The Truth is Out There – Or Not

It’s no secret – nor a crippling blow to the ego – that as far as Social Media popularity goes, there are cats and serial killers that draw more followers and readers than the Speech Dudes. In fact, if we were to post more pictures of cats and become serial killers ourselves we could probably push up the numbers significantly. This absence of interest applies to our blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account, although to be brutally honest with ourselves, the output to any of these has been pretty spartan of late.

However, a recent reply to a tweet did snag us a few more likes than we are used to, and it didn’t include a picture of a kitten. The original tweet was about the nature of academic publishing as a “paid-for” sport i.e. having research papers treated more as an academic version of vanity press rather than a “free exchange of ideas.” Here’s the original comment:

In a moment of weakness, I responded with a more general comment about the effect that this can have on the world of public discourse:

This drew a number of “likes” and a perfectly valid comment about how sites such as PubMed can provide free access to some articles. But I don’t believe Facebook or Twitter are effective platforms for reasonable discourse so I decided to take a little time to create a blog post to examine this further. Contrariwise, I do believe that Facebook and Twitter are splendidly effective platforms for unreasonable discourse, in fact, it’s pretty much something at which they excel!

I’m sure there was a time when folks naively felt that Facebook would be a glorious democratic forum for John Stuart Mill’s “marketplace of ideas,” where anyone and everyone could expound their beliefs, discuss them with others who had different perspectives, and through logic and reason come to some form of consensus that would ensure stability and understanding amongst the populace.

Well, that’s not at all how it’s worked out has it, boys and girls? Although Freud is seen these days as little more than a historical curiosity, obsessed by sex and having mommy issues, his more general commentaries still ring true over a century from when he first began writing. In Thoughts for the Times, written in 1915 during World War One, he said:

In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared because they had never risen as high as we believed.

Thoughts for the Times (1915, Standard Edition XIV, p.285)

In times of war, the comfy warm overcoat of rational civilization gets taken off and the true nature of man’s inhumanity to man is revealed in the most cruel, remorseless, and shocking ways, made all the worse by the fact that people at the time don’t see what they are doing as “cruel,” “remorseless,” or “shocking” but easily convince themselves that there is some good and noble purpose in what they do. And as well as potentially arming themselves with guns and knives, they also arm themselves intellectually with the weapon of rationalized brutality.

In a recent conversation with my sister, who lives in the UK, she strenuously criticized the “Black Lives Matter”[1] movement saying that “All Lives Matter,” but then went on to argue vociferously that George Floyd “deserved what he got” because he had a criminal record. Then, when I asked her about refugees crossing the English Channel, she said that they should be sent back and “bombed in the water.” Clearly, not “all lives matter.” And like a depressing number of folks with similar views, she stressed she’s “not a racist” and merely against “foreigners coming to our country and getting free stuff.” This, of course, doesn’t apply to multi-national companies who get tax breaks and grants, which is also “free stuff.”

The casual disregard for the lives of refugees is how she (and others) rationalize brutality. When I pointed out that children have drowned along with their families trying to get into other countries, she says that’s the fault of the parents and it’s their fault. Countering with reminding her how English parents during Word War II sent their children from the London area to the relatively safer north of the country as “refugees,” she said it was different. Yet in both cases we have parents trying to do something to protect their children but one is “bad” and the other is “good.

One of the tools that leads to the development of rationalized brutality is the propagation of lies. Call them “untruths” or “alternative facts” or even “playful hyperbole,” a fib is a fib is a fib. It doesn’t help that we live in a world where lies are treated as being somewhat acceptable, where the “little” in “little white lies” is a lot bigger than folks might want to admit. Add to this the clearly observable fact that in cyberspace, not only are lies amplified and propagated with ease but there are no really effective ways to sanction lying or punish liars. Even an ex-President of the USA who gets banned from social media platforms still gets to tell whatever lies he wants and be heard on the global stage. Any bleating that he’s “censored” is demonstrably untrue – and the same goes for anyone who claims to be a “victim of cancel culture” who is simultaneously tell you about it!

We either live in the Upside-Down or Orwell’s Newspeak dystopia – choose your metaphor. Bad is good; wrong is right; false is true; and “alternative facts” are just as legitimate as “facts.” If the Truth is, indeed, out there, then it’s turning out to be much harder to find than we used to think. The phrase “my truth” has become something of a mantra with many more people than we’d like to believe. And even the phrase, “You’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts” seems increasingly hollow in a world where, according to a recent Monmouth University poll [2], one-third (32%) of Americans continue to believe that Joe Biden’s presidential victory in 2020 was due to unproven and unsubstantiated voter fraud. Facts have no bearing on these type of belief, and no amount of evidence will change the mindset of someone who has created a mental model of the world that reflects their own construction of a personal reality that appears to run parallel to world in which other people live.

