Since I collect these things, here’s another instance of someone saying ‘capsicun’. I wonder why it’s always ‘My Kitchen Rules’ when people say this.
And this time it’s someone from South Australia.
I’ve also created a ‘capsicun’ tag, if you want to keep up with this wild new language craze.
This was a fun episode today. I didn’t think I was going to have enough to talk about on the subject of ‘uptalking’, but there’s quite a lot to say. Plus it was fun to actually ‘uptalk’ because I knew it would annoy our producer Peter Barr.
‘Uptalking’, for the uninitiated, is where you use question-style intonation even when you’re not asking a question. Everyone has an opinion on what it means — you’re unconfident, you’re seeking approval — but I think of this as idle speculation. And then I add some of my own — hey, my idle speculation is as good as anyone else’s.
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It was a Great Moment in Tech Support. The caller asked me how he could remove a word from his WordPerfect dictionary.
It was an unusual request, but we got a lot of those. “What word do you want to remove?” I asked.
He stumbled. “Um… ‘pubic’?”
I knew immediately what had happened. ‘Pubic’ is a real word, of course, but he hadn’t meant to use it in his document, and there he’d gone and given a presentation on ‘pubic works’ and how ‘pubic libraries’ operate for the ‘pubic good’. These things can happen when you speak in pubic.
His dumb spell checker had failed him. Spell checkers have been around so long that we’re used to their limitations, and one of them was that it was insensitive to context. Well, no more. Google’s DocsBlog (via Lifehacker) has announced that it’s rolled its “do you mean” spell checker into GoogleDocs.
1. Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”
2. Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee” you’ll see a suggestion to change “meat” to “meet.”
3. Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they’ll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex.
How do ordinary spell checkers work?
Spell checkers work by taking words that don’t appear in the dictionary (sometimes known as ‘out-of-vocabulary’ words, or OOV), and comparing the string to a list of known words in the dictionary. To figure out the most likely suggestion, they calculate an ‘edit distance’, or how many changes it would take to go from the malformed word to a known word.
So how do you calculate the edit distance? One easy measure is the Levenshtein distance. It’s pretty intuitive. Ask yourself: How many changes would it take to go from ‘pubic’ to ‘public’? Just one: add an ‘l’. So the edit distance is 1. But the computer calculates this using a grid. This is the cool part.
Start by putting the two words in a grid like so; one word down and the other across. Also, fill the second row and column with numbers. (This will make sense in a minute.)
| p | u | b | i | c | ||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| p | 1 | |||||
| u | 2 | |||||
| b | 3 | |||||
| l | 4 | |||||
| i | 5 | |||||
| c | 6 |
Now, fill each of the inner boxes with one of three numbers, whichever is lowest:
For our example, ‘p’ matches ‘p’, so the smallest number would be the 0 to the upper left. No cost.
| p | u | b | i | c | ||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| p | 1 | 0 | ||||
| u | 2 | |||||
| b | 3 | |||||
| l | 4 | |||||
| i | 5 | |||||
| c | 6 |
On we go, down the column. None of the other letters are a ‘p’, so the lowest number for each box would be the one just above it, plus one. Notice how the numbers keep stacking up.
| p | u | b | i | c | ||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| p | 1 | 0 | ||||
| u | 2 | 1 | ||||
| b | 3 | 2 | ||||
| l | 4 | 3 | ||||
| i | 5 | 4 | ||||
| c | 6 | 5 |
We start again at the next column. The ‘p’ and the ‘u’ aren’t a match, so we give it a 0 + 1 from the left, but the ‘u’ and the ‘u’ are a match, so that box gets a cost-free ‘0’ from the upper-left.
| p | u | b | i | c | ||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| p | 1 | 0 | 1 | |||
| u | 2 | 1 | 0 | |||
| b | 3 | 2 | ||||
| l | 4 | 3 | ||||
| i | 5 | 4 | ||||
| c | 6 | 5 |
You can work out the rest of the table if you’re keen, but here it is in full.
| p | u | b | i | c | ||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| p | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| u | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| b | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| l | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| i | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| c | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
Notice how everything’s going smoothly until the number in green, where the first real mismatch is. But the number to watch out for is that last one in the lower right, in red. When the whole table is filled out, that’s where your answer is. So the words ‘pubic’ and ‘public’ have a Levenshtein distance of 1, which matches our intuition about the number of changes we’d have to make to go from one to the other.
