English – Page 14 – Zipf's Law

On reviewing: The summary

It takes a while to learn to review a paper. Here’s one approach, starting with…how to start your review.

You’d think that when people in my line of work–research–sit around the hotel bar at a conference swapping war stories, we’d mostly be complaining about the crappy state of research funding, pesky deans, and flying economy class–and we do. But, what we complain to each other about the most is how much reviewing we have to do. Peer review–the evaluation of articles by your fellow academics for suitability for publication–is a big part of being an academic. One of the things that makes science an exciting thing to be doing right now is that it’s booming–the amount of productivity in the world of research right now is enormous. (Booming explained in the English notes below.) In my field alone–biomedical language processing–the number of conferences has grown enormously since I got started in the field, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The thing is: lots of research activity means lots of papers being produced, and lots of papers being produced means lots of papers to review. Lots of papers. Most academic conferences in any field take place either during the summer or in early January–the easiest times to travel without having to miss the classes that you’re usually teaching. Consequently, there are a couple of periods during the year when you get slammed with a lot of reviewing requests all at once. This is on top of the constant flow of journal articles, which can get submitted at any time, plus grant reviews, which come in thrice-a-year waves themselves. It can get pretty overwhelming.

Reviewing is a big responsibility–a reviewer’s comments and recommendations about acceptance affect the progress of science, and the progress of people’s careers, too. That makes it an opportunity to make a real contribution to your community. There are some good things about the fact that you’re being asked to do it. If you’re getting invited to review, it’s a sign that your peers hold your expertise in high enough esteem that they think it’s OK to entrust you with a job that is of some importance. Reviewing is also part of how you stay on top of what’s hot and exciting in your field. If you can keep that it mind as you stare at a pile of papers on a beautiful Sunday afternoon when you’d rather be sitting on the back porch with a beer and a trashy novel, it certainly helps.

e0a47bc09472f957ea2813b2acad1512 — Picture source: phdcomics.com, https://goo.gl/2oGXfI

There are a lot of approaches to writing a review. I don’t claim to have the perfect one, and the specifics of how I structure a review have certainly changed over the years. However, there are a few such structures that clearly make sense, and that you can apply secure in the knowledge that they won’t leave the authors angry and frustrated or the editors that have to pass those reviews along to the authors feeling embarrassed, or worse. Here’s one structure to think about. It starts with an overview of the paper that you’re reviewing.

All quotes are from reviews of my own papers. I was either the first author or the “senior author” (in my field, that means the person who directed the research, typically coming up with the idea and then supervising the design of the experiments and the writing of the article) of the work.

16198_10155276140165640_8482032632772318289_n — The amount of stuff available on the Internet about the pain of poorly-done reviews is not a bad indicator of … Picture source: https://goo.gl/VaUtks

A little overview of the paper at the beginning of your paper serves a couple purposes. One is to reassure the author that you read the paper with attention. This may sound obvious, but unfortunately, it’s not that uncommon to get a review back and wonder whether the reviewer really read it. A research paper typically represents around a year’s work, and it’s Here’s a beautiful example of a summary of the paper at the beginning of a review:

This work presents a novel study of inter-annotator agreement when labelling semantic relations in compound nouns. The authors asked two annotators to annotate such relations in a subset of 101 Gene Ontology concepts according to two commonly used relation sets, namely the Generative Lexicon and the Rosario and Hearst sets, respectively with five and 38 relations. Cohen’s Kappa factor and F1-score are reported for both tasks, with a maximum of k = 0.774 and F1 = 0.90 in a relaxed evaluation of the Rosario and Hearst relation set.

What’s so nice about it? Everything. It summarizes:

What the paper is about (This work presents a novel study of inter-annotator agreement when labelling semantic relations in compound nouns),
…what was done, and with what data (The authors asked two annotators to annotate such relations in a subset of 101 Gene Ontology concepts according to two commonly used relation sets, namely the Generative Lexicon and the Rosario and Hearst sets, respectively with five and 38 relations),
…and what the authors found (Cohen’s Kappa factor and F1-score are reported for both tasks, with a maximum of k = 0.774 and F1 = 0.90 in a relaxed evaluation of the Rosario and Hearst relation set).

Here’s another one that was really nicely done. The reviewer covered pretty much the same things:

The manuscript studied the ability of humans to label the semantic relations between the elements of noun compounds. Two annotators, one with a BS and the other one as a cardiovascular technologist did the annotations. The sample annotation terms were defined based on the GO. The test relations are the Generative Lexicon relations and the Rosario and Hearst relations. The F-measure and the Cohen’s Kappa value are used to measure the inter-annotator agreements. The results showed fairly high agreement even with very minimal guidelines and no real-training.

…which is to say:

what the paper is about (The manuscript studied the ability of humans to label the semantic relations between the elements of noun compounds),
…what was done, and with what data (Two annotators, one with a BS and the other one as a cardiovascular technologist did the annotations. The sample annotation terms were defined based on the GO. The test relations are the Generative Lexicon relations and the Rosario and Hearst relations. The F-measure and the Cohen’s Kappa value are used to measure the inter-annotator agreements),
…and what the authors found (The results showed fairly high agreement even with very minimal guidelines and no real-training).

This paper investigates on the assumption that inter-annotator agreement (IAA) can be used as an upper bound for NLP systems performance. The authors make a review of the literature to extract papers that support this assumptions and papers that instead have found opposite results, concluding that there are several works where NLP systems have demonstrated to outperform inter-annotator agreement. The authors also correlate IAA with the performance of the systems as reported on the papers, finding that in general there is a positive correlation among the two.

This very nice summary doesn’t talk about what was done, or to what data, but it goes much more than the preceding ones into what the authors found, and the reviewer’s assessment of whether or not, and why, that matters.

The manuscript titled “Translational morphosyntax: Distribution of negation in clinical records and biomedical journal articles” discusses differences in the use of negation between journal articles and clinical notes. Clinical notes are found to be much more explicit in their use of negation than journal articles, while journal articles use morphological negation significantly more often than clinical notes. The results have significant impact on mining clinical notes and combining information in clinical notes with background information found in literature.

This one takes the approach of the first summaries that we read–what the paper is about, what was done and with what data, and what was found:

The authors present a study on the distribution of negation (explicit at the syntactic/lexical level and morphological at the sub-word level) in two document types (clinical text and scientific journal articles). They investigate whether there are significant differences in the distribution of these two levels of negation between the two types of texts. Distributions are calculated from clinical progress notes from the MIMIC II corpus and the CRAFT corpus. The main findings are that explicit negations are more prevalent in clinical text, while morphological negation is more prevalent in scientific text.

Now, I must say: the preceding introductions are exceptionally well done. The following is more typical for an introduction to a review–if it has one at all:

The authors compare incidence of two types of negations. They use notes on the status of patients in the Intensive Care Unit and compare these with scientific journal articles on mouse genomics.

Here’s the thing: the one that you just read is enough to make it clear that you read the article and bothered to figure out what it’s about. Sounds pretty goddamn basic–but, unfortunately, it’s not. Not having a summary at the beginning of a review that you’re writing really isn’t a problem if you write a well-justified review–but, if you do a shoddy job that leaves the authors wondering whether or not you read the paper with the appropriate level of care, it’s going to piss them off; if they complain to the editor, it’s going to piss off the editor, too, as well as embarrassing them for not having caught your crappy work; and you should feel guilty. Putting a summary of the paper at the beginning of your review doesn’t just reassure the authors–it’s a good way for you to verify to yourself that you actually do have a good grasp of what’s going on in the paper. One final note on this: if the paper is so badly written that you can’t actually tell what’s going on in it, it’s totally appropriate to say so, explicitly, and this is the point in the review where you should say it–in the introduction to your review. Summarize what you can, and be explicit about what parts of the paper weren’t intelligible enough to summarize.

Since I started this piece with a description of complaining, I’ll close with an attempt at attitudinal adjustment. Ashley ML Brown on her blog:

Reviewing the work of your peers should be pleasurable. Don’t laugh. I am serious. It should be a chance to see what others in your field are doing, a chance to read cutting edge research, and a chance to share your expertise (what good is knowledge if you don’t use it?)

English notes

booming: this word has at least two senses (meanings). In the blog post, it shows up with Merriam-Webster‘s sense number 2: growing or expanding very quickly. Here’s how I used it: . One of the things that makes science an exciting thing to be doing right now is that it’s booming–the amount of productivity in the world of research right now is enormous.

There’s another common sense of this word, which Merriam-Webster gives as making a loud deep sound. Their example his booming voice is totally natural.

French notes

l’évaluation par les pairs: peer review.

On destiny

Of paper towels and 16th-century philosophers.

