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June 19th, 2025 (Permalink)

Lesson in Logic 19: Polysyllogisms

In previous lessons, I discussed how circles can represent classes, how two-circle Venn diagrams can represent categorical statements and be used to test such statements for equivalence and contradiction. Of course, two-circle Venn diagrams can only represent logical relations between two classes; so, to handle reasoning involving a third class, you must add a third circle. Three-circle Venn diagrams―or "pretzels", as I like to call them―can be used to represent the logical relations between three classes, and test arguments involving three classes, notably categorical syllogisms, for validity.1

If you've studied the lessons covering the topics mentioned in the previous paragraph, or in some other way learned how to use Venn diagrams to evaluate categorical syllogisms2, you have every right to take pride but, before you get too arrogant, what would you do with the following argument?

  1. All sapsuckers are woodpeckers.
  2. All woodpeckers are birds.
  3. All birds are animals.
  4. Therefore, all sapsuckers are animals.

Now, you might say, quite correctly: "That's not a syllogism! It has three premisses instead of two. It has four class terms rather than three. I don't know how to diagram four class terms on a three-circle diagram!" Yet, it's an obviously valid argument and all of the statements making it up are categorical statements, so it seems a shame not to know what to do with it.

Your first idea might be to add another circle to the Venn diagram, but you can't do that. You may remember from a previous lesson3 that adding a circle to a Venn diagram should double the number of areas that the circles divide the space into so that every logically possible subclass will be represented on the diagram. So, a Venn diagram with four circles should have sixteen areas for subclasses. Unfortunately, it's not possible to add a fourth circle to the diagram in such a way as to yield sixteen areas4.

However, it is possible to create diagrams with the right number of subdivisions for any number of class terms5, but using shapes other than, or in addition to, circles. However, the more classes involved, the harder it is to correctly draw such a diagram freehand. Moreover, though the diagramming process is an extension of that for three-circle Venn diagrams, the more complex and tangled the diagrams get, the more difficult it becomes to diagram the premisses correctly. So, if you wish to use the diagrammatic method to evaluate arguments such as the above example, it will help to make copies of the appropriate diagrams6.

There's another way to show that arguments such as the example above that are really two syllogisms in one are valid using only pretzels. Such arguments are called "polysyllogisms", meaning "many"―"poly-", as in "polytheism"―syllogisms. They're also sometimes called "sorites"7―which means "heap" in ancient Greek―because they're a heap of syllogisms.

More specifically, you can reconstruct the example as a chain of two syllogisms where each syllogism is a link in the chain. What links the two syllogisms is the missing conclusion: All sapsuckers are birds. Adding that conclusion to the argument gives:

  1. All sapsuckers are woodpeckers.
  2. All woodpeckers are birds.
  3. Therefore, all sapsuckers are birds.
  4. All birds are animals.
  5. Therefore, all sapsuckers are animals.

This is clearly a sequence or chain of syllogisms where the conclusion of the first syllogism―"all sapsuckers are birds"―is a premiss in the last syllogism. Such unexpressed statements in a polysyllogism that serve as both conclusion and premiss are called "intermediate conclusions". The conclusion of the last syllogism in the chain―in this case, "all sapsuckers are animals"―is called the final conclusion to distinguish it from intermediate conclusions.

Both of the arguments making up this chain are syllogisms, so that you can test them individually for validity using pretzels. Chains of arguments are like metal chains in that they are only as strong as their weakest link. In other words, if even one link in the chain is invalid, then the entire chain breaks. In contrast, if every link in a polysyllogism is valid, then the original argument is valid. Since both of the arguments in the polysyllogism above are valid, the example is itself valid.

Unfortunately, there's a confusing subtlety here: if every sub-argument in a polysyllogism is valid then the polysyllogism as a whole is valid; but it's not the case that if some sub-argument in a polysyllogism is invalid that the polysyllogism itself must be invalid―the most that you can conclude is that it has not been shown to be valid. If you want to show that it's invalid you'll have to use a diagram, for if you correctly diagram the premisses of a polysyllogism and the resulting diagram does not show the conclusion to be true, then the polysyllogism is invalid.

Example:

  1. All flickers are woodpeckers.
  2. No birds are mammals.
  3. All woodpeckers are birds.
  4. Therefore, no flickers are mammals.

The above polysyllogism should seem intuitively valid, but let's see how to show that it is by breaking it down into a chain of simple syllogisms. Since there are three premisses containing four class terms―"flickers", "woodpeckers", "birds", and "mammals"―this should be broken down into two syllogisms connected by an intermediate conclusion.

