polyglot conspiracy

It is sometimes frightening how well data mining software works:

This series of ads, from my MySpace home page, could only be more fitting if it replaced one of the Garrison Keillor references with something in the vein of either yarn sales or linguistics books. Otherwise, it’s pretty much got me nailed.

Living on Earth broadcasted a lengthy interview with Hillary Clinton about climate change yesterday. An interesting thing occurred when Clinton invoked the term “green” (everyone’s new favorite socially meaningful adjective/verb) in a way I hadn’t heard before:

CLINTON: And I think it’s very important to start talking about green collar jobs. Everybody knows about blue collared jobs and white collar jobs, we’re going to put five million Americans to work making America green.

Wow. Green collar jobs. Silly me for not noticing this sooner. Here’s an article in Alternet from earlier this year:

A “green-collar job” involves environment-friendly products or services. Construction work on a green building, organic farming, solar panel manufacturing, bicycle repair: all are “green jobs.” The green-collar economy is big money, and it’s booming. Including renewable energy and clean technology, “green” is the fifth largest market sector in the United States.

Here is something about the origin of “blue collar,” from Wikipedia (so who knows as to verifiability):

The term blue-collar is derived from uniform dress codes of industrial workplaces. Industrial and manual workers wear durable clothing that can be soiled or scrapped at work. A popular element of such “work clothes” has been, and still is, a light or navy blue shirt. Blue is also a popular color for coveralls, and will usually carry a name tag of the company/establishment on one side, and the individual’s name on the other. Often these items are bought by the company and laundered by the establishment as well.

The popularity of the color blue among persons who do manual labor is contrasted to the ubiquitous white dress shirt that, historically, has been standard attire in office environments. This obvious color-coding has been used to identify a difference in socio-economic class. This distinction is growing more blurred, however, with the increasing importance of skilled labor, and the growth of non-laboring, but low-paying, service sector jobs.

These are quite different applications of a color term in front of the term “collar”: for “blue” and “white,” they obviously refer to socioeconomic/training/pay-based aspects of the employment positions themselves. “Green”, on the other hand, refers to the nature of the overall outcome of the employment positions, not the work or pay involved in the positions themselves. And this is different yet from “pink-collar,” whose color term reflects the demographic most likely to hold a certain class of jobs, as well as something about the jobs themselves that was (at one time) seen as fairly confined to that demographic. Anyway, something’s happened to the idiom and it’s spinning out of control: the color term slot has switched referential categories.

Also on NPR yesterday, On the Media devoted its segment last night to talking about the history and future of the books in a segment One for the Books. If you are interested in any of the following things, this piece might be interesting to you: books (duh), print, Google, Kindle, War and Peace, paperlessness, paperfulness, Oprah’s Book Club, Jonathan Franzen slamming Oprah’s Book Club, bookbinding, the sentimental affordances of books v. other forms of information storage. Commenters to the story on the website point out some of its weaknesses, but if nothing else, it’s interesting to hear how this issue, which has been the topic of several scholarly-ish works in recent years (i.e. The Future of the Book), is covered by a news outlet.

We’ve been talking in class about reclaiming words lately, and one word that came up was “bitch,” which people have very different opinions about whether it counts as being somehow “reclaimed” or not.  The argument that it is reclaimed has to do with things like the Meredith Brooks song, Bitch; Elizabeth Wurtzel’s book, Bitch; Bitch magazine (I have written about this before, which I kind of forgot about, here).  But our class brought up a good point about the limits of considering this word reclaimed, namely, that reclamation usually has to do with some identifying group that is attempting to alter public perceptions of their group by utilizing the negative terms used to describe their group to describe their group in a positive way, to express pride in being precisely what they get criticized by the mainstream for being.  But it’s unclear who exactly belongs to the group that would be called “bitches,” i.e., who is the reclamation taking part on behalf of: is it all women? all women who are sometimes bitchy-acting? women who are always bitchy-acting? women who are “strong”? self-identified “bitches”? etc.  Nonetheless, even without an identifiable group to point to that can be empowered by reclaiming “bitch,” using the term to self-identify, even on an individual level, can be very satisfying and feel personally empowering (I speak from, um, experience).  So it was determined that while “bitch” may not be reclaimed on a massive level, it is definitely in the “reclaiming zone,” where its use is not always negative, and it can be employed for ends of empowerment.

