Experts

Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed piece (p. A23) in the NYT on 26 March, “Learning How to Think”, attacks appeals to “experts”, citing a 2005 study by Philip Tetlock of experts’ forecasts on economic matters that concluded:

The predictions of experts were, on the average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

Though Tetlock’s findings were unsurprising to me, I was dismayed at the way Kristof framed the discussion, as a denunciation of “experts” and “expertise”. Dismayed because I’ve become accustomed to having people dismiss what I (and my colleagues) say about language, in particular grammar and usage in English, as tainted because I’m an “expert”, and therefore in some way prejudiced. This is especially galling because because one of the messages of many technical disciplines (of which linguistics is one) is

Some things you are sure are true are significantly mistaken.

So slamming “experts” and “expertise” is a way of buttressing folk wisdom in these matters. Pointy-headed self-aggrandizing “intellectuals”!

Thanks

Last week’s mail brought a package from Japan: a copy of Tetsuya Koshiishi’s Ph.D. dissertation, Collateral Adjectives in English and Related Issues (Edinburgh, 2009). With an acknowledgements page that begins by expressing gratitude to his supervisors (Heinz Giegerich and Nikolas Gisborne) and continues:

Thanks must also go to Arnold M. Zwicky, who first taught me syntax and morphology at the Ohio State University back in 1987 and 1988. Without this wonderful experience, I would not have chosen to become a teacher of English linguistics.

Oh my. There’s something to warm a teacher’s heart. (By the way, my old friend, sometime collaborator, and Language Log colleague Geoff Pullum was Tetsuya’s internal examiner.)

(A collateral adjective is a “Latinate suppletive relational adjective”: feline, related to cat; oral, related to mouth; and the like.)

Every so often I get touching thanks like this. A while back, a linguist who wrote a dissertation under my direction in 1992 reconnected with me by e-mail and revealed that he had given his son (now in college in Korea) the middle name Arnold. Wow.