Wwwwhhhhaaaa[t]?

Watching last night's Colbert Report (no [t]s in there) rerun tonight. In his despair over the stock market plunge yesterday, he urged himself to 'get it together, Colbert; you need this job now', or words to that effect. The Missus points out that he said it with a [t] at the end, and with initial stress. Now, there's a little slip-up.

Bendable blends?

So, blends have come up here a few times lately, most recently with regard to frenemy, and along the way Stumblerette was prompted to ask some good questions:

Why is a schnoddle (schnauzer + poodle) not called a pauzer? Or a labradoodle (labrador + poodle) not a poobrador? Or a cockapoo (cocker spaniel + poodle) not a pockle? (To my ears cockapoo doesn't sound like anything you'd want to cuddle, but that's just me.)

I know there are ideas out there about the ordering of elements in blends, but others know infinitely more about that (and I hope one or another of them will comment it). And for the record, pockle sounds about right for those little things.

But yesterday brought an instance of a possibly reversible blend: A colleague was telling me about a bus traveling the country or at least the region with a historical exhibit. (That's another story.) She said "It's called the museobus or something like that. Turns out, she passed along later, it's called the buseum. But google these terms and you get results for both, but museobus almost only for French. If you'd asked me, I would have bought museobus, but never buseum.

So, morphology buffs, what the heck is going on here?

IRBs

Your blood runs cold at just reading those letters, eh? And seeing that scary graphic doesn't help, does it?

The New York Times has a front-page piece this morning about Institutional Review Boards, the ethics folks who make sure that we don't do bad things to people we gather data from. The hook is this:

faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone.

Syntax footnote: it's not entirely automatic for me to get the last that to refer to research rather than subjects — I thought poses was a typo until I finished the sentence. Maybe it's just a convoluted sentence. Anyhow, the examples are:

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

The article never returns to the linguist, but we all have our horror stories. Fortunately, they normally get resolved without too much grief. At Wisconsin and surely most major institutions, we have explicit instructions for obtaining oral consent from subjects who may not be able to read, might have political or cultural reasons for not signing something, and so on. But people are talking lawsuit …

Philip Hamburger, a professor at Columbia Law School … argues that prior approval violates the First Amendment. “There are potentially hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs.”

Actually, research with human subjects needs to be regulated: We train students in all aspects of doing research, and having a clear plan for what we're going to do and what impact it might have on subjects / consultants is something every researcher needs to consider carefully. I see reasonable IRB stuff as quality control and research methods material.

The problem, I think, is the profound lack of explicit, established standards in this realm. The Linguistic Society of America has been talking about laying out guidelines for linguistic research. I hope they do, and I'll immediately take them to our social and behavioral sciences IRB.

Frenemy

Colbert had as his Wørd last Friday frenemy. He talked about the relationship between the U.S. and China, the People's Republic. Turns out, fremeny is widespread in current use ... over 43,000 g-hits and even that particular show has already been worked up on the web, here.

"When will William Safire retire?"

That's a quote from the subject line of a post last night on the American Dialect Society's electronic list. In fact, I hereby forgo any direct comments on Safire's On Language this week and instead urge readers to consult the latest ads-l posts on it. Just go to this URL and search for doughnut hole (that also seems to return results for donut hole). Unless you subscribe and get the mailings, there's some lag time on when new posts come up in the archive, but it's worth checking again later too.

What you'll see is how people who actually study words and word histories have approached this little issue, pieced together relevant evidence, and worked out a story about the term and its evolution. Even when Safire's assistant checks the archives (i.e., when he has his helper bring him the work of trained professionals, though he virtually never credits them for their work), he generally botches things massively. But even if he doesn't misunderstand, misinterpret or misrepresent what his assistant has found, he has never once, in my experience, given readers a sense of how these specialists think about their field. Speaking as a linguist who does not work in this area, it is worth seeing how they do it — and it's far more engaging than a smudged twelfth-generation xerox of the process.

Now, I'm going to kick back with a steaming cup of coffee and enjoy the post-blizzard calm here in Madison, before I have to go out and shovel the stuff.

The Republic Party

Tomorrow's Doonesbury cartoon will feature, Mr. Verb sources have learned, a suggestion by an aid that Bush start calling his party the "Republic Party" to show that he doesn't "mean any offense" in referring to the opposition as the "Democrat Party". The strip will be up by tomorrow, I trust, here, but I don't find it up anywhere yet, on a quick check.

Still, Republic Party gets a ton of g-hits, about 130,000, many of course to parties that actually contain that element, but a good number to sources making the same point that Garry Trudeau does.

By the way, Trudeau has the aid using Bush's own account (see here) of the form:

… Sir, part of it may be their irritation over how often you mispronounce their name.

Again, it is surely not a phonological issue, but a morphological one.