To find which premisses to combine, look for two statements with a common middle term. So, the first two premisses will not work since there are four terms between them, but the first and third premiss share the term "woodpeckers". Here's the resulting syllogism:

  • All flickers are woodpeckers.
  • All woodpeckers are birds.
  • Therefore, all flickers are birds.

This syllogism is an instance of Barbara and, therefore, valid. Now, to complete the chain we take the intermediate conclusion―"all flickers are birds"―and combine it with the remaining premiss and final conclusion:

  • All flickers are birds.
  • No birds are mammals.
  • Therefore, no flickers are mammals.

You can show that this syllogism is valid by a Venn diagram or any other technique you prefer. This shows that the original polysyllogism is valid.

Exercises: To practice proving polysyllogisms valid, use the same technique demonstrated in the above Example on the following arguments. The chains of syllogisms given in the Answers are not necessarily the only way to show the polysyllogisms valid, so yours may differ.

I.

  1. All quacks are cranks.
  2. All charlatans are grifters.
  3. No grifters are cranks.
  4. Therefore, no charlatans are quacks.

II.

  1. All twaddle is poppycock.
  2. All gobbledegook is drivel.
  3. All balderdash is twaddle.
  4. No drivel is poppycock.
  5. Therefore, no gobbledegook is balderdash.

Notes:

  1. ↑ For the Lessons in Logic that cover the topics mentioned in this paragraph, see:
    1. Class Diagrams, 6/22/2016
    2. Two-Circle Venn Diagrams, 6/22/2016
    3. Categorical Statements, 8/17/2016
    4. Equivalence, 11/15/2016
    5. Contradiction, 12/13/2016
    6. The Third Circle, 2/16/2017
    7. Pretzel Logic, 4/28/2017
    8. Categorical Syllogisms, 5/22/2017
  2. ↑ From here on, just "syllogisms" for short.
  3. ↑ Lesson 16 in note 1, above.
  4. ↑ For a proof, see Amy N. Myers, "Are Venn Diagrams Limited to Three or Fewer Sets?". Moderately mathematical; also contains blank diagrams for four and five classes that could be copied for testing arguments for validity.
  5. ↑ See: A. W. F. Edwards, Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams (2004).
  6. ↑ See the sources in the previous two notes for such diagrams.
  7. ↑ See: W. L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought (1980).
June 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

In the Mouth a Dessert

Columnist Roger Harris offers an intriguing distinction between two types of movies: Country movies, which are not necessarily about the country, stress the old-time country virtues in an old-fashioned country way: you are never left in doubt as to who are the "good guys" or the "bad guys," and both always get their just deserts (he spells it "desserts," but no matter).1

Initially, I wrote the following sentence in a puzzle a few years ago: "Just planning what kind of pies to bake for desert is a puzzle." Certainly, figuring out what pie to make for a desert is quite a puzzle: cactus pie2, perhaps? Of course, I meant "dessert", not "desert".

While spelled almost the same, "desert" and "dessert" are pronounced quite differently, with "desert" accented on the first syllable while "dessert" is accented on the second. "Desert" is a noun that refers to an arid area of land3 whereas the noun "dessert" usually means a sweet dish eaten as the last course of a meal4. It's hard to remember which pronunciation goes with which number of esses, since there's nothing about one "s" or two that indicates which syllable should be stressed. It's enough to make you wish that English had accent marks as some other languages do, such as French.

Making matters more difficult is the verb "to desert", meaning to leave without permission, which is spelled exactly like the noun for a dry region but pronounced like "dessert". Also spelled and pronounced identically is the noun "desert", which is related to a different verb, "to deserve", and refers to a state of entitlement or what one deserves. In this sense, it is usually plural and most often found in the phrase "just deserts". When we say that someone got his or her just deserts, we mean that they received what they deserved, which is not necessarily a dessert5―in fact, it's often a bad thing.

Luckily, I recognized the misspelling in the puzzle before posting it. I suspect that misspellings of these words must be common, yet only two of my reference books mention the error6. To test whether spelling and grammar checking programs would have caught the mistake, I tried out the misspelled sentence in a few free online ones, and two out of three did indeed correct it.

I asked ChatGPT to check the following, more difficult example: "I will dessert my family, move to the dessert, subsist on just deserts, and get my just desserts." Here is how it responded:

You're close, but there are a couple of words that need tweaking for clarity:

"I will desert my family, move to the desert, subsist on just desserts, and get my just desserts."

