Interesting is not the same thing as useful

From the unfailingly interesting Language Log blog, THE by Mark Liberman.

The post in question is "Reading Macroanalysis 4: On the matter of 'the'", New Savanna 8/13/2014, and the "detail" in question is a cited difference in the frequency of the word the between a collection of of 19th century British novels and a comparable collection of 19th-century American novels:

Chapter 7, “Nationality” is pretty straightforward. I don’t have much to say about it except for a puzzle that Jockers presents at the beginning. He points out that, because British and American writers have different practices concerning the word the, that word is about 5 percent of the word tokens in his corpus of 19th Century British novels, while it is about 6 percent of the tokens in the American novels.

The discussion is interesting in and of itself but I think it also serves as an example of a larger issue. The first, and often quite challenging, question is whether the claim of a 20% surfeit of the usage among American writers is accurate. Is the statement really true? A lot of time and intellectual effort can be spent validating of refuting a claimed "fact".

This is followed in turn by a generation of hypotheses seeking to explain what is causing the statement to be true. All that is perfectly conforming to the scientific method and part of the process by which the boundaries of knowledge are expanded.

The interesting question that usually receives relatively little attention is some form of "So what?" Is it relevant? Is it material? Does it matter?

This is brought home in the final paragraph where Liberman is still trying to figure why there is the different usage rate of the. He introduces other new information.

Thus part of the reason for the somewhat more frequent use of THE by male speakers in the Fisher transcripts is probably the somewhat more frequent use by female speakers of e.g. possessive pronouns:

         Males       Females
my      0.461%      0.650%
your    0.211%      0.215%
her      0.062%      0.113%
his       0.058%      0.070%
our      0.079%      0.105%
their     0.132%      0.145%
TOTAL 1.00%        1.30%

Women use possessive pronoun "my" 41% more often than men do. Fascinating. But does it mean anything?

It is not enough to know if something is true or not. You have to know whether it is useful as well.

It is great to be able to spend time speculatively trying to determine cause and effect and significance. Great discoveries almost by definition arise from looking at something in a new way or with greater intensity than it has been before. But you don't know until the outcome whether the time invested in exploration actually will yield something useful.