Update, Sunday morning: We have a specialist on the topic now, including the full strip, here. For the record, Ben, I'm counting Trudeau as "remarkably prescient".

A little cultural difference ...

This image is now floating all over the net (I first saw it at Wonkette), along with similar pictures of basically the same billboard. Hell Pizza Deliveries is a pretty big New Zealand chain, with an engaging menu. (The Damned has avocado, camembert, cashews, fresh spinach, sundried tomatoes, black pepper, mushrooms, onions, pineapple. What, no skewered flesh of sinner?) But check out the website and think about how this whole pitch would go over in North America ... Calling your locations "Hell holes" doesn't floor me, but "Putting the Vice in Service" is cute, and having your phone numbers contain 666 may be a feat of sorts for marketing. But can you begin to conceive of what the reaction in the U.S. would be to such an approach? Makes me tempted to try here in our town, of which Bill O'Reilly famously said:

Madison, Wisconsin, where you expect those people to be communing with Satan.

But for Americans, doesn't it just make you proud? At least it sounds like he won't be getting delivery on the extra large Gluttony, with a side of spare ribs, a box of Chatterbox Red, and some kupiti hokey pokey for dessert.

Colorless green ideas

The NYT was late this morning ... just arrived, in fact. I like the OpEd page on Fridays, because Paul Krugman's a good read. When he does economic stuff, it's like what linguists need in terms of public voices in prominent media outlets: a top academic who can speak to a broad public effectively.

But today's column is called "Colorless Green Ideas", leading me to wonder if he'd taken up our battle. Alas, it's a column about environmental policy (= green ideas) and how important nitty gritty but not-very-sexy (= colorless) policy decisions are.

There's a whole cult around the phrase colorless green ideas. (Unlike the editors at BBC News, you, gentle reader, can use google, and other search engines too probably, so can easily track down zillions of them.) But I don't ever recall seeing it played with quite this way.

Finding some balance

Well, I quickly regretted the effort to be generous to William Safire last week by suggesting that I'd give him a passing grade on his latest column — I cringed as soon as Ben Zimmer pointed out that the core point of Safire's piece had been laid out on the ADS-list a couple years ago (see here). It hadn't even occurred to me to check that angle and Safire's assistant reads ADS-l (or at least posts queries there from time to time). There's no good spin to put on that.

But then, the local paper ran this piece about PBS's new piece about the war on the press in this country. The article included this quote:

The great check and balance that was built into the Constitution is under challenge," says author and former New York Times columnist William Safire. "You've got to have a relationship between the government and the press that's adversarial … .

I agree.

/ɪ/ lowering: The video

(Warning: the video contains, hmmmm, let's say, language you won't hear on network TV.)

Lowering of the lax high front vowel /ɪ/, where bit and bid sound more like bet and bed, is pretty widespread today across a variety of American dialects. Steve Conley on the Changelings list at The Ohio State University called attention to this YouTube video as a good example of lowering, which seems to be becoming "a popular affected pronunciation", particularly in taboo vocabulary. (Don't know him from Adam, but a big thanks to him and to those who passed this along.)

In addition to the socially-marked pattern of /ɪ/lowering here, this vowel change is also part of the Northern Cities Shift, and m[ɛ]lk has become a stereotype for especially southeastern Wisconsin. (A coda /l/ presumably plays a role here.) At the same time, lowering is stereotypical in the pronunciation of the state name Illinois ([ɛ]llinois). This last feature is likely older than NCS — I've heard it reported that the name was spelled with e in some historical sources.

Frananglais in the news ....

Just got this passed along by somebody, on the emergence of "a new language", frananglais, in Cameroon. I'm saying saying the BBC should actually hire a linguist or anything, but couldn't they maybe find one to talk to about stuff before they publish big articles?

I trust the folks over at Language Log are already working on something about the continuing mistreatment of language and linguistics by the BBC and I sure hope Dennis Baron at Web of Language comments on this one too.

Foxworthy's Law

Mr. Verb is right that Jeff Foxworthy has a tradition of sorts when it comes to regional English. I'm pasting in below an old abstract submitted to the 2nd Madison Informal Linguistics Conference, MILC, back in 1998. (The abstract has been slightly cleaned up stylistically.) Note that the abstract's authors, Kloppt & Hämmert, either did not know about the so-called "Southern Shift" involving front lax vowels, or chose not to refer to it.

As it happens, the next MILC, the ninth, is coming up in a month, and I bet the announcement will soon be up at the link given above. So, Mr. Verb, will you dare to show up? Or has being called "the mysterious Mr. Verb" on Language Log driven you even deeper underground? Double dare you to come and wear a name tag with "Mr. Verb" on it.

And some day, somebody needs to do a post about 'NASCAR accent' and Foxworthy's role in it.


