Comments on a Longish Passage

This passage is long, but it contains several gems that I think are worth commenting on. I found it one of my favorite blogs; He was quoting a frontiers in Psychology article:

“Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases,” which you can tell is serious because it has a colon to introduce the over-long subtitle.

It’s all interesting, but the relevant part today is that, among pop-psych fallacies, they include “Autism Epidemic,” noting:

there is meager evidence that this purported epidemic reflects a genuine increase in the rates of autism per se as opposed to an increase in autism diagnoses stemming from several biases and artifacts, including heightened societal awareness of the features of autism (“detection bias”), growing incentives for school districts to report autism diagnoses, and a lowering of the diagnostic thresholds for autism across successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Gernsbacher et al., 2005; Lilienfeld and Arkowitz, 2007). Indeed, data indicate when the diagnostic criteria for autism were held constant, the rates of this disorder remained essentially constant between 1990 and 2010 (Baxter et al., 2015).

To which I will add some amateur analysis that would, no doubt … well … I was going to say “drive them crazy” but let’s just say, “probably upset them.”

1. Some correct tricky plurals: diagnoses, biases, data, criteria
2. Pretentiousisms: “as opposed to” instead of “compared with”; and how about using  “more public” instead of “heightened societal”? Maybe the Latin “per se” is a pretentious version of “itself,” but it is, after all, an academic article.
3. Getting rid of “drive them crazy” and replacing it with “probably upset them” is a good example of replacing metaphorical language with straightforward language.
4. Actually saying that he was replacing the phrase fits the good-natured humor of the piece. If he were editing something more serious, he would have just gone with the better phrase.

I don’t read all this academic stuff; I found it about a third of the way down this article.

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I remember online discussions about how to spell email. The official spelling used to be e-mail, which I was okay with, even though I opted for email in my personal writing, figuring that was the way the language was going, and eventually it did. I remember when Microsoft, in their style guide changed web site to website, which I have used ever since I learned about it.

But that’s not the news!

According to the AP style guide we don’t have to capitalize internet or web any more.

I’ve long thought internet shouldn’t be capitalized, but what about spiders’ rights? We’ve used web for, um, centuries to name their delicate traps and things like them. The capital W was a nice way to distinguish the two webs. In the future, I guess you’ll have to pay careful attention to the context, eh?

I couldn’t find a comment from a spider

If you’re interested, here’s an article about this and a couple other changes from AP.

When you write clearly, your reader understands what you wrote and doesn’t have to take a lot of effort to do so.

However. It’s possible to write things consisting of known words that sound profound, but on reflection, you’re not sure what the writer meant. This type of writing is commonly called BS, or any of a multitude of synonyms, including “obfuscation,” which is an example of itself unless you happen to know what the word means. I ran into an example the other day:

Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.

Sounds profound, doesn’t it? This is an actual tweet composed by Deepak Chopra, as quoted by University of Waterloo psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues in a paper published in the November 2015 issue of Judgment and Decision Making.

I have to add that the statement isn’t even true. Attention and intention are what you do when you make a decision to do something. Manifestation is when something actually happens. I can refute this little pseudo-profundity with a quiz I saw once:

Four frogs are sitting on a log. Three decide to jump off. How many are left?

The answer is “four frogs,” because deciding to do something isn’t the same as doing it.

To give credit where it’s due, I found the Chopra quote in an article about BS. I encourage you to be suspicious of anyone who is needlessly profound-sounding.

Other people besides me are good with English (duh) and I ran into an article by one of those folks; I think you might like to read it. The article is about an internet-based linguistic meme called doge (pronounced “doggy,” I say). Read the article for a full understanding of how it works.

The article, by Gretchen McCulloch, is here: http://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/. The paragraph below is toward the end of the article.

The first factor is the kind of “baby talk” that we do towards our pets, known in the literature as pet-directed speech (yes, there are actual studies on this). It tends to involve speaking with exaggerated pitch and using simplified sentence structure. By comparison, the “baby talk” that we do towards actual children involves these two factors plus extra-precise articulation of sounds and is known as infant-directed speech (formerly motherese until some genius realized that it’s not only mothers who talk to babies).

Of course I can’t resist adding value for my dear readers, both of them, by making a comment or two. Two things: I had a post about baby talk a while back, which I recommend. The other thing is about the word “towards.” It has a synonym, “toward.” Perhaps it’s a personal quirk, but there is absolutely no difference in meaning between the two words, but one is longer, with that s tacked onto the end.

Use the shorter word, I say.

What happens if you don’t get a Valentine? Maybe you write a post-Valentine’s Day blues poem. My youngest says this poem by Shel Silverstein is her favorite:

I hope things turn more cheerful in the future.