. I swear, he’s just taunting us. He’s actually a Democrat with an IQ of 300 and he’s running a test to see just how far you can bamboozle the press corps and the conservative base and still lead the Republican primary race. Judging by Wednesday’s debate performance, he’s finally tiring of the gag because it appears you simply can’t go too far.)

So: no more Donald. Instead, prepare yourself for a ridiculous topic explored at ridiculous length. Here’s the background: the iPod in my car is set to permanent shuffle play, and yesterday the Eagles’ “Hotel California” came up. I’ve heard this song hundreds of times, I suppose, but this time one word in the final famous lines suddenly struck me as odd:

“Relax,” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave.”

Programmed? This song was written in 1976, before the PC revolution and the rise of Silicon Valley conspired to make programming into a common word. See update below. Even cheap programmable calculators had just barely started to hit the market. It was certainly a common word among techie types, which is probably why it never seemed odd to me before, but was it common among shaggy rock musicians? It doesn’t seem like it would be. Did Don Henley take an intro CS course at North Texas State? Or is the word being used in a different sense?

Naturally, I went to my favorite source for word usage over time, the Google Ngram Viewer. Here’s what it shows:

There are two notable things here. First, the use of programmed peaks in 1984. That’s odd. You’d think it would have kept on rising into the stratosphere. It’s in common use today for everything from building a space shuttle to setting up your toaster oven. UPDATE: In comments, weirdnoise suggests that this is because coding is used rather than programming these days. Could be.

More germane to my question, however, is the fact that its use starts to rise around 1940. What’s up with that? This is obviously a non-computer usage, since digital computers hadn’t been invented at that point. So let’s go to Google Books and check things out. Programmed appears to have been commonly used in four basic senses. Here are examples of each:

War Housing: Hearings Before the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, 1942: “The 20,000 units in item 5b and the 100,000 additional Government dormitories yet to be programmed and financed, as shown in item 5c….”

Variety Radio Directory, 1940: “National Broadcasting Co. Owned and/or Managed and/or Programmed Stations—474….”

Health and Its Maintenance: A Hygiene Text for Women, 1931: “She has always programmed her work. She never undertook more than she could do and do well….”

Life magazine ad, 1949: “IBM products using electronic principles: Card-programmed Calculator….”

In order, the four senses in which programmed was used are: (1) in construction and engineering scheduling, (2) in radio scheduling, (3) as a generic synonym for scheduled, and (4) the IBM sense, which is a precursor to the common computer programming sense of today.

The first three of these are all variants of scheduled, or else used in the similar sense of verbing the noun program. The final one is the source of the contemporary usage of the word in the software biz.

So what were the Eagles thinking of? It doesn’t make sense that it was used as a synonym for scheduled. That doesn’t read right, and anyway, why not just use the word scheduled instead? The computer sense works in context, but somehow seems unlikely. That leaves us with the radio programming sense, and I suppose that’s the right one. Musicians would obviously be familiar with this usage, and so would their audience.

I warned you that this was a ridiculously long post about a ridiculous topic. Don’t blame me if you read all the way to the end. But now that you have, feel free to comment if you think there’s a possibility I’ve left out.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Dan Perkins (aka Tom Tomorrow) reminds me that programmed—in the computer programming sense—was fairly commonly used in science fiction TV and movies in the 60s and 70s. For example, here it is from 1965 in the first episode of Lost in Space:

DR. SMITH: I have reprogrammed the robot. His power has been activated. Exactly eight hours after launch the robot will destroy the spaceship with all hands aboard.

Here it is from 1967 in I, Mudd, an episode in the original Star Trek series:

KIRK: Who sent you?
NORMAN (an android): I am not programmed to respond in that area.

Here it is from 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe that Hal has genuine emotions?
POOLE: Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. He’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him.

And from 1972 in Silent Running:

LOWELL: Hey, that’s really excellent. Now, um…you see, what I’ve done is…I’ve reprogrammed both of you so that now you’ll respond directly to me.