So this got me thinking about another word that refers to women, that I figured might be in the reclaiming zone: ho(e) [I always assumed this was spelled ho {except when I was little and thought it was spelled who < whore}, but most of the internets spells it hoe, so go fig.].  This is a word that is prominent in especially rap and hip-hop music, and also in everyday parlance.  I figured that surely, *someone* would’ve found it appropriate to use this term to self-identify; if not directly as a “ho,” (promiscuous woman?) then perhaps just as a “woman” in general, with “ho” being used often like “bitch.”  I searched high and low for a song in which a female singer refers to herself as a “ho.”  I failed to find anything.  I did some searches for lyrics for specific artists I thought might be implicated in this: Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, etc.  The only example I could find of a woman calling herself a ho (as opposed to calling another woman a ho in a derogatory sense) was this line from Fergie:

All my girls get down on the floor,
Back to back, drop it down real low.
I’m such a lady, but I’m dancing like a ho,
‘Cause you know
I don’t give a fuck, so here we go!

And she is obviously using it in the sense in which most male artists also use it.  I couldn’t even really find any examples of women referring to their girlfriends as “hoes” in the playful/solidary sense (think Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie with “bitch”), but I imagine these must be out there.  Can anyone think of examples of songs (or other media) wherein either a) a woman is referring to herself as a ho, and it means something positive and proud; or b) a woman is referring to her frinds as hoes, and it means something positive or proud?  Otherwise, it seems that ho is really not in the reclaiming zone yet.  So maybe Queen Latifah’s plea still stands:

(Here we go)
U.N.I.T.Y., U.N.I.T.Y. that’s a unity (You gotta let him know)
(You go, come on here we go)
U.N.I.T.Y., Love a black woman from (You got to let him know)
infinity to infinity (You ain’t a bitch or a ho)
(Here we go)
U.N.I.T.Y., U.N.I.T.Y. that’s a unity (You gotta let him know)
(You go, come on here we go)
U.N.I.T.Y., Love a black man from (You got to let him know)
infinity to infinity (You ain’t a bitch or a ho)

Then again, maybe bitches just still ain’t shit but hoes and tricks. Who’s to say???

I have been recorded a few times lately in assistance to some of the phonologists/phoneticians in our department. It’s great fun, repeating nonsense words over and over again while hoping that I’m a) not stressing the wrong syllable (or, sometimes I feel lots of pressure and freak out and just *lengthen* syllables instead of properly *stressing* them), b) not being too creaky, c) actually saying things like I’m a normal, native, American English speaker. But when it’s my friend Kevin recording me in the sound booth, there is a bigger problem: I can’t help but start cracking up in the middle, especially when HE starts cracking up and then *I* start cracking up and then we’re both cracking up and the word sounds like something ridiculous like “loose-a-tom”…

The formants of laughter!

This is a level I’m comfortable with: on par with Savage Minds and slightly above Language Log’s UNDERGRAD. I mean, I guess it’s appropriate, though maybe this means my audience is a little limited by my readability???

(ht/the bellman, though PS check the code when you embed that shit if you do the test - it’s got spammy alt linkage in it)

Make your voice heard in discussion of the most important educational question of the decade. (related). Look, I don’t want to spend my career putting down educators for being worried about their students’ language skills. That’s exactly what I *don’t* want. Really, though, we need some better linguistic education of educators if these are the big questions they’re asking. It’s not the *asking* of question that bothers me, in fact, but how painfully misguided the framing of the question is.

Dennis Baron has an excellent post up at The Web of Language, regarding (among other things) why handwriting is still taught in schools, when cost-benefit analysis would so clearly show that touch-typing is more valuable.