Don Henley had it right in his “The Garden of Allah” is the following soliloquy from “the stranger:”

I am an expert witness because I say I am
And I said gentlemen (and I use that world loosely)
I will testify for you, I’m a gun for hire, I’m a saint, I’m a liar
Because there are no facts, there is no truth
Just data to be manipulated.
I can get you any result you like
What’s it worth to you?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night,
No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution
Just people selling t-shirts,
Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus
And winning, winning, winning. [3]

Notes

[1] The hashtag, as a Twitter-specific phenomenon, is another example of how poorly such social media platforms handle complex issues. With it’s initial restriction of only 140 characters in a tweet, any attempt to encapsulate an idea into a string of text was doomed to failure. The idea that there’s some magical way to keep things “short and sweet” has always seemed to me to be chimeric and an excuse for folks to simply not put together a coherent set of arguments in a longer piece of text. At best, hashtags such as #metoo, #defundthepolice, and #blacklivesmatter serve as social markers that only loosely try to address difficult and complicated topics. They are models of linguistic imprecision that end up making discussion more heated than productive. For example, critics of #defundthepolice are free to frame the argument along the lines of suggesting that the aim is to literally stop funding a police force and thus end up leading to a lawless society. Of course, that’s not what it means but the minimal, limited structure of the hashtag leaves that avenue of attack wide open. Similarly #blacklivesmatter invited the simple retort of “no, all lives matter” because there’s enough ambiguity in the hashtag to allow it. In short (no pun intended) the brevity of Twitter makes it a terrible platform for debate and discussion.

[2] Monmouth University Polling Institute, June 21, 2021: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_062121

[3] “So much winning!”

“‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy!”

Watching the French Open Men’s final last week, I was primarily focused on the action on court between Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas and only half-listening to the commentary. As we all know, “half-listening” can be a very dangerous thing – or on the upside, pretty funny. As the players headed off for a quick rub down with a cold towel, I swear I heard one of the commentators say, “Djokovic was definitely hit in the balls.”

New balls please

This comment instantly turned my semi-attention to full-blown concentration, and I wondered if I’d missed some action on the screen. After all, being smacked in the scrotum by a ball traveling at somewhere in the region of 85-95 miles-an-hour isn’t something you’d fail to notice. At that sort of speed, your meat-and-two-veg are likely to swell up to the size of a melon and a vigorous massage from your physio isn’t going to offer any help whatsoever. So did I really miss one humdinger of a nut nobbling?

It took me maybe a minute to work out that what was actually said was, “Djokovic was definitely hitting the balls.” Clearly I had fallen victim to a spectacular mishearing, or what is commonly called a mondegreen. Given that in spoken language, many of the individual sounds at the beginning and end of words will blend and overlap with others, the phrases “hitting the balls” and “hit in the balls” can be identical.

The process at work here is called phonetic assimilation and it happens all the time. And I mean, all the time. What we think we hear and what actually reaches our brain is often different from what we might believe. In rolling speech, “hit in the balls” will be /’hɪtɪnðəˌbɔlz/ and “hitting the balls” will also be /’hɪtɪnðəˌbɔlz/. That /ŋ/ sound in “hitting” (/’hɪtɪŋ/) becomes an /n/ because it assimilates with the preceding /t/sound, which is made by tongue against the back of the teeth (what we call an alveolar sound) and also with the /ð/ sound that’s also made with tongue between the teeth (or an interdental). The /ŋ/ sound is made at the back of the mouth up towards the soft palate (a velar location) but the process of assimilation in connected speech pulls it forward to become a regular old /n/ sound.

