polyglot conspiracy

I am not really sure if it’s supposed to be comedy or not. Ack!

or, Better Make Those Flaps Instead of Released Stops!

A fun little video from Slate…not really sure what the point is, but the anchor is affable enough.

Wishydig has a post about this article regarding a blog that tracks “unnecessary” quotation marks. I hadn’t ever heard it so clearly put, before this post of Wishydig’s, that “language-lover” is “too often used with the connotation of intolerance.” It’s true: peevologists et al. are often people who claim to love language so much that they are willing to take on the job of protecting it. This is perhaps not what we linguists think of as “loving a language,” but this is the form that the feeling of “love” often takes in practical matters, I think: I love this shirt so much, I must keep it stain-free. I love my cat so much, I cannot let her out of the house. I love my car so much, I can’t parallel park it lest it be knicked by someone more careless than I am. I don’t want to get into the semantics of “love”…it means what it means.

But so it’s not the association of “love” with “protection” that’s amiss, but the premise that language is something subject to such a dynamic of love as protection. Or that it’s the type of thing for which “love” ought to be expressed in a manner different from strict formal protectionism (then again, save the endangered languages!).

Anyway, I am teaching a class this semester called Language and Discrimination, and we’ve spent the first couple of weeks talking about the “linguistic facts of life” (thanks to Lippi-Green) and processes of prescription and standardization (thanks to the Milroys). These are really important concepts to lay down right off the bat, because what most college students (or so I’ve heard, and so I’ve experienced) come to class thinking about language (these are mostly non-linguistics majors) is that there’s one correct way of speaking/writing, and that other ways of speaking/writing are incorrect (and sometimes indications of a speaker’s low intelligence or linguistic ability). This is no surprise at all, because this is the general opinion of the general public in the US, which we talk about as a product of the “standard language ideology” - what makes us accept the fact that there’s a right and a wrong without questioning why it should be that way, or who that means gets mostly considered “wrong.” But in order to talk about the stuff that follows in the course (dialects, gender, language in the workplace, listener burden…), we have to start questioning this ideology from the start.

Yesterday we watched this Fox News report in class, and we had a rousing discussion about what students saw in it in terms of standard language ideology and ideas about correctness. To bring this all back to Wishydig’s post: as I was standing in front of the classroom facilitating discussion, listening to students’ opinions and ideas about what people think is standard or correct, I noticed that almost every time I said a word like correct or incorrect, I was using airquotes around them. I first thought to myself that this probably seemed excessive (and meaningless) to the students, and was furthermore just a sign of how I nervously gesture incessantly while teaching, and so I was going to concentrate very hard on stopping with the quotations.

But then, this precise thought went through my head:

No, you know what, that’s not right - actually, the best I can hope for is that these students start putting the word “correct” in airquotes when they talk about it in relation to language, too.

And they did. I hope it wasn’t entirely that they were mimicking my own use, or thinking that they were disallowed to use the terms without airquotes - but rather that they had actually been thinking about what the terms meant, and what kinds of values they espoused. That they could say those words while indicating that they no longer take them for granted as concepts that apply to language. Airquotes seem like a good start.

My dad sent along this headline:

Peculiar Alderman Resigns Amid DUI Charge

That would be an alderman from Peculiar, Missouri. Note that the headline could easily have read: Peculiar truck pull incident forces alderman’s resignation. Any other good ones you can think of?

As far as Missouri town names and their semantic behavior in headlines go, Peculiar is just better than Gipsy but maybe still not quite as good as Licking (and fun in a different way from Squires and Lingo, which I hold dear to my heart). For a list of Missouri town names, click here.

Beaner’s Coffee is changing its name (press release), in efforts to dissociate its name from the racial epithet of the same…name.

