Themself

I’ve become totally enamored with singular they, which provides a completely natural-feeling solution to the thorny problem of gender-neutral pronouns. As a consequence, I just found myself writing “themself” and doing a double take when my spell checker flagged it. A little research revealed that the Language Log has been there already. From my perspective, themself is a logical corollary of singular they, and I’ll be using it unashamedly in my writing. After all, 1.6 million Google hits can’t be wrong, can they?

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10 F**king Snowclones

Mike Shaver made a minor media splash with his well-publicized pronouncement at Blackhat that Mozilla would fix security holes in “ten fucking days”. (Note: we don’t usually curse here on Peer Pressure — though I swear like a sailor in real life — but this is a direct quote and we’re all adults here anyway, right?) Despite the fact that this got blown out of proportion, it was actually a pretty good PR move since it highlighted Mozilla’s unquestioned commitment to addressing vulnerabilities in a timely fashion when compared to other browser vendors (who will remain nameless). Like much of what Mike says, it’s also grumpily hilarious.

Well, it seems like the expression has legs. Someone remarked to me the other day (off the record and jokingly) that Firefox 3.0 would be out in “10 fucking months”, causing me to almost pee myself. Now Shane from ActiveState has followed suit by pegging the timeframe for their upcoming source code release for Open Komodo as “two f**king months”.

There’s a name for this type of linguistic construction: a snowclone. Coined by a writer for the excellent Language Log, it describes a formulaic cliche like “X is the new black”. This may well be the first vulgar snowclone of any import, proving that in the Mozilla community we (or at least Shaver) are forging new territory in language as well as technology.

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The Power of Passionate Users

A few months ago, we decided to make the various character strings in AllPeers easily available on Babelzilla (The official localization site for Firefox extensions) so that people who wanted to have AllPeers in their language could simply translate the software.

At the time of the announcement we were amazed that within 48 hours, 8 languages were already in the making. Today we’re delighted to announce that the next version of AllPeers is currently being translated into 28 languages thanks to the dedication of an amazing team of volunteers.

We already have 15 languages ready so if you are a native speaker of any of the following languages, please do not hesitate to go to Babelzilla and give a hand to the existing translator(s) of:

When you develop software, it is often hard to know what people really think of your work. Of course, you can setup a blog, a support forum, a feedback form but most of the time these are used by people who are encountering problems. So to experience first hand that there are users out there who care enough about your work to spend some of their spare time to make your software more accessible to their compatriots is an amazing feeling.

So to all of you, if you are reading: Thank you, we love you too!

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A Tipping Point Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling The Tipping Point was first published in January 2002, but I didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. And suddenly the term “tipping point” seems to be on everyone’s lips. I heard it used seemingly dozens of times at Le Web 3 conference in Paris in early December to describe the goal that AllPeers and other up-and-coming technology startups are striving for. Then when ever-insightful Firefox poster boy Blake Ross took it to Google for its evil search tips, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch couldn’t resist the (actually pretty clever) pun and blogged at length about Google’s Tipping Point.

Having just finished the book, I remember clearly what Gladwell’s coinage is intended to mean: the moment at which some sort of critical mass is attained and a low-intensity trend suddenly achieves massive growth, recognition and/or adoption. Mike’s usage is thus quite correct. Last year I visited a large Silicon Valley company that shall remain nameless and heard someone note that the tide had finally turned on Google’s golden boy status. At the time this was just wishful thinking, but it’s hard not to notice that something has recently tipped and that people are increasingly inclined to criticize, rather than blindly idolize, Google.

What I noticed today is that even the “tipping point” term now seems to be tipping, at least if a totally over-the-top article by Danny Sullivan is any indication. Danny uses the phrase to mean some sort of generic milestone, ignoring the subtly brilliant implications that gave the meme legs in the first place. How long until this banalization takes over? Maybe I’m overreacting, but it seems inevitable to me that we’ll soon be commenting on our recent fashion tipping point (stopped wearing white socks with sandals), last week’s culinary tipping point (had tuna instead of ham and cheese for lunch on Wednesday) and a major tipping point at work (Sally finally returned my stapler).

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Seek But Ye Shan’t Find

I stumbled yesterday upon Matt Marshall’s expose of stealth search startup Powerset on VentureBeat. My immediate reaction was of intense skepticism. Having majored in computational linguistics in university, I’ve developed a healthy respect for the tremendously difficult problem of natural language understanding. It’s impossible for me to imagine a startup appearing at the present time with a radical new search solution based on this type of technology. Scrolling down to the comments, I noted that Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch fame had expressed similar doubts (which didn’t stop me from posting my own rambling opinion).

Sure enough, Danny followed up with a fascinating post about the sordid history of natural language search. Despite his encyclopaedic knowledge of the space, however, I disagree with Danny’s analysis of why these efforts have all failed. He seems to be saying that the main issue is changing people’s habits.

