Grammar

This week MedCity News shared an article about patient engagement that posits, "Patients today aren’t truly engaged with health technology or even with their own health." The article, written by Laura Wagner and originally appearing in VentureBeat, is a commentary based on a session from HealthBeat 2013, a VentureBeat presented conference. VentureBeat "covers disruptive technology and explains why it matters in our lives," which well explains the session's title: “Consumer Health Apps: Human Centered Design." However, if the panel's conclusion was that patients are not engaged with health IT or their own health, then the human centered design part of consumer health apps is clearly failing—because the apps are not designed to meet consumer needs. No one needs an app. In order to even want an app, a patient—engaged or otherwise—must first have a device. Far too many advocates on the health IT bandwagon assert that smartphones are ubiquitous. According to Pew Internet statistics, 85 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone. Of that 85 percent, 53 percent have a smartphone. Of the 53 percent who have a smartphone, 52 percent have used that smartphone to collect health information, Pew Internet reports. The additional questions to ask are—of that half of a half, how many are using an app and how many remain patients of Dr. Google? One report from Adeven, a mobile analytics firm, provides some insight—nearly 400,000 apps sit in the iOS App Store classified as "zombies," generating few downloads and little to no revenue for their producers. The beauty of the internet's search function is the power of suggestion. One doesn't need to know exactly what one is looking for in order to embark on a search. With each return of results comes an addition of knowledge that enables one to further refine one's search and/or run off down an entirely different rabbit hole of information. Apps limit this kind of unfettered exploration. Their specificity of operation—the very thing that makes them a marketable app—is exactly what keeps them from being the go-to tool for inquiring minds. To want to use an app is to want to do a specific thing. To engage patients in this form of health IT we must not ask how we get patients to use an app, but how we get patients to want to do the certain thing in question. Whether we want patients to keep track of their blood pressure, count calories, log blood glucose readings, or learn about cellular reproduction, we must first find their source of motivation. Games and rewards only go so far in triggering prolonged motivation—but show me the game that rewards me not with new flowers for my virtual garden or a special frog to breed and instead with reduced insurance premiums and I'll make it part of my daily routine. What patients want is to define their own goals and outcomes. To be "healthy" is couched in institutional ideology of standards and measurements; yet a patient who couldn't care less about his BMI and blood pressure may care enormously about living long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle or celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. To engage a patient in his own health one must find what matters to that individual patient. To engage a patient in health IT is thus a secondary matter, and engaging patients in mobile health IT a tertiary one. The benefit of utilizing health IT to achieve the patient's self-defined goals and outcomes must be clearly defined with a detailed measure of cause and effect. Should the aforementioned patient who wishes to walk his daughter down the aisle receive a doctor's recommendation to lose 10 percent of his body weight, the benefits of doing so must be illustrated in relation to his goal. According to a recent New York Times article, a recent national study found that "patients who lost a mere 7 percent of their total body weight reduced their risk for diabetes by 58 percent." For the patient to gain his own definition of meaningful use

Instead of focusing on the names the writer for Yahoo! Movies got wrong (like Taissa Farmiga and Sofia Coppola) or the arbitrary word that got capitalized, let’s focus on the words that are correct: That was easy. Filed under: Capitalizing, Misspellings Tagged: bad spelling, capitalization, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, Sofia Coppola, Taissa Farmiga, Yahoo! Movies

I’m pleased to announce that, for the fifth consecutive year, this blog has been honored with a nomination in the Lexiophiles Top Language Blogs competition, “Language Professional” division.   Support a professional! Click the badge to cast your vote for Fritinancy!   Make that two nominations. I’ve also been nominated for Top Language Twitter Account: Click the badge to vote for my Twitter account! What’s in it for you? Just the deep (and cheap) satisfaction of supporting a blog and Twitter account dedicated to the profound, puzzling, quirky, mysterious, enlightening world of names, brands, and the language of commerce. Remember: I receive zero compensation for publishing all this content (or “kohn-tent,” as a Russian friend used to say). So your votes are, to me, the equivalent of winning the Powerball or being fully funded on Kickstarter or getting acqui-hired by Yahoo. Or like discovering a treasure chest full of Bitcoin. Vote once (in each category) and vote at once: the contest ends at midnight June 9, German time. Like Bartles & Jaymes in the famous ads from the 1980s, I thank you for your support.   P.S. Congratulations to fellow nominees and blog/Twitter friends Grammar Girl, Literal-Minded, Lingua Greca, Word Routes, Johnson, Back of the Cereal Box, and Sentence First.

