How many words are there in English?

Just around a million.

Did you know that by November 2006 there will be one million words in the English language?

That is the estimation from Paul Payack, the President of Global Language Monitor, a non-profit group that documents, analyses and tracks trends in language the world over.

Oh, too late, Paul. Oxford has already clocked a billion words.

A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as “podcast” and “celebutante” to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.

I’ll see your billion and raise you a brazilian.

Oh, but wait. It appears those aren’t separate word types. They’re just tokens. In other words, they’ve assembled a corpus of a billion words, but most words are repeated.

Determining how many words there are in English isn’t so hard from a compiling standpoint. It’s easy to write a Perl script to plow (or plough) through a corpus and count individual word types. No, the problem is defining what a word is. ‘Cat’ and ‘cats’ are two words, but one lexeme, so dictionaries list them under the same heading. What about polysemous words? The mouse on my computer and the mouse my cat runs from are two separate things; should they be one word or two? What about multi-word expressions: is ‘ice cream’ one word or two? Does it matter if I spell it with a hyphen? Any one of these decisions will change the count and complicate the task. So when someone reports ‘English has X words’, they really ought to clarify what definition of ‘word’ they used.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that I know someone’s going to come to me and say, “Did you know that there are a billion words in English?”

And then I’ll say, “UK billion, or American billion?”

I’m teaching a new Extension course called “English: The World’s Language”. Our first class was last night, and I quite enjoyed it.

We discussed the current national anthem flap over in the USA. Seems someone’s translated it into Spanish, and it has the usual folk feeling belligerent.

Several Republican senators are steamed at the notion of a new Spanish version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander, Majority Leader Bill Frist, both from Tennessee, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, and Pat Roberts of Kansas submitted a nonbinding resolution on the Senate floor last week that said the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance “should be recited or sung in English.”

How dare they sing our national anthem in the language of a foreign country! They should only sing it in English… which is the language of a foreign country.

The reason, they say, is that what binds Americans together is not race, ancestry or origin, but a common language — English.

It’s true that language is a unifying force. If blood is thicker than water, then language is thicker than blood. The UK and Australia are close partners with the US not just because of mutual business interests, but also because of the common language. ‘Speakng someone’s language’ is a frequent metaphor for mutual understanding. But just as language can be a unifying force, so can tolerance and respect, which you never see from the Party of Division.

And they argue that immigrants wanting to become citizens must renounce allegiance to their former country and swear allegiance to the laws and Constitution of the United States, and they must make that oath in English.

Lamar Alexander’s actual words:

“I worry, Mr. President, that translating our national anthem will actually have the effect of dividing us. It adds to the celebration of multiculturalism in our society which has eroded our understanding of our common American culture.”

Aah, there it is. The old bogeyman Multiculturalism. They dress up their detestable sentiments in the language of unity and togetherness, but the real message is always: We are one nation: ours, not yours. And leave your language at the razor-wire fence.

This reaction doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that people aren’t better at recognising their own fear and managing it. The fear I’m talking about is the fear of one’s language vanishing. Think about it for a minute — it would be terrible. Not having anyone who understands Shakespeare? Not being able to communicate with anyone (especially because you haven’t actually taken the effort to learn another language)? It would be like having your way of thinking erased. But is that likely to happen to English? Not really — English is the number two language in the world, in terms of native speakers and learners. It’s other languages that are being threatened by English. But try telling that to the poor English-speaking xenophobe. He’s too busy fighting an eternal trumped-up war against imaginary and ever-changing foes.

Wars are about control. In a physical war, you try to control the resources; land, oil, water. In a culture war, you try to control the standard — whose standard will prevail? So consider this conflict a pre-emptive strike. We have to protect English from Spanish, just like we had to protect America from Iraq. They might do something to threaten us, you see.

Since it’s Bush Week around here, let’s talk about The Decider. With Donald ‘Abu’ Rumsfeld under fire, Bush has stepped in to remind everyone that he’s the one with all the power around here.

“I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”

‘Hearing the voices’ is a trifle worrying, but were you heartened to hear that he reads the front page? Maybe if he read more of the paper, he’d be a Better Decider.

The word ‘decider’ isn’t new; it even has an established computational meaning. In the linguistic ham-hands of Bush, the word takes on a dangerously petulant, yet still mockable tone.

But this usage has legs. The Daily Show has picked it up, and it may cross into other domains as well. For example, the New York Times asks: Are you the decider in your relationship?

[W]hile spouses are often quick to say they jointly consider where to vacation, how many children to have, what car to buy and where to live, each is often quick to lay claim to some, if not all, of the domestic terrain.
…
But dubbing oneself “the decider” is often much less about the end product — a new stove, a vacation, a cabinet member — than it is about expressing power.

