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Beware the Misles

December 1, 2011, 4:00 am

I recently learned the story of a colleague’s secret shame. Revealing his name would bring humiliation down upon him. But journalism is cruel and blogging is worse. He is Professor D. Robert Ladd, a distinguished phonologist and phonetician at the University of Edinburgh, noted especially for work on prosodic phenomena like intonation and stress. Which relates (oh, the irony!) to his dark secret: For a number of years, when he read the word biopic, he privately assumed a totally wrong stress pattern for it: He saw it as having the stress pattern of myopic. Fail!

Bi-OP-ik, he was saying to himself in his head. But the word (a Variety magazine neologism from around 1947, according to Ben Zimmer of Language Log) is of course a combo of the first bit of biographical and the first bit of picture, and both parts get stress: BI-o-PIK.

Bob eventually realized his error, and it could have stayed safely confidential inside his brain, if only he hadn’t made the inexplicable mistake of telling a language blogger. I revealed all on Language Log immediately. (I could be a tabloid reporter, I really could. I’ve got the cruelty. I just don’t have the technical expertise in telephoto harassment and cellphone voice-mail hacking. But you can hire people from News International for that.)

Bob Ladd isn’t actually as alone as he no doubt feels. People have written to him to admit making the same mistake. One Language Log reader reported hearing bi-OP-ik from a quiz show host on British TV (no one seemed to notice).

Errors of this kind—private misanalyses of written forms that yield phonological errors if and when the word has to be spoken—need a technical name. They are not to be confused with other types of word error like folk etymologies, malapropisms, eggcorns, or mondegreens. I have learned, however, that people interested in English usage already have an established name for the words in question, which may suffice: They’re known as misles.

The term derives from the most widespread of all misles: the verb misled, which has misled many. It is formed from mis- (“in a wrong way”) and the preterite or past participle of the irregular verb lead (mislead, misleads, misleading, misled). But the spelling misled tempts a reader to think it might be the preterite or past participle form of an imagined regular verb misle, rhyming perhaps with sizal or perhaps isle: Don’t misle me, She misles me, She is misling me, I was misled.

There are more than a few misles in English. A comprehensive listing was attempted recently on the newsgroup alt.usage.english. I reproduce it below. On the right I add the most misleading hint on pronunciation I could think of. As a Chronicle reader and probably a Ph.D.—intelligence is a curse here—you might otherwise fail to see how a given word could qualify as a misle. Don’t be misled. And for heaven’s sake don’t show this list to anyone who is learning of English as a foreign language, because it will set them back by months. Even native speakers find it makes them a little queasy.

amphitheater	(creature that eats amphiths)
apply	(not lemony, more sort of … )
baketable	(able to be baketed)
barfly	(somewhat like barfle)
barroom	(varoooom!)
bassethorns	(larger than tenor thorns)
bedraggled	(bed raggled)
bedrock	(be-drock)
beribboned	(berry boned)
biopic	(try the macrobiopic diet)
boathouse	(a boa’s a snake; what’s a thouse?)
bootheels	(boo theels)
codenamed	(what you are when someone co-denams you)
codeveloper	(someone who velops code)
coworker	(if you want your cows orked)
deicer	(alternative spelling of dicer?)
fathead	(fa-thead? fath-ead?)
goatherd	(ther from Goa)
infrared	(what you are when someone infrares you)
manslaughter	(not like a woman’s laughter)
menswear	(they sure do)
menus	(roughly like a minus)
middecade	(middie cade)
miniseries	(plural of minisery)
misheard	(mi-sheard)
misled	(preterite of to misle)
molester	(a kind of subterranean hamster)
moped	(mo-ped)
mothers	(they collect moths)
porthole	(por-thole)
potash	(po-tash)
pothole	(po-thole)
redrawing	(making things red raw)
riverbed	(verbed and ri-verbed)
shelfreading	(what’s freading?)
sidereal	(side real)
sundried	(preterite tense of to sundry?)
sundry	(sundry topics, sundry tomatoes)
therapist	(the what?)
titleist	(tit leist?)
triphammer	(the tri-phammer is 3 phammers in 1!)
tutus	(and his brother Titus)
underfed	(has not yet been derfed)
undermined	(has not yet been dermined)
unionized acid	(rather than ionize, it joined the union!)
unshed	(I knew unshing was bad, but I unshed anyway)
warchest	(warc-hest)
warplane	(the lane for going at warp speed)
watershed	(at the water’s hed)

As Tom Lehrer once sang of the elements (“These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard”), there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered. (Could lacerate have something to do with rating lace? Does dishevelled have anything to do with dishes?) So be afraid, be very afraid, when reading in public from unfamiliar material without preparation. As an insurance, learn at least a smattering of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and pick up a copy of John Wells’s superb Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Then you’ll be safe.