Here's why:

  • Desert (verb): to abandon.
  • Desert (noun): a barren, sandy area.
  • Dessert (noun): a sweet course typically eaten at the end of a meal.
  • Deserts (noun): refers to what one deserves, as in "getting what you deserve."

Let me know if you need further explanation!7

You're also close, ChatGPT, but you just missed the last misspelling.

Notes:

  1. Mario Pei, Weasel Words: The Art of Saying What You Don't Mean (1978), p 61.
  2. There really is such a thing, surprisingly; see: "Nopalito Pie (Cactus Pie)", Food, accessed: 6/1/2025.
  3. "Desert", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/31/2025.
  4. "Dessert", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/31/2025.
  5. Bonnie Mills, "The Meaning of 'Just Desserts'", Quick and Dirty Tips, 12/10/2020.
  6. The winners are:
    • Harry Shaw, Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions (Revised edition, 1987)
    • Bill Walsh, Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print―and How to Avoid Them (2000)
  7. Chat with ChatGPT, 6/1/2025.
Recommended Reading & Listening
May 31st, 2025 (Permalink)

Lost in Lexicon Valley

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect."1

The following podcast is from over a dozen years ago, but I just discovered it earlier this year. Its topic is the pros and cons of euphemisms for "illegal immigrant". I have several comments to make, which I've added to excerpts from the transcript, below.

Mike Vuolo, "From 'Wetbacks' to 'Illegals' to 'Undocumented' to…?", Slate, 11/13/2012

Bob Garfield, Host: …[A]s recently as about six weeks ago the New York Times [NYT] affirmed the usage of "illegal" on the grounds of it's hard to be wrong by calling a thing by its name. The reasoning is, and I have to say I mostly agree with this, that being unlawfully within the borders, whether you were brought here by your parents or whether you have overstayed a visa or what have you, is against the law and the shortest synonym for that is "illegal." And they're concerned about the kind of linguistic revisionism which robs perfectly legitimate adjectives and nouns of their meaning in an attempt to destigmatize them. …[H]ere's what's bad about it. So often it seems to me, with the perfectly noble motive of wanting to destigmatize people for things that are not necessarily their fault, we have lost meaning in just a whole slew of words from physical disabilities to ethnic backgrounds to you name it. And I'm not sure I want "illegal" to be the latest casualty in the linguistic wars.

I was surprised to read this. What a difference twelve years make! My impression is that the NYT is now politically correct in its use of language for illegal immigrants. To test that impression, I read a recent article on illegal imigration in the NYT, which reported that the Internal Revenue Service has agreed to provide tax information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)2. The terms it uses for illegal immigrants:

  • "Migrants": Used in the headline, subheadline, and once in the body of the article, "migrant" fails to distinguish between those who are entering a country―immigrants―and those leaving it―emigrants. I doubt that ICE is interested in emigrants.
  • "Immigrants": This word at least has the advantage of indicating that it is those migrants that have entered the country who are the object of interest for ICE, but I also doubt that ICE is interested in legal immigrants.
  • "Undocumented workers": "Undocumented" has been the favored euphemism for "illegal" up until recently, when it's begun to show signs of losing its euphemistic force and, thus, is falling out of favor3.

So, no occurrences of the taboo phrase but that, of course, is just one example. Early in the year after the above interview, the NYT adopted a new policy:

This month, The Associated Press announced it would eliminate the use of "illegal immigrant" entirely. The news agency wrote, "Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use 'illegal' only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant." On Tuesday, The New York Times updated its policies on how it uses the phrase "illegal immigrant" in its coverage. The newspaper did not go as far as The Associated Press, and it will continue to allow the phrase to be used for "someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authorization." But it encourages reporters and editors to "consider alternatives when appropriate to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions."4

Later in the article, we read:

The changes announced by Mr. Corbett to the stylebook suggested caution when looking for alternatives to "illegal immigrant." "'Unauthorized' is also an acceptable description, though it has a bureaucratic tone," Mr. Corbett said. "'Undocumented' is the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, but it has a flavor of euphemism and should be approached with caution outside quotations."

So, "unauthorized" was a possible replacement for "illegal" twelve years ago, but it was already becoming outdated since good doublespeak doesn't have "a flavor of euphemism". When you hear or use a word that you know is a euphemism, you're immediately reminded of what it is a euphemism for, whereas good doublespeak prevents thinking about taboo topics.

