The plausibility effect; or, if it sounds true, it must be true

Ben Goldacre, in his excellent Bad Science column in the Guardian, recently examined what he calls the plausibility effect: the tendency for people to believe statements based on the perceived credibility of the person making them, unconnected to any evident truth value. If this is true in various branches of science and medicine, it is just as true when it comes to people’s reactions to words – and, in particular, to opinions on the origins of words and their correct usage.

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Scottish dictionaries need money

Scottish lexicographers may be the most hard-to-sell charitable cause in the world, but here goes.

Scottish Language Dictionaries, a registered charity based at Edinburgh University, has had its funding cut by the Scottish Arts Council. This is very bad news for contemporary and historical Scots lexicography. SLD is responsible for producing the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, a historical dictionary of Scots up to 1700, and the Scottish National Dictionary, which covers the period from 1700 to the present. It also produces a range of more concise dictionaries. Its website, http://www.dsl.ac.uk, receives between 15,000 and 23,000 hits per day. For anyone who believes that Scots is worth studying, SLD’s output is the best resource, doing for Scots what the OED does for English. It’s also regularly consulted by lexicographers of English (there being no absolute boundary between English and Scots) and by historical linguists and literary historians (and historians generally). If it goes, a lot of people (and an entire country) lose a first-class linguistic resource.

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We do love dummy verbs. We are loving them right now.

Walking through London Bridge tube station the other morning, I heard the following pre-recorded announcement, or something like it:

Ladies and gentlemen, we do apologize for the reduced gate entry to the Northern Line.

I’ve heard similar announcements on the tube. Am I right in thinking that the emphatic do-insertion is fairly new? I don’t recall having heard it before quite recently. Of course, the pre-recorded messages may vary from station to station.

Before this heads too far into trainspotter territory, it’s worth pausing to think about the effect of that dummy verb. As well as being emphatic, it renders the rather dry ‘we apologize for the reduced gate entry’ into something perhaps slightly less formal, as well as more heartfelt. Compare ‘I apologize’ with ‘I do apologize’ when someone’s in your seat on a train. (You could research this, but you’d spend a lot on tickets.) This may be because going round the houses a bit with one’s language is a way of seeming unguarded, and of taking the edge off what could otherwise seem very pointed. Oddly, in English, it seems the emphatic insertion can have two levels of intensity. ‘I do apologize’ can be an politeness that suggests you really mean it if it comes after ‘Excuse me, you’re in my seat’, and something much more heartfelt if it comes after ‘The problem with you is you never apologize!’ (Here, though, the emphasis is a result of using a repetition of the main verb from the previous statement in contradicting of its assertion.)

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Another slice of dictionary, Mr Shakespeare?

Book history tells us that books are the results of processes, and that what we might think of as the ‘final form’ of a book might, in fact, not be.

Consider this post, for example. The activity of writing it is, of course, a process: its producer (that’s me, though it’s unfashionable to say so) writes text, a process which takes time. He can also delete and rewrite text. Nor is the time taken necessarily continuous: the producer can go pause for lunch, go to work, go on holiday. He can even go back, in the case of a blog post, and change things after he’s saved it. It’s even possible that he might get bored, abandon the work (as Coleridge supposedly did when interrupted during the writing of Kubla Khan), even die, and be replaced as producer by someone else who adds more material, and gives more time to the work. (This is what happened, very notably, in the case of the medieval French poem the Roman de la Rose. It’s what didn’t happen to Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood: it is unfinished.) I’m not dead, for the record – but you’ve only got my word that I’m the same person who began writing this post. Writing is a process; it takes time. We tend to think of the ‘final form’ as the last possible snapshot in a series, the point after which the text does not change.

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