Assimilation is the basis for mondegreens, phrases that are misheard, often to humorous effect but sometimes to the detriment of the listener. The word itself comes from a mishearing of a poem called The Bonny Earl of Murray, which contains the line “They have slain the Earl o’Moray and layd him on the green,” and that in turn was interpreted as, “They have slain the Earl o’Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” It’s a plausible mistake because it’s not impossible that a double murder could have occurred with the Earl and his Lady being the hapless victims. But if we consider the phonetic forms, we can easily see how “laid him on the green” and “Lady Mondegreen” can sound alike:

• Laid him on the green: /’laɪdɪm’ɔnðəˌgrin/

• Lady Mondegreen: /’laɪdɪ’mɔndəˌgrin/

The stress in the second syllable changes and the /ð/ becomes a /d/ in the second instance, but what we might consider to be clear, phonetic differences when written down can be much less clear when spoken and heard. Also, the words in spoken language are separated by spaces like they are in text – they simply all run together into one long stream of sound. It’s the listener that has to decide where the “spaces” are, and it’s not uncommon to get that wrong [1].

The internet is full of examples of misheard lyrics for songs that have become almost classic example of mondegreens. In Jimmy Hendrick’s Purple Haze, “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” gets heard as “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”; George Michael’s I Want Your Sex includes “Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should,” which turns into, “Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, not everybody should”; Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer has “Doesn’t make a difference in we make it or not” that sounds like “Doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not”; and even I thought for years that when Dobie Gray sang Drift Away, the chorus was “Gimme the Beach Boys and free my soul…” instead of “Gimme the beat boys and free my soul…”

In his classic book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud called such errors “verhören,” which is German for mishearing [2]. His focus wasn’t on the underlying linguistic errors based on the misinterpretation of assimilation processes but on the words actually misheard and what that might say about the individuals underlying psyche. What he’d make of a patient hearing “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” hardly takes six years of Psychoanalytical training to work out but if you’re hearing Abba sing “See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen” or Queen sing, “You got mud on your face, big disgrace, kicking your cat all over the place,” then maybe Dr. Freud needs paging after all!

Notes

[1] Although I’m no fan of Donald Trump and take pleasure in hearing and seeing his gaffs, it would be uncharitable of me not to come to his defense in relation to his much ridiculed use of the word “bigly.” What really happened is that he said the phrase “big league” with a weaker stress on the second element “league,” which was in turn misheard by reporters as “bigly.” If you’re not convinced, just try yourself to say “big league” but let that final /g/ sound weaken slightly and you’ll hear that it easily becomes “bigly.” From /’bɪglig/ to /’bɪgli/ is a dropped final consonant away, a process that is stunningly common in connected speech. And as a bonus, I can tell you that “bigly” is a real word that dates from the 15th century and, as an adverb, means “With great forced, firmly, violently; or loudly, boastfully, proudly, haughtily, pompously.” As an adjective, it means “habitable, fit to live in,” and was used in Scotland until it became obsolete in the early 19th century.

[2] Freud introduced a number of such errors, or what he labeled parapraxes (German Fehlleistungen), that begin with “ver-“: Versprechen (slips of the tongue); Verschreiben (slips of the pen); Verlesen (misreading); Verhoren (mishearing); Vergessen (forgetting of names or intentions); and Verlegen (the misplacing of things). When folks talk about someone making a “Freudian Slip” it’s usually a spoken error – a Versprechen – but as you can see, Freud had a much more extensive classification set to errors. Many of these errors are nowadays analyzed as linguistic phenomena rather than psychoanalytical – but it’s fun to try!

As a side note to the side note, if you intend reading just one of Freud’s books in your life, although The Interpretation of Dreams is typically considered his magnum opus, I highly recommend The Psychology of Everyday Life as an alternative. Along with Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he builds on many of the themes that he wrote about in The Interpretation of Dreams and applies them to non-pathological areas of life.

Parsing Does Matter

One of the things we like to promote as the Speech Dudes is that the skills and knowledge that Speech Pathologists/Therapists learn can be put to use outside the field of Speech Pathology in general. To our way of thinking, that serves to encourage the rest of the world to recognize that SLPs are not just “twin-set and pearls” ladies who help people “speak correctly” but also talented individuals whose years of training and experience can be used to comment on and critique the broader topic of “human communication.”

Which brings me to the following sign and the Case of the Unauthorized U-turn.

As my wife and I were heading for dinner at a local brew pub, she noticed a car making a U-turn on a divided highway at a gap where this sign was present. “Oh,” she said, “Look at that. He’s not allowed to make a turn there.” At this point, the SLP in me kicked into gear.

“Well,” I replied, “that’s not necessarily true because the sign is lexically ambiguous.” Before you worry too much, we’ve been married for close on 35 years so she’s completely unsurprised when I use phrases like “lexically ambiguous” in a casual conversation. So when she asked “What do you mean,” it wasn’t for a definition of lexical ambiguity but for an explanation of the nature of the ambiguity.

