Poll #1462574
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Things I have heard

theferrett just claimed that he'd written a unique sentence, and was a tiny bit proud:

Trillions of English words are spoken daily, in many configurations. At this point, it's hard to put together a reasonable sentence that hasn't already been said by someone else; sure, you can mash together a set of random words like "May I mambo dogface in the banana patch?", but for most of the things you'd want to convey you have to realize that you're trodding a well-worn path.

Every once in a while, though, you get the pleasure of speaking a sentence that you can be almost certain has not been spoken before by any human, living or dead. And then you sit back and such in a deep, happy sigh at making a little notch in the world - even if no one ever sees it, you know that you have been as unique as it is possible for an organism to be.

My contribution?

"I invited my periodontist to play Rock Band: Beatles."

Obviously an amusing throwaway post, but it occurred to me that actually pretty much any sentence over about 9 or 10 words was unique because of how many possible sentences there were. I pointed that out, and he wasn't impressed. I thought I'd reproduce (and lightly refine) the math here, because it's really mind boggling, and really counterintuitive until you see it.

So let's say you have roughly 40,000 words in your vocabulary, counting brand names and proper nouns. That puts the cap on the number of 10 word sentences you could generate at 10^26 assuming no grammar rules. Grammar constrains the hell out of that, so let's say only one in a million of those is a real sentence that someone might say. So we have 10^20 possible sentences.

Ok, on the other side, how many 10 word sentences get spoken or written in a day. Let's say 10 per person, because most of your spoken sentences are short, and the number of words in a sentence is super variable (this sentence has 38, for instance), so 10 words is a pretty small target. But it could be 100 and wouldn't make much difference.

How many english speakers are there in the world? Let's say a billion, which I'm sure is an overestimate of the number that speak english day to day. So that's 10 billion candidates per day, or trillion candidates per year. That's 4*10^12, or to put it another way, it'll take like 10,000,000 years for all the 10 word sentences to be uttered assuming no overlap.

Let's run the calculation backward. English has been around for less than 1,000 years, so let's use that as a starting point. What's the average number of speakers over that time? Can't possibly be more than 100 million, so 10^8 people times 10^3 years times 10^4 10 word sentences per year per person (again an overestimate) and we get 10^15 10 word english sentences uttered throughout history. So for any given 10 word sentence, you have a one in one hundred thousand chance of uttering a previously spoken sentence assuming the language hasn't changed at all in the last thousand years.

The odds only get worse as the number of words goes up. Each extra word adds at least a couple of orders of magnitude to the number of candidate sentences, and maybe quite a bit more. So revel in the fact that every longish sentence you say is unique, yours, and nobody else's.

Watching him learn to talk is my favorite part of parenthood. It's really quite entertaining. He is amazingly talkative and fluent for being 21 months old, but that just leads to amusing conversations like this from today:

J: See Grandpa, wanna see Grandpa.
K: He's traveling right now. He'll be back in a week.
J: Grandpa in Las Vegas, playing poker!

One of the things I keep track of is how long his sentences are. Most of his sentences are 3 or 4 words, with up to 5 being fairly common, the occasional 6, and rarely a 7. But in the last week and a half, he's had two eight word sentences:

J: I want to drive it all night long.

Now, that one might not count for two reasons. First, he actually said "wanna" instead of "want to", though he knows the two separate words so I think it counts. Second, though, that's actually a song lyric from Life is a Highway, which he loves and we were just listening to. So... yeah, nice memory, but not a real sentence. However, a couple days later he said:

J: You want to put it on the table.

Again with the "wanna", but a legitimate 8. "You" there refers to him, since he hasn't quite figured out pronouns. It's tricky: when we say "you" around him, we pretty much always mean him, and when I say something like, "Want me to pick it up?" "me" always refers to Daddy and not Jackson.

On the other hand, sometimes we correct him, and he definitely understands that something's not right about the whole thing, as evidenced by conversations like this:

J: You want to go outside!
D: I do?
*pause*
J: Jackson wants to go outside!

He's also starting overgeneralization, which I'd been expecting but hadn't seen yet. Actually, the same day as the song quote above, our lunch partner, a pediatrician, had asked if he'd been doing it yet. I said no, but that week I started noticing it.

Overgeneralization is when he figures out a grammatical rule, like to make something plural you should add an -s to the end, or -ed puts something in the past tense, but then applies it to words that are irregular. Last week he emitted:

J: The mans leaved!

