AI Smackdown - Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I already blogged about my Android phone—not the way a professional critic would, but in terms of what’s actually interesting about it, which to me is the Artificial Intelligence angle.  Actually, “artificial stupidity” was the point:  a phone playing dumb so it can play favorites.  I’ve also blogged a bit about AI in general, with Apple’s Siri agent as a case study, but that was before I had an iOS device.  Now, I own all three platforms:  Moto/Android; Siri; and Microsoft’s Cortana.  In this post I compare and contrast them: not because I’m going to help you choose, but to try to make you laugh.  And you might have something interesting to scratch your head about later.

(I’m not going to try to differentiate between the terms Google Now, Android, and Moto.  They all meld in my mind.  If somebody protests that there are massive differences, I won’t be offended if you go read his or her blog instead.)

Cortana

I’ll start with Cortana because it can be dispatched very quickly.  If you type something into the Cortana field in Windows 10, it does a Bing search.  Bing is a little bit like using a Curad bandage instead of a Band-Aid, or using Hunts ketchup instead of Heinz, or wearing Sears Toughskins jeans instead of Levi’s.  It just isn’t done.  I don’t actually care if Bing works just fine.  It’s Bing, which means it’s not Google. “Let me Bing that for you.”  Give me a break.

Moreover, before you can get into the voice recognition stuff, you have to deal with this frightening disclaimer:

Yes, I know all this meddlesome snooping is just to “tailor the experience,” but it’s the online equivalent of your tailor saying, “To get the fit right on these trousers, I’ll have to reach in and fondle your balls.”  The explicit information Windows wants to use is bad enough, but that wide-open phrase “and other information” is just over the top.

Besides, “Cortana” sounds like a new model of Hyundai.  You know what Microsoft?  It’s over.  You lost.  You’re just a PC software company.  Stop trying to act “mobile.”

Android/Moto

I won’t go into a lot of detail about how well my Android phone responds to voice commands, because a) I already did that, here; and b) as I describe the Siri experience, I’ll compare it to Android/Moto as I go.

The really lame thing about Siri

Imagine if, before engaging with a person, you had to go push a button on the person’s chest.  In most cases, this would be absurd.  (With my kids, who never hear my commands, it would actually be an improvement.)

I think it almost goes without saying that voice response is a minimum requirement for any kind of AI.  The Siri demo I watched way back in 2012 did feature voice activation on the iPhone.  But oddly enough, for the Siri voice response to work on the iPad, the iPad has to be plugged in to an electrical outlet.  That is just so bizarre!  I mean, the iPad’s portability is the whole point, isn’t it?  What’s next for Apple:  an iPhone you plug into an RJ-11 jack?  This is ridiculous.  If I’m sitting at a desk next to an electrical outlet, I might as well be using a laptop.

There’s something else really lame about the iPad:  a limitation that hasn’t existed on an Apple product since the Apple II computer.  But I’ll get into that later.  Better to keep you in suspense.

Siri voice response:  up to snuff?

In general, Siri tries to have a bit more personality than Moto.  For example, if I ask my Droid, “Do you love me?” it shows me a song called “Do you love me?” by the Contours.  (My younger daughter, who has not seen “Her,” put me up to asking this question.)  When I asked Siri if she loved me, she responded, “I respect you.”  And when (again at my daughter’s behest) I asked Siri, “Have you ever gone to the bathroom?” she replied, “Who, me?”

Is this cheekiness a good thing?  Well, Siri’s responses may strike you as funnier that Moto’s.  On the other hand, when I asked my Droid about using the bathroom, I got a list of hits pertaining to using the wrong restroom (i.e., the one intended for the opposite sex).  It was a very funny list, linking to some amusing sites.  (You may be wondering:  have I ever used the wrong restroom?  Well, yes, once, purely by accident.  I was in there doing my business and thinking, “What kind of public restroom doesn’t have urinals?”  When the answer suddenly came to me, I hightailed it right on out of there.)

