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The authors assert that the ngram statistics for "said" are wrong, and imply that they have evidence of the contrary, but they don't provide the evidence. Looki

by tensor 3y ago

The authors assert that the ngram statistics for "said" are wrong, and imply that they have evidence of the contrary, but they don't provide the evidence. Looking at their own website, all they provide is google ngram statistics: https://www.etymonline.com/word/said#etymonline_v_25922 https://www.etymonline.com/word/said#etymonline_v_25922. This coupled with the huge failing of not displaying zero on the y-axis of their graph, and even interpreting the bad graph wrong, makes me not believe them at all. A very low quality article.

lolc 3y ago
A decline to half the usage of "said" within 6 decades, followed by a recovery to the previous level within two decades? Show me evidence that the English language changed so fast in that way. It's extraordinary and you'd have to bring something convincing. Otherwise I believe their hypothesis and their conclusion that ngrams are bunk. Yeah they interpreted the "toast" graph wrong. They should be more careful to read shitty graphs that cut off at the low point.
- pixelesque 3y ago
  It's possible (but I think unlikely) it could be somewhat due to different usage of words than the English language changing completely (which clearly didn't happen). i.e. maybe instead of lots of books having direct text like "David said" or "Dora said", over time there was a trend to use a different more varied/descriptive way of describing that, i.e. "David replied" or "Dora retorted"?
  - lolc 3y ago
    Yea there may be a shift in usage hidden in those numbers. As this article laments, we can't use ngrams to measure the develpment of usage between said, replied, and retorted.
- tensor 3y ago
  It depends entirely on what the data set is, and to conclude that it's "wrong" you'd have to consider the underlying data too. Google ngrams makes no claim to be a consistent benchmark type data set. Over time the content its based on shifts, which can cause effects like this. To make any sort of claim like "this word's usage changes over time" in an academic sense you'd need to include a discussion of the data sources you used and why those are representative of word usage over time. The fact that they'd even try to use google ngrams in this way shows how little they actually researched the topic. Google ngrams is a cute data set that can sometimes show rough trends, but it's not some "authoritative source on usage over time" and it doesn't claim to be. The authors, on the other hand, are claiming to be authoritative and thus the burden of evidence on their claims is far far far higher. I didn't even get into their completely unobjective and vague accusations of "AI" somehow doing something bad. Ngrams don't involve AI, it's simple word counting.
  - lolc 3y ago
    The way I read it, the article was a rant about how people shouldn't be using ngrams to prove things.
  - ramblenode 3y ago
    > The authors, on the other hand, are claiming to be authoritative and thus the burden of evidence on their claims is far far far higher. From what I read the authors are only claiming that some Google n-grams fail the common sense test and that the data shouldn't be considered rigorous. "said" is in the top 300 most frequent English words, according to Wiktionary. For its usage to halve in 80 years then double again in 20 would represent a profound shift in English that would certainly be known to linguists. Or, as with "toast", one could simply doubt the veracity of the data.
  - ehaliewicz2 3y ago
    According to this page (https://books.google.com/ngrams/info https://books.google.com/ngrams/info), if you want to write a paper based on their results (why would you do this against a cute dataset?) make sure to quote their very authoritative sounding paper "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books"
coldtea 3y ago
A low effort comment. That "said" haven't declined and raised the way shown isn't what needs evidence. It's the extraordinary claim that it has that does. That claim is Google's, and before accusing the author of the blog, maybe how representative their unseen dataset is. Should we take statistics with no knowledge of their input set at face value because "trust Google"?
- tensor 3y ago
  Google isn't claiming any such statement. It's merely providing fun statistics based on their data set. With that context, when I read a headline claiming that the statistics are "wrong," it would imply that the counts are somehow off. Maybe due to a bug in the algorithm or the like. Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data. It's cheap and snobby grandstanding, ironically complete with faulty interpretations of the little data they DO present.
  - mattigames 3y ago
    But Google is claiming such thing by calling it "trends", which the dictionary defines as "a general direction in which something is developing or changing.", if they didn't want to create such misunderstandings they would just call it "word frequency on Google books" so the biases of the data would be a lot more clear.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >fun statistics based on their data set. It should be marked "Fun statistics" with a big red label "Not representative of anything, any graph you see could be and probably is totally bogus" then. >Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data. A, blame the victim and goalpost moving. Old favorites. Why the fuck would the author need to "provide alternative data"? Google is showing statistics, that people, including journalists and scholars, take at face value. Now they're suddenly just "fun statistics", so if they take them seriously, it's on them?
prepend 3y ago
It’s hard to present evidence because there’s only one source. So the article basically calls out flaws in the methodology of Google Books/Ngram. I think this is reasonable. As otherwise we end up accepting things that exist solely, but are flawed. Just because something exists and is easy to use doesn’t mean it’s right. Just like the answer to “the most tweeted thing is X therefore it is most popular and important” does not require a separate study to find the truth. It’s acceptable just to say “this is a stupid methodology, don’t accept it just because that’s what twitter says.”
wrsh07 3y ago
I think what you want is for someone (yourself, me, the author) to review newspapers or some similar source and determine how the frequency percent changes over time for the word "said". This is a reasonable request, but I also think it's fine for the author to state it _as an expert_ that newspapers continued using said at a similar frequency. The story they tell us plausible, and I don't really think the burden of proof is on them.
lolinder 3y ago
EtymOnline isn't in the business of tracking shifts in the popularity of words over time, they set out to track shifts in meaning. So it's understandable that they don't have any specific contrary evidence in their listing for "said". As for why they don't include the evidence in TFA, as others have noted, it's the extraordinary claim that "said" dropped to nearly 1/3 of its peak usage that needs extraordinary evidence backing it up. It's plenty sufficient for them to say "this doesn't make any sense at all on its face, and is most likely due to a major shift in the genre makeup of Google's dataset".