Image credit: Flickr/ rubber bullets

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http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1467544646 Peter Christian

Nothing wrong with mo-ped as a noun. (It’s in the OED.)

But how does Carphone Warehouse manage to stay in business? How many people do you know who own a carp?

big_giant_head

Seriously, dude. And how often does a carp need to be honed, anyway?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1558697482 Carolyn Roosevelt

My family’s idiolect (if that’s the word for a language shared by half a dozen people) includes several of these, including ‘misle’ itself. A wet dog, to my father, was invariably ‘bed-raggled’.
Those I still hear wrong in my head include infrared and sundried.
And our local ‘co-operative society’ actually goes by ‘Coop’, which makes a handy shibboleth.

leah_shopkow

Indeed, my father grew up in the famous workers cooperative apartments in the Bronx, which have always been known as “The Coops.” I suspect here that this was not a misle, but a joke, as they were worker coops.
aka darrell

Misle is a word for a heavy mist or light rain. A wet dog is not too far off I should think.

Guest

I was wondering how to pronounce “misle.” Now I think I’ve got it: /mIzl/

meldenius

LOVE this piece.
panchodesastre

Maybe on a tangent, but what does codify have to do with fish?
http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Wells/648286079 John Wells

Gosh, thanks for the plug.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Terry-Kattleman/1293544518 Terry Kattleman

Basset horn is two words. This is a list of English words, not German words, ja? And anyone who would close up bake table should get his or her just desserts.
cleverclogs

Great piece! But to my ear, “Bi-OP-ik” is way more aurally pleasing than “BI-o-Pik,” which sounds like some sort of dental device.Go Bab Ladd! I say we should adopt the former pronunciation, as we have for “contemplative” (“con-TEM-pla-tive”) and “neologism” (“ne-AH-lah-gism).

gavin_moodie

But a biopic is a BIOgraphical motion PICture and its meaning is more evident if it is pronounced conventionally.

kathden

A reply to both pullum and gavin_moodie: When I use the word, I hear it as biographical epic: bi-op’-ic (since you can’t have bio-epic, the o and e fuse into a digraph o-sound).

After all, these aren’t just pictures, but they remake the life into epic format. A nice corollary is that the word can be used of other genres than film.

My folk etymology is as good as yours!

http://twitter.com/enkiv2 John Ohno

Neologism is better as Ne-O-LO-jizm — which is fairly close to the more etymologically consistent neo-log-ism. Softening the ‘g’ makes it more pleasant, and widening the second ‘o’, but there’s no reason to soften the ‘o’. After all, you can hardly expect to have to say neologism quite quickly; you can afford to enunciate.

patpolk

Now I must know, what is the “proper” pronunciation of “misle?” The pronunciation of the fictional verb indicated in this article? Or the same as the pronunciation of “misled,” but truncated? Admittedly the latter is somewhat awkward sounding.

As far as my own personal misle, for some reason my brain oscillates between reading “resign” as 1) quitting your job, or 2) the opposite, you are re-signing your employment contract. Garner’s Modern American Usage contains a list of “Re- Pairs,” words that begin with “re” that change depending on whether they are hyphenated or not, but for me “resign” is always the most problematic.

mbelvadi

I second the request for the pronunciation of “misle”! Trying to follow the pattern described in the article from biopic (intonation based on origin), I get the nearly unpronounceable “miss-LEH” (as in, misled without the d). Since you ruled out it rhyming with “isle”, my best guess is a homonym of “missle” – am I close?

big_giant_head

I’m afraid I spent a couple of decades pronouncing it “mizzle.” I stopped when a close friend could not help but laugh and laugh at me, once she realized what I was actually trying to say.
crunchycon

It isn’t likely that it would be a homonym of “missle”, but it could. It would more likely be pronounced MAI-suhl, as a vowel followed by one consonant and “le” would be a “long” vowel. Were it not English, MEES-leh might be the pronunciación.. oops, I mean pronunciation. Unless the “s” is silent, couldn’t rhyme with “isle”. (pardon the fragments)

beedhamm

The pronunciation of the fictional verb “misle” which has become the term for this error is described in the article as “rhyming perhaps with sizal or perhaps isle.”

patpolk

While I agree that is the most natural interpretation of the article, I wanted to make sure. “Misling” (is the imaginary verb transitive?) misle would be QUITE embarrassing, no?

