polyglot conspiracy

Here’s a quite interesting MetaFilter thread reacting to M-W’s online offering of ‘nü-ky&-l&r as a pronunciation for nuclear. It’s pretty instructive in how people tend to channel their pure hatred of other people (in this case, the president) into hatred for their language.

Molly Ivins has a great article on Alternet about the “new political correctness,” focusing on the current social security language of “private” vs. “public” accounts.

Everybody went along in cheerful harmony describing the president’s Social Security plan as “partial privatization,” since it would allow younger workers to put a third or more of their payroll taxes into private accounts. President Bush called them “private accounts,” everyone in the administration called them “private accounts,” and Republicans, Democrats and the media all called them “private accounts.”

Then, one day, some focus group showed that people, particularly older people, react negatively to any connection between Social Security and the word private. For some reason, people like the sound of “personal accounts” better than they do “private accounts.”

So the Republicans, with their fabulous ability to march in lockstep, all about-faced and started referring to the privatization of Social Security as “personal accounts.” The Republicans in Congress, the president, the administration and all its media supporters, both paid and unpaid, now insist on referring to the partial privatization plan as “setting up personal accounts.” This is the new political correctness.

She goes on to talk about the linguistic flip-flop of the political sides: Liberals used to get mocked mercilessly for their silly little PC monikers (”African American,” “special needs,” etc.), and now conservatives adopt (rather blatantly) whatever silly little monikers get them more public sympathy. This is nothing new in politics, of course, but what Ivins points out is the new insistence of right-wingers that the media adopt the language of the administration, rather than the language of journalism (or whatever supposedly neutral domain you want to take your supposedly neutral language from):

If we continue to call private accounts private accounts, then we, the media, are taking sides and the right can once more trot out their hoary shibboleth about “the liberal media.” Use our language, or we’ll accuse you of bias again. If the president no longer says it, no one else can, either.

It’s a ridiculous deal, and it’s a perfect example of the linguistic stronghold the administration has over not just the public, but the media the public is supposed to rely on for objective, unloaded language. Yes, of course it’s questionable that such a thing as “objective” language is possible, especially in the PR-driven, mediacratic epoch in which we live. But it’s certainly imperative for liberals that they finally start to understand the system at play, and try to do something to use it to their advantage, or at least stop letting conservatives decide how to frame everything.

[Note: I should note that having been somewhat out of my loop of political reading lately, I take Ivins' word that the titular switch in question did, in fact, happen, but I have not investigated the matter for myself.]

Today I saw this sign on campus, by a group called Students for the Preservation of Honor (it’s a UVA Honor Code thing, part of the Jeffersonian tradition):

Do
U
♥
Single Sanction??

US TOO!

It then listed the group’s email address, whose handle is Iheartsinglesanction. This is completely in line with the popularity of the current offscreen usage of heart, so I’m not surprised. However, why didn’t they abbreviate TOO to 2? Since U was used, you’d think it’d be IMspeak all the way around. Maybe too isn’t often abbreviated to 2; maybe only the verbal to is (if it often even is) - the sign is obviously trying to approximate some kind of CMC linguistic style. I’d be interested if people have opinions or evidence for this distinction.

Also spotted today: an URL scribbled on a chalkboard which looked like, instead of .org as it actually is, .omg. I think this may be the domain suffix of preference for teenage girls in the near future (call it a “novelty suffix” - why don’t we have these yet?!?!).

This nice little article in The Cincinnati Enquirer worries over the decreasing use of please for extra-pleading purposes, like where most English speakers would use pardon, huh, or excuse me. I’ve never known of this Cincinnati phenomenon before, which apparently also exists in other places with deep German heritage:

The unusual usage is a translation of the word, bitte, which Germans say when they want something repeated. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, director of German-American studies at the University of Cincinnati, speculates that German immigrants who moved to Cincinnati as early as the 19th century translated bitte (bit-uh ) to “please.”

I’m more familiar with bitte being used to mean something like please and you’re welcome (like prego in Italian). This always made me sort of jealous, as I think it’s lovely that the same word can work for both ends of a respectful transaction. The please for pardon in a way makes more sense to me, because it seems almost like an abbreviation for Could you repeat that, please? But here’s something for discussion:

Although it’s supremely polite, this small piece of Cincinnati’s vernacular can cause confusion - even bruised feelings. Unless the inflection is perfect and context is clear, most are perplexed when they first hear “Please?” in response to a statement.

I’m not sure that saying “please” is any more polite than saying “pardon.” In my dialect, “pardon” is an uber-polite, almost formal word (which is why I use it so little…). So for me, as long as there’s SOMEthing there which formally signals want for repetition (and not, perhaps, just the blank stare or huh?), decent etiquette is being respected. Others? Please?

I just discovered this very cool blog, Blogos, which “covers language through multilinguality and translation, localization and global markets, individual skills and emerging technologies, enablers and barriers, knowledge and speculation.” Maybe a little too business-y for my usual purposes, but that might prove valuable, as I don’t normally follow “the language industry” as much as I might should, especially as it relates to technologies.

