polyglot conspiracy

There’s an article up at the NYT right now which I can’t access b/c it’s TimesSelect (fie!), but it’s called “Kos and Effect” and it’s about responses to David Brooks’ recent column criticizing Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and his liberal blogerific empire, Daily Kos. Problem: Kos isn’t supposed to be pronounced in a way that makes it punnable as cause. Notice it’s the final syllable of its founder’s name; he explains:

I started Daily Kos on May 26, 2002 (named after my Army nickname, rhymes with “dose”)

Yet we get puns like “kosmopolitans” and “kos he’s an asshole” (google didn’t turn up much else), even though Wikipedia even sets the record straight:

Daily Kos (IPA: [koÊŠs] in an American accent) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and liberals/progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, often mispronounced) a United States Army veteran….

Someone at the Washington Monthly had it right earlier this year, with the headline “Kos Call.”

I suppose this is a case where the word’s origins are just not well-known enough to be influential on pronunciation, as the word has taken on a life of its own, and mostly (until recently enough) in print rather than speech, anyway. You could also say that a pun like “kosmopolitan” is sort of a visual one rather than an audible one; same with “kos” if you consider that “cos” is a popular re-spelling of “’cause” in IM and message boards and so forth.

To be sure, Kos has better things to worry about. I never see TV so I have yet to hear anyone *talk* about DKos - anyone know which way Moulitsas says it?

[Retroactive disclaimer: You may have been referred here by a political blog, which happened to pick up this post and link to it, but THIS blog is not (for the most part) about politics. It's about language and linguistics, and so if I'm "nitpicky" about pronunciation - which I am - it's because that's what's interesting to me and most of my readers. This doesn't mean you shouldn't comment if you feel the desire to do so, but it does mean you should realize that if your comment is blatantly partisan or snarkily uninformed as to where the author of this blog is coming from, it will not be as appreciated as it might be elsewhere. Also, judging from some of the comments, it seems as though I'm being misconstrued as being in agreement with the anti-Kos camps, which I'm not, at all, FWIW.]

Lots of McDonald’s over here; the other day down in Stanley (town on Southern coast of Hong Kong Island) I happened to notice that there was a McCafe, which is McD’s trying to run a hip Starbucks-style coffee joint, and which I had yet to see anywhere but had heard rumor of. When I went to investigate, I noticed something far more interesting:

I feel like someone in the lx-b’sphere (I am getting sooo tired of writing out “linguablogosphere” or “linguistiblogosphere;” I guess I should just write “on some other linguistics blog” but somehow it seems too intentionally avoidant) wrote about the mixing of Chinese/Japanese characters and English letters, but I’ll be damned if I can remember who or when or what it was in reference to. So, ok, the thing about this (that I gather - since I’m not a speaker/reader of any dialect of Chinese, someone else can maybe take up this ball and run with it) is that this character:

represents the syllable fan4 (pinyin fàn), which is also the word meaning rice. So it’s rice-tastic. (The thing is like a burger with rice patties as the bun.) This is a very very clever name. But what I don’t get is the slogan: They’ve made rice rice-tastic?

Also for fun, here is a commercial:

As part of Slate’s Slate’s 10-year Anniversary coverage, editor Jacob Weisberg has written a piece on what makes Slate “Slatey.” It contains some interesting thoughts on what it meant back in 1996, and thereafter, to write for the Web as opposed to for a print publication, and the consequent slackening of tone in print as well. The most interesting parts according to your authoress have been bolded by…your authoress.

Our feeling of clubbiness is partly explained by the intimate tone of Web journalism in general, and of Slate in particular. This was one of our earliest discoveries after we started publishing in 1996. Recessive writers like myself, who in print used to avoid the first person at all costs, soon found our copy sprouting a stubble of I’s and me’s as we stretched to speak to readers in the more personal and direct way that felt natural to the new medium. We soon came to recognize that writing for the Web called for a cross between the more formal diction of the expository essay and the to-the-point, in-your-face tone of e-mail.

Many of Slate’s most familiar early rubrics…were essentially journalistic adaptations of this emerging form of mass communication. “Pretend you’re writing me a letter,” an old editor of mine used to say when I was struggling to get started on a piece. At Slate, we shoot you an e-mail.

He goes on to use the nearly insufferable pun e-pistolary, coin the word Slatester, and curiously use a hyphen in Slate-iness and Slate-ily but not Slatey (meanwhile always maintaining Slate in bold while the adjectival/nominalizing suffix is in either italics or nothing [also: is the E that important to hold on to?]). At the end of the article comes what I suppose I should’ve known was coming: a plug for Slate’s new anthology, in book form. So, take all those things that were special about the magazine simply because it was online and put ‘em in a good old fashioned book. Ah, this crazy mixed-up modern world.

In case people missed it, last week, Bridget at ilani ilani announced that she had created a site for the internet public to share their linguistics links. Bravo! Go to LingNews to read, share, and rank stories related to our nerdy little interests. If people take to this, what a great resource it will become for the community.

OK, so these so far are less Asia-related oddities and more ”differences between British and American English that I’m unaware of because I don’t have much experience with British English.”  So they’re not really all that interesting.

But yesterday when I was hiking Victoria Peak I noticed all these signs that are about picking up your dog’s poo on the trail.  And they say things like, “Do not allow dogs to foul public places” and “Dogs fouling public places will be fined.”  I had never heard transitive foul before; not even in thinking of it in sports terms - “He fouled me!” - did it really sound right to me.  It does sound all right as a phrasal verb, like “He fouled the play up” or “He fouled up the play,” but not taking an immediate direct object.

