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What can Large Language Models offer to linguists?
It is fair to say that the field of linguistics is hardly ever in the news. That is not the case for language itself and all things to do with language—from word of the year announcements to countless discussions about grammar peeves, correct spelling, or writing style. This has changed somewhat recently with the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs), and in particular since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the best-known language model. But does the recent, impressive performance of LLMs have any repercussions for the way in which linguists carry out their work? And what is a Language Model anyway?
At heart, all an LLM does is predict the next word given a string of words as a context —that is, it predicts the next, most likely word. This is of course not what a user experiences when dealing with language models such as ChatGPT. This is on account of the fact that ChatGPT is more properly described as a “dialogue management system”, an AI “assistant” or chatbot that translates a user’s questions (or “prompts”) into inputs that the underlying LLM can understand (the latest version of OpenAI’s LLM is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4).
“At heart, all an LLM does is predict the next word given a string of words as a context.”
An LLM, after all, is nothing more than a mathematical model in terms of a neural network with input layers, output layers, and many deep layers in between, plus a set of trained “parameters.” As the computer scientist Murray Shanahan has put it in a recent paper, when one asks a chatbot such as ChatGPT who was the first person to walk on the moon, what the LLM is fed is something along the lines of:
Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what word is most likely to follow the sequence “The first person to walk on the Moon was”?
That is, given an input such as the first person to walk on the Moon was, the LLM returns the most likely word to follow this string. How have LLMs learned to do this? As mentioned, LLMs calculate the probability of the next word given a string of words, and it does so by representing these words as vectors of values from which to calculate the probability of each word, and where sentences can also be represented as vectors of values. Since 2017, most LLMs have been using “transformers,” which allow the models to carry out matrix calculations over these vectors, and the more transformers are employed, the more accurate the predictions are—GPT-3 has some 96 layers of such transformers.
The illusion that one is having a conversation with a rational agent, for it is an illusion, after all, is the result of embedding an LLM in a larger computer system that includes background “prefixes” to coax the system into producing behaviour that feels like a conversation (the prefixes include templates of what a conversation looks like). But what the LLM itself does is generate sequences of words that are statistically likely to follow from a specific prompt.
It is through the use of prompt prefixes that LLMs can be coaxed into “performing” various tasks beyond dialoguing, such as reasoning or, according to some linguists and cognitive scientists, learn the hierarchical structures of a language (this literature is ever increasing). But the model itself remains a sequence predictor, as it does not manipulate the typical structured representations of a language directly, and it has no understanding of what a word or a sentence means—and meaning is a crucial property of language.
An LLM seems to produce sentences and text like a human does—it seems to have mastered the rules of the grammar of English—but at the same time it produces sentences based on probabilities rather on the meanings and thoughts to express, which is how a human person produces language. So, what is language so that an LLM could learn it?
“An LLM seems to produce sentences like a human does but it produces them based on probabilities rather than on meaning.”
A typical characterisation of language is as a system of communication (or, for some linguists, as a system for having thoughts), and such a system would include a vocabulary (the words of a language) and a grammar. By a “grammar,” most linguists have in mind various components, at the very least syntax, semantics, and phonetics/phonology. In fact, a classic way to describe a language in linguistics is as a system that connects sound (or in terms of other ways to produce language, such as hand gestures or signs) and meaning, the connection between sound and meaning mediated by syntax. As such, every sentence of a language is the result of all these components—phonology, semantics, and syntax—aligning with each other appropriately, and I do not know of any linguistic theory for which this is not true, regardless of differences in focus or else.
What this means for the question of what LLMs can offer linguistics, and linguists, revolves around the issue of what exactly LLMs have learned to begin with. They haven’t, as a matter of fact, learned a natural language at all, for they know nothing about phonology or meaning; what they have learned is the statistical distribution of the words of the large texts they have been fed during training, and this is a rather different matter.
As has been the case in the past with other approaches in computational linguistics and natural language processing, LLMs will certainly flourish within these subdisciplines of linguistics, but the daily work of a regular linguist is not going to change much any time soon. Some linguists do study the properties of texts, but this is not the most common undertaking in linguistics. Having said that, how about the opposite question: does a run-of-the-mill linguist have much to offer to LLMs and chatbots at all?
