The Chance Of Schwarzenegger’s ‘F*ck You’ Acrostic Being Random: One In A Trillion
The Chance Of Schwarzenegger’s ‘F*ck You’ Acrostic Being Random: One In A Trillion
The likelihood that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R-CA) recent vulgar hidden message was inadvertent is about one in a trillion, according to a Wonk Room analysis. In a recent message announcing a veto of a bill sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano — who had earlier told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” — the first letters in each line of the two paragraphs spelled out “Fuck You,” with that capitalization. The governor’s press secretary claimed it was just a “weird coincidence“:
Schwarzenegger’s press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted Tuesday it was simply a “weird coincidence.” He sent us veto messages the governor sent out in the past with linguistic lineups such as “soap” and “poet,” which he said were also unintended.
Ignoring the likelihood of the paragraphs breaking into the correct 4-3 lines necessary for “Fuck You” and the likelihood of the capitalization being inadvertently correct, the probability of that particular phrase is approximately one in a trillion.
This is considerably smaller than the likelihood of the vulgarity appearing if the distribution of first letters were even, which is 1 in 10 billion (26^-7 = 1.25e-10).
If word distribution were based on the frequency of first letters in a common word dictionary [3esl.txt], then the likelihood of randomly spelling out the particular phrase would be one in a trillion (1.19e-12).
However, that ignores the distribution of word frequency in speech — words beginning with “t” (e.g. “the”, “that”) appear much more often than any other. Calculating first-letter frequencies from a 30,000-word concordance of recent speeches by Schwarzenegger (removing instances of “Thank you”), we still find the likelihood of the phrase in question randomly appearing to be one in a trillion (8.8e-13), in line with our less well-designed estimate.
Now, the likelihood that some phrase would be spelled out? Ignoring letter distribution, there’s about a 0.3% chance any four letter string is a common English word, and a 3% chance any three letter string is a common English word. The specific likelihood of the words “soap” and “poet” appearing, for example, given the Schwarzenegger speeches, is one in 100,000 — much greater than the one in 10 million shot of “fuck” appearing.
As letter distribution would make the appearance of common words more likely (e.g. “teas”), the probability of some two-word combination appearing is on the order of two percent. The likelihood of it making any sense, of course, is smaller. A more accurate estimation is left to the reader.
How likely is one in a trillion? To give a sense of scale, one trillion is about 10 to 20 times the number of human beings who have ever lived on the planet. For a person to speak a trillion words, you’d have to live for 400,000 years. About 20 trillion words are spoken every day on the planet. You would need to search through about the number of books in seven Libraries of Congress to find a book that randomly had Schwarzenegger’s phrase going down one of its pages.
Still, that means there’s a chance.
| First-letter distribution | |
|---|---|
| Common English words | Schwarzenegger speeches |
|
s: 11.57% c: 9.29% p: 8.14% a: 6.04% d: 5.91% r: 5.43% b: 5.25% m: 5.22% t: 5.02% f: 4.92% i: 4.88% e: 4.15% h: 3.99% g: 3.52% l: 2.99% w: 2.93% o: 2.56% u: 2.24% n: 2.06% v: 1.43% j: 0.91% k: 0.60% q: 0.43% y: 0.33% z: 0.12% x: 0.05% |
t: 17.44% a: 12.74% i: 8.62% w: 7.84% o: 5.96% s: 5.83% c: 4.66% h: 4.55% b: 4.28% p: 3.06% f: 3.06% g: 3.00% m: 2.97% d: 2.42% l: 2.42% y: 2.15% n: 2.07% e: 2.01% r: 1.93% u: 0.81% k: 0.74% j: 0.72% v: 0.68% q: 0.03% z: 0.01% x: 0.00% |
14 Responses to “The Chance Of Schwarzenegger’s ‘F*ck You’ Acrostic Being Random: One In A Trillion”
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Bleh.
October 31st, 2009 at 3:03 pmMildly pointless analysis, but I am convinced he wrote it on purpose. Still, what effect will this have on anything?
October 31st, 2009 at 3:44 pmCheck the kerning!
October 31st, 2009 at 5:58 pmIt is not at all pointless when the governor is denying the charge. That have expressed the opinion that you ‘think’ he did it entirely misses the point. Any mathematically literate person will ‘think’ the governor did this on purpose in the same way that they will ‘think’ the earth isn’t balanced on an infinite column of turtles.
In other words governor’s denial isn’t open to him. If he thought he could hide behind probabilities he forgot to do the math.
Which is why it is valuable that it be done by somebody.
October 31st, 2009 at 6:06 pmIf you’re going to do this kind of analysis, the relevant probability you want is surely that some combination of letters that form a pattern for some interesting or offensive phrase. And that’ll be several orders of magnitude.
Still, the prior probability of him doing something like this is probably high enough for me to believe he did it on purpose.
October 31st, 2009 at 6:28 pmtyusha: As I wrote:
To properly calculate the likelihood of this phrase occuring randomly, you need to assess the likelihood of Schwarzenegger being the type of person who would respond to a childish taunt with a puerile taunt of his own. That likelihood is very high, given everything we know about the Governator.
Then you can use Bayes’ formula for conditional probability to demonstrate that the likelihood of any vulgar phrase randomly appearing is astronomically small.
October 31st, 2009 at 7:14 pmNonesense! Words can’t ever be correctly counted end-to-end! Here’s why all instances of a word, are never identical, and cannot be compared, or counted:
…literally, a word will only mean what its present context allows it; so a speaker or author, at all times, has unlimited flexibility to employ any word or words in his or her texts! Precisely because ordinary circumstances shift and change dramatically, in a very real sense, the moment such a linguistic analysis is completed, it will have instantly become outdated!
An rough analogy might pertain to the problem, of parsing an appendum of all bon afide historical, ecumenical texts, in order to count their translated, word frequencies; to do this would likely require many years of historical research in order to find: 1) every relevant literary style, from which to find some common literary basis, and 2) a timely, arbitrary set of cultural paradigms, to put each word within its right and proper ’semantic ball-park’! Therefore, aside from the sheer (logistical) impossibility of collecting endless texts, the job of classifying this huge, resulting set, of words chosen for analysis and their corresponding frequency allocations, would never make sense linguistically, theologically, nor even historically!!
October 31st, 2009 at 10:38 pmJust like the girly man jokes and the big knife, he thinks he is clever. It is allot easier to manipulate words to do what you want, than them just happening to end up that way. He did it on purpose.
October 31st, 2009 at 11:42 pmLet has-beens lie.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:50 amThe thing that people have seemed to miss in this whole thing is that the Governator has reached a Nabokovian level of political retaliation, and I think he should be applauded for having such high aim.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:21 amThanks a bunch, Brad. I was sure upset when Schwarzenegger claimed the acrostic “was a total coincidence.” Glad to find out it wasn’t.
The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com
November 1st, 2009 at 10:35 amStatistics aside, isn’t “Californians overwhelmingly deserve” (as opposed to, say, “all Californians deserve”) an ever-so-slightly odd phrase? Suggesting, perhaps, that someone, for some reason, very much wanted that line to start with an o?
November 1st, 2009 at 1:58 pmYou need to include the I in the first paragraph of the letter.
The letter was three paragraphs, and the first letters of each line reads “I F*ck You”.
November 1st, 2009 at 7:51 pmUhh… 26^-7 = 1.25e-10 is one in 8 billion.
Turn it upside down, and you’ll see. 1.00e-10 would be one in ten.
That said, whoever wrote this is clearly a child from the Monica Goodling mold.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:36 am