Maybe this is because we’re talking about different things. For me, natural language search means that I can enter “What is the best way to revive a failed hollandaise sauce?” into a box and get back a list of relevant results. Get this to work and people will change their habits so fast it’ll make your head spin. In fact, the notion of entering terse keywords to get search results is far less intuitive than just asking the computer for information as you would ask another person, so going back to the more natural approach shouldn’t be a problem at all.

The real issue is that it’s so hard to make this work. At the risk of sounding pretentious (like that ever stopped me), I don’t think that the average layman realizes how difficult understanding language is. It’s so easy for us humans that we aren’t able (without academic study) to take a step back and bask in the complexity of the task that we are performing so effortlessly. Keeping this in mind, Danny’s quote from former Excite CTO Graham Spencer is extremely revealing:

“The problem with any technology that tries to be explicitly ’smart’ is that it has to be really close to perfect or else a human will notice.”

If you’re very clever and work very hard, you can perhaps create a search engine that uses computational linguistics to provide intelligent results X% of the time (where X is some low number). This is fantastic for demos since you know which queries work well. But in the real world, users are going to expect the computer to respond like a human being, since they’re talking to it as if it were one. These expectations are sure to be dashed after only a handful of queries, sending them running back to Google with their keywords in tow.

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Thank You for Smirking

To reinforce my comments about language pedants, here’s a link to the Language Log, where Geoffrey Pullum’s joke illustrates nicely the linguist’s view on this question.

Since he freely admits that the joke is a rip-off, I feel no remorse in stealing this post’s subject line from him.

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Anti-Social Network

Sometimes at work I have compassion for E.T. and understand how he felt when he was left behind by his friends on this strange planet.

Yes I do realise how Queeny Dramatical the above comment is but let me describe this strange world where I spend most of my days.

I sit in a room with 4 C++ developpers. Now whoever has ever spent more than a few hours with pure C++ developpers can imagine what it’s like to be sitting there in the middle of 4 C++ programmers!!.

First they don’t talk.

When they do, they usually shout some life threatening menace to their defenseless screens while pointing their fist at them saying: “You F**** son of a mother b***, I’m going to kill you”. Or something like that. You get the picture.

Sometimes, instead of shouting, they just jump around in pure orgasmatic pleasure raising their hands to the sky in a position that screams “I’m God, I’m the best”. (which can’t be since that’s me they are talking about ;-))

Second, if you have the courage to speak to them you can’t just say: “Hey, can you tell me ….”.

No. You silly naive person! First you have to request the communication by waving at them with your both arms stretched so they pay attention to you and remove their headphones which isolate them from people like me: “Non-C++ developpers who want to talk“.
In fact, the best way to communicate with them is to send them an Instant Message even if they are sitting next to you. “Oh Oh, my computer wants to speak to me”. That for sure gets their attention and they reply straight away. Oh Yes! And they don’t even need to remove their headphones.

Then sometimes, when all is quiet and you can only hear the soft sounds of fingers nervously hitting the keyboards, a miracle happens… They all remove their headphones at the same time and start talking to each others!

Of course because they are all Czech, they speak in Czech and it goes something like: “dobry blatichova darek. Tak yo. Nemuzu tento tade pocitace. Ano. Dobry. Ah Ah Ah Ah” Or something like that. You get the picture.

Sometimes I can even hear “Cedricka” or “Cedricku” or “Cedrickem” (yes the Czech language is a killer) which means they are talking about me. So I just smile, putting a brave face trying not too feel neither lonely nor stupid (I know it’s hard). I’m the boss after all.

As I said, sometimes I feel like Cedric phone home!

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Begging the Question

My brother Ben wrote to me to complain about my excessively modern usage of the phrase “beg the question”, thereby leaving my father as the only member of my family who doesn’t write to me mainly to criticize my mauling of the English language here on Peer Pressure (because he’s the only one who doesn’t read it?). Of course, it’s easy to point fingers when you don’t even have your own blog. Start one, people, and then we can talk. But be forewarned: split one infinitive and I’ll be all over you.

But seriously, Ben pointed me to a Wikipedia article whose main message seems to be that people who criticize the newer usage of the phrase are hopeless pedants. As a linguist, I often find myself arguing that the only criterion for “right” in language is how people actually speak. After all, language evolves, and if the prescripters had their way we’d still be talking like Chaucer (or Beowulf, for that matter). But I guess there’s no point in baiting the wordanistas. The best policy is doubtless to avoid the phrase altogether.

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Singular They

One of the biggest challenges for any writer of English is the singular third-person pronoun. The according-to-Hoyle correct way to refer to an unknown actor is to use the masculine versions of the various pronominal forms: he, his and suchlike. Unfortunately, all those pesky feminists have taken offense to this convention, leading to any number of clumsy alternatives: hyphenation (his/her), alterating male and female pronouns or even creative but ugly hybrids (hiser, anyone?). My favorite is to avoid the singular altogether: “users like their software lean-and-mean,” rather than “a user prefers his/her software lean-and-mean.”

Well this Language Log post confirms what I’ve long believed: using the plural forms (they/their) to refer to singular antecedents is perfectly kosher in modern English. If it’s good enough for “esteemed writers”, it’s good enough for me. So I’m going to adopt this in my future writings, and language pedants be damned. Who knows, I may even start splitting infinitives one of these days.