And of course, from 1977 in Star Wars:

OWEN: You, I suppose you’re programmed for etiquette and protocol.
THREEPIO: Protocol? Why, its my primary function, sir. I am well-versed in all the customs—
OWEN: I have no need for a protocol droid.
THREEPIO: Of course you haven’t, sir. Not in an environment such as this. That is why I have been programmed—

OK, I’ll stop now. The point is that perhaps the computer programming sense of the word was actually pretty common in popular culture by 1976. So I guess there was no real mystery to be solved after all.

UPDATE: Or maybe it’s being used in the new-agey sense of cult programming. That would make sense on multiple levels.

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We Are Programmed to Receive

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"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

by ThomasSaxton Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Emily Badger passes along news of a group trying to get us all to stop talking about traffic “accidents”:

An “accident” is, by definition, unintentional. We accidentally drop dinner plates, or send e-mails before we’re done writing them. The word also suggests something of the unforeseen — an event that couldn’t have been anticipated, for which no one can be blamed. That second connotation is what irks transportation advocates who want to change how we talk about traffic collisions. When one vehicle careens into another or rounds a corner into a pedestrian — call it a “crash,” they say, not an “accident.”

“Our children did not die in ‘accidents,'” says Amy Cohen, a co-founder of the New York-based group Families for Safe Streets. Her 12-year-old son was hit and killed by a van on the street in front of their home in 2013. “An ‘accident,'” she says, “implies that nothing could have been done to prevent their deaths.”

I remember this from my driver’s ed class 40 years ago. Our instructor told us endlessly that they were “collisions,” not accidents. But we’re still talking about accidents 40 years later, so apparently this is a tough habit to break.

And the truth is that I didn’t really get it back then. I still don’t. “Accident” doesn’t imply that something is unforeseeable, or that no one can be blamed, or that nothing could possibly have been done to prevent it. Here’s the definition:

noun. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap.

“Unintentional” is the key word here. If you drop the dinner dishes, it’s unintentional unless you’re pissed off at your family and deliberately threw the dishes at them. Then it’s not an accident. Ditto for cars. If you deliberately run over someone, it’s not an accident. If it’s not deliberate, it is.

Nearly all “accidents” are foreseeable (lots of people drop dinner dishes); have someone to blame (probably the person who dropped the dishes); and can be prevented (stop carrying the dishes with one hand). The same is true of automobile collisions. Driving while drunk, or texting, or speeding are all things that make accidents more likely. We can work to prevent those things and we can assign blame when accidents happen—and we do.

I have a tendency to use the word “collision” because I was brainwashed 40 years ago, but it’s hard to see that it makes much difference. Here is Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives:

“If we stopped using that word, as individuals, as a city, in a national context, what questions do we have to start asking ourselves about these crashes?” says Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives. How did they happen? Who was to blame? An erratic driver? A faulty vehicle? A perpetually dangerous intersection?

I’m mystified. We already do all that stuff. Collisions are routinely investigated. Fault is determined. The NTSA tracks potential safety problems in vehicles. Municipal traffic departments make changes to intersections. We pass drunk driving laws. We suspend the licenses of dangerous drivers.

So it doesn’t seem to me that use of the word “accident” is either wrong or perilous. If we had a history of ignoring automobile safety because is was common to just shrug and ask “whaddaya gonna do?” you could make a case for this. But we don’t.

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"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

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Internet Gossip Collective Votes to Join Socialist Hollywood Cabal

by ModestaMilliner Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Gawker just voted to join the WGA-E.

To celebrate I made this photo of George Michael writing the word “union” in lipstick on a lady’s body.

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Here is one of him drawing the Gawker logo.

And last but not least:

A few days ago Gawker staffers explained why they were or were not for the unionization effort. The thread is really fascinating. You should read it.