Sometimes Siri’s personality gets in the way.  For example, I asked Siri, “What time is it?” and she responded, “At the third stroke, it will be 16:26.  Beep.  Beep. Beep.”  This was more confusing than amusing, and besides, it was inaccurate:  the actual time was like 4:25:30.  I would rather Siri have a more reliable connection to the NIST Internet time servers than a zingy response.

If your desk is as cluttered as mine, being able to summon your phone by voice is very handy.  When I call out my keyphrase for my Droid, it makes a pretty loud two-tone beep to let me know it’s listening.  The iPad beep is much quieter.  Neither device responds in any useful way to the question, “Where are you?”  Siri says, “Wherever you are, that’s where I am.”  This isn’t that funny, and for most people wouldn’t even be true.  (I bring my iPad, Droid, silverware, and all other valuables with me wherever I go, so don’t bother burglarizing my house.)

 This is where these devices are inconsistent.  Their programmers need to decide if the device should have a sense of self or not.  Siri speaks in the first person (e.g., “Who, me?” and “I respect you”), but when I say, “Hey Siri, how’s your battery doing?” she has no idea what “your” means.  She replies, “My apologies ... I couldn’t find those stocks.”  Pretty useless.

When I tell my Droid, “Find my phone,” it makes this cool sonar sound continuously until I find and silence it.  When I tell Siri “Find my iPad,” she tries to make me turn on Location Services.  Look, Siri, if I could do that, I’d know where you are, and I wouldn’t be asking.

I’ve often thought that one of the most useful features of voice response would be getting help configuring the device.  So I said, “Hey Siri, turn on your flash.”  She replied,  “Who, me?”  I decided some context might help, so within the camera app I said to turn on the flash.  Siri replied, “It doesn’t look like you have an app named ‘flash.’  If you’d like, I can help you look for it on the App Store.”  I just don’t think this is that difficult a concept.  You have a camera.  It has a flash.  Turn it on.

The Droid does respond to “Take a selfie.”  It ought to say, “I can’t,” because its camera is basically its face.  But its reaction, which is to launch the camera, put it in selfie mode, and set a self-timer, is actually fairly useful, at least for the hands-free breed of narcissist.  When I tell Siri “take a selfie,” she says, “You’ll need to unlock your iPad first.”  This isn’t very helpful, and in fact isn’t even true.  As my older daughter discovered, the iPad can be used as a camera even by somebody who lacks my fingerprint and passcode.  And when I follow Siri’s instructions and unlock the iPad, it does go into camera mode, but not selfie mode.  As regards this command, Siri is fairly incompetent.

Something that bothers me about my Droid’s AI is a certain lack of resourcefulness.  When I ask it, “How do I look?” I think it should activate the camera in selfie mode, to use as a mirror.  Or It could really wow me by saying, “Your hair is a mess.”  (When you consider modern digital camera technology, which can tell if a subject’s eyes are closed, this hairdo check actually seems quite doable.) 

I asked Siri, “How do I look?” and she really stumbled.  She kept hearing, “How do I luck,” which she should have automatically revised because it just doesn’t make any sense.  One time, she thought I asked, “How do I lurk?” and replied, “I found something on the web about ‘how do I lurk.’ Check it out.”  That’s really unfortunate.  I wonder what kind of banner ads and spam I’ll get now that the Internet thinks I’m a stalker.

Finally Siri heard me right and replied, “Judging by your voice, I’d say you must be fairly attractive.”  Clever, but also kind of patronizing.  I mean, it’s bad enough asking an inanimate object such a personal question, but to be damned with faint praise ... that’s pretty pathetic.  I think Siri should be generous and say, “I would so go to bed with you.”

At least Siri respects my privacy.  When I said, “Get me home,” she replied, “I don’t know your home address.  In fact, I don’t know anything about you.”  I found this really reassuring, especially after Cortana’s attempted shakedown earlier.  (Yes, Siri did ask me to go into settings and identify myself, but didn’t require it.)

I have to say, though, there’s something a bit creepy about Siri.  When I ask something complicated, such as a question regarding navigation, there’s this little blurry light that bounces back and forth along the bottom edge of the screen, which reminded me of something sinister.  After racking my brain for awhile I realized what:  the single roving eye of a Cylon from “Battlestar Galactica.”  Is Siri some kind of kindred spirit to the AI powering the Cylons?  If so, that doesn’t reflect well ... the Cylons were really pretty stupid.  They always went down like bowling pins.