My question was whether the “proper” pronunciation is that of the admittedly “imagined” verb (which as you point out is provided in the article), or if the pronunciation springs from the ORIGIN of the imagined verb (misled). Even if one assumes that the article is stating that it should flow naturally from the imagined verb, the two potential rhymes are not in agreement.

In conclusion, I apologize. As my technical and non-whimsical inquiry may suggest, I am a lawyer, not a linguist.

BBuddha

There is no proper pronunciation for an imaginary term. Misle means “a fine rain, like a thick fog” and nothing else.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misle

beedhamm

Nice one.

We started with the Germanic stress rules of Old English, then imported Romance languages (Latin and, more importantly in this instance, French, after the Norman Conquest) with quite different rules about word stress, and so, as with so many other aspects of English, there’s no rule that doesn’t have an attending exception.
tom_sawallis

While working on my PhD in linguistics, I heard from my wife of the problems my Michigan in-laws were having with moles in the yard, unknown in my Florida background. A couple days later, walking on campus thinking of something doubtless quite profound, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a newspaper headline I initially thought recounted a treatment for what I think wasn’t yet called erectile deficiency. I couldn’t imagine, however, why it was directed at mole exterminators. I wondered even if mole exterminator was a legitimate specialty, capable of supporting full time employment. About 10 seconds later I: 1) broke up laughing and almost fell over, 2) realized the importance of priming, & 3) understood why normal people often think linguists are nuts.

The headline: Molester Charged with Sexual Battery

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Orthogonal to the topic, a s the Geisteswissenschaftler like to say, but that reminds me of a typo I once saw, in an advertising brochure of a company that makes large machines for grinding, sieving and turning organic waste before and during composting (not your little toy compost heap in the garden: municipal-scale windrows). One of their models is called the Mashmaster. It had been spelled as Mashamster. I wanted to ask: so how many hamsters to the hour does it do?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000014837542 Addison Stumpf

Just wanted to point out, misle is a verb, meaning to rain in very fine drops.
johnbarnes

I spent a couple of years a kid noticing that many things seemed to “go orry.” That being how I mentally pronounced awry.

big_giant_head

Oh, lord, me too.

jlawler42

I don’t know how they got “bedraggled” (bed-raggled) and missed “bedridden” (be-dridden).
dank48

And then there’s the rich fund of English words pronounced (and hyphenated at the end of a line) differently depending on part-of-speech status: “pre-sent” and “pres-ent” and so on.

How about words that no one can agree on: Caribbean, Hiroshima, for instance. Once upon a time, certain people thought it was cool (or whatever) to stress the second syllable of Vietnam, [vee ET nuhm]. Yuck.

Personally, “weeknights” has always made we think of a bunch of little guys in armor.

mbelvadi

Mispronouncing Iraq as *I*-raq seems to have become a marker of a certain political position in the US. But when it comes to populated places, I’m a supporter of adopting the pronunciation favored by the people who live there (or as close to it as an English speaker can get – I’ll never get Qatar quite perfectly since I can’t do glottals).

alabaster

Actually, there aren’t any glottals in the Arabic name Qatar (there is an initial voiceless uvular stop (q), but don’t let that throw you – just pronounce it like a “k”). It’ll be fine as long as you pronounce it with stress on the first syllable (KA-tar), like the word “cutter” Just don’t say (as many do) ka-TAR.

mbelvadi

Thanks, I confuse glottal stops and uvular stops!

dank48

The thing is that, unless you can actually go there and listen, it’s hard to know. For example, “Hiroshima” would seem (to this nonspeaker) primarily stressed on the third syllable and secondarily on the first: HE-roh-SHEE-mah, but you often hear hi-ROH-shi-mah or hi-ROHSH-i-mah. I have no idea which is local pronunciation.
Again, local usage seems to trump “correctness.” San Franciscans pronounced the chocolate manufacturer’s name Jiradelli despite the h after the initial G, until it was nationally advertised with the correct Italian pronunciation; I have no idea what the locals say these days.
But when did Kabul change from kah-BOOL to cobble?

mbelvadi

Well, we happen to have lots of people who do go there and then come back and get on the national airwaves to speak of the place – they are sometimes called journalists or correspondents. It’s an embarrassment to America that our national tv news programs don’t require their overseas reporters to “correctly” pronounce the names of the places from which they report. That would be a great opportunity for those who can’t go there to learn.

