OK everyone, I know I’ve been “woefully negligent,” as one faithful reader and dear friend put it, of the blog. But PC’s got to take vacation sometimes! And sometimes, PC needs to, like, *really* take vacation. So that’s just what I’ve been doing the past two weeks. Cutting off from almost any semblance of my regular life, a pre-summer Rehab from the Ordinary. I feel refreshed (albeit exhausted from a flight getting in in the middle of the night), and once I start noticing interesting languagey things again, you can bet I’ll be prolifically summerblogging away.
In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been doing:
1. Philly Tap Challenge ‘07! I did a little number with my friend Pam Hetherington, and it was super fun. The Philly tap community seems bent on keeping itself vibrant, and this is an inspiring thing to be around; especially because in terms of dance styles, tap seems often to be the least well represented and funded, despite being nearly the most entertaining to regular audiences. I have almost nothing to report linguistically from either the tap stuff or the excursion to Philadelphia, except that it was kind of exciting to hear more than ever before the vowel fronting I’ve often read about. Also, I love West Philly.
2. Family time in Eugene, OR, with a mini-trip to Portland. This made me look forward to my time in California later this summer, because I can honestly say that people from the West Coast have no notable dialect features to me whatsoever, and this is something that fascinates me. I know I think this partly because I haven’t read much about any Western accents, and also because I’m sure there are *tons* of interesting variables floating around in them, I just haven’t been exposed to natives enough to notice them. I do perceive some more open vowels a lot of times, but I can’t pin any of them down very well. I know there’s already research on this that I could easily access with a wiki search or something, but dammit, my brain is real mushy. Leave comments on said topic if you like.
I did learn the word Menglish from a newspaper article there. I also noticed that the word MySpace may be undergoing broadening and becoming the generic term for “social networking sites”: in an article about Facebook being used for recruiting engineers, the headline was “Aerospace, meet MySpace.” This could’ve just been sloppy headline writing, but I have a feeling MySpace is acting as more than a brand name in many situations.
I also found myself in a heated argument with someone about Netspeak, in which all the usual arguments were espoused as to how abbreviations are not good English and shouldn’t ever be used in writing, even in blogs, never ever ever. Then I started re-reading Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America and wondered at how he renders eye dialect for the different parts of the country he’s in, especially the South, and at how he notes billboards and store names that include lots of phonically-inspired letter replacements, including U and 2 and 4 and 8, and how this was written several years ago, long before the internet took its hegemonic hold over language, and also how he is very intolerant of missing apostrophes, all of which was and continues to be very interesting, and I recommend the book to you all, if you have never read it.
Then on the plane I watched a movie that I can scarcely believe was actually produced, Code Name: The Cleaner, and it was strangely entertaining, not least for its over-reliance on portmanteaus to crack an easy joke. Then again, most everything is entertaining when you’re trying to kill 3.5 hours in the air with a broken iPod and the knowledge that you already should’ve been home by now. I even enjoyed the E! special on celebrity moms. It was like, “Q: How do celebrity moms stay so fabulous? A: They pay a lot of fucking money to do so! And so you will never be this fabulous when you are a mom! You will never be this fabulous even when you are not a mom! Because you do not have the ridiculous fucking money to make yourself ridiculously fabulous, and even if you did you would probably do something foolish with it like be charitable, you sucker regular person! You would rather be charitable than be fabulous! This is why you will never be a celebrity and this is why you will now rush out to the store to spend lots of money you don’t have on absurdly expensive stretch-mark reducing skin care products! Because I am warping your mind! Buy! Buy! Buy!”
Also, when I have access to TV - which is only ever when I’m on vacation - I get really freaked out by the sorts of things that are on it (you may have noticed, ahem, above), including the speech styles of hosts of varying programs, where they put unbelievable emphasis on unnecessary words. The most interesting thing I saw this time was that some channel’s stupid “news”/advert ticker at the bottom of the screen - they have these going nonstop now, which is distracting and useless - it was probably E! or some other equally destructive celebritymongering station - asked you to go to the station’s website to get the “deets” on some celebrity scandal or another. It seriously said that, all written out: deets. So, people, it’s not just the internets: it’s all the tubes fit to write on. Does the TV station use deets because people say it, or because people write it online? Do people write it online because they say it, or do they say it because they write it online? I guess these are the more interesting questions.
Perhaps the most interesting question is whether any of this made any sense. I leave that to you to judge, but don’t tell me too loudly if it didn’t, because I’m skittish from lack of sleep.
One last thing: I returned to Ann Arbor to find it 80 degrees and still. Happy summer!!!
