Fabulous Adventures In Coding : English Usage

Begging the question

Eric Lippert — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:23:00 GMT

In my last post I described the syllogism "Photogenic people look good in photograps; Michelle Pfeiffer is photogenic; therefore, Michelle Pfeiffer looks good in photographs" as "begging the question". A few people commented on that, so I thought I'd address this point of English usage.

In modern usage, "begging the question" has come to mean nothing more than "the situation suggests that an obvious question to raise at this time is blah blah blah." For example, "The global financial meltdown begs the question: was there insufficient federal oversight of the American mortgage industry?" Though this usage is certainly common in civic discourse and the media, it is entirely a modern departure from the historic usage of the phrase. I try to eschew this modern usage when I say "begs the question".

"Begs the question" is also sometimes used to mean "this argument raises additional questions which require additional investigation before we can accept the argument". Though this is considerably closer to the traditional definition of the phrase, this is also not exactly what I mean.

When I say "begs the question", I mean it in the traditional sense of "this argument is fallacious because it takes as a premise an assumption which is at least as strong as the thing being proven, and is therefore an unwarranted assumption."

Let me give you another example of question begging, in the traditional sense, which might be more clear.

Suppose I asked "why are diamonds very hard but butter is very soft?" and you answered "diamond and butter are both made out of atoms; the atoms of diamonds are hard and the atoms of butter are soft." You would have begged the question; your answer to my question "why are some things hard and some things soft" is "because some things are made out of stuff that is hard and some things are made out of stuff that is soft" -- that is, you've avoided answering the question by providing an "explanation" that itself cannot be understood without answering the original question -- namely, why is some stuff hard and some stuff soft? This pseudo-explanation has no predictive power; it doesn't tell us anything new, it just circles back on itself. The explanatory assumption -- that some atoms are hard and some atoms are soft -- is stronger than the thing we are trying to investigate -- the hardness and softness of two substances.

A non-question-begging answer would be "diamond and butter are both made of atoms; the atoms of a diamond are all identical and arranged in a stable, rigid lattice where every point in the lattice is reinforced by a strong bond to four other points. The atoms of butter are a disorganized collection of many different atoms grouped into different kinds of relatively complex molecules; though the molecules themselves are quite strong, each molecule of butter holds weakly to each other molecule. It takes only a small force to disrupt the loose arrangement of butter molecules but a very large force to disrupt the strong arrangement of diamond atoms. We perceive this difference in required force as 'hardness' on the human scale, but in fact it is a property that arises from the sub-microscopic-scale properties of each substance."

Now, this explanation does *raise* more questions. It raises questions like "why are some lattices strong and some weak?" and "why are some objects composed of many different kinds of atoms organized into molecules, and some composed of just one atom?" Question-begging is not the act of raising more questions. Every good explanation raises more questions. What makes this explanation a good one is that it is testable and has predictive power; we can investigate the hardness or softness of other substances, and make predictions about what sorts of atomic structures they will have -- or, vice versa, we can look at an atomic structure and try to figure out from it how hard the substance will be. We can invent other techniques for determining atomic structure, like x-ray diffraction crystallography or spectroscopic analysis, and use those to cross-check our "atomic theory of hardness".

But the "because she's photogenic" pseudo-explanation is clearly question-begging. Why does she look so good? Because she's photogenic. Why is she photogenic? Because she looks so good. We have learned nothing about photogenicity (or the lovely Ms. Pfeiffer).

Similarly, if you ask "why is this code thread-safe?" and the answer is "because it can be correctly called on multiple threads", we've begged the question. Why is it thread-safe? Because it's correct. Why is it correct? Because it's thread-safe. Again, we have learned nothing about the nature of thread safety.

Five-Dollar Words For Programmers, Part Four: Boustrophedonic

Eric Lippert — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:39:00 GMT

Here’s an almost useless but thoroughly delightful five-dollar word. English of course is read left-to-right. Hebrew and Arabic are read right-to-left. A text is boustrophedonic if it reads left-to-right and right-to-left, alternating.