What's interesting about that is that he had both "men" and "left" a couple of weeks ago, and replaced them with the incorrect "mans" and "leaved". What this means is that he used to have separate mental dictionary entries for "man" and "men", but now he's combined them into one entry and is applying the rule to make a plural. Eventually he'll update the entry to reflect that it's irregular and it'll all be good.

One thing I wished I knew where to find is the distribution of language acquisition among children. It's easy to find a good list of average development by age, where Jackson can do most of the three year old milestones and some of the four year old ones, so it's clear he's quite advanced for his age. What I don't know, though, is how unusual that is. Is language development high enough variance that it's not remarkable that he's so far ahead? Or is he some kind of linguistic super genius?

My guess is neither, that his ability is rare but not incredible. But I'd still like to know. I suppose I'd have to ask an actual scientist in the field, since that sort of thing is hard to google.

Jackson has recently acquired two word phrases. I think his first one was "fire truck", which could just have been a compound word except for his pronunciation was more distinct than his other two syllable words, with a noticeable gap between the two words. Soon after that he started putting together a whole bunch of them. What I find interesting is that they seem to have a kind of grammar to them, related to ours.

For instance, he'll say "car come" meaning "the car is coming", or "back hurt", or "more strawbah" (strawbah means strawberry), but he'll never say the opposite. So you never hear "hurt back" or "come car". I think this is because "hurt" for him is a verb -- he's saying his back hurts, and you would never say your hurts back.

So one theory could be that he has the pattern N V as a sentence, a noun followed by a verb. His V N sentences seem much more rare. He sometimes says "put it" and "put there", but never "put N" -- "put" is always followed by a pronoun. Still, pronouns function as nouns, so that counts as a case of V N. Note that put is obligatorily transitive: you have to follow it with an object and a location. He clearly gets that put takes a location ("there") and an object ("it"), and sometimes he'll repeat "put it there" though he seems not to say it on his own. It's kind of hard to tell, though, since his pronunciation isn't always very clear. Is "putih deh" "put it there", or just "put there" with some sloppy pronunciation?

His phrases do encompass all parts of speech. Along with N V and V N, he also has noun-particle, "pick up"; noun-adjective, "potato hot" or "train fast" -- though never the opposite, which means these are probably predicates, like "the train is fast", only without the verb; and one I don't know how to classify, "bye bye Grandma", since I have no idea what part of speech "bye bye" is. The bye byes are very funny because they almost always happen shortly after the subject has left earshot, so we hear them but the Grandma doesn't.

His parroting has also drastically increased. He's started mimicking longer words, mostly nouns, like Hidden Villa, "hivilla", or astronaut, "atohtot". Every day he mimics several new words, but mostly they don't stick. He'll repeat them if you ask him to, but won't generally emit them unsolicited. New permanent words are more rare, maybe more like one per day or slightly less.

Watching him learn language is really fun. More fun for me than his learning to walk, possibly because I have some linguistics training. And also because language is much harder than walking.

In linguistics, there's a now-discredited theory called the Sapir-Worf hypothesis that suggests, in its strong form, that the language we speak can influence the kinds of thoughts we have. For example, if your language lacks a name for a certain color, you won't be able to distinguish that color from similar ones. This is the theory behind Newspeak in 1984, and it worked about as well there as you might expect in real life, which is to say not at all.

In poker, though, I think that the language of analysis has changed in the last decade, and it's had a real impact on the game. Here are some terms that didn't exist, or at least that I wasn't aware of despite reading books and RGP, 10 years ago:

• Hand distribution. This is a common term used to describe the set of hands someone would do a particular action with. As in, "He just called preflop and then check-raised the flop, so his distribution includes a lot of suited connectors that hit draws, small sets, and almost no overpairs." The idea certainly existed, but talking about it was more clumsy.
  
• Polarized distribution. You get in situations, especially in no limit, where someone likely has either a monster or a bluff -- their distribution is polarized, and they can't have a medium strength hand. This means that calling with top pair and calling with a set are about the same, and yet people frequently do different things with those two hands. Identifying those situations is easier if there's a term for it.
  
• Floating. This means calling (usually with position) a bet postflop, planning to steal if shown weakness on a later street. My friends and I used to call this "the Nate play" after the guy who taught it to us. It's much more well-known now.
  
• Continuation bet. A completely standard play, but was it called this? I certainly didn't use the term.
  
• M, Q, and inflection points. These are tournament analysis tools that the best players had and understood, but the second tier did not. Now there's a popular book out that talks about them, and I see online discussions that reference them. They aren't as well known as some of the other terms, as far as I can tell, but still much more understood than ten years ago.

