On "Welcome to the Internet"

I interrupt the regularly scheduled (linguistics/data/stats) programming to bring you a special message about a topic which has been really bothering me. This blog is my primary venue for writing publicaly about anything, so even though Anita Sarkeesian's project on Tropes vs. Women in Video Games doesn't fit into any of my usual topics, I'm going to write about it here.

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I think most people will have heard about what's going on here. Anita Sarkeesian puts together an excellent video series called Feminist Frequency which offers accesible feminist critiques of movies, TV shows, etc. She set up a Kickstarter project to help fund research and production of a new video series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Grames. The project was a great success, raising over 26x the original goal, but the backlash from people on the internet has been really vile. You can look over a summary of links about the issue here.

I'm not writing about how vile I think the backlash is. Instead I'm writing about how much some people's reactions to the backlash have bothered me. I've read some of these online, and had them come up in conversation. They fall into a few categories.

"We can disagree without being disagreeable"

I have not heard one person in a respectable forum defend the backlash against Sarkeesian. However, I have heard a lot of "you might disagree with what she says, but you can do so in a civil manner." But at this moment, nobody can disagree with what Sarkeesian says, because she has not, in fact, said it yet. The whole backlash is not against what she said about misogyny in video games, but rather against her stated intention to say anything about misogyny in video games. What we are looking at is simply unvarnished hatred, and its exponents cannot make pretentions to having intellectual differences of opinions. That would require careful consideration of Sarkeesian's points, which again, is impossible, because she hasn't even had the opportunity to put them forward yet.

"Welcome to the internet"

I've heard more than one person say "welcome to the internet" about the harassment Sarkeesian is experiencing. As if what is happening to her just happens to everybody. A porn bot following you on twitter is a "welcome to the internet" moment. A spam comment on your blog including links to purportedly cheap viagra is a "welcome to the internet" moment. What we're observing with this backlash is not a "welcome to the internet" moment.

Even if we limit the discussion to the trolling comments on her blog and YouTube pages, the magnitude and intensity of the comments are already far beyond the average person's experience. And as Jay Smooth pointed out, it's also the case that members of marginalized groups tend to have a much worse experience with trolling like this. So this isn't just your plain vanilla internet, it's one that is especially bad for for people who are already marginalized IRL.

But we can't really limit the discussion to high volume trollish comments. We have to also bring in the vandalism of her Wikipedia page, which included adding a lot of porn. We also have to bring in the meme-ification of her image with the goal of specifically attacking her in specifically sexual ways. We need to bring in the fact that people are sending her explicit threats of rape and violence. And we also need to bring in the creation of a flash game that invited the player to beat Sarkeesian's face in. This last one is especially disturbing to me, because I've been reading a lot of guys talking about how much they want to hit her. To quote YouTuber MundaneMatt (linked here just to provide substantiating evidence, I wouldn't advise visiting it):

She's got those eyes that make you just want to punch her in the face.

And to quote a user's review on Destructoid of the flash game (I'm not even linking to it this time):

The voice acting isn’t the best at riling up the player, especially as her videos do this quickly anyway.

We are far far outside the realm of "welcome to the internet" and deep into the very dark, very real topic of silencing women with rape and violence.

And of course, there's the internet vigilantism. Her site has been DDoS-ed, there have been attempted hacks of her e-mail and various social networks, and she's been dox-ed (her personal address and telephone number posted online). This is the kind of treatment reserved for people dubbed villains by the internet. It is more than atypical, it is specifically reserved for the worst of the worst. By no means is it "welcome to the internet." And what did she do worthy of being treated like such a villain?

I think it is justified, given the evidence, to say that what is happening to Anita Sarkeesian is uniquely bad, and it is happening to her because she is a woman.

The Mos Eisley Gambit

Closely related to "welcome to the internet" is the Mos Eisley Gambit, which is simply stating that on the internet at large (and in YouTube comments specifically) "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." This more and more easily believable the more you read about the Sarkeesian backlash.

But, I'm sorry, don't a lot of the same people who deploy the Mos Eisley Gambit also have a lot to say about how the internet is the future of free and open discourse? Wasn't there a whole collective kumbaya moment just a few months ago where "the internet defeated SOPA"? Wasn't the whole SOPA thing a backlash against the possibility government censorship? Isn't the goal of the backlash against Sarkeesian to censor her? You can't have it both ways. You can't go around hailing the internet as a revolutionary space for free communication (a human right even) that must be protected at all costs, and be so flip about what's happening to Sarkeesian.