Another creepy thing:  when I said, “Hey Siri, lock my iPad,” she replied, “I’d like to, but I cannot.  My apologies.”  This almost gave me chills.  It brought me right back to the HAL 9000 in “2001 – A Space Odyssey,” when Dave says, “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” and HAL replies, “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.”  Who is Siri’s master:  me, or Apple?

Feature parity with Moto?

If I were designing Siri, or working on an update package, I’d pay close attention to what the competition is doing.  I’d make sure, for example, that anything Moto could do, Siri could do better.  This evidently hasn’t occurred to Apple, because there are all kinds of commands Moto can handle that Siri cannot.  For example, if you ask Moto, “What’s up?” it will trawl through your appointments, e-mails, etc. and give you an update.  I asked Siri “What’s up?” and she said, “I’m thinking about pie.  Mmmmmm.” 

If you tell Moto, “Talk to me,” it will announce incoming calls and texts for the next 30 minutes.  This doesn’t occur to Siri, who responds, “I’d really prefer it if you talked to me.  Tell me your hopes, your dreams, where you’d like to make a dinner reservation.”  So I told Siri, “I hope my dinner is yummy tonight.”  She replied, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I hope my dinner is yummy tonight.’  How about a web search for it?”  Not a very good listener, since she specifically asked me to tell her my hopes!  Just lip service.  I said, “I dream of being rich and famous one day,” and got the same “I don’t know what you mean” response.

I said, “Hey Siri, play Beethoven on YouTube.”  She replied, “You don’t seem to have an app named ‘YouTube.’ We could see if the App Store has it.”  Don’t play dumb with me, Siri!

I asked Siri to zap my screen (which is how Moto is told to take a screen snapshot).  Siri kept hearing “zapped my screen” (which resulted in a web search) and then eventually heard “zap ice cream,” and—bizarrely—pulled up a Dairy Queen in Beulah, North Dakota.  I’m not kidding.

Since screen snapshots are really useful to bloggers, I kept trying:  “Hey Siri, take a screen snapshot.”  To my great surprise, Siri didn’t play dumb, but simply refused:  “That’s beyond my abilities at the moment.”  Huh?  No way is this beyond her abilities.  I managed to learn (no thanks to Siri) how to get a snapshot (pressing two far-flung buttons at once).  So it can be done.  Why can’t Siri do it?  Is she a bit ... simple?

You may be wondering how I know so many cool Moto commands.  It’s because you can say, “Get a list of commands,” and Moto provides one.  I told Siri, “Get a list of commands” and though—as you can see—she did hear me right, she decided just to show me a map of the nearest Coast Guard station.  WTF!?

Is Siri the best at anything?

Okay, I’ve been pretty harsh on Siri here.  Is she better than Moto at anything?  Well, yes.  I think her navigation is better.  I just asked Moto, “Where is the nearest pizza place?” Moto replied, “Here are the listings for ‘nearest pizza place’ within zero point eight miles.”  The nearest place—Gioia Pizzeria—was listed first among non-paid entries, but at the top of the screen was an ad for Little Caesars $5 Pizza, which a) isn’t nearby, and b) isn’t even pizza.  (I don’t know what that stuff is, but it ain’t pizza.)  Meanwhile, if I were trying to get this answer without having to look at my phone—like, if I were driving—this written response would be useless.  (At least Moto did better than when I first blogged about this, when it lied and said Zachary’s Pizza was the closest.)

Here, Siri did better.  She replied, aloud, “The nearest one I found is Gioia in Berkeley, which averages 4½ stars and is inexpensive.  Would you like to try it?”  Presumably if I’d said yes, she’d have navigated there.  Instead I said, “Actually, Siri, it’s pretty expensive.”  To which she replied, “I’m sorry.”  Well played, Sir[i]!

