polyglot conspiracy

Man, I’ve really been laggard on the blogging lately. This semester has officially been teh suck, for a few reasons. It’s been good for a few other reasons, but it’s overwhelmingly been teh suck. I wasn’t used to only having a week off during winter break; I had four classes, only two of which moderately interested me (no offense to any of my professors, who are great - it’s the subject matter!); I experienced some professional letdowns and have been trying to scrounge together summer plans; I was sick most of the time. And so on.

Anyway, in between defending sociolinguists from implicit charges of not having studied prescriptivism and ruminating on Wikipedia’s neologism policy and stuff, I *have* actually been keeping a pretty good watch on the linguablogosphere, despite having not much to contribute myself. So here’s a rare “roundup”-style post, mixed in with a half-written-entries-style post.

YouTube
It started when I finally watched the Danish comedy sketch (hat tip/Brook), and discovered that there must be a bunch of interesting stuff on YouTube having to do with language - I don’t YouTube as much as I probably ought to, so having others send me links is much appreciated. To start, though, I just clicked on the “language” tag to see what popped up.

Imagine my excitement when one of the first things was from A Bit of Fry & Laurie, in probably the most language-centric sketch from that show. It’s here and you must watch it if you haven’t before. And speaking of Danes, here’s Victor Borge on “inflationary language.”

Linguablogs
-Catafora Paratactica recently wrote an post “On Chomsky”, in which frustrations are shared that very much match my own, namely, why the hell does everyone want to know what I think about Chomsky just because I’m in linguistics?!

-Mark Liberman on the flight delay due to cussing. This isn’t nearly as surprising to me as the flight delay due to farting was - if someone is cursing profusely on the job, I might be worried about their ability to rationally fly my plane. This is not because cursing is bad, of course, but because cursing on the job (especially a public service job like piloting) unequivocally violates the sociolinguistic norms of the job setting, and this is a potentially disconcerting thing.

-Ben Zimmer responded to the Newt Gingrich “ghetto” quote with an explanation of his probably-channeling the English-only movement’s rhetoric. He mentioned me in the post as a source that had “followed suit” in interpreting Gingrich’s comment as equating Spanish with speakers who reside in ghettos. I’d like to point out that my headline (Spanish is indeed spoken by many individuals who do not live in the ghetto) was echoic of a commenter on Gingrich’s remarks, not Gingrich’s remarks per se. That said, I disagree with Zimmer’s argument - I think Gingrich meant ghetto, not linguistic ghetto - and even if he meant the latter, I’m not all tha sure the two are different if you get down to what’s under the metaphor. I disagree even more after seeing Gingrich’s multiple online “apologies,” in which he not only makes no reference to anything resembling linguistic ghettoization, but he also says explicitly that he was drawing on imagery of the Jewish ghettos. Jewish ghettos were (are?) urban ghettos, centers of marginalization and cultural oppression and discrimination. This isn’t a linguistic thing, at least not foremost.

-Mr. Verb is a language blog I just found out about.

Wants
-In reading Mark Liberman’s recent LSA Talk on The Future of Linguistics (in which I have a great stake, mind you), I was struck by a page that compares the number of websites linking to the American Psychological Association vs. the Linguistic Society of America, and Liberman’s figures represent something like that the APA gets 12 times as many links as the LSA. On the one hand, this doesn’t surprise me, since the number of psychologists out there far outnumbers the number of linguists, and because APA has involvement in a number of other fields as well (i.e., we use APA style in lots of our journals). But, it made me add the link to my sidebar, which I shamefully hadn’t done before (probably because - honestly - LSA’s website isn’t very useful for those who don’t have business to conduct there), and it also made me think that I’d love to have a little button (like my Creative Commons or Technorati button) that stands for the professional organizations I’m a member of. I don’t even think that AoIR has one of these, but with the number of AoIR bloggers out there, it sure should. I don’t know how much publicity this would actually bring to the organizations, but I’d be pretty proud to show my affiliation in this way, and possibly provide some traffic to them. (FWIW, Language Log doesn’t even permalink to LSA [not that I can tell, anyway]. This seems problematic; if the most-read linguistics blog doesn’t link to the linguistics professional organization, who will?!) Does anyone know of any organizations who have something like this?