Your phonology may be redneck if …: The prosody of “Foxworthy’s Law”

B. Kloppt & B. Hämmert
Fernuniversität des Südens, Muscle Shoals /
Harry’s Smoked Meat & Fresh Game Emporium, Biloxi

Foxworthy’s Law is obviously well-known to every historical linguist, dialectologist, phrenologist, professional bassfisherman and British schoolboy, but to date an adequate phonological account of the phenomenon has been lacking. The Law has been informally stated as: “You may be a redneck if all of your four letter words have two syllables” (Foxworthy 1997).
As is well known, taboo words in English, so-called ‘four-letter words’ (Carlin 1988), have a monosyllabic CVC templatic form, where the vowel is lax. This is exemplified in (1), using the familiar transcription where <*> represents any lax vowel:

(1) CVC: h*ll, d*mn, sh*t, f*ck, etc.

Foxworthy’s Law simply captures the fact that, in the so-called “Redneck” dialect of Southern US English (cf. Newman 1981) such forms are preferentially realized under emphasis with two distinct sonority peaks, the first normally a tense vowel, the second a reduced vowel of variable quantity. More interestingly, this tendentially includes formation of an onset in the new second syllable. With full vowels, this is accomplished via glide epenthesis, illustrated in (2):

(2) Four-letter word, two-syllable cussing
/hɛl/ > [he.jəl]
/ʃɪt/ > [ʃi.jɪt]
/dæm/ > [dæ.jəm]

For other cases, the onset is formed by laryngealization or glottalization, as in (3). (We use [ʔ] here to represent laryngealization and/or glottalization as well as the optional full glottal stop.)

(3) /fʌk/ > [fʌ.ʔək]

The stress patterns of such forms have previously been treated as mundane examples of left-headed feet (φ = s, w), but until now, specialists and amateurs alike (see Dullard 1983, for a strikingly stupid example of the latter) have failed to note the critical role of stress in PROVOKING such templates, established only last year in our own already-classic sociolinguistic study (Bloppt & Bämmert 1997).


REFERENCES
Bloppt, K. & H. Bämmert. 1997. “Stress Effects, Health Effects: What happens when you repeatedly insult cops.” Publications of the Tennessee State Prison Hospital 103, 2: 217-218 (Series IX: Papers from the Intensive Care Unit).

Carlin, George. 1988. “The seven words you can’t say on the radio.” Southern Baptist Quarterly 13:666. (See also the response by Jerry Falwell, 14:1–5948.)

Dullard, Elron. 1983. Tensionetics for Germanisten. Reviewed in Der Fachidiot, 1.2.

Foxworthy, Jeff. 1997. The Redneck's Tale. Georgia.

Hämmert, B. 1995. “English Templates: Why all words in Eng have one syll.” Weit hergeholt, äußert unsicher, Ursprung dunkel: Etymological studies. Falls Church: Dimwit Press.

Newman, Randy. 1981. “Rednecks”. Rednecks. LP (“phonograph record”).

Introducing the book

Pronouns as obscure knowledge

Hard to follow Stumblerette's most recent fine effort, but a quick note from another corner of TVland: Last night while watching the Simpsons (where they used the term shuttlebuggery — a term which just now garnered a big one g-hit!), there were ads for a new Fox show, featuring Jeff Foxworthy (of "You may be a redneck if …" fame). The show is called "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?", where adults are asked questions about things in fifth grade textbooks. Here's the example they give, of a question being asked to a middle-aged woman:

Q: Do you know what a pronoun is?
[long pause, nervous look, then:]
A: I think so.

This must be quite a moment for Mark Liberman, who has pleaded so often for better education of the public about language and how it works. (I'm still pondering how to interpret it — is it a sign that this woman is utterly out of it that she doesn't know or is this regarded as some obscure knowledge?)

And Joe needs to post his old joke abstract about "Foxworthy's Law", showing that Foxworthy's interest in linguistic matters is not new and that he can be insightful.

Pluto's Reality Show Cousins

I was thrilled when plutoed was voted Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Passive participles don't always get the attention they deserve! But there's hope: As a fan of Bravo TV's Project Runway, I noticed that plutoed has some cousins in reality TV land. A contestant who is eliminated from Project Runway (a show in which designers have to create garments, sometimes out of plants or grocery store items) gets aufed. The verb gets its name from the German host's (Heidi Klum) goodbye phrase Auf Wiedersehen. There are many discussion forums and blogs in which aufed is used quite naturally as a passive participle, and people have no idea what auf actually means, nor do they seem to mind. Brilliant.

