polyglot conspiracy

One thing that has kept me from posting practically all semester has finally been settled: late Tuesday night my union settled our contract negotiations with UM and reached tentative agreement. This came after nearly 5 months of bargaining and union members striking during a one-day walkout - which was really a two-day walkout with the 2nd day halted by the reaching of agreement. We won an incredible contract, and I am so proud to have been part of the collective action that made it happen. The solidarity demonstrated by this whole process has been overwhelming; I have learned so much in the past several months and despite the windburn (it was in the 30s on Tuesday while we picketed, and ridiculously windy - it ain’t spring in Michigan yet!) and the fact that I have a ton of stuff to do before going to Amsterdam next week for Sociolinguistics Symposium, I feel totally invigorated - I’ll get it all done.

If you are interested, you can check out some parts of the GEO website (which I’ve shifted much of my energy toward this semester, to PC’s detriment!): news coverage, pictures, pictures, and more pictures. Here’s the basic gist of the walkout:(rally; note the great support expressed from undergrads on the building!)(strike HQ)(THANK YOU to all the construction workers who respected our picket lines!)(the good-lookin’ Anthro picketers)

And this is what you would’ve heard if you were in the room with us when we found out we were on the verge of an agreeable agreement:

Not about linguistics, but today, a member of my university community who I will not name made the following comment:

Here at Michigan, it’s easy to get students to write summaries. They’re good at writing summaries, and it’s easy to get them to do it - this is not some community college where you’d have to give them pizza and rewards to get them to do it.

I was pretty upset by this. First of all, this was said in a context of pedagogical exploration, in which one of the ostensive goals is to teach us (graduate students) how to teach undergraduates in such a way as to improve their academic performance and experience, in particular their academic writing. I do not take it as one of our goals to uphold a false dichotomy of good v. lazy students that is based on superficial, institutionalized, economically-driven notions of “prestige.” I would furthermore like to think of this as something that prepares me to take on challenges of teaching in ANY academic setting, not just the golden halls of UMich.

Second, as a fellow grad student pointed out, in my experience there is not one out-of-classroom event at UMich that does not include some culinary enticement. On the above-undergraduate level, people don’t go to talks and expect no food. People don’t go to department meetings and expect no food. People don’t generally do service-related activities unless they are forced into it, or there is food (there are clear exceptions to this, but still). But oh, look at us, we’re so lucky to be at Michigan, where all the students do all their work all the time and we don’t have to do anything to prod them; thank goodness we’re not at Washtenaw where the students might have things other than college to worry about sometimes or just not feel like paying tens of thousands of dollars every year so that they can be judged by pretentious, condescending instructors. Sheesh.

I’m very behind in lots of pop culture things, e.g. pop songs, and so I come very late to the song Cater 2 U by Destiny’s Child, which I heard tonight for the first time (new car = actually listen to non-NPR radio sometimes). So I know I’m 2 years behind in pointing this out, but good lord! Seriously? I guess you can be a survivor and also cater to your man, but

I Promise You (Promise You)
I’ll Keep Myself Up (Oh)
Remain The Same Chick (Yeah)
You Fell In Love With (Yeah)
I’ll Keep It Tight, I’ll Keep My Figure Right
I’ll Keep My Hair Fixed, Keep Rocking The Hottest Outfits
When You Come Home Late Tap Me On My Shoulder, I’ll Roll Over
Baby I Heard You, I’m Here To Serve You (I’m Lovin It, I’m Lovin It)

Um, if you come home late and I am sleeping, please do NOT tap me on the shoulder to wake me up - I have to go to work in the morning, thanks. Not that tapping me on the shoulder would work anyway; you’d have to ring the alarm.

Also, today I took my cat to the vet and they referred to her as a “geriatric kitty” (she’s 13 but still *adorable*). Is there a human formulation that’s equivalent to this? “Old girl” is the only one that comes immediately to mind, and I don’t think it means quite the same thing.

I just saw a marquee at an A&W restaurant in Vancouver that said

Teens
2 for $6

I have absolutely, utterly, completely NO IDEA what this could mean.

???

I wake up naturally there around 7 am, which is about 3 hours earlier than I usually wake up naturally (i.e., I wouldn’t wake up before 10 am EST if I didn’t have to, ever. No seriously - EVER). Because of the convenient 3 hour time difference, this makes it possible for me to wake up unprompted and go for a nice run before the first activity of whatever activity I’m out West for happens. This is a good way to get used to being in a new city, especially somewhere like Vancouver which has a fantastic harbourside running trail downtown, even if it is still dark, raining, and very very cold at 7 am.

