That apparently is no longer true in WordPress 3.3.1. The wp-admin.css file has no editorcontainer text anywhere in the document, and I changed a few Consolas,Monaco,monospace fonts to something a human would like to type with, to no effect. (No effect that I have noticed yet.)

So I simply did what I should have done from the beginning: used Firebug to determine what CSS selector was specified for this text box/entry field and what CSS document it was located in. It was wp-includes/css/editor-buttons.css, and the CSS selector was wp-editor-area. Therefore, to correct this stupid lapse on WordPress’s end, you can either download the WordPress .zip file to a temporary place like your Desktop, unzip it there, and find wp-includes/css/editor-buttons.css, or connect to your home directory with an FTP program like Filezilla to download the editor-buttons.css file that WordPress automatically placed on your server. Open editor-buttons.css with a text editor or more advanced programming software, and search for:

wp-editor-area

Immediately or shortly after that text should be:

{font-family:Consolas,Monaco,monospace; …

I recommend just deleting those three fonts and adding normal fonts in their place, like so:

{font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; …
[or, you know, whatever other good fonts you want]

Don’t delete the semicolon!

Finally, use an FTP program to upload the new file to your home directory/wp-includes/css/, overwriting the old file.

It turns out that using the Visual editor option to edit posts (and pages, I’m sure), as opposed to the HTML option, uses a normal font like Verdana or something, but I hate the visual editor. I always feel like I know exactly what I’m getting with the HTML editor and can control everything better with it.

So if you’re annoyed like I am at the puzzling decision to change the font of the text in the edit post/edit page text boxes in the wp-admin interface, you have Martin Brinkmann to thank for finding the offending code and pointing us in the right direction.

Earlier I remarked that Geoffrey Pullum, Ph.D., professional linguist, ardent descriptivist, and language blagger extraordinaire surely didn’t really think this but wrote it in Language Log posts for rhetorical effect: that languages want to change and love ambiguity and show no interest in avoiding polysemy or ambiguity. Perhaps he really does, without the purpose of irony, cuteness, rhetorical effect, or simple convenience/time-saving in informal blag posts, anthropomorphose languages to such a great extent. We’ve all heard about real-life and fictional animal researchers becoming attached to their research subjects the way they would a pet or loved one, artistic creators feeling more love and devotion to their creations than to real people, entrepreneurs exhibiting more devotion to their businesses than their families, car or boat lovers thinking of their cars or boats almost as people, etc. I guess some linguists can become so immersed in and attached to the subject of their life’s work that they ascribe to it human qualities that it doesn’t deserve.

Geoffrey Pullum has repeatedly, over and over and over again, written that languages love ambiguous meanings and show no interest in avoiding ambiguity or polysemy. No, of course they don’t, because they are abstract things, basically concepts, that are incapable of thought or emotion. People, on the other hand, very obviously are interested in avoiding ambiguity. At least, some of us are. I doubt very many people, even those dreaded prescriptivists whom Dr. Pullum basically makes into a caricature of intolerant, unthinking, dogmatic unreasonableness, which in itself makes me wary of intellectually associating myself too closely with descriptivists of his type, care too much about the polysemy that is so typical of short, one-syllable words that we’ve inherited from ages past. But I find myself sympathetic to prescriptivists, if that’s what it makes them (me), who object to a rarer word with an established meaning acquiring a new one that it doesn’t need and doesn’t help anyone communicate.

The point of those posts by Dr. Pullum was to point out that polysemy does not mean ambiguity and thereby prove that prescriptivists are wrong in wanting words to maintain constant meanings, or even in believing that they can.

I would say the archetypal ongoing definition shift that divides descriptivists from prescriptivists is the adjective “disinterested”. It means impartial or not having a stake in either side. In contrast, “uninterested” means bored or not engaged. I don’t know if it’s descriptivist, prescriptivist, or neither to note that “impartial” is basically a synonym of “disinterested”, so do we really need the latter at all?, and that it is kind of stupid to have two negation-of-”interested” words mean different things. Then again, the word “interest” means different things, so I have no problem with “disinterested” and “uninterested” meaning different things. The sentences, “I’m not interested in that,” and, “I don’t have an interest in that,” can have distinct meanings from each other—the first would mean “uninterested”, and the second would typically (or at least occasionally) mean “disinterested”. Ah, but “interested” isn’t the same word as “interest”; maybe that influenced the meanings of the sentences more than just the polysemy did. How about, “I have no interest in that,” vs., “I don’t have an interest in that”? Phrased and juxtaposed thusly, more ambiguity certainly seems to creep in. Normally, when we use “interest” to mean stake in a matter, we use “matter” or other contextual clues to clarify our meaning (“I don’t have an interest in that matter”).