by tensor 3y ago

lolc 3y ago

A decline to half the usage of "said" within 6 decades, followed by a recovery to the previous level within two decades? Show me evidence that the English language changed so fast in that way. It's extraordinary and you'd have to bring something convincing. Otherwise I believe their hypothesis and their conclusion that ngrams are bunk. Yeah they interpreted the "toast" graph wrong. They should be more careful to read shitty graphs that cut off at the low point.

pixelesque 3y ago
It's possible (but I think unlikely) it could be somewhat due to different usage of words than the English language changing completely (which clearly didn't happen). i.e. maybe instead of lots of books having direct text like "David said" or "Dora said", over time there was a trend to use a different more varied/descriptive way of describing that, i.e. "David replied" or "Dora retorted"?
- lolc 3y ago
  Yea there may be a shift in usage hidden in those numbers. As this article laments, we can't use ngrams to measure the develpment of usage between said, replied, and retorted.
tensor 3y ago
It depends entirely on what the data set is, and to conclude that it's "wrong" you'd have to consider the underlying data too. Google ngrams makes no claim to be a consistent benchmark type data set. Over time the content its based on shifts, which can cause effects like this. To make any sort of claim like "this word's usage changes over time" in an academic sense you'd need to include a discussion of the data sources you used and why those are representative of word usage over time. The fact that they'd even try to use google ngrams in this way shows how little they actually researched the topic. Google ngrams is a cute data set that can sometimes show rough trends, but it's not some "authoritative source on usage over time" and it doesn't claim to be. The authors, on the other hand, are claiming to be authoritative and thus the burden of evidence on their claims is far far far higher. I didn't even get into their completely unobjective and vague accusations of "AI" somehow doing something bad. Ngrams don't involve AI, it's simple word counting.
- lolc 3y ago
  The way I read it, the article was a rant about how people shouldn't be using ngrams to prove things.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  > The authors, on the other hand, are claiming to be authoritative and thus the burden of evidence on their claims is far far far higher. From what I read the authors are only claiming that some Google n-grams fail the common sense test and that the data shouldn't be considered rigorous. "said" is in the top 300 most frequent English words, according to Wiktionary. For its usage to halve in 80 years then double again in 20 would represent a profound shift in English that would certainly be known to linguists. Or, as with "toast", one could simply doubt the veracity of the data.
- ehaliewicz2 3y ago
  According to this page (https://books.google.com/ngrams/info https://books.google.com/ngrams/info), if you want to write a paper based on their results (why would you do this against a cute dataset?) make sure to quote their very authoritative sounding paper "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books"

coldtea 3y ago

A low effort comment. That "said" haven't declined and raised the way shown isn't what needs evidence. It's the extraordinary claim that it has that does. That claim is Google's, and before accusing the author of the blog, maybe how representative their unseen dataset is. Should we take statistics with no knowledge of their input set at face value because "trust Google"?

tensor 3y ago
Google isn't claiming any such statement. It's merely providing fun statistics based on their data set. With that context, when I read a headline claiming that the statistics are "wrong," it would imply that the counts are somehow off. Maybe due to a bug in the algorithm or the like. Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data. It's cheap and snobby grandstanding, ironically complete with faulty interpretations of the little data they DO present.
- mattigames 3y ago
  But Google is claiming such thing by calling it "trends", which the dictionary defines as "a general direction in which something is developing or changing.", if they didn't want to create such misunderstandings they would just call it "word frequency on Google books" so the biases of the data would be a lot more clear.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >fun statistics based on their data set. It should be marked "Fun statistics" with a big red label "Not representative of anything, any graph you see could be and probably is totally bogus" then. >Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data. A, blame the victim and goalpost moving. Old favorites. Why the fuck would the author need to "provide alternative data"? Google is showing statistics, that people, including journalists and scholars, take at face value. Now they're suddenly just "fun statistics", so if they take them seriously, it's on them?

prepend 3y ago

It’s hard to present evidence because there’s only one source. So the article basically calls out flaws in the methodology of Google Books/Ngram. I think this is reasonable. As otherwise we end up accepting things that exist solely, but are flawed. Just because something exists and is easy to use doesn’t mean it’s right. Just like the answer to “the most tweeted thing is X therefore it is most popular and important” does not require a separate study to find the truth. It’s acceptable just to say “this is a stupid methodology, don’t accept it just because that’s what twitter says.”

wrsh07 3y ago

I think what you want is for someone (yourself, me, the author) to review newspapers or some similar source and determine how the frequency percent changes over time for the word "said". This is a reasonable request, but I also think it's fine for the author to state it _as an expert_ that newspapers continued using said at a similar frequency. The story they tell us plausible, and I don't really think the burden of proof is on them.

lolinder 3y ago

EtymOnline isn't in the business of tracking shifts in the popularity of words over time, they set out to track shifts in meaning. So it's understandable that they don't have any specific contrary evidence in their listing for "said". As for why they don't include the evidence in TFA, as others have noted, it's the extraordinary claim that "said" dropped to nearly 1/3 of its peak usage that needs extraordinary evidence backing it up. It's plenty sufficient for them to say "this doesn't make any sense at all on its face, and is most likely due to a major shift in the genre makeup of Google's dataset".