But the phenomenon is more general: When Project Runway was replaced by Top Chef (same concept, except this time contestants prepare a meal), bloggers were looking for a new word to describe the elimination process. They came up with oeufed, after the French word for egg. Again, brilliant. However, the word seemed too complicated to spell (and also too much of an insider joke) and most people settled on the homier knived. [Edited to add: Not sure about the voiced fricative, but the sendoff phrase is "Pack your knives and go"]

The youngest member of the plutoed family is the word used for elimination of a contestant in Bravo's latest reality show, Top Design. One of the show's judges uses the (lame) sendoff phrase "See you later, decorator" - and so the passive participle latered was born.

Passive participles of the world, unite!

Safire dodges the third rail, kind of

If I had to grade Safire's columns — and, man, I'm glad I don't —I would give him a less dismal grade than usual today, I suppose, but with pretty harsh comments in the margins. He reports on the origins of third rail in American political discourse, basically giving a description of the phrase and its early use. (The image on the right comes an article here on BART, an article worth reading ... or maybe the pictures of the Bay Area just look appealling this morning.) So, he does no harm. He had raised this question a while back ("put a fishhook in this column ... and awaited a nibble"), trusting his Phrasedick Brigade to tell him the origins. He then runs through a list of his phone calls and contacts with Washington journalists leading to Kirk O'Donnell, an aid to former House speaker Tip O'Neill.

The web of evidence he's assembled makes it very plausible that O'Donnell was the person who led to the phrase becoming popular. It's not so clear, though Safire seems to assume it, that O'Donnell actually coined the phrase. That strikes me as passable work, even for a beginning grad student maybe, the kind of situation where you'd just be sure explain to the student how cautious one has to be about sifting historical evidence for conclusions, how hard it is to avoid overstepping what's actually clear from the data before us. I'm not really a historical linguist, or a real linguist at all in the minds of many, but I've sure made that mistake enough myself. Of course as I read it, Safire assesses his accomplishment in the column as helping along the emergence of "the historical truth". Whoa.

The incessant name-dropping deal grates, as it always does, and he can't go without calling Tom Oliphant "a liberal", when it adds zip to the piece. His efforts at cute images don't quite work, like this: "my e-mail box bulging (screens don't bulge)". But that's an odd mix of metaphors, isn't it? Emails don't really fill boxes in any sense and can't quite bulge. I'd leave aside the number of phrases, words and rhetorical moves he uses constantly, but each week phrasedick has come to sound worse and worse to me. He's doubtless old enough that dick in the sense of "detective"is more alive for him than for most of us. I wouldn't mind if he used it only for himself, but then of course he doesn't actually do the digging, just cash the checks for writing up the work of those who do. But it sounds demeaning when it refers to very serious researchers and they don't seem to like it very much, as here.

So there. I read him so you don't have to.

-o nouns in English

Here's a little question that Mr. Verb is unable to help me with, so I'll just record it here. (Actually, his reaction was more like "What? Who do I look like to you, Mr. Noun?" Never seen anybody get so sensitive over lexical categories. Sheesh.)

Anyways, somebody recently emailed me about doing a preso. I know this as a hip tech term, what young people in the computer industry would say. (The person who used it is such a person, in fact.) What struck me was how diverse -o nouns in English are. They're often negative (weirdo, psycho, etc.) in American English and I know that Australian English has lots of them as slang, like bizzo for 'business'. And on and on …

But what's preso doing hanging out there all by itself? I can't come up with other recent (I can't find evidence that this is older) words that pattern with it, semantically or in terms of who uses them, etc.

Racist mascot!

That's what the UW hockey fans chant over and over again when North Dakota comes to play here. ND's team is infamously called the 'Fighting Sioux'. If you don't know about college ice hockey, the league membership is unrelated to the usual leagues: There is no Big Ten in hockey and we are part of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, along with North Dakota and some schools people in other parts of the U.S. probably aren't familiar with. Last night, for example, the Badgers beat St. Cloud State here. (For reasons I don't know, last night the students chanted 'Cite your sources!' — Plagiarism scandal involving the goalie? Or maybe just the feeling that St. Cloud's current national ranking of fourth needs some justification.)

But to Big Ten sports: We do not play Illinois in ice hockey, so the 'Illini' and their mascot, 'Chief Illiniwek', don't feel the wrath of Wisconsin fans. (I imagine they do in other sports, but once you start following ice hockey, other stuff is just too slow to hold your attention.) An email message yesterday from Wunk Sheek, our university's Native American Student Organization, was the first place many of us heard that the 'Chief' will dance his last on Feb. 21. This is a victory for many groups, including Wunk Sheek, that have long protested this bizarre ritual. (See here or here; if you have the stomach, get the movie "In whose honor?" about this whole deal, made a number of years back.) What I could never grasp is why people were attached to this tradition ... but I'm glad we're a step farther along on this one count, anyway.