Very similar to the Seinfeldian notion of having ‘hand‘ in the relationship.

I often run into the trap of giving power to people who want it, especially if they’re good at using it. On those occasions when I’ve had to be the Decider, and it’s something I’m interested in, I’ve done it well. I can do Decider. Decider is good for me.

So I shall be watching with (some) interest when the American Dialect Society picks its Word of the Year. I bet ‘decider’ is an early favourite.

The debate on guns is over, at least in the USA. The anti-gun side has lost. Even prominent lefties like Kos are pro-gun. And there are an awful lot of guns and guns enthusiasts out there. That’s just the kind of place America is.

It’s a curiosity, then, to see the issue from over here in Australia. Obviously, Australia’s a different place. It’s more British than American, and if you’re a moderate, you’re a lefty-moderate, not a righty-moderate like in the USA. There are parallels, though: the feisty independence, the rurality of much of the country. But here, handguns are tightly controlled, gun groups are not terribly effective, violent crime is pretty low, and most people don’t see the need for any of this to change. There’s a particular aversion to ‘going down the American path’, partly because of TV carnage and news coverage, and partly from the historical resentment of Americanism that bubbles just below the collective Australian psyche.

Most curiously of all, the conservative Prime Minister John Howard is staunchly anti-gun. Here are some comments from today:

“We did a lot more in 2002 and 2003 with handguns, but we really must resolve as a nation never to go down the American path.

“There are many things about America that I admire, but I do not admire their gun culture.”

How’s about that? In lots of other ways, Howard’s the Bush-in-training: he’s used immigrants to divide voters, he’s big into privatisation, he’s tried to gut higher education, and on Iraq he was one of Bush’s biggest enablers. So this issue has always been an unusual departure to my view.

Maybe Howard’s like Bush the Elder. Like Howard, I couldn’t stand him, thought he was wrong, and knew he’d done some real damage to the country. But now that we’ve seen Junior in action, I’d have to admit that he was a man of some character who was able to maneuver around some tricky problems.

I guess comparing anyone to Bush the Younger isn’t really helpful. No one’s going to suffer from that comparison. Even Nixon starts to look good.

Mr Bush is working his way down the thirties (currently at 32% approval) on his way to the twenties. It’s hard work — hard work! — but he’ll get to 25 by August, peg by peg.

That’s a CNN poll, too, so it doesn’t trend as low as, say, Zogby or Pew.

But Mr Bush is taking time out to discuss Iraq, and maybe some things that he could have done better.

“I also want to let you know that before you commit troops that you must do everything that you can to solve the problem diplomatically,” he commented. “And I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max

His elocution is improving, but I thought his day-glo accents and jelly shoes were a bit much.

and would have committed troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq, knowing what I know today.”

Actually, I meant to say: he explained why he would do everything the same all over again.

Oh, and did you know he also believes in God?

Bush also explained, in unusually stark terms, how his belief in God influences his foreign policy. “I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true,” he said. “One, I believe there’s an Almighty.”

Yes, an almighty… stench of hypocrisy coming from the direction of the White House.

Once again, Bush shows his ability to ignore facts and embrace comforting ideology. Way back before I understood about evolution, I knew that it posed a serious threat to my religious understanding. And I’m ashamed to say that at the time, I decided to ignore the facts and stick to the fiction. My education would have to wait until the day I decided it was more important to go with facts than preconceptions. A day, incidentally, that signalled the end of my religious faith. But I still do see this pattern play out in religious believers I talk to. Somehow when a belief is very very important, we marshall all our cognitive faculties to protect it from attack, whether it be that God exists, that we’re good people, or that we’re bringing freeance and peeance to the world.

“And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.”

Do you think he knows that this is an ex post facto attempt to explain Iraq, or that he doesn’t know?

What a disaster. Folks, you don’t want a leader who has a religious ideology. You want an agnostic pragmatist. Someone who’s going to say, “Let’s have a look at the various solutions to this problem. What’s been tried? What effect did it have? And let’s be careful — no Supreme Being is going to pull our fat out of the fire if we screw it up.”

A religious ideologue would say, “I’m coming at the problem with this viewpoint, which I firmly believe to be true. I’m going to implement it, and I’m going to assume that because my princples are true and my heart is good, the plan will work.” And then if it doesn’t work, don’t change the plan. That would imply that the cherished ideology is wrong. Just have faith.

Religious ideologies are disastrous from a public policy point of view, be they Taliban or Christian Coalition. If you want to see the logical consequences of faith-based living and leaderhsip, you need look no further than George W. Bush.

