Comments on: Why the “millionth word” story is silly http://www.thenameinspector.com/why-the-millionth-word-story-is-silly/ Tells you what makes names tick. Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:36:26 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Benjamin Lukoff http://www.thenameinspector.com/why-the-millionth-word-story-is-silly/comment-page-1/#comment-120670 Benjamin Lukoff Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:57:08 +0000 http://www.thenameinspector.com/?p=399#comment-120670 Excellent piece, but I do have to take issue with this: "The easiest criticism of the millionth-word story is that Web 2.0 isn’t a word, but a phrase. That’s the main thing that linguist Geoffrey Pullum had to say about the matter on Language Log. And that’s pretty disappointing, actually, because it ignores the fact that the whole enterprise of counting words that precisely is linguistically suspect." Yes, that's what Pullum had to say <i>this</i> time. But they've posted on Language Log many times before this about Payack and his Global Language Monitor shenanigans. Just see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=payack. Yes, fundamentally this is about (heh) definitions. What do you mean by a word? What's your methodology for counting them? Etc. For me, one of the sillier ideas here is that you can figure out precisely when a word — whatever that is — becomes part of the English language — whatever <i>that</i> is. Another silly — or, rather, sad — idea here is that professional journalists are largely taken in by this. I am glad to see you contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way — unlike Mashable, John Battelle’s Searchblog, TechCrunch, and CNN (well, at least the latter gave some good space to linguistics, although Payack got more). http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/10/million.words/index.html Excellent piece, but I do have to take issue with this: “The easiest criticism of the millionth-word story is that Web 2.0 isn’t a word, but a phrase. That’s the main thing that linguist Geoffrey Pullum had to say about the matter on Language Log. And that’s pretty disappointing, actually, because it ignores the fact that the whole enterprise of counting words that precisely is linguistically suspect.”

Yes, that’s what Pullum had to say this time. But they’ve posted on Language Log many times before this about Payack and his Global Language Monitor shenanigans. Just see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=payack.

Yes, fundamentally this is about (heh) definitions. What do you mean by a word? What’s your methodology for counting them? Etc. For me, one of the sillier ideas here is that you can figure out precisely when a word — whatever that is — becomes part of the English language — whatever that is. Another silly — or, rather, sad — idea here is that professional journalists are largely taken in by this. I am glad to see you contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way — unlike Mashable, John Battelle’s Searchblog, TechCrunch, and CNN (well, at least the latter gave some good space to linguistics, although Payack got more). http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/10/million.words/index.html

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