Want to know what it means? You’ll have to read the rest of the post.

One of the things that makes French so fun to speak for anglophones is that many of the words that we’ve taken from French belong to a high register in English, but are everyday words in French. Case in point: the verb destiner. In English, this is a high-register word that you probably wouldn’t use very often, meaning something like predetermined. (Register is a technical term in linguistics that refers to something like the level of formality of usage. In English, we basically have normal words, formal or academic words, and slang. In francophone culture, it’s much more complicated–but, that’s a subject for another time.) Here are the frequencies of destined (the only form that I know of for the word) and a few other words for comparison:

destined: 1.25 per million words
dog: 69 per million words
jump: 30 per million words

(This data is from the written section of the Open American National Corpus, a collection of 11 million words of written American English created by my colleague Nancy Ide at Vassar. You can download it free here, if you’d like to see what a linguistic corpus looks like.) Here are some pretty typical examples of how it’s used:

What more natural than that the White perception of a bird destined to become a plaything of the western world–as evidenced by another of its names, the lovebird – – should become paramount.
The French press gave prominence to President Jacques Chirac’s efforts to get the Russians to bring Milosevic back [to] the negotiating table, and an editorial in Monday’s Libération suggested this should be done by greatly reducing the area of Kosovo destined to become autonomous under the Rambouillet proposals.
The iris was more differentiated as evidenced by the fact that some of the cells destined to form the stroma had started to synthesize pigment and were, therefore, distinguishable from those of the future TM.

In contrast, in French the verb destiner means something like intended for or designed to be used as, and as far as I can tell, it’s a pretty everyday word. Here are the frequencies of the French equivalents of the same English words that we looked at above:

destiner: 76 per million words (versus 1.25 per million words for the English word destined)
chien: 79 per million words (versus 69 per million words for the English word dog)
sauter: 43 per million words (30 per million words)

1.25 versus 76–that’s a pretty big difference. It’s far more common in French, reflecting the fact that it’s a high-register word in English, but not in French. (I got these frequencies from the Frantext corpus, a collection of 18th-20th-century French literature, which I picked because like the written section of the Open American National Corpus, it’s written language, and at 15.6 million words, it was the closest in size to it that I could find. I searched both the Frantext corpus and the Open American National Corpus through the Sketch Engine web site, purveyor of fine linguistic data in many languages, and the tools for searching it.)

So: with destined being a high-register word in English, the sign that you see at the top of this post sounds pretty damn funny. I ran into it in a bathroom the other day; it translates something like the toilets are routinely stuffed up by paper towels. Please toss them in the trashcan that’s intended for them. Americans are often attracted to the French language by way of Molière, or Rousseau, or Voltaire–but, ultimately, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.

The title of this post is meant to be reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist who is considered to be the father of all magazine writers. Many of his essays have titles like On experience, On idleness (he was a fan), Of the arms of the Parthians, and the like.

Global warming: At least I’m messing up a better class of verbs

Pride comes before a fall, and sometimes the fall is worse than others.

Most mornings, I sit with my first cup of coffee and a stack of index cards and look up all of the words that I ran into the day before and didn’t know. My 15 minutes or so of vocabulary every morning is a given–I typically learn about 10 new words a day, which means that despite having grammar that makes my French tutor shudder and an accent like fingernails on a blackboard, I know three ways to say “unremittingly.”

Everything else–conjugation, grammar, pronunciation–I rotate between. Which is to say: I try to make sure that every week I spend a day on some new verb form, a new tense I don’t know, the order of double pronominal preverbal objects (my current bugaboo–il me le rend? Il le me rend? FUCK), or something of that ilk. Hence, I know lots of obscure things to say–but, I don’t necessarily know how to say them, if that makes any sense.

The other morning my plane landed in Paris after a long weekend in the US. (A work thing, and then I surprised my father for his birthday. We made fried matzah with schmaltz, which is to say: rendered chicken fat.) On your first day in Europe, the challenge is to stay awake–fall asleep when you get off the plane and you’ll find yourself in a cycle of décalage horaire-induced sleep cycle disturbance that you won’t work your way out of for a week. Sundays and Wednesdays it’s easy–there’s a market under the Metro tracks down the block, and getting out in the fresh air and sunshine is a good way to keep yourself moving and conscious.

On market days, I actually start not at the market, but at the fromagerie at the Dupleix metro station. (Right outside the station was the spot where you were most likely to get taken to face the firing squad, at least as recently as 1871, the last date of which I’m sure.) Although as an American, I had no clue about this ’til I got here, it turns out that cheeses have seasons; the first thing that I do when I get to Laurent Dubois is check the ardoise in the window to see what’s just come in.

This week: 3 “rare” cheeses. Bleu du Nil, an obscure tomme, and something even more obscure that had already sold out. Now, you’ll hear numbers about how many cheeses France has, but in truth, no one really knows how many cheeses France has. Like the apocryphal Eskimo words for snow (that’s bullshit, by the way), some say 200, some say 300, some say 350… In truth, there’s no way to know, because it’s not clear how to define “a cheese.” In the limiting case, since every farmwife who still makes her own cheese is making a cheese unlike any other, the cheeses of France are essentially uncountable. (That’s not to say that there’s an infinite number–uncountable and infinite are different things. I remember well being baffled by the idea of being countably infinite versus uncountably infinite as a graduate student. As my wife of the moment said to me: Kevin, if you can’t wrap your head around this, you just can’t take any more math classes. I thought that that was adorable, since I haven’t taken a math course since the obligatory algebra and trig course in college, and in fact am completely innumerate.)

But, back to the fromagerie. My copy of Marie-Anne Cantin’s Guide de l’amateur de fromages (“”Cheese-lover’s guide”) lists somewhere around 200 or so French cheeses, but it doesn’t list any of the cheeses that had come in this week, so I asked the adorable pixie-cut saleslady to tell me about them. It developed that the name of one of them comes from the valley where the cows from whose milk it is made graze. Except…she didn’t use the word graze, and I didn’t catch the word that she did use. No problem–I recently learnt the verb to graze. “Where they paissent?” …I asked, using the verb paître–a favorite of mine, because I love circumflex accents. Seulement voilà, the only thing is: I’d never had the opportunity to use this delightful lexical item before, and I screwed it up. I should have said paissent–but, my mind wandered off into the delights of that circumflex, and instead I said paîtent. Which sounds like pètent… Which means that I had just asked the nice lady if she were referring to where the cows fart. Damn it. Pride before a fall, and all that. She had the good grace not to laugh. At least, I think she didn’t–I was too embarrassed to look at anything but the floor.

In the English notes, we talk about the little-known English subjunctive. The French notes are, of course, devoted to the verb paître. The bleu du Nil comes from exactly one farm, in Brittany–see the picture above. It’s delicious–as creamy as butter, with little bits of fenugreek.

English notes

Anglophones complain constantly about the French subjunctive. Even French teachers get into it, commiserating with us about its chiant existence and teaching us ways to avoid it. In reality, this most charming of the conjugations of the French language is not one that is completely foreign to us. Although it’s not widespread, my dialect still has a subjunctive. It’s easiest to say in the case of the verb to be. Here’s how it showed up in this post:

I had just asked the nice lady if she were referring to where the cows fart.

The subjunctive here is were. You would expect was:

I had just asked the nice lady if she was referring to where the cows fart.

…and indeed, (a) you most certainly could say that, and (b) I would guess that most Americans would say that. (I hate to guess, but I don’t have any statistics on this–sorry.) You can find some exercises on the use of the subjunctive in English here, if you’d like to pursue this. Be aware that there are some differences between American and British English in the use of the subjunctive–the Wikipedia page on the English subjunctive goes into them at some length.

French notes

Paître is the kind of delightfully irregular verb that I just adore. Along with repaître, native speakers don’t seem to agree on whether either, both, or neither of them can be used for humans, or just for cows and the like; whether either, both, or neither of them can be transitive only, intransitive only, or both; or in which tenses the i gets its little chapeau chinois. (From what I can tell, the Academy’s decision on this has not always been gracefully accepted.) My Bescherelle maintains that (a) it doesn’t have any of the compound tenses, and (b) le participe passé pu, invariable, n’est utilisé qu’en termes de fauconnerie…. and if you can find a verb that’s cooler than that, I will buy you a beer–and if you’re a woman, I’ll marry you.

Three ways to say unremittingly:

sans trêve
sans répit
sans cesse

Dulce et decorum est

Engine room, Liberty Ship John W Brown 2012_284_4718-1024x677 — Engine room of the Liberty Ship John W. Brown. Picture source: https://goo.gl/aT2YhF

I spent my last few years in the Navy working in cardiac catheterization labs, doing physiological monitoring–mostly hemodynamics and electrophysiology. I started out on a ship, though–working in the engine room of a guided missile cruiser. It was hot down there–the coolest that it got was under one of the giant air vents, where it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).