Has anyone noticed if any one particular major US tv news outlet does a better job of this than others?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Marrou/100001026744729 Chris Marrou

Read a book Michener did on Afghanistan 40 years ago in which he noted the “cobble” pronunciation.

My own misle was the Greek word chaos, which as a 9 year old I thought was CHAH-os. Like the “sodder” commenter, I thought KAY-oss was another word.
johnbarnes

American English is also one of the few languages in which people try to pronounce it like the people who live there; in many others, “pronounce it like it looks” is the rule. Oddly, Americans get nervous about mispronouncing giving offense to the locals, but it tends to be other Americans who are offended; BBC broadcasts form muh-NAGG-you-ah nick-a-RAGG-you-ah don’t seem to bother Nicaraguans any more or less than American broadcasters mangling (but attempting) Spanish do. (Also the exceptions are sometimes puzzling; why are nearly all English speakers comfortable with PARE-iss not pah-rEE, and NOR-mun-dee not nohr-mahn-dee but many of the same speakers will try for a French pronunciation of Lyons, Marseilles, or Avignon?)

lilyhiker

I just heard an announcer on Decatur, Illinois TV say MAD-Regal singers.
dinw1520

I’ve laughed out loud and now have tears in my eyes! Thoroughly enjoyed!
dank48

And Penelope has nothing to do with antelope or cantaloupe. On the tape recording of the first Harry Potter book, “Hermione” rhymed with “fermion.” (Come to that, why is it FERM-ee-ahn not fer-MY-on?) Crazy damn language.

When reading aloud a certain story from _Alcoholics Anonymous_ American readers almost always say “. . . and a row ensued,” pronounced Roe not Rau, making nonsense of the passage.
thenomad

It should be noted that some of these misles are only so when American spellings are employed. In British spelling, one would write amphitheatre, which wouldn’t be as confusing. Many compound words or words with particular prefixes are still spelled with hyphens, so you would have a co-worker, a de-icer, a mini-series, and a co-op )

big_giant_head

That would help. I vote in favor.

jffoster

I vote nay. These United Colonies are, and of a Right ought to be, free and independent States, and are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and British spelling Conventions.

marcleavitt

I came across “misled” years ago when I was a newspaper editor; to this day I purposely mispronounce it when I see it in print.
But my favorite the-joke’s-on-me anecdote follows. Some while back I was sitting in a pub with friends. I happened to comment that so-and-so was the epi-tome of whatever. Dead silence fell, and then I had an epiphany. I realized that the word I had always pronounced ep-it-o-me, but never learnt to spell, was the synonym for epi-tome; I had used both interchangeably. I’ve since dropped the latter from my working spoken vocabulary.
marcleavitt

The fine rain that comes before drizzle is spelt mizzle. I first came across it in a Daphne DuMaurier novel some years ago. Haven’t looked up the etymology. Don’t know if she coined it.
http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

I have a friend who likes to write “coworker” as “cow-orker”.
cgoodson

I was one of those who was humiliated to learn (while an undergraduate) that I had been mispronouncing “misled” my entire life. What a relief to learn that this mistake is common: I never knew that–and obviously never got over the shame, either, LOL
cerebellum

When I was a child, my parents had a record (yes, I’m that old) of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” I read that as a variant of “laughter” (s laughter?). It was many years before I realized that “slaughter” and “laughter” are quite different things and don’t sound alike.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

That’s funny, only yesterday I stayed in bed most of the day, feeling a bit barfly. Towards evening I felt better and had a bit of dinner before hitting the sack again.
rmelton5

In a sixth grade when we went around the classroom reading alound from the “Weekly Reader” or some such, I pronounced “Gibraltar” as GIBB-ral-tar. This being southern Appalachia, most of my classmates had never heard of it, so it shouldn’t have been too embarassing except of course the teacher publicly corrected me. Being a professor’s kid, I felt she took some particular relish in that correction.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1442047706 Anne Madison

Speaking of Appalachia, I’ve heard tell that up north they say Appa-LAY-sha in lieu of the correct Southern pronunciation Appa-LATCH-a.

dank48

And a certain department head wrote a department-circulated paper about his summer studying Appellation folk art.
Yan Doodan

Considering “Appalachia” is a neologism created as a term of opprobrium, I would consider the Northern pronunciation to be the correct one.

