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Passage II

Sociologist Matthews writes that Let's say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who haveworked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity,that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly citethree of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without havingread the original work; rather, they'll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names becomeassociated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the othermembers of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, butsimply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, thesesuccessful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. It iseasier for the rich to get richer, for the famous to become more famous. This theory can easily apply tocompanies, businessmen, actors, writers, and anyone else who benefits from past success.

During the 1940s, a Harvard linguist, George Zipf, examined the properties of language and came up withan empirical regularity now known as Zipf's law, which, of course, is not a law (and if it were, it would notbe Zipf's). It is just another way to think about the process of inequality. The mechanisms he describedwere as follows: the more you use a word, the less effortful you will find it to use that word again, so youborrow words from your private dictionary in proportion to their past use. This explains why out of the sixtythousand main words in English, only a few hundred constitute the bulk of what is used in writings, andeven fewer appear regularly in conversation. Likewise, the more people aggregate in a particular city, themore likely a stranger will be to pick that city as his destination. The big get bigger and the small staysmall, or get relatively smaller. A great illustration of preferential attachment can be seen in themushrooming use of English as a lingua franca—though not for its intrinsic qualities, but because peopleneed to use one single language, or stick to one as much as possible, when they are having a conversation.So whatever language appears to have the upper hand will suddenly draw people in droves; its usage willspread like an epidemic, and other languages will be rapidly dislodged. I am often amazed to listen toconversations between people from two neighboring countries, say, between a Turk and an Iranian, or aLebanese and a Cypriot, communicating in bad English, moving their hands for emphasis, searching forthese words that come out of their throats at the cost of great physical effort. Even members of the SwissArmy use English (not French) as a lingua franca (it would be fun to listen). Consider that a very smallminority of Americans of northern European descent is from England; traditionally the preponderant ethnicgroups are of German, Irish, Dutch, French, and other northern European extraction. Yet because all thesegroups now use English as their main tongue, they have to study the roots of their adoptive tongue anddevelop a cultural association with parts of a particular wet island, along with its history, its traditions, andits customs!