Noncompositional

Stephen Dolan had a simple question: what is the center of Wikipedia? That is, if you look at a graph of all the articles in Wikipedia with all the links between them, and see which is (on average) closest to all the other articles. In doing this he came up with a great tool that finds the shortest distance between any two Wikipedia articles (that existed at the time he downloaded them). Lets see what the results are for Spinach to Cataphora: Spinach — Asia — Arabic language — Pronoun — Cataphora

Because links in Wikipedia are one-way, it’ll be different going the other way: Cataphora — Linguistics — Brain — French cuisine — Spinach

And interestingly, the results are rather different for anaphora. It’s sort of interesting if you’ve picked two lower level articles to see what sort of strange connection happens as you go “up” the hierarchy (which in my experience is usually what happens; I haven’t seen a lot of traversal among more leafy levels to get from one specialty article to another) — like the connection from brain to French cuisine: go figure! Now I don’t know what happens when there are multiple, equally short paths – my hunch is that alphabetical order is involved, but I haven’t looked into it.

My personal best is eight links: from kinship to Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination.

As far as I can tell, the term desktop computer originated as a way to designate a computational device that could fit on a desk, as opposed to the larger variety that, my elders tell me, took up entire warehouses and required something like an entire army Santa’s elves to operate. Now, though, the more common distinction is with laptop computer.

Now, a laptop is also called a notebook computer, and while I’m not sure exactly what the differences in usage are, there are some cases where you would use one term and not the other. For one, there is a variety of computer called the subnotebook — not the sublaptop. If I had to guess, I’d say that laptop is on a par with notebook computer, but that just plain notebook requires a (little, to be sure) context to be used normally.

Okay, great. So we have {desk/lap}top and then notebook. Then Intel comes along and starts calling the ultraportable, intenet-oriented laptops like the Asus Eee netbooks, presumably to both indicate the functionality and minimal (ahem) differences with full-fledged notebooks. So, what do you call a non-portable, on-the-top-of-the-desk computer with processing capability approximating that of a netbook? Perhaps it will have a word like, say, desk in it? No: they’re nettops. I guess the salience of notebook/desktop is enough to trump the laptop/desktop distinction, and so -top has, at least here, come to mean “desktop.”

Let’s talk the maxim of quantity. It’s one part of Grice’s cooperative principle that has most certainly withstood the test of time. (Don’t know who Grice is or why he came up with the maxim of quantity? As usual, check out the free encyclopedia as a starting point). The maxim is:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The first part is really the crucial (the second part could probably be subsumed by some other of the maxims). One often-studied consequence of this maxim is what is called scalar implicature. Say you ask me how many cats I have, and I say “I have three cats.” If I have less than three, I’m lying; but if I have more than three, then I’m not strictly untruthful, but I’m certainly being uncooperative (if I hear “you must have three cats to qualify for VIP membership” I assume that having four or five is sufficient as well). That is, in many cases expressions of quantity are taken to be exact specifications.

The principle extends beyond numbers, though, to a sort of nebulous idea of “specificity” – that is, one should be as specific as required (but not too much). If one is less specific than people usually tend to be, something special is usually implicated. If I say “I drive a vehicle to work every day,” you might be inclined to think it’s not a car; If I say “I work in a man-made structure downtown,” something similar might happen. Now I will present a story that, I think, illustrates that people actually do this.

Someone I know had some car trouble the other day, and he called AAA for help. He said where he was and described to the dispatcher what he was wearing. They sent a tow truck out, but after driving around the area for a while and seemingly not seeing him, he flagged down the driver. The driver apologized — for not being able to help random people who flag them down! After my friend explained that he was in fact the person who called in, the truck driver said:

Oh, they told me to look for someone wearing a green jacket, not someone wearing an A’s jacket

That is, if the dispatcher knew he was wearing an A’s jacket they would have said so, it being a good identifying characteristic. He apparently took “green jacket” to mean “green jacket that’s not an A’s jacket.”