Also, HongKong Post currently has a set of special stamps out that are “Chinese Idioms and Their Stories.”  Idioms include (English glosses):

Reading is always rewarding

Respect makes successful marriage

Prepare for success

All in the same boat

According to the Post,

For many people, stamps are used to prepay postage; seldom do they realize the cultural significance that such tiny stamps have come to represent. As stamps are one of the ways to remember things of importance, some of the subjects appear on them are full of references and wisdom. If employed as teaching aids, they may bring amazing educational experiences to students. So are the Chinese idioms. They are the essence of the language. Concise yet expressive, they contain profound meaning calling for deep thought.

Respect Makes Successful Marriage, Reading Is Always Rewarding, Prepare For Success and All In The Same Boat are the four idioms depicted in this set of stamps. The messages they bring home chime in perfectly with the corporate culture of Hongkong Post.

Plus, they’re adorable.

At the Hong Kong airport, what we call (in the States) “bag claim” is called “baggage reclaim.”  As in, “proceed to the baggage reclaim hall to reclaim your checked baggage.”  According to Googlefights, “reclaim” doesn’t even make it onto the map of usage frequency with either ”bag” or “baggage,” as compared to “claim.”  However, once I thought about it it seemed somehow more fitting.  Defs from MW:

Reclaim

4 a : to demand or obtain the return of b : to regain possession of

Claim

2 : to take as the rightful owner

My guess: British origins.  My time/willingness to look it up right now to corroborate the hunch: nonexistent.  My level of desire for someone else to look it up and comment: astronomical.

Mike’s Web Log alerted me yesterday to a story in the Toronto Star, Adios, Apostrophe. It’s another doom-and-gloom piece about the internet’s deleterious effects on English, and Mike does a good job of pointing out some inconsistencies and illogical arguments. I’m not that interested in even responding to it, because it’s been well established that journalists don’t do a good job of covering linguistic issues, and when they involve the internet, it’s particularly disturbing because the coverage is always negative (if you have a counterexample, I’d love to see it) and usually not even based on good empirical research.

I want to make clear, though, that I don’t discard such articles because I think the changes they discuss aren’t real or significant: they’re just not presenting them as significant for the right reasons. It’s hip to make claims like “The internet is driving us to lose apostrophes in our writing,” but such trends, if true, are not interesting primarily because of their “effect” on “English” (btw, there’s an interesting connection of this claim to this week’s discussion at Language Log and here about a certain lack of apostrophes on Old Navy t-shirts). They’re interesting in terms of how they show speakers manipulating linguistic resources in contexts that have both technical and social dynamics that aren’t quite what we’re used to, but that we’re becoming more and more used to all the time. It’s about the people, not The Language.

Satisfying toponym alert: there’s a town in Ohio called Chagrin Falls.

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has written about some Old Navy baby tees (no, actually, they’re *for* babies, not like “baby tees” that really are *for* grown women who simply want to look a-dorable) with baffling spelling/punctuation practices. For instance:

Zwicky first tackles the issue of “and” rather than “or” under a negation and the misspelling of “potatos,” then the missing apostrophe in “dont.” While I agree that “potatos” and the missing apostrophe are probably attempts at making the shirts written in “if baby could write” style (i.e., attempting to replicate mistakes the baby would make if it were writing), the apostrophe omission might be due to apostrophes being dropped more commonly - in online writing, most particularly (though I’m reading Faulkner’s Light in August right now, and in my copy contractions dont use apostrophes about half the time youd think they would). Zwicky mentions this at the end of his post, and I think it’s a trend to watch for in English.

There’s one thing I disagree about, though.

Tee-shirts serve as signs of a kind, like billboards or highway signs. For some time now, highway signs have been moving towards a clean, modern, punctuation-free (and diacritic-free) style. Colons and commas mostly disappeared long ago. That’s surely the source of the comma-free style at Old Navy.

Alternative interpretation: If you look at the design of the tees, it seems more like the commas aren’t present because they’re not necessary, because delineation of the constituents is done by the layout of the words. Here’s another example:

As well:

If these were written on the same line: “I want lots of hugs, kisses, and [teddy bear]” [btw, does this really make sense? There seems to be some zeugma action going on in here too], I suspect that commas would become more necessary and probably be included. And the accompanying ad copy probably doesn’t include the commas just because the commas aren’t actually on the shirts.

Now. Two additional things that Zwicky didn’t mention are troubling to me. First, the issue of singular and plural. In the first and second tees, there’s only one carrot and one cupcake in the image, yet the ad copy glosses these shirts as “I Don’t Like Potatoes Spinach and Carrots” and “I Love Candies Chocolate and Cupcakes.” Fine; to be parallel you want the plurals there if you’re going to figure out how these things are pronounced (Zwicky and other Language Loggers, of course, have some great older posts about graphics and pronounceability). But the third shirt’s message is glossed as “I Want Lots of Hugs Kisses and a Teddy Bear.” Why just one?

Second, the line break separating [don't like] is very jarring.

Oh, and third: I understand spinach, potatoes, and carrots. Those come in baby food. But who gives a newborn candies, chocolate, or cupcakes?!!? Babies grow up so fast these days!

OK, so your authoress is getting ready to take a big ol’ mind-boggling trip to Asia, where she has never been or really even thought about going, until some certain important family members happened to move there last year. And, as it turns out, some certain good friends live there too, for the time being. So it’s a good time to go.

I will be spending most of my time in Hong Kong but am also hoping to make trips to Singapore and Japan (probably Osaka). Sooo, if you’ve ever been any of those places and have fond memories of particular eating or drinking establishments, tourist/local attractions showcasing physical or manmade beauty, markets, linguistic curiosities, beaches, musical acts, etc - share them here in the comments, or email me. I’m casting a wide net here for suggestions, and anything is helpful. Thanks!