Undictionaried words: Erin McKean

While we're on a dictionary thing, a recent development in linguistics blogging is that publishers are feeding bloggers offers to review books (!) and links to some media appearances by their folks. I haven't bitten on one until now, but Erin McKean's presentation on dictionaries and dictionary making is just too good to pass up.

Frederic Cassidy: Cause for celebration

Yesterday, the CapTimes' Doug Moe (he writes a local-interest column called "The Talk") published this about the UW's "legendary linguist", Frederick Cassidy, and the upcoming celebration of the centennial of his birth, to be held on Oct. 10.

Wisconsin has been home to many legendary linguists (especially structuralists and people of that era, like Bloomfield and Haugen), but Cassidy, founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English, is the one with the greatest impact and visibility today.

Image from PBS (here), with Cassidy on the right, talking to fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Semantics and pragmatics

Sorry for the silence, but with the Milwaukee Brewers crashing and burning — after we got our hopes up so high — it's hard enough to get out of bed, let alone blog. But leave it to the Onion's horoscopes, a real miracle drug. No, I don't mean this one:

Virgo August 23 - September 22
You're no music expert, but the shadow growing around your feet looks like that of a concert grand piano.

I mean THIS one:

Sagittarius November 22 - December 21
A passionate and intelligent debate over semantics this week will unfortunately get bogged down by pragmatics.

Ha. Like that would ever happen.

But the Brew Crew is supposed to be getting their ace back tonight, Ben Sheets, and maybe they'll best the Cubbies.

Bart speaks

Outrageous ignorance: Why we need language expertise

At what point do you fire the leaders of a university for their willful, dangerous ignorance?

Last year, I heard this story from a couple of very reliable sources: Provost Patrick Farrell of the University of Wisconsin, the de facto chief operating officer, came to a meeting with a group of arts and humanities department chairs. They were very direct about their concern that the current leadership of the UW fails to understand the value of arts and humanities in the university today. Farrell's response? "Could you give me a sentence or two summarizing why these areas matter?" My god, the man becomes the COO of one of the greatest research universities in the United States and he needs that? Strike one.

Now, an anonymous commenter on this post, reports as follows:

Sandefur said … at the opening of the Language Institute in Van Hise, much to the dismay of the entire assembled audience … "before becoming dean I didn't realize we had all these great language departments", which was equally dismaying. And guess what? Now UW DOESN'T have all those great language departments.

Of course, anybody who takes over as dean really needs to understand the strengths of their college, and UW is among the national leaders in the range of languages it offers. What did he know? Strike two.

But it's Chancellor John Wiley himself who gets strike three, again drawing from the last comment (I can confirm that this was said, and will report back if it's not confirmed):

The Chancellor … has been quoted by the Dean of Letters & Science as wondering out loud why UW needs to offer "all these languages".

Why? Ever hear of the war in Afghanistan, where we suffer for the lack of people who know languages like Dari and Pashto? Or Iraq? We don't even have a fraction of the number of speakers and teachers we need for Arabic, clearly one of the world's strategic languages. Or the global war on terror? Even the US government realizes the need for a broad base of speakers and teachers of many languages — Monterey and the Center for the Advanced Study of Language show that. They are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the area and they are not making much of a dent. This is surely a central part of the mission of major universities, directly in the national interest.

This came up in the context of how UW teaches "obscure African dialects" spoken by "dwindling numbers of speakers". (Oh, is that a whiff of racism I smell in the gentle late summer breeze?) Now, the strategic importance of languages doesn't come simply from their numbers of speakers and Africa is surely a crucial part of the world in every way, whether Wiley understands that or not. But let's consider the numbers of speakers for the African languages I'm pretty sure are regularly taught here (using Ethnologue's online numbers and leaving aside Arabic, as being of obvious importance):

• Swahili 30 million second-language speakers, 800,000 L1 speakers
• Hausa 24.2 million
• Yoruba 19.3 million
• Xhosa 7.2 million
• Zulu 9.6 million
  

This is a critical time for public education in this country, and we cannot afford to be led by such willfully ignorant little people.

Image from here, with an article about "embracing your ignorance". (I don't know this chalkboard scene from the Simpsons and wonder if it's an altered one.)