I think the intent of the sign is to use the phrase “emergency and authorized” as an adjectival pre-modifier for vehicles with the and working simply as a coordinating conjunction along the lines of:

NOUN PHRASE [(ADJ <emergency + <and> + authorized>) + (NOUN <vehicle + s>)]

So the whole thing is a single noun phrase consisting of an adjective, a noun and an adverb. Fair enough.

However, you can also interpret it as TWO sentences [1], where the first uses the word emergency as a noun, which is then yoked by and to the second sentence, which is about “authorized vehicles.”

NOUN PHRASE [(NOUN <emergency>) + CONJ (and) + NOUN PHRASE [(ADJ + (NOUN )]

The adverbial element of only doesn’t really help because whether you choose the single- or two-sentence interpretation makes no difference. That’s why I have conveniently left it out of the analysis [2].

What makes it more ambiguous is that there is, in fact, an implied rather than actual subject to the sign, along the lines of “This gap in the road can be used for…” and so both the following interpretations would be fair game:

“This gap in the road can be used for an emergency” and;

“This gap can be used for authorized vehicles.”

In the event that the offender was stopped by the police, I would think that a smart lawyer could argue that is he/she was making a U-turn because there was a definable emergency (“I just got a call from my wife telling me she thought someone was skulking around in the yard”) and if that is true, then it was a legitimate maneuver.

The fundamental ambiguity stems from the fact that the word emergency can used both as a noun and an adjective but authorized can only be an adjective or a verb. So you can have both “an emergency situation” and “an authorized situation” but although you can have “I had an emergency” you can’t have *”I had an authorized.” On the other hand, you can have “The vehicle was authorized” but not *”The vehicle was emergency.”

Of course, one option is simply to use the following sign instead:

You’re welcome, Ohio Department of Transportation.

Notes
[1] I know I’m running a little fast and loose with the term sentence here but hopefully you understand the basic idea. For the purpose of the article, I’m adopting the fairly liberal definition of a sentence as “a group of words that express a single idea.”

[2] One of the challenges – for me – with a blog post is that for every sentence I write or word I use, I feel like I could write a separate paragraph on each. This is especially true when I make a statement that I think someone might want me to support by evidence. That’s not, in of itself, a bad thing because as a Speech Therapist I would want to be able to use a evidence-based approach to my practice. But the danger is that you get stuck in the infinite regression of “prove it” for everything you say. In fact, in the world of politics. that’s an actual tool you can use to prolong discussions to the point that nothing gets done. So you can say things like, “Despite what people believe, the average US citizen is 407,000 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than at the hands of a terrorist; or 6 times more likely to be killed by a shark” to which a supporter of travel bans from predominantly Muslim countries will respond, “And where did you get those figures?” So if you then say, “The National Safety Council and the National Center for Health Statistics report for 2013,” the next response is “How did they arrive at those numbers?” At this point, you begin to see where this is going and with each supporting statement and new “appeal to your sources” will be made. If you keep this up long enough, nothing changes.

A Year of Core Words With Unity® 2.0

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the reason I left the UK and moved to the US some 22 years ago was to take over the lead in the long-term development of the Unity® vocabulary program that is available on all Prentke Romich Company (PRC) devices. We actually started working on the Unity system in 1993, and at that time I would visit the US every two months for a one-week period. When the offer to take over the running of the project came up in 1995, my wife and I decided to sell up, ship out, and join the ranks of the “Ex-Pat” communities of English folks scattered across the world.

22 years later, after several iterations of devices and software, PRC have now released what’s called Unity 2.0, a newer version of the original that beefs up on the number of vocabulary items that are pre-stored and adds a slew of new icons, which should appeal to those folks who think that “more is better” when it comes to pictures. I’m not actually of that school, and at some point I’ll put together a few blog posts to explain why. As I’m no longer the head of the Unity project (I have other fascinating projects to work on) and so my role in the current iteration has been more consultative than directive. But what I can do in my spare time is create materials to support the teaching of the system.

In my previous post, I mentioned the recently released Unidad® Spanish bilingual program and provided a link to a set of free resources for using it along with Carole Zangari’s popular A Year of Core Vocabulary Words program. I’m now adding the same resources for the 60-, 84-, and 144-key versions of Unity 2.0. They are stored as zip files at the Speech Dudes’ Box account and here’s what each packet contains:

• A Year of Core Words Unity 60/84/144: A PDF manual with each page containing a different month and the icon sequences used for the words to be taught.
• Cheat Sheets folder: A set of 12 documents that simply list alphabetically the words and icons on a month-by-month basis.
• Word Lists folder: A set of 12 text files that can be imported into a PRC device for use with the Vocabulary Builder feature. Once you’ve imported the lists, just (a) choose list of the month and (b) turn ON the Vocabulary Builder and all you’ll see are your target words.
• Read Me First: A single-page document with information about the packet.