It’s from the Greek βουστροφηδόν meaning “as the ox turns”; you’d plow a field with an ox right to left and then left to right, obviously.

There are a number of ancient languages which were written boustrophedonically, which I’m sure has given members of the Unicode committee many sleepless nights. The example here is a rare early Latin text written boustrophedonically.

What’s the relevance to computer people not on the Unicode committee, given that odds are slim to none that Word will ever support boustrophedonic editing? That’s how most modern dot-matrix and inkjet printers print. The head goes left-to-right, then prints the image “backwards” right-to-left, and so on.

I discovered this word several years ago when grepping through the Scrabble Tournament Word List post-game to see if HEDONIC was in fact a legal bingo, or if I had played a phony. (It is legal.) But I had partial text matching on, so I hit BOUSTROPHEDONIC first and was intrigued, so I looked it up.

At fifteen letters long, it would run the entire width or height of the board. If OUST, HE and ON were all on the board already in the right place along an edge, you could play the remaining seven letters, get the triple-triple-triple word score plus the bingo bonus, and score 725 points. That would almost double the world record for highest scoring play (CAZIQUES, 392 points).

This seems unlikely, but you never know. Might come in handy.

A Couple Links

Eric Lippert — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:24:00 GMT

Just two unrelated links today.

First, Raymond's post today reminded me of one of my favourite lines from the L.A. Story screenplay:

"Look, rather than do an interview with me, which would be fascinating, by the way, because of my interesting word usements I structure, what if I showed you around town a little?"

Pre-envisioning? What could this possibly mean?

And second, my colleague on the C# compiler development team and fellow Waterloo alumnus Sam Ng has started blogging. Check it out!

"Boolean or" or "boolean or"?

Eric Lippert — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:52:00 GMT

I was writing the text for some new error messages for the expression tree library the other day. When I ran them past our user education specialists (that is, the people who will be writing the documentation to explain the error messages), one of them pointed out that “Boolean” is an eponym -- a word named after a person -- and therefore should be capitalized.

And indeed, she was correct. Boolean logic is named after its inventor, George Boole (1815-1864).

That got me thinking, which often leads to trouble.

English writers do not usually capitalize the eponyms “shrapnel” (Henry Shrapnel, 1761-1842), “diesel” (Rudolf Diesel, 1858-1913), “saxophone” (Adolphe Sax, 1814-1894), “baud” (Emile Baudot, 1845-1903), “ampere” (Andre Ampere, 1775-1836), “chauvinist” (Nicolas Chauvin, 1790-?), “nicotine” (Jean Nicot, 1530-1600) or “teddy bear” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1916).

However, we do capitalize “Darwinian evolution”, “Victorian morality”, “Elizabethan plays”, “Dickensian stories”, “Machiavellian politicians” and “Orwellian surveillance”, so perhaps we should capitalize “Boolean logic”.

I think the actual guideline to follow here is that we capitalize eponyms only if they are adjectives. Once they become nouns, we quickly stop capitalizing them.

Of course, that then doesn’t explain why we do not capitalize “caesarian section” or “draconian measures”. Expecting that much consistency from English is asking rather too much.

Error messages: diagnostic is preferable to prescriptive

Eric Lippert — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:04:00 GMT

The new LINQ features are going to create new failure modes for the compiler, so we're going to need to create some new error messages. The compiler development team got together the other day to discuss what makes an error message good or bad. I thought I'd share with you guys what we came up with. We believe that good error messages are:

Polite: making the user feel like an idiot is very, very bad.
Readable: poor grammar and tortured sentence structure is bad.
Accurate: error messages must accurately describe the problem.
Precise: "Something is wrong" is an accurate error message but not a very precise one!
Diagnostic but not prescriptive: describe the problem, not the solution.

The first four are obviously goodness. That last one is a little more controversial. Surely a good error message not only tells you what is wrong but helps you fix it, no?

The issue is that deducing what is wrong with bad code is hard enough. Trying to read the user's mind and figure out what they were thinking when they wrote the bad code, and then telling them how to correctly implement that thought is not something that we feel we can do with sufficiently high accuracy in most situations.

