polyglot conspiracy

If you haven’t already read it on Translate This! or Language Log, experience the Register’s report on Cingular’s recent patent application for an emoticon-dedicated key/button thingie. To read the Register article and some of what the bloggers have written, you’d think Cingular were trying to patent emoticons themselves, and were incredibly silly to do so:

Cingular, the United States’ largest mobile phone network this week applied to patent emoticons, better known as smileys.
The application refers to selecting emoticons on mobile phones or handheld devices over a wireless, and makes 35 claims in all. Although it uses the word ‘emoticon’, the application doesn’t acknowledge that mutant punctuation has been livening up online communications since at least 1961. -The Register

You’d be right to think this were “lame” (Mark Liberman’s word), “outrageous” (the Register’s word), or sarcastically “groundbreaking” (Translate This!’s words), were this what Cingular was actually trying to do. But people seem to be missing that this is a technology they’re applying for the patent for. It seems no different from patents for predictive text programs. I wouldn’t expect to come up with a way to enter predictive text and NOT think about patenting it. Here’s the abstract of the patent application:

A method and system for generating a displayable icon or emoticon form that indicates the mood or emotion of a user of the mobile station. A user of a device, such as a mobile phone, is provided with a dedicated key or shared dedicated key option that the user may select to insert an emoticon onto a display or other medium. The selection of the key or shared dedicated key may result in the insertion of the emoticon, or may also result in the display of a collection of emoticons that the user may then select from using, for example, a key mapping or navigation technique.

A second piece in the Register contains letters from readers who point out this very thing.

Moreover, in the application’s claims section, it talks about the user being able to insert their choice of emoticons from a “palette of emoticons”:

in response to the emoticon key being selected, displaying a collection of graphical displayable icons that the user may select from, wherein at least some of the graphical displayable icons from the collection of graphical displayable icons indicates a mood or emotion.

I am guessing that those “graphical displayable icons” don’t look like this :-) but rather look more like what you see as icons on IM programs. And it seems like those could be arguably proprietary, since they’re not created by the user as a combination of text strokes, but they’re created by the system, custom-made - every system has different sets. A quick search turned up that Microsoft received jeers last summer for trying to patent emoticons; in that article, some good arguments are made against giving a patent for such things. Namely, that emoticons are “part of language” and you obviously can’t patent language (though you can, of course, trademark certain words/phrases for commercial purposes - natch that doesn’t preclude anyone else using them, except for also commercially). But inasmuch as they represent a distinct set of icons, I feel like this is a justifiable thing to want to patent. Aren’t fonts patented, or trademarked, or whatever? How is it different from those?

I don’t know much about patents, nor the technicalities of this kind of technology, so I might well be missing some things. I hope this post inspires some discussion, rather than just saying “that’s a dumb idea.”

Final note: this seems to bring a sort of legitimacy to the emoticon. It’s “part of language”? Whaddaya think, Lynne Truss?

[PS - In exploring the current graphical options on my Cingular phone, I found that there is a graphic called "sceptic." Not "skeptic," but "sceptic." I know it's a variant, but where is it prominent? (I don't currently have OED access, pity.)]

And I do not mean linguistic performance.

So this is part of my life I almost never talk about on this blog (why would I?!), but publicity is publicity. If you live in or near DC and enjoy the arts, please consider attending my tap group’s big show in February. Also, if you know people who live in or near DC who enjoy the arts, please consider urging them to attend my tap group’s big show in February. Fliers below, and I’ll say no more. [Is it "flyers"? Can we talk about what a strange word that is?]

I realize I’ve been posting really lightly lately, which I blame on being out of town a bunch and also still being in vacation mode. But alas! Today brings some fun.

Recently, my attention was brought to the currently high frequency of use of the colloquialism “Get your ___ on.” I want to say this phrase was really popularized by Missy Elliott’s excellent Get Ur Freak On in 2001 (was it that long ago?!). There’s also the Big Tymers’ Get Your Roll On, from 2000 actually - predating Missy - and Nelly’s 2004 Flap Your Wings, which advises you, Girl, to drop down and get your eagle on.