I note that Wordnet idiotically defines “Appalachia” as “an impoverished coal mining area in the Appalachian Mountains (from Pennsylvania to North Carolina).” Really? How much coal do they mine in North Carolina?

kit50

For some reason I always pronounced (and not always to myself) clandestine as candle stine and revered was rev-erd. This is before I went to collage, of course.
mbelvadi

Since we’re making confessions, for a long time I thought there were two different words for using a hot iron to repair metal objects (wires, pipes, etc.). I had seen “solder” written (in my mind, “SOLD-er”) and I had heard people say “sodder” and had even come up with my own definitions to distinguish them – “solder” used some kind of extra soft metal to make the repair, whereas “sodder” was when you just melted the existing wire/pipe/whatever directly to repair the problem without adding anything. It made sense to me!
kphagen

I used to read maniacal as MAY nee ak ul.

This piece reminds me of a skit by Mike Nichols and Elaine May in which he is calling the operator for a phone number for Kaplan. Elaine (as the operator) says, “That’s K as in Knife?” and also goes on to use “P as in Pneumonia?” That has led me on a quest for more unsuitable words, such as “B as in bog” and “P as in Pterodactyl.”

dank48

In one of Leslie Charteris’s Saint stories from the 1930s, Simon is phoning the police to report a miscreant, spelling his name (Beppo) phonetically, “B as in bdellium, E as in eiderdown, P as in Psychology, P as in phthisis, O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention! . . .”

Silly old book, fondly remembered.

racheltoor

Loved, loved, loved this. In college I liked to refer to things as “vague and vapid.” It sounded so good with those two “vays” at the beginning of each word. A woman sitting next to me before a performance at the Yale Rep heard me going on like this to a friend and leaned over to correct me. I was humiliated, but grateful.
greensubmarine

The one glaring omission I see is “sabotage,” the bane of young readers everywhere.

I can also confess to making the same “biopic” error when I first encountered the word in crossword puzzles.

jiminnc

urls are a great source of this. Baseball announcer Jerry Remy has a website that looks like There My Report. Incautious creators of websites can create risque urls (so the process is risky).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=609086856 Christina Barrett

You missed “nowhere”; right now, right here. And my son’s English teacher (!!!!!) was fond of dis-heveled. Long e sound–dis-heaveled, as it were. His teacher! O_o
mjcohenw

And then there are those words that can legitimately be pronounced in more than one way. I remember a character in a fantasy story whose name was “Hellspawn”. He got very upset if someone pronounced it “Hells-pawn”.
alanbaragona

The presence of “therapist” on the list makes me think of Tobias in the American TV show ”Arrested Development,” who wanted to combine his expertise as an analyst
with his expertise as a therapist and made business cards calling himself an
“analrapist,” with the accent, of course, on the second syllable.
fizmath

I don’t think football encourages violence off the field. It may just attract those people who are more likely to be violent. It also produced people who are large, strong and fast which makes any violence more severe. Take a look at people convicted of violent acts. Are they more likely to have played football in their youth?

pianiste

This is a vicious cycle: To get a good football team, you recruit people who like physical violence. (A film on ESPN the other night, about three quarterbacks competing to be the starter, the successor to Cam Newton, showed the head coach saying, “It’s whup, or be whupped!” And he wasn’t talking about exes and ohs.) Those people have a tendency to let the violence spill over off the field. If it weren’t the case, the physics club or the cross-country team would have the same arrest rate as football players.

Socratease2′s analysis of the evidence is similar to the defense team’s fine-grained analysis of the Rodney King videotape that showed that those police officers weren’t really beating the guy.