Featured image: Google Deepmind via Unsplash (public domain)
Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
Founded in 2012, Political Violence @ a Glance is an award-winning, peer-reviewed online magazine that explores timely topics and scholarly research on political violence and its alternatives. PV@Glance has an international readership, with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of annual page views. It is among the premier venues through which scholars of political violence communicate the relevance of their findings to a wider scholarly and public audience.
The current editors of PV@Glance, Erica Chenoweth, Barbara Walter, and Joseph K. Young, seek applications for a new editorial team. The new editorial team would assume editorial and management responsibilities for PV@Glance in September 2023, with the existing team providing transitional support during summer 2023.
Successful applicants will hold secure positions at one or more academic institutions and receive sufficient resources from their home institutions to support their editorial tasks.
Those interested in assuming editorship of PV@Glance should submit CVs of proposed editorial team members along with a brief letter that addresses the team’s qualifications and experience, institutional support, and aims and vision for PV@Glance going forward.
Proposals must be received by May 25, 2023, for full consideration. Applications (or questions about the role or application process) should be submitted to PVG Managing Editor Lindsay Morgan at [email protected].
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
What is subject marketing? An interview with Hana Purslow, philosophy marketing manager
In this interview, our marketing manager for philosophy, Hana Purslow, outlines OUP’s approach to subject marketing. She provides examples of campaigns and channels that we use to promote our content and reveals what she enjoys most about her job and how she sees her role evolving in the coming years.
Subject marketing promotes a particular topic or subject to a research community by showcasing relevant content in that area, regardless of format. This can include book chapters, journal papers, or articles from our reference products. By marketing the subject, we showcase key content for academics to use in their teaching or research. Through the dissemination of OUP’s scholarly research in this targeted way, we can have a direct and positive impact within the subject community.
Our focus in subject marketing is building our brand and OUP’s profile in a particular discipline. We concentrate our efforts on building a strong subject community around our content; it is only through researchers reading, sharing, and citing our content that we can be sure of the real-world impact our publishing has. Our job in marketing is to ensure that the academic community is aware of OUP’s high-quality, cutting-edge, and impactful research.
I am responsible for leading our philosophy subject marketing. I take huge enjoyment in working with OUP philosophy content and learning from the greatest minds across all areas of philosophy. I find working with OUP Philosophy Editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall extremely rewarding—their knowledge of philosophy is second to none, and with so many interesting areas within the subject to cover, it’s a marketer’s dream when choosing which topics to highlight!
A good example is the “Philosophy in Focus” campaign I run each month. This is our most successful thematic campaign, where we host a selection of thought-provoking free content around a particular theme. We market each collection through a range of channels including social media, advertising, email, and a dedicated collection web page—always evaluating our results to hone our strategies for increased reach, awareness, and engagement with our OUP philosophy content.
Our first topic was “race,” which we launched during Black History Month in October 2021. Other topics, which often coincide with observance months, include emotions, disability, feminism, technology and AI, and democracy.
“Through subject marketing, academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens.”
Choosing content around important events or areas in philosophy is a team effort between myself in marketing and my colleagues in editorial, ensuring we share key research within the subject and shine a light on topics that matter. This means that academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens beyond individual titles. Sharing content in a way that engages our audience and showcases the OUP Philosophy brand in the best possible light is something I take great pride in. I am grateful to have so many brilliant authors to work with and feel privileged to share their influential work in campaigns like Philosophy in Focus.
The OUPblog—this really helps to increase the discoverability of our content, which is how our books are found on search engines like Google. As we publish across such a broad range of topics, we can get creative when working with authors on blog posts. For instance, in our most read philosophy blog of 2022, Kristin Gjesdal brings a unique viewpoint to the relationship between philosophy and theatre by focusing on the work of playwright Henrik Isben.
Our philosophy blog posts aim to be accessible to non-specialist academics so have a wider reach than our published content itself. We share OUPblog posts widely on social media, particularly through our dedicated philosophy Twitter channel, @OUPPhilosophy.