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Internet Gossip Collective Votes to Join Socialist Hollywood Cabal

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Your Binge-Watching Is Making the Planet Warmer

by Myrna Posted on May 22, 2015

Those cat videos, TED talks, and Netflix original series you watch to unwind might be slowly killing the planet. mezclaconfusa/Flickr You recycle. You ride your bike to work. You bring your own bags to the grocery. You might think you’re a good environmentalist. But those cat videos, TED talks, and Netflix original series you watch to unwind might be slowly killing the planet. That’s the word from Greenpeace’s latest Clicking Clean report, which evaluates the clean energy initiatives of many different internet companies. While we’re used to thinking about our environmental impact in terms of how much trash we throw out, how much we drive, and how much electricity we use in our homes, the report highlights the ways that our internet usage has environmental effects that we never see. Data center emissions account for small percentage of global emissions, Greenpeace information technology analyst Gary Cook tells us. That’s not much compared to 14 percent that goes towards agriculture or the 13 percent that goes to transportation. But data center emissions are growing by at least 13 percent per year, Cook says. And within two years, information technology in general, including manufacturing servers and other gear, is expected to be to account for between seven and 12 percent of all electrical use, according the report. To keep reading, click here. View original article:   Your Binge-Watching Is Making the Planet Warmer ; ; ;

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Your Binge-Watching Is Making the Planet Warmer

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Are You a True Political Junkie? A Wee Test.

by Mitchel123 Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m often amazed at the incredible memories that true political junkies have for trivial stuff that happened well over a decade ago. I was just reading a Kevin Williamson item over at The Corner, and he was noting that (a) some police organizations were apparently referring to President Obama’s new restrictions on transfer of military equipment as a “ban,” and (b) that lefties were attacking this as fear-mongering, since it wasn’t a ban, just a restriction on how the federal government plans to spend its own money.

Where’s he going with this, I wondered. I didn’t have to wait long to find out:

Well….

Am I the only one who remembers the so-called federal ban on stem-cell research enacted by the Bush administration? That was a ban that was not, in fact, a ban at all, or even a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but a restriction on federal funding for research using newly created lines of embryonic stem cells. When the Fraternal Order of Police complains that police departments cannot use federal funds the way they did before, the Left insists that the word “ban” is inappropriate, that the complaints amount to “fear-mongering.” But Mother Jones wrote of a “Stem Cell Research Ban” under Bush, CBS News reported “Obama Ends Stem Cell Research Ban,” Wired wrote of a “Bush stem cell ban,” U.S. News and World Report wrote of “Bush’s Stem Cell Research Ban,” etc.

A funding restriction is not a ban; it isn’t now—but it wasn’t then, either. It is too much to expect even a modicum of consistency from our feckless, lollygagging media, which is mainly composed of people who were too thick for law school and too lazy to sell real estate, and certainly not from the intellectually dishonest Democratic operatives within the media (Hello, Mr. Stephanopoulos!). But we should always keep that dishonesty in mind.

I guess I take a much more easygoing attitude toward this stuff, especially when we’re talking about headlines. Heds are almost never entirely accurate thanks to space constraints, and using the word ban instead of ban on federal funding of new stem cell lines seems pretty much inevitable. As long as the hed is reasonably close to reality and a more accurate explanation is put in the first paragraph or two, I can’t get too excited.

And if it was something that happened back in 2001? I’d be racking my brains to remember what happened and whether I should still give a damn. I guess that’s what marks me as not really a true political junkie. I don’t hold grudges against the press quite long enough.

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Are You a True Political Junkie? A Wee Test.

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

by MarkoBurhop Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok passes along the chart on the right, which shows the default rate on student loans. What it shows is surprising at first glance: the highest default rates are among students with the lowest debt, not the highest.

But on second glance, this isn’t surprising at all. I’d suggest several good reasons to expect exactly this result:

The very lowest debt levels are associated with students who drop out after only a year or so. They have the worst of all worlds: only a high school diploma and a low-paying job, but student debt that’s fairly crushing for someone earning a low income.
The next tier of debt is likely associated with students at for-profit trade schools. These schools are notorious for high dropout rates and weak job prospects even for graduates.
The middle tier of debt levels is probably associated with graduates of community colleges and state universities. Graduates of these schools, in general, get lower-paying jobs than graduates of Harvard or Cal.
Conversely, high debt levels are associated with elite universities. Harvard and Cal probably have pretty high proportions of students who earn good incomes after graduation.
The highest debt levels are associated with advanced degrees. The $50,000+ debt levels probably belong mostly to doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and so forth, who command the highest pay upon graduation.