The “interest” examples provide yet more support for my point that in contrast to languages, people are quite obviously interested in avoiding ambiguity and avoiding problems caused by polysemy. For example, if we wanted to write a sentence with a structure like one of those in the previous paragraph but were worried about the ambiguity of the word “interest” (meaning fascination/attraction/intrigue vs. stake/bias/potential benefit or loss), we would use a different word. This is because we are interested in avoiding ambiguity and the problems that polysemy causes. The languages we’ve inherited and were able to evolve on our own have plenty of polysemy, occasional ambiguity, and also plenty of ways to avoid both, so we can further influence our language through usage to enable as much precision, clarity, and anti-ambiguity as possible.

One way to achieve this in the “interest(ed)” examples is to choose a different (coincidentally, also polysemic) word that could, despite its polysemy, have only one meaning in the sentence at hand: “I have no stake in the matter,” or, “I don’t have a stake in the matter.” Or, you know, something completely different but still constructed in the same way: the colloquial, “I don’t have a horse in that race.” Another way to achieve clarity in a short sentence like that is to use a word with a specific meaning for this purpose, “disinterested”. We wouldn’t be compelled by Language to choose the word it wants us to use and has devised for this specific purpose; we ourselves would choose a different word, possibly the polysemic “stake”, which people themselves have come to use for certain meanings because of the benefit of doing so, not caring whether it were polysemic or what it meant in other, irrelevant contexts.

On this point I both agree and disagree with Dr. Pullum: polysemy doesn’t (necessarily) cause ambiguity, certainly not enough to paralyze our use of language, but at the same time, we are not slaves to a disconnected, extra-societal, self-evolving Language that dictates what words mean and how they must be used. We have words with multiple meanings or one meaning because of how our ancestors used them, and we can continue to influence our usage of our language by conscious choice to achieve or at least maintain as much precision and clarity as is reasonable. What is reasonable can be debated extensively but also largely agreed upon, by either the linguistics community specifically or by society at large, and can include the maintenance of a word’s definition when it seems beneficial to do so and, especially, when it is obviously not necessary and not helpful for its meaning to change.

Language shows no interest in having “disinterested” and “uninterested” mean the same thing or different things or doing anything else. People, on the other hand—at least some people—seem to have an interest in keeping both “disinterested” and “uninterested” at one meaning each. Descriptivists are quick to remind us that “disinterested” used to mean what “uninterested” means today. This either occurred because the abstract concept of Language wanted and willed its meaning to change, or it happened because people came up with two different, non-overlapping meanings for these two words, which became standard and popular because it was helpful. Maybe it was the latter, and maybe people can choose, by way of usage, to keep it that way. Maybe it’s worth considering that people who use “disinterested” incorrectly are only doing so out of ignorance of its definition or a simple lapse of prefix distinction, not because Language wants oh-so-badly for it be polysemic, and that we could actually influence usage in a good way by simply reminding people of its definition while sparing ourselves half of the effort we expend arguing over whether this polysemic shift is a good, bad, or completely neutral thing.

Language Log commenter Jeff Rembetikoff said,

I don’t think the more reasonable breeds of prescriptivists object to each and every word with multiple meanings. Instead, they object to a rarer word losing a distinction between it and a more common word due to perceived sloppiness. Their frequent objections to certain uses of, for example, collide and comprise seemed reasonable enough to have influenced my own usage.

I agree. I don’t want words to have a certain, static meaning per se; rather, I want their meanings and distinctions to be clear and precise, and I want people separated by time and space to mean the same thing when they write, say, hear, and read the same words. Ardent descriptivists, in contrast, seem to consider any change a good and desirable thing per se because it’s what language does and is therefore by definition good. They spend hours and hours and millions of words defending their complete lack of a position, which seems to border on pointless, to me, except in such cases as people’s communication or understanding is impaired by undue prescriptivism or other strictness. I don’t really care about the polysemic words that we have, despite their meanings being broad and ambiguous, because the phrases and sentences they are used in are clear, unambiguous, and easily distinguishable from their other uses.

