Uncommon knowledge

Beware of chivalry

People generally think of discrimination as a manifestation of negative attitudes about another social group. Yet, in the case of gender discrimination, it can also be motivated by ostensibly benevolent attitudes, with the aim of protecting women. Though perhaps not as offensive as hostile sexism, new research finds that benevolent sexism can damage a woman’s career, too. In surveys, women managers reported having fewer challenging experiences and less negative feedback in their jobs, something that may hinder their opportunities for development and advancement. In experiments, men who held paternalistic attitudes towards women were less likely to recommend challenging experiences for women subordinates.

King, E. et al., “Benevolent Sexism at Work: Gender Differences in the Distribution of Challenging Developmental Experiences,” Journal of Management (forthcoming).

Educated smokers quit sooner

A new analysis of smoking suggests that educational background is a critical component of people’s health, affecting how quickly new ideas are acted on. On Jan. 11, 1964, the surgeon general issued the first widely publicized report about smoking’s negative health effects. By analyzing data collected from pregnant women between 1959 and 1966, two researchers found that educated women cut back their smoking almost immediately on the release of the surgeon general’s report, while less educated women actually increased their smoking. This divergence of smoking rates — and the associated rate of newborn health problems — between people of different educational backgrounds continued all the way up until the mid-1980s, when the rates began converging. The effect of education was amplified by the level of education of one’s community, such that educated people surrounded by other educated people were especially likely to quit.

Aizer, A. & Stroud, L., “Education, Knowledge and the Evolution of Disparities in Health,” National Bureau of Economic Research (March 2010).

What video games do to judgment

Though not yet up to the standards of the Matrix movies, video games are becoming increasingly realistic. This has prompted many studies of whether video games induce violent behavior, but an even broader question is whether experience with video games can skew judgment. In a new experiment, researchers asked people to play True Crime, a game where the player is a police officer who must catch as many criminals as possible, by any means necessary. After two hours of play, participants were asked to judge real-life cases where either a civilian or a police officer had committed a particular crime. Compared to people who hadn’t played the video game, those who had were significantly more lenient on the police officers.

Lee, K. et al., “Will the Experience of Playing a Violent Role in a Video Game Influence People’s Judgments of Violent Crimes?” Computers in Human Behavior (forthcoming).

E-mail makes lying easier

If you’ve ever caught yourself writing something on the Web or in an e-mail that you would never have written in a letter, you’re not alone. A recent study confirmed that people are more willing to bend the truth in e-mail. In one experiment, anonymous business students were asked to divvy up an imaginary pot of money between themselves and another person. Students who were required to submit their decision by e-mail were more likely to misrepresent the size of the pot than students who were required to submit their decision using pen and paper. Likewise, in an experiment involving real money and without anonymity, business managers misrepresented the size of a pot of money in an e-mail communication more than they did in a paper communication.

Naquin, C. et al., “The Finer Points of Lying Online: E-Mail versus Pen and Paper,” Journal of Applied Psychology (March 2010).

The war really did come home

What is the true cost of war? The psychological trauma that many Vietnam combat veterans experienced led some of them to violence in civilian life. An economist analyzed survey and personnel data on Vietnam veterans and found that combat exposure increased their propensity for subsequent violent acts. The economist also estimated the social cost of this post-combat violence to be around $65 billion in 2007 dollars.

Rohlfs, C., “Does Combat Exposure Make You a More Violent or Criminal Person? Evidence from the Vietnam Draft,” Journal of Human Resources (March 2010).

Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/23/beware_of_chivalry/

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Getting ‘untracked’

The surprisingly deep history of a bit of jock-talk

IN THE FIRST playoff game against the Celtics last Sunday, the Orlando Magic “finally got untracked” only in the last quarter, the Globe’s Frank Dell’Apa wrote.

That untracked is standard usage in sports reporting, but it still puzzles readers who look at it closely. Tom Fitzpatrick of Groton recently e-mailed to suggest that it might be a corruption of the more sensible get on track: “After all, a train can’t go anywhere unless it’s on the track, and if it were to get ‘untracked’ it would crash.”

An excellent theory, and the one I embraced a decade ago, when a reader first pointed out the get untracked usage. It obviously wasn’t related to “untracked wilderness,” but to the later mechanical senses of track. But when wheels or radar systems track properly, it’s a good thing. Why would an athlete want to get untracked?

Several readers offered rationales for the usage: The image reminded one of breaking free of a deeply rutted dirt road. Others suggested untracked implied “jumping the tracks” to surprise opponents. Or was a slump like being on a runaway train that has to be derailed? Globe sportswriter John Powers dismissed those guesses: “Just jockspeak,” he said.

Like Fitzpatrick, I leaned toward the simplest explanation: Untracked was probably what linguists playfully call an eggcorn — an unwitting modification of on track that changed that plodding expression into one that suggested breaking free.

But 10 years later, the status of untracked has changed. It’s no longer a stealth usage; several standard dictionaries (though not the Oxford English Dictionary) now include it. The New Oxford American gives it as the phrase — get untracked — and defines it as “get into one’s stride or find good form.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dates it to 1939. And a wealth of online sources have accumulated since those early attempts to trace untracked to its roots. Who knew what might lie deep in the archives?