Socratease2

Oh, they beat Rodney King, no doubt about that. I am not an advocate of violence in any way but we do live in a violent, irrational world. No sense denying it. I am not trying to be a fly in the ointment, but I see no fault in asking to clarify what is actually true versus what is assumed to be true. I think it is misleading statement to say a good football player is someone who likes “physical violence.” The connotation is that any FB player would not want to just play the game hard and aggressively but would want to injure and hurt people for fun. You see, those are the broadstroke stereotypes that I argue against. If I had to say where more behavioral issues came from, then, yes, I would think football would have a decent share in comparison to cross-country (my sport by the way, thank you) but what about in comparison to ice hockey, rugby, lacrosse or any other “violent” contact sport. If the thesis is that violence is encouraged on the field/ice and that slops over into real life, then that is a hypothesis. If the assertion is that there are certain character traits common to people who play football that cause violence then there is another avenue to explore. Or if you want to go down the class/race path intersection with FB you can attempt (at your own peril) to contstruct theories around that as well. But, whatever the theory, it has to be testable. I may have an OCD for methodological rigor but at least I keep questioning.

And..as for Tenured Radical, I said I would not respond any further but just saw her last post. And, just for the record, I may not agree with you but it is not because you are a woman and can’t understand football or the men who play it. I disagreed on points of argument, I do not think you are less capable of having a voice in this discussion and I certainly didn’t ever consider your points “girlie.” Having theoretical lenses are good but all ideological filters create blind spots so it is important to understand that. I am not saying a feminist perspective does not shed light on many aspects of our culture and politico-economy but it also can create an adversarial dynamic at times. To the people who were flat out stupid and sexist about the topic, well, they should go away. To people who argued differently, I wouldn’t be so quick to impune their motives. Ok, time for a new topic.

tenured_radical

Honestly? Let’s do a feminist analysis of the content stream here. I think a big part of the problem here is that *women* aren’t allowed to speak in a knowledgeable way about *sports* — unless they are girlie sports, but certainly not a he-man thing like football. How could a woman possibly understand something as complex and manly as football? The proof of my lack of understanding is that the post isn’t *empirical* and is full of my girlie opinions (someone else was chided for having cited a wussy little “experience” of having been beaten by football players, which makes him kind of a woman in this conversation too and easily dismissable.) It is not the kind of post astute scholars like socratease and reddevil would write for the CHE at all, if they had been asked to do. Which nobody asked them to do.

And this is also why these anonymous commenters do the power-trippy thing of calling me by my first name, even though my last name (with Professor or Dr. appended, please) would be polite and respectful.
iriselina

I once heard a BBC newsreader say ” ke-RAH-la” for the South Indian state of ” KER- ala”. Within a few seconds he had been corrected and he said the word correctly the next time he had to say it !
Bravo!
I do see the difficulties in saying Indian names and have often split my own surname in different ways to get folk there to say it right or explained how many syllables there are in it…..some never try.
http://logophilius.blogspot.com Andy Hollandbeck

I still remember the moment I realized that the printed word “Ciao” was pronounced “chow.” I was in high school, and I was suddenly very embarrassed. I had read the word in print often enough, and I had used it while speaking often enough, but it took me a long time to put the two together.
bor123

Terrific article; thanks. Of course English–like life itself–is a great mystery. That’s why I love nothing more than to curl up with a good whod-unit.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=504803007 Sylvia Hunter

I recently heard “misled” read as a misle in an otherwise excellent audiobook from a very reputable, nay, renowned, publisher thereof, and it cracked me up: truly, no one is immune!
BBuddha

Has anyone tried Yahoo! or Google? Your favorite vain charlatan is trying to inaugurate a term that doesn’t mean what he claims it means, it seems, considering that no search engine finds a single occurrence of it ever having been used that way.
Wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be the guy who coined a term like that? Immortalize your name like Sylvia Wright with Mondegreens? So this Kim Kardashian of linguistics is trying to pull a fast one on the world, it appears.
http://twitter.com/johnpdeever johnpdeever

One of my favorites is “biped.” (Rhyme it with “piped.”) In ninth grade, my very smart friend turned to me in class to whisper the question, “What the hell is ‘beipped’?” I replied, “You’re saying it wrong!”

Another very smart friend who read a lot once referred to something grotesque as “groat-ess-cue.”