Going back to Dr. Pullum’s examples of completely unambiguous, unconfusing polysemy, I was particularly interested in his example “see”. Here are the definitions he lists for “see”, which exclude the original vision-related one:
1. understanding: I see what you’re saying.
2. judging: I see honesty as the fundamental prerequisite.
3. experiencing: Our business saw some hard times last year.
4. finding out: I’ll see whether he’s available.
5. dating: I heard that she’s seeing someone.
6. consulting: You need to see a doctor.
7. visiting: I’d be go and see my aunt for a while.
8. ensuring: I’ll see that this is done immediately.
9. escorting: Let me see you to your car.
10. sending away: I’ll come to the airport and see you off.

The thing that struck me about all of these uses is that in my world of scientific writing and editing, and possibly in the primary literature of most academic fields, every single one of these uses of the word “see” would be inappropriate. We would never use “see” to convey any one of these meanings (maaaayyyybe “see a physician”). Using “see” to mean any of those things in a biological or medical paper would be imprecise and inexact because we have better words with more specific, specialized meanings that would more precisely convey the meaning of the sentence. In everyday speech, such pomposity wouldn’t be necessary, but in higher-level writing, it’s often beneficial and even necessary, my objections to bombasticness in general notwithstanding. In the case of “see” as used with any of the meanings listed above, I would consider a replacement necessary, for clarity and precision. The reason “see” would be inappropriate in primary literature is not because Language wants and compels us to write differently for different situations, nor would it be (only) because scientists and scientific editors are bad writers who conflate “more syllables” with “better writing”. We would use more specific words because we want to and we see the benefits of doing so.

I see the benefit of keeping many words’ meanings distinct and constant, the best example of which is “disinterested” vs. “uninterested”. Many more I don’t care about. I think it’s reasonable to agree with me on any or all of them (if I ever compile a list, I’ll let you know), and it doesn’t make me ignorant, intolerant, pompous, unrealistic, or prescriptivist to advocate lexicographical constancy for some words when there are clear reasons to do so and unclear benefits of change.

My desire is not to avoid polysemy or change per se, but rather to promote things that make sense and discourage things that don’t. All of those different uses of “set”, “draft/draught”, “charge”, and “put down” make sense and don’t cause ambiguity, so there is no problem with them. Advocating the use of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested” probably doesn’t cause much lack of clarity, either, but it’s stupid, so I oppose it. It’s stupid because it already means something else and there is already a word that means “uninterested”. It’s not a short, simple, common word with lots of everyday uses, especially uses that are distinguished in prepositional and adverbial clauses. It’s a long, uncommon adjective whose meaning it makes more sense to preserve, so I advocate its preservation and constancy. This position is simple, beneficial, common-sensical, and very nearly unobjectionable, as far as I can tell.

This is a really simple concept, but I’m not surprised I didn’t think about it before. When an application on your computer (say, Microsoft Word or Mozilla Firefox) loads text of a certain font, it has a certain folder(s) on the hard drive where it goes to look for fonts and then displays each bit of text in the correct font. Instead of limiting the browser to fonts stored on the same hard drive as itself, or at least the same computer (with multiple drives) as itself, why not tell the browser to fetch the font from a location on a hard drive on a different computer, connected to it via the internet? That’s exactly how web fonts work!

I first realized this when I came across Typekit, a web font service that several blags I’ve encountered use. I’m a little too obsessed with typefaces, so naturally I was curious about what those blags’ fonts were called and where they came from and how it was possible that they displayed as normal text in my browser, not as a static image or snapshot or anything. I eventually decided to click on the little Typekit logo in the bottom-right of the screen of one of those blags, which says “Fonts from” and then the logo.

So I signed this domain up for a free account (which gives you two fonts at a time, which can be switched out any number of times, and I only needed one font) and started trying a few different serif fonts that would serve me better than my all-time favorite font of Times/Times New Roman had. These will always both be my favorite font because they’re just so…classical, functional, straightforward, unassuming, readable without being bland, elegant without being flashy.