A commenter suggests yet another reason for high default levels at low levels of debt: it’s an artifact of “students” who are already deep in debt and are just looking for a way out: “The word is out if you have bad credit and are desperate for funds just go to a community college where tuition is low and borrow the maximum….Want the defaults to go down — stop lending to students that have a significant number of remedial courses their 1st and 2nd terms at a college where tuition is already low.”

If you’re likely to complete college, student loans are a good investment. But if you’re right on the cusp, you should think twice. There’s a good chance you’ll just end up dropping out and you’ll end up with a pile of student loans to pay back. If you’re in that position, think hard about attending a community college and keeping student loans to the minimum you can manage.

And try majoring in some field related to health care. Occupations in health care appear to have a pretty bright future.

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

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Chart of the Day: Hooray for the Economy!

by ChristeCarder Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday featured several gloomy posts—strictly a coincidence, I assure you—so today here’s some good news. Matt Yglesias passes along the word that for the first time since the Great Recession, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index broke into positive territory this week. Here’s Gallup’s explanation for the steady rise since mid-September:

While various factors likely contribute to the rise in economic confidence, the weekly average price of gas in the U.S. began to fall precipitously in the late summer and, over the last four months, the price has fallen by nearly 30% — an economic boon to most Americans. In fact, for the week of Dec. 22, the average price of gasoline was as low as it has been since the first half of 2009. Additionally, the U.S. stock market rose in December to its highest levels in history while Gallup’s unemployment rate fell to the lowest since its daily tracking began in January 2008.

So there you have it. A little late to help Democrats in the November midterms, but not too late for 2016.

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Chart of the Day: Hooray for the Economy!

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Watch “Emperor” Obama Take Over Hosting Duties for Colbert

by Chang79Tczpox Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

“You’ve taken plenty of shots at my job. I’m going to take a shot at yours.”

And with that, President Obama seized control of a special D.C. edition of “The Colbert Report” last night, leading off by taking over hosting duties for the latest installment of “The Word,” or as the president promptly renamed, “The Decree.”

Later on, the two sat down and discussed everything from the midterm elections to the nuclear launch codes. Regarding immigration reform, Colbert asked his guest, “You realize you’re an emperor now…Why did you burn the Constitution and become an emperor?”

Colbert, who will be replacing David Letterman over at the “Late Show” soon, concluded the special appearance with a suggestion that melded both immigration legislation and Keystone into one bizarre policy proposal. The president declined: “Stephen, that sounds like a ridiculous idea. But that’s why you’re where you are, and I’m where I am.”

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Watch “Emperor” Obama Take Over Hosting Duties for Colbert

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

by AlfredoParnell Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve long been sort of interested in the ongoing research that shows the importance of building vocabulary in children. This is famously summarized as the “30 million word gap,” thanks to findings that high-income children have heard 30 million more words than low-income children by age 3. But apparently new research is modifying these findings somewhat. It turns out that quality may be more important than quantity:

A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

….In a related finding, published in April, researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2. The total number of words had no correlation with future ability.

In practice, talking more usually leads to talking better, so there’s probably a little less here than meets the eye. Still, it’s interesting stuff. Regardless of parental education level, it turns out that simply interacting with your newborn more frequently and more conversationally makes a big difference. So forget the baby Mozart, all you new parents. Instead, just chatter away with your kids. It’s cheaper and it works better.

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

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The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

by ArnoldoCornell Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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What can you tell about a restaurant from its menu? A lot more than what’s cooking. That’s what linguist Dan Jurafsky reveals in his new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

Dan Jurafsky Photo by Kingmond Young

Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, looked at hundreds of examples of food language—from menus to marketing materials to restaurant reviews. Along the way, he uncovered some fascinating patterns. For example: In naming foods, he explains, marketers often appeal to the associations that we already have with certain sounds. Crackers and other crispy foods tend to have names with short, front-of-the-mouth vowels (Ritz, Cheez-Its, Triscuits) while rich and heavy foods have longer vowels that we form in the back of our mouth (Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge). He also describes the shared linguistic heritage of some of the most common food words. Take salad, sauce, slaw, and salsa: All come from the Latin word sal, meaning “salted.”

