Of the Media, Scientists, Word Lengths, and Colossal Squids
I’m a big fan of Pharyngula, but… he was kinna wrong about a nitpicky little detail. And this particular nitpicky little detail was about language, so, the truth must out!
In his post As big as dinner plates?, Dr. Myers compares two articles about the recent dissection of a Colossal squid. (Can we please pause to acknowledge that that thing is HUGE? Kthx.)
Read the USA Today article on the colossal squid eye, which boils down to basically, “Oooh, they’re big!”. Then compare it to the blog entry on the colossal squid eye, written by a scientist. The latter is much more informative, and contains more specific details, and isn’t afraid to challenge the reader with words longer than a single syllable.
Emphasis added, to the bit that’s linguistic. Now obviously, that’s an exaggeration; the AP article (not USA Today, in fact) doesn’t really consist of one-syllable words (though one can say a lot with one-syllable words…)
But the idea is clear enough: USA Today uses shorter words than scientists, because journalists dumb down science.
Right?
Heck, I dunno. So, I answered the question the way I usually do: I wrote a program.
Surprise!
Average Word Lengths 4.45 Blog 4.64 AP Longest words Blog: photoreceptors tremendously considerably architeuthis neighbouring cephalopods cephalopods disappeared AP: mesonychoteuthis communications international invertebrates redistributed formaldehyde centimeters spectacular
Average word length is about the same. Which says nothing whatsoever about the quality of information in the articles; it does however say that they use words that are about the same size.
One can argue about the character of the long words in each text (you could use frequency counts of them, too), but still, the AP article uses the word “Mesonychoteuthis.” That’s a long way from a one-syllable word.
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