You can try this with any two words, either on paper, or using this handy website here. Having a play with it is a good way of getting a grip on this algorithm.
There are lots of ways we can tweak this spell-checker. We can adjust the cost so that near keys (and therefore more plausible typing mistakes) cost less than farther-away keys. We could adjust for frequency so that more common words float to the top of our suggestion list. But what we can’t do is look at nearby words to see what’s likely. That means the classic ‘form/from’ problem is beyond the reach of our spell checker.
But not the one from GoogleDocs. It will flag words, even if they’re real words. Behold:
Note how throwing in a related word (‘pelvis’) in that last example is enough to calm the spell checker down.
How does it do it? It looks like it works by calculating the probability of other words appearing nearby. Articles like ‘the’ and ‘a’ are likely to appear before ‘island’, less likely before ‘Iceland’. The whole thing could be modelled with n-grams (nearby words) using a sufficiently large language corpus, which Google certainly has. And that huge corpus ensures that lots of words will be in the dictionary, including low-frequency or brand new terms.
It’s good to know that people are still adding to a technology that’s so seemingly mundane.
I was talking about the word ‘shemozzle’ and the word ‘carillon’ on today’s “Talk the Talk” podcast. I shall never look at Perth’s Carillon City shopping centre in quite the same way again.
I forgot to include a shoutout to Laverne and Shirley, which is the first place most of us ever heard the word ‘shemozzle’ (or more probably, ‘shlemazel’).
Also: my computer doesn’t seem to recognise ‘shemozzle’, which is too bad. And when I type ‘shlemazel’, it suggests ‘schlemiel’. These computers don’t know from Yiddish!
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I’m a bit of a G-dropper. I have a habit of dropping my participial g’s sometimes. If I say “doing” and “working”, it can come out as “doin'” and “workin'”. (Although really, there’s no /g/ there in the first place. It’s alveolarisation of the velar /ŋ/. But I’m going to call it G-dropping anyway.)
This is a pretty common pattern that shows up in many dialects of English, be they British, Australia, or USAian. For me, it seems to get more pronounced the closer I am to the USA.
Nowadays, G-dropping is tied to lower socioeconomic status (but it used to be a high-prestige feature), or to certain regions. Which is why it interested me to see this little story:
Mitt Romney wishes Mobile ‘good mornin”
Although he didn’t mention grits or his growing like of the word “y’all,” Romney’s awkward bid to connect to Southern voters was still evident. He wished the crowd a “fine Alabama good mornin’’” — dropping the letter “g” at the end of some words.
So is Romney doing some linguistic pandering with the locals? I thought I’d check by watching stump speeches — one in the North, one in the South — and compare the number of dropped g’s.
This meant watching videos of Romney on the stump, which is not entirely without risk.
When my boys have asked about Romney, I’ve said that although I don’t want him to be president of the USA, he’s not one of the crazy ones, and that there were loads of people in the race who were more stupid (Santorum, Perry, Bachmann, Cain) or evil (Gingrich, um… Cain) than Romney. But the weird thing about Romney is that he is capable of saying stupid, evil things while seeming perfectly sensible. Call it his gift.
So I’ve watched a bit of Romney doing the usual Republican schtick: bashing Europe, vowing to repeal health care, hammering away at unions, and claiming that the free market will fix everything. While watching these speeches, I was left with one over-arching impression: If you want to know what Romney’s stump speeches are like, just picture a giant penis in a suit, saying “I believe in freedom!” I’m sorry for that mental image, but tell me if you don’t find it accurate.
To the counts.
New Hampshire
| ing | in’ |
| saying founding enduring value bringing going campaigning overwhelming saying taking choosing distributing pursuing |
talkin’ |
Alabama
| ing | in’ |
| interesting manufacturing cutting spending coming proposing |
(ain’t that somethin’?) |
Well, just from these two speeches, it seems like Romney doesn’t do a lot of G-dropping in either place. I have no doubt that he tried it out in Mobile, but it doesn’t seem to be a feature he uses often, no matter where.
I realise this is a small sample. I tried to watch more, but there’s only so much moral vacuity that one can stand.
