Uncommon knowledge

How prayer prevents drinking

A recent study supports an interesting approach to curbing alcohol consumption: regular prayer. In surveys, people who reported praying more often also reported less alcohol consumption and fewer alcohol-related problems, and more prayer was associated with less consumption and fewer problems over the next several months. Of course, people who pray a lot may be less prone to drink anyway, so the researchers randomly assigned people to regular prayer or nonprayer tasks and then asked them to report their alcohol consumption after four weeks. Those who were assigned to pray drank significantly less than those who weren’t.

Lambert, N. et al., “Invocations and Intoxication: Does Prayer Decrease Alcohol Consumption?” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors (June 2010).

Fame, enemy of your town

The reality show genre has flourished during the past decade, bringing fame and fortune to many people. But along with the good comes the bad. Two economists at Occidental College in Los Angeles analyzed crime rates in Laguna Beach before and after the debut of MTV’s popular reality show of the same name, which followed the social lives of some of the town’s affluent teenagers. Compared with a similar neighboring beach town (Dana Point), Laguna Beach experienced an increase in nonresidential burglaries, auto thefts, and rapes, ostensibly caused by the town’s newfound fame. Residential crime might have increased too but, as the authors speculate, may have been blunted by the prevalence of gated communities.

Chioue, L. & Lopez, M., “The Reality of Reality Television: Does Reality TV Influence Local Crime Rates?” Economics Letters (forthcoming).

Don’t go after insurgents too hard

The question of how aggressively to target insurgents has been a central issue in the Afghanistan policy debate, especially during the recent transition from General McChrystal to General Petraeus. Current policy is focused on defense, rather than attack, to avoid civilian casualties, but many, including the troops themselves, have complained. Now, a detailed analysis from a team of civilian researchers and a US Army counterinsurgency expert has come down on the side of restraint. The average counterinsurgency incident generates an additional six violent insurgent incidents during the following six weeks. Revenge appears to be the driving factor, especially given that the insurgent response is locally concentrated.

Condra, L. et al., “The Effect of Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2010).

The unhappy middle school

Unlike 19th-century schools and contemporary private schools, most public school systems have a separate “middle school” for grades 6 through 8 or 7 and 8. Is this good for students? Researchers at Columbia University analyzed achievement data from New York City public schools and found that students who transitioned from an elementary school to a middle school did worse in math and English than students in K-8 schools who didn’t transition. Parents and students also reported being less satisfied with middle schools. The authors estimate that the impact of this situation — if it persists past middle school — could be worth thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings, and it appears to be more severe for already low-performing students. It does not appear to be caused by any difference in resources or class size but may have something to do with the effect on young adolescents of bringing so many students together from different elementary schools.

Rockoff, J. & Lockwood, B., “Stuck in the Middle: Impacts of Grade Configuration in Public Schools,” Journal of Public Economics (forthcoming).

Sealing off bad memories

For many people, dealing with bad memories can be an ongoing nightmare. Some research, though, suggests that simple acts can help. A new study has even demonstrated that psychological closure is aided by literal enclosure. First, people were asked to write about a regrettable decision or an unfulfilled desire. Next, some were asked to seal their disclosure in an envelope before handing it in, and some were just asked to hand it in. Those who had sealed their disclosure in an envelope felt better afterwards. Likewise, people who read a news story about a baby’s tragic death were subsequently able to forget more of the story and get more closure if they placed the story in an envelope.

Li, X. et al., “Sealing the Emotions Genie: The Effects of Physical Enclosure on Psychological Closure,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).

Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/25/how_prayer_prevents_drinking/

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Verbed!

What do these words and phrases have in common? Friend, Google, TiVo, log in, contact, barbecue, unlike, concept, text, Photoshop, leverage, party, Xerox, reference, architect, parent, improv, transition, diligence, host, chair, gift, heart, impact?

They’ve all been declared–by someone, somewhere, whether a usage expert or just a self-appointed language cop–”not verbs.” It doesn’t matter whether they’re useful, interesting, or entertaining as verbs; to many people, if a word began its life as a noun, then ”verbing” it (like I did there) is just wrong.