And what's more, the residents of this hive of scum and villainy don't actually live in the internet. The trolls, vandals and harrasers are not internet pixies, they are real actual people. The images of Sarkeesian's likeness being raped by video game characters didn't just pop into existence of their own accord. A person, someone's next door neighbor, son, brother, sat down and spent time drawing the damn thing, and e-mailed it to her. The hive of scum and villainy is actually the real world we're all living in, and it's just reflected in the internet. Trolls are people too, and that's exactly the problem. You don't get away from the racist YouTube commenters by going outside, you ride the bus with them. Which is why, I think, hateful trolling is a worthwhile thing to worry about. It's not just about silly things that happen on the internet. It's about the attitudes and actions of real people who we all interact with every day.

Question: Work on -ly-less adverbs

I think I'm going to ask general information gathering  questions that I have about linguistics research here on my blog, rather than as Facebook or Twitter posts. Then, I can add the answers I get back to the post.

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What research is there on -ly-less adverbs? I think the most common one that comes up is "personal," as in

• Don't take it personal.

Here are two more real life examples (the second one I heard just today, hence the question):

• I go to South Jersey occasional.
• I need a cigarette desperate.

I have some vague intuitions about restrictions on the -ly-less forms. Specifically, I think they're only possible post-verbally, so

• *I personal took it.

And I doubt we'd ever see it with a sentential adverb, like

• *Hopeful, we'll find an answer.
• *We'll find an answer, hopeful.

But then, I don't really trust my intuitions, because I would have also rejected the "occasional" and "desperate" sentences above, which I heard come out of real people's mouths.

So, anyone know of any research on the topic?

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Update
People came through for me! First, Mercedes Durham pointed me in the right direction on Twitter.

@JoFrhwld Hoping I'm not the 10th to say this: Tagliamonte and Ito in JSoc 2002 looked at it in York UK + Opdahl's 2 books r mentioned there
— Mercedes D (@drswissmiss) July 5, 2012

The Tagliamonte and Ito paper provides a great introduction to the topic of -ly~ø variation in adverbs. First, in the long view of history, the -ly adverbs are the innovation creeping in, not the zero forms. Here's how I understand it worked. There used to be a morpheme -lic which was used to create adverbs from nouns.

• friend + lic
• man + lic

And there was a separate morpheme -e that created adverbs from adjectives.

• direct + e
• open + e

Sometimes you'd get them stacking on top of each other

• friend + lic + e
• man + lic + e

And sometimes you'd wind up with the -lic+e morphemes coming together and behaving like one morpheme that turns adjectives into adverbs.

• sweet + lice

This part sounds similar to a more modern situation. We have a morpheme -ate that turns nouns into verbs.

• assasin + ate

And a morpheme -ion that turns verbs into nouns, which sometimes stacks on top of -ate.

• delete + ion
• assasin + ate + ion

But sometimes, we get -ation coming together and acting like one morpheme that turns verbs into nouns.

• cause + ation (*causate)

Anyway, back to Old English. At some point the little -e morpheme that turned adjectives into adverbs got lost (probably as part of a larger language change that dropped a lot of word final unstressed e's). At that point, adjectives and derived adverbs just all sounded the same. That is, derived adverbs were all zero forms. But then, the fused form -lice started being used to make adverbs in more places than it used to be, and it eventually changed in pronunciation to modern day -ly.

On these historical issues, a lot of ink has been spilled including a whole two volume series on just this case of variation in adverb formation, and a few book chapters.

Tagliamonte & Ito also provide a lot of cool examples from other studies, like these ones from Appalachian and Ozark English (Christian, Wolfram & Dube, 1988).

• I come from Virginia original.
• It certain was some reason.

Their own study was on a large corpus of speech from York, Enland. After treating really separately (they argued the patterns in really had more to do with its use as a special intensifier and less to do with adverb formation), they found basically no age effects, but working class men strongly favored the zero form compared to everyone else.

As for language internal effects, they completely excluded preverbal adverbs as being invariantly -ly forms (per my intuition, but not per that one example above from Appalachian English). After that, the found that the concreteness of the verb had the strongest effect, with concrete verbs favoring the zero form a lot more than abstract verbs.

I noticed that both the examples that I felt were interesting enough to take a mental note of above involve abstract verbs + zero form adverbs. Maybe the fact that abstract verbs disfavor zero forms is what made them jump out at me.

Allison Shapp pointed me to work she's doing on -ly~ø variation in American English, and specifically (if I understood the poster right) African American English. They've found a big effect of education, where higher education favors more -ly form, and that African American speakers, who are likely to be speakers of African American English, favor the zero form.

