The ‘The’ article appears in The Indexer, the information- and fun-packed publication for professional indexers everywhere. The Indexer has its own index, which includes an entry for Browne, Glenda.
Browne characterizes herself as an Australian freelance indexer. Her study is a four-page guide for the definitely perplexed. It explains: ‘If “The” exists in a name or title, it should exist in the index entry for that name or title. And if it exists in the index entry, it should be taken into account when sorting the entries.’
The problem is widespread, and although there are rules (at least three different – and differing – official sets of rules), indexers often go their own ways. Browne gives examples. In the 2000/2001 Sydney telephone directory, ‘“Agency Register The” and “Agency Personnel The” are sorted under “A”, while “The Agency Australia” is sorted under “The”. “The Sausage Specialist” is filed under “The” and “Sausage”, while “The Meat Emporium” is only filed under “Meat Emporium The”.’
Browne says, ‘“The” often doesn’t matter. There are many titles that include “The”, but then treat it as if it doesn’t exist. The masthead of [the newspaper] The Australian, for example, has a tiny “The” above a large “Australian”. Their layout tells us that The is insignificant, but they won’t follow this through and omit it entirely. Corporate names such as “The University of Queensland” are used at times with, and at times without, an initial “The”. This makes it very difficult for users to know whether “The” is an integral part of the name.’
‘On the other hand,’ she continues, ‘in many corporate names “The” has been deliberately chosen as the first word of the name, and is used consistently. The musical group “The Beatles” is referred to as such, and never as “Beatles”. In these cases, the group considers the initial article significant, and it will be the access point consulted by many users. An extreme example is the group “The The”, which would look absurd with the initial “The” omitted or inverted.’
There are good reasons for sorting on ‘The’, says Browne, and good reasons for ignoring it. She suggests listing ‘The’ items twice: under ‘The’ and under the second word in the entry. Lest that create unmanageably long lists of entries starting with ‘The’, she offers other alternatives.
Win-win situation proposed by Glenda Browne, the.
Internationally, the ‘The’ problem is not the problem – it is merely a problem. Browne makes this clear at the very start of her paper, with a quotation from indexing maven Hans H. Wellisch: ‘Happy is the lot of an indexer of Latin, the Slavic languages, Chinese, Japanese, and some other tongues which do not have articles, whether definite or indefinite, initial or otherwise.’
For her study of the ‘The’ problem, Glenda Browne was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in literature.
Browne, Glenda (2001). ‘The Definite Article: Acknowledging “The” in Index Entries.’ The Indexer 22 (3): 119–22.
To Wrestle a Bad Metaphor
Carl Phillips, Brian Guenzel, and Paul Bergen are hopping mad about bad metaphors. Writing in the almost-poetically-named Harm Reduction Journal, they pull on their metaphorical boxing gloves. Stepping into the ring, so to speak, they issue a forthright statement: ‘Anti-harm-reduction advocates sometimes resort to pseudo-analogies to ridicule harm reduction. Those opposed to the use of smokeless tobacco as an alternative to smoking sometimes suggest that the substitution would be like jumping from a 3-story building rather than 10-story, or like shooting yourself in the foot rather than the head.’ Following their summary of these two disagreeable metaphors, Phillips, Guenzel, and Bergen then proceeded to administer a good thrashing.
They collected several versions of the ‘jump from a building’ metaphor. Some metaphor makers, they report, have ‘likened smoking to falls from at least the 10th floor and smokeless tobacco to falls from at least the 3rd; we found numbers as high as 50 and 30’. These are beneath contempt, they explain, because ‘anyone with passing familiarity with the human body and Earth’s gravity should be aware that falls from the 10th story are almost always fatal’.
Perhaps unsure of their own familiarity with the human body and Earth’s gravity, they conducted a review of the available literature on mortality rates as a function of free-fall distance.
‘It is surprising’, they write, ‘how little information is published on the topic ... The literature suggests that falls from up to the 3rd story are most always survived, with the death rate increasing sharply and approaching 100% over the next three or four stories ... More accurate analogies might actually be fairly useful in painting the picture for consumers. A nontrivial portion of young men have probably jumped from a 2nd story window, but few would dare jump from the 4th.’
This is their main line of attack. They go at it from other directions, too.
In the second bout, they pummel the ‘gunshot to the head’ metaphor, applying a devastating one-two punch:
‘It is immediately obvious that the gunshot metaphor is absurd: If someone was faced with the choice of shooting himself in the head and shooting himself in the foot or leg, the latter option is quite obviously better from a health outcomes perspective.’
‘Mortality risk from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head dwarfs that from smoking, while foot wounds, though they have a low mortality rate, have a high probability of permanent debilitating orthopedic damage, a risk absent in tobacco use.’
Phillips and Bergen are at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Guenzel is at the Center for Philosophy, Health, and Policy Sciences in Houston, Texas.
In the end, they let slip what’s most got up their nose. ‘The metaphors’, they write, ‘exhibit a flippant tone that seems inappropriate for a serious discussion of health science.’