It’s in the realm of a more specific request where Siri really shines.  I asked, “Where’s the nearest deep dish Chicago style pizza place?”  She showed me Zachary’s, which is correct.  I’m pretty impressed, especially since when I asked Moto the same question, it showed me Giordano’s and Lou Malnati’s, both of which are in Chicago.  As you can see, Moto clearly heard “nearest” correctly, but somehow missed my meaning.

The second really lame thing about iPads

Earlier I complained about how you have to plug in the iPad to get voice activation, and promised to reveal another huge shortcoming.  I doubt you’ll immediately grasp how lame this next one is, but here goes:  Apple iOS doesn’t support the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is  more efficient than QWERTY and has been supported by Apple since the Apple IIc.  According to Wikipedia, the IIc  “had a mechanical switch above the keyboard whereby the user could switch back and forth between the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout.... The IIc Dvorak layout was even mentioned in 1984 ads, which stated that the World’s Fastest Typist, Barbara Blackburn, had set a record on an Apple IIc with the Dvorak layout.”

                                                               

I haven’t been able to find anything on the Internet about why Apple decided not to support Dvorak on the iPad.  I guess the default answer for their product choices—“Because we’re gods, and we can do whatever we want!”—will have to do.  It’s so frustrating, since this has got to be really simple to do in software.  It would probably take some Apple developer about five minutes.

But why should you care, since you type on QWERTY anyway?  Well, consider the security ramifications of encouraging third party developers to create such fundamental utilities as keyboard software.  After installing Fleksy, a free Dvorak-enabled app, I messed about with the iPad a little, wandered off to do something more useful, and then realized, “Duh, I’ve just done something really stupid.”  What better way to steal somebody’s keystrokes than to create an app that quite obviously has access to everything I type?

At first I told myself this was no big deal.  After all, I’m mainly using the iPad to browse the web, and I don’t kid myself that my every move on the Internet isn’t already tracked, and not just by the NSA.  (By the way, keep up the good work, guys!  Thanks for keeping me safe!)

But of course, there’s the little matter of passwords.  I felt like I’d just given away the keys to the kingdom, or at least to the two websites I’d logged into (my bank and my e-mail).  I was all set to go change those two passwords, but first decided to see how hard it is to switch iPad keyboards on the fly, so going forward I could type passwords with the native Apple iOS keyboard.  Perhaps there would be a function key right on the soft Fleksy keyboard to simplify this switch?  And then I noticed this:

It might be hard to tell, but in the first snapshot above, the cursor is in the Username field.  In the second snapshot, the cursor is in the Password field.  The same flag that tells the OS to obscure the password (i.e., showing ******* instead of what’s typed) tells the iPad to switch to the standard Apple iOS keyboard.  So those passwords I typed before? I’d typed them on the standard QWERTY  keyboard without even realizing it.  Those passwords weren’t at risk of being intercepted by the Fleksy keyboard app after all.  That’s pretty clever of Apple, isn’t it?

Of course, when your cleverness only serves the mitigate the downside of your pointless shortcoming, it’s actually a lot less impressive.  Hey Apple, why not support the Dvorak layout to begin with, like you did with the Apple IIe, the Apple III, the Macintosh, the Quadra, the PowerBook, the Performa, the iMac, the iBook, and the MacBook?

At the time of this writing, Apple is sitting on over $200 billion in cash.  Couldn’t they spend a few bucks to match the features of their own earlier products?  Hell, they could probably get an unpaid intern to do it.  I, for one, am not feeling the love ... even if Siri does claim to respect me.

Other albertnet posts on A.I. 

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

The Trouble With English

Introduction

I have an English degree. This leads a good number of people to assume that I have above-average knowledge of grammar, and these people are not wrong. However, I think the link between an English degree and knowledge of grammar is a lot more tenuous than most people think. The number of college courses that taught me grammar was exactly zero. (Only one grammar class was offered and I didn’t take it.) I know a lot of grammar because I’ve studied other languages; such study requires more of a structural approach than kids take when learning to talk.