Hyperforeign [x]

One of the coolest linguistics papers around is this one, which established — to my knowledge at least — the notion of 'hyperforeignism':

Janda, Richard D., Brian D. Joseph, & Neil G. Jacobs. 1994. Systematic Hyperforeignisms as Maximally External Evidence for Linguistic Rules. The Reality of Linguistic Rules, edited by Susan Lima, Roberta Corrigan & Gregory K. Iverson, 67-92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

They trace how common it is for people to substitute more foreign-sounding pronunciations in foreign names and words, even when the source language doesn't have that. So, Beijing and Taj Mahal have (so I'm told) [dž] but many English speakers avoid that utterly normal affricate for [ž]. And famously, English speakers think that French drops final consonants, so people say coup de grace as [gɹa], where French has a final [s] — producing something that would mean 'blow of fat'.

I've long noticed some people using [x] as a pronunciation for [h] as a kind of generalized hyperforeign pronunciation. You get this associated with Germanic, Slavic, Semitic languages and so on. But yesterday, Stephanie Miller used that for the word 'Bahamian'. What's striking there is that I would expect people to treat Carribean English as h-less, and this suggests that [x] has generalized somehow to "non-US English". Or maybe it's some idiosyncrasy.

More moonwalking ...

I commented a while back on "moonwalking" (and see Ben Zimmer's key comments here.) It seems that the term has really gotten established as a (very negative) description of Bush's shuffling on Iraq. Stephanie Miller just used it on her radio show without any clear indications that it had any novelty to it.

The life cycle of negative political terms – flip-flopper, northeast/San Francisco liberal, etc. – is a curious thing, but I'm wondering if this is joining that club.

icless Democrat

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log has erased any last doubts about Bush on Democrat iclessness, here – he's continuing to use 'Democrat' (adj.) freely, if not consistently. As to whether it's carelessness or malice, it at the least shows that he doesn't care enough fix it. And he's clearly paying attention to what he said and how he said it, given the situation.

He knows that this is a very negative term and we usually are able to control our use of such language. I remember reading that when he served on corporate boards, he was criticized for not contributing anything except "jokes, usually off color" (or words to that effect). So, hey, maybe he wasn't doing that on purpose either ... maybe it's some bizarre form of coprolalia.

For what it's worth, I only saw excerpts from Bush's performance, but he looked and sounded like he was doing his overarticulation thing a few times, like not flapping the /t/ in center. He does stumble pretty often, as always. (You can listen to the NPR recording of the conference here.) If time permits (don't bet on it), I'll have a listen and post a followup.

Politicians speaking well

Just saw Pelosi on PBS's News Hour. I would not have ever described her as 'articulate', but she was effective and clear, it seemed. Maybe one part of being 'articulate' for me is speaking with a certain intensity and passion. I know that's not in the dictionary definitions, but it seems that people speak articulately when they feel compelled to say what they're saying.

Team Verb

Well, we're starting to get a good trickle of posts from other contributors ... keep'em coming, guys!

übercool

OK, I'm finally going to post ... but just on a little point. Mr. Verb long ago talked about the differences between in meaning and usage between the prefix über in English and German, here. I just got a striking example of über- in email correspondence with a colleague in Germany: They* responded to reading a couple of papers about possible traces of German in Wisconsin English with this comment:

Ist ja übercool.

Yes, cool is so established in German that academics use it in an email exchange on a technical topic. But I immediately thought that übercool here (meaning basically 'really cool') would be semantically different from English ubercool/übercool. (Seems that it's often written without the umlaut now in English.) I just assumed that English ubercool would have a negative ring to it — 'overly cool', 'tragically cool', or something. Well, lo and behold, it doesn't, based on googling around a little. There's a company called this, and Google describes its Google Financial interactive charts with this word, etc. One language borrowed an adjective from the other, which borrowed a prefix. Both end up with the same word meaning basically the same thing. That's just plain ubercool, in either language.

*Yes, I'm using singular they ('epicene they'). It was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Mark Twain, apparently.

Introducing new technology

I don't know how to create the image for a video link yet, but this is must-watch material: Introducing the book.

Used in a sentence ...

Here's a word widely used as an example in linguistics actually used in a sentence ... antidisestablishmentarianism. Kind of.

Language humor from The Onion

Since starting this blog, I've been meaning to write some posts about language humor in the Onion, America's Finest News Source, founded here in Madison. Just look at this week's issue:

The word you use to denote long sandwiches in your region is ridiculous (headline on p. 1, referring to the non-existent Opinion page 9B)

Straight-up dialect joke, if cut from a template they use a lot -- making things generic. (They sell stuff that says "The Sports Team From My Area Is Superior To The Sports Team From Your Area" and "Your favorite band sucks.")