Phillips, Carl V., Brian Guenzel, and Paul Bergen (2006). ‘Deconstructing Anti-harm-reduction Metaphors: Mortality Risk from Falls and Other Traumatic Injuries Compared to Smokeless Tobacco Use.’ Harm Reduction Journal 3: 15.
In Brief
‘The Case of the Burly Wee Man’
(published in the Archives of Environmental Health, 1974)
Colonoscopy Sociologica
The passing years make it difficult to remember how much excitement arose when Sue Ziebland and Catherine Pope published their epic report ‘The Use of the Colon in Titles of British Medical Sociology Conference Papers, 1970 to 1993’.
Ziebland was then at the department of public health medicine of the Camden and Islington health authority in London. She has since passed through the digestive system of academia and emerged at the University of Oxford. Pope was at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Time and circumstance have deposited her at the University of Bristol.
Together Ziebland and Pope explored the colons of several British researchers. Their report appeared in the Annals of Improbable Research. It shed light on a problem that distressed many social scientists: how to properly devise the titles of their conference papers. This is how Ziebland and Pope described it: ‘Unless the presenter is of an unusually retiring disposition, there will be a desire to choose a punchy, attention-grabbing title in the hope of attracting a large and lively audience. However, sooner or later the truth will out, and it is clearly in one’s interest to make some mention of the actual subject of the work. The favoured solution is to use a colon, separating the snappy from the prosaically descriptive, as in: “Sex and Drugs: Women’s Use of Aspirin”.’
Ziebland and Pope examined trends in the use of the colon in paper titles using evidence from a particular annual conference. They considered every paper that was listed in the printed programmes from the first annual conference in 1969, up to the 1993 meeting.
Their analysis is based on the percentage of the total number of papers per year that include one or more colons in the title. They tallied each paper as a single occurrence, even a 1979 paper that included five colons. (Alas, they do not tell us the name of that paper.)
They discov
ered that the percentage of paper titles increased almost continuously during the 1970s and 1980s. From the mid-1980s onwards, a steady forty to forty-eight percent of titles included a colon. In the year 1985, a staggering fifty-seven percent featured colons. This anomaly, Ziebland and Pope wrote, ‘has no obvious explanation’.
The colon has fascinated scholars for generations. More than a decade before Ziebland and Pope’s colonic examination, the noted and footnoted scholar J. T. Dillon, of the University of California, Riverdale, performed three historical endoscopies of the academic colon. They are:
The Emergence of the Colon: An Empirical Correlate of Scholarship (American Psychologist, 1981)
Functions of the Colon: An Empirical Test of Scholarly Character (Educational Research Quarterly, 1981)
In Pursuit of the Colon: A Century of Scholarly Progress: 1880–1980 (Journal of Higher Education, 1982)
Incisive and exciting as these studies may have been when published, they are now seen as period pieces.
Highlights of Highlighting
The practice of reading textbooks for pleasure is just as lively now as it has ever been. More people buy textbooks – actually spend their own money to do it – now than ever before. And in deciding what to buy, they (or should I say, ‘we’) are kids in a candy shop. There is an ever-growing number of specialized subjects for which textbooks exist, and so the variety of textbooks on offer is always increasing. Even if you somehow manage to exhaust the cream of one genre, you can easily find another to sample.
An untimid reader can find lots of good, meaty reads packed with literary merit. Like the best novels, many of the textbooks in forestry management, ergodic theory, multinational auditing, and thousands of other genres try to fill a reader’s mind with ideas and words that, at first read, really do feel completely novel.
But that’s not the best part. Used textbooks offer one thing more to beguile the leisure-time reader.
For many of us, the highlight of reading used textbooks is the highlighting, the lines previous readers have drawn under, around, or through particular words or passages. Good highlighting makes any used textbook worth the purchase. Bad highlighting makes it even better. And in buying highlighted textbooks, you sometimes get a double bonus: despite the carefully added interest, they often have drastically reduced price tags.
Of course, not everyone’s pulse races at the sight of a textbook. H. G. Wells was outspoken about this. In 1914, he put textbooks in their supposed place, which to him was fifth in a list of derogatory words he used to describe bad education: ‘thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial’. Wells, for all his insights into science, into humanity, into the future, into the etc., was somehow not seeing the good parts – not even the highlights! – of textbooks.
Vicki Silvers and David Kreiner, of Central Missouri State University, stepped on to the scene eighty-three years later, with a study called ‘The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension’. ‘Textbook highlighting is a common study strategy among college students’, Silvers and Kreiner wrote, using the academese that their profession demands. Then they described their experiments.
First, they had students read a passage of text. Some students had text that was highlighted appropriately. Some had text that was highlighted inappropriately. Others had Spartan, unhighlighted text. Silvers and Kreiner then tested how well the students comprehended the text. Those with the inappropriate highlighting scored much lower than the others. A second experiment showed that even when students were warned about the inappropriate highlighting, they had trouble ignoring it.
In 2002, Silvers and Kreiner were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in literature. At the awards ceremony, they offered one piece of advice: ‘Don’t buy a textbook that was highlighted by an idiot.’ I’m not sure I’d agree.