The only problem is that it wasn’t as readable as I’d like on my laptop. I love how the text of my posts looked on my 19” desktop monitor (on Ubuntu Linux), but in every single browser I tried on my Windows 7 laptop (a 13” Toshiba), the text was just too small for the Times New Roman font. It isn’t just a matter of size, because many smaller sans-serif fonts on most web pages are the same size as this text was; the font doesn’t scale down well or something, because it is just hard to read at that size. Too much serif or too small spaces between letters or something. Part of the problem could be my beige parchment background, which looks very pale on my desktop monitor but quite red-tinged on my laptop. I’ve spent probably upwards of an hour among several different occasions trying to get my laptop’s display closer to my desktop’s, but it seems impossible. I think I would need hardware buttons like the RGB balance and gamma, but they don’t seem to exist on this laptop.

When I work in Microsoft Word for my editing job, 90% of the papers are, thankfully, written in Times New Roman, most of those in 12-point size. When I zoom Word in to 120%, the text looks perfect in every way; my ideal font. In contrast, in Microsoft OneNote, which I use to jot things down and take notes while editing, Times New Roman 12-point font has the same problem as above (suggesting the website readability problem was not due mainly to the parchment background). The dilemma was that if I made it any larger, it would be way too large on my desktop monitor. I don’t know how they would look on visitors’ displays, but if my two computers were any guide, Times New Roman wasn’t achieving a happy medium between readability on a laptop and aesthetics on a desktop monitor. It just isn’t a web font.

The same was unfortunately true with a font I quickly became enamored of from Typekit, Adobe Garamond Pro. When I applied that font to my blag at 16px, it looked wonderful on my desktop, elegantly simple, with a little extra flare or style that Times doesn’t have. However, it was probably even less readable on my laptop. Increasing the size was an option, but not a great one.

The free account at Typekit.com doesn’t give you access to all of their fonts, so I didn’t have many Times- or Garamond Pro–like options, and most available serif fonts again looked too small on my laptop or too big and awkward on my desktop. Liberation Serif initially seemed a good option, but on my laptop it looked even too narrow and almost like the letters were too close together. I want a serif font for my main entry content because it seems a little more professional and academic, more classically stylish and not newfangled-computer-stylish, which matches the brown/red/beige/earthy theme of my website better. Serif fonts also display em dashes and en dashes better than some sans-serif fonts, such as two of my favorites, Lucida Grande (which displays en dashes and hyphens identically) and Trebuchet MS. Looking around at other websites recently, I suppose I could go with Georgia at around 14px, but I have disliked Georgia on other websites before, probably at 16px, so I’ve acquired a little bias against it. It seems to be basically a web font while Times is a word processing font.

To make a long story short, I found the Google Web Fonts service and am now using that with Sebastian Kosch’s Crimson Text as the text you are reading. I have no idea how long I’ll keep it as that.

I have discovered three large advantages of Google Web Fonts over Typekit. 1) There are thousands more fonts available for free, many of which are the same as those available with the free Typekit account (PT Serif, Droid Serif, and Prociono, just to name a few). The free Typekit account has plenty of good ones, hence its popularity, but not all of the open-source ones. 2) Some of the Google web fonts seem to look better, at least on my laptop, than the same font from Typekit does. I am not sure if it’s possible that Google Web Fonts’ version of PT Serif looks better, but something has convinced me it does. Sebastian Kosch has apparently uploaded two different versions of Crimson: Crimson to Typekit and Crimson Text to Google Web Fonts. I am completely sure that these two look different on my two computers, in favor of the latter. 3) Google Web Fonts’ API is much easier and is open-source, so you don’t need an account, username, download, special access, or anything other than minimal CSS knowledge to apply a certain font to a certain type of text on your web page. All you do is add the link rel tag to the appropriate place in a CSS document, with the name of the font at the end of it, and the font will display properly on your web page. I was successful on my first try. You don’t need any WordPress (or other blagging platform) plugin, you don’t have to download, activate, or sign up for anything, and you don’t technically even have to visit the web fonts gallery; if you know the syntax of the CSS tag and the name of the font, you can type it in yourself. You just need access to the right CSS document(s).