This is my best suggestion for dealing with pre-conference anxiety, though: make sure the conference is West from wherever you are, so you can run out the jitters before anything even begins. Of course, this plan comes back to bite you in the ass when the jetlag from going East back home, combined with the inevitable post-conference hangover, debilitates you for three days afterward. But still, it makes for a good start. (It also creates a great excuse for downing every possible bad-for-you food item that is made available at the conference without feeling absurdly guilty.)

1. The word “Vancity,” which the first time I saw it I thought was actually “Vanity.” The second time I saw it I parsed it as “Van city” and thought it was an autovan dealership. The third time, I realized what a stupid American I was and that this was indeed a clever way of referring to the city of Vancouver.

2. A flier for “HILLBILLY ‘HELL’OWEEN” up at the bar next door to my hotel. I took this at first as a musician named Hell Oween, like Hell Owen with an extra E. Ah yes, it was a long day of travel. But then I got to thinking: hillbillies? in Canada? Really? Then I remembered all those “country doctor” skits from Kids in the Hall and it sort of made sense.

3. The MuchMusic VJ/news anchor who looks like a Ken doll. Seriously, looks. like. Ken.

4. The bartender asked me if I enjoyed my “mac.” I have never heard anyone refer to it this way before; it’s always “mac and cheese.” You?

5. At the same bar, they list an advertisement for a free beer upon ordering any “appy.” I have heard appetizers referred to as apps, starters, and pupus, but never appies.

6. J.Lo started out as a backup dancer for MC Hammer. Whaaaa? She was also ridiculed on the set of In Living Colour, but “as with all adversity, the insults only fueled her fire.”

Yeah, so I’m in Vancouver for AoIR, enjoying the requisite hotel room cable. I’ve only been here 4 hours, and look at all the fun stuff I’ve found to post about already.

I was asked yesterday by a friend for guidance on what kinds of English words/sounds are easily understood over phone lines given their bandpass filtering. I didn’t really know what to say, so I just cobbled together what little knowledge of this issue I could remember from Phonetics, which may or may not be accurate at this point, and spat out this at him:

hm, what i can think of right off the bat is don’t use any fricatives - so avoid V, S, F, TH, Z. these are hard to hear over the phone because their frequencies tend to be higher and their noise bursts are really messy, making it harder to identify them. also try to use “main” vowels like EE (meat), AY (aim), O (boat), and U (mood). other vowels are really variable in English (actually AY is too, but it’s clearer than, say, A [bad] or AH [lock]). i would avoid nasals (M, N, NG) too - easily confusable for one another on the phone (nasal formant makes them all sound alike), except for things that end -ING which is usually pretty easily construed via context.

OH and no R’s or L’s word-initially or word-finally!

OK, I know that there’s probably only about 20% of what I told him that makes sense, but I actually really am interested in knowing the real answer to this now…also, there should be a “telephone sound simulation” thingy somewhere online. If you know of this existing, please tell me.

If you have a blog or website and ever check your stats, you know how fun it is sometimes to see what kind of crazy searches have led people to your site. As I gear up for the new semester, let us reflect on the past with a smattering of interesting keyphrases taken from my stats engine.

sms language is not effecting english language
overage charges
past of shrink
get your groove on meaning
freudian slip linguistics
pronunciation missouri
myspace conspiracy
what is sociolinguistics
girls locked up for 7 years developed an almost unintelligible
shakespeare text messaging
drop down and get your eagle on meaning
wards emoticon hotmail
conspiracy facebook myspace
small beer picture
why do we use z instead of s
you are very mean
english accent intelligent
reasons why flight attendants should know foreign languages
different forms of communication that you employ in your daily life and conversation
president bush english good enough jesus
linguistics not science
mr. verb identity [!]
are you going to the mall later thats what i am asking
paradise lost uncyclopedia
pinyin sex phrases
z-spelling s-spelling
a bunch of big words that mean nothing [!!]
descriptive words on antarctica and the emperor penguin
american pop culture trends that don t work in other countries
you know you make me wanna shout lyrics original [?]
do i suck at scrabble
how to read peoples myspace messages without them knowing
why people fail to recognize their own incompetence
the baddest swear word ever
myspace ruined my marriage [:-(]
be an audience member on iron chef america [WTF]
dear optimist a few years ago i inadvertently declared war on the wrong country.
don t fuck my grandma [I am the first hit for this. ?!?!]
ginnifer godwin butt
missouri family conspiracies
homosexuality in country and western singers
websites devoted to words and phrases that people misinterpret
fucking log me into facebook
what do the words i heart you mean?
is the word shit in the scrabble dictionary
a word that means confused and in love
conspiracy academia degrees
the five most insulting words in cantonese
linguists who believe in prescriptivism
i have a phd and work at mcdonalds
when is the mcrib coming back?

