Noncompositional

After you use the right detergent, they should smell like new.

The following words form a sort of class in English. Why?

new, normal, regular, mad, crazy

(There are actually two separate subclasses, but at the right level of granularity, you can call it a single class. Also, this may not be a completely exhaustive list, though it is as far as the BNC is concerned.)

(Hint: I started looking for this class of words while doing the laundry.)

I have multiple email accounts, as I assume most people nowadays do. Some of these I associate with some sort of physical location, like my work email. Although I can access it from anywhere I please, it happens that read it most often when I am in a particular location (my office). My school-provided email, on the other hand, I access from a variety of locations, and do not attach a particular locality to it (though if I had to pick, it would be either wherever my current home is, or perhaps the school campus). And I have no particular associations with my purely web-based email accounts, like gmail.

The other day I received a message on my school account asking when I would be at work. The sender wished to retrieve some items from my office, but she did not have access to the floor that I work on. I read this on my word computer from the web interface to my school account, and replied through the same. A problem confronted me as I went to indicate when I would be at work. First, the original query (paraphrasing):

There are some things that I need to look at your work office. Are you around tomorrow or the next day after around noon to let me into ACME so I can look at things?

Note the naming of my place of employment. Now, my reply:

Yes. Tomorrow I will be there until late, and the next day will be there from […]

I had some serious issues when I got to there in my message. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to rename the place where I work, wanting instead to use a deictic. Well, as I typed the message, I was sitting in my office, so it should have been “here” (especially since the relevant event, i.e., letting her in, would also be taking place with both of us “here”). But this was troubling, because I was typing from my school account, which I do not associate with work (though it has no strong associations with other locations, it is definitely negatively associated with work, pushed out my explicitly work-related account). So I viewed this communication as taking place in some space outside of my office, and the building containing it. So I went with “there”, instead, essentially taking my interlocutor’s viewpoint (or at least her perceived viewpoint; this is complicated by the fact that she may not have been aware of my work address).

Somehow I don’t think this issue would have come up if this were a telephone conversation, even if (for instance) I had received a call on my (non-existent) work-provided cell phone. The use of deictics would have been a function of my actual location. As it was, though, somehow the medium of communication influenced me enough to make me unsure of what word to use. Hmm, perhaps a folk theory of accessibility to email accounts (“you can only access xyz@abc.com when you are ‘located’ at abc”).

It’s funny. There’s been an issue of Time magazine sitting on my coffee table for at least a week now, dedicated to the brain and recent research in neurology and psychology. Until tonight, I hadn’t looked through it much (it’s my roommate’s subscription), but I picked it up while eating dinner and started reading an article about the neural-computational basis for consciousness. I skimmed to the end, and found it was written by Stephen Pinker. This becomes particularly relevant later. I then went back and read the article more carefully.

I then flipped through a few more articles, and found in the middle of one a blown-up quotation (what are those things called?) that mentioned mirror neurons. Now, the mirror neuron is a relatively significant finding in some corners of cognitive linguistics, so I took a closer look. I found that one of the researchers mentioned (and indeed, the one mentioned at the very beginning of the article) was Lisa Aziz-Zaheh, who I met when she spent a year at ICSI. See, it’s really only a few steps until mainstream linguistics gets the front page treatment from Time!

Then, later this evening, I found that Stephen Colbert had interviewed Pinker last night. I watched the interview (which was nice, with some good lines from Colbert; I enjoyed the geek/rich geek analogy), and was amused that the first question from Colbert was about Pinker’s hair, which is admittedly quite noticeable. Noticeable enough that, in fact, it’s pretty easy to find somewhere on the web evidence of yours truly also commenting on the psychologist’s hair (though at a time when it was a bit shorter than it is now).

For those of you who may have missed this exciting panel over in Philadelphia, fear not. In Berkeley there is a three-day session on language, called the 33rd annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. So come one, come all, and enjoy the show.

Since Grant’s useful comment on skeuomorphs, I’ve started keeping my eye out for them. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the difference between the linguistic and non-linguistic versions of this. Additionally, there is apparently a thing called path dependence, which is common in talk of economics and history/sociology in general, whereby decisions made at some point in time turn out to be non-optimal or non-suitable for some point much later in time, though by that point there’s no way to switch paths. Or, as some people seem to sloganize the concept, “history matters.” This seems like a nice, general concept, perhaps illustrated by my recent difficulties in getting the sysadmins at work to let me use a dvorak keyboard interface (actually, they’ve been very nice about it, but once they had to do maintenance on my machine, and it was a real pain when they didn’t know the key layout; so it’s all on hold for now).

Path dependence may or may not subsume skeuomorphy, though this latter concept seems to be more in the realm of aesthetics, rather than somehow being “stuck” on some path. That is, designers of (say) audio software make the GUI look like a regular stereo interface, knobs and screws and all, to make the experience easier for the user, and also to make the experience more “authentic” (becuase clearly computer software is always a replication of what we used to do without them). It’s all about familiarity. On the other hand, the typical examples of path dependence, like usage of VHS and QWERTY, or the various standards for railway guages, are not about aesthetics, I suppose, and more about the fact that changing is just not very easy. It’s a variation on the “keep things familiar” tune, though in a different domain.

On the other hand, this terminological distinction may simply be…uh, an accident of history, so to speak. In any case, we can always borrow real science terms and talk about “inertia.” Inertia of design features, inertia of symbols, inertia of the familiar.

In any case, a couple of examples I came across yesterday. First, in a (non-new) standup routine Ellen Degeneres commented on the common gesture that people use to get someone to to roll down a car window, namely, miming a circular hand crank. There are two parts to this. First, that gesture is simply carried over from when that was the only way to roll (roll?) down a car window. Second, the new way to lower a window doesn’t involve a very unique or visually salient gesture: you hold down a button. Assuming that it isn’t interpreted as simply pointing downward, there is still the question of disambiguating all of the things that could be accomplished by holding down a button. And even if the only likely thing in context is “roll down your window!”, there’s still factor number one, i.e., there’s already a gesture for that, so this must mean something different.

The second example came when I was watching Star Trek Voyager (one of the very rare good episodes), and the holographic doctor said that he would be ready as soon as he finished “scrubbing,” which appeared to be moving and rubbing one’s hands underneath a dull orange light (which I assume also emits cleansing sound waves, as supposedly the general self-cleaning method in Star Trek is the “sonic shower”). Now, the rubbing was still there, so perhaps scrub is not so much of an anachronism. But if it were simply moving one’s hands underneath the cleaner, it probably would be. I’d guess that the choice of that word was quite conscious, in order to show the viewer how certain mundane things change over the centuries. The significance might have been lost if the doctor had just said “I’ll be there after I finish disinfecting/cleaning/sanitizing my hands”. (Uh, and let’s ignore the fact that this shouldn’t really be necessary, given he’s a hologram: he could just disappear and then come back, presumably all cleaned up)