Aside from the getting on of eagle and freak (roll isn’t listed), UrbanDictionary defines getting one’s grub, plask, shine, and smile on.

Also included in UD is a definition for Get your (verb) on:

Can be used as a substitute phrase for performing or completing a certain action.
Ex. 1.) “Im tired, (gesturing toward the armchair) so im gonna get my sit on.”

Ex. 2.)”Yo Rosco! I got the juice, time to get our drink on.”

This explains the “get your __ on” phenomenon nicely, though it’s not limited to verbs. In fact, part of what this construction seems to do is to indirectly verb nouns. Like, you can’t say “Drop down and eagle, girl.” Well, you could, but I think part of the fun of this phrase is that it can make a verb-type thing (an action) out of things that are normally noun-like. Another example of this, and why I was inspired to write this post, is this employment classified ad for a journalist at our hip local alterna-weekly:

Get your news on!

You can’t news, but you can be someone who makes or writes or finds news, so instead of making news a verb, we can talk about getting news on.

Now. I wanted to know what other words are most popularly inserted into “Get your ___ on.” Here are some ghit results for “get your * on”:

Get Your Bootleg On
get your war on
Get your Booze on!
Get Your Snooki on!
Get Your Prayze On
Get your Cubs on
Get your dreidle on
Get your tweak on!
Get your Induce on
Get Your Hemp On
Get your cheer on
Get Your Suffrage On
Get your rhythmic groove on
Get Your Borscht On
Get Your Scribble On
Get your Lowell on (the town)
Get your Agitprop on
Get your pilates on
GET YOUR GAZZIZA ON!!
Get your boogie on
Get your filmi on
Get your purve on
Get your Freestyle on
Get your rocks on
get your moog on
Get your tees on
Get Your Glow On
Get Your Blinq On
get your FRAG on
Get Your Hustle On
Get your Wanzer On
Get Your Churn on

So that takes me through enough interesting variations to be…interested in the fact that yes, this phrase has become ubiquitous. A note: These results gave some that were, like, “Get your hands on ____” which obviously doesn’t count, but other phrases like “Get your skates on!” This also doesn’t count, because it’s a normal imperative sentence. If it were the verb, on the other hand, “Get your skate on,” then that would count. This seems not entirely consistent with what I just said about nouns and verbs, but I think the noun thing is only relevant when there’s not an obvious verb form (like “news” or “borscht”).

Also discovered in the process of writing this blog post: Slang City. Mom, if you’re reading this, please click here, and it will give you an interesting explanation of what a hollaback girl is. More interesting than the explanation I gave you when you asked me a few weeks ago, at least.

Subjunctivitis currently has an amusing post up addressing a very important question: how many Us do you put in “dude” when you want to indicate its drawn out vowel? The results of some diligent googlefighting lead him to conclude that two is too few, three is the most popular, four through ten decrease in popularity from three, but eleven is more popular than ten. And after eleven, hits are scant. And since Google stops counting at 126 Us (129 characters?), we’ll possibly never know who has Ued “dude” the most. (Eric - correct me if I’ve misinterpreted these statistics, please!)

This is all very interesting in terms of online renderings of one’s speech patterns - but how do we know when someone is being sincere with trying to indicate that they draw out “duuuude,” and how we do we know when they’re being ironic? How do we know when it’s imitating speech v. signaling a different interpretation of “dude” that applies only in writing?

He also mentions the book, which prompted his search for the most Us, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, And, Like, Whatever by Leslie Savan. This book has been recommended to me, and I have glanced at it in the bookstore, but I haven’t picked it up for a serious peruse yet. Savan is a journalist, not a linguist - which will probably mean interesting anecdotes but frustrating claims. As I understand it her basic premise is that lately, we’ve become more and more patterned/idiomatic/collocational in our speech (”pop language”), using a finite set of media-imparted expressions rather than generating new ones. Which in turn shows that we’re not thinking as much or as originally. If it’s true, it’s interesting - I’m not sure how you show that it’s true, though.

