Sloppy grammer check: google-voting
February 4th, 2007Inspired from a comment I left at Quilhill’s: I often find myself using an intellectually sloppy yet empirically efficient technique for grammar check. Essentially, I hesitate on idiomatic expressions a lot and sometimes I cannot find a proper entry in my dictionary or any online resource I know. I want to know about usage. For instance: do people say “to take up a challenge” or “to take on a challenge?”. It may be obvious to you but not to me (check this post), and I am sure everybody hesitates on that sort of things some day.
Instead of trying every possible dictionary entry (take, up, challenge), I do google-voting: I query both variants (between quotes) and find out which gets the most pages. I just make sure I scan the first few entries to make sure my request has not been stupidly misinterpreted (or that it does not correspond to something in German or Dutch). In the above case, the up variant gets 11,000 votes, while the on variant gets 26,000. Hence I conclude that I might not err that much (or at least I would not be the only one) if I wrote ‘to take on a challenge’.
Let us try it with other examples:
- “I feel like going”: 176,000 / “I feel like to go”: 127,000
- “to get on a train”: 83,000 / “to get in a train”: 158
- “to bear a grudge”: 17,000 / “to hold a grudge”: 94,000
And it also works with spelling (although I seldom need this feature):
- “grammer check”: 15,000 / “grammar check”: 315,000
- “supercalifragilistic”: 88,000 / “supercalifragilestic”: 5
- “sarsaparilla”: 700,000 / “salsaparilla”: 1800
- “rein in”: 1,280,000 / “reign in”: 1,270,000 (this was a close shave)
I wonder whether anyone uses such twisted methods. And I am curious whether someone could come up with a tricky counter-example.
English being my second language, I also use Google to check my idioms and prepositions. I do not use the votes (didn’t know about that feature). I simply search for the expression I’m doubting and Google returns results matching the expression and results using an alternate grammatical construction.
By reading the surrounding text I make a decision on whether to stick with what I have (if it seems like a lot of people are using it consistently), or search again for the alternate expression if it looks like that’s what’s more prevalent.
I rely on quick observation of results. You actually go for the statistics…
I frequently use Google as my English spell checker and Japanese grammar checker. It’s very fast to just switch to my browser and use the search box in the corner. That said, Google isn’t perfect.
There’s a nuance difference between “take on a challenge” and “take up a challenge.” “Take up” has the suggestion of “to begin a habitual action.” So, naughty teenagers “take up smoking,” and social climbers “take up golf.” For neither of those examples will “take on” work. On the other hand, “take on” suggests “to challenge” or “to address a problem.” So, a boxer will “take on Mike Tyson.” (”Take on” can also be used more literally as in, “the ship began to take on water” or “take on passengers.”)
So, you can say either “take on” or “take up” a challenge. “Take on” gives emphasis on the struggling, and “take up” emphasizes the beginning a long process.
Also, in the case of “I feel like to go,†the only words that can comes next in my mind are “would be.” In other words, the “to go” must be the start of a dependent clause. It cannot just take an object. *”I feel like to go home” is wrong, but “I feel like to go home would be nice” is fine.
Maria: the statistics are only one part of the answer, and you are right that reading the surrounding is compulsory, especially when unexpected crowd-culture artifacts get in the way. For instance, if I want to know whether I should say “light my fire” or “start my fire”, the result is totally biased by The Doors’ song. Also, as Google is punctuation-insensitive, I have to check for the odd comma skewing the results.
Carl: thanks for the accuracy of the linguistic analysis. This is exactly what Google does not offer. However, once Google gives me clues as to the proper spelling, I know where to look in my Collins dictionary for more precisions.
The interesting thing about the rein/reign example is that they are both “right” but they mean different things. To rein in is to hold back or to curtail, as in pulling the reins on a horse to slow it down. To reign in is to hold sovereignty over something. Ambiguity is one of the joys of language.
You are definitely right, BikeProf, and this was why I chose the example. If you try ‘reign in’ with Google, you will find many examples of sovereignty, but also many examples of people wanting to “reign in costs” or “reign in trade deficit”: the votes for “reign in” therefore nicely combine a totally different usage (the sovereignty part) with a cultural over-representation (especially Milton’s “better to reign in Hell”) and mistakes in the usage I was querying (the holding back part). I was that close to getting a counter-example.
The thing about using the word, reign, is that the correct usage is ‘reign over’ and not ‘reign in’ (as bike prof mentions)..
If I was not so lazy, I would use google voting. It is a great idea … I am going to use it when next I hesitate over an expression.
And come to think of it, I will use it when I am writing in French. I could definitely use it then.
Google voting. This is why I love blogging. I just came across an activity and concept that had NEVER OCCURRED to me. I tend to use my analog book with pages dictionary to check spelling. It is faster than using google, at least it is for me.
Google-voting comes in very handy when it is hard to find the phrase in a dictionary. Imagine a complex phrase like ‘falling head over heels’, for which I hesitate with ‘going head over heels’; and I would not know where to look it up in a dictionary (fall, go, head or heel?). Google sort of knows, unless everybody makes the mistake, but then I’d be with the majority