Shashi Tharoor on the English language - some errors in his analysis

This article by Shashi Tharoor in the New York Times came up on the BAQC Facebook group earlier today.

An English friend of mine says that he nearly had a heart attack on a flight in the United States when the American pilot announced that the plane would be airborne "momentarily.' 'In British English, the language my friend speaks, "momentarily" means "for a moment," and he thought the pilot was suggesting an imminent crash soon after takeoff. In American English, however, "momentarily" means "in a moment," and the pilot was merely appeasing the impatient passengers.

I had my suspicions that Shashi Tharoor was not, in fact, accurately representing the subject matter. I had my suspicions, that's all. This is not intended to be a commentary on Shashi Tharoor himself. Although I hate to miss out on any opportunity to call into question a politician's motives.

Some of it was pretty clearly false.

A British linguist once told a New York audience that whereas a double negative could make a positive, there was no language in the world in which a double positive made a negative. A heckler put paid to his thesis in forthright American: "Yeah, right."

So, yeah, this is an old joke. "Yeah, yeah" and "Yeah, right" are two instances of usage in the English language where two positives seem to make a negative. But it occurred to me that, besides that problem, Shashi Tharoor was mistaken in ascribing this to the differences between British usage of the English language versus American. It is, in fact, a matter of context. (This would be studied as part of what is known as pragmatics in linguistics.) Even a British speaker of the English could say 'yeah, right' (and also 'yeah, yeah') to imply disagreement. The tone of voice is what would give away the context in this case. Unless, of course, the speaker is a teenager. Those fellows give nothing away.

As for Shashi Tharoor's point on the usage of the word "momentarily", it turns out that Mark Liberman has written up an entire post on this topic.

Cavett wrote: 

When the flight attendant would say, “We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,” I used to enjoy replying, “Will there be time to get off?” But I see the forces of darkness have prevailed, and this and many wrong uses are now deemed acceptable by the alleged guardians of our language, the too-quickly supine dictionary makers. Are they afraid of being judged “not with it”? What ever happened to, “Everybody does it don’t make it right”? 

I chose the quotation because it's an especially clear example of the sentiment that usage, no matter how widespread and how authoritative, doesn't outweigh the peever's sense that a certain usage is somehow morally wrong. But having chosen the passage, I felt in duty bound to check the implication that the evil sense of momentarily is a recent development, limited to ill-educated flight attendants and similar corporate drudges.

It was my understanding too that the word 'momentarily' should be used in the sense of 'for a moment'. People who use the word 'momentarily' in the 'soon' sense may strike some as ill-educated or under-educated but that usage, in fact, has some history to it. It is merely a deprecated usage of the word. It has little do with the differences between British and American English. So, anyway, Shashi Tharoor is quite mistaken on many points in this article. I don't believe much of the other stuff he has written as well. Poor Mr. Tharoor. The trouble with being a politician is nobody believes you even when you are being sincere. Because it is just so hard for anybody to tell.

Inequality of the means

To skip the talk and go straight to the this month's main puzzle, just go to the Indiatimes article (linked here) and scroll all the way down.

Indiatimes is running an edited version of this article, which is the next installment of the puzzle column. This article is in collaboration with Prof. Krishnan Shankar of the University of Oklahoma.

The main problem in this article, the geometric version of the Inequality of the Means, has been chosen for its simplicity and elegance. It is one of those mathematical problems that is easy to state but ridiculously hard to prove. There are two puzzles this month. Please be sure to use the two different Subject lines mentioned in the article to help us distinguish which puzzle it is you are replying to.

A note regarding the "New Dice" puzzle - the problem is not asking whether it is possible to number the dice such that each possible outcome 2 through 12 occurs with equal probability. The problem is to come up with numbers a1, a2, a3, a4, a5 and a6 for one dice and b1, b2, b3, b4, b5 and b6 for the second dice (together, a1 through a6 and b1 through b6 form a "numbering") such that the following properties are satisfied:

• Together, a1 through a6 and b1 through b6 constitute two sets of 1 through 6.
• The "numbering" is not identical to the default "numbering". 
• The "numbering" would lead to the same probability distribution of outcomes as the 1,2,3,4,5,6; 1,2,3,4,5,6 numbering.

One possible "numbering" could be : 1,1,2,2,3 and 3 for Dice 1; and 4,4,5,5,6 and 6 for Dice 2. The only problem is that this numbering would not lead to the same probability distribution as the default 1,2,3,4,5,6; 1,2,3,4,5,6 numbering. So, without further ado, the column is below.

INEQUALITY OF THE MEANS

This article is in collaboration with Prof. Krishnan Shankar, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.

The Oracle Asks

This article’s material came forth from the fertile mind of the extraordinary John Conway. References to the mathematics of the problem are listed at the end. It was a pleasure to discuss this problem with Prof. Dror Bar-Natan. Prof. Bar-Natan’s exposition and Javascript applet make the subject come alive on his website (http://www.math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/), which is certainly worth a visit.

We start with a well-known inequality from high school algebra: let a and b be any two non-negative numbers. Then, their arithmetic mean is at least as large as their geometric mean, i.e.,

square_root(a *b ) <= ((a + b)/2)

Equality occurs precisely when a = b. This is not hard to prove algebraically, but here is a nice geometric proof. Consider the following figure where a square of side length a + b encloses 8 right angled triangles of orthogonal sides a and b each. 

Ask the Delphic Oracle

To skip the talk and go straight to this month's main puzzle, just click on the Indiatimes article (linked here) and scroll all the way down.

Indiatimes' main page carried an edited version of this article on Operations Management and the applications of mathematical analytics there.

Ask the Delphic Oracle

“Ask the Delphic Oracle” is a new column in the Times of India. As part of this column, we plan to run a new puzzle every month. We will allow three to four weeks for you to solve the puzzle. Please write in with your answers to: askthedelphicoracle@gmail.com. We will publish the names of the people who answered the puzzle correctly (randomly chosen out of the first fifty). Good luck!

Ask The Oracle:

Q. I am an Australian in California. I have noticed that a lot of Indians here drive Toyotas. Why do so many Indians drive Toyotas?

Answer. While we put our business analyst hats on, may we point out that there are excellent reasons to own a Toyota? The main reason is, of course, the quality of the car. But how is Toyota able to produce cars of such high quality? Behind the answer to this question lies the story of the machine that changed the world.

Before there were Hondas and Toyotas, there were Fords. The big idea that Henry Ford came up with was that of the assembly line. Henry Ford realized that if you organize a car factory floor like a meat packing assembly line where each worker gets to specialize on one piece of the job, then the productive efficiency dramatically increases. From this was born the modern automobile assembly operations setup, the machine that changed the world.  The Ford automobile assembly operations setup was further improved upon by the Toyota Motor Company by means of the Toyota Production System. The Toyota Production System consists of a unique combination of social and technical processes that makes it possible for them to create very high quality cars with low rates of failure. This makes Toyotas cheap to own in terms of total cost of ownership and easy to maintain, but this is clear only after you have been educated on many different aspects of the matter of car ownership. Although Toyotas are expensive to buy, they pay off in the long term, and have low total cost of ownership. It is not surprising then that Indians in America, given their high level of price sensitivity, like to own Toyotas.

The Oracle Asks:

Why are Toyota cars of such good quality? Why are shipping containers sometimes sent halfway across the world half full? Why do clothing stores such as Pantaloon and J. C. Penny have so many extra trousers sitting around on shelves? If the average expected sales of iPads is 100 units per month, does it make sense for a store to have more than a hundred tablets in stock? These and many other questions may be answered using operations management techniques.