None of these terms describes concepts that didn't exist, but wrapping up the concept in a neat little word package makes it easier to talk about. And because of that, cardplayer articles talk about them in a way they never did before. And I think you see more players thinking about the game differently.

Of course, I may have cause and effect backwards here. Perhaps people are just thinking at a deeper level in general, and that drives term creation.

Man do Eskimos have a lot of words for snow, though.

I recently read a post from the The Volokh Conspiracy about whether homosexual is an offensive term, and gay should be used instead.

I think that the way to decide which to use is to look at how the terms are used and see if there's a difference in meaning. Certainly in casual conversation, almost nobody I talk to ever uses the word "homosexual". I've never heard any of our numerous gay friends say anything but "gay". Similarly, when you look at columns from conservatives who are anti-gay, they almost never say "gay" but always say "homosexual".

However, it could be that "gay" is the casual term, and "homosexual" is the formal term. Columns or speeches are inherently more formal than conversation, so you would expect a higher incidence of "homosexual" in columns or speeches regardless of a difference in meaning. The New York Times has a topics section on the matter called Times Topics: Homosexuality. "Homosexuality" is not quite the same as "homosexual", since there is no equivalent informal term ("gayness" not seeing much use), but it is so similar that by association it seems to make "homosexual" more palatable. Noted conservative gay columnist Andrew Sullivan seems to use both terms. Note that in the most formal writing, that of medical experts, "homosexual" has been (almost) entirely discarded as a description of behavior; the usage now is apparently "men who have sex with men" or "MSM", because medicine is interested in capturing behavior rather than outlook -- there are men who have sex with men who would not identify as gay, for instance.

Perhaps a small empirical study will help matters. If you search for phrases that are likely to be used by pro-gay or anti-gay groups, will you see a difference in distribution? Based on (notoriously inaccurate) query term counts in Y! search (or Google), I find the following:

• "gay rights" beats "homosexual rights" by 30:1. This is probably colored by the gay rights movement, though, which made the phrase mainstream.
  
• "homosexual agenda" beats "gay agenda" by almost 3:1. Tellingly, of the top 10 results for "homosexual agenda", 7 are from conservative anti-gay organizations, 2 are liberal responses to anti-gay organizations, and the last one is wikipedia. Several of the hits for "gay agenda", on the other hand, are gay-friendly travel sites on Y! (kind of odd, really, even if that's the name of the trip), whereas Google shows an assortment of antigay writings. Since the agenda terms seem to correlate with antigay writings, it seems that the right uses "homosexual" more frequently that "gay".
  
• "gay marriage" beats "homosexual marriage" by 5.3:1
  
• "gay friendly" is very common, but "homosexual friendly" has less than 1000 hits, and the top 10 are almost all antigay. The top 10 hits for "gay friendly" are all either pro gay or news articles.
  

It seems to me from this that there is indeed a difference in distribution between "gay" and "homosexual", which seems to suggest that the latter is much more heavily used by conservative writers, where "gay" is used by everyone.

There seems to be another dimension, though: for this speaker, there is a large difference in tone between the noun and adjective forms of the words. A statement about "homosexuals", or to a lesser extent "gays", seems to be to be more aggressive and more likely to be negative than a statement about "homosexual men". This is intensified if there's a definite determiner: "the homosexuals" is even more negative, and sounds like the sort of thing that would show up in a scare-mongering speech involving agendas and exhorting thoughts of the children. "The gays" is also likely to be used negatively than "gay men", which sounds very neutral to this liberal.

From all of this I conclude that "homosexual" is ambiguously antigay, especially as a noun, while "gay" is neutral-to-positive. There is some direct research to back this up. From an article on the New York Blade, which I gather is a gay interest newspaper:

Every May since 2001 a Gallup poll asked Americans “In general, do you think homosexuals should or should not have equal rights in terms of job opportunities?”

The yes responses are as follows: 2001: 85 percent; 2002 86 percent; 2003 88 percent; 2004: 89 percent; 2005: 90 percent/87 percent; and 2006: 89 percent.

Note the two percentages given in 2005. That year, Gallup asked half the respondents about equal rights for “gays and lesbians,” resulting in a 3 percent higher approval compared with the Galllup’s typical use of the term “homosexual.”

What is fascinating to me is that both terms once had very negative connotations: homosexuality was a psychological disorder for years, and for centuries, bible-thumpers have denounced homosexuality. However, "gay" was an epithet for a long time as well -- during my childhood, it was a common negative term which could be applied equally to wimpy boys, bad food, losing a game, or any undesirable object or event. It, along with "queer", seems to have been reclaimed by the gay community.