polyglot conspiracy

Overcoming Faith church: they know it sounds like faith is something one is afflicted with and must triumph over, right? They must know.

I just inadvertently wrote this in a note in a syntax paper:

Topics are in Spec,TP they claim

Heh.

An update on Facebook’s update on updates: as I linked to earlier this week, Facebook no longer requires “is” to start off your status with. Here are some of the statuses of my friends [one of which might be you] right now. Read them as “Firstname Lastname…”:

done christmas shopping, i think

almost done for the year

is oye vey….

is feeling very upset with the lack of snow

is illin like Jake Gyllen

waiting on the return of some of my best friends.

would like to “refresh” Ann Arbor.

misses the ‘is’.

has entered the final weekend.

is amused that Facebook gave in.

’s back hurts.

onomatopoeia!

would like to skip tomorrow.

finds your hypothesis (and his own) irrefutably asinine.

made a snow angel!

is currently using the “is” even though he isn’t required to any more.

can’t decide which verb to use now that the shackles of “is” seem to be gone.

hears Kevination loud and clear on this “is/was” business.

is achieving.

Some people clearly didn’t realize it had happened; some people have been completely habituated to “is”; some people are taking full advantage of the new tense/aspect/modality/DP possibilities; some people are just totally meta. Note that most of the latter category are regular readers of this blog, and you can guess what that means about them.

Context inferrable from general knowledge of current events, I suppose, rather than from the rest of the Times‘ front-screen teaser:

Player Cooperated, and His Name Was Left Out of Report

One unidentified active baseball player who cooperated with George J. Mitchell was able to keep his name out of the report.

In the actual story, the report is well contextualized in the first paragraph; maybe it’s presumed that you’ll only care about the story if you already know what “the report” is, or maybe that you’ll only need to read the story if you *don’t* know what “the report” is. Or maybe you are supposed to make the connection between George J. Mitchell and the report, deducing that the report is George J. Mitchell’s report?

Sadly, this is about the best posting I can muster right now, because a) I’m really really tired, and b) my computer is all but dead. Might I mention that this is the THIRD time in a span of 6 years that a laptop has died on me approximately six days before all my final work was due for the semester? Seriously, it happens every other year. I think I’m cursed. Anyway, so without that little box that constitutes my other brain, I’m pretty much useless on the internet - all my bookmarks, RSS feeds, browser familiarity - it’s all gone, and getting around online without it is always pretty tough. Damn machines.

Apparently a lot of other people have noted this, but it bears repeating:



Between this, singular they, and the ever-present present progressive slash copula-driven statements of fact, Facebook is proving to be a wonder among linguistic wonders. No wonder its groups are so populated with grammar jackals and spelling hounds.

A brilliant little Shouts & Murmurs bit by Tom McNichol in the New Yorker, Emoticons During Wartime. E.g.

=|:-)= This e-mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection.
:-x I’d rather not say in an e-mail that’s being monitored for my protection.
:-w Our current leader speaks with forked tongue.
*:o) Our current leader is a bozo.
/:-=( Our current leader in some ways resembles Adolf Hitler, at least in hi disregard for civil liberties during wartime.
:-o Uh-oh, what was that? 

But there’s one I don’t get:

:-)8 Latest George Will column still doesn’t get it. 

I mean, I know who George Will is and everything, but I’m not connecting the dots with how this emoticon represents his failure to be relevant. He has no facial hair…is the 8 supposed to be the shape of his chin? Somebody help.

My dear friend Zach presents an easy way for you to evaluate your presidential options:(Late Night Players)

Great sign by the drinking fountains at the gym:

Please do not SPIT or RINSE your face in the fountain! 

Yes. If you need to spit your face, please do it in the bathroom.

A couple of weeks ago we did an informal poll of the undergrads in the class I’m teaching this semester, asking them a few questions about the term “feminist.”  Results were that a) a majority of them claimed they would not call themselves “feminists,” b) a bigger majority agreed that “feminist” has primarily negative connotations, c) a bigger majority claimed knowing between 0 and 10 peers who would call themselves “feminists” (with only a handful claiming to know lots of self-identified “feminists”).  This surprised me not one bit, because the word “feminist” has been getting dirtier and dirtier my whole life (I was born sometime during the late-2nd-wave and around the time the big backlash got underway, and it seems like it’s just been downhill from as far back as I can remember - which is to say probably around 7th grade when I started thinking about such things).  I tend to think it doesn’t mean very much in the end; surely most people these days  who reject the term “feminist” still sympathize, ultimately, with feminist projects. And by “most people” I mean most women, most young people, most open-minded and tolerant people, most men who respect women, etc - generally, anyone who is not an old conservative jerkface or his submissive conservative wife [oh, sure, this is a silly and definitely non-feminist thing to assume, but it helps get me through the day].

But the other day I began to be concerned when I realized that not only do a lot of my students not identify with “feminists,” and not only do they not think that “feminist” is a good word, but they don’t really seem to think that feminist issues are still issues anymore!  This was brought to my attention most poignantly during a lecture I gave in class, during which I was trying to make a point about how the media can use language to frame the way we think about people in the news, and how often their use of language is subtle and can reveal underlying assumptions about said newsworthy characters.  The example I used: the media’s firstname bias towards women, about which I have written before. The specific example I used: the fact that I can find 145 Google news hits for headlines containing the search terms “Hillary Obama -Clinton -Barack” (i.e. Hillary, Obama call for top Pak. lawyer’s release; Obama Hits Hillary’s Experience) but only 2 hits for “Barack Clinton -Hillary -Obama” (i.e. Common Backs Barack, Clinton Still Leads). Now I understand that Hillary Clinton’s campaign actually presents her as “Hillary,” and I understand that she’s not the only Clinton in politics. But I also understand that whereas Rudy Giuliani runs his campaign as “Rudy,” you still get headlines that talk about Hillary and Giuliani (i.e. Giuliani: Hillary Makes Kerry Look Like Amateur Flip-Flopper; Giuliani, Thompson, Romney Beat Hillary in Latest Mason-Dixon Poll). Which leads me to believe that overriding the candidates’ own approach to campaigning is a tendency to refer to women by their first names while referring to men by their last names. And in a political race that is, like it or not (see), going to reveal a lot to us about how the US views gender, talks about gender, and votes related to gender, this has the effect of highlighting Clinton’s womanness and all the things that can come with that.

But I could not convince my class of this; getting them to think of this in terms of actual differential gender-based treatment was like pulling teeth. And note that I’m not saying it’s necessarily intentional differential treatment: it is insidious. A couple of them seemed sympathetic, but almost every comment was about how Hillary Clinton herself chooses to be called by her first name, or how the fact of two political Clintons requires the use of her first name for clarification, so the media was just doing what the candidate would herself prefer. I thought I was getting somewhere when I put up the slide with headlines from Monica Lewinsky, wherein not just men but other women are referred to by their last names while Lewinsky is referred to as Monica (i.e. Lott asks Starr to find out if Monica-Clinton tapes exist; Tripp indicted in Monica taping; Jones’ top attorney says either Monica or Clinton is lying; Jones stuck her nose into Monica’s business). But to these, they just said “But Monica Lewinsky isn’t in a position of authority; those other people are.” Implication: reference by last name signals authority. Question to class: Where does that leave us in terms of Senators Hillary and Obama, then?