polyglot conspiracy

Summertime! Summertime! Summertime! OK, so there’s not much going on in PC-land, other than dodging some awesome Michigan storms, trying to get work done on two papers (which I’ve not *completely* failed at), and spending a lot of time reading on the internets. Which leads me to a few items of interest from the past few days.

1. Sometimes I try to read Maureen Dowd’s column just to see how miserable she comes off as on that particular day or with regards to that particular topic, with the hopes that it will make me feel happy that no matter how frustrating grad school seems, at least I’m not *that* inexplicably bitter, but I can usually only get as far as a) the first paragraph or b) the first use of a nickname for a political figure, whichever comes first. Her use of extravagantly gendered language aside, there’s just something about both her style and lack of substance that just really gets to me. The other day, the Times’ Public Editor weighed in on the former issue with Dowd, but I think the Times would do well to consider other issues with Dowd’s writing, mainly that it’s vapid uninspired drivel masquerading as “opinion,” and designating it as “opinion” apparently gives it a free pass to suckitude. Kind of like the political pundits of Fox News, come to think of it.

Anyhow, trying to read today’s column really put me over the edge of Dowd-annoyance. Dowd’s got a game to play with language, and I am pretty sure that language is winning this one, because Dowd can’t seem to get it to say anything really at all in any parse-friendly way. It starts out:

Unity was spared the banality of unanimity.

This doesn’t bode well…

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity…..

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the Unity humidity……

This amenity did not stop the disunity.

Ack. OK, I get that it’s a thing, but I don’t even know what you call it, this “-ity” repetition pattern…is it technically some kind of reduplication? I’m only familiar with alliteration, assonance, and consonance, and this doesn’t seem to neatly fit any of those definitions. It makes me dizzy.

The column could’ve just said “In Unity, some Clinton supporters showed that they were still behind their candidate and hadn’t yet bought into party unity.” That would’ve done it. But noooooo, we have to go on with the calamity of the insanity of the SeanHannity blah blah blah and the Hill and Bam and Bamary and Hill’s supporters are angry bitches who want Obama to die (no really, it’s in there) and Bill Clinton is a washed-up prima donna struggling with his masculinity (which is really how *every* Dowd column seems to end, isn’t it?). I can’t even find an opinion in this piece (like most of Dowd’s columns); the opinion lies latent in the fact that she’s chosen to write about the thing she’s writing about. So I can only guess from the fact that she’s written about Clinton supporters who aren’t yet Obama supporters that she has some seething dislike for Clinton supporters who aren’t yet Obama supporters. OK there’s one opinion at the end, which is that Obama should have nothing to do with Clinton’s debt repayment strategy (or something like that).

I just read her columns and immediately feel angry; it’s not just the too-cute rhyming and patronizing nicknaming. Why is this person insulting me?, I think. Why does she have so many grudges, and why doesn’t she channel them into something that’s at least useful for me to know? Why does she want to hurt the Democrats? I think the Times owes its readers better. That column is a waste of readers’ time and the papers’ money.

End. Rant.

2. I saw this ad yesterday and found it to be a delectable example of how internet domain names, what with their typical lack of orthographic word-separators (spaces, capital letters, periods…anything), are often a parser’s nightmare.

It might be because I had just been watching Little Britain, but when I saw this I thought it said “Plenty offish,” as in “Well she’s plenty offish, isn’t she?” meaning “She’s not very friendly.” It sounded like something that could work in British English, for whatever reason. Luckily when I looked for context, the dating site thing helped me figure out what it was really saying.

3. I find the practice of adopting a politician’s name, as reported in this Times story about people adopting “Hussein” as their middle name to show support for Obama, very strange. I get that it’s an attempt at reclaiming a word so as to disempower those who might use it for ill against you, but I feel like we might do better to have a more in-depth conversation: If you’re using “Hussein” to make the point that the name is not always an index of a Muslim, you’re ceding the point that to be a Muslim would indeed be a bad thing. Aren’t you? This has been bothering me since the whole start of the Obama-Muslim scare: And just what if he were a Muslim? Would that be such a terrible, terrible thing? Oh, sorry of course it would, because all Muslims are terrorists. Except they’re not. It strikes me that THIS is what people need to be understanding out of this whole confusion, not just that Obama is not Muslim and neither are his names. He made the whole racial unity speech; could he do the same for religion? How about if we got postreligious just like we’re (supposedly trying to get, by some misguided accounts) postracial and postfeminist?

4. If you are in the DC area and appreciate the arts, come see me tap dance next month!

Oh boy, I love catching typos right before they get corrected. Especially in papers like the NYT. Especially when they are typos that might be construed as insidious rather than innocuous, Freudian-like rather than Cupertino-like, given the media-cultural climate that the story the typo is in is in (! whoah! how’d I do that?!??). This has been changed now, but note this sentence of Bob Kerrey’s analysis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the Times:

This mistake actually does create some cognitive slowdown (for me it did, anyway), making the sentence hard to parse: wait, maybe they were actually talking about Bill, but then why did it say “her husband,” but wait Bill wasn’t running against Obama….ack! I’m so confused! Clusterfuck of gendered pronouns and honorifics!!! (Does anyone know if the print version has this typo? And I am *sure* this isn’t the first time this typo has gone national…)

Despite Chris Matthews’ apparently being a total sexist and racist) ass (I don’t have TV so this is just read-say to me), he did do something impressive and stunning which you should see.