SUBJECT-VERB PROBLEMS Find, identify and correct the error in the following piece. “Officials said as much as 125,000 pounds of plastic was on scene, keeping the inferno fuelled despite the best effort of dozens of firefighters.” Chris Thompson and Trevor Wilhelm, “One firefighter injured as black smoke covers city”, The Windsor Star, Wednesday, May, 22, 2013. SO TRUE! Identify the author of the following observation. “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” TODAY’S WORD The word for today is “aberrant”. What part of speech is “aberrant”? What other parts of speech can be made from “aberrant”? Which syllable should be stressed in “aberrant“? Define “aberrant” and use it in a sentence that demonstrates its meaning.

Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning. Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.Give it a try!

What do you do when you’re unsure of the use of the hyphen? Should you hyphenate two words or leave them open? Just do what the editors at the Yahoo! front page do: You’re sure to be right — once. Filed under: Hyphens, Punctuation Tagged: consistency, editing, hyphen, inconsistency, proofreading, Punctuation, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse, naturally”), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”? A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events. And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.” Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours). The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run. John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words are derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.” In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward. Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series. It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding. This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English. To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” or treatment. It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.” The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED. In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”). By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, the OED says.  And that’s how we generally use it today. Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823): “She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.” This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ” We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries. It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722). In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course. Check out our books about the English language

Josh, a postdoc at Harvard, has initiated an online game called VerbCorner in order to crowd source the study of the meaning of verbs. How often do you and I, the little people, get a chance to contribute to Harvard quality linguistic research? Well, apparently quite a lot these days. Research is for the masses! Here's Josh's explanation Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning. Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.Being a verb meaning kinda guy myself, I'm very interested to see how this all plays out (literally and figuratively). My [defunct] dissertation was on verb semantics and Talmy's force dynamics. I'm really curious to see if Josh has included any Force Dynamics into this game.Now, go play!

The phrase Netflix adultery popped out at me when I read this Maureen O’Connor column in New York magazine. Netflix adultery is when you secretly watch a show that you had promised to watch with your partner. A quick Googling shows that O’Connor didn’t coin the term, but it is quite recent. There are numerous hits from various sites, all within the last two weeks. I immediately thought of the construction _____ porn, as in food porn or war porn, and wondered if there were other similar _____ adultery terms. Sure enough, Urban Dictionary has movie adultery going back to 2004. Urban Dictionary also records soapdultery from 2008, although that is slightly different in that entails watching a different soap opera. Is Netflix adultery going to catch on? (As a term, that is; as a phenomenon it’s inevitable.) Or is it just a flash in the pan, a flurry of articles about a topic the media is temporarily interested in? [Discuss this post]

In the comments to "Shanghainese", a lively discussion on the relationship between the Wu branch of Sinitic languages and early Mandarin has ensued.  Quoting South Coblin, ===== This reminds me … of something Jerry Norman was wont to say, i.e., that there were three good criteria for identifying Mandarin and deciding how old the family is. These are the concurrent presence of the third person pronoun t?, the negative bù, and the subordinative particle de/di. Jerry called languages of this type “Tabudish”, and he sometimes used this name for them in correspondence with me. ===== South was referring to the late specialist on Manchu and the Min branch of Sinitic who studied at Berkeley under Y. R. Chao and taught at the University of Washington from 1972-1998. Other commenters on the Shanghainese post, especially Tsu-Lin Mei, gave additional, precise criteria for distinguishing Mandarin from Wu, which led them to conclude that the roots of Mandarin go back before the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to the Six Dynasties period (220/222-589).  I should note that both Tsu-Lin and South were close associates of Jerry Norman, and the three of them together have made remarkable contributions to the understanding of the early rise of Mandarin. As for how much further the beginnings of Mandarin per se might be pushed, I wouldn't care to venture, but I have little doubt that the split between Literary / Classical and Vernacular Sinitic goes back to B.C. times.  Although three millennia of literary redaction have left precious little evidence of the vernacular before the Tang period when Buddhism began to legitimize its written form (see Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 [August, 1994], 707-751), we do find occasional bits and pieces of the vernacular that have managed to slip through the grasp of the literary editors of the textual tradition.  Even more exciting is the discovery of archeologically recovered texts which help to document the existence of the vernacular during the B.C. era. One of the clearest indications of Vernacular Sinitic is the use of shì ? as the copulative rather than as the demonstrative pronoun as in Literary / Classical.  Rare examples of this usage have been showing up in recently unearthed texts.  About six or seven years ago, Jeff Rice wrote a brilliant paper in which he showed how shì ? evolved from being used for the Literary / Classical demonstrative into the copulative verb in Vernacular.  At the same time, he documented the shift from the Classical form X Y y? ? to Vernacular X shì ? Y for equational sentences ("X is Y").  Unfortunately, although from time to time I've nudged Jeff to publish that paper, it's still moldering is some drawer.  Maybe now that he's finished his dissertation on medieval historiography, perhaps I'll be able to persuade him to publish the paper on shì ? and y? ? before another six or seven years pass.