the miscast Net

[Arnold Zwicky]

tom paikeday asks:
 >What comes to your mind first when you hear the word "net" in isolation?

well, there's no such thing as "in isolation" or "out of context".
you're asking the question on an internet newsgroup, so i'm inclined
to interpret "net" as the internet.  similarly, if i hear someone
use the word on the street or in a restaurant near my house; i live
in palo alto, after all, and a large percentage of the people i
run across are computer folk of one kind or another (some recognizable
as t-shirt techies, others as silicon valley preppies, in blue dress
shirts, no tie, and chinos).

in a sporting goods store, or with non-tech friends i know to be
sports fans, i'd think of basketball nets or volleyball nets.

a lot would depend on the informant's interests in life.  for some,
it would be a fishing net, for some the bottom line in accounting,
for some a fabric, for some mosquito netting.

you could do a survey, but what you'd be tapping isn't knowledge
about language but rather the distribution of certain interests or
concerns in the population.  plus whatever biases are introduced by
the circumstances in which you ask the question, the informant's
knowledge (or guess) about what sort of person you are, what's going
on in the world (two months ago, "worm" would have called up annelids
for me, but right now the first thing that comes to mind is the
computer use of the word), etc.

i don't doubt that college students would be very likely to think of
the internet first.  the internet is a very significant presence in
their lives.  things would probably be different for inner-city kids.
for the young men, at least, basketball is a very big thing in their
lives.

actually, it would be hard to think of a question that's more
exquisitely context-bound than "what do you think of when you hear
the word W?"

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)