Look at it this way: suppose we pull off a miracle and manage to produce error messages which 90% of the time tell the user the correct way to fix their code so that it does what they want it to do. That means that 10% of the time we are telling people how to write a syntactically correct program that does something different than they intended! Pushing people towards writing buggy programs that still compile is very bad, and we do not want to go there.

It's instructive to look at a few places where we violated these guidelines in earlier versions of the compiler:

Static member 'Baz' cannot be marked as override, virtual or abstract

If the user wrote static virtual, then we don't know what the heck they meant to do. Assuming that they meant to say static and that the virtual is wrong is a little presumptuous. Maybe the static is the wrong part! Also, if the user said static virtual, then why is the error message mentioning override and abstract? That's accurate but not precise. A better error message in this case would be something like

Member 'Baz' cannot be both static and virtual

Here's another place where we get it wrong, but this one is more subtle:

A params parameter must be the last parameter in a formal parameter list

This is an example of an English sentence that can be interpreted different ways depending on the context. If I said "a punctuation mark must be the last symbol of a sentence" then I mean that every sentence must end in a punctuation mark, but I do not mean that punctuation marks are only legal at the end of a sentence. If I said "a period must be the last symbol of a statement" then I mean that every statement must end in a period, and furthermore that periods are forbidden anywhere else in the statement.

You and I know that what the error message is trying to say is that if there is a params then it must go at the end. But based solely on this error message, a user would be entirely logically justified in thinking that (int i) is an illegal parameter list because it doesn't end with a params parameter. Or, under another interpretation, they'd also be logically justified in concluding that (params int[] foo, params int[] bar) is legal, because it does end with a params parameter.

The portion of the specification which the error message is attempting to draw attention to is of course "If a formal parameter list includes a parameter array then it must be the last parameter in the list. There can only be one parameter array for a given method" which is nicely unambiguous. Why not simply use this quote from the specification for the error message? That's a reasonable idea, but it sounds a little stiff and doesn't call out where the problem is. I'd prefer:

Method 'Foo' has a parameter array parameter which is not the last parameter in the formal parameter list.

This tells you what is wrong without telling you how to fix it. Since we don't know how to fix it – whether the user should be removing the params modifier, or moving it to the end, or rewriting their method from scratch – we should just report the spec violation and let them sort it out.

There are times when we do want to tell the user what to do, but only when we are highly likely to be correct. For example:

User-defined operator 'Blah' must be declared static and public.

Here we are both diagnosing the problem and prescribing a solution. If they're trying to make a user-defined operator, this is what they absolutely must do to be successful. It is very unlikely that they wanted to make a private instance function and made a private instance operator by mistake!

This illustrates another principle of good error messages that I didn't call out before: good error messages use precise terminology from the standard rather than making up new jargon. Yes "formal parameter list" and "user-defined operator" are a little bit stiff, but they are also clearly defined in the standard.

Sometimes we get the error right but the wording could be improved:

Foo: static classes cannot be used as constraints

Why are they trying to use a static class as a constraint? Who knows? How should they fix it? Beats me! The best we can do is to tell them that it hurts when they try to do that. But the wording! Good heavens! Would you ever say "Pizza: delicious foods should be eaten while they're fresh!" ??? Clearly

Static class 'Foo' cannot be used as a constraint

is much better.

Anyone have additional suggestions for what makes a good error message? Or other examples of places where we got it wrong?

If so smart Yoda is, why does not words the right order in his sentences put?

Eric Lippert — Thu, 19 May 2005 21:55:00 GMT

Part three of my series on the impact of high-dimensional geometry on search algorithms will have to wait at least until after the Victoria Day weekend -- I'm crazy busy getting wedding invitations out, working on last-minute book edits and, oh yeah, that Whidbey thing.

However I will take a couple minutes out of my crazy busy schedule to comment on Eric Bakovic's recent posting about why Yoda talks like that.

"My own take is a little more cynical. I think it's just that Yoda is old and wise and therefore speaks in a way that sounds like he's saying something much deeper than he actually is."