“We choose channels for promoting our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve.”
It’s worth noting that we choose channels for our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve, so while not all our campaigns will feature a blog post, this doesn’t make them any less valuable—we align the strategy or channel with the campaign objective.
I have always been passionate about marketing, which led to numerous paths in the events, public, and private sectors before joining the publishing industry, which I soon realized was the place for me! Working in marketing for an academic publisher means that I can give back to the world by helping to advance knowledge and learning.
At OUP, we use digital marketing to share high-quality academic content from thought-leading authors around the world. This is something that really drives me; being a lover of all things digital, targeted marketing allows me to build creative strategies that showcase the breadth of publishing we have to offer at OUP, alongside our vision to grow and maximize the impact of our content.
A large part of my role involves working with authors, which is a real highlight for me. I help authors learn how to promote their books by providing guidance and explaining how they can build their profile to increase long-term engagement with their work. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!
Creating campaigns for conferences—such as American Philosophical Association, Philosophy of Science Association, or The Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association—is another highlight. Whether we’re attending in person or promoting our content digitally, it’s exciting to showcase our cutting-edge publishing with conference delegates and researchers from around the world.
“I help authors learn how to promote their books and build their profile. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!”
Overall, I’m motivated by seeing the impact that marketing can make, from campaign planning right through to the end results. It’s exciting to see how marketing can influence online usage and more, depending on what we’re trying to achieve for that campaign.
Everything evolves, and so does my role and offering as a marketer. This will be based on the challenges and opportunities we face in the market—from open access growth to the way people find research, and the ever-changing digital landscape. There is always more to learn, and I am excited to see what’s coming next.
Women in the history of linguistics—from marginalization to recognition
Women’s History Month raises issues of erasure and marginalization, authority and power which, sadly, are still relevant for women today. Much can be learnt from the experience of women in the past. We find inspiring stories of women who overcame prejudice and constraints of all kinds and who sometimes managed to gain recognition from their peers, only to be excluded from the history of their discipline.
In the field of linguistics, this marginalization relates to some extent to what is today considered part of linguistics and the current valuing above all of theoretical work. Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.
“Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field.”
Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. A group of equally motivated and determined scholars joined us in our quest. We looked for names, works and ideas, especially in those liminal spaces not reached by official historiography, that is, outside institutions, universities, and academies in more private and domesticated spaces. We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution.
For the earlier periods, it was difficult to find women who published grammars or dictionaries, but they did exist. Marguerite Buffet in seventeenth-century France wrote a volume of observations on the good usage of French specifically aimed at women (Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, 1668). Similarly, in 1740, Johanna Corleva published a Dutch translation of Port-Royal’s celebrated general and rational grammar. In Portugal, in 1786, Francisca de Chantal Álvares produced a compendium of Portuguese grammar for female pupils in convent schools, the Breve Compendio da Gramatica Portugueza para uso das Meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa, at a time when the majority of women did not have access to formal education. Further afield, women missionaries were also active in the field. Gertrud von Massenbach joined the Sudan Pioneer Mission in 1909, as a teacher of mathematics in Aswan, in Nubian territory. Her linguistic interests led her to publish a dictionary with a grammatical introduction of Kunûzi Nubian (Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes mit einer grammatischen Einleitung, 1933) and a collection of Nubian texts (Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi, 1962).
“We need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language.”
But there is much more. Women were, for instance, the intended audience or dedicatees of some of the earlier vernacular grammars in Europe. The Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) by Antonio de Nebrija, the very first printed grammar of a vernacular language in Europe, was commissioned by Queen Isabella I of Castile and, according to Juan de Valdés, was meant to be of benefit, “para las damas de la sereníssima doña Isabel” (“for the ladies-in-waiting of Her Very Serene Highness Queen Isabel”). Women were translators, language teachers, collectors of data on endangered languages, and creators of new scripts. In Jiangyong county (Jiāngyǒng xiàn) of Hunan (Húnán) province in China, a rural territory surrounded by mountains, the nǚshū script (“female script/writing”) was used and transmitted among village women for at least one and a half centuries: a variant of the Chinese script, it represents a significant example of Chinese women’s contribution to character invention and development.