The good side of being on a naval vessel is visiting cool ports of call, seeing the sun and the moon both in the sky at sunrise after a midnight watch, eating roasted squid in Spain–stuff like that. The bad side is the Navy’s equivalent of combat training. At the time, that involved a few weeks in the Caribbean, doing “casualty drills” over, and over, and over again, until you could get them right over, and over, and over again.

When a ship is on the receiving end of a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, you put on gas masks, and you shut its openings down completely while some guys put on serious protective gear, go up on the decks, and scrub down every inch of the vessel. This takes a long time–my ship, the USS Biddle, was 547 feet (167 meters) long.

So, there you are down in the engine room. The alarm for an NBC attack (nuclear/chemical/biological) is sounded. You put on your gas mask and you shut off all of the ventilation–in a space where it was already 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the cool places. Then you watch the temperature start to rise.

When you learn how to put on a gas mask, they teach you what to do if you vomit with the gas mask on. (If you can think of a way to not end that sentence with a preposition, I’d love to hear about it.) This is super-necessary, because one of the old dirty tricks of gas warfare is to mix in an emetic with the gas. An emetic is something that makes you vomit–the idea is to get you vomiting in the hopes that you’ll rip your gas mask off, in which case you’re toast. (To be toast explained in the English notes below.) So, you know what to do if you vomit–but, there’s nothing to be done about what happens when you’re in a super-hot space with a gas mask on, which is that the parts around your eyes fill up with sweat to the point that you can’t see anymore. We’d sit there, our eye ports filling up with sweat, and watch the thermometer go up, and up, and up.

The temperature in an unventilated engine room goes up fast. Around 120-130 degrees, the air is so hot that it’s painful to breathe, and when I say painful, I mean really painful. It’s very quickly so hot that they call it a day for the engineering spaces and let you take off your gas mask and open the ventilation again. Now, as I said, it takes a long time to scrub down a ship–but, it was clear to everyone that there was no way that we were going to be able to survive that long with the ventilation shut down. So much for What To Do In Case Of NBC Attack.

Today’s bow to National Poetry Month is about a gas attack. It’s by Wilfred Owen, an Englishman who fought in the Great War. You tend to think of poets as wispy, ethereal types who you wouldn’t want backing you up in a tight spot; Wilfred Owen is a pretty good counter-example to this widely-held prejudice. He was one of the great poets of the First World War–the poem that you’ll find below was the first one I ever memorized that didn’t involve words that I don’t really dare to put on this blog. He was also a gay man who wrote what appears to be a poem about anonymous sex–and a decorated military hero who volunteered to go to the front repeatedly, even after being wounded twice in artillery shellings. He was awarded the Military Cross–here’s the text of the commendation:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly. (Copied from Wikipedia.)

Before the war, he spent several years teaching French and English in France. He died there just days before the Armistice–in action.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

by Wilfred Owen

blood-shod is an amazing neologism. “To be shod” means something like “to have footgear (e.g. shoes, boots, and the like).” Examples below in the English notes.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

hqdefault1 — “…the white eyes writhing in his face…” Victim of gas attack by the Syrian government. Picture source: https://goo.gl/6nHTK6

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You can find readings of this very famous poem here.

English notes

Examples of shod:

All horses’ hooves are healthier without shoes, and barefoot horses are healthier than shod horses. (Source)
The foot evolved to function unshod. (Source)
Paul says in verse 15 that we are to have our feet “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” (Source)

to be toast: to be in a bad situation, to be in trouble.

Fuck me. I’m toast for my shift later. Zombie.

— NoBags (@CerebralV0rtex) April 19, 2017

I’m toast. That’s what I am. I’m done for

— Kristen☼☾ (@vibrantsmilee) April 17, 2017

If they ever find out my real identity, I’m toast https://t.co/x5FojVC32B

— Dow (@mark_dow) April 6, 2017

Keeping your…together: Reproducibility in computational research

A failure to archive some data leads to discussion of a colorful American English expression. Trigger warning: rampant obscenity referring to poop.

You’ve probably heard: there is a crisis in science. You don’t have to be on top of the literature to be aware of this–it’s covered in the popular press, too. This piece in Forbes is representative: How the reproducibility crisis in academia is affecting scientific research. The term “crisis” might be a bit overblown, but certainly researchers in many fields have recently been paying a lot more attention to planning their analyses for reproducibility, which can sometimes mean planning the experiments that precede the analysis for replicability (also known as repeatability). The contrast between these is that you can think of reproduction as arriving at the same values, the same findings, or the same conclusion as an earlier study; replication, on the other hand, refers to the ability to repeat the initial experiment. Replicability is important for a number of reasons, one of them being that as an initial attempt to assess the reproducibility of a study, you might want to see if you can replicate the results when you repeat the original experiment.

Lately I’ve been talking and writing about this kind of thing a lot. When I do that, I’ve found that what audiences and reviewers seem to enjoy the most is when I give details on my own failures to be able to repeat my own studies. The irony is lost on exactly no one, including (obviously) me: in theory, I have some expertise on the relevant issues, and yet I struggle just to keep my own shit together in this regard. (To keep one’s shit together explained in the English notes below.)

So: for your amusement, I present today’s reproducibility fail. To wit: I just had a paper accepted that involved doing manual examination of hundreds and hundreds of words, all of which started with letters that could be one of the negating morphemes of English. (A morpheme is a part of a word. For example, cat has one morpheme, while cats has two: cat, and the plural -s.) When I say negating morpheme, I mean things like the prefix de in deoxygenate, or the prefix in in inefficient.

Now, I said that we were examining words that start with letters that could be one of the negating morphemes of the English language. Those strings are not always negative–think of examples like these:

ineffective (not effective) versus intuitive (nothing negative in there)
unclear (not clear) versus uncle (nothing negative in there)
deactivate (cause to not be active) versus deal (nothing negative in there, although the word’s current association with Donald Trump–the molesting, draft-dodging, tax-dodging, race-baiting, disabled-mocking, religiously bigoted, lying assclown that is now the president of my fatherland–makes it somewhat nauseating for me to type it)

…the moral of which is that you can’t find all of the words with negative prefixes in a text just by starting with a list of negative prefixes and looking for all words that start with them. Doing this would lead you to count intuitive, uncle, and deal as words that start with negatives, which they are not.

affix: something that cannot be a word, but can be added to one. English examples: un-, pre-, -‘s.

prefix: an affix that is added to the beginning of a word. English examples: un-, pre-, pro-.

suffix: an affix that is added to the end of a word. English examples: -‘s, -ing, -ed.

So, when I wanted to find out how the incidence of affixal negation compares between different kinds of biomedical texts–I care about that kind of thing because my job involves researching computer programs that do things with biomedical texts, and I need to know things like how much does negation add to the burden of understanding medical texts by patients’ family members?–I knew that I could write a program to pull out all of the words that start with things like de-, un-, in-, and anti-, but I also knew that I would have to have actual human beings look at those lists and mark which ones actually started with negative prefixes, and which didn’t.

Now, when you do something like this–that is to say, when you have humans look at data (linguistic or otherwise) and make judgments about it, you typically want to have more than one person do it. Then you calculate how often they agree with each other. If they agree with each other, say, 90% percent of the time, then you probably have pretty good judgments in hand. On the other hand, if they agree with each other only 60% of the time, then you’ve got a problem. Maybe you’ve defined a task that’s just too difficult for humans to do consistently, in which case you want to redefine it in a way that makes more sense. Maybe you wrote crappy instructions, in which case you want to improve them. Maybe one of your humans is smoking what we call in France shit (marijuana–no, I do not indulge). In any case, it’s that calculation of agreement between the humans that lets you decide whether or not you have a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Coincidentally, at the moment I’m teaching a course on what I do for a living, and I wanted to give my students the opportunity to get some hands-on practice with the process of making the human judgments that provide the data that we use to do our research. This little project seemed like a good one to offer them, for a number of reasons:

It’s relatively straightforward (we got good agreement on the original project)…
…while still difficult enough to be challenging (we had to take a couple passes at developing the instructions, and even then, we didn’t have complete agreement on everything)…
…plus, you don’t need a special program to record the judgments, while more complicated tasks frequently do require that the human learn a complicated program in order to record their analyses (did you notice that little subjunctive? …that a human learn… versus …that a human learns…?)…
…and I actually need the data for future research, which means that I’ll use it to write papers, which means that the students will have the opportunity to participate in writing the papers, and for students, published papers are the key to getting your doctorate and getting the hell outta Dodge.