It’s actually very interesting to type these in to google and see what else comes up other than my site (which usually comes up waaaay last, probably). You would be shocked at how many of the search phrases have to do with MySpace, the word “grandpa,” Scrabble, or “heart.” Or swear words. Or McDonald’s.

OK, so I apologize to the communal spirit of blogging for my lack of contact with other blogs these past couple of weeks.  At my parents’ house I use the internet on their home desktop, which means that my RSS feed - which is on Safari on my laptop (because I used to use Bloglines but it was less convenient, and I never set up another browser-independent feed, which to be frank is probably a good thing because vacation is for vacation, dammit!) - is unavailable.  So, I’ve been sporadically checking on some blogs for interesting things, and here are some random comments in no particular order, mostly about Language Log (because it’s centrally located).  This is a rare post where I do almost nothing but present reactionary opinions, so if you’re not interested in that, you should probably give up now.

-Mark Liberman on how people hate the words “moist” and “panties.”  I know almost no woman who doesn’t hate these two words, either separately or (oh god, don’t even make me imagine it) in combination.   Mark spends a post wondering why this should be, but there’s a really simple answer: they’re icky.  They’re totally icky words.  Well, “moist” is icky and “panties” is insulting.  And together they will destroy the world.

-Ben Zimmer on more peeveblogging.  His post just compels me to recommend everyone (EVERYONE) read the book Verbal Hygiene by Deborah Cameron.  I am positively *ashamed* not to have read it before now (thanks for insisting on this one, Sai), but I have been reading it the past couple weeks (slowly - I’m on vacay!), and it is so good.  It is a study in peevology - and linguistic naming and shaming, and prescriptivism - as well as a study in the study of these things, all of which are forms of what Cameron terms verbal hygiene.  Actually, I find that Zimmer has already made this connection, so here, I leave him to it, and forcefully add my own recommendation.

-Mark Liberman on the differences between people who use “I mean” and “you know” as discourse markers.  He makes an admirable first-pass at some corpus data, trying to answer a reader’s question of whether there are “personality” differences between people who use “I mean” or “you know” more often.  All that I will say is that if you’re looking at “personality differences,” or even demographic differences as Liberman does, you’re only going to get one piece of the picture from the raw frequency of these phrases in a corpus.  What I’m thinking is that these two phrases are often used in different places within discourse; “I mean” is almost never used to terminate a turn or clause, whereas “you know”often is (and with rising intonation - tag question).

I mean, it’s not like men and women are any different.

You know, it’s not like men and women are any different.

It’s not like men and women are any different, you know?

I mean, it’s not like men and women are any different, you know?

This is how *I* use them, at any rate - my point is, it’s not going to get you very far to just say that some people use one more often and some people use the other more often - without knowing where they occur and with what intonation, you can’t really know what purpose they’re serving in the discourse.  So I think a discourse-analytic approach would be much more useful in addressing a question like this than a corpus-based one, although putting the two together would make for one fine dandy analysis.  I’d love to see it! Also, here is a reference to an article about “you know” and “I mean” as discourse markers:

Fox Tree, J.E. and Schrock, J.C. (2002). Basic meanings of you know and I mean. Journal of Pragmatics 34(6): 727-747.

-Mr. Verb on country music.  There should be more stuff about country music done from sociolinguistic viewpoints.  Turn on a country music radio station and you hear *plenty* that’s worthy of attention.

[If you want a PDF of that J.Pragmatics article and don't have library access, shoot me a friendly email.]

 Now, I am being kicked out of my parents’ office.  Til whenever!  Also, when I get back I am going to have like 6 8 million RSS articles, none of which I’m going to read…if I missed anything particularly juicy over the past couple weeks, somebody let me know.

Our Roble Hall Hello Kitty wikiboard has gotten an edit:

(thx kevin)

Overseen at CSLI:

You sure can, Stanford. You sure can has minimalism.

Look at how cool linguists are:

I know, I know. You’re thinking: “That can’t possibly be linguistics camp. They look like they’re on their way back to their respective homes after a long night of playing guitar and drinking beer and singing around a beachside bonfire. Shouldn’t they look more hungover? But no - they’re all ready to take on the world again, just like that, and look fabulous in the California sun while doing it. They’re so cool. Brendan, Nate, Brian, and Emma are so f’ing cool.” Well, I am here to tell you that it’s true. They’re linguists, they’re cool, and they’re standing in the sun on Stanford’s campus. Get used to it. (Actually, get over it, ’cause it’s all over in 3 hours!)