Madison's faves

The Isthmus, our free weekly (named after the striking geographical feature of the city), has published its always eagerly awaited Annual Manual for the year, with the results of their poll for Madison's favorite everything. Tragically, Mr. Verb was not voted top blog, but they do acknowledge that "the local blogosphere* is burgeoning" and the winners for local-content blog (Dane 101) and local website (TheDailyPage.com) really are obvious choices. (Besides, they link pretty regularly to this blog.) Mel & Floyd's brilliant radio show (WORT, Friday 1-2 pm) got edged out for first, but WORT won best station, John Nichols' You have no rights gained him best for newspaper writer, and so on. A good year, overall, and a reminder of what we have here. Man, what a town.

Just wish we could get the Assembly Republicans a cure for their collective cranio-rectal inversion, and that our once-great university had some leadership.

*Wait a minute: Blogger flags it as a misspelling. How can the built-in spellchecker at www.blogger.com not like the word blogosphere?

Yes! Somebody speaks up for UW

Bill Berry, an occasional editorial writer for the CapTimes, gets it right in this column. In talking about the collapse of affordable public education in Wisconsin and the bizarre budget cuts proposed by Republicans in the Assembly, he has a question for UW alumni across the state:

What in the hell are you thinking, letting this happen?

He concludes with this:

Here's a little homework, UW grads. Find out how your Assembly representatives voted on this package. If they voted to continuing trashing the institution that gave you so much, rip off their ears like John Hunter would have done. Then let them know you 'll be supporting someone who recognizes the value and importance of education the next time elections roll around.

Yes! The word on the street has been that support for public education, including the UW System, helped turn elections toward the Democrats in the Senate last time. Let's finish the job.

Wisconsin cheese — Artisanal, even!

I've been feeling a little bad for not writing more while fellow Midwestern-based linguistics bloggers Wishydig and Polyglot Conspiracy were getting the semester started and on the road, respectively. But I have been too busy and just not having a lot to say. Fortunately, our newest team member Monica has been blogging up a storm around here. (For the record: I do sleep regularly and do not ever hang like a bat.) But on to cheese news …

First, Wonkette has declared its love for former Wisco gov and failed presidential candidate Tommy G. Thompson with a ringing endorsement of his broccoli/cheese quiche recipe. More precisely, it's the recipe his executive chef used to do and it looks utterly generic.

Far tastier, the Isthmus reports that we're getting an "artisanal cheese shop" downtown, Fromagination, 12 S. Carroll St. Reviews to follow! (The name's too cute, but my hopes are high.) Now, no spellchecker on my computer seems to like the adjective artisanal, and every time I hear it, it seems like it's a cheese-related collocation. Maybe that's about my tastes or from living in Wisconsin, but its use for cheese seems to outstrip other food uses and I barely think of it as used beyond food. OED On-line has the relevant definition as its second:

2. Of a product: handmade (esp. with care and skill) using traditional techniques; having qualities associated with small-scale, pre-industrial production.

Interestingly, it's first attested in 1983 (first baguettes, then calvados), and mostly with food.

God, I love cheese.

Sweet Dreams

Mr. Verb, while you were peacefully slumbering (if you ever actually sleep), Aasif Mandvi - you know, that cute reporter on the Jon (no 'h') Stewart show - he said that if we wouldn't have left Vietnam, Prez Bush might have gone on to get a PhD in Linguistics to keep his deferment. Linguistics! Worth watching the rerun tomorrow, dude.

The morphology of typing errors?

The title of the last post on this blog now reads "Sentence structure mistakes" but until a little while ago, it was "Sentences structures mistakes". That's a pretty striking case of something I see very often, in emails and in letters going back to the 19th c.: -s suffixes wandering or spreading around on words where they don't belong. This seems far more common than similar speech errors, though that's a mere hunch with not a speck of support. Is there work out there on this that I just don't know about?

"Sentence structure mistakes"

This was posted at TPM this morning:

… in a conversation with Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim, the president said, "You're not the only dissident. I too am a dissident in Washington." As Eric Kleefeld told me yesterday, President Bush seems confused. Dissidents are the ones who get tortured and wiretapped. Not the ones who do it. I guess that's one of those sentence structure mistakes.

Even though I had read the quote earlier, it took me a while to get my stomach settled at the thought of Bush saying that, when I consider it in context. Of course, Josh Marshall is right: If you torture and wiretap, you're not a dissident.