Silvers, Vicki, and David Kreiner (1997). ‘The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension.’ Reading Research and Instruction 36: 217–23.
Hey, Dude…
The story of dude – its rise, its role, its rich history as a word – takes twenty-five pages to tell. University of Pittsburgh linguistics professor Scott Fabius Kiesling’s analysis of dude carries the title ‘Dude’. It occupies a stylish chunk of the autumn 2004 issue of the journal American Speech.
Kiesling’s tale accords with the pithy history of dude that you’ll find in the Oxford English Dictionary. Of American origin, dude in the 1880s was ‘a name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment’. A few decades later, a dude was ‘a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the US, especially one who spends his holidays on a ranch; a tenderfoot’. Nowadays, a dude is the object of more-than-just-self-esteem. Today’s dude is ‘any man who catches the attention in some way; a fellow or chap, a guy. Hence also approvingly, especially applied to a member of one’s own circle or group.’
Kiesling delves deep into the modern dude, the dude of whom we hear speak wherever young Americans roam. He provides context for those whom the world may have passed by. ‘Older adults’, he writes, ‘baffled by the new forms of language that regularly appear in youth cultures, frequently characterize young people’s language as “inarticulate”, and then provide examples that illustrate the specific forms of linguistic mayhem performed by “young people nowadays”.’
He then gets down to business, outlining ‘the patterns of use for dude, and its functions and meanings in interaction’. Dude, we learn, is: (a) used mostly by young men to address other young men; (b) a general address term for a group (same or mixed gender); and (c) a discourse marker that generally encodes the speaker’s stance to his or her current addressee(s). Best of all, ‘Dude indexes a stance of cool solidarity, a stance which is especially valuable for young men as they navigate cultural Discourses of young masculinity.’
Note from study: The label ‘Hetero’ refers to ‘heterosexual intimate relationships’, and though ‘there were responses for male-male and female-female categories ... it is clear from the students who gathered the data that not all respondents understood the intimate nature of this category’
Kiesling attributes the sudden blossoming of dude, in the 1980s, to the actor Sean Penn, who played the role of Jeff Spicoli in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Penn, in his Spicoli persona, is ‘the do-nothing, class-cutting stoned surfer’ who takes ‘a laid-back stance to the world, even if the world proves to be quite remarkable’. Kiesling confides that he was a teenager at the time the film came out, and that ‘many young men glorified Spicoli, especially his nonchalant blindness to authority and hierarchical division’.
The bulk of ‘Dude’ is technical, an exploration of data gathered by students in Pittsburgh. Each student wrote down the first twenty usages of the word ‘dude’ they heard during a three-day period. These Kiesling compiled into what he calls ‘The Dude Corpus’. The corpus awaits the scrutiny of future dudes and scholars of dude, who may see in it things that are invisible to us.
Kiesling, Scott F. (2004). ‘Dude.’ American Speech 79 (3): 281–305.
Hazards of Bobbing
New parents beware! is the implied theme of a new study called ‘Who Do You Look Like? Evidence for the Existence of Facial Stereotypes for Male Names’.
The researchers begin with this little shocker: ‘Choosing a name for a forthcoming baby occupies a good deal of time for most expectant parents ... Few worry about whether the name will provoke a facial stereotype in the minds of others (hmm ... he doesn’t look like a “Bob”), but, as the present research suggests, this may be yet another potential worry to have when one selects a name for one’s progeny.’
Scientists Melissa A. Lea, Robin D. Thomas, Nathan A. Lamkin, and Aaron Bell hammer home the unfairness of the situation. ‘This is an especially provocative suggestion’, they write, ‘as names are usually chosen before or immediately after birth, certainly before any knowledge becomes availa
ble of what the child may look like when they are adults.’
All of the team members are associated with Miami University of Ohio. The university issued a press release that announced ‘researchers at Miami University think they know why you can remember some peoples’ names but not others’. They’ve shown quantitatively that certain names are associated with certain facial features. For example, when people hear the name “Bob” they have in mind a larger, round face than when they hear a name such as “Tim” or “Andy”.’
The study includes a pair of photos – on the left, a tousle-haired young man in a white shirt; on the right a bald, droopy-eyed fellow wearing what might be a striped prison outfit. The researchers say, when shown these two pictures, ‘audience members overwhelmingly agree that the man on the left is named “Tim” and the man on the right is named “Bob”.’
Figure: ‘Audience members overwhelmingly agree that the man on the left is named “Tim” and the man on the right is named “Bob”.’
This, however, was not what happened in the experiment.
In the experiment, software was used to create idealized, hairless faces for each of fifteen names: Andy, Brian, Joe, Justin, Rick, Bill, Dan, John, Mark, Tim, Bob, Jason, Josh, Matt, and Tom. Then a group of volunteers was given printed cards – each card had one of those pictures or one of those names – and told to match up pictures and names.
Most agreed that Bobs are Bob-like. Many agreed that the Bills are Bill-like and that the Toms are Tom-like. There was not so much agreement as to the other faces and names.
Of course, these research results are definitive only for those particular faces and those particular names, and only as they struck one particular group of student volunteers on one particular day.
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