I agree -- sort of. I'm not quite that cynical. I always assumed that Lucas was simply ripping off, I mean, making an homage to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, a professional linguist with a world-class knowledge of the evolution of the English language, was a master of this technique. Every single character in The Lord of the Rings speaks with a syntax and diction appropriate to their race, age, learning, intelligence and social standing.

Elrond, an Elvish leader who has been alive for millennia, uses a high-class vocabulary with lots of Latin and Greek roots and an archaic, formal syntax. Sam, a young working-class hobbit, uses only modern syntax and a countrified vocabulary. The riders of Rohan actually speak Anglo-Saxon amongst themselves and when they speak "English", use an archaic syntax, but not nearly so archaic as Elrond. They hardly ever use English words derived from Latin.

In my misspent youth I read a lot of badly written fantasy novels, and it is amusing and a little bit sad to see lesser writers try to fake their way through this technique. It takes more than throwing in "thou art the son of the wizard, art thou not?" every now and then to make a character seem authentically archaic. They do a pretty decent job with Yoda. I believe that guy's 900 years old!

Ologiology

Eric Lippert — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 23:18:00 GMT

No technology today -- but, hey, where does that word "technology" come from, anyway?

I'm on this politics/technology/etc. mailing list. A recent poster noted that Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview will Bill O'Reilly on the subject of, of all things, the Boy Scouts, used the word "phraseology". He was speaking in reference to "don't ask, don't tell".

Anyway, the poster noted that "phraseology" looks like it should mean "the study of phrases", but it doesn't, it means "the meanings of words in phrases". I was curious about that, so, I looked it up in the OED.

Turns out that there are two distinct camps of -logy words in English. There are those in which -logy means "the study of", like technology, psychology, entomology, geology, theology, astrology, and so on. And then there are those in which -logy means "the words", like eulogy (nice words), trilogy (three words), ideology (idea words), tautology (the same words), and so on.

Both come from the same Greek root, λογος meaning "saying", or "words" or "discourse". It's a natural progression from "theology" = "saying words about the gods" to "the study of the gods", so that clears up that.

"Astrology" and "theology" are Anglicizations of real ancient Greek words. Ideally, we'd form new -logies by using only Greek prefixes -- zoology, geology, and so on. But, as we've discussed here before, English is a slatternly language; we cheerfully hook up Latin-derived (and otherwise!) prefixes to -logy all the frickin' time. (And any grammarian who complains about it can tell me the etymology of "grammarian" and then be quiet.)

Here's another interesting fact about -logies: you can guess how old an -logy word is in English by whether someone who studies it is a -logist (modern) or -logian (old), or -logue (quite old), -loger (realy very old indeed).

Try it! People who study religion are theologians, or, now obsolete, theologues, but never theologists. People who stick to a rigid ideology are sometimes ideologues, but these days more often ideologists. People who study insects are entomologists, not entomologians, entomologers, or entomologues; entomology is a relatively new -logy word. Doesn't "entomologian" sound a lot more archaic? People who study astrology are astrologers, a very old word indeed, entering English in the 14th century. New -logy words -- and we're getting new ones all the time -- practically always use -logist these days, and lots of the old ones are transmogrifying into -logist, if they haven't already.

Anthimeria weirds languages

Eric Lippert — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 21:44:00 GMT

A little non-technical rant for a Friday.

Professor Thingo, in a recent blog entry, decries the use of "Gestalt" as a verb and asks "Does the English language now allow parts of speech to be used entirely interchangeably? Did I miss a memo?"

Though I also would personally balk at verbing "Gestalt" and "architecture" (but not "architect", a perfectly good verb!) I feel compelled to answer the rhetorical question -- yes, by and large English does allow parts of speech to be used interchangeably. In fact, the very notion of "part of speech" arose from the study of Latin grammar, a language with precious little in common with English. The whole notion of "parts of speech" maps poorly to English, a language which cheerfully uses "green" as an adjective, verb, adverb, noun and interjection.