Now, because I care about reproducibility of research, I use a publicly available web site to archive the code (computer programs) that I use to do my analyses. (You can find the stuff for the project that I’m talking about here.) So, getting my students started seemed like it would be straightforward: send them to the web site, and tell them to download the instructions, the list of words that needed judgments, and the actual judgments of the two analysts so that they could use those to figure out how to use the analysis program and to evaluate their own judgments.

It happens that I was one of those analysts, and that a colleague who happens to be a practicing emergency room physician was the other. It also happens that we annotated a randomized mixture of text from two sources: from scientific journal articles, and from the clinical records (totally anonymized, and available free to researchers) of actual patients. In the case of the clinical records, I found when doing the analysis of our agreements and disagreements that when we disagreed, I mostly thought that he was right and I was wrong. (Not surprising, since he is currently practicing, and I haven’t touched a patient since 1991.) In contrast, I tended to be right when we disagreed on the scientific journal articles–not surprising, either, since I spend all day, every day with my nose stuck deep in them. So: it was super-important to me that my students have access to both of our data, both so that they could compare their own judgments to it, and so that they could see what kinds of things we had disagreed on. (It’s usually the differences in the world that are the most interesting, right?)

Seulement voilà, the thing is: when I went to the web site where I had archived all of the code and the data on which the analysis was based, I saw that I had totally forgotten to put the other analyst’s data there. Think about the context of this:

In theory, I have some expertise on issues of reproducibility in computational science.
I was very deliberately making an effort to make this experiment as repeatable as possible.

…and yet, I still screwed it up. This is important in that when you read about reproducibility problems in science, sometimes you’ll see–often implicitly, and sometimes even explicitly–the view that reproducibility problems come from deliberately deceptive actions on the part of the researcher. Now, I know that a certain amount of self-deception can take place pretty easily in research, typically taking the form of screwing around with statistical tests of significance. But, that’s a pretty different thing from deliberately publishing crap research. When you consider that someone who is pretty deeply invested in doing, and in promoting, reproducible research–that is: me–can still fail to archive everything that would be needed to repeat one of his own experiments, it gives you an object example of how difficult it can be to ensure even the less-ambitious goal of repeatability of one’s work…and a fortiori, reproducibility of one’s results.

In French, there are some very interesting things associated with affixal negation, including the phenomenon of verbs like dératiser and décafardiser that we talked about in the post that you can find here. Several of the English-language examples in this post come from this paper on affixal negation by Chantal van Son, Emiel van Miltenburg, and Roser Morante, all of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

English notes

One of the expressions in this post, along with its many relatives, strikes me as interesting because it contains the word shit, which is almost always an “inherently negative” word, and yet it describes a desirable state. The expression in question: In theory, I have some expertise on the relevant issues, and yet I struggle just to keep my own shit together in this regard. (I should point out that you can only use these expressions in contexts, and with people, such that it would be acceptable to use obscenity. So, I would use this with my siblings and cousins, maybe or maybe not with my aunts, depending on which one, and most definitely not in front of my grandmother.) Unless otherwise stated, the examples here come from the OPUS2 English corpus, a collection of 19.7 billion words of English texts. I searched it through the Sketch Engine web site, purveyor of fine linguistic corpora and tools for searching them.

to have one’s shit together is the most basic of this surprisingly large family of expressions. In its most central sense, it means something like to be functioning in an efficient way. Here are some examples of how it’s used.

That’s because I have my shit together and I prioritize properly.
If you don’t have your shit together chances are it’s because you surround yourself with people who don’t have their shit together (Twitter) (Note: “chances are” means “probably.”)
I know I probably sound like I have my shit together , but really I feel confused inside.
And pretending I have my shit together when it comes to deadlines and paperwork is one of my specialties, a skill to which I probably owe every job I’ve ever had.
I thought, perhaps naively, that by almost a year along I would have my shit together – or at least have some sort of clue and I do not.
Turns out she’s sharp as a tack and really has her shit together. (Note: “to be sharp as a tack” means “to be quite intelligent.”)
And so perhaps this is why he doesn’t find himself attracted to his students, and instead finds himself attracted to Audrey’s silver hair and faintly lined face: these things signify a woman who has her shit together, who has moved on to the next level.

With that established: if to have one’s shit together means to be in a particular state–the state of having one’s shit together–to keep one’s shit together means to maintain that state. Some examples:

I am now one of the countless unemployed because I could not keep my shit together.
I’m trying to navigate the holiday season as a crafter, keep my shit together at work, plan the holidaze both for Thanksgiving at my mom’s house and what will surely be a painful Christmas Eve . . .if we could decide who’s host/essing it.
“As long as you keep improving.” I raised my eyebrows. “Is that your way of telling me to keep my shit together?” (Michelle Hodkin, The evolution of Mara Dyer)
Ruby Pelletier put her hands on her skinny hips, threw her head back, and bellowed laughter. “You think you can keep your shit together when twelve CB cowboys pull in all at once and order scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, and flapjacks?” (Stephen King, The dead zone. A CB cowboy is a truck driver–very, very old slang, although not quite as old as I am. 1970s, I would say. French toast is pain perdu. Flapjacks are pancakes.)

There are several more of these odd expressions where shit means something positive–so many that if I tried to get them all into one post, I would be writing this for the next two weeks. Watch this space for more, as the spirit moves me–and don’t say this stuff in front of my grandmother.

Red, but not off-color

sophia_schliemann_treasure — I can’t find a picture of Dimitar Pantaleev, so here’s a picture of Schliemann’s wife. I’ve loved it since childhood, though I couldn’t tell you why. Here she’s dressed in jewelry that they dug up in Turkey. Picture source: Storia Illustrata n. 167. Public domain.

My father once told me that the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann spoke 14 languages, all of which (other than his native German) he learnt by memorizing a book in the language. Whether or not this is true, I don’t know–my father’s level of willingness to just make things up is non-zero (although never malicious). But, memorizing things in your language of choice makes as much sense to me as any other way of learning a language, and it’s certainly more fun than memorizing long lists of vocabulary. Unfortunately, my choices of what to memorize are mostly drawn from the stuff that I like to read, which means that (from what I’m told), way too much of what comes out of my mouth is either off-color (Céline, Queneau) or marivaudage (Laclos, Molière). (See the English notes below for what off-color means.)

As National Poetry Month continues, here’s the first poem that I ever tried to memorize in Bulgarian. I only got as far as the first stanza, which may explain why my Bulgarian sucks (see here for a good example of the trouble you can get into when you don’t speak Bulgarian quite as well as you think you do). By Dimitar Pantaleev, in theory it’s a Communist poem, although I don’t understand why, since it’s entirely anti-authoritarian–the title means I cross against a red light. Also, as far as I can tell, he was considered a formalist, and Communists (Reds, if you will) were pretty anti-formalism, to the best of my (very limited) knowledge.

Amazingly, the poem was recorded as a song by the officially government-sanctioned rock group Diana Express. The production is as unfortunate as most music recorded in the 1980s that wasn’t either Joan Armatrading, Simon and Garfunkel, or Elton John, which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t spend $0.99 (literally) to buy it on Amazon, just for its inherent cool-value. Amazingly, these guys are still around–here’s footage of them giving a concert two months ago in Atlanta, Georgia.

минавам на червена светлина

by Dimitar Pantaleev

Аз пазя свято земните закони,
но в дни, когато леден дъжд се рони
и трябвада спася една старица,
едно дете, една ранена птица
или една разплакана жена –
минавам на червена светлина.

Когато гинат младите тополи,
когато нечий глас за помощ моли
или когато в топлата ни есен
внезапно слъхва млада чиста песен
по чужда необмислена вина –
минавам на червена светлина.

А някой път, когато трябва смело
да се спаси едно човешко дело,
една любов или една страна,
провиквам се на кръстопътя ясно:
минете, въпреки, че е опасно,
минете на червена светлина.