But it's not a syntax error. Semantic role reversal of an odd sort, maybe: dissident as agent of torture rather than patient. Simply changing the meaning of the word seems more likely: dissident = one who disagrees with others who have some power (more limited than and subordinate to his own, of course). But at his age, I'm going with a plain old speech error: He's just the decider, not the dissenter. Probably mixes up staff names all the time too.

Proud Verbs angrily reject "Intelligent Design"

Well, kind of. For a lot of ice hockey players, a key principle is that you'd always rather have the assist than the goal — it's cooler to make the big move that sets up a shot than to take it, and it's often the move that matters. The Ridger gets more assists than anybody in the language blogging game, I think. She's passed along a great piece from Thoughts from Kansas (here). It's about how a Discovery Institute person has "declared war on the English language". You know that DI is the heavily funded crew of pseudo-scientists peddling the latest version of anti-evolution bunk, "Intelligent Design". (Can we call it "ID"? We can read it as "Intelligence Dysfunction", which is closer to its actual meaning.)

Here's the key quote (if you haven't read Ridger's comment and followed up on it):

First of all, ID is not creationism—and no one is more vociferously insistent about this than the major creationist organizations like Answers In Genesis. We’ve heard this charge before. But stealth?

Stealth...like black helicopter stealth?

'I don't know what you mean by "stealth",' Josh said.

'When I use a word,' Logan Gage said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Josh, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Logan Gage, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'

Josh was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Logan Gage began again. 'They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs: they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

And I didn't even catch, until Jan called my attention to it in a comment below, that this is just an intro about ID that segues into Lewis Carroll instantly, from a dialog between Alice and Humpty-Dumpty. I gotta get more sleep.

Frite Alors!

Mr. Verb's friend Monica here. Wanted to say that I spent some time in the lovely city of Montreal last week, attending ICHL (although I didn't really ichl and scratchl until we went camping in Maine the following weekend, but that's another story). Well, at first I didn't think Montreal was very lovely at all but after a few days I realized that that was just because we were staying in a fairly sleazy area, and if I just walked one more block past the place the talks were in I would find a very cool neighborhood with cafes and restaurants and all that kinda stuff. I did take a picture of a place of business called Pussy Corps but it came out kind of blurry so I can't share it with you. However! Montreal is certainly a center of linguistic interest, and not because of that old English-French thang they got goin' on. No, it is chock full of places like Boutique D-Structure!!! (Selling foundation garments, no doubt.) And then at Frites Alors! we learned that the paradigm is alive and well. I think I'll give that to my Ling 101 class for a homework assignment. Analyze *this*, suckers!

Course cuts at Madison: African languages

I often bemoan how course offerings at the University of Wisconsin have suffered with budget cuts. Today's Wisconsin State Journal provides details, showing that we're currently offering about two-thirds as many courses as we did in 1975. (Don't put too much weight on those numbers — they depend on lots of variables and interpretations of data that aren't clear in the article.) The number of distinct majors has dropped from 239 to 214. Of course, classes have gotten bigger, much bigger in lots of cases.

But what strikes you is the opening passage of the article:

If a language class about an obscure African dialect spoken by a dwindling number of people worldwide attracts only a handful of students at UW-Madison, should the university continue to offer it?

Do we offer any "African dialects", let alone ones spoken by dwindling numbers of people? Our Department of African Languages & Literatures offers Swahili, Arabic, Hausa, Yoruba, and Xhosa. Hardly obscure or endangered languages. There are plenty of topics courses that cover some unnamed language of a region, etc., but those aren't regular course offerings in the relevant sense. Ancient Egyptian is offered, but its numbers long ago stopped dwindling.

The WSJ is hardly a great paper, and the fact that the opening is never explained (or even followed up on in a significant way) maybe isn't shocking, but I'm wondering what the heck this is about.

Heard on sports talk radio ...

ESPN, someone describing the firing of Florida A&M's football coach, apparently on stalking charges: Universities are …

very issue sensitive of the day.

Sounded completely fluent, no indication of obvious performance error (although it could well have been). I don't mean to try and play Syntax Guy here, but I can see the conflicting pressures between the need to keep issue-sensitive together and issue-of-the-day together. I'd have to go the latter way, with a German-like preposed nominal modifier issue-of-the-day sensitive.

I'm guessing this doesn't sound grammatical to English speakers.

Loser friendly and alt country punning

Language-oriented blogs haven't plowed the rich soil that is country music very much, though Geoff Pullum's note on Language Log almost a year ago is striking, quoting "a contemptuous Bob Newhart joke about country music":

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.