Or their treatment of a recent usage (News in Brief, p. 2):

Troop Gradually Withdraws
BAGHDAD—According to members of his squad, 22-year-old Army Pfc. Casey Schreiner, who has been stationed in Iraq's Sunni Triangle for nearly a year and a half, is nearing completion of his psychological withdrawal from the war that constantly surrounds him. "The timetable for his exit certainly isn't optimal—we still need him to stay with us," said Cpl. Chris Oswald, adding that Schreiner began pulling out mentally little by little as members of his platoon were killed by roadside bombings, sniper shootings, and various personnel carrier and helicopter crashes. "At this rate, I think he'll be completely gone by spring." U.S. and coalition commander in Iraq Lt. Gen. David Petraeus said Schreiner is just one of thousands of troops who have experienced a phased cerebral withdrawal, adding that throughout the next year an estimated 20,000 more are expected to stage a retreat from reality.

There's been discussion lately on ADS-L and elsewhere about the use of troop for troops. Only the Onion can be this devastating with a linguistic innovation. And they've been at it for a while, back to when they were mocking the "coalition of the willing", see here.

They're just as good on science humor. Like the Aquarius horoscope this week:

Your perfectionist streak will consume you this week when you attempt to posit the world single most precise chaos theory.

DummycRats

WhiteHouse.org has been a little slow on reacting to the State of the Union, but they manage to play off the 'democrat' thing. The headline is:

President Delivers Warmly Bipartisan, Effusively Conciliatory Remarks to House DummycRATs

The full post, including Bush's insistence that he gets "mad respectz", is here.

A little (fairly recent) verbing ... 'to truth squad'

An announcer on NPR, which I was half listening to while doing something else, just said they were going to have somebody 'truth squad' something. I didn't know this as a verb, but it gets some g-hits, in political and journalistic circles. American Speech had the noun in 1979 in "Among the new words", with a 1952 citation.

Of course, you get a kind of split we see so often now in political stuff between two patterns of usage. One group consists of people using it as part of a (presumed) search for accuracy, like this from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, basically like the NPR use:

"Truth squad" is a term you hear quite a bit around our newsroom during election season. We tend to use it as a verb, to describe the practice of checking the accuracy and veracity of statements made by a political campaign. The P-I truth-squads claims made in local and regional campaigns.

The other group, where I don't find it used as a verb (on a cursory search), is composed of highly partisan attack groups, who've taken the name, not for a general search for accuracy but to tear down particular individuals and political points of view. This is of course much like the swift boaters, who got verbed very quickly. Paul Krugman seems to have attracted a particularly virulent crew of them, with the phrase "Krugman Truth Squad" trademarked. (See here for details.) Checking a few such hits doesn't actually show that they've found much in the way of untruth; it's mostly invective. Maybe they should change their name to Truthiness Squad.

Pinker on Colbert!?!?!?

Colbert's got Stephen Pinker as his guest tonight. Pinker is introduced as a specialist in "how the brain works" ... and then later "also language is very important to you". That's a shame: Given Colbert's interest in language, he could have played up Pinker's linguistic background. One of the flatter Colbert interviews, sadly. Colbert seemed generally off tonight. Oh well.

A last note on 'articulate'

You hesitate a little in this blogging game and somebody says what you were going to say, and they even do it better sometimes. Dennis Baron's Web of Language post on 'articulate' gets at a point I was chewing on, and he does it better — here. I had been trying to figure out the meaning of this anonymous comment on this post when Nancy's very smart comment here nailed the point: The relevant use of 'articulate' has nothing to do with speaking readily or well, it means 'to sound white'. Nancy's absolutely right that this is the only view of the world in which Al Sharpton is not articulate and Condi Rice is. Couldn't wrap my brain around such a semantic shift.

The closing footnote to this topic, I suppose, is that dictionaries need to update their definitions. UrbanDictionary.com does not yet include this one, it looks like.

Dictionary of American Regional English in the news!

Barbara Wallraff's Word Court column today has praise for UW's jewel of a dictionary project, known as DARE around here. She even cites Joan Houston Hall. The headline for the column was pretty hilarious: "To outsiders, regionalisms add flavor to language". The topic, in fact, was a colorful word, 'toad strangler" (a gulley washer), first attested in North Carolina — pretty close to an issue just raised here.

Eric Partridge

As much as I love the Upper Midwest (especially at however many degrees below zero it is now, with that really fine snow falling like you get at these temps), Garrison Keiller really doesn't particularly move me. Still, every now and again I learn something good from his morning radio piece. This morning, he said that it's the birthday of Eric Partridge, born in 1894. (See the bio here.)

I know Partridge best for his monumental Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. That dictionary is almost (but of course not quite) as much fun to browse as the Dictionary of American Regional English. Of course he did lots of lexicographical and etymological work.

"Colorful sayings"

A regular topic for humor is the "colorful folk saying". Years ago, Dave Barry did an "Ask Mr. Language Person" piece on what he called something like "senseless rural expressions", stuff like "like stomping snakes in a bucket".