English notes

Off-color means something like not quite obscene, but not quite OK, either, at least not for the context. Here are some examples from the OPUS2 and enTenTen13 corpora, collections of 1.1 million and 19.7 billion words of English, respectively, that I searched through the Sketch Engine web site, purveyors of fine linguistic data in more languages than I care to count. You’ll notice that it frequently modifies either joke or remark, and almost always a noun whose semantics have inherently to do with communication–

It’s an off-color remark, it was highly inappropriate.
Tom never tells off-color jokes.
You also need to be careful of the language you use – nothing off-color, or discriminatory.
For the most part, Smith said she overlooked the off-color jokes, sexist remarks and rituals that permeated the fighter pilot culture.
The event host was Leonard Maltin who remained professional during an event riddled with technical problems and a few off-color moments.
…on many other websites normal people converse sans real names and do so without rancor, without hostility, without profanity, without racism, without sexism, without misogyny, without venom, without bile, without hatred, bigotry, obscenity and lame off-color jokes.
A disgruntled employee, or one with an off-color sense of humor, could post something reckless under the company’s name.
One of the most vivid characters in the show, whose off-color tantrums have become an audience favorite the way Kramer’s clumsy entrances once were.
This is the time to Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! in terms of cursing and off-color talk.
Crow is the most likely of the four movie-riffers to make off-color or lewd comments during the film, and receives frequent scoldings from Joel, Mike, and occasionally Tom because of this habit (see Crow Syndrome ).
And we hear what is believed to be Tiger telling an off-color joke.
Sure this is an extreme case but it’s a reminder that we all eventually have that moment when we get a complainer, an off-color remark, or misleading information posted by users on our social media sites.
The humor here is ribald and off-color and noone is safe from abuse including tuners, parents and vendors.
You’ll be teaching him the principles of keyword searching; at the same time, you’ll be able to steer him away from off-base or off-color content.

To get a really solid sense of how to use off-color, it’s useful to look at the other words that it occurs with. (With which it occurs, if you prefer your sentences non-preposition-final.) Here’s a screen shot of something called a “word sketch”–again, from the Sketch Engine web site. Scroll down past the figure and I’ll talk you through it.

Screenshot 2017-04-14 06.01.28 — Picture source: screen shot from the Sketch Engine web site.

At the top left, you see the adverbial modifiers that are most commonly associated with off-color. Note that they are similar–mildly and slightly. What you’re not seeing here are intensifiers–you wouldn’t typically say that something is very or horribly “off-color.” Why? I don’t know–that’s just the statistical tendency with this adjective. You certainly could say that–but, a native speaker probably wouldn’t.

In the next column, you see the nouns that have the strongest statistical associations with off-color. You won’t be surprised to see that the most common ones are joke, remark, and humor. Most of the other words with strong statistical associations are other nouns that refer to humor–gag, limerick, hilarity, quip, banter, antic, and pun.

The next column over is a nice example of how you can get insight into a word by seeing what other words it’s joined with by and or or. Most of the words that are joined with off-color in this way fall into one of two categories: they’re either related to humor, or they’re clearly negative. The first category is related to the fact that off-color itself is so often used to modify joke and, as we saw in the preceding paragraph, other words that refer to humor. In that category, we have:

hilarious
quirky
humorous
funny

In the second category, we have:

tasteless
vulgar
inappropriate
incorrect
crude
offensive
racist
rude
dirty
racial

If you had any questions about whether being off-color is good or bad, this should make it pretty clear to you that it’s not good.

In case you’re wondering: no, Sketch Engine does not pay me to shill for them. In fact, I pay them quite a bit of money every year for access to their corpora and search engine.

Just because you’re a poet doesn’t mean you can’t kick ass

Operation Iraqi Freedom II — An LVTP7 amphibious assault vehicle. Picture source: USMC.

One day some decades ago, the amphibious assault vehicle in which I was riding around Camp Pendleton, California while we practiced assaulting hills and the like made an unplanned stop. I reached into one of those voluminous pockets that military uniforms tend to be covered with and pulled out a book to read while the platoon leader tried to figure out where the fuck we were. Whatcha reading, Doc?, some big, bulky Marine or another asked me. (I was a medic in the Navy. The US Marines don’t have their own medical personnel–they’re all provided by the Navy. This came as a surprise to lots of young men who volunteered to join the Navy during Vietnam thinking that there was no better way to avoid finding yourself in a rice paddy with leeches on your scrotum and somebody shooting at you than working in a naval hospital–and then found themselves in a rice paddy with leeches on their scrota and somebody shooting at them. Technically, the term for a Navy medic is hospital corpsman, but by long tradition, the Marines call us “Doc.” But, back to Camp Pendleton…)

The social animal, I said. Social psychology. (You might think that I wouldn’t remember what I was reading in the early 1980s–but, the paperback fit perfectly in my left thigh pocket. My right thigh pocket was for a bag of licorice. You never know when you will/won’t get to eat, and licorice doesn’t leave your hands covered with melted chocolate.) Social psychology…hm… I like to read about history, myself, said the big, bulky Marine. The Wars of the Roses–that was some crazy shit… The second lieutenant gave the staff sergeant an embarrassed smile and folded up his map; the big, bulky Marine and I climbed back into our hatches; and we all went back to assaulting whatever we were practicing assaulting–the Wars of the Roses would wait. In the military, every branch has their stereotypical insults for the other branches, and everyone’s insult for the Marines is that they’re stupid, but I’ll tell you this: I know exactly two guys who dropped out of high school, joined the service, and then got a doctorate, and the one who isn’t me is a Marine. (I don’t say “was” a Marine, because once a Marine, always a Marine, and they are, indeed, bad motherfuckers. “Bad motherfucker” explained in the English notes below.)

You tend to think of poets as ethereal, wispy types who are super-sensitive and probably wouldn’t be the person you would want to cover your back if you got into a fight in a metro station. However, if you’ve been paying attention to the stuff that we’ve been reading for National Poetry Month, you’re already aware that there are plenty of counter-examples to that. Case in point: Guillaume Apollinaire. He may or may not have been sensitive, but he was definitely a serious scrapper. He tried to join the army when the First World War came to France in August 1914, but was turned away due to not being a French citizen. No problem–he left Paris and headed south-east to Nice and tried again, this time successfully. He was initially assigned to an artillery unit, but this wasn’t hard-core enough for him, so he got himself transferred to a decimated infantry unit, picking up a promotion to second lieutenant in the process. (That’s a very low rank for an officer, but for an enlisted man to get promoted to it is a pretty big deal.)

guillaume_apollinaire_calligramme — Calligramme. Public domain.

Apollinaire was one of the greats of French poetry; if you’ve only heard of one French poem, it was probably his Le pont Mirabeau. One of his innovations was his role in the development of what’s known as “concrete poetry.” It is “concrete” in the sense that not just its linguistic elements, but its typographic shape are essential to the poem. The one to the left is my favorite of his works in this genre. In the form of the Eiffel Tower, the words translate something like this:

Hello, world of which I am the eloquent tongue. Oh Paris, may your tongue stick out, and stick out always, at the Germans.

guillaume_apollinaire_foto — Guillaume Apollinaire. Public domain.

Now, being poetry, it is, of course, a bit more complicated than that. What I’ve given here as “may your tongue stick out” comes from a volume of translations of Apollinaire by Anne Greet and S.I. Lockerbie that I like. “To stick one’s tongue out” is a plausible translation of tirer la bouche, but it’s not necessarily the most obvious one. Certainly it fits with the facts that (a) Apollinaire refers to la langue éloquante, “the elegant tongue,” and the Eiffel Tower does have a tongue-like shape. But, given that this was written by a guy who was putting his life on the line in the trenches at the time, I tend to think that he was playing on another meaning of the verb tirer: to fire a weapon. For a poet in an infantry unit, the metaphor of the mouth as a weapon (que sa bouche…tire et tirera toujours aux Allemands) is certainly an apt one.

hybrid-suite-cardiac-16x9 — A cardiac catheterization lab. Picture source: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The Navy eventually sent me to school, and I finished my time in the service in a cardiac catheterization lab, which over the course of some rather bizarre decades led to me being a faculty member at a medical school, where I specialize in biomedical language. Apollinaire caught a shell fragment in the temple (when a bombardment started while he was reading a literary magazine, they say); although he survived trepanning, he never fully recovered, and in his weakened condition, died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Whenever I visit the Panthéon, I take a moment to slip away from my friends and find his name on the (long) list of writers who gave their lives for France–and to pay my respects.

English notes

bad motherfucker: One of the cute things about American English is that bad–and similar words, depending on the region of the country that you’re in–can have positive connotations. (Connotation is the cultural meaning of a word, as opposed to its denotation, which you could think of as its “dictionary meaning.” Connotation and culture both start with a C; denotation and dictionary both start with a d. That’s how I remember them, at any rate.)

So: a bad motherfucker is someone who is really tough, with some implication that this toughness involves fighting. You would want to be called a bad motherfucker. When I was a kid, it was common to use bad to mean something like cool, impressive–our favorite bands were “bad,” a nice leather jacket was “bad,” etc.

wicked-smart — The spelling of “smart” as “smaht” here is important, in that it’s meant to reflect the stereotypical regional pronunciation of the Northeast US, where this use of “wicked” comes from.

