polyglot conspiracy

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…)

English is totally a null subject language.

From a restaurant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which apparently considers just water to be a compound count noun:Also, thanks to everyone for the positive greetings in response to my last post. Winter break is coming up and I feel a rejuvenation upon me…

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.

Over break, I heard one of my cousins say two things that completely amazed me, in that I didn’t realize they were part of whatever dialect she and my family members in Missouri speak. They seemed unremarkable to everyone else in the room.

First:

Do you think the light needs on?

This is like the prototypical Ohioan The car needs washed, but sounded way weirder to me because the whole main verb is elided and what’s left for the needing is simply a preposition. Whoah!

Second:

You mightn’t oughta go…

This is not terribly surprising because I know that the dialects in MO have double modals, but the negation in there caught me off guard (shouldn’t oughta wouldn’t have caused the same reaction, I think, and google agrees that it’s far more frequent than mightn’t oughta).

Overcoming Faith church: they know it sounds like faith is something one is afflicted with and must triumph over, right? They must know.

Great sign by the drinking fountains at the gym:

Please do not SPIT or RINSE your face in the fountain! 

Yes. If you need to spit your face, please do it in the bathroom.

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???