How to Spot a Psychopath

We all know what YouTube comments are like.

Exactly which site boasts the Web's stupidest commenters is a matter for debate, but YouTube is unquestionably right up there.

You can try to ignore the comments on YouTube; if you've got a small enough browser window and don't page down, you may be able to avoid seeing them altogether. You can also tell YouTube to only display comments rated "excellent (+10 or better)" until it forgets you're logged in or the cookie's cleared or whatever. I think that setting leaves a grand total of about eight comments visible on the whole site.

One way or another, though, most of us at least catch a glimpse of YouTube comments, out of the corner of our eyes, from time to time. Sometimes we even look there on purpose, for the same reason people look at other such... things. Every glance corrodes your faith in humanity a little more.

May I, therefore, suggest the Firefox add-on YouTube Comment Snob?

It ain't perfect, but it's fighting the good fight.

There are a few Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things. YouTube Comment Cleaner, for instance, and (as I write this) three scripts that replace comments with quotations, including one that hybridises with YouTube Comment Snob, replacing any comments the Snob blocks with quotes from Richard Feynman.

The Comment Snob options...

...remind me of the old Microsoft Word Hidden Settings joke:

By default, Comment Snob doesn't block comments that include profanity, which of course is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of intelligence.

Except in fucking YouTube comments.

It may say something about me that when I read this Global Post article about Scandinavian countries' prosecution of people who mutilate the genitals of their daughters, what I found most striking was the grammar.

The article contains this sentence:

Last year, at age 19, a Swedish court convicted the mother for those illegal acts, awarding the victim record demages.

Yes, "damages" is misspelled. What actually bothered me, though, was that this sentence contains what's known as a dangling modifier. And it's a really impressive example.

Usually, as Clive James points out here, a dangling modifier is just something like "at the age of eight, his father died in an accident". This stops your reading in its tracks until you figure out that the author meant that it was the father of an eight-year-old that died, not an eight-year-old father.

The Global Post example aims at that mistake, but manages to hit an even worse one. Literally, it says the Swedish court was 19 years old. So you apply your standard Dangling Modifier Corrector and conclude that the mother was the one who was 19 when she was convicted. And then you find you have to run the sentence through the de-dangler one more time, to get the correct interpretation that it was actually the girl who was "circumcised" who was nineteen years of age when her mother was convicted.

So this isn't just the usual dangling-modifier grammatical pothole. There are bamboo spikes in the bottom of it.

(Oh, and later in the article, there's "originally from Kenya where circumcision rates affect about 32 percent of the female population", which is also quite impressively confusing. I presume it meant to say that about 32% of Kenyan women are "circumcised" - that sorta-kinda lines up with this map from the Wikipedia article on the subject. But who knows?)

As I've said before, I only get really upset about misuse of language when a departure from Correct Usage damages the meaning of the words.

I find the American enthusiasm for calling Lego "Legos" irksome, but have no argument against it as far as meaning goes. But, to pick another oft-quoted example, the slide of the word "decimate" from meaning "kill one tenth of" to meaning "kill most of" is a damaging change. A modern writer will probably intend the second meaning, but you can't be certain - and people who read a contemporary account of the life of Napoleon that contains the word will have their comprehension impeded by the change.

You can't, of course, prevent the meaning of words from drifting. Relatively slow changes like the one affecting "decimate" aren't really a problem unless a word ends up with more than one meaning at the same time, and those different meanings cannot easily be discerned from context. Prescriptivist complaints about what a word "really" means are pointless if general usage says otherwise, and it's even sillier to complain about a word gaining numerous easily-distinguished meanings. English, like most other languages, is full of words that can mean several different things, but everybody still seems to be able to use words like "set" without difficulty.

Dangling modifiers can damage the meaning of the words, but usually don't. If someone was 30 years old when his father died in an accident, you could cruise right over a dangling-modifier account of the event and end up thinking the dad died at 30. Usually, though, the error is like one of the examples currently in the Wikipedia article about dangling modifiers: "As president of the kennel club, my poodle must be well groomed." After a brief double-take, you can see what that means; you don't have to try to work it out from context.

I think I need a new category for grammar problems like this. Down, I say, with lousy writing that can only sanely be interpreted one way, but which forces the reader to decode seemingly nonsensical statements, like the kennel-club one, before they can figure out what the writer actually meant.

(Since this post is completely off the topic of the actual article that triggered it, I invite you all to get back on that topic and have a big argument in the comments about all the wonderful ways in which people chop bits off of genitals. Look, I'll start it off: "Men don't have a clitoris at all, so obviously cutting the clitoris off your little girl is a great step forward in female equality!")

A reader wrote to tell me that he'd replicated my ice-resistance-measuring experiment, with the same results - about ten million ohms per inch. Then he said:

...although in Oz, shouldn't that have been centimetres?

This pressed one of my numerous Talk Buttons, so I thought I'd pour my canned rant on this subject out into a blog post where you all have to put up with it, rather than only favouring that one correspondent with my deathless wisdom.

Because nobody's forcing me to stick to a style guide, I freely mix metric and imperial units - doing my best to avoid the traps that lie therein - when I think it's appropriate.

Fractions of inches are seldom useful for anything (to me), and are a pain to work with too - I've got a lovely little German Imperial-unit vernier caliper that confuses the heck out of me every time I try to use it. Metric vernier scales are easy, but the imperial one is another of those things that slither out of my brain as soon as I put the caliper down.

But metric units just don't come in the right sizes for some measurements. "About an inch", as in the ice-resistance measuring, clearly conveys the rough-eyeball-distance-measuring I was doing. The metric equivalent either suggests an excessive level of precision ("about 2.5cm" gives the impression that the range is no more than 2.3 to 2.7...), or is cumbersome ("between 2 and 3cm").

My favourite example of not-so-useful metrication is in measuring human height. Australian publications usually have a style guide that forbids feet and inches, or at least requires metric equivalents to be added in brackets. So "the suspect in the Brooklyn Slasher murders has been described as being about 6 feet tall" becomes "...about 183cm tall", which again suggests more precision than actually exists in the measurement.

Some people might even say "182.9cm" in this situation, giving the impression that someone's measured the suspect with a micrometer. Since a person's height can easily change by more than an inch depending on what shoes they're wearing and slight changes in posture, I think most human height measurements with precision beyond the inch level are actively misleading.

(Wikipedia has a good little article on "false precision". And here's a piece on seeing false precision where it in fact does not exist. I ramble on about the limits to precision in real-world measurement here.)