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!

Just back from Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 in Amsterdam, jetlagged, just in time for finals! The conference was interesting and fun, and it was really good to see some of my linguafriends there. English is everywhere in Amsterdam, of course, and at the opening reception for the conference the Mayor of the city gave a welcome speech in which he referred to the “Nether-English” being created from the use of English in the Netherlands (it was his way of “connecting” to us, I suppose). He did not give specifics, but I had never heard this term before (though am not surprised that it’s a concept that’s out there, though perhaps “Netherlish” would be more like the names of other world Englishes?). There are a few hits on the web out there, but nothing like a Wikipedia entry or page devoted to information about Nether-English, that I can find. If you know anything about this let me know. [Also, doesn't "Nether-English" also sound like it's English that doesn't really exist, or exists in a parallel dimension?]

So perhaps an example of Nether-English is to be found in the Visitors’ Attraction guide book we were given upon arrival, which gives some hints about the Red Light District. My favorite is:

If you choose to visit one of the women, we would like to remind you, they are not always women.

Though not perhaps the most Nether- of the English in that particular book, it does have a certain alter-stylistic property to it that sounds very odd to my American English ears. It also reminds me of a discussion had between me and some Brits, in which I was asked:

Brit: Do Americans call muffins muffins?
Me: Um…if you are referring to what I call muffins, then yes, we call them muffins. If you are referring to something other than what I call muffins, I do not know what you are referring to, and so I do not know what I call it!

Women aren’t always women and muffins aren’t always muffins…let’s call the whole thing off!

I have lately started noticing that people often ask me if linguists study or teach about the “misuse of language.” I am never quite sure how to respond, so I usually just change the subject. The truth is I am not sure what this phrase even means, and I never feel like asking for clarification because I fear the worst (i.e., “You know, people who don’t speak proper English”), and even what I presume is the best possible meaning (i.e., “You know, using rhetoric to dupe people into voting for unjust wars”) does not make me particularly interested in responding. When you hear someone talk about the “misuse of language,” what do you interpret them to mean?

Dennis Baron has an excellent post up at The Web of Language, regarding (among other things) why handwriting is still taught in schools, when cost-benefit analysis would so clearly show that touch-typing is more valuable.

The example of [Dr.] House notwithstanding, this glorification of handwriting is just another example of the growing disconnect between education and the needs of actual writers, and I’m not just saying this because my own handwriting is illegible. It made sense for 19th-century American schools to push handwriting as an essential skill because legible handwriting was necessary to secure an office job…

A 2005 survey by a major publisher of handwriting textbooks showed most schools spending an hour a week or less on cursive writing, and many have ditched handwriting altogether in favor of working at the computer, which students are happier to do not because it will one day get them something nice in a white-collar 9 to 5, but because many are already spending lots of their non-school time online.

Now, however, some educators want to turn back the clock, convinced, as Newsweek puts it, that “handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning.” Fans of handwriting argue that when handwriting becomes automatic, children write faster, better, more, and they’ll learn faster, better, more as well.

Handwriting, like typewriters and computers, is a writing technology, and just as any writing technology can become automatic once we get used to it, any writing technology can also help us learn.

He’s referencing a Newsweek articlethat argues for the educational virtues of handwriting. This article makes some points that I could go in for, but all of the “mounting evidence” it cites is in the form of “experts’” opinions, not actual research. Save this one part:

Handwriting is important because research shows that when children are taught how to do it, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves. A new study to be released this month by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham finds that a majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades—aside from being easier to read.

Now, the key here - or at least what seems to be the key - is in this phrase “primary-school teachers believe.” Though I can’t get the actual study to see what’s really going on, this makes it sound like what you have is a case of teachers stereotyping based on a single measure of performance: if you don’t have fluent handwriting, you aren’t a good student. And I’m not sure who *wouldn’t* believe this, whether they’ve had experience teaching or not. It’s like asking if people think that someone who’s tall will be better at basketball than someone who’s short. Or something.

There’s no doubt that we consistently judge content based on form: we tend to think more aesthetically pleasing things are better, regardless of actual content or talent or quality or benefit (think Britney Spears in her heyday; shiny new iPhones; Barack Obama as opposed to Hillary Clinton [yeah, I went there]; Ikea). It shouldn’t be surprising that teachers would think this, nor should it be taken as evidence that handwriting is a vital cognitive skill necessary for students’ achievement and self-development. We don’t assume that because most Americans think that tall people are better at basketball, it actually means that being tall is a necessary component of becoming a good basketball player (or maybe we do; I don’t know). I guess I’m just confused about what a study like this is saying, because the way it has been presented here, it sounds like it is telling us something about teachers’ perceptions of handwriting’s relation to student achievement, not anything about the actual benefits of handwriting to student achievement. Which is also very interesting, but not the same. But because we still long for the good old days of romantic handwritten notes, we’ll probably be quick to see this as a sign that typing is bad and handwriting is good.

But it sure turned into one (my post, that is, a rant about the media’s portrayal of the ages.)

NYT has another article (I wrote about one a few months ago here) in yesterday’s Style section about oldsters on social networking sites - though this time it’s just about the old folk encroaching on the youthful playground setting of Facebook, not about new sites popping up to cater to the gray-hairs (h/t:Robin).