Back to "Lexicon Valley":

Mike Vuolo: I asked Jonathan Rosa what he thought about these news organizations sort of standing by their belief that "illegal" remained neutral and accurate. Here's a couple of minutes of the conversation I had with him.

Jonathan Rosa: It's frustrating to see folks try to claim that something like illegal is neutral or accurate when it clearly is more about staking out a claim to a political identity as conservative. And undocumented is about staking out a political identity as liberal or progressive. I mean, neither of them is neutral.

Certainly, when I use the phrase "illegal immigrant" it's not because I'm "staking out a claim to a political identity as conservative." I seriously doubt whether Bob Garfield, the host of the program is either a conservative, or was trying to stake out a claim as one, when earlier in the podcast he defended the phrase. Is it "conservative" to use language to communicate rather than to obfuscate?

Surprisingly enough, later in the interview Rosa explains why "illegal immigrant" does not imply that the person referred to is illegal, whatever that would mean:

Rosa: …[O]thers have pointed out, for example, that…we talk about certain kinds of biologists and we call them marine biologists. But that doesn't mean that they're from the sea or something like this, that they were born in the water.

My favorite example is the phrase "criminal lawyer"5, which does not mean a lawyer who is also a criminal―though no doubt some are―but a lawyer who specializes in the criminal, as opposed to civil, law. Likewise, an "illegal immigrant" is not an immigrant who is illegal, but one who entered the country illegally. People who respond that "no person is illegal" to the phrase "illegal immigrant" seem not to understand how adjectives in the English language work, perhaps because they're not native speakers.

Despite understanding how English adjectives work, Rosa goes on to say some silly things:

Rosa: …But if, in fact, we look at how some of these usages, how they work in context, there's this way that illegality maps onto one's entire person. You know we see slogans that say things like "illegal immigrant hunting permit." This has concrete consequences in the sense that in the FBI's most recent annual report, Latinos constituted two-thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes. This usage of "illegal" is a way of framing an entire population regardless of their migration status. So you have many people who were born citizens of the United States, but because of the way that this notion of "illegal" has racialized connotations, their citizenship status is called into question.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Mike Vuolo sounds skeptical, as well he should be. So, some unknown person said some bad thing about illegal immigrants: How does it follow that the phrase "illegal immigrant" made this anonymous person say it? Where is the evidence that hate crimes would decline, let alone disappear, if we just stopped saying "illegal immigrant"? The FBI's report is no evidence that the phrase had anything to do with any of the crimes in question. At the time that this conversation took place, the use of the word "illegal" in the context of immigration had declined considerably6, so why were there still so many hate crimes against Latinos? The focus on making certain phrases taboo seems not to have worked. Speaking of euphemisms not working, Bob Garfield comments:

Bob: …Remember when people who could not see were called "blind"? Now "blind" is a perfectly legitimate word. It describes the condition and equally describes those so afflicted. And yet it became deemed stigmatizing to people who couldn't see. So, all of a sudden, the blind ceased to be blind. They began to be visually handicapped. But then, oh no, handicapped was itself stigmatizing. Then maybe visually impaired but even that seems to have an edge to it, so now people are not handicapped or impaired or disabled but they're challenged. And sometimes they're differently abled, and it goes on and on, you know, well into absurdity. What happens, it seems to me is, that each of the words chosen to replace the word supposedly stigmatizing itself eventually becomes stigmatizing because it takes on all of the stigma attached to the condition itself. It's not the word that's stigmatizing. It's the condition….

This is an excellent description of euphemism inflation at work.

Mike: …I asked Jonathan Rosa, what's the alternative? And he mentioned "unauthorized" as a possible term that isn't politically charged. And in fact the day after the election I was reading the New Yorker online and they listed a number of sort of policy proposals and issues that they thought Obama would try to tackle in his second term, one of which was immigration reform. And they said that the goal should be to "pass the DREAM Act. Make a deal with Republicans on a comprehensive immigration bill that includes a path to legalization for unauthorized immigrants." …

Bob: And to me that is the "differently abled" of immigration policy. It doesn't even mean anything. It's so expansive. Unauthorized? What does it mean; you don't have a pass to get backstage? … I think that gets to the very nub of why it is very dangerous to try to use linguistic revisionism as a means to pursue social policy. It just kind of misses the point and bastardizes language and obscures meaning.