In case you’re wondering, some of the other fonts I was attracted to and might cycle through again later were Lusitana, Cambo, PT Serif, Gentium Basic, Ovo, and Poly. The main reason I probably won’t use Lusitana, Ovo, and Poly is because they are a little too squat—too short and wide and not tall and narrow enough. I use those terms relatively, of course, because I hate really narrow fonts like Arial Narrow and other compressed/condensed fonts. I like the fonts that are very slightly on the taller and narrower side. They just seem more elegant and stylized to me. Another one I’m interested in if I can figure out the API or CSS is Century Catalogue. It is listed at webfonts.info as being available for @font-face embedding, but I’m missing some knowledge about how to link to or embed this font. Maybe just link to the .sfd source file?… Its author says it is still a work in progress, so maybe it’s not embeddable yet?…

I recently had to return a movie that I received two copies of for Christmas, and I chose to return the one that had come from Barnes & Noble because I knew their movies (and CD’s) are all over-priced and that I could get a more valuable store credit from there than wherever the other copy came from. Also I wasn’t planning on exchanging one over-priced movie for another; rather, I was going to buy two or three books with the store credit.

My frustration with Barnes & Noble (and, when you think about it, all brick-and-mortar bookstores) reached a peak when I couldn’t find a single one of the first 12 books I looked for. Going on memory and the Amazon wish list on my phone’s Amazon app, I walked back and forth and all around the fiction & literature section looking for all of these titles, none of which was carried by this particular Barnes & Noble:

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip
Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg
The History of Danish Dreams by Peter Høeg
Bridge of Birds: A Novel of Ancient China That Never Was by Barry Hughart
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (I looked under both Bi- and Ca-)
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Alternate Realities by C.J. Cherryh
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Blindsight by Peter Watts

(I looked only in the English-language fiction & literature section because I only care about translations of the foreign-language novels, which is obviously why I listed their English titles.)

Every single one of those books has over a dozen to hundreds of reviews at Amazon.com, and I only ever heard about them because they were recommended by others over the internet as fascinating, memorable, unique, must-read, or even life-changing books. In other words, these aren’t just run-of-the-mill novels that I might kind of like to read someday.

They also didn’t carry Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage in the reference section, although they did carry other usage guides (Chicago and MLA, for example), so up the total number of absent books in a row to 14.

I did eventually find five that I was looking for. Three I didn’t buy: The Brothers K by David James Duncan for $3 or $4 more than Amazon sells it for, Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny for a hell of a lot more than the $5 Amazon is currently selling it for, and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge for either $3 or $5 more than Amazon is selling it for. I don’t mind Barnes & Noble charging a little more for a book than Amazon, but for a standard mass-market paperback, I think more than a $3 difference is quite high. The two I ended up buying were The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon and Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

In all fairness to Barnes & Noble, if I had really gone into the store with a pre-planned list of books to look for in the order that I wanted them, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union would almost certainly have been number 1, perhaps behind only The Invention of Morel, which Octavio Paz has described as “without exaggeration…a perfect novel”, an extolment many others agree with. It seems to me that any respectable bookstore would carry the English version of this novel.

I probably would only have ended up with two novels in the end anyway, so I’m glad I found the two that I did. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was in the main literature section, although I’ve heard it described as science fiction, so both of these science-fiction novels should be very interesting to read in the near future.

If I start with $100 and end up with $250, did that money grow 2 1/2 times?

A reporter and I are having a good-natured disagreement: He says yes, and I say no.

There is simply no way to construe and contort the English language in such a way that “grow 2 1/2 times” can mean “grow 1 1/2 times”. They are written and pronounced differently because they mean different things.

When anything in the real world grows, one dimension or another increases, gets added to, becomes larger, acquires a greater value. When a physical thing grows by a certain concrete amount, that concrete amount gets added to the original size. That’s what the word “grows” means. When a child grows one inch taller, an inch has been added to his previous height to reach the new height. The concept of growth or addition is simple. In the above example, “grow 1 1/2 times” is not the same as “multiply 1 1/2 times”. To become 2 1/2 times larger is not to grow by 2 1/2 times. Grow means increase or add to; it does not mean multiply by. At least, it shouldn’t. Saying “grows by” instead of just “grows” can make it clearer, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