Women also assisted male members of their families, or male colleagues, in their work as linguists. Lucy Catherine Lloyd (1834-1914), the sister-in-law of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, was his most important collaborator. Together they created the nineteenth-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts (today called the Digital Bleek and Lloyd), an invaluable resource for linguists working on Khoisan languages. Cinie Louw followed her husband Andrew Louw to South Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work on the Morgenster Mission, learning the local language, Karanga, a Shona dialect, and becoming a fluent speaker. Their 1919 translation of the Bible into Karanga was a joint effort, preceded in 1915, by an important manual of the Chikaranga Language.
Other women’s linguistic work has been neglected or overshadowed, the men with whom they collaborated reaping the benefit of their efforts. The young Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) helped codify the oral tradition of the Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Thanks to her bilingual and bicultural knowledge she was able to collect a wide range of oral performances, preserving them for posterity and making them accessible by translating them into Japanese. Her invaluable work ultimately ended up promoting, instead, the career of a prominent male academic who was awarded the Imperial prize for his work on the Indigenous language.
“Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries.”
What came to light, piece by piece, through reading their personal stories, was the challenges women had to face in male-dominated academia. Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries. Theirs are often tales of perseverance and determination. Take the example of Mary Haas, a stalwart of twentieth-century American Indian Linguistics and a central figure in the Boas-Sapir tradition, which laid the foundation for current language documentation practices. Haas found her marriage in 1931 to Morris Swadesh limited her opportunities both within linguistics and with respect to employment generally. Given the scarcity of academic appointments, she considered getting a teaching certificate to teach in public schools in Oklahoma to support herself and her fieldwork on Native American languages. However, as a married woman she was unlikely to get hired in a public school. Undeterred, she wrote to Swadesh asking for a divorce so that she might be able to support herself. Swadesh agreed. Their divorce was meant to allow Haas to pursue more avenues of employment, although her plans were ultimately interrupted by World War II.
Uncovering such stories proved complicated, but extremely rewarding. And the more we found, the more we have become convinced that there is still so much more to discover.
Read a free chapter from Women in the History of Linguistics on Oxford Academic.
Featured image from the cover of Women in the History of Linguistics by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson.
Charity and solidarity! What responsibilities do nonprofits have towards Ukraine?
In a speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2022, President Biden called on the UN to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. At least 1,000 companies have left Russia because of Putin’s brutal unprovoked war on Ukraine. Some companies left because of sanctions. Others left for moral reasons, often under pressure from investors, consumers, and out of empathy with their employees in Ukraine. But companies also have human rights responsibilities. Whether they stay or leave Russia will impact the war and human rights of the people of Ukraine. When companies leave en masse, Russia faces the possibility of economic oblivion.
Nonprofits can also impact the war. Russian oligarchs have donated lots of money to cultural organizations, universities, and think tanks, such as Harvard, MOMA, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Many of these donations are tainted by corruption and the close ties oligarchs have with Putin.
Philanthropy is a common way for oligarchs to launder their reputations, sometimes with an eye to future wrongdoing, what social psychologists call moral licensing. Studies show that people often follow their good acts with bad acts as a way to balance out the good with the bad. In the end, whatever good oligarchs do through their giving may be outweighed by the bad they’ve done in the past or will do in the future. But oligarchs are only part of the problem. Nonprofits that solicit and accept their donations are complicit in those harms, too.
What are the responsibilities of nonprofits? How should they meet their moral and human rights responsibilities during Russia’s war on Ukraine? What should we expect from museums, universities, and cultural organizations? If anything, they should be held to a higher standard than for-profit enterprises. After all, nonprofits serve the public good. They may not have had a physical presence in Russia, the way Starbucks and Levi Strauss did, but many of them are connected to Putin by way of Russian oligarchs.
“Philanthropy is a common way for oligarchs to launder their reputations, sometimes with an eye to future wrongdoing.”
