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78 Books and arts
The Economist
September 22nd 2018
2
E
VERY writer overuses a word or two.
Johnson’s weakness is “fascinating”.
Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology book
“Watching the English” uses the word
“liminal” 24 times in about 500 pages.
(She deploys it to describe borderline
spaces such as the pub, which exists be-
tween work and home.) “Liminal” ac-
counts for just 0.00009% of all the words
in English books published, as “Watching
the English” was, in 2004. In a random
work of 150,000 words, “liminal” should
appear 0.14 times, so Ms Fox uses it at
around 180 times the average rate. If you
read an anonymous piece of writing that
features “liminal”, you might think there
is a good chance shewrote it.
Such analysis has become a parlour
game, since the recent publication of an
anonymous op-ed by “a senior official in
the Trump administration” in the
New
York Times
. The article excoriated Mr
Trump and portrayed an in-house “resis-
tance” that thwarts his impulses. Pundits
have striven to unmask the author—and
oneword has preoccupied themespecial-
ly. The anonymous writer praised the late
Senator JohnMcCain as “a lodestar for re-
storing honour to public life”. Armchair
detectives pounced. “Lodestar” is only an
eighth as common as “liminal”. Quick
searches found that Mike Pence, the vice-
president, has used thisword in a number
of speeches. Does thatmake him themys-
tery insider?
He denied it, of course. But there are
better reasons to thinkthis lodestar—origi-
nally, a guiding star—is leading in the
wrong direction. Experts in forensic lin-
guistics don’t rely on words like “lode-
star” to determine authorship: rare events
are bad at generating predictions.
Much more helpful are small words
that appear more frequently, even if they
are not particularly striking. You may no-
tice that the perpetrator of a crime had red
hair orwas particularly tall. But lots ofpeo-
ple fit both descriptions. The many ridges
on your fingertips—ordinary, but in an ar-
rangement unique to you—provide a far
surermethod of attribution.
Writings are not exactly like finger-
prints; people produce many more than
ten ina lifetime, andvary their style for any
number of reasons—including attempting
to disguise their authorship. (It is ru-
moured that when Trump staffers speak
off the record to the press, they insert col-
leagues’ signature phrases to throwsleuths
off the trail.) But the two are similar in that
trivial features, in aggregate, provide a clue
to their ownership.
Take the Federalist Papers, written
pseudonymously by John Jay, Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison to support
the ratification of the American constitu-
tion in the 1780s. Of 85 essays, 12 were later
claimed by both Hamilton and Madison.
Historians looked for reflections of their
politics in the documents, but reached no
consensus. Then in the 1960s two statisti-
cians noticed that Hamilton, in his
known writings, used “while”, never
“whilst”. Madison was a “whilst” man.
Madisonwrote “on”, rarely “upon”; Ham-
ilton used both.With these and a fewoth-
er common words they created a statisti-
cal model, and tested it against a separate
set of papers known to be written by one
or the other. It worked perfectly. They
then tested the disputed papers against
their model—and all turned out to be
Madison’s. What had eluded the histori-
answas proved by themathematicians.
Today, it is known that a piece of writ-
ing can supplyhints of the probable sexof
the author, along with their level of edu-
cation, regional background and other
qualities. Men go in for certain words
more than women—and not just stereo-
typical ones (“football”) but common
ones like “a”, “this” and “these”. Ben
Blatt’s recent book “Nabokov’s Favourite
Word is Mauve” is a delightful introduc-
tion to this science of style.
Nailing the “lodestar” author this way
is possible—but unlikely. There are not
two candidates, but many, and probably
not enough written evidence to develop
linguistic fingerprints for some of them.
Hamilton andMadisonwrote a lot; today
most politicians’ “writing” is actually
done by aides. The guessing-gamewill re-
main just that.
Finding out that your lexical finger-
print is found in pronouns and preposi-
tions may feel a bit like discovering that
your genetic blueprint is just a series of
four chemical bases. But theway inwhich
humankind’s soulful nature arises from
soulless components is itself a quiet mir-
acle. If you hadn’t used your quota al-
ready, youmight even call it fascinating.
Lodestars and fingerprints
Johnson
The subtle science of attributing anonymous prose
vision of a brutal, zero-sum world, as Mr
Trump seems to, everyone elsewill, too.
Where does this analysis lead? “World
order is one of those things people don’t
think about until it is gone,” Mr Kagan
warns. People take for granted howAmeri-
ca’s security guarantees have prevented
the merciless escalation of a dog-eat-dog
world. Post-war Germany and Japan felt
safe enough to forsake militarism and con-
centrate on economic growth—as they had
not in the late19thand early20th centuries.
Even the Soviet Union trusted America
enough to give upwithout a fight.
A common belief holds that world
peace can sustain itself. In fact, “vines and
weeds…are constantly working to under-
mine it”. Mr Kagan thinks that without
America’s management, the world faces
what the State Department in 1945 called
“power politics pure and simple”. Unsta-
ble spheres of influence and mutual suspi-
cion will ensue. “We do not face a choice
between good and bad but between bad
andworse,” hewrites. “It is betweenmain-
taining the liberal world order, with all the
moral andmaterial costs that entails, or let-
ting it collapse and courting the catastro-
phes that must inevitably follow.”
This is a bleak vision. Even if Mr Kagan
underestimates the power of an idea to stir
people—as liberal democracy did in east-
ern Europe during the cold war—he is right
to detect a crisis of confidence in the demo-
craticworld. He sets out his casewith char-
acteristic brilliance and conviction. The
tragedy is that, in Mr Trump’s America, his
words are almost certain to be scorned.
7
Clarification.
In our coverage of the fire at Brazil’s
National Museum in the issue of September 6th, we said
that a plan to renovate it with $80m from the World
Bank failed because the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro refused to turn the museum into an independent
trust. The World Bank maintains that in discussions over
a loan to support the museum, in 1998-2000, no amount
or conditions were specified.