Having struggled with Russian, French, and Latin, I came to appreciate what was easy about them and what was not. My general impression has been that whatever difficulty I had, these languages are easier to learn than English (though French is impossible to pronounce). In this post I’ll examine just a few of the things that make English so hard: the absurdity of English spelling; the impossibly vague unwritten rules; and the challenges of pronunciation, slang, and jargon. Along the way I’ll offer up some examples of warped English sentences, mainly for your amusement.

Is English really that hard?

Yes, it is. Consider the following insert that came with an electric mosquito repeller my mom bought back in 1992. (Yes, “repeller” actually is a word, even though my word processing program flags it as a misspelling.)

Mosquitoes frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night, They are externely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the most annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito‑increase or "Electrified Mosquito Killer" are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. . . . According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitos are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel‑It' is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitos to repell female mosquitos away.

Beyond its laughable gaffs, that passage struck a chord with me because I once lost a spelling bee because of the word “mosquito,” which I thought was spelled “misquito.” (Another time I lost on “maize,” not understanding the clue “The Indians called it maize.” Had my pugnacity been fully developed back then, I’d have said, “Excuse me, but whether you mean Native Americans or persons from India, they’d have used a word from their own language for whatever they were talking about. That you couldn’t have meant ‘labyrinth’ is not at all clear and I deserve a new word.” But I digress.)

In the repeller insert, “they disturbed our sleep” seems ridiculous, but then, whom are we talking about, anyway? I’d have used a different verb and the pronoun—“they disturb your sleep”—but this formation is also easy to find fault with. To somebody new to English, the use of the present tense to imply habitual behavior is far from obvious, and “your” suggests that the writer of the insert has met the reader, which of course isn’t the case. The unwritten rules of our language seem so sensical, and yet they’re completely arbitrary. And that word I just used, sensical? Of course it’s not a word. How come things can be nonsensical, but not sensical? Because. Just because.

The absurdity of English spelling

As I note my children’s various misspellings I appreciate afresh how easy it is to guess wrong at the spelling of an English word. At school my daughter Lindsay was assigned to draw a monster than then write about it. She wrote, “He is Rushen.” When I first read this I thought, gosh, my daughter sure is stupid! But then I thought, wait, why does “R-u-s-s-i-a-n” make any sense? That ought to spell “Russ-ey-an.” Lindsay’s spelling actually makes more sense.

Now, my more patriotic readers might try to blame this crazy spelling on the Russians themselves, but of course they would spell it “русско,” which is pronounced “ROOSE-koh.” And it’s spelled totally phonetically: the “р” makes an “r” sound, the “у” makes an oo sound, the “с” makes an “s” sound, the “к” makes a “k” sound, and the “о” makes an “oh” sound. These letters always make these sounds; the Russian “с” is always an “s” sound, never a “k” or “z” sound, and so on. None of this “-tion” or “-sion” nonsense for the Russians; they have a letter, “ш,” that makes the “sh” sound. Latin is similarly consistent in its spelling; in fact, if you see two “u”s together (e.g., in the handy phrase “ignis fatuus”), you pronounce both the “u”s: “ig-nees fat-oo-oos.”

Next in my exhibit of hopeless English spellings is the street name “Gough” in San Francisco. Nobody I knew when I lived in that city could produce a definitive pronunciation of this street name. It could rhyme with bough, through, cough, tough, or even the second syllable of “borough.” It could be “Gow,” “Goo,” “Goff,” “Guff,” or “Go.” All we can say for sure about “Gough” is that the second “g” doesn’t make a “g” sound. I mean, why should it, right?

My final evidence about the hopelessness of English spelling is the existence of the heteronym. A heteronym is a pair of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, like “tear” (that rolls down your cheek) and “tear” (to rend something). I know of seventy-eight of these double-words in the English language, most of which you can find on the Heteronym Homepage. (One they missed is “entrance,” the way in, vs. “entrance,” to put into a trance.) The only way to know how to pronounce an instance of a heteronym is by context.

We think of the English language as phonetic, but it barely is. Our spelling rules are really more like tendencies. In Lindsay’s classroom the teacher has posted a large collection of “word wall words”—that is, words that cannot be sounded out and must simply be memorized, like multiplication tables. Some people are better at this memorization than others—hence the many English speakers you encounter who are no good at spelling.

