Talk:Recency illusion

Truthiness
Is the Stephen Colbert example really a good one? The early citation for "truthiness" seems to mean something like "truthfulness", whereas Colbert (as far as anyone seems to know) coined its current sense ("believable, and who cares if it's true?") Entail (talk) 17:32, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually, there's another problem with it: People aren't wrong when they believe that they never heard the word 'truthiness' until recently! Even if it's in an old dictionary, it's certainly not well-established. Removed the example. Entail (talk) 17:38, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

'' For example, it is widely believed that the term "truthiness" was coined by Stephen Colbert (born 1964) when in fact it was recorded in 1824. ''

Atkinson & Schiffrin's recency effect
Shouldn't there be a reference to Atkinson & Schiffrin's recency effect (1968)? It's not exactly the same phenomenon (the recency effect is about recent memories being stronger, not about believing that something is more recent than it is) but it seems strongly related.--88.73.50.218 (talk) 11:57, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Only if a reliable source mentions such a connection. Atkinson & Schiffrin's effect seems to involve the mechanics of short-term memory of items presented to test subjects. Zwicky's recency illusion has to do with items outside the subjects' awareness due to a lack of exposure in the first place. A mistaken impression based on ignorance (more neutrally, lack of exposure) has nothing to do with forgetting. The only relation I see is that the word "recency" appears in the name of both effects. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 13:26, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Ask
Doesn't this variant go back as far as Old English? (ascian) Zyxw59 (talk) 06:54, 1 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You are correct: The metathesis does go back to Old English. However, the spelling ax or aks is clearly not as old, as this may have prompted people to not recognise the Old English variant, although the spelling and ending is immaterial: the metathesis is the point.
 * This is also a valid example because the Afro-American aks most likely goes back directly to the dialect variant, conveyed through Southern American English. However, other examples are more questionable, as pointed out above. Just because a phenomenon is occasionally attested centuries earlier does not mean there is a connection to the modern phenomenon; in fact, that is rather unlikely. The real question is whether the phenomenon was established, which means it was frequent (at least in non-standard, spoken language), and that is hard to prove – but actually rather unlikely if there are only very sporadic attestations, say, two in the 19th century resembling a phenomenon that appeared around 2000. I see this kind of argument often employed against the allegation that some grammatical construction, for example, is an Anglicism in German: somebody manages to dig up one or two isolated examples in Goethe and claims this proves it cannot be an Anglicism, HA! – but really, that doesn't prove anything when the suspected Anglicism only started in the 1990s. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:53, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Multiple negation is tricky
I undid two changes by User:Seino van Breugel that (I believe) misstated the perception at issue here. The recency illusion is the perception that things are new, even though they are not. Seino van Breguel's edits stated the illusion as believing that things are not new. The edits changed a direct quote from Rickford et al. 2007, and another from Dr. Zwicky's blog. Changing direct quotations is always fraught, and in this case the change actually reversed the meaning. At least, I think I've got it right now. Cnilep (talk) 07:25, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Singular they
Another user noted the need for reliable sources that specifically discuss the examples of recency illusion as examples of recency illusion, as opposed to simply discussing the usage. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage divides discussion of singular they into two types of objections: objections based on gender and objections based on number. In the first section, MWDU specifically states, "Although the lack of a common-gender third person pronoun has received much attention in recent years... [the issue] is much older" (p. 901). The section on number says, "Examples of this use are very old" (p. 902), but it does not say the objectors think of it as new. Therefore, to be maximally conservative, I specified as recency illusion objections to "the use of they to reference a singular antecedent without specific gender". Cnilep (talk) 01:13, 11 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The section on singular they here does not cite a source for the claim that "referenc[ing] a singular antecedent without specific gender" is a definition used by anybody. This section should either cite a source for someone making that claim, cite a source for a historical usage of singular they in reference to a known and specified singular subject, or be removed. BuzzSmooth (talk) 15:57, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Where do you see "known and specified" in the text of this article as it was before your edits, or in the text of singular they? Just plain Bill (talk) 16:23, 8 July 2021 (UTC)


 * "known and specified" was taken from the "citation needed" tag on this page. Singular they also says "In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for people who do not identify as male or female, as in, for example, 'This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work.'"
 * Given that singular they agrees that there is in fact a new usage of the term when referring to a known individual, this section should support the language of "referenc[ing] a singular antecedent without specific gender" with a citation, as the only reference I can find that uses that terminology is the original comment in this talk page section BuzzSmooth (talk) 17:46, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Given that singular they agrees that there is in fact a new usage of the term when referring to a known individual, this section should support the language of "referenc[ing] a singular antecedent without specific gender" with a citation, as the only reference I can find that uses that terminology is the original comment in this talk page section BuzzSmooth (talk) 17:46, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't get this example
The phrase between you and I (rather than between you and me), often viewed today as a hypercorrection, which could also be found occasionally in Early Modern English.

English prescriptivism is largely based on the simple question: what would Latin do? Latin was a core educational requirement among the educated elite until not so very long ago. And clearly, from the lens of Latin, "between you and I" deserves an immediate failing grade in basic subject/object distinction.

What's the recency illusion here, anyway?

It seems to me that English is/was drifting toward a usage pattern where compound pronoun phrases shed the subject case entirely.

Both of these suffused my prairie childhood:


 * Me and you went there together.
 * He gave it to me and you.

I suspect that putting "I" into either of those is a virtue-signalling (urban) artifice, that doesn't come entirely naturally to the native English-speaker's intuition. And then when we train ourselves to do it in one place (subject role), it just pops out automatically in the other place, too (object role).

The lack of compound subject ("Me and you") still sounds sloppy to our ears, the actual compound subject sounds overly stiff ("He and I"), and even if we embrace stiff, when we formulate sentences, subject/object distinctions in pronoun phrases just doesn't come natural, so we end up with stiff and strange ("between you and I").

I removed "between you and I" from my deliberate speech long ago, mostly just to see if I could (it's hard). And still, after decades of practice and constant monitoring, it still leaks out when my mind is thinking hard, or I'm tired, or the immediate social environment is in flux.

In order for a language to change at a fundamental level, it pretty much has to cross these unhappy valleys, where our ears and our mouths are not in full agreement over the standards of correct speech. That's the biggest problem with the Latin reference model: we have a version of grammar-school Latin handed down that is artificially self-consistent. Street Latin would have had the growing pains of a living language, too.

I think that referencing the (tricky) hypercorrection debate in this context is simply pouring good money after bad, and I don't even understand why this example is here in the first place. &mdash; MaxEnt 19:43, 24 June 2018 (UTC)