As I write this week’s entry to Aristotle to Digital, I am reflecting on the life and times of Yogi Berra, who just died at the ripe old age of 90. I fervently hope that he is resting in peace. In my opinion, he earned it.
In an earlier column, published about a year ago, I wrote about Yogi Berra Logic as I termed the legendary witticisms of one of the greatest catchers to have ever played the game of baseball. In tribute to his life and passing, I thought I would revisit that whimsical posting with some more thoughts on what made Yogisms have such timeless attraction and talk a little about some other playful uses of natural language.
Before I go deeply into these points, I would like to correct the record about Yogisms. Several people have used the word malapropisms to describe the various nuggets of thought that he would utter. This is an incorrect application of malapropism, which is defined as:
I’m not saying that Yogi never used a malapropism in his life. I am saying that most, if not all, of his Yogisms don’t fall into this category. Rather they fall into the category of equivocal speech. The meaning of words changes, often extremely quickly, from one part of the Yogism to another and one has to read them with the various contexts that they span in mind.
A host of Yogisms can be found at the Yogi Berra Musuem and Learning Center’s list of Yogisms. To illustrate the point of equivocation in some detail take the Yogism
The future ain’t what it used to be
On the surface, this expression doesn’t seem to have any meaning and would surely throw any natural language analysis software for a loop in trying to assign one. And yet, there actually is at least a little meaning as evidenced by the smile, chuckle, chortle, snicker, or belly-laugh that each of us has as a reaction upon reading it.
But surface impressions are rarely more than skin deep (a Yogism of my own perhaps?) and with a bit of imagination we can easily parse out some meaning and, perhaps, even profound meaning. I base this expectation on the fact that Yogi Berra was not a stupid man by any measure – his accomplishments alone should testify to that – and that his Yogisms strike a chord in so many peoples mind.
There are, at least, two fairly poignant meanings that can be mined with a fair amount of confidence from the Yogism above. The first is that the hope and aspirations for the future that filled his head at a younger age are now replaced with far less hopeful ideas for what the future holds now that he has grown older. On other words, the next 20 years looked brighter to him when he was younger compared to how he perceives the same 20 year span into the future now that he is an older man. The second is that when he was younger, say 25 years old, and looking forward to what the world would offer when he was 40, he had huge dreams of what might come true. Now that he has turned 40, he’s found that ‘the future’ wasn’t as wonderful as he imagined it might be.
Notice the structure of this particular Yogism. It invokes these two ideas compactly and with humor in a way that a plainer and more logical composition that avoided equivocation cannot do. It’s a masterpiece of natural language if not of pure predicate logic and I think we should be thankful for that.
I don’t know with certainty but I suspect that the next example of natural language gymnastics would have likely captured Yogi’s fancy as well. It is known as the continuum fallacy.
In the continuum fallacy, natural language is used to allow one to cross a fuzzy line without even knowing one is doing it. One form of the continuum fallacy (really the sorites paradox, but they are essentially the same thing) reads something like this.
- We can all agree that 1,000,000 grains of sand can be called a heap
- We can also agree that if we take 1 grain away from this heap, it’s still a heap
- Then we can also agree that 999,999 grains of sand can also be called a heap
- And in continuing in this fashion we can soon arrive at the idea that a heap of sand need not have any sand in it at all.
In the general explanations of why this line of argumentation is a fallacy, analysts will cite that reason being the vague nature of the definition of heap (vagueness of predicates). Certainly it is true that at some poorly undefined (or undefinable?) line exists between where the heap turns into a non-heap.
This ‘paradox’ is not confined to linguistics. Take the image below.
The color gradient from red to yellow is so gradual that it is hard to say that any single color is really different from its neighbors and yet red is not yellow and yellow is not red. And where does the orange begin and end?
This vagueness seems to be a universal feature that is built into most everything. And while it may throw linguists, logicians, perceptual psychologists, and computers into a tizzy, I suspect that Berra, the playful king of vagueness, would have had as much fun with this as with uttering Yogisms.