Less common, but incontestably much cooler, is the use of wicked to mean “very” in front of an adjective, especially one with a positive meaning. I believe it’s a Northeast thing, although I’ve seen it as far west as Oregon. Scroll down for lots of examples.

73585648 — The spelling of “smart” as “smaht” here is important, in that it’s meant to reflect the stereotypical regional pronunciation of the Northeast US, where this use of “wicked” comes from.

Returning of issue: the illustrated version

Henry Reed’s “Returning of issue” for Day 6 of National Poetry Month.

Returning of issue is the sixth and final part of Henry Reed’s Lessons of the war cycle. Published two and a half decades after Naming of parts, it is in two voices, like the rest of the cycle, but they are difficult to tell apart. The recording of the poem on the Sole Arabia Tree web site (follow the link and scroll down to the bottom of the page) differentiates the two voices very nicely; it’s also a somewhat different version of the poem, and you may find the differences interesting. The version that you see here is the written one from the aforementioned site.

From a linguistic point of view, the most obvious (to me, anyways) thing going on in this poem is that Reed goes back to plays on the various meanings of the English word issue, and in the case of this poem–as opposed to his Unarmed combat–the sense of progeny is one of the meanings that he draws on, as the sadder parts of the poem are a dialogue with the trainee’s deceased father. Here are a couple of the relatively obscure items of vocabulary–scroll down past the illustrations to find the poem.

military-regimental-sergeant-major-ronald-brittain-mons-barracks-aldershot-g4tktg — A sergeant-major is a very senior enlisted man in the US military; in the UK of Reed’s time, I think it was a warrant officer. The “RSM” of the poem is the regimental sergeant major, a leadership position that is held by someone who has been in the military for quite a while. The photo is of a British RSM; no date, sorry. Picture source: https://goo.gl/aV1Z9I

stupefied — In theory, “stupefaction” is the state of being surprised into silence. You’ll also hear it use to mean something like a state of silence or dullness from any cause whatsoever. Picture source: https://goo.gl/SLM93N

Reed, Henry. “Returning of Issue.” Listener 84, no. 2170 (29 October 1970): 596-597.

LESSONS OF THE WAR

VI. RETURNING OF ISSUE

Tomorrow will be your last day here. Someone is speaking:
A familiar voice, speaking again at all of us.
And beyond the windows— it is inside now, and autumn—
On a wind growing daily harsher, small things to the earth
Are turning and whirling, small. Tomorrow will be
Your last day here,

But not we hope for always. You cannot see through the windows
If they are leaves or flowers. We hope that many of you
Will be coming back for good. Silence, and stupefaction.
The coarsening wind and the things whirling upon it
Scour that rough stamping-ground where we so long
Have spent our substance,

As the trees are spending theirs. How much of mine have I spent,
Father, oh father? How sorry we are to lose you
I do not have to say, since the sergeant-major
Has said it, the RSM has said it, and the colonel
Has sent over a message to say that he also says it.
Everyone sorry to lose us,

And you, oh father, father, once sorry too. I think
I can honestly say you are one and all of you now:
Soldiers. Silence, and disbelief. A fact that will stand you
In pretty good stead in the various jobs you go back to.
I wish you the best of luck. Silence. And all of you know
You can think of us here, as home.

As home: a home we shall any of you welcome you back to.
Most of you have, I know, some sort of work waiting for you,
And the rest of you now being, thanks to us, fit and able,
Will be bound to find something. I begin to be in want.
Would any citizen of this country send me
Into his fields? And

Before I finalise: one thing about tomorrow
I must make perfectly clear. Tomorrow is clear already:
I saw myself once, but now am by time forbidden
To see myself so: as the man who went evil ways,
Till lie determined, in time of famine, to seek
His father’s home.

Autumn is later down there: it should now be the time
Of vivacious triumph in the fruitful fields.
As he approached, he ran over his speeches of sorrow,
Not less of truth for being much-rehearsed:
The last distilment from a long and inward
Discourse of heartbreak. And

The first thing you do, after first thing tomorrow morning,
Is, those that leave not been previously detailed to do so,
Which I think is the case in most cases, is a systematic
Returning of issue. It is all-important
You should restore to store one of every store issued.
And in the case of two, two.

And I, as always late, shall never know that lifted fear
When the small hard-working master of those fields
Looked up. I trembled. But his heart came out to me
With a shout of compassion. And all my speech was only:
‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and am no more worthy
To be called thy son.’

But if I cried it, father, you could not hear me now,
Where now you lie, crumpled in that small grave
Like any withering dog. Your fields are sold and built on,
Your lanes are filled with husks the swine reject.
I scoop them in my hands. I have earned no more; and more
I shall not inherit. And

A careful check will be made of every such object
That was issued to each personnel originally,
And checked at issue. And let me be quite implicit:
That no accoutrements, impedimentas, fittings, or military garments
May be taken as souvenirs. The one exception is shirts,
And whatever you wear underneath.

These may be kept, those that wish. But the rest of the issue
Must be returned, except who intend to rejoin
In regular service. Silence. Which involves a simple procedure
I will explain in a simple group to those that rejoin.
Now, how many will that be? Silence. No one? No one at all?
I see. Very well. I have up to now

Spoken with the utmost of mildness. I speak so still,
But it does seem to me a bit of a bloody pity,
A bit un-bloody-feeling, after the all
We have bloody done for you, you should sit on your dumb bloody arses,
Just waiting like bloody milksops till I bloody dismiss you.
Silence, embarrassed, but silent.

And am I to break it, father, to break this silence?
Is there no bloody man among you? Not one bloody single one?
I will break the silence, father. Yes, sergeant, I will stay
In a group of one. Father, be proud of me.
Oh splendid, man! And for Christ’s sake, tell them all,
Why you are doing this.

Why am I doing this? And is it too late to say no?
Come speak out, man: tell us, and shame these bastards.
I hope to shame no one, sergeant, in simply wishing
To remain a personnel. I have been such a thing before.
It was good, and simple; and it was the best I could do.
Here is a man, men! Silence.

Silence, indeed. How could I tell them, now?
I have nowhere else to go? How could I say
I have no longer gift or want; or how describe
The inexplicable tears that filled my eyes
When the poor sergeant said: ‘After the all
We have bloody done for you’?

Goodbye forever, father, after the all you have done for me.
Soon I must start to forget you; but how to forget
That reconcilement, never enacted between us,
Which should have been ours, under the autumn sun?
I can see it and feel it now, clearer than daylight, clearer
For one brief moment, now,

Than even the astonished faces of my fellows,
The sergeant’s uneasy smile, the trees, the relief at choosing
To learn once more the things I shall one day teach:
A rhetoric instead of words; instead of a love, the use
Of accoutrements, impedimenta, and fittings, and military garments,
And harlots, and riotous living.

Psychological warfare: the illustrated version

For National Poetry Month, Day 5, here is “Psychological warfare,” Part 5 of Henry Reed’s “Lessons of the war.” Trigger warning: racist and homophobic language.

When I was a kid, my father would give me helpful life lessons, such as what to do when slapped to the ground by a German soldier versus what to do when slapped to the ground by a Japanese soldier. Note that there are two assumptions here: (a) you’re a prisoner of war when this happens, and (b) the advice was presented as what to do when you’re slapped to the ground by a German or Japanese prisoner-of-war-camp guard, not if you’re slapped to the ground by a German or Japanese prisoner-of-war-camp guard. This phrasing, amongst similar phrasing in many of my father’s life lessons for me, contributed to a number of things in my life: (a) I didn’t realize that the Second World War was over until I was probably 9 years old–I used to freak when planes would fly overhead, not knowing whether they were friend or foe–and (b) I always assumed that really horrid shit was going to turn my world and my life upside down, one way or the other. I tell you all of this to give you some context (which is to say: my selfishly personal context) for today’s celebration of National Poetry Month: the fourth in Henry Reed’s Lessons of the war cycle. I’ll warn you again that there is reprehensibly racist language, as well as homophobia, in this poem; in reading it, I keep in mind that this comes out of the mouth of a character that Reed is criticizing. Reading this as an adult who “gagne son croûte” by working with language, I’m reminded of Krippendorff‘s discussion of pre-WWII Fascist propaganda and by the similarity between that Fascist propaganda and Trump’s message; it’s the weird mix of nationalism, racism/homophobia, and craven cowardice (is that a pleonasm? probably) in the character’s words that brings both pre-WWII Fascist propaganda and Donald Trump to mind for me.

The version of the poem that I’m giving you here is from the Sole Arabian Tree web site, your source for all things Reedian. Unfortunately, I don’t have a source for a recording of Reed reading this one. The promised illustrations precede the poems, and explain (or try to) some of the language in the poem.