Last year, Dilbert ran a strip that also goes for the meaninglessness of colorful sayings angle. This has actually led to some real-world use of a new turn of phrase around here: Happier than a wooden spoon at a spelling bee.

Try using it in conversation!

More on the bigotry of soft linguistic expectations

Lynette Clemetson has a nice article in the NYT this morning on "The racial politics of speaking well". Her conclusion is very consistent what I was trying to argue in the post a couple of steps below. Here's the crux of her piece on 'articulate':

Do not use it as the primary attribute of note for a black person if you would not use it for a similarly talented, skilled or eloquent white person. Do not make it an outsized distinction for Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, if you would not for the University of Michigan’s president, Mary Sue Coleman. Do not make it the sole basis for your praise of the actor Forest Whitaker if it would never cross your mind to utter it about the expressive Peter O’Toole.

But there was a little unintended humor in there too: It cracked me up that Condoleeza Rice's name came up a couple times as an example of a person described as 'articulate'. I've listened to a fair bit of her recently in front of congress and she expresses herself all but "readily, clearly and effectively". She's hesitant, obfuscates like mad and doesn't seem to be effective with congress. And it's not simply that I disagree with her views — What she does do is speak in that academic way that sounds educated but precisely fails to be clear or effective. Do I need to take a transcript and do a little fine-grained analysis?

I was somewhat less surprised to see Al Sharpton listed as somebody white people wouldn't consider articulate. He's actually one of the examples of a public speaker who springs to mind as speaking readily and clearly. But if you are heavily invested in standard language ideology, I suppose you'd miss that. I had originally had him and Jesse Jackson in my set of examples, but dropped them — in large part because preachers presumably still have to speak well (Ned Lovejoy aside, maybe) and I didn't know where to go with that connection.

But it's Sunday, so I'm thinking Safire, who today has me flummoxed, and on this very topic. His whole column is dedicated to praising Obama's use of language, and especially effusively for using 'a slang verb with verve', namely gummed up and Safire gets equally excited about the Senator's use of boneheaded. My immediate reaction was that this starkly exemplified the bigotry of soft linguistic expectations: These are utterly normal parts of English and it would be natural to praise only a less-than-proficient speaker of English for using them. Sounds like part of a conversation along these lines: "My, Gerhard, how your colloquial English is coming along. Now, let's work on those 'th' sounds." In fact, if you google boneheaded and various senators' names (I tried Chris Dodd and Mary Landrieu, for no particular reason), you'll get some hits, some where it's used by the senators and some where it's simply used in the same piece. Looks like a pretty common word around the Senate.

This leaves me itching to hurl fresh invective at Safire, but I'm not sure I can exclude the possibility that he's just truly this out of touch.

'short e sound', 'long e sound'

Another indication that Will Shortz needs some clear way of describing sounds. Last week's puzzle, answered this morning on NPR, involved a famous person's name, one syllable names both first and last, where adding a 'short e sound' to the first and a 'long e sound' to the second would produce an ordinary English word. He pronounced 'e' like we normally call that letter, with the vowel of heat and heed. I couldn't begin to do it because I was entirely unsure what he meant by those vowel descriptions. Turns out, the answer was:

Al Gore
allegory

For me, and probably most Americans, that's [ə] and [i:]. For the first, I'll give you [ɨ] as a good possibility and the transcription of the second does vary, especially across subfields of linguistics, from phonetics to sociolinguistics.

I'm not asking him to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (though it would be useful for him!), but he could at least do what linguists do to disambiguate: 'the vowel in the word heat', etc.

Can it be racist to call somebody 'articulate'?

Short answer: unfortunately yes, but the short answer misses the bigger point. And for the record, I'm assuming M-W's definition c here:

expressing oneself readily, clearly or effectively.

Joe Biden should never, ever have run for president, certainly not after his campaign fell apart over plagiarism the last time around. Others have shown that in his most recent political suicide attempt he was misquoted, but that doesn't even begin to reduce how offensive his characterization of Senator Obama was. To call any political figure 'clean' is extremely dangerous; to use the word like he did is unthinkable — i.e., I would expect that from Trent Lott. Anyway, Biden's campaign rocket got off the launchpad exactly far enough for the explosion to be visible for many miles around. Worse yet, he's going to drag his own rotting carcass around the country to campaign even though his chances of going anywhere are, as Elvis Costello put it so long ago, less than zero. Like the really hard-edge Wisconsin hockey fans yell when an opposing player is laying on the ice: "Shoot him like a horse." (Yeah, they get brutal.)