See what media could be like? If the people who know their shit and are in positions to show it really did so, on a regular basis, to point out that lots of people who criticize liberals politicians don’t know their shit, like at all? (h/t to Shakesville, which is just blowing my mind with its awesomeness) 

Has anyone else seen There Will Be Blood yet? Daniel Day-Lewis’s dialect sounds more-than-vaguely like Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery…discuss.

No seriously, has anyone thought about or read a decent account of what historical basis there is for DDL’s linguistic portrayal? (Immigration patterns, migration patterns, etc…) It’s got some interesting features, including retroflex fricatives, not much postvocalic /r/, and some vowels way further back than I’d expect. Also, William Bandy sounds like he’s from Michigan but then says “water” like he’s from Jersey (nowadays). What?

On a fairly related note, I’m reading Thomas Paul Bonfiglio’s Race and the Rise of the American Standard - *hightly* recommended.

OK, so somehow I completely missed the boat on this last year:

Such semiotic dissonance!

Last night I watched (finally; it’s been a goal for a while) Pasolini’s Accatone, which is in Italian with English subtitles. Unfortunately, because it’s an old film, the subtitles are in white font and thus very often diifficult to read against the bright white atmospheric background of black-and-white Italy. But I could make out enough to get the general gist of things (along with my by-now extremely rusty knowledge of Italian), and also enough to notice something odd with some of the subtitling. Whenever the English translation demanded a modal + have, the have was represented in the subtitles by of. So you got, unexceptionably as far as I noticed, things like:

You should of told him sooner.
I could of been killed.
We would of already seen him. 

(Those are made-up examples - I tried to replay the movie just now to take screenshots, but my computer isn’t cooperating - what’s new?!) In colloquial English speech these haves would be cliticized onto the modal, so you’d have:

You should’ve told him sooner.
I could’ve been killed.
We would’ve already seen him. 

Many people hear these as sounding much more like of than have; it’s probably often written as of and so is eggcorn-like, though I don’t see it listed in the Eggcorn Database, and since it’s such a functional word instead of a substantive one, maybe it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.

But what’s strange to me is how in a translation and subtitling situation, this got represented as of instead of have. I always presumed that subtitling or dubbing translations worked from the written script, in which case I don’t know how anyone would ever get of instead of have, unless they had just learned the auxiliary have as of, which would be extremely curious indeed. The way I figure this got in there, instead, is that someone was actually translating the film by sound rather than print, and the person entering the text for the subtitles was not the same person as a the translating speaker. So the subtitler transcribed what the translator said, and the translator was saying things colloquially, so that ‘ve sounded like of. For a native English speaker, this actually reads ok, because we *know* that these sound alike and maybe we’re even aware of the potential alternative representations. But I wonder if reading these constructions would make sense for a nonnative speaker, given that of in English is pretty much only ever a preposition? 

OK, news flash, M-W actually does list of as a verbal auxiliary, but with the following definition:

nonstandard : have — used in place of the contraction ‘ve often in representations of uneducated speech [I could of beat them easy — Ring Lardner] 

So it’s used in eye dialect, basically, to index nonstandardness. Maybe you could argue that the subtitlers of Accatone were trying to do something like this, representing something about the characters’ speech (they’re in Rome, which AFAIK is not where whatever’s considered “standard” Italian is spoken) through the English translation, but that seems far-fetched, and there are lots of other cues that probably could’ve gotten this across as well.

One of the first things you do in an introductory syntax class is learn all sorts of fun diagnostics for when you have grammatical constituents, that is, words or groups of words that act together as a unit in terms of the structure of the sentence. For locating verb phrases (VPs), one of these diagnostics is a substitution test of the type that replaces the alleged VP with the phrase do so. For instance, you can have things like:

Maybe John went to the club, but I would never do so/go to the club. 

So basically, do so stands in for a VP. This actually became a joke amongst some members of my cohort last year, when one of our nonnative English speaking colleagues thought it was very funny (for whatever) that people might ACTUALLY say do so in normal conversation, not just as a nifty syntactic analysis trick. But in normal conversation when you say “do so” it generally has a pretty clear VP that it’s being proxy for, whether it’s occurred earlier in the same sentence or just earlier in the same discourse. So when I saw this quote in an article in yesterday’s NYT, it struck me as a totally mangled reportage of do so, lacking structural context and sounding really incomplete. Bolded part is the kicker:

“There have been some conversations, I can say that,” said Senator Ben Nelson, the moderate Nebraska Democrat. Mr. Nelson, who invited Mr. Obama to campaign for him in 2006, said he has not yet pulled the trigger on an endorsement but that he was more inclined to consider one now since two Senate Democrats - Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut - had dropped out.“When there were four of your colleagues, it certainly made it virtually impossible to do so,” he said earlier this week. “You get to two and it is just a little bit easier.” 

I have no doubt that Nelson actually said this, but I’m guessing there was a specific VP articulated pretty directly beforehand, either by Nelson or the reporter, that explained what exactly was being done (or not being done). I assume it refers to endorse a candidate, though what you can gather from the preceding reported context is something like pull the trigger on an endorsement, which just seems silly.

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.

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???