And doesn't accomplish anything substantively. I agree with Bob Garfield, but obscuring meaning is the whole point of doublespeak, so it really isn't a point against "unauthorized" that it obscures meaning, but a point in its favor as a euphemism.

Notes:

  1. George Orwell, 1984 (1949), Chapter 5.
  2. Andrew Duehren, "I.R.S. Agrees to Share Migrants' Tax Information With ICE", The New York Times, 4/8/2015.
  3. 21st Century Doublespeak, Part 2, 2/4/2025.
  4. Christine Haughney, "The Times Shifts on 'Illegal Immigrant,' but Doesn't Ban the Use", The New York Times, 4/23/2013.
  5. "Criminal Lawyer", Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed: 5/31/2025.
  6. Emily Guskin, "'Illegal,' 'undocumented,' 'unauthorized': News media shift language on immigration", Pew Research Center, 6/17/2013.

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in this podcast, as is evidenced by my criticisms above, but I think it's worth listening to or reading as a whole.

Weird Science Fantasy
May 19th, 2025 (Permalink)

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Robert Ripley was a cartoonist who started a newspaper cartoon strip over a century ago called "Believe it or Not!", which told supposedly true but hard-to-believe stories in words and pictures1. Believe it or not, this strip is still being published despite his death in 1949. The success of the cartoon led to books, museums, television shows and, of course, a website.

Since the purpose of "Believe it or Not!" was to shock people with amazing "factoids" that you were invited to choose not to believe, Ripley wasn't overly-scrupulous about fact-checking2. For instance, the following headline is from the Ripley's site a couple of years ago:

Humans Inhale Credit Card-Sized Amounts of Microplastics Every Week3

Should we believe this or not? The Ripley's article was based on one published earlier that month with a similar headline and which begins:

Humans may be inhaling a credit card's worth of toxic microplastics every week…. In 2019, a team of scientists estimated that up to 16.2 bits of microplastic enter our airways every hour―adding up to a credit card's worth each week.4

A half-year later, the venerable Beeb repeated the story:

We inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics each week5

As in so many of these sci-fi media scare stories, the underlying claim seems to have come from a press release put out by the publisher of the journal in which the "team of scientists"' paper appeared. The first sentence of the release was originally: "Research shows humans might inhale about 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour, which is equivalent to a credit card over an entire week.6" However, that sentence has since been deleted and the following note appended to the article:

This press release was updated on March 12, 2024. The original version included a claim that humans might inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics every week. That statistic was determined to be an overestimate, the actual amount is much lower.7

How much is much lower? The false factoid appears to have originated in a "blog" post from a company that sells air purifiers. According to the author of the scientific article cited by the company, "at the highest rate he recorded, inhaling a credit card's worth would take thousands of years.8" How many people hearing from the BBC about inhaling a credit card every week ran out and bought an air purifier?

It turns out that the notion of measuring exposure to microplastic in terms of credit cards predates the above episode. There are, of course, other routes by which small pieces of plastic can enter your body, as in the following headline:

You could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic every week9

I find this hard to swallow―the headline, that is―though it's more plausible than the claim that you breathe in the same amount in a week. Interestingly, this earlier article remarks in passing: "Although microplastics have been detected in the air, the study says inhalation accounts for a negligible intake 'but may vary heavily depending on the environment.'" I assume that a "negligible intake" would be far less than a credit card a week.

This indigestible claim comes from a different study than the one that led to the inhalation headlines. Just as the previous one originated with a company that sells air-purifiers, this one comes from a study funded by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF)10, an environmental organization. At the end of the very report from which this claim originates, the WWF calls for "collective global action" "to address plastic pollution on a global level".

The study in question was a meta-study that looked at previous studies that attempted to estimate the amount of tiny pieces of plastic that people eat or drink11. The credit card claim came from the upper-end estimate of 5 grams of plastic per week, approximately the amount in such a card, but the lower-end of the range was only one-tenth of a gram, which would mean that it would take almost a year to ingest a credit card's worth of plastic.

The fact that this was a high-end estimate shows up in headlines and articles by words such as "could" in the above CNN headline: you could be if you're consuming the maximum amount. Similarly, another CNN headline originally read this way:

We consume a credit card's worth of plastic every week12

The headline was subsequently revised to:

We consume up to a credit card's worth of plastic every week13

The added "up to" indicates that this is a maximum.