Consider Viktor Vekselberg, a prominent Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin and head of the Skolkovo Foundation. Like many Russian oligarchs, he made his money with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Skolkovo Foundation donated over $300 million to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to support Skoltech, a program aimed at developing Russia’s tech sector. Vekselberg also sat on MIT’s Board of Trustees. It was only in 2018, after the US Treasury sanctioned him for “malign activities,” that MIT found the wherewithal to remove him from the Board. And, it was not until Russia invaded Ukraine that MIT ended the Skoltech Program, explaining, “this step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.” MIT finally got it right. Donors, such as Vekselberg, implicate nonprofits in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But had MIT done its due diligence from the outset, it would not have accepted Vekselberg’s donation in the first place. Boycotting oligarchs shows solidarity with the people of Ukraine, while doing nothing renders nonprofits complicit in the human rights violations suffered in Ukraine.
Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest oligarch, has supported the Kennedy Center and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. Until recently, he sat on the Board of Trustees at the Guggenheim, and on the Advisory Board of the Council of Foreign Relations. Potanin resigned from both in April 2022. Although not a Russian citizen, Len Blavatnik is a Russian insider who donated millions of dollars to Oxford, the Tate Modern, Yale, Harvard Medical School, and the Council of Foreign Affairs, to name a few of the elite recipients of his philanthropy. Aaron Ring, a Yale professor who received support from the Blavatnik Fund, called on Yale to suspend the Program. He was concerned that Yale was endorsing the donor. Yale maintained that since Blavatnik had not been sanctioned, his donation could be accepted. During Russia’s war on Ukraine, stakeholders like Aaron Ring don’t want to benefit from Russia’s oligarchs. They want to stand in solidarity with Ukraine.
The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. They hold that enterprises are responsible not only for their direct human rights violations, but also for their indirect ones. So, what counts as an indirect violation in the nonprofit sector? When a nonprofit benefits from donors who are implicated in human rights violations, the nonprofit is complicit in the wrongs of the donors. Many Russian oligarchs are tied to Putin, have profited from their relationship with him, and stand to benefit from his war on Ukraine.
“Boycotting oligarchs shows solidarity with the people of Ukraine, while doing nothing renders nonprofits complicit in the human rights violations suffered in Ukraine.”
When nonprofits refuse to accept donations from oligarchs, they stand in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia. Given the tendency of oligarchs to donate to elite and high-profile organizations, boycotting them may create a bandwagon effect, or a little philanthropy warfare!
Russia has a long record of human rights violations. Freedom of expression is one. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirmed that 82 journalists and media workers were killed in Russia between 1992 and 2022. In 2020, Russia adopted a law banning so called “disrespect” to authorities. Its violation of the fundamental rights of LGBTQ people is longstanding. In 2013, it penalized so called “propaganda” about homosexuality. Activists and celebrities faced fines for supporting the LGBTQ community in Russia.
Now, Russia is under investigation for war crimes such as rape, torture, and execution style murders of civilians. As of 2022, the UN General Assembly resolved that Russia should withdraw its military forces from Ukraine. This came amidst reports of Russian attacks on residences, schools, hospitals, and on civilians, including women, people with disabilities, and children.
Have nonprofits done enough for human rights? No, not when it comes to Russian oligarchs. By laundering the reputations of oligarchs, nonprofits have enabled Putin’s war on Ukraine and the horrific suffering it has brought. The Guiding Principles can help nonprofits identify their human rights responsibilities and ensure that they are not complicit in Russia’s human rights violations. All enterprises should practice due diligence, a mechanism that prevents human rights violations and complicity in them. Refusing donations from Russian oligarchs is the very least nonprofits can do.
Transparency is at the heart of due diligence. Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has tracked which companies left Russia and which have stayed, providing much-needed transparency on the operations of for-profit enterprises. Not only does Sonnenfeld’s list incentivize companies to pull out of Russia, those that left have outperformed those that remained. Unfortunately, no such list exists for nonprofits. Tracking nonprofits with respect to Russian oligarchs, knowing and showing, would go a long way toward ensuring that they meet their human rights responsibilities.