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Bloc Head

Loic Le Meur points to the new official French translation for “blog”. They went with “bloc-notes”, which literally means a notepad, because it can be abbreviated as “bloc” and thus sound a bit like the English equivalent.

Very clever. Well I hate it. The cool thing about “blog” is that it is a neologism that comes from “weblog” and thus has a bit of hi-tech panache. “Bloc-notes” sounds pitifully mundane. I love French culture, French food, the French language and a bunch of other French stuff, but they have to get a clue and realize that some anglicisms just sound cooler than anything dreamed up after the fact by a committee of uptight language extremists. The good news is that there’s little to no chance that anyone will actually use the new term.

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Bigger Than Big

So Merriam-Webster had a contest challenging people to suggest their favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary. Hehe, I’m going to be using these liberally in my writing from now on. I must be horribly out of touch because there were a number of top choices that I had never heard of. “Confuzzled”, for example, was new to me but is clearly a gem. Rarely has a word sounded so much like what it means. As an added bonus, now I finally know how to spell “ginormous”.

Update: Once again, I scooped Boing Boing.

Update: And Slashdot.

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Trompe l’Oeil

Don’t even ask me how I stumbled on this one: words and phrases that sound gross but aren’t.

Now that’s what the web is all about!

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Nouning Verbs

What’s in a name? In the technology world, quite a lot, as illustrated by a friendly little spat over the term “social software” on the Many-to-Many weblog. Of course, great technology often wins out with or without a catchy buzzword, but I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of terminology. For one, it has a clustering effect, lumping disperse projects together under a single label that lets people know that they are not alone in what they are doing (and, crucially, helps them to decide which industry conferences to attend).

This in turn has a tangible effect on capital allocation. For better or for worse, VCs tend to invest in the hot sector du jour, invariably associated with a handy catchphrase (”we’ve just closed a fund focusing on B2B, P2P, e-commerce, nanotechnology, etc., etc., etc.”). Heck, when you get right down to it, isn’t this why language was invented in the first place? It often seems arbitrary to attach any label to any group of inevitably heterogenous stuff, but it was the willingness not to require a different word for every type of snow that optimized interactions sufficiently to give rise to civilization. (Sorry, I may have been watching a little too much of the presidential debates.)

So is “social software” a good term? It’s a great one! It’s short, alliterative, says what it is, and I agree with Clay Shirky that the implicit emphasis on technology is a feature, not a bug. Just look at danah boyd’s proposed alternative: “Computer Mediated Communication” or CMC. Very catchy. In fact, it strikes me that the best thing of all about “social software” is that it isn’t a TLA.

But the most intriguing part of Clay’s post is the second sentence: “I want to address her despisity (despision? despisement?) of the term.” In linguistics there is a famously clever saying: “In English, any noun can be verbed.” Clearly the inverse is not true.

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Bending Gender

An amusing post by Clay Shirky about one futile and vaguely ludicrous effort to categorize all flavors of human relationships using a handful of English-language terms. The effort even has a snappy name: XFN or XHTML Friends Network. (Note to self: blog a biting entry about the dangers of escalating acronymization. Are there any acronyms left that aren’t composed of other acronyms?)

What struck me most about this was the fact that XFN’s creators felt it necessary to find “gender-neutral” terms for all of their relationships. This had the most impact on the “Romantic” categories, not coincidentally the ones that Clay chose to pick on. The archetypical example was the choice of “date” for someone you’re dating, instead of the more natural “girlfriend” and “boyfriend”.

Someone ought to let these folks know that English is not the only language out there, and the effort to find gender-neutral words in other languages makes even less sense. In Czech, practically every term that refers to a woman uses the suffix ka. So a female doctor, teacher and police officer would translate, respectively, as doktorka, učitelka and policistka.

I encounter similar issues all the time in the course of developing AllPeers. Although we currently have only an English version, it is clear that we will want to internationalize it at some point. So I shudder when I’m forced out of expediency to write code like:

// Generate the name of the shared folder for this resource
strName = "Shared " + poResource->GetDescription()->GetName() + "s";

For non-programmers, this code says that the name of the shared folder for some type of resource should be the word “Shared”, followed by a space, followed by the name of the resource (say “Photo”), followed by an “s” (resulting in “Shared Photos”). Well, obviously this won’t work reliably even in English (consider what happens if the resource is called “Child” or “Goose”). In most languages, the problem is even worse since different types of nouns tend to form plurals in different ways (German is notorious for this) and adjectives often vary based on noun gender. So in French, a folder for shared photographs would be photos partagées, but the equivalent for books would be livres partagés, without the extra e at the end (since photo is feminine and livre is masculine).

My point is that it’s naive to imagine that we will find gender-neutral terms for human relationships in English, and even more naive to think that this will fly in any other language. Better to accept this and use more natural terms that may vary based on gender, since all of the machinery to handle this is necessary anyway in well-designed, internationalized software. The good news is that it’s a darn sight easier to generate natural language than to understand it.

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