But it’s Jurafsky’s menu analysis that really stands out. Where most of us see simply a list of dishes, Jurafsky identifies subtle indicators of the image that a restaurant is trying to project—and which customers it wants to lure in. I asked Jurafsky to examine the menus of Taco Bell and its new upscale spinoff, US Taco Co., whose first location just opened in Southern California.

We started with Taco Bell’s breakfast menu. Of course, everyone knows that the Tex-Mex fast food chain isn’t exactly fine dining, but Jurafsky pointed to some hidden hallmarks of down-market eateries’ menus.

The first thing that Jurafsky noticed about Taco Bell’s menu was its size: There are dozens, if not hundreds of items. “The very, very fancy restaurants, many of them have no menu at all,” says Jurafsky. “The waiter tells you what you’re going to eat, kind of. If you want, they’ll email you a menu if you really want it.”

Next, Jurafsky picked up on descriptors. “So there’s all of those adjectives and participles,” he says. “Fluffy.” “Seasoned.” That’s one thing that’s common on cheaper restaurant menus—as if the restaurant feels the need to try and convince its diners of the quality of the food. A fancier restaurant, he explains, would take it as a given that the diner expects the eggs to be fluffy and the pico de gallo to be freshly prepared.

“Notice the word ‘flavorful,’” says Jurafsky. “The cheapest restaurants use these vague, positive adjectives. Delicious. Tasty. Scrumptious. Wonderful. Again, more expensive restaurants take all that as a given.”

“The description specifies ‘real cheddar cheese.’ Just like all the other adjectives, ‘real’ tells you that they think customers are assuming that the cheese is not real, so they have to tell you that it is.” Also, note that the word “jalapeño” is missing its tilde—the little squiggle over the “n” that signifies a “nye” pronunciation in Spanish words. Jurafsky isn’t sure whether the missing “ñ” is linguistically meaningful, but keep it in mind, because it will become important when we look at US Taco Co.’s menu.

The words “double portion” and “lots” are also typical on the menus of cheap restaurants,” says Jurafsky. “They want you to know you’re getting enough food for your money.”

Next, we turned to US Taco Co.:

“This is a hipster menu,” says Jurafsky. “This isn’t a linguistics thing, but there’s a Day of the Dead skull on top and the desserts are served in mason jars. I mean, how hipster can you get?”

Let’s take a closer look at some of the menu items:

“What the really upscale restaurants these days are doing is just listing their ingredients. They don’t say “and” or “with.” It’s just a list. They’re also using non-standard capitalization, everything lower case or everything upper case, for example. Here they’re making everything upper case. On the Taco Bell menu, they used standard capitalization.”

Also, in “Wanna Get Lei’d” there’s a reference to sex. Jurafsky explains that we often use sex metaphors to talk about fancy food, while for cheaper food, the metaphor of choice is often drugs. “The wings are addictive, or the chocolate must have crack,” he says. “There’s something about inexpensive foods that make us feel guilty. Talking about it in terms of drugs lets us put the responsibility on the food, not on ourselves.”

“There are more unusual Spanish words on this menu,” says Jurafsky. Taco Bell has “burrito” and “taco.” Everyone knows those. But “here we have ‘molcajete’ and ‘cotija.’ Every item has at least one Spanish word. And there’s the “ñ” in jalapeño! For Taco Bell, there might be tension between English and Spanish. In a hipster place, it’s okay to be authentic.”

Of course, says Jurafsky, language trends are always evolving. What we consider hipster menu language now is not the same as it was a few decades ago. In his book, Jurafsky notes that for most of the last century, trendy restaurants used French words to signify their status (think au jus, a la mode, and sur le plat). To the modern ear, these sound pretentious. Today’s fashionable restaurant menus have replaced French phrases with “carefully selected obscure food words and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables,” he writes. That is, “if they offer you a menu at all.”

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The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

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