(Conversation reported verbatim until the last panel, but yeah, that’s how it went.)
Lots of people say that sexual orientation is pretty much determined from birth, and you can’t chose it or change it. I’m willing to accept that there’s an element of choice and circumstance in who we’re attracted to, and nobody’s 100% hetero or homo, but I think I can say I’ve always known that I’m a straight guy. My moment of realisation occurred in first grade.
My Year 1 class was a tough place. I had a really sadistic teacher, and this was poison for a “pleaser” child like me. I wanted to do well in school, escape the wrath of Mrs Allen, avoid this one kid named Chad who hated me and wanted to pound me, and try not to feel powerless.
There were lots of kids in my class, but this one girl Paula was a newcomer. I noticed her appearance in class matter-of-factly, as just another kid. I distinctly remember one day working at my desk (probably with crayons, a brand new box of Binney-Smith Crayolas with 64 colours and the electric sharpener in the box). All the other kids were doing their thing, too, working in groups, or moving about the room. And then Paula walked past my desk, and said off-handedly, “Hey, Lover-boy.” And kept on walking.
What made her say that? She couldn’t have meant anything by it; it was probably one of those crazy things kids say all day long. Yet its effect on me was crystallising. It was as if a droplet of boiling hot oil had been dropped into the pool of water in my deepest self, spattered and swam, and made me dizzy. I felt confusing desires and weird attractions. I felt drawn. In that moment, I knew: I liked girls and I wanted their attention.
I don’t remember seeing her again — the tape cuts out at that point. But when people say they “always knew” they were gay, I believe them. My girl-likingness was always in me in supersaturated form, waiting for some kind of seed around which to coalesce. I don’t think I chose to be a straight guy.
There’s this phrase that I’m hearing that’s heading for my bin. Every time I hear it, the speaker is bullshitting. No, it’s not “states’ rights”. It’s “public square”. As in “religion has a role in the“.
‘Religion has a role in public square’, says Rick Santorum
Or “we’re being excluded from the”.
Backstory: Professional Christian and growing pain Kirk Cameron decided to air his opinion on gay people.
“I think that it’s… it’s… it’s unnatural. I think that it’s… it’s detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”
Okay, so he has the right to that opinion. And other people have the right to their opinion of his opinion.
In response to the comments by Cameron, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued the following statement:
“In this interview, Kirk Cameron sounds even more dated than his 1980s TV character. Cameron is out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.”
And:
Christopher Rice, novelist
“Kirk Cameron says marriage was defined by God in the Garden of Eden. No response from Cameron on why the world isn’t full of talking snakes.”Roseanne Barr, actress-comedian
“Kirk or Kurt or whatever Cameron is an accomplice to murder with his hate speech. so is Rick Warren. Their peers r killing gays in Uganda.”Josh Charles, actor
“I know Growing Pains was only a TV show, but I have to think both Alan Thicke & Joanna Kerns must feel they failed as parents tonight.”Zach Braff, actor
“If Kirk Cameron hates gay people, why was he best friends with Boner?”Jesse Tyler Ferguson, actor
“The only unnatural thing about me being gay is that I had a crush on Kirk Cameron until about 24 hours ago.”Alan Thicke, actor
“I’m getting him some new books. The Old Testament simply can’t be expected to explain everything.”
Cameron, for his part, is appealing to his right to speak in the good old P.S..
“I should be able to express moral views on social issues,” he said, “especially those that have been the underpinning of Western civilization for 2,000 years — without being slandered, accused of hate speech, and told from those who preach ‘tolerance’ that I need to either bend my beliefs to their moral standards or be silent when I’m in the public square.”
What he means, of course, is that he should be able to say whatever he wants with no consequences. No one should be allowed to criticise his viewpoint. We’re silencing him because he’s frightened of our disapproval, poor petal.
He concluded, “I believe we need to learn how to debate these things with greater love and respect,”
Keep in mind, it was he who referred to people’s lives and relationships as “detrimental, and ultimately destructive”. Reminds me of this cartoon.
And now I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever heard the phrase “public square” by anyone other than a smarmy religionist who was trying to explain why their superstition and irrationality should be taken seriously in civic discourse. Nope, don’t think so.
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