A small but growing coffeehouse chain is changing its name amid concern that the moniker meant to celebrate the seed of its main product also is a disparaging term for Hispanics…

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was preceded by “bean-eater,” a slur against Latin-Americans, particularly Mexicans. The earliest example goes back to 1919, and the first recorded use of beaner as a derogatory term was 1965.

“The concept of referring negatively to Mexicans because of what they eat goes back a long way,” said Jesse Sheidlower, an editor at large at Oxford.

“You can offend unintentionally. That beaner has a meaning within the coffee community doesn’t matter if it coincidentally is the name of an ethnic slur.”

I have had numerous people in town point out to me that Beaner’s is a really awful name for a coffee place (or any place), but I must admit that this term as a racial slur was completely unknown to me before I moved to Ann Arbor and the coffeeshop’s presence forced people to point it out to me. What I love about the press release is that the whole thing has BEANER’S written in all caps, while at the same time talking about how negative of a word BEANER is. Aw, they can’t win. (hat tip/Robin)

Hipster Olympics has so many topics ripe for socio/linguistic dissection that I can’t even begin to begin, though I can list some things that come to mind as most fascinating

-Failure to appear to care about anything; delight in judging others
-Failure to admit hipsterness
-Excessive use of text messaging
-Irony (”So ironic it’s not, so unironic it is!”)
-Propensity for wearing skinny jeans, liking “fauxhawks,” and smoking cigarettes
-Need to borrow money from parents
-Unconventional names
-Intense concern over appearance in person and on Myspace
-Use of the term “sesh”
-Inability to appreciate musicians who have perceivably “sold out” or who will conceivably “sell out”
-Noam Chomsky as influential to hipsters
-Multiple people named “Chuck” as influential to hipsters
-Interest in Vice magazine, American Apparel, and Pitchfork
-”X is the new Y” snowclone
-Residence in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
-Frequent proneness to hangovers

But…no mention of bikes! Curious. But seriously - this is brilliant. (hat tip/Brandon)

Wishydig beat me to a post about an NPR story yesterday on the new Kelsey Grammar-Patricia Heaton sitcom. Except mine isn’t about the silly (serious?) headline given the story (”Sitcoms Are Serious Business”); it’s about the word sitcom.

As I was listening to the story, which interviewed several of the veteran sitcom creators (writers, producers, etc.) who are working on the show, I noticed that they started talking about the “sit” of the show. That, of course, is short for situation, the first part of situation comedy:

Back To You isn’t the first sitcom to make its “sit” a local news station. Levitan, the show’s co-creator, says it’s fertile ground for comedy.

“You have people that think they’re giant stars in little towns,” he says, enumerating the possible sources of laughs. “You got a ticking clock, which is great for comedy — everything’s happening, we’re working towards a show, and we got to get it on the air. You got egos bumping up against each other, and that’s all funny.”

But the “sit” is irrelevant to Burrows, the show’s director. He thinks the writing, pacing and the characters are a lot more important. Burrows points out that some of the best sitcoms have had very simple concepts.

“Six people sitting around a coffee shop,” Burrows says, meaning Friends. “A garage in New York City, with a bunch of cab drivers (Taxi). A bar in Boston (Cheers). Wow. The execution of the sit is more important than the sit.”

But I kept thinking of how people have started saying “sitch” as short for “situation.” And I was wondering whether it seemed weird to anyone else to hear “sit” as the abbreviation rather than “sitch.” And if the term “sitcom” had been coined today instead of years ago, would it be a “sitchcom”? And do the people who make sitcoms ever want to talk about “sitches” instead of “sits”? [OK, and I didn't know that "sitch" was an integral part of talking about Kim Possible...I just know it from my friends saying it, similarly to "totes" (=totally), "cazh" (=casually), "unfortch" (=unfortunately), etc. Is the show where it started getting popular? The earliest UD entry for it is 2003, and the show first aired in 2002, so it seems possible. That'd have been a hell of a quick spread, though, from a kids' show.]

From earlier this summer, a contribution to the discussion of how awful a word is “panties.”