[UPDATE: In related news, I just found this headline in the NYT online: "Heeere's Bill Maher, Live on Amazon".]

The NYT article (again, the NYT permalink generator seems to be broken - does anyone know anything about this?) about “the new electronic b@by” in Sunday Styles caught my attention. It starts out talking about how parents are buying their children domain names and email addresses before they’re even born, usually with the hopes that they’ll want the websites, but also sometimes in order to ward off any undesirable uses of the websites by others who would defame them. Mostly though, it seems it has to do with the urgent feeling of need to snatch up prime online real estate as soon as possible:

The motivation, parents and other experts say, is akin to securing a good street address in a fast-developing city a decade early, so the children do not have to live on virtual Main Street, stuck when they eventually develop the motor skills to log on, with an obscure domain name like lukeseely.ce, or a pedestrian e-mail address like lukeseeley@hotmail.

This distinction between what is desirable v. what is considered “obscure” or “pedestrian” email names is becoming more and more salient, I think, as more people become wired and are afforded more different kinds of internet accounts. I certainly feel this way: I only use my Yahoo account sparingly now, and with those who have been using it for years already. Part of this has to do with a “credibility” issue, as the article mentions:

Nima Kelly, a vice president of one of the country’s largest domain providers, GoDaddy.com, bought four domains for her 11-year-old daughter two years ago.

“People are moving away from free accounts, their name at Hotmail, or John Doe at Aol.com,” she said. “What’s happening is that if you don’t have a personalized e-mail address, it’s seen as having a lack of credibility.”

Per example: I just finished my degree at UVA and asked the IT people (those of mst3k fame) if I could keep my school email account for, like, six months until I’m connected to another school somewhere - so I wouldn’t have to use my Yahoo or Gmail or whatever free email account (or my @polyglotconspiracy.net email account, which just sounds terrifying if you’re not expecting it) to interact with people on a more professional level. No one wants to write an email to an unknown professor from a free account, knowing that that professor will probably feel trepidatious even before reading it on account of it looking like spam with a .com extension, whereas most relevant emails to them come from .edu extensions. I tried to make the case with the IT people that this was a very important grad student matter, a matter of professional reputation, but they basically told me I was SOL.

At any rate, it’s interesting how domain extensions (which I’ve talked about somewhat jokingly before) and whatnot are becoming such symbolic capital for people who conduct part of their lives online. It’s much more than just choosing a good screenname to be the front end of your email address; it also has to do with the .com .org .edu .ac.uk .net stuff on the back end.

One more thing: I cannot believe we have come to a time when this clause was written:

It is impossible to say exactly how many preliterate children possess their own e-mail accounts and Web sites…

Yesterday on BBC Radio I heard this really interesting piece about a man whose speech style completely changed after suffering a stroke. Afflicted with what researchers at Oxford University have named “foreign accent syndrome,” George Reynolds formerly spoke Estuary English, and after the stroke he sounded like an Italian ESL speaker. Another example he gives is an Australian woman who started sounding Scottish.

More information about foreign accent syndrome is found through the BBC here:

Now researchers at Oxford University have found that patients with “foreign accent syndrome” seem to share certain characteristics which might explain the problem.

A small number of them all had tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain.

This might explain the combination of subtle changes to vocal features such as lengthening of syllables, altered pitch or mispronounced sounds which make a patient’s pronunciation sound similar to a foreign accent.

Dr Jennfier Gurd, who led the research with phonetician Dr John Coleman, said: “The way we speak is an important part of our personality and influences the way people interact with us.

“It is understandably quite traumatic for patients to find that their accent has changed. Patients derive some comfort from knowing more about the causes of their rare condition and many are happy to help scientists to understand better the nature of the brain and its role in human accents.”

Dr Coleman told BBC News Online: “There is a good likelihood in time you are going to improve and become more like you used to be.”