The example of [Dr.] House notwithstanding, this glorification of handwriting is just another example of the growing disconnect between education and the needs of actual writers, and I’m not just saying this because my own handwriting is illegible. It made sense for 19th-century American schools to push handwriting as an essential skill because legible handwriting was necessary to secure an office job…

A 2005 survey by a major publisher of handwriting textbooks showed most schools spending an hour a week or less on cursive writing, and many have ditched handwriting altogether in favor of working at the computer, which students are happier to do not because it will one day get them something nice in a white-collar 9 to 5, but because many are already spending lots of their non-school time online.

Now, however, some educators want to turn back the clock, convinced, as Newsweek puts it, that “handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning.” Fans of handwriting argue that when handwriting becomes automatic, children write faster, better, more, and they’ll learn faster, better, more as well.

Handwriting, like typewriters and computers, is a writing technology, and just as any writing technology can become automatic once we get used to it, any writing technology can also help us learn.

He’s referencing a Newsweek articlethat argues for the educational virtues of handwriting. This article makes some points that I could go in for, but all of the “mounting evidence” it cites is in the form of “experts’” opinions, not actual research. Save this one part:

Handwriting is important because research shows that when children are taught how to do it, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves. A new study to be released this month by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham finds that a majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades—aside from being easier to read.

Now, the key here - or at least what seems to be the key - is in this phrase “primary-school teachers believe.” Though I can’t get the actual study to see what’s really going on, this makes it sound like what you have is a case of teachers stereotyping based on a single measure of performance: if you don’t have fluent handwriting, you aren’t a good student. And I’m not sure who *wouldn’t* believe this, whether they’ve had experience teaching or not. It’s like asking if people think that someone who’s tall will be better at basketball than someone who’s short. Or something.

There’s no doubt that we consistently judge content based on form: we tend to think more aesthetically pleasing things are better, regardless of actual content or talent or quality or benefit (think Britney Spears in her heyday; shiny new iPhones; Barack Obama as opposed to Hillary Clinton [yeah, I went there]; Ikea). It shouldn’t be surprising that teachers would think this, nor should it be taken as evidence that handwriting is a vital cognitive skill necessary for students’ achievement and self-development. We don’t assume that because most Americans think that tall people are better at basketball, it actually means that being tall is a necessary component of becoming a good basketball player (or maybe we do; I don’t know). I guess I’m just confused about what a study like this is saying, because the way it has been presented here, it sounds like it is telling us something about teachers’ perceptions of handwriting’s relation to student achievement, not anything about the actual benefits of handwriting to student achievement. Which is also very interesting, but not the same. But because we still long for the good old days of romantic handwritten notes, we’ll probably be quick to see this as a sign that typing is bad and handwriting is good.

When I was in the Heritage Center at the University of Colorado a few weeks ago, I took this picture because I found it amusing:

I think I thought it was funny at the time that the school felt the need to justify its reversed abbreviation AND point out that other Big Twelve schools also use this abbreviation scheme: if Kansas and Oklahoma do it, surely it’s ok. But the sign also points out further evidence that people don’t really distinguish very much between the terms acronym (often claimed to be ONLY usable when there’s a “new” “word” formed from the initials of other words, e.g. NATO) and abbreviation (often claimed to be any kind of word shortening BUT acronymic ones, e.g. sitch, pls, Dr.). You may think this is a silly point, but for someone who writes about the internet communications, it’s sometimes hard to know what to call things, and what people are going to complain about if I call an abbreviation an acronym or an acronym JUST an abbreviation (and forget about initialisms, which for some reason don’t even turn up in the talk at all).

Also, this is my 500th post!!! The state of Georgia wants to celebrate with me.

And as mentioned previously, I recently got a new car. It has a fancy rear view camera that pops up an image of what’s behind you on a screen in front of you. But one of the instructions for it says:

As it becomes hard to see if a stain or a drop sticks, clean the camera lens without hurting it.

Instructions on how not to hurt it would, I think, be in order here.

I totally do this:

Except it’s usually with verbal duels, and it’s usually trying to devise what my reaction will be if someone tries to cut in line in front of me. Though there are variations, depending on where I am - it’s common at the airport that I choreograph an oral argument with airline staff about something or another. This has occasionally come in handy when I’ve actually *needed* to argue with airline staff about something, realizing the dream.