she was cuffed to the truth

Posted by Mark Liberman

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Following up on the issue of English spelling variation, this picture has been making the rounds on social media:

I thought of it when I was reminded that the New Jersey borough of Buena is pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/ — so that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of beauty.

It's not clear how this (mis-)pronunciation got started — according to the Wikipedia article,

Buena was incorporated as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on September 1, 1948, from portions of Buena Vista Township. The borough was reincorporated on May 18, 1949. The borough derives its name from Buena Vista Township, which in turn was named for the 1847 Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican–American War.

The "Buena" part of Buena Vista Township is also pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/, according to Wikipedia.

The other English words in which "ue" is pronounced /juː/ — at least the ones that I can think of — are all Germanic proper names, like "Bueller" and "Mueller". Maybe there are some non-proper-name borrowings as well? But anyhow, I'm not clear why mid-19th-century South Jersey folks (or their descendants) applied Germanic-borrowing pronunciation to an obviously Spanish word.

[Update — commenters remind me of a bunch of obvious non-proper-name parallels: Cue, rescue, fuel, imbue, …]

Elle Cordova chose the "i before e except after c" thing as the thematic "rule" in her 5/2/2025 Grammarian vs. Errorist skit, presumably because it's so well known. The raw statistics line up a bit oddly against the aphorism, and not only on bookstore sidewalk signs: the counts of relevant wordforms in (for example) CMUdict are;

ie  4324
ei  2238
cie  177
cei   41

There are no comparable couplets to help us with "ue" and "eu", although CMUdict has 1368 wordforms containing 'ue" and 630 containing 'eu', and there's plenty of variation in the letter-to-sound mapping…

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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In Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, the chapter titled "Chomsky contra Darwin, Four Episodes" ends with this provocative sentence:

The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy.

What Dennett meant by "Artificial Intelligence" in 1995 was no doubt rather different from what people take the word to mean now. Still, the intended meaning of his aphorism remains intact and relevant.

You need to start with his distinction between "skyhooks" and "cranes", described here by Wikipedia. And then read about how he learned that Noam Chomsky rejected Darwinism as  form of epistemelogical empiricism, i.e. a "crane" that learns in the genome rather than the neurome:

In March 1978, I hosted a remarkable debate at Tufts, staged, appropriately, by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Nominally a panel discussion on the foundations and prospects of Artificial Intelligence, it turned into a tag-team rhetorical wrestling match between four heavyweight ideologues: Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor attacking AI, and Roger Schank and Terry Winograd defending it. Schank was working at the time on programs for natural language comprehension, and the critics focused on his scheme for representing (in a computer) the higgledy-piggledy collection of trivia we all know and somehow rely on when deciphering ordinary speech acts, allusive and truncated as they are. Chomsky and Fodor heaped scorn on this enterprise, but the grounds of their attack gradually shifted in the course of the match, for Schank is no slouch in the bully-baiting department, and he staunchly defended his research project. Their attack began as a straightforward, “first-principles” condemnation of conceptual error—Schank was on one fool’s errand or another—but it ended with a striking concession from Chomsky: it just might turn out, as Schank thought, that the human capacity to comprehend conversation (and, more generally, to think) was to be explained in terms of the interaction of hundreds or thousands of jerry-built gizmos, but that would be a shame, for then psychology would prove in the end not to be “interesting.” There were only two interesting possibilities, in Chomsky’s mind: psychology could turn out to be “like physics” — its regularities explainable as the consequences of a few deep, elegant, inexorable laws — or psychology could turn out to be utterly lacking in laws—in which case the only way to study or expound psychology would be the novelist’s way (and he much preferred Jane Austen to Roger Schank, if that were the enterprise).

A vigorous debate ensued among the panelists and audience, capped by an observation from Chomsky’s colleague at MIT Marvin Minsky: “I think only a humanities professor at MIT could be so oblivious to the third ‘interesting’ possibility: psychology could turn out to be like engineering.” Minsky had put his finger on it. There is something about the prospect of an engineering approach to the mind that is deeply repugnant to a certain sort of humanist, and it has little or nothing to do with a distaste for materialism or science. Chomsky was himself a scientist, and presumably a materialist (his “Cartesian” linguistics did not go that far!), but he would have no truck with engineering. It was somehow beneath the dignity of the mind to be a gadget or a collection of gadgets. Better the mind should turn out to be an impenetrable mystery, an inner sanctum for chaos, than that it should turn out to be the sort of entity that might yield its secrets to an engineering analysis!