Impossibly vague unwritten rules

In the mosquito repeller insert was the phrase “very disgusted.” If this didn’t make you chuckle, what’s wrong with you? After all, we all know (once we stop and think about it) that “disgusted” is a word with a built-in sense of the absolute. Similarly, I know a fellow from Hong Kong who often uses the phrase “extremely delicious,” which I’ve actually adopted myself due to its delightful oddness.

Scanning a bulletin board at a Laundromat ages ago, I came across a handwritten ad for the services of a “reliable French young man.” I found it impossible, upon reading this, to prevent the song “International Bright Young Thing” from invading my head and lingering there. I can imagine that no native English speaker would let “reliable French young man” go by without at least a raised eyebrow. Surely you would immediately see that a more correct order would be “reliable young French man” or “reliable young Frenchman.” And yet nowhere in Strunk & White does it say, “Any adjective specifying nationality must be placed immediately before the noun it modifies.”

It’s also curious to note that it’s intuitively obvious that “French man” can be shortened to “Frenchman,” while “German man” cannot be shortened to “Germanman.” It really only works with French. From the standpoint of accepted linguistic forms, you can shorten Chinese man to “Chinaman,” but you never, ever should because it’s disparaging, obviously.

And even if we eliminate the “French” aspect of the Laundromat ad, there’s a right and a wrong way to order the adjectives. The phrase “reliable young man” sounds totally fine, but not “young reliable man.” The placement of adjectives officially matters in French: a word can have a totally different meaning based on whether it precedes a noun or follows it; “propre chemise” means “my shirt” whereas “chemise propre” means “clean shirt.” In English it’s assumed the adjectives can go in any order, but that’s not really the case if you want to sound like a native speaker, as the Laundromat ad shows. Is this subtlety taught in grammar class? I think not. Latin, meanwhile, offers not only the opportunity to put adjectives in any order, but every word in a sentence in any order. You could write a sentence on a piece of paper, cut the paper so each word is its own scrap, and rearrange the scraps any old way and the sentence would still make sense.

You might wonder why I capitalize Laundromat. Well, originally I didn’t. My spell-checker caught that. I looked it up, and it turns out to be a trademark, like Band-Aid. So we capitalize it, just like we capitalize Dumpster, Jacuzzi, and Lycra, even if we’re using the word to refer to a general thing, rather than a specific brand. Is this a hard-and-fast rule? No, we don’t capitalize aspirin, bundt cake, cellophane, escalator, or zipper, though they all derive from trademarks as well. Why don’t we capitalize them? We just don’t. (In the case of zipper, the B.F. Goodrich company sued—unsuccessfully—to protect its trademark. Whom did they sue? I don’t know. Look it up.)

One unwritten rule that continues to confuse my kids is that verbs of desire should be rendered in the hypothetical subjunctive. Now, before you take my kids’ side on this, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Instead of “I want a snack,” they should say, “I would like a snack.” And of course they should say “please.” In my household, “I want a snack, please” isn’t good enough. The “please” in that instance sounds tacked-on. “I would like a snack, please” is close enough to “May I have a snack, please?” that I’ll accept it. Why does the hypothetical subjunctive convey humility and politesse? Beats me.

Then there are the words that only exist in certain comparative forms, as with my “sensical” bit above. For example, you can be overwhelmed, and underwhelmed, but never just whelmed. You can be overbearing, but not underbearing. You can understand something, and you can stand something, but you can’t overstand something. A library book can be due, or overdue, but not underdue. You can be incognito, but not cognito. I’m not the first person to point these out so I won’t dwell on them. I’d just like to make the point that we pretend this language is modular—that is, we can tack on prefixes and suffixes as we please—but it’s just not the case.

There are countless other unwritten rules, of course, but I just saw you checking your watch so I’ll move on.

Pronunciation, slang, and jargon

I group pronunciation and jargon together because they’re both examples of how a language can seem deliberately designed to stymie the outsider. All languages are guilty of this to a greater or lesser degree. Perfect mastery of a vernacular is like membership in an exclusive club.