This visceral reaction is the motivating force behind the recently popular loginisnotaverb.com, one man’s impassioned plea against this kind of verbing. The site’s elaborate (and funny) arguments against login’s verb status really boil down to a simple denial. ”I will repeat the important part for clarity: ‘login’ is not a verb. It’s simply not,” he writes.

The history of English, however, suggests that the language is remarkably flexible in terms of what can be verbed. Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles. It’s easy to think of scenarios where ”She me’d him too much and they broke up” and ”My boss tomorrowed the meeting again” make sense.

(Linguists discussing this process sometimes avoid the nonstandard word verbing by using the technical terms denominal derivation or conversion instead. Rhetoricians are even less likely to use the word verbing and use the general term antimeria to describe any use of a word in a different part of speech.)

Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like friend is declared not a verb, the problem isn’t that it’s confusing; it’s that the protester finds it deeply annoying.

Some of the outrage might be connected to verbing’s popularity as a feature of business jargon: Liase, incentivize, leverage, and status are often cited as horrible bizspeak to be shunned at all costs. (Why are businesses supposed to be superefficient in everything but their use of language? ”He didn’t have a chance to status us before he left” is four words shorter than ”He didn’t have a chance to give us a status update before he left.”)

Some not-a-verb declarations are made for reasons that are more financial than linguistic: Google, TiVo, Adobe, and Xerox want to defend their trademarks, and one way to do that is to announce loudly, and at every opportunity, that Google, TiVo, Photoshop, and Xerox are not, repeat NOT, verbs. Xerox occasionally runs ads in major magazines (most recently in the Hollywood Reporter this past May) reminding people that Xerox is still a trademark, and asking writers not to use Xerox the trademark as a verb.

Given the outrage, why do people verb? Often, it’s a shortcut: There comes a point where text is just a shorter way to say ”send a text message.” And there’s a kind of cultural currency to verbing, which might be a reason that it’s a staple of television writing. (There’s an episode of ”Seinfeld” where Kramer says ”Let’s bagel!”; and ”Buffy the Vampire Slayer” used proper names as verbs on multiple occasions, including Keyser Soze, Clark Kent, and Scully.)

But something deeper is going on, too: When done well, verbing delights our brains. Philip Davis, a professor at the School of English at the University of Liverpool, devised a study in 2006 that tested just what happens when people read sentences with verbed nouns in them–and not just any verbed nouns, nouns verbed by Shakespeare. (Shakespeare was an inveterate noun-verber; he verbed ghost, in ”Julius Caesar, I Who at Phillipi the good Brutus ghosted”; dog, in ”Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels”; and even uncle, in ”Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.”)

So what did happen? When people were confronted with verbed nouns (in sentences such as ”I was not supposed to go there alone: You said you would companion me.”) EEGs measured their brains recognizing a syntactic anomaly, but not a semantic one. In other words, the subjects understood–in a time measured in milliseconds–that something cool and new was happening. And they immediately got what it meant. Their double-take was measurably different from the one caused by hearing nouns or verbs unrelated to the context of the entire sentence (”you said you would charcoal me” ”you said you would incubate me”).

Granted, it was just one study, and using Shakespearean language to boot. But if there’s even a slight chance that verbing attentions people, wouldn’t it be a shame not to take advantage of it?

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com.

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/25/verbed/

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‘Mad Men’-ese

As the fourth season of the AMC series “Mad Men” kicks off, some of the show’s fans are gearing up to play another round of a peculiar language game: trying to spot flaws in the meticulously constructed dialogue portraying 1960s Madison Avenue.

No show in American television history, it is safe to say, has ever put so much effort into maintaining historically appropriate ways of speaking — and no show has attracted so much scrutiny for its efforts. The three seasons that have been broadcast, set between 1960 and 1963, triggered endless arguments in online discussion forums, with entire threads devoted to potential anachronisms. Among recent small-screen forays into historical fiction, only “Deadwood,” which ran on HBO from 2004 to 2006, generated remotely comparable discussion about the authenticity of its language. (Commenters on that series tended to focus on whether its torrents of colorful, modern-sounding cursing were out of place for a South Dakota mining camp in the 1870s — which they almost certainly were.)

