Lexiconical Gap

Another phrase from the Frenemy episode of NPR’s This American Life.  A lexiconical gap is the name given to an absence of a necessary word in a language.  Linguistics suggests that if two words ever become fully synonymous, both in their literal and semantic meetings, one word will disappear.  It is a free marketplace of ideas philosophy.  However, the inverse doesn’t seem to be true.  Just because a word is needed, doesn’t mean it will appear.

The best example offered is that in our English we have a word for a child who lost his parents (an orphan), a woman who lost her spouse (a widow), but we have no word for a parent who lost a child.  This is a lexiconical gap.

Frenemy

NPR’s This American Life did an episode about frenemies not too long ago.  In one act, they discussed the history of the word with Erin McKean of Wordnik.  Amazingly, this seemingly modern internetty  word was first recorded back in 1953 when Walter Winchell joked “Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?”  The term didn’t show up again of note until 1977 and then again faded into disuse for another fifteen years.

The turning point for the word: It’s twenty-first century use in Sex and the City. Now the word is here to stay.

P.S. The link to the episode of This American Life is here.

Drapetomania

Drapetomania was a pseudo-scientific mental illness first proposed by U.S. physician Samual Cartwright in 1851. Cartwright wrote of the illness in his book Diseases and Pecularities of the Negro Race. Drapetomania was an illness that affected slaves and caused them to run away from their masters. Drapetes, is the Greek word for runaway slaves.

Thanks to NPR’s This American Life as the source for much of this information.

Recision

Recision is the act of rescinding and is specifically used to refer to the policy of health insurance companies revoking health care from clients once they become diagnosed as ill. Last weekend’s This American Life had a segment on this very issue.  Last month, a House sub-committee interrogated representatives from three major insurance companies to investigate their policies of actively searching for excuses to deny health coverage for the sickest of patients.  For example, allegedly insurance applications contained difficult to understand language on purpose with the hope that a patient might make a mistake on them.  If said patient then becomes very ill, the company has the grounds to deny coverage (even though they accepted payments all along from this patient).  In the culmination of this hearing, all three companies were asked to commit to not rescind any policy unless there was “intentional fraudulent behavior” on the part of the client.  All three companies refused on the grounds that state laws did not force them to do so.  There it is, EMAIL YOUR  REPRESENTATIVES.

I recently spoke to Jess Roney, a history professor at Ohio University, about her research on Colonial American voluntary organizations in Philadelphia.  These included some of the earliest insurance companies in the country, including the fire insurance company popularized by Benjamin Franklin.  “They were more like mutual-aid societies,” she said.  That’s exactly the concept that has been lost: a group of people concerned about a the possibility of a catastrophe (in this case, fire), pool their money together so as to aid any one of them on whom that catastrophe falls.  It had the added benefit, Jess told me, of creating a mutual responsibility.  If you saw a house on fire that was protected under your insurance, you would rush to the aid of putting it out because you knew that it was in your economic interest to reduce the damage.  To be sure, some houses, particularly wooden  ones, were denied coverage — this was not a charity.  The reason was, however, that coverage was denied because it was an undue burden on the other members.  Under this system, recision would have been a bad policy because your vote to deny a fellow contributor today could easily be turned on you tomorrow.

Modern insurance companies have lost that sense of being a mutual-aid society, and recision is only one example of that.  The problem is that the company itself, formerly just a money-management tool, has now become an interest in itself.  What used to be an agreement between a group of contributors is now a corporate entity that is built, not upon redistributing wealth to those in need, but upon making a profit.  The day that insurance companies became profit-seeking organizations was the day recision became an effective policy.  It is also the day that an insurance company ceased to be a mutual-aid society.

Stochasticity

n. the property of being randomly determined so that one’s behavior can be analyzed statistically but not predicted precisely.

Today’s definition, which was reworded from the O.E.D., was the name of the most recent episode of N.P.R.’s wonderful show Radio Lab.  There seem to be plenty of synonyms for chance or randomness, but what I like about this one is the idea that there is a certain predictability to randomness.  As the episode of Radio Lab suggests, unlikely events occur quite predictably in a random world.  Here is a short story from the show to emphasize the point:

They described an experiment where the tester had two groups.  Group A was to flip a coin one hundred times and record the events.  Group B was to imagine flipping a coin one hundred time and record the imagined results.  When both groups finished, they wrote their results on the board (T, H, H, T, H, T, T, etc.).  The results of the two, at a layman’s glance, apparently looked quite similar.  The tester, however, immediately recognized which results belonged to which group.  The reason? Group A, early on, had a string of seven straight tails.  No one would imagine such a result, but statistically, there is a pretty good chance that it would happen (about one out of six if you flip a coin one hundred times and, I imagine, one out of three if you accepts seven straight heads as well).

This reminds me of the math equation to determine the odds that two people will share the same birthday.  If memory serves me correctly, it only takes a room of thirty-five people to make it more likely than not that two will share the same day.  I tested this in the days when I taught classes that large and it worked.

Hmm…is there a word for something that appears unlikely but is actually quite likely?