Though I was struck at the time by Minsky’s observation about Chomsky, the message didn’t sink in. […]

That's the crux of the "evil twins" idea: maybe the mind is a collection of gadgets, evolved by learning in the genome, the neurome, and culturome, and suitable for analysis by engineering techniques.

After touching on John Searle, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Herbert Spencer, McCullough and Pitts,  B.F. Skinner, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and others, Dennett zeroes in on Searle, ending the chapter with the "evil twins" sentence:

According to Searle, only artifacts made by genuine, conscious human artificers have real functions. Airplane wings are really for flying, but eagles’ wings are not. If one biologist says they are adaptations for flying and another says they are merely display racks for decorative feathers, there is no sense in which one biologist is closer to the truth. If, on the other hand, we ask the aeronautical engineers whether the airplane wings they designed are for keeping the plane aloft or for displaying the insignia of the airline, they can tell us a brute fact. So Searle ends up denying William Paley’s premise: according to Searle, nature does not consist of an unimaginable variety of functioning devices, exhibiting design. Only human artifacts have that honor, and only because (as Locke “showed” us) it takes a Mind to make something with a function!

Searle insists that human minds have “Original” Intentionality, a property unattainable in principle by any R-and-D process of building better and better algorithms. This is a pure expression of the belief in skyhooks: minds are original and inexplicable sources of design, not results of design. He defends this position more vividly than other philosophers, but he is not alone. The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy, as we shall see in the next chapter.

If you're interested, you should read the whole chapter, and indeed the whole book.

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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Elizabeth Ribbens, "How the use of a word in the Guardian has gotten some readers upset", The Guardian 6/4/2025:

‘Got’ was changed during the editing of an opinion piece, leading to correspondence lamenting a slide into American English. But language isn’t a fortress.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

FWIW, the cited opinion piece has now been edited to use got rather than gotten:

Geoff Pullum's comment:

David Crystal is quoted on the point that Am uses both forms, but he doesn't explain the contrast between them, because that would involve him in a tricky little area of semantics relating to the difference between actions (He has gotten away with it) and states (He has got a lot of nerve).

Or a minimal pair like

• Kim has gotten Parkinsonism.
• Kim has got Parkinsonism.

Of course the socio-morpho-semantics of got(ten) is more complicated than that — most of the issues are covered in the got, gotten entry in Merriam-Webster 's Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I'll leave it to the commenters to excavate further.

But in terms of socio-geographical evolution, Google Books Ngrams suggests that the British anti-gotten faction are losing — here's the plot for "British English", showing that has gotten started rising around 1980 and has now topped 14%:

The plot for "American English" shows has gotten has been rising since 1865 or ao, and is now above 46%:

Again, there are aspectual and other semantic choices as well as morphological preferences, but it's clearly true that there's a geographical issue, and a secular change in favor of the American (and Shakespearean) choice. (Although Google Books' geographical assignment of publications is far from perfect…)

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Posted by Victor Mair

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A brief collection of "Chinese words for Adults!", with the last one being "KPI", which I had to look up in English.

A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.

(Wiktionary)

Pronounced à l'anglaise, not according to the pinyin values of the letters.

BTW, Wiktionary has a neat example sentence here:

Les Allemands ont tendance à prononcer les anglicismes à l’anglaise.

Germans tend to pronounce English loanwords in the English way.

The Chinese equivalent of KPI is jīxiào 績效 ("performance").  She probably learned KPI on the job.

Another interesting item, though not an acronym, is the one right before KPI, viz., tuōfà 脱发 ("hair loss; trichomadesis"), the pinyin for which has the same letters as that for tóufǎ 头发 ("hair"), though in a slightly different order tóufà and with a change of tone.

When you're speaking Sinitic languages, you often have to mind your Ps and Qs.

Selected readings

• "Acronymomania" (8/28/14)
• "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19) — a dozen, with references for the study of the alphabet in Chinese
• "PUA" (8/30/24) — with interesting bibliography
• "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19) — popular initialisms used in Mandarin; with generous bibliography for "creeping Romanization" and digraphia

Good news!  Mark Hansell is in the midst of updating his classic paper on the incorporation of the alphabet into the Chinese writing system:  Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)

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