Latin, unlike English, is a highly inflected language. In inflected languages there are roots. You then do things to them that make them into nouns, verbs, plurals, diminutives, whatever you want. The part of speech can usually be determined by the inflection. Some Latin verbs have over a hundred inflections.

English, by way of contrast, never has more than five verb inflections for a given verb (except the perennial exception, "to be"). Drive-drives-driving-driven-drove, throw a couple nouns for good measure (driver-drivers) and we’re done. Every other form of "drive" is formed by adding more words into the mix. You can figure out whether a noun or a verb is meant from cues such as phrasal verb particles ("back" is ambiguous, "back away" is probably a verb), auxiliary verbs ("turn" is ambiguous, "will turn" is not) and other contextual cues.

A huge number of English words are nouns that became verbs without benefit of any kind of inflection or derivation. That's just what English does, and what it's done for centuries, and yet prescriptivists continue to decry it. (Of course, they’ve also done so for decades, so it’s a bit silly for me to decry prescriptivism!)

I found this page of bad advice to be particularly hilarious. This line in particular:

If you look at a dictionary entry carefully, you'll often see that the word you're looking at was used exclusively as a noun up until 1983 or something like that.

Unlike those guys, I actually did look at a dictionary carefully and discovered that in fact many of the verbings they were decrying had been used as verbs in English for centuries. Two in particular stood out. "Impact", which is actually a verb that became a noun in the late 18^th century. (Though, to be fair, the 17^th-century meaning of "impact" as a verb was more along the sense of "impacted molar" than the physics sense of things colliding – that usage didn’t arise until the 20^th century.) More ridiculous though is "parent", which they decry as "idiotically new-age" but has been used as a verb in English since at least the mid 1600’s. (Again, to be fair, the intransitive usage is modern, but the transitive verb sense is very, very old.)

The earliest known recorded usage of each as a noun and verb is telling.

contact: v: 1834 n: 1626
impact: v: 1601 n: 1781
focus: v: 1875 n: 1656
parent: v: 1663 n: 1450
medal: v: 1822 n: 1578

"Parent" has been a verb almost as long as "impact" has even been a recorded English word! And anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t use "medal" as a verb because it’s only been used in that sense since 1822 should also be decrying the use of "mail" as a verb (in the postal sense). "Mail" as a verb dates from as recently as 1827. And not to mention "access", which only dates from 1962 as a verb!

Furthermore, when English introduces new words it frequently takes on both noun and verb forms. Is "Spackle" (a trademark, incidentally) a noun or verb? What about "blog"?

Look at the over two dozen words I’ve used just in this short essay that are clearly both verbs and nouns – part, miss, map, green, root, contrast, throw, figure, answer, cue, back, down, turn, will, line, record, sense, mention, date, take, look, tell, form, use, essay … Using nouns as verbs is just what English does, and I think it’s great. Go verb!

OOP = Obviously Oxmoronic Posting

Eric Lippert — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 22:19:00 GMT

In double-checking today's entry, I see that I wrote:

Saying that script is bad because spotty teenage vandals use it is obviously specious.

Hmm.

Is there such a thing as “obviously specious”, or is that an oxymoron?

A Grammatical Aside

Eric Lippert — Wed, 03 Dec 2003 02:48:00 GMT

I just wrote in a comment to my previous entry, "The ability to rate one's knowledge of a subject accurately is strongly correlated with one's knowledge."

Wait a minute. "One's"??? Word's grammar checker didn't blink at that. But nor does it blink at "ones". Well, according to the OED, "one's" is the genitive declension of "one". Let's sum up:

Pronoun Genitive

-----------------

Me My

You Your

Us Our

Him His

Her Hers

Them Their

Thou Thine

It Its

One One's

I always thought that the reason that "its" doesn't take an apostrophe-s was because the rule "add an apostrophe-s to form a possessive" applied only to noun phrases, not to pronouns (And of course, we all know that apostrophe-s does not itself form a genitive noun -- otherwise, in the sentence "The First Lady is the President of America's wife," Laura Bush would be associated with America, not President Bush.)

What the heck is going on here? Surely there is some grammar pedant out there who can justify this. My faith in English grammar has been sorely tried.