When I spoke recently with Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer and head writer of “Mad Men,” he readily admitted that goofs sneak through on his show. He said he still regrets allowing the character Joan to say “The medium is the message” in the first season, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced the dictum in print. But he defends Joan’s year-end valedictory, “1960, I am so over you,” by pointing to the Cole Porter song “So in Love” from “Kiss Me, Kate.” Scholars of semantics might disagree, seeing a nuance between Porter’s use of the adverb so, which quantifies the extent to which the character is in love, and the later Generation X-style spin on the word as an intensifier meaning “extremely” or “completely” without any comparison of relative degree.

Other lines that have struck a discordant note with quibblers include Don’s “The window for this apology is closing” and Roger’s “I know you have to be on the same page as him.” Window in its metaphorical sense (as in a window of opportunity) and on the same page evidently date to the late ’70s. In a piece in The New Republic, the linguist John McWhorter complained that Peggy’s line “I’m in a very good place right now” is actually in a bad place, historically speaking. Even interjections can come under fire. When the character Sal reacts to the abrupt end of a screening of “Bye Bye Birdie” by exclaiming “awwa!” his falling-and-rising intonation has a 21st-century tinge, according to the linguist Neal Whitman.

Very often, however, fans will discern anachronisms that aren’t there — “un-achronisms,” as they were dubbed in the online forum Television Without Pity. Deborah Lipp, who runs the “Mad Men” fan blog Basket of Kisses with her sister Roberta, has dispelled fans’ concerns about the appearance of words like intense, lifestyle, self-worth, regroup and recon. She credits the hard work of the “Mad Men” brain trust with making sure that the true clunkers are few and far between.

To a large extent, Weiner and his staff members brought this festival of nitpickery on themselves through their own perfectionism. The show is famous for its loving attention to retro details, most notably in the set design (Weiner has been known to halt production over matters as subtle as the size of fruit in a bowl) and wardrobe (the actresses bravely suffer through the exquisite discomfort of vintage undergarments). Language naturally comes under the same microscope. To try to ensure accuracy, Weiner and his fellow writers sometimes take cues from the films and books of the era, but, as Weiner told me, those sources don’t necessarily provide the best window into genuine speech patterns. “You’re much better off if you can find a letter from your grandmother,” he said. He did acknowledge that Joan owes much of her sultry style to the writings of Helen Gurley Brown, the author of ’60s advice books like “Sex and the Single Girl” and “Sex and the Office.”

Even after a script is painstakingly developed, Weiner said, certain words and phrases can be flagged as questionable during the table read, when the cast runs through the dialogue for the first time. Whenever there is a question of usage, the research staff consults the Oxford English Dictionary, slang guides and online databases to determine whether an expression is documented from the era and could have been plausibly uttered. “When in doubt,” Weiner said, “I don’t use it.”

Despite his aversion to revealing anything about the new season, Weiner did let slip two examples of words from coming episodes that had to be researched thoroughly before they were deemed acceptable. One is humorless, a pedestrian adjective that is recorded back to the mid-19th century but nonetheless sounded “really modern” in the portion of dialogue where it appears. The other word is much more vivid — too vivid for print here, in fact, but suffice to say it’s a scatological slur for a person’s head. Though cursing on “Mad Men” isn’t as rampant as it was on “Deadwood” or “The Sopranos” (on which Weiner previously worked), it has its place in the show and promises to become more prominent as the characters move through the ever-liberalizing ’60s.

As the show progresses, new linguistic pitfalls await the writers. Weiner says he welcomes the fault-finding from fans, because he identifies himself as “one of the most nitpicky people in the world.” “I’m glad that we’re held to a high standard, and I’m glad that people get pleasure from picking it apart,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, it’s a battle for me to make sure it’s right.”

Ben Zimmer will answer one reader question every other week.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25FOB-onlanguage-t.html

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