For those of you familiar with the PRC device feature called embellished icons [1], the resources have been created to be used with embellished icons turned OFF. The biggest advantage of this is that there are fewer actual icons to learn than you would with the feature turned ON, and as a “less is better” proponent, I’d recommend you teach the core vocabulary in that way. Should anyone be inclined to create a set where embellished icons are turned on, let me know and I’ll add those to our Box account.

Click below to download the materials.

DOWNLOAD: Unity 60

DOWNLOAD: Unity 84

DOWNLOAD: Unity 144

Feel free to share these materials with other folks using Unity and as before, all we ask is that you occasionally mention the Dudes 😉

Notes
[1] This is a feature unique to PRC devices where you can choose to have two different sets of icons available to you. Turning embellished icons off gives you a smaller icons set than having embellished icons on. If you want some numbers, you have to learn 87 different pictures to be able to use the 144 words in A Year of Core Vocabulary if embellished icons are off; if  you turn them on, you have 178 different pictures to learn. Your choice.

Politics and Platitudes: The “No Shit, Sherlock” Test

A recent TV ad from a Republican group called opportunitylives.com in North East Ohio has been getting my proverbial goat. Not, I should add, simply because it’s from Republicans but because it appears to say absolutely nothing that helps me differentiate their position from that of anyone else. Nothing. The entire ad is simply a sequence of soporific sentences playing over insipid images of smiling people, families, heath care professionals, workers, and so on. All that’s missing are puppies and kittens.

So take a look at the transcript I took from the ad and imagine for each phrase what the opposite claim might be:

Republicans believe in a society open to all; where government stays out of our way; where families can get ahead; where opportunity lives; where good schools are available to anyone; where good jobs are there for the hard-working; where every one of us has the opportunity to succeed; and where all can look forward to a better and more secure future. There are people who still believe opportunity still lives in America, and we call ourselves, Republicans.

Let me help make the point a little more obvious by providing you with the possible antithetical marketing copy:

Republicans believe in a society closed to all; where government stands in our way; where families can fail; where opportunity is stifled; where good schools are available to only a few; where good jobs are not there for anyone; where no-one has the opportunity to succeed; and where all can look forward to a worse and more dangerous future. There are people who still believe opportunity is dead in America, and we call ourselves, Republicans.

If you prefer this version of the ad, then you’d have to be close to bat-shit crazy and the sort of person who wears one of those special shirts that ties your arms at the back. And the reason the antithetical prose sounds so bad is that the original is nothing more than a set of vapid platitudes. When the negative version of a claim sounds stupid or is plainly false, then you can pretty much bet that the claim is a platitude.

A platitude can be defined as “a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one uttered as if it were fresh or profound” (Dictionary.com), “a banal, trite, or stale remark” (Merriam-Webster), or “A remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful” (New Oxford American Dictionary). More often than not, a platitude simply states the obvious and so would be better off not having been uttered [1]. In the world of Marketing, a good sales pitch avoids platitudes like the plague. 

Of course, bad Marketing and Politics are crammed so full of platitudes that you have to wonder if there’s a computer spewing out the copy, because surely there’s no sane human doing it? And if you want to spot a platitude, here are two simple tests you can apply:

A: The “What Would the Other Dude Say?” Test

Imagine that the statements being made were uttered or written by your competitor, nemesis, or arch-enemy. Would they make the same claims? Well, in the example above, if you change the word “Republican” for “Democrat,” “Libertarian,” “Communist,” or “Monster Raving Loony Party Supporter,” you bet your patootie they’d agree. And if that’s the case, then there’s no differentiation and therefore it says nothing of substance. Now if the phrase, “where everyone can carry a semi-automatic and a hand grenade into a Chuck E. Cheese” is include in the list of beliefs, then that’s not going to be OK with everyone, so it’s not a platitude.

B: The “No Shit, Sherlock” Test

If you read a claim that makes you want to reply, “Well no shit, Sherlock” then it’s a platitude. So if a law firm says, “We offer a professional service,” well no shit, Sherlock! Or if a printing firm offers “high quality prints,” then no shit, Sherlock! When someone claims to offer something that is inherent or implied in the service, then there’s a no-shit-Sherlock moment ahead.