One piece of wreckage that's fallen from the sky in this disaster has been whether it's racist to say that an African-American is 'articulate'. As others have said (forgive the lack of links, I'm doing this on a short break from figuring out how language works and don't have time to track them down), this is a markedness thing, where it's being asserted that it is unusual for an African-American to have this trait. A few months ago, in fact, I had a discussion with a friend and colleague whose views I take very seriously and somebody I have great respect for, especially in terms of how to think about race and ethnicity in our country today. He said that a high school student had spoken at a pretty official community meeting he was at and that she had been described as 'articulate'. He was worrying about precisely this point: was it racist to describe her this way? My reaction was that any high school kid who can speak with poise at an event like that earns the adjective. But this shows how the issue is out there among thoughtful, well-informed people. And it's certainly easy to imagine it being used in a way that we might reasonably understand as reflecting racist beliefs.

That's only one layer of the story. As was pointed out at some length on Al Franken's radio show yesterday, 'articulate' is widely used about politicians, even for Biden, they said. I think we need, no, we have to have, articulate political figures and the problem is precisely that we cannot assume that major political figures are. I am utterly baffled that such ill-spoken people as Bush get elected. (I don't mean his affected dialect or constant misspeaking, but his fundamental failure to get across basic points, time and time.) And don't get me started on Cheney, (shouldn't the Devil be well spoken?), Donald 'Bad Acid Trip' Rumsfeld, Condi Rice (she was the top administrator at a top American university? No wonder higher ed is going to hell), or Tony 'Spokesliar' Snow. And it's not party-specific — none of the new Congressional leadership really seem to know how to make me believe either, and Kerry and Lieberman were embarrassing on this count. Have you ever heard any of these people be compelling on any single point? Yet they dominate the national scene.

Being a powerful public speaker has become a marginal skill, all the more so with the passing of Molly Ivins. In fact, an alarmingly limited number of people on the national political stage strike me as truly articulate: among politicians, Clinton (him, emphatically not her) and John Edwards. Maybe it is just something about what I personally find 'clear' and 'effective' and expressing oneself 'readily' but few politicians can do it. But back to the point: The one extended speech I've heard from Barack Obama, at the 2004 Democratic Convention, fit that bill. He painted a picture of a country that I want to live in, and he told a compelling personal story along the way.

What's striking about that speech is maybe not that it came from a person of African heritage, but more that he wasn't raised in the tradition of southern oratory, something which crosses the color more freely than almost anything. This regional association with effective political speech wasn't always there. FDR and JFK could do what I'm talking about, but Cuomo's 'shining city on the hill' speech may have been the last compelling piece of political speechifying from a northerner I remember offhand.

We need to be listening closely to Obama and others in the coming months, in terms of what they say and how they say it. I guess this is just a rambling, inarticulate plea for a political scene where we have a lot of articulate leaders.

Mrs. Verb is emboldened to blog

Mr. and Mrs. Verb watched that John Stewart show together the other night. He had his senior political correspondent, John Oliver, on, and my goodness! Mrs. Verb could hardly understand a word he said! It was almost as if he had taken the words apart and put them back together again, but wrongfully. I wonder if he's from that place in the south where they still speak Elizabethan English that a nice woman told me about just the other week in a hotel lobby. Well, whatever it was, heavens! it was confusing.

Molly Ivins

I knew that others, including the real linguistics blogs, would be more articulate about the passing of Molly Ivins than I could be, and they are. But this morning's column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times hits exactly the right note about her career and her importance for our society. (I think it's only availabe through Times Select, but try here.)

Emboldenable

Can't believe I haven't seen anything on this yet: Last night, Jon Stewart riffed on the ubiquitous accusation that some action or other "emboldens the enemy". Of course this comes mostly from Bush as a tool for condemning every question about his plans (or lack thereof). Stewart has his correspondent John Oliver come on and they use embolden in various ways, including a phrase about our enemies being "an emboldenable bunch". Then they go wild with derivational morphology: How somebody could be beweakened, about enscaring people, how to get the bad guys to becave themselves again, and on and on. In the closing, they manage to get reembebolden into the mix. (They were naturally tripping over some of these forms and that extra -be- in there might be an error rather than an affix.) Would be nice to have a full transcript of that.

Sure seems like this skit could be to affixation what the famous Calvin & Hobbes strip was to verbing.

Update, Friday, 6:21: A quick google check this morning finally turns up a little bit on this piece, at Philocrites.

Variation among the Verbs

There's a story floating around on various news sites about Seymour Hersh's latest words on the Bush administration (it's truly depressing), given at a symposium at Tufts. Striking, verbwise, is this sentence (quoted here from a Tufts Daily story):

Whatever Iran has, they've shown us, they've showed the I.A.E.A. [International Atomic Energy Agency].

Assuming he was quoted correctly (I know, massive assumption, but I've been quoted accurately by reporters several times), these are nice examples of morphological variation from a journalist speaking in a formal context.