Here it is! The hundredth Good Reason post. Expressions of congratulations may be left in comments.

As a celebration, a little gift for you: a wonderful list of cognitive biases. Yep, all those funny little bugs in our mental system that make fictions seem real, and that keep religion and alternative medicine going.

I’m going to be poring over this list for quite some time today. Once I’ve got it memorised, I expect I shall be an insufferable tormentor to all my religious friends. “Sorry, pal, but that’s a mighty big case of observer-expectancy effect you’ve got going there.”

In the Language Technology community, we don’t talk enough about the ethical consequences of our work. We’re busy building speech recognisers and text classifiers — and they could be used to listen to your phone and flag an agent if you mention the wrong key words. I hope we don’t all someday have an Oppenheimer moment.

Data mining has been in the news, especially with regard to Bush’s illegal wiretapping operation. Data mining has acquired a vaguely sinister whiff about it, especially in the hands of the CIA.

But have a look at this interview with CIA ‘Open Source Center’ director Douglas J. Naquin:

“A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center’s creation in November.

Okay, so they’re pulling together a lot of opinions and stuff that’s already out there. That doesn’t sound so sinister. In fact, it sounds like the kind of thing I’d like to have.

In fact, I’d love a data mining news program similar to Google News, but with a few changes. It’d watch the articles I clicked on, and track those topics. It would pull up similar topics as they arrived. Of course, I wouldn’t only want items similar to what I’ve already seen, so then it would throw in unrelated stories every once in a while, just to see if I was interested in them. Over time, it’d learn my preferences, and deliver related news and blog pages. Things like this are already in the works, and the tools are already available: just combine data mining, topic detection, and user modeling.

Here’s the problem: the sinister-ness of the technology goes up exponentially with the opacity of the government.

“We’re certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer,” said Mr. Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the government’s nonsecret intelligence in December.

“I can’t get into detail of what, but I’ll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president’s daily brief has gone up rather significantly,” Mr. Jardines said. “There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we’ve been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community.”

Mr. Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said.

That was weird. Could they have been any less specific? “We can’t say too much, but we have information that something happened. Perhaps in a foreign county, perhaps not. Also someone said something to someone else, so we’re looking into that.” I guess it must be hard getting respect when you’re in non-secret intelligence.

Is this information good for anything? Yes, one thing. Assembling an enemies list.

This stuff has to be pursued as openly as possible, and right now I don’t trust the US government to do the right thing with the technology. Or anything else.

Even though I know very little about other Presidents of the USA before Nixon (the Watergate hearings are one of my earliest memories), I still think Bush Jr has to be the worst. After all, the country was still standing when he got it, so no one else could have been worse, right?

So it’s nice to hear that many actual historians agree with my uninformed assessment. And better still, Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, lays out the case.

What makes this better than the typical ‘Bush is bad’ article is that the authors uses past presidencies to make historical comparisons.

How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

One quote that got me thinking:

No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties).

Do you think that people’s opinion of the President has more to do with external factors, like whether they feel happy or not, rather than whether they agree with his policies? Sort of like your favourite album or something.

I note that the latest SurveyUSA polls are out, and Bush isn’t looking good. Nice to see that Utah’s still pulling for him at the number 1 spot, though. It hurts to say this, but this may have been the thing that made me realise that people in my former state of residence really are a bunch of dumbasses, speaking collectively and not individually.

Anyway, try this. Sort it by approval, and notice how the states are marked as ‘red states’ (that voted for Bush in 2004) or ‘blue states’ (that voted for what’s-his-name). Now, which ‘red state’ gives Bush the lowest marks?

It’s Ohio. The one that turned it all for Bush. They finally figured it out, but it’s too late for the rest of us.

You can’t really say that they’ve repented, though. There’s a bill in the State Legislature to criminalise abortion — even if you try to get one in another state.

Ohio house bill 228 introduced by Tim Brinkman, R-Mount Lookout, in April would make it a felony for a woman to seek to terminate her pregnancy and holds the same penalty if she chooses to leave the state for the medical procedure.

Additionally, anyone who helps coordinate an abortion or transportation to leave the state for one could be charged as well.

The controversial nature of the proposed bill has slowed its progress through the legislature.

“House Bill 228, as far as I know, is still in committee. Some bills take more time to come out of committee. You just never know,” said Ohio Rep. John Schlichter, R-Greenfield. “I’m a pro-life person. My voting record has been consistent. I was raised in a Christian home.”

In a way, it’s nice to know that not all the dumbasses are in Utah. On the other hand, some of them are in public office.