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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A possible Annie Lehmann has been hanging around the Internet this week.
In last week’s Sunday Book Review of the New York Times, Steven Pinker reviewed
Malcolm Gladwell’s new book of essays, What the Dog Saw.
Clearly, Pinker regards Gladwell as an intellectual dilettante: “Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring.†He is especially irritated by Gladwell’s substitution of interviews for a mastery of subject. “I will call this,†says Pinker, “the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.â€
Pinker’s cute name for the problem comes from page 72 of What the Dog Saw. Gladwell reports there a talk by Nassim Taleb, transcribing it with the words “We say we have a Gaussian distribution…. You have your igon value.â€
Gladwell’s copy editor failed him at this point, not recognizing the mathematical concept of an eigenvalue behind the author’s “igon value†expression. To make matters worse, the chapter of Gladwell’s book that contains this error replicates sections of an essay that first appeared in The New Yorker in 2002. In this essay, which is reproduced on the author’s web site, Gladwell also has “igon value.†Gladwell and his editors had seven years to correct this glaring error. Someone must surely have offered feedback about this error when it was first published. Yet the error carried over to the recently published book.
There is no English word “igon,†of course. Although Gladwell does not capitalize “Igon,†one suspects that he had in mind a proper name. Herr Doktor Igon, in this case, would be the one who came up with the linear equation roots known as “Igon values.â€
I can only find one other instance of this Annie Lehmann. It is in a manuscript taken down by dictation.
Last edited by kem (2009-11-16 00:10:29)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Cute.
kem wrote:
Someone must surely have offered feedback about this error when it was first published. Yet the error carried over to the recently published book.
I wouldn’t count on it. You can write much more egregious errors (I bear witness) or even astounding insights (I by faith believe) and get no feedback whatsoever. Occasionally you hear, years later, from somebody that they noticed what you wrote, admiringly or not, but such comments are usually results of a chance encounter rather than the person choosing to let you know. To be an academic waiting for feedback is not a very exciting occupation.
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And errors survive re-edits very frequently. (I bear witness.)
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Speaking of which, let me tell you (and the rest of you all) again, I enjoyed your The Next Generation Gap: The Rise Of The Digitals And The Ruin Of Postmodernism . Unlike Pinker, I am too igonorant (well-attested) of the general subject to have spotted any Igonic statistical mistakes, but much of what you had to say made sense, and I’m interested to see how well it works out in its predictions.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-11-16 06:03:31)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Thanks, David T.
I don’t know if you have been following the story, but writers have been complaining about the general loss of copyediting services. Fact is, few books are copyedited these days. Some publishing houses that still offer the service have started outsourcing their copyediting to places where English is not the only language (A gruesome example). I believe, without knowing for sure, that most major publishing houses do still offer copyediting to their major authors. I cannot bring myself to think that Little, Brown and Company would not have done so in the case of a money machine such as Gladwell. My best guess would be that Gladwell *waved the offer, thinking that all the pieces had been adequately serviced when they were first published.
A copyeditor once saved my reputation (such as it is). I had written “lentil” for “lintel.” I still shudder at the thought of walking under a legume when go through a door.
Last edited by kem (2009-11-16 11:08:36)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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