To be sure, there is a risk that nonprofits will receive less money if they boycott Russian oligarchs. But it is also possible that they will be rewarded for doing the right thing, as Hands on Hartford was when it refused donations from the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group. Generous donors may come forward when they learn that nonprofits stand in solidarity with Ukraine. Granted, the impact nonprofits can have on the war in Ukraine is not as great as for-profit companies, if only because of scale. But keep in mind that nonprofits serve the public good, which if anything enhances their human rights responsibilities. In the long run, when nonprofits stand in solidarity with Ukraine, they serve the public good.
Featured image by Elena Mozhilov via Unsplash (publish domain)
A Q&A with Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around”
The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner—who has been called “the least stuffy grammarian around” and was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace—about what it means to write a usage dictionary.
“Possesses” is a good word for it. In my case, it was matter of falling in love with the genre as a teenager. I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1942) and immediately felt that it was the most fascinating book I’d ever held. Partridge discussed every “problem point” in the language—words that people use imprecisely, phrases that professional editors habitually eliminate, words that get misspelled because people falsely associate them with similar-looking words, the common grammatical blunders, and so on. And then Partridge had essays on such linguistic topics as concessive clauses, conditional clauses, elegancies, hyphenation, negation, nicknames, and obscurity (“It may be better to be clear than clever; it is still better to be clear and correct.”).
At the age of 16, I was going on a ski trip with friends, and the book had just arrived in the mail as I was leaving for New Mexico. I stuck it in my bag and didn’t open it until we arrived at the ski lodge. Upon starting to read it, I was hooked. In fact, I didn’t even ski the first day: I was soaking up all that I could from Usage and Abusage, which kept mentioning some mysterious man named Fowler.
So when I got home, I ordered Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2d ed. 1965), and when it arrived I decided it was even better. By the time I was 17, I’d memorized virtually every linguistic stance taken by Partridge and Fowler, and I was thoroughly imbued with their approach to language. By the time I’d graduated from high school, I added Wilson Follett, Bergen Evans, and Theodore Bernstein to the mix. I was steeped in English usage—as a kind of closet study. I spent far more time on these books than I did on my schoolwork.
I suppose in retrospect it looks predictable that I’d end up writing a usage dictionary. I started my first one (A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage) when I was 23, and I’ve been at it ever since. That was 41 years ago, and it ended up being my first book with Oxford University Press.
You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.
Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.
It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.
I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had. By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.
“I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had.”
I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. I liked combustible, raucous words, such as blast, bray, fulminate, and thunder. I liked arch, high-toned words, such as athwart, calumny, cynosure, and decrepitude. I liked toga-wearing, Socratic-sounding words, such as eristic, homunculus, palimpsest, and theologaster. I liked mellifluous, polysyllabic words, such as antediluvian, postprandial, protuberance, and undulation. I liked the technical and quasi-technical terms of rhetoric, such as asyndeton, periphrasis, quodlibet, and synecdoche. I liked frequentative verbs with an onomatopoetic feel, such as gurgle, jostle, piffle, and topple. I liked evocative words about language, such as billingsgate, logolatry, wordmonger, and zinger. I liked scatological, I-can’t-believe-this-term-exists words, such as coprolalia, fimicolous, scatomancy, and stercoraceous. I liked astonishing, denotatively necessary words that more people ought to know, such as mumpsimus and ultracrepidarian. I liked censoriously yelping words, such as balderdash, hooey, pishposh, and poppycock. I liked mirthful, tittering words, such as cowlick, flapdoodle, horsefeathers, and icky.
In short, I fell in love with language. I filled hundreds of pages in my vocabulary notebooks.
In the end, I decided that I liked the word lexicographer better than copyist, so I tried my hand at it.
I was trying to impress her, it’s true. I never called her. I just started using lots of big words. It took me about two years to realize that big words, in themselves, have no intrinsic value in attracting females. Perhaps the opposite.
But that’s okay. By the time I was 17, I had this prodigious vocabulary. I thought of SAT words as being quite elementary. I had a larger vocabulary then than I do today. You can see why, at the ski lodge in early 1975, this particular teenager was absolutely primed to relish the work of Eric Partridge and H.W. Fowler.
That’s true. But it all began with words and English usage. Then I moved to legal lexicography and other language-related topics.