At this point, you might be wondering what the difference is between a platitude and a cliché. To some extent, a cliché might be thought of as a platitude that refuses to die. A platitude states the obvious and a cliché states the commonplace.

New platitudes can be created every day but clichés have to stand the test of time. When a company is creating a Mission Statement [2] sometimes it ends up as an exercise in saying nothing but in a new way. Here’s one you might have heard some years ago: Respect, integrity, communication, and excellence. This was from the company called Enron, which was one of the most notorious business scandals in American history and is considered by many historians and economists alike to be the unofficial blueprint for a case study on White Collar Crime. It’s also an example of a crime against vocabulary for creating such a miserably loose mission statement

Avoiding platitudes is always a good thing. But as we in the US move closer to the next Presidential election – and hey, it’s only a year away! – I can guarantee that the platitudes will be coming thicker and faster as we hurtle headlong to November 8, 2016. Set your No Shit Sherlock phaser to stun.

Notes
[1] With a platitude, not only is there a stating of the obvious but it’s also done in such as way as to have the appearance of being profound or wise. Facebook is full of such pre-digested pabulum that, sadly, spreads like linguistic herpes, passed on by well-meaning but ultimately uncritical people who think that quoting something that sounds smart also makes them sound smart. It doesn’t. Platitudes also seem to aspire to taking on a moral dimension, presumably to reinforce the semblance of profundity.

[2] A Mission Statement is supposed to be a clear and succinct representation of a business’s purpose, which should incorporate socially meaningful and measurable criteria that address concepts such as the moral/ethical position of the company, its public image, the market it serves, the product and services it offers, and expectations of growth and profitability – if you want to stay in business. Alas, a Mission Statement can become so generic that is wanders into the Platitude Latitudes and says essentially nothing, or becomes a boiler-plate for ANY company in the world. A mission statement such as “To combine aggressive strategic marketing with quality products and services at competitive prices to provide the best value insurance for consumers” is about as broad as you can get – and by the way. it’s from Aflac.

My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels and My AAC Device Full of N-grams

A hovercraft with or without eels

Back in my college days – that’s 1977 to 1982 for those who like historical perspective – a friend of mine was taking East European studies with a view, I think, to improving his chances of joining the Socialist Workers Party. Although it wasn’t actually obligatory to speak any of the languages from Communist Europe, he clearly felt it might help. And come the day of the Glorious Revolution, when the Working Class of England would cast off their Capitalist shackles and take control of the means of production to become part of the global Socialist world, he’d be one of the intellectual elite who would help the under-educated proletariat rise to power. Sadly for him, the down-trodden workers decided to vote for Margaret Thatcher and usher in a new age of Capitalism where owning the means of production meant buying shares in British Telecom, British Aerospace, British Gas, and a host of companies that they already owned as tax payers! This was Mrs. T’s version of Clause IV socialism [1].

And that is why I happened upon a Czechoslovakian phrasebook.

I have to admit that my brief flirtation with radical socialism was fueled at that time by the fact that the local Labour club served subsidized beer, and another of my friends who worked behind the campus bar would serve Russian vodka as doubles or triples while still charging for a single. Hardly a rock upon which to build a firmly held political perspective but unlike my socialist buddy, I wasn’t at college to change the world – I was there to get a degree in Psychology and Linguistics so I could become a professor with a job for life [2].

Like many foreign language phrasebooks, it contained many “useful sentences” that one could simply trot out in the appropriate situation. Although I no longer have the book itself – and can’t for the life in me remember the title – I did keep the following short list of examples:

Can this be invisibly mended?
I have broken this denture.
How high is that mountain?
The clutch engages too quickly.
To whom does this concrete sports pavilion belong?

The latter, if memory serves me correctly, had an example answer along the lines of “It belongs to the people of the glorious Czech Republic.”

There’s actually a name to describe these types of sentences; postilion sentences. This was coined by the UK linguist David Crystal in a 1995 article where he talked about sentences used in teaching English as a Second Language:

A postilion sentence is one which has little or no chance of ever being useful in real-life. It could be used, obviously, because it is grammatically well-formed; but the contexts in which it would be natural to use it are either so restricted or so adult that the chances of a child encountering it, or finding it necessary to use it, are remote. In short, it is uncommunicative. It conveys a structural meaning, and a lexical content, but that it is all.