When anything in the abstract world of math and numbers grows, the concepts do not change. In the above example, $250 is 2 1/2 times $100, but $250 is 1 1/2 times more than $100. When we say “grew by x times”, the original number appears twice in the calculation: once as the starting value that gets added to, and once in the multiplication to determine how much gets added to the original number. The word “times” and the factor written before it (or the word “percent” and the number written before it) represent real, actual quantities—numbers that could be written in a different way with no factors, percentages, fractions, ratios, or other relationships involved. In our example, the “times” part represents 1.5 times 100 = 150. Therefore, “grew (by) 1 1/2 times” here means “grew (by) $150”, not “multiplied by 1.5”. If the calculation in question were only multiplication, then we would say $250 is 2.5 times 100, but the calculation does not involve only multiplication. It involves multiplication and then the addition of that product onto the original value.

A simple equation can explain this nicely.

Let x = 100
Solve for y

x + 1.5x = y
100 + (1.5)(100) = y
250 = y

In a different version of this equation:

Let x = 100
Solve for y

x + 2.5x = y
100 + (2.5)(100) = y
350 = y

Addition means “grows”. The + sign means “grows”. Because the times operation is invoked, you have to do multiplication to determine how much gets added, and then you have to add that product to the starting value. If a value, quantity, or measurement grows by 1.5 times, the final value is 2.5 times the original. Not 2.5 times greater, just 2.5 times the original value. It is 1.5 times greater than the original value.

If you respond, “Oh, well, yeah, if you put it that way, it works out in your favor, but that’s not what I meant,” then you are not speaking English and you suck at math. You are speaking your own version of a language that sounds mostly like English and using a misinterpretation of simple arithmetic that would preclude the existence of the universe as we know it.

You might counter, “Well, if you had $100 and end up with $200, would you say your money grew 1 time?” No, I would say it grew 100%. Or grew by 100%. Or increased (by) 100%. In the original example, $250 is 250% of $100 but is 150% greater than $100. In other words, $100 would have to grow by 150% to reach $250 but would have to multiply by (or be multiplied by) 250% to reach $250.

Now, the word “fold”. As far as the word “fold” goes, I thought its meaning seemed clear to me, but its meaning as used seems different, and I would typically avoid using it if I were writing a scientific paper and not just editing others’ papers. In my job as a scientific editor, I think every time I’ve ever seen the word “fold”, it has meant “entailing multiplication by a factor of [the number that comes before it]”. In other words, a 2.5-fold increase always is used to mean “multiplied by 2.5 times”. Therefore, people would say both that $250 is 2.5-fold greater than $100 and that $250 is 2.5-fold $100. That makes no sense to me. Well, no, it does make some kind of sense, but it is inconsistent sense. Well, no, it’s consistent mathematically, because regardless of the construction of the sentence, you just always multiply the original by the fold factor, but it is inconsistent semantically.

Folds are also frustrating when referring to decreases, but I’ve come to accept formerly non-sensical fold decreases and not care anymore. For example, in the real, physical world, nothing can decrease more than 100%. If some quantity decreases 100%, none of it is left, and there is no such thing as negative matter or energy, so it is non-sensical and meaningless to say something decreased by more than 100%. If something decreases by half, 50% of it is left. If something decreases by two-thirds, one-third of it is left.

Well, if you took “fold” to mean “percent of” or “fraction of”, then the most anything could ever decrease would be 1-fold. If something decreased 0.5-fold, that would be decreasing 50%. Etc. That, however, is not how any biomedical research scientist has ever used “fold” that I’ve seen. They say something “decreased 7-fold”, meaning the final value was 1/7th of the original. If something decreased 150-fold, the final value was 1/150th of the original. That’s stupid, but I guess everyone’s consistent, so now “fold” means “involving a factor or ratio of the original value”.