Many if not most lexicographers today are interested in slang, in current catchphrases, and in jargon—the more shifting and volatile parts of language. (Always something new!) I’m different. I’ve always been interested in the durable parts. In my usage book, I tackle the difficult question of what, precisely, constitutes Standard Written English. In any era, that’s a complicated question or series of questions. And so I’ve answered it in a 1,200-page book, word by word and phrase by phrase. It’s intended for writers, editors, and serious word lovers.
Of course. I’m very Fowlerian and Partridgean in my mindset. Though all my essays are original, some bear the same category-titles as Fowler’s (for example, “Archaisms,” “Needless Variants,” and “Split Infinitives” ) or Partridge’s (“Clichés,” “Johnsonese,” and “Slang” [yes, that]). Meanwhile, I’ve created new essay-categories of my own, much in the mold of my admired predecessors: “Airlinese,” “Estranged Siblings,” “Hypercorrection,” “Irregular Verbs,” “Skunked Terms,” “Word-Swapping,” and the like). I have a dozen new essays in the fifth edition, including “Irreversible Binomials,” “Loanwords,” “Prejudiced and Prejudicial Terms,” “Race-Related Terms,” and “Serial Comma” (a big one). These essays are some fun.
Yes, something like that. Consider an example. Note that an asterisk before a term denotes that it’s nonstandard:
tic-tac-toe (the elementary game in which two players draw X’s or O’s within a pattern of nine squares, the object being to get three in a row), a phrase dating from the mid-1800s in AmE, has been predominantly so spelled since about 1965. Before that, the variants *tick-tack-toe, *ticktacktoe, and even *tit-tat-toe were about equally common. The British usually call the game noughts and crosses.
Current ratio (tic-tac-toe vs. *tit-tat-toe vs. *tick-tack-toe vs. *ticktacktoe): 96:4:3:1
There are thousands of such entries. As you can see, a usage-book entry is entirely different from a normal dictionary entry.
Yes. Those are key. I’m capitalizing on big data, which makes GMEU entries empirically grounded in a way that earlier usage books couldn’t be. This is a great era for lexicographers and grammarians: we can assess word frequencies in various databases that include millions of published and spoken instances of a word or phrase. By comparison, the evidence on which Fowler and Partridge based their opinions was sparse. In my case, opinion is kept to a minimum, and facts come to the fore. Sometimes that entails inconveniently discovering that the received wisdom has been way off base.
“People who say they’re sticking to the original Fowler might as well be driving an original Model-T.”
I’ve heard that. It’s a naive view. For one thing, the empirical statistics on relative word frequencies have been updated from 2008 to 2019. The language has evolved: email is now predominantly solid. There are thousands of updated ratios, and some of the judgments differ from those in past editions. For example, overly and snuck are now declared to be unobjectionable.
Every single page of the book has new material. It’s a big improvement. The six years have allowed for much more research.
People who say they’re sticking to the original Fowler might as well be driving an original Model-T.
Here’s something reference books have in common with medical devices. There’s no reason for a new one unless it’s a significant improvement over its precursors. That’s how the field gets better and better.
I’m just a dogged researcher. That’s all. Research is simply formalized curiosity, and I seem to have an inexhaustible curiosity about practical problems that arise for writers and editors. I certainly wouldn’t call myself “the world’s leading authority on the English language.”
I’ve also been helped by generous scholars, especially by John Simpson, the Oxford lexicographer, and Geoffrey K. Pullum, the Edinburgh grammarian. And then I had a panel of 34 critical readers who minutely reviewed 55-page segments for suggested improvements. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the contributions of all these erudite friends.
In any event, a lexicographer must be especially adept at delayed gratification. You labor for years and then wait. You’re lucky, as Samuel Johnson once said, if you can just “escape censure.” That some people have praised my work, after all these years of toil, is certainly pleasing. But for me, the real pleasure is in the toil itself: asking pertinent questions and finding useful, fact-based answers to all the nettlesome problems that arise in our wildly variegated English language.
Find out more and buy Garner’s Modern English Usage, Fifth Edition →
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