Asked to search for get untracked — the usual phrasing nowadays, and a term that avoids calling up thousands of citations for untracked deserts, moorlands, and snows — Google News whisked me back to September 1927. There was Jack Dempsey himself, in a widely syndicated first-person essay, musing on his upcoming rematch with Gene Tunney. “I either get away to a whirl-wind start…or I can’t get untracked for a long while,” the ex-heavyweight champ explained.

In a 1933 AP report, lightweight Tony Canzoneri complained of the same problem: “I felt strong all the way, but toward the last I couldn’t seem to get untracked.” And in 1939, welterweight Davey Day confessed, “I don’t get untracked till around the sixth or seventh round.”

In the following decades, get untracked crossed over to football and track, then to golf and baseball and tennis. By the 1970s it could be found in the odd music review, describing performers who got (or failed to get) untracked, though it remained predominantly a sports expression.

But wait, there’s more. Boxing may have launched the career of the phrase get untracked, but that wasn’t the earliest version of the sportswriters’ untrack. Further digging unearthed examples of the verb as early as the 1890s, in regular use at — where else? — the racetrack. “Before Carr had untracked his mind Dungarven had beaten him,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “The latter [horse] did not seem able to untrack himself in the heavy going,” said The New York Times.

This untracked might well have been confusing to some 19th-century readers, since the word was also used in the horse world to mean “never raced.” Untracked also shows up now and then with the meaning “fell to pieces,” the opposite of its standard sports sense. In 1990, for instance, a New York Times racing item reported that “the sloppy track apparently untracked the favorites.”

But the positive untracked seems to have prospered modestly, not making a splash, for more than a century before we began to notice its oddity. Then came a mild attack of the Recency Illusion — the notion, named by linguist Arnold Zwicky, that a usage new to you must be new to the language.

After 120 years, though, I think we can agree that the usage is standard. And the fact that it may have come from the racetrack may be some consolation to readers baffled by the modern usage. But we still don’t know what image (if any) the coiners had in mind. A number of early examples come in race-day reports that involve muddy tracks; could untracking refer to a horse’s hitting its stride despite the heavy going?

Or maybe untracked is meant to contrast the racetrack with railroad tracks. For a train or streetcar, getting untracked is a disaster. But in a horse race — where “tracking” another horse means following it — the only way to win is to “untrack” and overtake the leaders.

But I wouldn’t put big money on either of these theories. After all, nobody ever said idioms had to make sense.

Jan Freeman, Boston Globe

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/23/getting_untracked/

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Fraught

W.F. Young asks: “Long ago I developed the expectation that on encountering the word fraught, I’d find it associated with a prepositional phrase, ‘with [something].’  Now, in old age, I find that expectation dashed, often.  Can you say what it was based on and anything about when, how or by whom it was undercut?”

Here we have a case of a very old word undergoing a rapid shift in contemporary usage. In Middle English, fraught (an etymological cousin of freight) was a verb meaning “to load (a ship),” and the identical form could serve as a past participle meaning “laden (with).” While the verb dropped out of the language almost entirely, the past participle stuck around, typically followed by “with” and an object — often a burden, whether real or figurative.

Fraught as a standalone adjective meaning “distressed, anxious, tense,” without an accompanying prepositional phrase, is a 20th-century innovation. When the word cropped up on William Safire’s radar in 2006, he offered a line from “King Lear” as a putative early example: Goneril tells her father to “make use of that good wisdom, whereof I know you are fraught.” But Shakespeare did use fraught with a preposition, whereof, and an object, wisdom, so it is in fact very much in line with the usage of the era. Lear was surely in a distressed emotional state, but that wasn’t what his daughter was driving at.

By the nineteenth century, the metaphorical extension of the word had developed a new twist. Instead of the traditional phrasing, fraught with followed by an object (something usually unpleasant or unfortunate), the object could appear before fraught in a hyphenated compound, such as danger-fraught, pain-fraught or war-fraught. Thus if a moment was fraught with emotion, it could just as well have been described as emotion-fraught or in time as emotionally fraught, signaling the implied object in the adverb.

The first glimmers of fraught without even a hint of an object start appearing in the 1920s and ’30s. The earliest example I’ve found so far comes from a 1925 serialized story by Henry Leyford Gates about a flapper named Joanna. In one installment Gates writes, “It was Joanna who at last broke the fraught silence.” The lyrical phrase fraught silence, perhaps evoking pregnant pause, shows up again in books from 1934, 1946 and 1958. Another early use is in George O’Neil’s 1931 novel about the poet John Keats, “Special Hunger”: “For Keats this was a singularly fraught circumstance.” Circumstances, along with anxiety-ridden situations, issues and relationships, would soon become familiar companions for fraught.

Standalone fraught picked up steam in the 1960s, attracting the notice of dictionaries and usage guides, but the last couple of decades have seen an even stronger uptick. In the texts collected in the Corpus of Contemporary American English from 1990 to 1994, only about 9 percent of the instances of fraught do not take the preposition with. From 2005 to 2009, however, the rate jumps to a whopping 30 percent. The usage has become a journalistic commonplace, as in the recent New York Times headlines, “For New Stadium, a Fraught Coin Flip” and “Opera Companies’ Fraught Seasons.” No doubt about it, we’re living in fraught times.

Ben Zimmer will answer one reader question every other week.

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-onlanguage-t.html

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