Crystal refers to a sentence from a early 20th century Hungarian-English phrasebook that went “The postilion has been struck by lightning.” It’s not perhaps a coincidence that the British Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy group came up with a skit called “The Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook video,” where Hungarian phrases were translated into obscene, or simply ridiculous, English phrases, one of which has taken on a life of its own; “My hovercraft is full of eels.” It has become such a popular example of a postilion sentence that the linguists at the Omniglot website have devoted a page to provide over translations in over 130 languages from Afrikkans (“My skeertuig is vol palings“) to Zulu (“Umkhumbi wami ugcwele ngenyoka zemanzini“). So should you ever find yourself needing to explain the fishy condition of your water-skimming vehicle while vacationing in Iceland (“Svifnökkvinn minn er fullur af álum“) remember to bookmark that page!

The royal postilion

In fairness to phrasebook creators, creating lists and lists of sentences can appear to be a reasonable goal. After all, should you find yourself in the middle of a crowded street in some foreign land with the need to scream “That organ grinder’s monkey has stolen my wallet,” having it written down at the tip of your fingers would clearly be of benefit [4]. Similarly if you’re out on a dark and stormy night in Transylvania and your postilion does indeed suffer a lighting-related injury, you’d also be covered (“A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal“).

The limitation – and it’s a pretty big one – is that it is impossible to predict all the sentences that a traveler could potentially need. The best you can do is create a selection of fairly generic sentences that can be used across situations, such as “I like that” or “That’s not what I wanted” or “Excuse me but I need some help.” Now, if you put your lexical and statistical hats on, ask yourself why “That’s not what I wanted” seems like a better choice than “My hovercraft is full of eels.” If you said it because the former seems to be a more probable sentence than the latter, then you’re definitely on the right track. When you consider strings of words, one way of analyzing them is in terms of frequency of use, and words like that, not, want, what, my, and is, are far more frequently used than hovercraft, eels, monkey, and postilion [5].

If  you wanted to perform a simple test at a bar, a much underrated and underused experimental venue, write down the following cloze sentence [6] and ask as many folks as possible to fill in the blanks:

My <blank> is full of <blank>

In truth, I have no idea what you’ll get in response, although glass and beer may well score higher than most nouns, but the  chances you’ll get hovercraft and eels is very low. What I can predict is that the missing words will be nouns because when you look at sub-strings of words, the inherent rules of how the English language behaves start to bias our choices. In computational and corpus linguistics, folks talk about such string as n-grams, where n is the number of words in the string.

The n-gram [my <blank> is] is a trigram, and words my and is limit the words that could fit into the blank. In fact, if we look at the bigram of [my <blank>], even that excludes certain choices. This is because when we use a possessive adjective such as my, the probability is that the word to follow will be a noun. If it’s the trigram of [my is], that probability actually goes up. For example, we can find examples of the bigram [my ] as follows:

[My dog]. (my + NOUN)
[My old] dog. (my + ADJECTIVE)
[My very] old dog. (my + ADVERB)

As you see, the bigram [my ] doesn’t have to be a noun if it’s part of a longer string. But if we contrast that with the trigram [my is] then we are much more limited:

[My dog is] hungry. (my + NOUN + is)
[My *old is] hungry.
[My *very is] hungry.

For those of us who work in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) we’re actually more familiar with the science of n-grams than we might have realized because this is essentially how word prediction works. Outside of AAC, anyone who uses a mobile phone will have seen next-word prediction and not necessarily worked out that it’s based on algorithms that use n-grams to estimate the most likely next word.

Of course, probabilities are simply that; probabilities. Given a word or n-gram as a starting point, we can make good guesses as to what word or words may come next but you can never be 100% sure. A number of AAC vocabulary sets have a feature whereby if you bring up the n-gram [SUBJECT PRONOUN + TO BE] a selection of verbs appear that are all in the progressing form i.e. VERB+ING. This is based on the thinking that whenever you say something like “I am…” or “he is…” or “we are…” any following verb is likely to be along the lines of eating, drinking, running, finishing etc. But that’s a probability only –  I might want to say “I am finished” or “He is done” or even “I am really thinking about…” or “we are certainly not wanting…” where the verb is actually in the ED form or there are other words (typically adverbial) before the following verb. If I want to say “I am doing something” then having doing appear automatically after “I am” can save keystrokes; but if I want to say “I am done,” I have to delete the word doing then find done as a word on its own, which adds keystrokes and takes more time.