I can’t say whether English is particularly hard to pronounce, at least when compared to the French who seem to speak without the use of their teeth or hard palette. The French somehow weasel out of most consonant sounds. They have a strange knack for beautifully speaking a language that sounds awful on a foreigner’s tongue. But English has its own difficulties, and not just the famous “th” sound that the French cannot make.

The most subtle (but undeniable) unwritten rule of pronunciation I can think of in English is the tendency to put emphasis on a specific word in a two-word phrase, consistently. (I describe this at length in my post about how to write a sonnet.) There is a right way to pronounce “hot,” and a right way to pronounce “dog,” and—this is the weird part—a right way to pronounce “hot dog.” You accentuate the first word, not the second: “HOT dog.” (The exception is if you’re expressing great delight and excitement: “Hot DOG!”) Another phrase like this is “boy scout”: always “BOY scout,” never “boy SCOUT.” Another is “TRASH can.” Another is “BIG time.” There are probably hundreds of phrases like this; they’re hard to come up with until you hear a foreigner get one wrong.

Obviously all languages have slang, but I suspect English could be the worst offender (or greatest innovator, depending on your perspective), because it is widely thought to have more words than any other major language. And the very existence of Cockney rhyming slang shows a willful desire to make language more complicated (but also more fun) through obscure word substitutions. (I realize that my assertion of English being more slangy is the most fragile one I’ve made, and quite possibly completely untrue. I’m baiting somebody to call me out on it.)

Slang would be no problem for newcomers to a language if the natives didn’t use it unconsciously. But we do. For example, I was watching bike race coverage recently and the Irish commentator (and bike racing legend) Sean Kelly kept using the word “ride” in a special sense I’ve only recently come to understand. “Ride” in this context doesn’t just mean to ride a bike; it means riding aggressively and pedaling really hard as opposed to tucking behind other riders and trying to conserve energy. Kelly is presumably speaking to a very wide viewing audience and may well fail to realize he’s using a highly specific connotation of a very general word here.

It’s easy for me to appreciate how subtle “ride” is in this context, but other cycling slang has become second nature, to the extent that I don’t even realize I’m using it. For example, I was talking one of my wife’s friends, a newcomer to cycling, and was surprised when she didn’t know what “drop” means, as in “I dropped him” or “don’t worry about getting dropped.” I thought everybody knew this.

The vernacular causes trouble when a writer is trying to educate a large and diverse population and, though trying to be clear, buries the reader in highly specialized terms. This unconscious use of jargon is what can make owner’s manuals and computer messages so hard to understand. Many a creator of such texts, through failure of imagination, sells short his audience. In the course of a single workday, I was nonplussed by three such puzzles. Here is the first:

What does “share” mean in this context? What would that look like? What would happen, on my screen, if I selected “Nobody”? Isn’t sharing with nobody the default behavior—i.e., what I was already doing? By the logic of this menu option, shouldn’t there be a button labeled “Simply exist”?

Check out this error message:

This was annoying because it popped up instead of whatever I had hoped would happen on my screen. (I can no longer remember what I was trying to do.) It’s frustrating, in such situations, to have as my only recourse a button to click that says “OK.” OK? No, it’s not okay! What are our children learning, through computers, about the meaning of the word “OK”? Perhaps this explains why, whenever I tell one of my daughters to do something, she says “OK” but does nothing. I always thought she was consenting to my command; now that I think about it, saying "OK" is just the non-PC equivalent of making my window go away so she can get back to what she was doing.

The last of the error messages was truly perplexing:

Whatever the difference is between the Outlook Address Book entries and e-mail addresses in contacts, it’s not obvious here. A colleague commented, “That is like saying, ‘Adding lettuce to a salad is prohibited.’” Amen.

Owner’s manuals can be even worse. (I’m not even completely satisfied with the term “owner’s manual.” Who is this mythical “owner”? Why can’t they just call it “Your manual”? After all, they go on to refer to you as “you” throughout the manual anyway. It’s not like they say “The owner must gather information about his machine…” and so on.)