“To ebb” is to flow down, as in the receding of the tide. Note the wet sand–that is what has been left uncovered by the receding of the tide or of a wave. To “ebb up,” as it is used in the poem, sounds awfully odd, and I haven’t found it in the British National Corpus. Picture source: https://goo.gl/A8r13s

tyne-cot-cemetery-passchendaele-ridge-belgium-world-war-i-c1918-1919-bjw9g1 — Part of the cemetery at Passchendaele, the site of a prolonged battle that took about 400,000 lives and moved the front line only several kilometers. When the speaker asserts that the trainees will all have heard of it, he’s probably right; how he managed to get captured there is hard to imagine, given that the German casualties were enormous. I speculate that this is part of Reed’s way of showing us what an idiot this guy is. Picture source: https://goo.gl/ej8Dpx

british_recruits_august_1914_q53234 — When the speaker refers to the recent “mobs,” he’s using an old slang word for a “mobilization” or call-up of civilians to the military. Here are Brits responding to the August 1914 mob, I believe. Picture source: https://goo.gl/Eha36A

hqdefault — The “helpless men descending from the heavens” to whom the speaker refers are German paratroopers. Don’t spend too much time searching for pictures of them on line, or you will be looking at pictures of little children waiting in line for gas chambers before you know it. Picture source: https://goo.gl/pIYaly

LESSONS OF THE WAR

V. PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

This above all remember: they will be very brave men,
And you will be facing them. You must not despise them.

I am, as you know, like all true professional soldiers,
A profoundly religious man: the true soldier has to be.
And I therefore believe the war will be over by Easter Monday.
But I must in fairness state that a number of my brother-officers,
No less religious than I, believe it will hold out till Whitsun.
Others, more on the agnostic side (and I do not condemn them)
Fancy the thing will drag on till August Bank Holiday.

Be that as it may, some time in the very near future,
We are to expect Invasion … and invasion not from the sea.
Vast numbers of troops will be dropped, probably from above,
Superbly equipped, determined and capable; and this above all,
Remember: they will be very brave men, and chosen as such.

You must not, of course, think I am praising them.
But what I have said is basically fundamental
To all I am about to reveal: the more so, since
Those of you that have not seen service overseas—
Which is the case with all of you, as it happens—this is the first time
You will have confronted them. My remarks are aimed
At preparing you for that.

Everyone, by the way, may smoke,
And be as relaxed as you can, like myself.
I shall wander among you as I talk and note your reactions.
Do not be nervous at this: this is a thing, after all,
We are all in together.

I want you to note in your notebooks, under ten separate headings,
The ten points I have to make, remembering always
That any single one of them may save your life. Is everyone ready?
Very well then.

The term, Psychological Warfare
Comes from the ancient Greek: psycho means character
And logical, of course, you all know. We did not have it
In the last conflict, the fourteen-eighteen affair,
Though I myself was through it from start to finish. (That is point one.)
I was, in fact, captured—or rather, I was taken prisoner—
In the Passchendaele show (a name you will all have heard of)
And in our captivity we had a close opportunity
(We were all pretty decently treated. I myself
Was a brigadier at the time: that is point two)
An opportunity I fancy I was the only one to appreciate
Of observing the psychiatry of our enemy
(The word in those days was always psychology,
A less exact description now largely abandoned). And though the subject
Is a highly complex one, I had, it was generally conceded,
A certain insight (I do not know how, but I have always, they say,
Had a certain insight) into the way the strangest things ebb up
From what psychoanalysts now refer to as the self-conscious.
It is possibly for this reason that I have been asked
To give you the gist of the thing, the—how shall I put it?—
The gist.

I was not of course captured alone
(Note that as point three) so that I also observed
Not only the enemy’s behaviour; but ours. And gradually, I concluded
That we all of us have, whether we like it or lump it,
Our own individual psychiatry, given us, for better or worse,
By God Almighty. I say this reverently; you often find
These deeper themes of psychiatry crudely but well expressed
In common parlance. People say: ‘We are all as God made us.’
And so they are. So are the enemy. And so are some of you.
This I in fact observed: point four. Not only the enemy
Had their psychiatry, but we, in a different sense,
Had ours. And I firmly believe you cannot (point six) master
Their psychiatry before you have got the gist of your own.
Let me explain more fully: I do not mean to imply
That any, or many, of you are actually mentally ill.
Though that is what the name would imply. But we, your officers,
Have to be aware that you, and many of your comrades,
May have a sudden psychiatry which, sometimes without warning,
May make you feel (and this is point five) a little bit odd.

I do not mean that in the sense of anything nasty:
I am not thinking of those chaps with their eyes always on each other
(Sometimes referred to as homosensualists
And easily detected by the way they lace up their boots)
But in the sense you may all feel a little disturbed,
Without knowing why, a little as if you were feeling an impulse,
Without knowing why: the term for this is ambivalence.
Often referred to for some mysterious reason,
By the professionals as Amby Valence,
As though they were referring to some nigger minstrel.
(Not, of course, that I have any colour prejudice:
After all, there are four excellent West Nigerians among you,
As black as your boot: they are not to blame for that.)

At all events this ambivalence is to be avoided.
Note that as point seven: I think you all know what I mean:
In the Holy Scriptures the word begins with an O,
Though in modern parlance it usually begins with an M.
You have most of you done it absentmindedly at some time or another,
But repeated, say, four times a day, it may become almost a habit,
Especially prone to by those of sedentary occupation,
By pale-faced clerks or schoolmasters, sitting all day at a desk,
Which is not, thank God, your position: you are always
More or less on the go: and that is what
(Again deep in the self-conscious) keeps you contented and happy here.

Even so, should you see some fellow-comrade
Give him all the help you can. In the spiritual sense, I mean,
With a sympathetic word or nudge, inform him in a manly fashion
‘Such things are for boys, not men, lad.’
Everyone, eyes front!

I pause, gentlemen.
I pause. I am not easily shocked or taken aback,
But even while I have been speaking of this serious subject
I observe that one of you has had the effrontery—
Yes, you at the end of row three! No! Don’t stand up, for God’s sake, man,
And don’t attempt to explain. Just tuck it away,
And try to behave like a man. Report to me
At eighteen hundred hours. The rest of you all eyes front.
I proceed to point six.

The enemy itself,
I have reason to know is greatly prone to such actions.
It is something we must learn to exploit: an explanation, I think,
Is that they are, by and large, undeveloped children,
Or adolescents, at most. It is perhaps to do with physique,
And we cannot and must not ignore their physique as such.
(Physique, of course, being much the same as psychiatry.)
They are usually blond, and often extremely well-made,
With large blue eyes and very white teeth,
And as a rule hairless chests, and very smooth, muscular thighs,
And extremely healthy complexions, especially when slightly sunburnt.
I am convinced there is something in all this that counts for something.
Something probably deep in the self-conscious of all of them.
Undeveloped children, I have said, and like children,
As those of you with families will know,
They are sometimes very aggressive, even the gentlest of them.

All the same we must not exaggerate; in the words of Saint Matthew:
‘Clear your minds of cant.’ That is point five: note it down.
Do not take any notice of claptrap in the press
Especially the kind that implies that the enemy will come here,
Solely with the intention of raping your sisters.
I do not know why it is always sisters they harp on:
I fancy it must ebb up from someone’s self-conscious.
It is a patent absurdity for two simple reasons: (a)
They cannot know in advance what your sisters are like:
And (b) some of you have no sisters. Let that be the end of that.

There are much darker things than that we have to think of.
It is you they consider the enemy, you they are after.
And though, as Britishers, you will not be disposed to shoot down
A group of helpless men descending from the heavens,
Do not expect from them—and I am afraid I have to say this—gratitude:
They are bound to be over-excited,
As I said, adolescently aggressive, possibly drugged,
And later, in a macabre way, grotesquely playful.
Try to avoid being playfully kicked in the crutch,
Which quite apart from any temporary discomfort,
May lead to a hernia. I do not know why you should laugh.
I once had a friend who, not due to enemy action
But to a single loud sneeze, entirely his own, developed a hernia,
And had to have great removals, though only recently married.
(I am sorry, gentlemen, but anyone who finds such things funny
Ought to suffer them and see. You deserve the chance to.
I must ask you all to extinguish your cigarettes.)

There are other unpleasant things they may face you with.
You may, as I did in the fourteen-eighteen thing,
Find them cruelly, ruthlessly, starkly obsessed with the arts,
Music and painting, sculpture and the writing of verses,
Please, do not stand for that.

