Misspellings you can count on

The official website of the White House is apparently expecting some misspellings of President Obama's name on web searches.

Here's a look at the page's keyword metadata.

<meta name="keywords" content="President, Barack Obama, White House, United States of America, 44th President, White House history, President Obama, Barck, Barek, Barak, Barrack, Barrak, Obma, Barack" />


via ironicsans on Twitter

Whatever your judgment

Yesterday Mark Liberman posted an image (taken by Aaron Davies) of a poster by the National Peanut Board that gives us the "friendly reminder" that "Peanuts are a good source of protein for whatever your conquest."

That's the second line in the ad. I'm pretty sure the first line is 'Why just get through the day when you could conquer it?' but it's cut off halfway through the <q> of what I believe to be 'conquer'.

The use of conquest strikes Liberman as so strange that he jokingly suggests it might be the product of outsourcing to China.

I don't think it sounds so strange. I left a comment saying so. John left a comment agreeing with me. Andrew thinks it's "perfectly normal English" while nat finds it "acceptable" if "slightly cavalier." Josh doesn't object tho he calls the use "unusual." Dave is OK with it but grants it might be awkward.

Some commenters are on the fence depending on prosody and semantics.

Gary writes If I put the major stress on the “ever”, I don’t find the sentence strange at all. and he adds If I use even stress on ever and conquest, the sentence sounds very strange.

Adrian Bailey observes

The problem with “conquest” is that it’s used to describe a completed action rather than an action itself, and in this case it could be taken to refer to a person or thing, rather than to an event.

Otherwise, the construction is sound and the message is gettable. And in the world of advertising its ghitlessness is a plus.

That quality she mentions -- ghitlessness -- means that the phrase doesn't show up in a Google™ search. Each result of a search is a 'ghit'.

Whether a search produces results is important to the phrase discussed here because Liberman uses search results to support his claim that the phrase is odd. It is unexpected to him and to everyone else writing text indexed by Google.

Now note that Liberman never said that this is ungrammatical. He calls it unexpected. He says it's unusual. And it is obviously unusual. The lack of search results is good support of that. The lack of support might even be the definition of unusual. It's just not out there.

But why is it unusual? Conquest is a noun and the form 'whatever your [NOUN]' is out there with several nouns filling the slot.

"whatever your needs" -- 210,000
"whatever your problem" -- 87,200
"whatever your goal" -- 71,800
"whatever your passion" -- 66,700
"whatever your task -- 8,400

Not all of these are the same type of noun final phrase as in the peanut poster. But a raw number for each search is relevant for comparison since a simple search for the conquest phrase brings up nothing.

But what interests me is not that the ad uses a rare phrase. I'm curious about why the phrase is so rare. Because it still doesn't sound so strange to me. Except for the fact that conquest isn't often used in ad copy or in conversational speech. Simple phrases are worth comparing:

"his goal" -- 3,480,000 : "his conquest" -- 246,000
"her goal" -- 973,000 : "her conquest" -- 33,500
"their goal" -- 3,760,000 : "their conquest" -- 175,000

Goal is easier to use without a complement than conquest is. A conquest is either over something or it can be that 'thing' that was conquered. In the ad it looks like the latter. If you conquer the day then the day is your conquest.

Looking for similar words -- prize reward accomplishment -- we find small numbers.

"whatever your prize" : 12 hits
"whatever your reward" : 315 hits
"whatever your accomplishment: 5 hits

In his comment Liberman adds Nowhere on the web does a sentence starting My conquest today is __ or My conquest today will be __ appear.*

Neither will you find a single result for my prize today is or my prize today will be. That surprises me.

So are we looking at a pragmatic constraint? Even tho the statements make sense and even tho they're grammatical people just don't use them. Dips and gaps like that aren't likely to be accidental. Conquests and prizes and rewards are usually spoken of in the past or in definite terms. These hypothetical and anticipatory contexts might be part of the block. But I'm not sure.

