Idiom of the Day
have done with (someone or something)

To be finished with someone or something; to cease being involved with someone or something. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
arduous

Definition: (adjective) Demanding great effort or labor; difficult.
Synonyms: backbreaking, grueling, laborious, toilsome, punishing, hard, heavy.
Usage: The roofer's work was so arduous that he was forced to take numerous medications to relieve the pain in his back.
Discuss

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get off (2)

to finish work, or have a break from work

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Language Log
Google AI Overview has a ways to go

…or maybe I should say, "is deeply stupid, so far".

At least, that's the verdict from my first encounter with this heralded innovation.

I updated a Chromebook, re-installed Linux, and thought (incorrectly) that I might need to add repositories in order to install some non-standard apps like R and Octave and Emacs. (Never mind if that's all opaque to you — AI supposedly knows its way around basic tech stuff…)

So I googled "how to install R in linux on a chromebook", and got this:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1.png
If I were ignorant enough to try that, the apt command would respond
# apt install R base and R base Dash Dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base'
Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base'
E: Unable to locate package R
E: Unable to locate package R
E: Unable to locate package Dash
E: Unable to locate package Dev
#
That's because the package names in question should be r-base and r-base-dev. Apparently Google AI thinks that names should (sometimes?) be capitalized, and that typographical hyphen (Unicode 0x002D) should sometimes be replaced by a space, and sometimes by the string " Dash ". Which makes sense in some contexts, but absolutely does not work in computer instructions…

Anyhow, I figured out for myself that the standard repository list for the Chromebook's Linux installation already includes the packages in question, so I simply needed to ask (in the standard way) for them to be installed.

The AI Overview "Learn more" link tells me that

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1A.png

"Info quality may vary" indeed.

It's probably not an accident that most of the recent news articles on AI Overview are about how to turn it off…

Maybe GPT-4 can answer this question in a less ignorant way, even if it can't count? I don't have the time to try this morning.

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
look after

to make sure something or someone has everything they need and is healthy

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knackered (2)

severely damaged

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futile

Idiom of the Day
have (something) going for (one)

To have something that is favorable, beneficial, or advantageous to one. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: galling

This word has appeared in 37 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Word of the Day
vestige

Definition: (noun) A visible trace, evidence, or sign of something that once existed but exists or appears no more.
Synonyms: tincture, trace, shadow.
Usage: He was so deadly pale—which had not been the case when they went in together—that no vestige of color was to be seen in his face.
Discuss

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Language Log
Linguistic capture errors

Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called  "completion errors":

…a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word.  I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending up with COOPERATION, for instance.  And several people have reported on the American Dialect Society mailing list that their intention to type LINGUISTS frequently leads them into LINGUISTICS, which then has to be truncated.  (This discussion on ADS-L followed my typing "original Broadway case", with CASE instead of CAST, and commenting on it.)

26 years earlier, David Rumelhart and Donald Norman used the term "capture errors" for this phenomenon ("Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance", Cognitive Science 1982:

This category of error occurs when one intends to type one sequence, but gets "captured" by another that has a similar beginning (Norman, 1981). Examples include:

efficiency – > efficient
incredibly – > incredible
normal – > norman
They further cite Donald Norman, "Categorization of action slips", Psychological review (1981), who wrote about "capture errors" of a more general type:

Capture slips. A capture error occurs when a familiar habit substitutes itself for the intended action sequence. The basic notion is simple: Pass too near a well-formed habit and it will capture your behavior. This set of errors can be described by concepts from the traditional psychological literature on learning—strong habits are easily provoked. […]

[C]apture errors have a certain flavor about them that set them off. Reason (1979) described them in this way:

Like the Siren's call, some motor programs possess the power to lure us into unwitting action, particularly when the central processor is occupied with some parallel mental activity. This power to divert action from some intention seems to be derived in part from how often and how recently the motor program is activated. The more frequently (and recently) a particular sequence of movements is set in train and achieves its desired outcome, the more likely it is to occur uninvited as a "slip of action."

The classic example of a capture error [is] the example from James of the person who went to his room to change for dinner and found himself in bed. Here are two more examples, one from my collection and one from Reason's:

I was using a copying machine, and I was counting the pages. I found myself counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King." (I have been playing cards recently.)

I meant to get my car out, but as I passed through the back porch on my way to the garage I stopped to put on my Wellington boots and gardening jacket as if to work in the garden. (Reason, 1979).

Rumelhart and Norman exclude these errors from their typing model: "There is no provision in the model for capture errors." And both earlier and later models of typing, as far as I can tell, either ignore these "capture errors" or similarly mention them without serious engagement, probably because they're much rarer than other sorts of typos.

But what I care about is something else. No doubt there are also "capture errors" in speech, though I don't think there's been an attempt to distinguish them systematically from other kinds of substitutions. What's interesting — and apparently ignored by psycholinguists — is the striking difference that I noted in "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018:

There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995:

One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipat[...]

ions, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When one word erroneously replaces another, most of the time the target and substituting word are of the same syntactic category. Nouns slip with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.

In other words, we're NOT likely to say something like "When one word erroneously replacement another, …" or "exchanges, anticipation, perseverations, and noncontextual substituted […] obey a syntactic category rule".

But errors of this type are fairly common in typing. They seem to be cases where we've started to type the right thing, but as our attention shifts to the following material, our fingers follow a familiar but incorrect path.

I suspect that an explanation of this difference would tell us something important about speech production.

Some relevant past posts:

"A Cupertino of the mind", 5/22/2008
"What the fingers want", 7/30/2015
"Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018
"'Evil being protesting'", 6/27/2018

And in 2009, Stan Carey wrote about typing that for than ("A typo more mysterious that most"), and then catalogued many published examples ("Even stealthier than I thought", 5/5/2010).