Our information is
That the enemy has no such rules, though of course they may have.
We must see what they say when they come. There can, of course,
Be no objection to the more virile arts:
In fact in private life I am very fond of the ballet,
Whose athleticism, manliness and sense of danger
Is open to all of us to admire. We had a ballet-dancer
In the last mob but three, as you have doubtless heard.
He was cruelly teased and laughed at—until he was seen in the gym.
And then, my goodness me! I was reminded of the sublime story
Of Samson, rending the veil of the Temple.
I do not mean he fetched the place actually down; though he clearly did what he could.
Though for some other reason I was never quite clear about,
And in spite of my own strong pressure on the poor lad’s behalf,
And his own almost pathetic desire to stay on with us,
He was, in fact, demobilized after only three weeks’ service,
Two and a half weeks of which he spent in prison.
Such are war’s tragedies: how often we come upon them!
(Everyone may smoke again, those that wish.)

This brings me to my final point about the psychiatry
Of our formidable foe. To cope with it,
I know of nothing better than the sublime words of Saint Paul
In one of his well-known letters to the Corinthians:
‘This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day
No man can take thee in.’

‘This above all’: what resonant words those are!
They lead me to point nine, which is a thing
I may have a special thing about, but if so,
Remember this is not the first war I have been through.
I refer (point nine this is) to the question of dignity.
Dignity. Human dignity. Yours. Never forget it, men.
Let it sink deep into your self-consciousness,
While still remaining plentifully available on the surface,
In the form of manly politeness. I mean, in particular, this:
Never behave in a manner to evoke contempt
Before thine enemy. Our enemy, I should say.

Comrades, and brothers-in-arms,
And those especially who have not understood my words,
You were not born to live like cowards or cravens:
Let me exhort you: never, whatever lies you have heard,
Be content to throw your arms on the ground and your other arms into the air and squawk ‘Kaputt!’
It is unsoldierly, unwarlike, vulgar, and out of date,
And may make the enemy laugh. They have a keen sense of humour,
Almost (though never quite, of course) as keen as our own.
No: when you come face to face with the foe, remember dignity,
And though a number of them do fortunately speak English,
Say, proudly, with cold politeness, in the visitor’s own language:
‘Ich ergebe mich.’ Ich meaning I,
Ergebe meaning surrender, and mich meaning me.
Ich ergebe mich.’ Do not forget the phrase.
Practise it among yourselves: do not let it sound stilted,
Make it sound idiotish, as if you were always saying it,
Only always cold in tone: icy, if necessary:
It is such behaviour that will make them accord you
The same respect that they accorded myself,
At Passchendaele. (Incidentally,
You may also add the word nicht if you feel inclined to,
Nicht meaning not. It will amount to much the same thing.)

Dignity, then, and respect: those are the final aims
Of psychiatric relations, and psychological warfare.
They are the fundamentals also of our religion.
I may have mentioned my own religious intuitions:
They are why I venture to think this terrible war will be over
On Easter Monday, and that the invasion will take place
On either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday,
Probably the Thursday, which in so very many
Of our great, brave, proud, heroic and battered cities,
Is early closing day, as the enemy may have learnt from their agents.
Alas, there may be many such days in the immediate future.
But remember this in the better world we all have to build,
And build by ourselves alone—for the government
May well in the next few weeks have withdrawn to Canada—
What did you say? The man in row five. He said something.
Stand up and repeat what you said.
I said ‘And a sodding good job’, sir, I said, sir.
I have not asked anyone for political comments, thank you,
However apt. Sit down. I was saying:
That in the better world we all have to try to build
After the war is over, whether we win or lose,
Or whether we all agree to call it a draw,
We shall have to try our utmost to get used to each other,
To live together with dignity and respect.
As our Lord sublimely said in one of his weekly Sermons on the Mount
Outside Jerusalem (where interestingly enough,
I was stationed myself for three months in 1926):
‘A thirteenth commandment I give you (this is point ten)
That ye love one another.’ Love, in Biblical terms,
Meaning of course not quite what it means today,
But precisely what I have called dignity and respect.
And that, men, is the great psychiatrical problem before you:
Of how on God’s earth we shall ever learn to attain some sort
Of dignity.
And due respect.
One man.
For another.
Thank you; God bless you, men. Good afternoon.

Unarmed combat: the illustrated version

Henry Reed’s WWII poetry remains sadly relevant in the age of Trump: “Things may be the same again; and we must fight // Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping // Something alive…”

More of Henry Reed’s WWII poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month 2017. Unarmed combat was published in 1945. I found this version on the Sole Arabian Tree web site, where you can find an audio recording of Reed reading it at the bottom of the page. English notes after the poem, as always.

LESSONS OF THE WAR

IV. UNARMED COMBAT

In due course of course you will all be issued with
Your proper issue; but until tomorrow,
You can hardly be said to need it; and until that time,
We shall have unarmed combat. I shall teach you
The various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Which you may sometimes meet.

And the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Do not depend on any sort of weapon,
But only on what I might coin a phrase and call
The ever-important question of human balance,
And the ever-important need to be in a strong
Position at the start.

There are many kinds of weakness about the body,
Where you would least expect, like the ball of the foot.
But the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Will always come in useful. And never be frightened
To tackle from behind: it may not be clean to do so,
But this is global war.

So give them all you have, and always give them
As good as you get; it will always get you somewhere.
(You may not know it, but you can tie a Jerry
Up without rope; it is one of the things I shall teach.)
Nothing will matter if only you are ready for him.
The readiness is all.

The readiness is all. How can I help but feel
I have been here before? But somehow then,
I was the tied-up one. How to get out
Was always then my problem. And even if I had
A piece of rope I was always the sort of person
Who threw rope aside.

And in my time I had given them all I had,
Which was never as good as I got, and it got me nowhere.
And the various holds and rolls and throws and breakfalls
Somehow or other I always seemed to put
In the wrong place. And, as for war, my wars
Were global from the start.

Perhaps I was never in a strong position.
Or the ball of my foot got hurt, or I had some weakness
Where I had least expected. But I think I see your point.
While awaiting a proper issue, we must learn the lesson
Of the ever-important question of human balance.
It is courage that counts.

Things may be the same again; and we must fight
Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping
Something alive: so that when we meet our end,
It may be said that we tackled wherever we could,
That battle-fit we lived, and though defeated,
Not without glory fought.

in due course: Merriam-Webster: after a normal passage of time : in the expected or allotted time. Reed uses it to have his drill sergeant say something that sounds both military (“in due course”) and silly, simultaneously–definitely a theme in this series of poems:

In due course of course you will all be issued with
Your proper issue

Checking out new uniforms — Getting your issue in Navy boot camp. Picture source: https://goo.gl/DqYe9r

issue: Reed goes whole hog with this one, using it three times in the poem, each with a different meaning, mostly ambiguous even in context. There are many, many possible meanings for both the nominal (noun) and verbal uses of the word; I’ll give you only the ones that I suspect he means to play with here, all of them from Merriam-Webster:

Verb: British : provide 2b, supply. Now: Merriam-Webster says that this is a British usage, but the verb is most certainly used in that way in the US military. Note the weird preposition that can occur here, although it doesn’t have to, at least not in the US. In the poem: On Twitter: I read that all members will be issued with a new card valid for 10 years. On the other hand, it’s perfectly fine without a preposition, too: in Switzerland every single male has to serve in the military between 18-20 years old. they are issued a rifle and keep it after serving (Twitter) Now that DeVos is Secretary of Education will each teacher be issued a rifle to guard against Grizzly bears? #wcedchat (Twitter)
Noun: in the military, your “issue” is something that you receive, that gets distributed to you; in this case, it’s what you get in basic training. That’s typically uniforms, basic supplies, and stuff like that. Here’s an example from Quora: At Army boot camp, the recruits first process in at the reception station. There, they are given their initial clothing issue, which includes BDU’s, dress uniforms, boots, black shoes called low quarters, belts, hats, coats, and even towels, socks, and underwear. Another example: …we all received a complete Navy sea bag issue of clothing. (How I learned about life: Navy boot camp, by Edward Olsen)
Noun: this word can also mean children, offspring, progeny.
…and of course there is an issue in the sense of what Merriam-Webster calls a vital or unsettled matter.

Here’s the third appearance of issue in the poem:

But I think I see your point.
While awaiting a proper issue, we must learn the lesson
Of the ever-important question of human balance.

ball of the foot: a picture will be worth a thousand words here.

Picture source: https://goo.gl/6r8Fgy

Picture source: https://goo.gl/NPwbOk

Picture source: https://goo.gl/xYoId9

to go whole hog: in closing, here’s one that I somehow couldn’t find a way to not use. To go whole hog: Merriam-Webster defines it as to do something in a very thorough and complete way. How I used it: Reed goes whole hog with this one, using it three times in the poem, each with a different meaning, mostly ambiguous even in context.

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