So! That was a fruitful information gathering adventure! This is a really cool variable!

Have you been in a Wawa's?

I would like to pre-empt all discussion here by saying that this blog post is strictly motivated by linguistics, and has no relevance to the US presidential election.

This video of Mitt Romney speaking about his experience in a Wawa has been floating around my newsfeed this week.


Full Disclosure: Wawa is my convenience market of choice.

What strikes me most about this video is the fact that Romney repeatedly said "Wawa's" even though the name of the store is just "Wawa" with no "s."  First, there's the linguistic issue of why this was such a natural mistake for Romney to make. Second, there's the sociolinguistic issue about why this particular mistake seems so egregious.

On the first point, there is clearly a strong tendency for store names to be formed in the possessive, indicating their ownership (or at least that's the origin). For example, "Macy's" was founded by Rowland Hussey Macy, "Wanamaker's" was founded by John Wanamaker, etc. However, not all stores which have names clearly formed in the genitive follow the ordinary orthographic rules for possessives.  For example, "Starbucks" is named after the Moby Dick character Starbuck, but the official name doesn't have an apostrophe. Similarly, JCPenney, which today isn't formed in the genitive, used to go by "Penneys" according to this logo from Wikipedia, also lacking the apostrophe.

Perhaps this is some kind of specialized "commercial genitive," I don't know.

At the same time, there are a lot of store names which are not formed in the genitive for some reason or another. One example someone brought up to me is "Nordstrom," which has no "s" even though it was founded by John Nordstrom. It's a little mysterious to me why this might be, except its original name was "Wallin & Nordstrom" (as in Carl Wallin and John Nordstrom), and coordination structures wreak havoc on everything. A similar story could be told for "Barnes & Noble."  In fact, the one kind of business that I know to be named after coordinated personal names are law firms (like "Dewey, Cheatum & Howe") which seem to never be formed in the genitive. There's also this blog post from Linguism which discusses the question of which store names get formed in the genitive and which don't, and he concludes that store names which are originally acronyms, like "Asda" and "Tesco" and foreign imports, like "Aldi" are less likely to be in the genitive.

At the same time, there is also a lot of asymmetric variation. People seem to be likely to form an officially non-genitive store name in the genitive, but not vice versa. How many of you would blink if someone said "I went shopping at Aldi's."? But no one would say "I went into a Starbuck."

Update: Ben Zimmer informed me on Twitter that the "Friendly Ice Cream" company officially changed their name to "Friendly's" perhaps because that's what all their customers called them anyway.

@GPHemsley @JoFrhwld @LiteralMinded Friendly changed to Friendly's and Church Chicken to Church's to match common customer (mis)perceptions.

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) June 22, 2012

@JoFrhwld @gphemsley @literalminded Hmm, I may be wrong about Church's Chicken: bit.ly/aPks92 But Friendly -> Friendly's is legit.

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) June 22, 2012

According to this slideshow from the Boston Globe, the name change happened in 1989.

The point of all this is that Romney was wading into very muddy linguistic waters when he started talking about Wawa, and it's not surprising he screwed it up.

Which brings us to the second point: Why was saying "Wawa's" such a big deal? I just said that I wouldn't blink an eye if someone said "Aldi's" and that's basically the same kind of error. But, and I'm trying to speak here as a Philadelphian and Wawa devotee, not as a partisan hack, when I heard him say "Wawa's" my reaction was "Oh, he doesn't know how it works."

In some ways, my reaction was similar to how I feel when someone screws up the correct use of determiners in proper names. For example, if someone said to me "I looked it up on the Wikipedia," I'd immediately know they were uninitiated to the internet. Similarly, if someone said "they were uninitiated to Internet," I'd immediately know they were hopelessly ignorant.

I think what it comes down to is that where there is variation, there is complexity, and where there is complexity, the ability to successfully navigate complexity the right way is an important social signal that you are the right kind of person. Consider, for example, the needlessly complex language surrounding Twitter, and the communal paroxysm of self satisfaction when a politician says "I sent out a twitter to my followers," or refers to the service as "Tweeter."

I don't think that reaction, or the reaction to Romney saying "Wawa's," is fundamentally different from the dirty word in linguistics: prescriptivism. A lot of prescriptivism is specific discrimination against politically, economically and socially marginalized people, but a lot of it also comes out of nowhere, and just turns into a really complex game that people play for the sake of showing they can play it. So be cautious, fellow linguists, because today's "Wawa's" and "Tweeters" are tomorrow's split infinitives and passive voice.