As my wise grad school professor taught me, “No one is born knowing any of this.”
Socratease2

I am not impressed by anything that comes out of spending 5 minutes on a search engine and your sources are overwhelming proof that you need to be careful when saying you have sources that prove something. Personal stories are fine when they are limited to representing a person’s personal experience. As for “enabling” I don’t know what you people are talking about. Just by living in the US I guess you also enabled the war in Iraq? Is that how this works?

As for your “data,” I have seen the CBS report previously and I would like to know where the comparison benchmark is for non student-athlete males 18-22 years old. Without that data I don’t know what you think you can conclude from this. The author(s) say 7 % of the players on the top 25 college FB teams have been “charged with or cited” for a crime. Did you read carefully? Being charged with a crime does not mean you are guilty of a crime so that is a very misleading statistic. The authors themselves reveal that only around 60% of these cases may even end in a penalty/conviction. I can’t recall all the numbers but just looking at “serious crimes”, those accounted for 56/277 cases I believe and that is about 20% of total . So, if we get rid of lesser charges (DUI, petty theft, minor drug possession) now we are looking at, what, about 20 players out of 2,500 in the top 25 teams who have been either “charged with” or actually committed a “serious crime.” 20 students out of 2,500, is that horribly out of proportion with non-athletes on campus, I don’t know, you tell me. But if you can’t then you should reconsider the validity of your argument. The numbers are thrown out there but if you break it down, that is some pretty meager evidence. I bet if I take 2,500 random students on campus I will find some assualts in there as well.

As for Spies article, “Winning at all costs,” that was a 30 page law review article that had exactly one paragraph devoted to showing the “evidence” of student-athlete misconduct. The rest of the article was a legal discussion of university liability and remedies. And in that one paragraph, she throws out 3 studies with absolutely no data to support them. For one “study”, produced by the certainly unbiased National Coalition against Violent Athletes (Gee, what is their agenda?), Spies says: “Statistics show that male athletes are more likely than the average male college student to commit sexual assaults.” There you go, that’s it. And I am supposed to fawn over this research. It is even worse because the real data is based on “reported assaults,” and there is definitely a selection bias working there. Just because someone produces statistics does not mean the numbers have any real world relevance.

So, get some solid comparative studies that aren’t tilted to bias the conclusions and then let’s chat.

On a final note, you are that concerned about the “violent culture” of football? How about the violent culture of the United States. We are a national security state in a constant state of war, I think we have bigger fish to fry.
physioprof

“We are a national security state in a constant state of war, I think we have bigger fish to fry.”

B – I – N – G – O! B – I – N – G – O! B – I – N – G – O! And BINGO was his name, Oh!
tenured_radical

Do you know me? I find it quite unnerving when people who are anonymous call me by my first name. It’s far too intimate and I wish you wouldn’t unless you are willing to say who you are, Red. But as to your critique, I just think it doesn’t respond to what the post is. Blogs are not empirical: blogs argue for a position, and if you don’t like this one, don’t read it.
tenured_radical

But you can’t require that — it’s a blog, which makes it like an op-ed, not a front page story. And even if the post were “empirical”, I am sure it wouldn’t suit you and you would find fault with it, because you haven’t engaged anything I have said on its own terms. Now go away, ok?
philosophile

Really, you shouldn’t make comments like this. What Blakesmith and pianiste said was quite enough.
Socratease2

Well, sorry, I am not going away and I don’t understand why you take all this so personally. If this was the comment page of Us Magazine, no, I would not criticize people’s ideas. I know that Kim Kardashian’s short lived marriage and E! TV wedding was about love not money, so why would I question that? On the other hand, why would anyone submit an article, sorry, blog, to the CHE and expect it to be posted in a vacuum without response. Isn’t that a tad unrealistic? And is that preferable? I don’t understand how you expect people to not comment about something that they have knowledge about or are passionate about. I am sure you know audiences who will be more than happy to support your ideas so I guess you should publish for the choir. If you want to select an audience of unknown origin, I think you had better expect a variety of feedback. A lot of people on this site are PHD researchers and faculty (not that it makes them special or above anything) and they will respond accordingly. So, I hope you can take your own advice and simply not read things that you think will upset you or challenge your beliefs. You keep responding to me as well, but I will promise not to respond to anything else you write and will donate a sum of money to the NCAA Scholarship fund in your organization’s name. That is the best I can do to make things right.
tenured_radical

Christ on a cracker. I forgot. Tomorrow’s post will be on competitive knitting.