I looked at the picture and thought little of it. Liberman's ear must be better than mine. Perhaps I'm permanently scanted out.**

---

*Liberman's comment in response to John is puzzling. He doesn't expect that people read LL only to agree with accept every judgment does he?

**more on this later

Did you mean to vote for...

One of the nice features of Google™ is the spelling suggestion given when a search term looks like a likely misspelling. Above the search results a helpful line in red letters alerts you to a more common spelling for what your search term appears to be.

Type in 'winndows' and you get Did you mean: windows

Type in 'johnny carsen' and you're asked Did you mean: johnny carson

Type in 'conen o'brian' and you see Did you mean: conan o'brian (tho his last name is spelled O'Brien...and misspelling only his last name doesn't offer the correct spelling.)

Note that the misspelled word gets the italic emphasis. That's nicely intuitive.

You've probably also noticed the Sponsored Links in the peach shaded box above search results when the search terms scream I might spend money! Search for 'books' and Amazon jumps up begging for attention. Type in 'stereos' and Circuit City elbows its way in. But these are sponsored and not necessary suggested by Google™.

I recently did an image search for Christopher Dodd and Google™ saw it fit to make the following suggestion

Also try: john edwards

At first I thought the search engine was just throwing out the names of other candidates -- an equal time thing. So I did image searches for all the candidates I could think of.

barack obama -- no suggestion

john mccain -- no suggestion

hillary clinton -- no suggestion

mitt romney -- no suggestion

rudy giuliani -- no suggestion

fred thompson -- no suggestion

bill richardson -- no suggestion

john edwards -- no suggestion

tom tancredo -- no suggestion

ron paul -- no suggestion

sam brownback -- no suggestion

dennis kucinich -- Also try: dennis kucinich wife elizabeth kucinich

Much as the spelling suggestion italicizes the respelled word, the additional or changed term gets bolded in these suggestions.

These "Also try" offerings only work in the image search. I can imagine that most searchers would appreciate images of Elizabeth Kucinich more than images of her husband Dennis. And I can imagine that searches for images of Elizabeth are more common than searches for images of Dennis. But what's going on with Dodd→Edwards?

Is politics really all about the hair?

All roads lead to...

About a week and a half ago Polyglot Conspiracy posted a list of the keywords that have led readers to her blog. It's a pretty good list. Then just earlier this week Mr. Verb reported finding a new eggcorn in his keyword list. One surfer used "lame mans terms" probably intending "layman's terms" (tho 'intending' is problematic because of the nature of snowclones).

Getting a good statistics counter makes for some fascinating graphs and a lot of easily wasted time. You have to wonder what some people are expecting to find. Several months ago I mentioned that one searcher stumbled on my site asking "what's a good dare for a gf?" I'm not sure he got any ideas from the blog but he might have been curious to try some of that freaky 'uvular frication' we like to talk about.

This is a cheap post. Still I'll not post all search terms because most of them make perfect sense. Quite interesting are the common search terms that bring in a steady flow of readers. Some of the most common search terms and phrases:

• supercalifragilisticexbealidocious lyrics [and this is by far the most common spelling--of course that's the spelling I commented on so I might be missing all the searches for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious]


• pronunciation of nabokov


• pronunciation of favre


• houshmandzadeh pronunciation


• adewale ogunleye


• -ology words [often asking for a list]


• hoi vey [about 20 times more common than 'oy vey']


• alphabetical principle


• jeep, q-tip aspirin [and several other brand names that illustrate eponymy]


• did alex trebek say the new world translation was the most accurate [this common query is apparently related to some Jehova's Witnesses propaganda claiming that the translation is so widely regarded to be superior that it even made it onto Jeopardy! as a question. I'm not sure if this is official JW propaganda or just a folk-argument]

Two of the most common searches since this blog got going:

• howl /wail /pee /sweating /working /scream meaning /laugh like a banshee


• ironic vs ironical [and often the question 'is ironical a word?'