It’s no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying, and that the percentage of active members who are over 25 years old and out of school has risen to some 40 percent of the overall population of about 45 million.

The influx raises questions. Will the loss of the campus sensibility and the youthful gestalt dilute the Facebook experience? And will the newcomers use the site — and change it? Or is it just another example of the fact that Americans age, but never seem to mature?

Actually, I think this article is just another example of the fact that Americans are obsessed with age differences, and never seem to get over the fact that the same things can sometimes be enjoyed across the lifespan. There’s something different about this though, of course: insteaad of “the kids are doing everything out of sight and who knows what’s going on on those sites, they’re all being eaten by predators,” it’s “the adults are invading the kids’ world, so it must mean that the adults are immature and silly or, obviously, child molesters.”

But I love the way the article frames how young people view older people - first it’s mentioned that to be over 40 on Facebook is “creepy,” and then you get this:

FOR the most part, in fact, the entry of millions of people with, you know, jobs and stuff, has been greeted with an epic “whatever,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “The average Facebook user isn’t going to care that people utterly unlike them are doing things they utterly don’t care about on some other corner of the site,” he said.

Facebook can avoid its “there goes the neighborhood moment,” he said, as long as it allows people to stay in their silos and gives them control over who can peek at their profiles. “As long as the individual users still feel their culture is preserved in their corner of Facebook, the growth won’t bother them.”

But the grown-ups are everywhere.

I’m sorry - college students aren’t just sitting around on their computers *all the time* not doing anything to contribute to society and bumbling about the grownups they may or may not encounter online who actually have “jobs and stuff,” though I do love the way this locution is paired with the “epic ‘whatever’” to construct college students as both inarticulate and completely self-distanced from anyone over the age of 30.

And then this:

Ms. Waldman — she of the creepy 40s — finds herself using Facebook in many of the ways that younger people do, except for the sexual cruising: she keeps up with old friends, makes new ones and uses the network to, well, network.

HUH? “Sexual cruising”? Maybe I’m just too old to get it (me at my stodgy 26), but I have never heard anyone talk about using Facebook for “sexual cruising.” If anyone can counter-example this, please feel free to do so. But the way this is stated is like as just an assumption that younger people use the site for sexual cruising…wtf??? Just like it’s always assumed that everyone on Myspace is meeting strangers all the time and lying about their ages.

This guy, on the other hand, I agree with:

Some longtime observers of technology also wonder if Facebook will hold the interest of adults. Paul Saffo, a technology consultant who teaches at Stanford, said that Facebook’s rapidly multiplying programs and widgets might compromise the simple, clean design that made the site popular in the first place — which could be especially irritating to adults. “We want fewer steps, not more,” he said.

Worse, he said, is that social software means “we all get to be in fourth grade again,” renegotiating the rules of engagement with others. Do you respond to every friend request? Is it rude to cut someone away as part of a friend-list pruning? Once again, he said, “You have to worry about bruised feelings.”

This is a pretty good way to characterize what it feels like to be amidst a social environment you’re unfamiliar with, regardless of whether it’s because you are signed up to a new online networking site, you start a new job, you move to a new place….and this is regardless of age. It still feels like 4th grade again. I guess the difference is supposed to be that 4th grade was so much longer ago for adults with, like, jobs and kids and houses and stuff?

Anyway: whatevs. What bugs me is just that in the whole article they only talked to one college student - who happens to be one of my students! - and his comment in no way indicated that adults online are creepy, or that college students feel toward adults any of the ways that the article frames them as feeling. I need to stop reading these things, because I am constantly disappointed. I *know* that journalists need to write about *something*, and if there’s no angle, there’s no story. So when you don’t have a fact-based angle, you can get an assumption-based one to do the job. But what articles like this really tell us is about how generations stereotypically relate to one another, not how they actually do: it’s adults writing about how they assume college students feel about them. My guess is that college students aren’t thinking about adults on Facebook at all - unless the adult is a) their boss, b) their professor, or c) their parent. THESE kinds of identity negotiations would make for an interesting article.

On another note, I really always thought the announcer from Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’s name was Carl Castle, not Carl Kasell.

I went to see Henry Rollins last night, which was kind of amazing. I’ve never known much about him other than that he was in Black Flag, that he does spoken word, and that I probably agree with much of what he has to say. After experiencing this one stop on his Provoked tour, I am confirmed in this latter fact. One of the best parts was when Rollins was talking about Bush’s speaking habits, that is, his brain as an untamed prairie whose words “run free across the plains.” He has a bit about Bush’s comment regarding Nelson Mandela:

I thought an interesting comment was made — somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, “Now, where’s Mandela?” Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.

Rollins spends a while trying to figure out what Bush could mean by this, and comes up with, to paraphrase:

There is no one Nelson Mandela-like anymore. And there is no longer any Mandela-like person because Saddam Hussein has killed his plural.

Very effective, raucous laughter follows.
A related bit:

This, too, is pretty brilliant. Rollins is ridiculously sharp (and I mean that in so many ways), but also? Is it just me, or does John C. McGinley channel Rollins when doing Dr. Cox? Compare:

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

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.

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)