Bill Walsh has experienced similar frustration with “fold”:

My friendly adversary pointed me to a dictionary that defines the verb triple as meaning “to increase three times in size or amount.” And there is the -fold model. A twofold increase is doubling, a threefold increase is tripling, and so on. To which I respond: None of the dictionaries on my shelves are that sloppy, and those shelves also hold an otherwise wonderful usage book in which the author is tripped up by -fold, insisting that tripling would be a twofold increase. (It’s a special case, -fold, because “a onefold increase” is not only never used but also impossible. You can fold something in two or three or more, but you can’t fold it in one.)
[I would love to know what wonderful usage book that is. —JTP]

His friendly adversary’s dictionary would, unfortunately, agree with most biomedical scientists on the use of -fold: they use a twofold increase to mean multiplying by a factor of 2 (doubling), even though multiplying by and increasing (growing) by ought to mean different things. I suppose you could argue that increasing (growing) by can mean adding to or multiplying by according to the whims of the author and following no consistent or pre-defined rule, but that is illogical to me and goes against the meanings of the words “increase” and “grow” as I understand them, especially when the word “by” is added after them. (This is a perfect example of why I am largely prescriptivist: so that meanings can stay as consistent as possible and people separated by time and space (and mathematical ability) will mean the same thing when they use the same words. I will stop being prescriptivist when I gain the ability to understand how people can not care that the same words mean substantially, crucially different things from different people.)

Anyway, with our earlier lesson on percent decreases under our belts, let’s conclude by returning briefly to the concept of growing a certain number of times or by a certain percent, except let’s consider the opposite of growing: shrinking or decreasing.

If Bill Walsh’s interlocutor were right and $250 were 2 1/2 times more than $100, then by extension $150 would have to be 1 1/2 times more than $100, and $100 would also have to be 1 time more than $100. If that weren’t incoherent enough, going in the money-losing direction, $75 would have to be 3/4 less than $100, i.e., the quantity of money would have decreased or shrunk (the opposite of increased or grew) by 3/4 times or by .75 times or by 75%. If you started with $100 and ended up with $30, your money would have shrunk by .3 times or by 30%. These calculations are non-sensical and, again, are not based in any actual language that has any logical consistency or any math that would permit the existence of the universe as we know it. (Incidentally, I can’t use $50 for this example because shrinking by 1/2 or .5 times or 50% is correct.)

If “shrink” is not the perfect opposite of “grow”, “less than” not the opposite of “more than”, and “decrease” not the opposite of “increase”, then, well, I don’t know anything and it’s pointless to write or talk about anything.

I tried to post a comment reporting my observation of another pair of vowel shifts that have annoyed me much more than those have, but his blag only allows posts from Google Blagger users, which I am not. (What kind of foolish isolationism is that? How many insightful comments and loyal frequent visitors has that practice precluded over the years at the blags that employ it? I’ve only ever seen it at Blagspot blags, but I know the owner has to choose to enable that restriction, so I can’t place the blame entirely on Google.)

Instead, I’ll post it to my own blag and reap the sweet, sweet internet karma it’ll bring me: The annoying vowel shift I’ve noticed that is unique to young-ish American females is pronouncing “thank you” as “think yo”. I guess the “yo” is actually more of a Minnesota/Midwestern type of “yoh”, but it’s not like it’s ever stressed or enunciated so strongly that it makes you think of Marge Gunderson. Maybe it’s just halfway between “you” and “yo”, and maybe the first word is more of a “thenk” than a “think”, but whatever it is with each individual girl, it’s annoying.

I haven’t noticed any prevalence of vowel shifts among American males, although a little bit of the valley accent certainly can be heard in some college guys’ (especially frat guys’) speech, as in “mahn” for “man”, “cuhl” for “cool”, etc. Sort of a surfer accent by guys who are trying too hard to sound casual and indifferent (or who have tried to sound casual and indifferent for so long that they no longer can tell any difference).

Maybe some nit-picky female linguists are equally as annoyed at males’ dropping of entire consonant sounds, as in “’anks” for “thanks”?

The first and most important thing to remark on about our trip was the nearly ideal whether. On the way down, it was drizzling and extremely foggy in Michigan and Ohio, but that’s a hell of a lot better than snow or ice and didn’t impede our travel in any way. Between Atlanta and Tampa both ways was dry and warm. The final leg of our trip, from Atlanta to Ann Arbor, was completely dry and not the least bit dangerous. We were very lucky in this regard, I think. That was Dec. 31, and on New Year’s Day it rained a little and created ice on the ground (which I felt as I was bringing groceries in from the car), and on Jan. 2 it snowed an inch or two. We missed dangerous or at least slow-driving weather by a day, or two at most.