What brought this all to mind was someone who commented on Nikola Jokić's role in Sunday's Denver/Minnesota NBA playoff game by writing:

He player 47 minutes tonight. He should have played like 41.

Again, this is a normal type of "capture error" in typing, but it would never happen in speech.

If I've missed some relevant research — which is likely — please let me know in the comments.

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Language Log
Bloom filters

Today's xkcd:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/bloom_filter_2x.png

According to Wikipedia,

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]
This is an all-too-common situation in forensic applications, though the reason has nothing to do with the Bloom filter hash-function method. To take a simple example, suppose that a video recording shows that someone is 6'1", give or take an inch.  If a suspect is is 6"1', they're "possibly in set" — though it's not strong evidence of guilt, since there are lots of people that size. But if they're 5"4', then they're "definitely not in set", at least if the measurements are accurate.

In my opinion, a more complicated version of the same thing applies to forensic speaker identification.

The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof adds an additional asymmetry in criminal cases.

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Language Log
Language Log asks: Mari Sandoz

In preparation for my run across Nebraska during the month of June, I'm boning up on the land, culture, and history of the state.  It wasn't long in my researches before I encountered the esteemed writer Marie Sandoz (1896-1966).  Hers is one of the most touching stories about a writer, nay, a human being, that I have ever read.  She has much to tell us about her language background and preferences, and how she had to struggle with her publishers to retain them in the face of standardization.

She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians.

Marie Susette Sandoz was born on May 11, 1896 near Hay Springs, Nebraska, the eldest of six children born to Swiss immigrants, Jules and Mary Elizabeth (Fehr) Sandoz. Until the age of 9, she spoke only German. Her father was said to be a violent and domineering man, who disapproved of her writing and reading. Her childhood was spent in hard labor on the home farm, and she developed snow blindness in one eye after a day spent digging the family's cattle out of a snowdrift.
She graduated from the eighth grade at the age of 17, secretly took the rural teachers' exam, and passed. She taught in nearby country schools without ever attending high school. At the age of eighteen, Sandoz married a neighboring rancher, Wray Macumber. She was unhappy in the marriage, and in 1919, citing "extreme mental cruelty," divorced her husband and moved to Lincoln.

For the next sixteen years, Mari held a variety of low-paying jobs, while writing—to almost no success—under her married name, Marie Macumber. Despite her lack of a high school diploma, she managed to enroll at the University of Nebraska, thanks to a sympathetic dean. During those years, she claimed to have received over a thousand rejection slips for her short stories. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Nebraska_Sandhills_NE97_Hooker_County_3.JPG/300px-Nebraska_Sandhills_NE97_Hooker_County_3.JPG The Sand Hills of Western Nebraska
In 1928, when she received word her father was dying, she visited her family, and was stunned by his last request: he asked her to write his life story. She began extensive research on his life, and documented his decision to become a pioneer, his hard work chiselling out a life on the prairie, his leadership within the pioneer community, and his friendship with the local Indians in the area. The resulting book was Old Jules, published under the name Mari Sandoz, which she had resumed using in 1929.

In 1933, malnourished and in poor health, she moved back home to the Sand Hills to stay with her mother. Every major publishing house in the United States had rejected Old Jules. Before she left Lincoln, Sandoz tossed over 70 of her manuscripts into a wash tub in her backyard and burned them.

Yet she continued to write, and began work on her next novel, Slogum House, a gritty and realistic tale about a ruthless Nebraska family. By January 1934, she returned to Lincoln, and got a job at the Nebraska State Historical Society, where she became associate editor of Nebraska History magazine.

In 1935, she received word that her revised version of Old Jules had won a non-fiction contest held by Atlantic Press, after fourteen rejections. Finally, her book would be published. Before that happened, however, she had to fight her editor to retain the distinctive Western idiom in which she had written the book, as her publishers wanted her to standardize the English used in the book.

The book was well received critically and commercially when it was issued, and became a Book of the Month Club selection. Some readers were shocked at her unromantic depiction of the Old West, as well as her strong language and realistic portrayal of the hardships of frontier life.

[...]

(Wikipedia)

What galvanized me to write this post is that, although I had learned Sandoz was of Swiss extraction and I knew about the Swiss pharmaceutical giant of that name and Swiss sculptor Édouard-Marcel Sandoz (1881-1971), her surname didn't sound like it was of Swiss derivation to me:
Swiss French and French (mainly Doubs): from the ancient Germanic personal name Sandwald, composed of the elements sanths 'true' + wald 'rule'.
(source)
My question to the Language Log readership:  how does one get Sandoz out of that? Bonus:  Nebraska and its bug eaters
U.S. territory organized 1854, admitted as a state 1867, from a native Siouan name for the Platte River, either Omaha ni braska or Oto ni brathge, both literally "water flat." The modern river name is from French rivière platte, which means "flat river." Related: Nebraskan.
Bug eaters, a term applied derisively to the inhabitants of Nebraska by travellers on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many parts of the State. If one living there were to refuse to eat bugs, he would, like Polonius, soon be "not where he eats but where he is eaten." [Walsh, 1892]

(Etymonline) Selected readings

* "Language Rights Lose in Nebraska" (10/16/03)
* "More lucking out" (10/11/11)

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
thick (2)

full-figured without appearing overweight

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neophyte

Idiom of the Day
have (got) (someone) pegged as (something)

To distinctly regard someone as being a certain type of person. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
apostasy

Definition: (noun) Abandonment of one's religious faith, a political party, one's principles, or a cause.
Synonyms: defection, renunciation.
Usage: He had been very devoted to his cause, so when he declared his apostasy to the crowd, there was an audible gasp.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fight back

If you fight back, you do what's needed to win a conflict or a battle after being attacked or threatened.

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