Senator Grassley’s side business in childhood psychiatry

From this article on conflicts of interest in medicine comes a hum-dinger of bad writing. I’ll defer to Josh for a more syntactically informed analysis and just point out that the most natural reading of the following sentence has “he” referring to Senator Grassley rather than Biederman, the intended referent:

In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007.

On the value of paper on which something of greater or lesser value than the paper itself is printed: A short, and probably poorly conducted, corpus-based study of a possibly nonsensical idiom

Following a link from Greg Mankiw’s blog, I was a bit surprised by the following apparently odd idiom in this New York Times article on ‘rent stabilized’* apartments (emphasis mine):

These fortunate souls also know that their leases… are worth far more than the paper they are written on, should the landlord or a developer decide to buy tenants out.

Well, I thought, of course the leases are worth more than the paper they’re printed on. How much could the paper itself be worth, anyway?

Wondering if the reporter was using the idiom in a silly way (i.e., incorrectly), I language logged “worth more than the paper” and “worth less than the paper” and found that the former returned “about 209,000 results” while the latter returned “about 109,000 results,” suggesting that I was wrong.

However, a brief look at how the two phrases are used indicates that it is, as I expected, more common to use either phrase with the assumption that paper is not worth much. In fact, it seems most common to use it in questioning the value of money and degrees.

The google n-gram viewer tells us that “worth more than the paper” has usually been more frequent than “worth less than the paper”, but without knowing the broader context of either, it’s difficult to say much more than that. But, hey, a chart makes this seem scientific, so:

A search of the corpora of contemporary and historical American English(es?) produce no results for “worth less than the paper” and two (each) for “worth more than the paper”, in both (both) cases with the understanding that paper is not worth much.

From an NPR interview: “Otherwise, they’re not worth more than the paper they’re printed on, and I don’t want to believe that.”

From the Washington Post: “For years, educators in Virginia, Maryland and the District — like their counterparts nationwide — have talked about moving to a system of rigid graduation tests to ensure that a high school diploma is worth more than the paper it’s printed on.”

From a New York Times editorial: “No policy statement, however, is worth more than the paper on which it is written unless it is carried out with decisiveness and expertness by a staff determined to build for the future rather than to lament the passing of the status quo.”

From The Nation: “King Hussein’s outspoken denunciation of the terrorists and their actions? ” the work of sick and demented minds, ” according to the Hashemite King — have given Israeli leaders, including Golda Meir, some confidence that a formal peace agreement, if indeed necessary, can be worth more than the paper it is written on.”

Okay, so I was right and the ‘rent stabilization’ article writer was goofy. Case closed, and smugness earned.

Except that one last little bit of research suggests that the origin of the phrase has the goofy construal. From the wikipedia article on Samuel Goldwyn:

Some famous Goldwyn quotations are misattributions. For example, the statement attributed to Goldwyn that “a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” is actually a well-documented misreporting of an actual quote praising the trustworthiness of a colleague: “His verbal contract is worth more than the paper it’s written on”…. Goldwyn himself was reportedly aware of – and pleased by – the misattribution.

So, it seems that the nonsensical version came first and can still be found, even though the sensical version is more common and, well, makes more sense.

– Noah

* The phrase ‘rent stabilization’ seems like a pretty silly euphemism for a price control, but this isn’t a post about economics, so I’ll just leave it at that.

[cross-posted at Source-Filter]

Syntax for phoneticians

Not syntax in any theoretically interesting way, mind you. More an issue of style and clarity.

From Kessinger & Blumstein (1998), an exemplary instantiation of unclarity and infelicitousness: “The increase in syllable duration found for syllables beginning with both voiceless and voiced stops, however, is attributable only in part to increases in VOT.”

Read the paper in vain. You’ll find nary a single syllable beginning with both a voiceless and voiced stop, much less a plurality of them.

– Noah

[cross-posted at Source-Filter]