Designing AAC systems to take advantage of n-grams is not a bad idea. Back in the 1990s when I was working with the team that developed the Unity symbol-based language program for devices built by the Prentke Romich Company, we included a number of bigrams and trigrams based on the thinking that phrases such as “I like” and “do you want” or “she doesn’t feel” have frequencies that are comparable to individual words and actually much higher than the vast majority of nouns. At the time, we didn’t have the resources to check the figures but nowadays it’s pretty easier to do that with online corpora. A phrase such as “do you want” has a frequency score or 11126 in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is way above words like postilion (9), hovercraft (109), eels (464), and even lightning (6724). Another example is “I don’t like,” which comes in at 5282 but when you look for “I don’t like ,” the frequencies drop dramatically:

I don’t like (5282)
I don’t like it (682)
I don’t like this (211)
I don’t like being (128)

What you see is that in general, as the length of the string increases, the frequency drops, to the point that “I don’t like eels” and “I don’t like hovercrafts” score a big fat zero. It’s only those bigrams and trigrams that seem to have frequencies that make them practical within an AAC vocabulary set.

You can now probably work out why sentence-based AAC systems are not only impossible to design but unlikely to be of use. Sentences are in effect simply n-grams with a large n value. “My hovercraft is full of eels” and “My postilion has been struck by lightning” are a 6-gram and a 7-gram respectively, and because probability is cumulative (the sum of the probability of each word) you can imagine how stunningly low the frequencies can be for sentences. Word-based systems, supplemented with high-frequency bigrams and trigrams provide access to vocabulary sets that are flexible and practical. Having the individual words eels, full, hovercraft, is, my, of as building blocks from which to construct novel sentences when turns out to be much better than having thousand upon thousands of prefab sentences stored “just in case.”

Notes
[1] The phrase “Clause Four Socialism” came from the fourth clause in the UK Labour Party constitution of 1918, which read; “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” Although it sounds like it was written by a lawyer and has more embedded clauses than a convention of Santas, it formed the basis for the Socialist ticket of Britain in the 1970s, where the country came as close to being a satellite of the USSR as it had ever been.

[2] That turned out to be yet another dream unfulfilled with my life taking a very different path that kept me well out of the world of academia. But you’re not here to read about me so go back to the article and keep reading 😉

[3] Crystal, D. (1995). Postilion sentences. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 11(1), 79-90.

[4] Technophiles will point out that the better way to do this is to shout “That organ grinder’s monkey has stolen my wallet” into their smart phone with translation facilities. That may be true but even machine translation can get a little iffy at times, and there’s a good chance that if the aforementioned simian is smart enough to target your wallet, it’s probably going to snatch your iPhone too. No-one reads books any more – not even monkeys – so your pocket phrasebook would be safe.

[5] I suppose now is a good time to add a little bit about postilions for those who are curious. On horse-drawn carriages, the postilion is a person who sits on the leading left-hand horse and who can guide the carriage if there isn’t an actual coachman on the carriage itself. The word derives from the French postillon meaning “the person who rides the post horse,” and the post horse was the one reserved for a mail carrier who would use it to take letters from one location to another. The earlier Middle French noun poste referred to “Any of a series of men stationed at suitable places along appointed post-roads, the duty of each being to ride with, or forward speedily to the next stage, the monarch’s (and later also other) letters and dispatches, and to provide fresh horses for express messengers riding through.” (OED).

[6] A cloze sentence is one where words are purposely left out so that readers can add appropriate choices. It’s a standard tool for research and education, especially when teaching literacy. The word is simply a shortened version of the word closure, hence the pronunciation of /kləʊz/ and not /kləʊs/. It’s not a “close” sentence but one that needs “closure!” It was first noted in 1953 so is relatively new.

First Post: Another Dude.

Not an original title, but I don’t always have an original thought.  Hope you enjoy the rantings, ravings, and misadventures of Duke Iceland.  Now, if you think Duke is my real name… stop reading now…This is my alias, my avatar, my other life, concealing my true identify as one of the Speech Dudes.  I really am a SLP and have specialized in AAC for nearly 20 years, working in rehab, the public schools, at the university level, the industry, and private practice.  Either I am very lucky for all my experiences, or I have one of the worst cases of professional ADHD.  Personally, my feelings are this field is going through a major time of transition like it has never seen before.  A new technology penetrated our field in a way that nothing has done before. It is time to weed out the good, the bad, and the ugly of what the technology can bring.