For whatever reason, though, I don’t mind “manties” one bit…

There’s a (rather ridiculous, but whatever) column by Patt Morrison in the LA Times about how the country should take some measures to protect against “butchering” of the National Anthem. According to a segment with her on Talk of the Nation this afternoon, butchering takes various forms: excessive vibratto, playing with the time signature (a caller complained about a children’s choir which had changed the timing from 3/4 to 4/4 for its 9/11 commemorative performance), elongating the song into a smooth jazzy improv jam, and, of course, screwing up the words:

What kind of national anthem is it if its people don’t know the words and can’t carry the tune?

Ignorance of the Anthem’s actual words is so widespread, she says, that 2 out of 3 Americans don’t know the words. And so if you were to

combine all the miscues and missed words, even from pros like Robert Goulet and Johnny Paycheck, and the lyrics would read:

“Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early night/What so loudly we sang, at the daylight’s last cleaning/Whose bright stripes and broad stars/Through the per-u-lis fight/For the rampants we watched/Were so gallantly screaming.”

What a sobering picture indeed (and this from what was originally a drinking song!). Look, I get the point - the words are tricky if you don’t know them (as are any song lyrics), and people get annoyed by such things - but, in particular, what is this “per-u-lis” business? Is that a slam on pronouncing it with a schwa in the second syllable and a high front lax vowel in the third syllable, rather than vice versa? Is it supposed to indicate that someone who sings with that pronunciation doesn’t actually know that the word is “perilous”?

As for my true feelings about her irritation with anthem-butchering, I agree with a comment by Peter R. Walters on TOTN’s blog:

Patt Morrison is right! They should sing the Anthem the way it was meant to be sung. What do these people think it represents? Freedom of speech?

At least, I think I agree with him; if he’s being as sarcastic as I think he’s being.

This article in the China Daily touches on so many interesting topics, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s an invocation of the language as a virus metaphor, with particular attention to what planet it comes from:

Net-speak is a growing trend among China’s younger generation of cyber-citizens, many of whom speak entirely in what, at first glance, appears to be the malicious stompings of a cat on a keyboard….Actually, the same thing has happened in English, and variations of “l33t” have spread through online games and onto mobile devices like a virus.

What is Marsspeak?

Huo Xing Wen, literally Marsspeak, is a writing style in wide use on the Internet by now grown-up 80s kids. It is a mixture of traditional Chinese characters, English and oral language translated into the Internet and random symbols.

Because it’s difficult to read for those unfamiliar with China’s cyber-culture, it has been dubbed Marsspeak, similar to English speakers dubbing anything not written in Latin characters as “Moonspeak.”

There’s an explanation of the features of Marsspeak:

Deciphering Marsspeak

Marsspeak can mainly be divided into four categories: hieroglyphics, mock sounds, combining characters and using elements from a “mistakenly-written” characters.

And there’s a very interesting short origin story given of Marsspeak - among other kinds of technology-induced dialects, THAT’s the interesting part:

Internet slang and its various “dialects,” netspeak, AOL-speak, l33t and SMS language, evolved in online messages and were refined when SMS messages became popular. They are abbreviated or symbolic forms of English known as a rebus. With predictive text input increasingly common, the SMS variant is dying out.

The languages evolved from Internet shorthand used to cut down typing time and keep up with speed in busy chat channels. When SMS debuted with its 160 character limit, more dramatic abbreviations became common to save time and money.

Finally there’s the assumption that cyberlects are created just to save time, and the belief that that results in neglected “grammar” and orthographic conventions:

The objective is to use the fewest number of characters needed to put across a comprehensible message. Consequentially, punctuation and grammar are largely ignored.

I am beginning to wonder whether the US or China is more worried about the internets ruining language. (Also, someone tell me about this publication - the article actually ran first in Beijing Today, I gather, and I gather that in either publication there’s great influence from the state.)