That’s not very much information, but it’s something. (Wikipedia has basically the same info - verbatim even - but maybe it’ll be updated someday; and, there are references to real articles by Gurd and Coleman.)

Fascinatingly, Reynolds even uses his body language now in an Italian style, using his hands exuberantly - so it’s not even just limited to his verbal behavior. He discusses in the interview how it’s almost like his whole personality has changed in many ways, the ways he interacts with people, just because his language has changed. One wonders if the mannerisms follow suit because psychologically one feels compelled to fill out a whole profile of one who speaks the way one is speaking - in other words, that he’s trying to fully communicate in the same way that he associates with people who he now sounds like - or if it’s caused by the same neurological process that affects the speech itself. This would be really interesting for nonverbal study, examining the ways nonverbal and verbal behavior are interrelated and controlled by the same or different parts of the brain (I don’t currently know much about this - anyone out there does?). I’d also be interested to know if it’s just phonological changes, or if grammar is also affected.

In the latest New Yorker there’s a great little piece by David Owen, a Three Wishes F.A.Q. I think you language philosopher types will particularly take pleasure in Qs 4 and 5:

4. What happens if I merely think a wish?
No wish will be executed until you speak it out loud, so “wishful thinking” does not count. Note: If you inadvertently use one of your wishes to render yourself permanently speechless—by turning yourself into a pig, for example, or by wishing that you were dead—you will be unable to use your remaining wishes, if any are left, to correct the error.

The performative speech act lives!

5. How specific do I have to be? If I wish for “world peace,” will you know what I’m talking about?
As a practical matter, no one ever wishes for “world peace.” But it is always best to be specific. “I wish for my penis, when erect, to measure eighteen inches in length and six inches in diameter” is clear and concise—and it counts as one wish only, because length and diameter are two dimensions of the same object. “I wish for my penis, when erect, to measure eighteen inches in length and six inches in diameter, and I want it to be erect all the time” is two wishes. “I wish to be a global celebrity, but not Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise” is three.

I mostly enjoy the implicit Russellian expansion type thing of this last wish really being three.

Also, since we’re all of us internet gurus ’round here, probably thinking a lot about how much of our identities/monies are being harvested at any one moment…

So I was just shopping for a birthday card for my mother’s father, and I went to the section in cards that were “For Grandfather.” Makes sense. But all of the cards - seriously, all of them - addressed themselves to “Grandpa.” This irked me, because I call mine “granddad.” So I didn’t end up getting any of the cards but rather a generic birthday card, because I’m not giving my granddad a card addressed to my grandpa.

Is it really that rare to use “granddad”/common to use “grandpa”? Googlefight shows “grandpa” winning also, but this is not inuitive for me.

reader_iam kindly passed along this article in the WP about Mandarin instruction in the public schools. reader_iam basically makes the point that it’s about time the US catch-up to foreign language learning needs and demand (for practical as well as “cultural” reasons). The article states:

The number of students nationwide who take Mandarin is minuscule — about 24,000, most of them in high school. That compares with the 3 million or so who study Spanish, the most popular language in the nation’s schools, with French and German next.

But a number of urban school districts have launched Mandarin programs, in cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and Boston.

High schools across the country were asked by the College Board’s World Language Initiative whether they would consider adding Advanced Placement courses in Italian, Russian, Japanese and Chinese — and the organization was amazed at the results, said Tom Matts, the initiative’s director.

Fifty schools in the 2003 survey said they would offer the Russian option, about 175 said Japanese, and 240 said Italian.

“And for Chinese, it was 2,400, 10 times the number of any of the other three,” Matts said. “We had no idea there was such an incredible interest out there. Of all the new AP courses, certainly Chinese shows the most promise for growth.”

Second order of business: past tense of shrink is shrank, right? Because I saw a NYT article two weeks ago where the headline used “shrank” (as in “Movie audiences shrank this year”), but the lead sentence said “shrunk” (as in “Audiences shrunk this year”). I’m not crazy to think that shrunk sounds bad, right? Despite Honey, I Shrunk the Kids…