[Corpora-List] Man bites dog

[maxwell]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:01:59 +0000, "Jimmy O'Regan" <joregan at gmail.com>
wrote:
> ...More importantly, it assumes that
> 'dog bites man' is a more frequent trigram in English (i.e., the
> target language model), which doesn't seem to be true
> ...
> which makes sense in hindsight, when you consider the idiomatic value
> of 'man bites dog'.

Yes, 'man bites dog' has been around the block a few times, and 'dog bites
man' is probably not that common because it isn't newsworthy--which is
precisely the point of the old saying, "If a dog bites a man, that's not
news. If a man bites a dog, that's news."

So use your imagination: "Baby kisses politician" (6 hits, vs. 18,000 for
"Politician kisses baby").  I was going to say, "Man bites snake", but that
seems oddly common, even in comparison to "Snake bites man."  My favorite
is "Man bites snake, faces animal cruelty charges."  Which says something
odd about our world, but never mind.

Your other points (about bigrams, etc.) are of course relevant.

   Mike Maxwell

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