Some typos searches I don't quite understand:

• "colorless green ideals bade" [what does this mean?]


• "3 i's lesson plan for high school english the topic is verb" [what are the 3 i's?]

Some searches are extremely clear--tho I'm surprised someone felt the need to ask so specific a question:

• "what part of speech is "very" in the sentence: after the game tome was very tired."

And then there are those searches that I just don't know what the searcher could have been hoping to find.

• i have to pee

Me too. but I already know what to do about it.

The owl vowels

Some days I step into the cyber office and the flurry of activity is obvious. Footprints from all over the world are leading up to my doorstep.

One of the nice things about putting up a blog is the freedom to be responsive to readers. One of the nice thing about good statistics software is the insight it gives us into what readers/visitors are wanting to know. Several months ago I put up a list of the ADS Word of the Year finalists. Web searches for "plutoed" and "Cambodian accessory" had all sorts of strangers standing in my foyer.

Another spike was in response to the mousetrap stunt that still baffles me.

The latest spike has to do with the IPA transcription of the owl diphthong.

Here's an answer: I transcribe owl as either [aʊl] or [awl].

Here's a question: Why is this such a popular search term right now? Are students around the world all cheating on the same final exam? Did the Democratic debate pose this as one of its questions? Did Alex Trebek ask this during Teen Week?

Here's some more information: the one we should ask about diphthongs is John Wells. He has written about them before and even in response to some of my questions. A while back I asked him why he prefers the two vowel transcription rather than /ow/ or /oʷ/. He wrote on his blog

I use the two-vowel-symbol notation for English diphthongs because the diphthongs behave as single indivisible units. A vowel-plus-glide notation would imply the identification of the first part of the diphthong with one of the simple (non-diphthong) vowels. If the nucleus of English goat is taken as /Vw/, what is the /V/? It could be (BrE) /ɜː/, the vowel of bird, or /ɔː/ the vowel of thought, or /ɒ/ the vowel of lot, or /ʌ/ the vowel of strut, or /ə/ a schwa. In this context there is no phonemic contrast between these vowels, and no strong reason to choose one solution over the other. By treating the diphthong as indivisible we avoid facing this false choice. (This concerns its phonological analysis. We still have to choose a notation for it in transcription.)

He further explains that the superscript W is not a possible notation of the /o/ because it indicates labialization and the vowel is already labialized.

Although I saw the superscript notation used by my phonology II professor, I like Mr Wells' correction enough to discard the convention.

It's also worth noting that the symbol is a tool. Symbols are not facts and in phonology sometimes they don't even represent facts. They represent analyses of the facts. It's a fine line but an important one.

I still haven't seen Gilroy

I like to look through my stats every once in a while (read: 6 times a day) to see who has been coming to my page. I use StatCounter to tally the visitors. It's a good meter. One of my favorite features is the Recent Visitor Map. But what I follow most are the keyword statistics. The counter provides a link to the pages that refered people to your page. When the visitor comes from a search engine the search terms are reported.

The search terms that have led the most visitors to my page have been related to banshees and the pronunciation of babel. There was a short time when pluto/ed and Word of the Year brought in a gaggle of Googlers. Burr in reference to winter and cold has been a steady term for a few months now.

Some searches are amusing. A few days ago someone came to my page asking "what's a good dare for a gf?" Use your imagination buddy. You'll come up with something. I have considered posting a little text box in the sidebar giving the most amusing search term of the week.

Today's find is not a search term but a page. Apparently there's a Pig Latin Google out there. Click here to take a look.

I notice on the search button that somebody named Peter probably designed the theme. I also notice that Google is never converted into Pig Latin. There are probably two reason for this.

1) The integrity of the trademark must be preserved. This is the prime directive.
2) Something about Ooglegay might not be quite right for mainstream marketing.