When you’re reading about how to set up your new PC device, you can’t just ignore what you don’t understand—you have to grasp what you’re reading or you’ll never get anywhere. You’re depending on the comprehensibility of that manual. So it was when I set up my new printer.

(A quick note about my printer. It’s not an expensive one. The manufacturer probably lost money on it in the short term. It’s really just a delivery mechanism for very expensive ink, according to the “first time’s free, kid” revenue model perfected by Gillette. Note also that I do not have a lot of ink stashed away here: only what came with the printer. You’d be much better off breaking into the home of someone who blogs about his iPad.)

So. The printer. I was quaking with fear at the setup process, because the last time I did this, for my mom, I failed. Nothing worked right, and the manual and help menus were worthless. Printers are a bitch. (Imagine that sentence, “printers are a bitch,” from a learning-English point of view. It’s not “printers are bitches.” It’s not “a printer is a bitch.” It’s “printers are a bitch.” How can multiple printers be one bitch?)

The manual I got is actually pretty well written. The setup process is pretty complicated, but the directions didn’t generally lead me astray. But there were some very perplexing bits. For example, in the part about removing the countless bits of orange tape securing everything for shipping, there was this note: “The tape and protective materials may differ in shape and position from what they actually are.” Wait. So you mean to tell me that as intimidated as I already am about this printer, there will be shape-shifting going on? “See this tape? It’s tape, right? No, look now—it’s a flower!” (I suspect they meant to say, “The tape and protective materials may differ in shape and position from what is shown here.” But if this is the case, why didn’t they just say so?)

The next troublesome point: “A USB cable is necessary to connect the machine with your computer (USB connection only).” Normally, context can help with these things, but it’s a wireless printer. Ignoring for a moment the parenthetical part, the basic statement is that the cable is necessary. (The fact that the printer doesn’t come with this cable is immaterial; printers have never come with cables, due to the “gouge them” revenue model.) Anybody could be forgiven for being misled by this statement into thinking the cable is necessary, especially since the parenthetical bit only seems to reiterate the rest of the statement. This is the kind of tautology you could get lost in for days. If you called the help desk for advice, the conversation could get really weird:

[Consumer] “It’s a wireless printer but it says here ‘A USB cable is necessary to connect the machine with your computer (USB connection only).’ Does that mean I need a USB cable?”

[Help desk] “No, the USB cable is only necessary when you’re using the USB cable.”

[C] “But I don’t have to use the cable?”

[HD] “No, you don’t have to.”

[C] “So why does it say I do?”

[HD] “You only need to use it if you’re going to use it. If you were going to use the cable but didn’t connect the cable, you wouldn’t be using the cable.”

[C] “Which would be a problem because…?”

[HD] “Because it was your intention to use the cable.”

[C] “Was it?”

[HD] I don’t know—you tell me!”

Of course this hypothetical dialog is completely unrealistic because the help desk person, regardless of his or her nationality, wouldn’t be nearly this articulate.

The last confusing bit is this: “Additional computers on the same network It enables the computer to use the machine.” I have tried and failed to figure out where this one went wrong. My first theory is that there’s simply a period missing before the word “It.” But this can’t be, because the first sentence would have no verb—and no object, for that matter. So maybe the word “It” was put in by mistake? No, because then the subject (“computers”) wouldn’t agree with the verb (“enables”). So “It” must belong, but what’s the antecedent? Impossible to tell. And logically, what would additional computers have to do with enabling “the computer” (whichever one that is) to use the machine? Besides, computers don’t use machines—people do.

My (very patient) wife suggested that the point here is that multiple computers can share the machine over a network. Great point, but this point was already made, earlier on the same page: “If the machine is already connected to a wireless/wired connection, it can be used from additional computers on the same network.” Despite the needlessness of “already,” and the strange yin/yang of “wireless/wired,” and the use of “connection” where “network” makes more sense, this is a pretty clear statement. Why follow it up with the totally muddled one? I can only assume that the technical writer here is paid by the word.

I only wish that I were paid by the word—I’d be rich now. And on that note, I shall end this post mid-

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