Fascinating threads over at Slashdot today regarding the Economist article, including discussion of internet abbreviations being spoken aloud, the internet causing “languages to merge” because of the quantity of English used by nonnative speakers, the annoyance of people “throwing grammar out the window” when writing on the web, etc. It makes for a fun perusal.

(This was brought to my attention by Geoff Pullum’s post over at Language Log, which also presents his perspective on the insignificance of netspeak, or whatever you want to call it, in the grander scheme of English [at least, insofar as "changing the language" goes]. As usual, thanks, LL!)

Mark Liberman at Language Log posted a nice heads-up today to this article in the Economist, about linguists’ use of the internet to collect linguistic data. There is far more data there, the article points out, than in any existing linguistic corpus, and it is fairly easily searchable, at least if you know exactly what you’re looking for and don’t want to search by something abstract like, say, parts of speech. But…

The web still has its drawbacks. Most of it is in English, limiting its use for other languages (although Dr Resnik is working on a Chinese version of the LSE). And it is mostly written, not spoken, making it tougher to gauge people’s spontaneous use. But since much web content is written by non-professional writers, it more clearly represents informal and spoken English than a corpus such as the North American News Text Corpus does.

There are so many interesting points here. I’ll just follow two: that of internet content as written/spoken, and that of internet content as a viable source for usage evidence.

In a course last semester, we read one paper (on optimality theory, if you must know) which used text from web pages to harvest examples of syntactic alternation for the dative (e.g., Sara gave him the ball v. Sara gave the ball to him–not that it matters here!). In the paper, the authors claim (in the abstract) that their corpus is of “spoken English.” But it’s retrieved from text, which is seen and read, visually! On a computer screen! Just like this blog, which is surely written!!

This of course spurred a class discussion of how much the web texts really did count as examples of spontaneous, spoken English vs. how much they counted as meditated, written English. While I agree with the Economist article that web content is likely to be more speech-like than some text-based corpora, I’m wary of the reasoning that that’s because it’s written by “non-professional writers.” It has more to do with a website’s genre, purpose, readership, etc. If I wanted to elicit a speech sample from an ordinary person, regardless of whether they were a professional writer, I wouldn’t ask them to give me something that they had written; I would have a conversation with them. Right? Don’t get me wrong, I think the internet is an extremely valuable source of information for linguistic usage (among gadzooks of other things, and maybe even foremost among them all, since validity of the content matters not to the linguist), but let’s not kid ourselves: even when people are writing online, they’re writing. It’s like IM: IM is a pretty good approximation to speech, but it’s not speech. “Speech” on IM is influenced by the medium. So is communication on the internet. I don’t think we can ignore the modalities; there are too many of them now, and we negotiate them all differently. So much of linguistics is focused on speech and not writing, which is a critical distinction - and one we need to continue to refine and build on as new media proliferate.

[OK, OK, you're saying: we get it. The internet is not sound waves is not a pen and paper is not the phone. But this is important! At a theoretical level it's crucial. Sure it's okay to use samples from the web--but don't claim that they're of spontaneous, natural, spoken language, because they're not.]

That said, the internet is, as I also already said (is this post redundant yet?), an extremely valuable resource for linguists, and also for lexicographers. I wrote a term paper last semester about the potential of online dictionaries (if anyone cares to actually read it, I’m happy to send it on) as sites of linguistic democratization. What’s curious to me about dictionaries is that they claim to represent spoken language (and of course written language), yet they only accept as evidence for usage written, meaning published, examples. One would think, hey, the internet’s writing! Internet’s perfect, because it’s written but it’s not necessarily written by “professionals.” But noooo. The OED won’t accept internet sources yet. Websites are too “ephemeral,” they say; authors can’t be contacted, the page might not be there tomorrow. But that’s exactly why the internet is so valuable: it offers that gray area of usage between speaking and writing and, moreover, it offers usage from the non-elite.

Maybe it all makes sense, according to the following syllogistic logic, which is undoubtedly fallacious, as it was formulated in haste to complete this too-long post:

The OED accepts written sources.
Material on the internet is written.
The OED does not accept internet sources.

So maybe…

Material on the internet is spoken.
Linguists use spoken material.
Linguists can use the internet!

What did vacation teach me? That good bloggers don’t take vacation. Not from the internet, anyway.

I’ll return with my (ab)normal wit and keen observations soon enough, after I’m settled back for the semester. As a plea for your patience, I offer you a reproduction of this amusing sign I saw today on a restroom door in a coffee shop in Washington, DC:

OUT OF OREDER!
OUT OF OREDER!!

As if I had just watched a film, the sign left me with the taste in my mouth of Passion. Conviction. Determination. Emphasis. and Metal.*

*Alternately, for the Italian lovers, Time. (= hours)