It's obvious why an air purification company or an environmental group might exaggerate the amount of microplastic pollution in the air or water, but why do reputable news organizations such as CNN and the BBC repeat these exaggerations in their headlines? The goal of headlines is to get people to read the story beneath it, and one way to do so is through the same techniques used by Ripley. Is it shocking that so many of these headline-grabbing claims from industry and advocacy groups have to be later corrected, and the corrections always go in one direction? This is one fact you'll never see in Ripley's.

Notes:

  1. "Robert L. Ripley", Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed: 5/16/2025.
  2. See:
  3. Noelle Talmon, "Humans Inhale Credit Card-Sized Amounts of Microplastics Every Week", Ripley's, 6/30/2023.
  4. Ben Turner, "Humans inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics every week. Here's where it ends up.", Live Science, 6/19/2023. This is the Internet Archive's cache of the page which, as discussed below, has been edited since. Paragraphing suppressed.
  5. "We inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics each week", BBC, 1/29/2024.
  6. "Microplastics Stick Around in Human Airways", AIP Publishing, 6/13/2023. This is the Internet Archive's cache of the page which has been edited since, as discussed below.
  7. "Microplastics Stick Around in Human Airways", AIP Publishing, 3/12/2024. This is the current, revised press release.
  8. Leo Benedictus, "You do not inhale a credit card's worth of microplastic every week", Full Fact, 3/14/2024.
  9. Isabelle Gerretsen, "You could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic every week", CNN, 7/17/2019.
  10. Wijnand de Wit & Nathan Bigaud, "No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People", World Wildlife Fund, 2019.
  11. Casey Decker, "Claims you eat a credit card's worth of plastic per week need context", Verify, 4/25/2022.
  12. Chris Cillizza, "We consume a credit card's worth of plastic every week", CNN, 10/31/2022. Timed to scare you for Halloween! This is the unrevised version of the article from the Internet Archive; for the current, revised version, see the next note.
  13. Chris Cillizza, "We consume up to a credit card's worth of plastic every week", CNN, 11/2/2022. Highlighting added.
May 7th, 2025 (Permalink)

"Versus" Vs. "Verses"

I found the following sentence in a book I was recently reading: "Paul Krugman tweeted that 'since Trump seems to have decided that stocks are proof of his success, here's US verses euro stocks over the past year.'"1 Do you see what's wrong with this sentence? The title of this entry gives it away, but I couldn't resist.

Though the words "verses" and "versus" are pronounced identically, and differ in spelling by only one letter, they do not even belong to the same grammatical category. "Verses" is the plural of the noun "verse"2, which usually refers to a line of poetry, a section of a song, or a sentence in a book such as the Bible; whereas "versus" is not a noun but a preposition used to link two nouns that denote opponents in a sporting match, a trial, or some other competition3. In the context of Krugman's sentence, the two noun phrases that should be linked by "versus" are "US [stocks]" and "euro stocks". Also, it's "versus" that "vs.", or just "v." in legal contexts, abbreviates.

Krugman's "tweet" spelled the word correctly4, so the incorrect spelling was introduced in the book and not caught by a spell-checker, whether human or automated. Since both spellings are legitimate English words, a spell-checking computer program that simply checks the words in a passage against an English lexicon will not catch the misspelling; but, because the two words belong to different grammatical categories, a program that parses the sentence may flag it.

I tried the sentence in a few free online spelling and grammar checkers, one of which did correct "verses" to "versus", but others found no errors. Turning from spelling and grammar checking programs to supposedly artificially intelligent ones, Grok spotted the error but, as was the case previously5, the answer it supplied was unnecessarily long though its advice was not technically wrong.

I don't think the confusion of "versus" and "verses" is common since none of my reference books mention it, but a short web search did turn up the following headline:

Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America6

So, it's not as uncommon as it should be.

Notes:

  1. Matt Palumbo, Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies (2019), p. 433
  2. "Verse", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
  3. "Versus", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
  4. Paul Krugman, Tweet, Twitter, 10/11/2017
  5. Pedaling Lies?, 4/5/2025
  6. William Schmick, "Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America", Valencia County News-Bulletin, 5/26/2022
Puzzle
May 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

Crack the Combination IX*

The combination of a lock is three digits long and each digit is unique, that is, each occurs only once in the combination. The following are some incorrect combinations.

  1. 7 3 1: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
  2. 4 2 1: Two digits are correct but neither is in the right position.
  3. 9 0 2: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
  4. 1 4 3: One digit is correct and in the right position.

Can you determine the correct combination from the above clues?

*Previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.

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