The most important observation I can make or thing I learned from the trip is that Ohio totally sucks. I already knew that from having lived near it for 6 years and having driven through it on our summer road trip to Atlanta and New Orleans, but, man, what a shitty state. On our way down south, we saw either four or five (let’s call it four to give them the benefit of the doubt) speed traps along I-75, compared to a total of zero in Kentucky and Tennessee. There was one that we saw in Georgia. There was nothing close to a speed trap on I-75 in Florida going north or south, as everybody there drives 85–90 mph and I was being passed going 85 in the middle lane. That was the only positive point that has ever made Florida a slightly less odious state to me, not that I’ve changed my tune from never wanting to live there. On the way back north, I’m not sure if there was any speed trap in Georgia, but there were a total of zero in Tennessee and Kentucky, compared to six—yes, six—in Ohio alone. Combine this with the lower speed limit of 65 throughout the state, and you get an entire state-wide heap of shittiness and pettiness. Luckily, we have not been pulled over on any of our road trips, but I saw two people get pulled over behind us after we passed the cops, one in Georgia and one in Ohio.

The absurdity of Ohio’s 65-mph speed limit and its numerous speed traps also emphasizes the fact that speed limits on interstates generally do nothing to increase safety. If they did, then German autobahns would have the highest death rate in the world, but instead they have a remarkably low death rate. Michigan and Ohio routinely have similar traffic fatality rates on interstates; for instance, in 2006, Michigan’s interstate highway death rate was lower than Ohio’s. When we crossed the border into Michigan that night, I didn’t feel the least bit more endangered when we increased our speed from about 68 to about 78. This is because it wasn’t more dangerous. I’ve never felt safer going the other direction, either. I could understand a city, county, and state wanting to increase its police presence on the roads on New Year’s Eve, but at midnight and after, when people are actually drunk and are actually driving home, not at 9:00 when people are going to the places of imbibement. My god, six speed traps on a 3-hour stretch of interstate? I know Jersey Shore has really increased in prominence throughout American culture in the last few years, but you don’t have to try quite so hard to edge out New Jersey for the Shittiest State in the Union award, guys.

On the way down south in the rain and fog, we noticed one additional advantage to those cool-white LED headlights in addition to their looking cooler: they stand out in precipitation far more than traditional headlights do. A lot of them are annoying and probably even unsafe because of how bright they are in your rear-view mirror, and I hope automakers fix that in the near future, but their superiority in fog and rain and their cool, futuristic, science-fictiony look make me really, really want them in my next car. Obviously there are many different kinds of LED headlights, and I want a kind that is not overly bright and not very blue. I like the cool-white look, which is very pure white with probably a hint of blueness in them, but the ones that look blue are just retarded.

On our way home on I-75 north in Florida, we saw a Georgia fan with four Georgia Bulldogs window flags driving down south, presumably to go to the Outback Bowl.

Also on I-75 north just north of Tampa, we saw a billboard for Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland…which is in Michigan. No, there’s not another branch in Florida; the billboard said “Frankenmuth, Michigan”. No, it wasn’t just an advertisement for their website for all those retirees to order piles of tacky Christmas decorations, although the website was listed on there. Just a normal billboard for a store that is over 1,000 miles away. Weird!

Finally, I recently found this new blag You are a bad driver and I hate you, which I will read regularly and eagerly. Dean, sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar.

Quarterback 1 is superior in every single meaningful category, including wins, so obviously I’m writing about this because Quarterback 2 was selected to the NFC Pro Bowl team and Quarterback 1 wasn’t. Who are they? Quarterback 1 is Matthew Stafford, and Quarterback 2 is Eli Manning.

What a bunch of bullshit. The Pro Bowl rosters are currently voted on by players, coaches, and fans, so it’s probably the idiot New York fans who voted Eli Manning in. As shown nearly every year by the baseball All-Star voting at some position or another, fans are idiots and shouldn’t be allowed to vote on anything because they make it a popularity contest instead of an accomplishment contest.

In the ESPN broadcast of the Fiesta Bowl on January 2, 2012, in which Oklahoma State beat Stanford in overtime, Sean McDonough expressed exactly those sentiments:

Some critics of this format don’t like the fact that you’re in field goal range, really, when it starts.

Amen to that. That’ll probably get fixed as soon as the inherent bias and traditional-power favoritism of rankings and bowl selections are eliminated…