As Pullum points out: "Once again, it's vocabulary size as the measure of intelligence and wisdom and culture, isn't it?" Direct vocabulary building is for SAT overachievers and such of course. It's like getting muscles in the gym: Some stuff you should come by honest (OK, -ly, if you want), through clean hard work. If you've ever taught languages, you know that vocab tests don't tell you much. A better indication of skill is creative use of language, the ability to play with it.

Country artists trade constantly on how they play with language. If you don't listen to country, or the revival of real country artistry known as "alt.country", "No Depression" and by other names, you're probably thinking of work like the Bellamy Brothers':

If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

Or maybe songs like Bobby Bare's that pun endlessly on truck, trucker, truckin', see esp. compound forms in mother. As much as I love those classics, the new guys are cold brilliant.

I thought about this topic while listening to David Ball's "Loser Friendly", from his album Amigo (he got known first as part of Uncle Walt's Band, I think.) It's set in a bar, like the Derailers' brilliant "(I'm) Takin' a bar exam" and a million other songs. The pun on user friendly is easy enough that the phrase is certainly part of general usage now (it has an Urban Dictionary entry). But, man, does he work that little pun hard for a few verses — sadly, the lyrics aren't on-line and I haven't transcribed them. But I can smell stale beer.

Then, minutes after hearing Ball, Banjo & Sullivan came on. They are masters of this art, like the particular song:

"I'm At Home Getting Hammered (While She's Out Getting Nailed)"

See here for the full lyrics.

What does it take for poetic genius to be recognized?

How to say "I quit" in Politician

I've long marveled at Deborah Tannen. She started writing 'relationship' books with a language angle when I figured pop psychology stuff was dead, and the language angle seemed pretty weak. But she has been phenomenally successful at creating a whole genre of books.

It's not terribly surprising that she weighed in on Karl Rove's hilarious declaration that he was leaving the White House "to spend more time with his family". And she's sure right about euphemisms as "cultural lubricant", although that turn of phrase sounds a little racy for this staid little blog. But of course it was not so much a euphemism as a screaming lie: Got kids at home to hang out with? OK, I might buy it. But his kid is in college. A little late there, Karl.

Even so, the whole family-values thing is ruined by Rove's lashing out at most of the nation (e.g., here). As Wonkette rightly notes with regard to Denny Hastert, this seems to be a trend:

But as each sore loser Republican announces their ignoble retreat from politics in this grim summer, they are required to give interviews consisting of bitter attacks on American citizens for voting them out of power.

Update, 5:00 pm: NPR is running a piece on the laundry list of such people — Hastert, Rove, LaHood, Pryce. A lot of full-family dinner tables from the Heartland to Texas.

Update, Saturday 5:00 am: In a bit of downright tragic irony, the one person retreating now from Washington who could without question say he's going to spend more time with his family specifically did not say that: Bush press secretary Tony Snow says he can't scrape by on a mere $168K, see here. Snow had colon cancer; it has returned and he's in chemo. Under the circumstances, he didn't need to explain anything.

Linguists on the teevee

What seems to be a very new blog has posted this:

I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV. (There's a pitch for the networks: Chicago Five-Oh: A buttoned-down linguistics professor solves crimes during office hours with her red pen and a penchant for descriptive phonetics! Dun dun dun!)

What with Language Log becoming a major media outlet, Stephen Pinker publishing on genealogy in the New Republic (I kid you not, see here), and so on, I say: Why not.

The description sounds like more of a CSI kind of hook, instead of Hawaii Five-0, given the lab angle and the reference to phonetics. But I kind of like the tough guy angle — think ¿Quien es mas macho? on Saturday Night Live — here. If you're into Proto-World, I'd go with an X-files knock off. And we all too often seem like we're the cast of Lost, but .... . Of course, Matt Groening has already given us a brilliant linguistics series, even if it doesn't star a linguist.

Sadly, I don't know enough about what's on television to even imagine good parodies.

Blogstapo

Looks like I've finally got a reasonable internet connection again ... maybe being 'off the grid' isn't what I thought it would be.

Anyway, last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. I won't go into the back story, but O'Reilly on Fox Noise (as Keith Olberman has dubbed them) has in essence called Kos as bad as the Nazis.

Anyhow, Colbert set it up with comments about "hate blogging", including a reference to the blogstapo. Key thing is, he pronounced it with a 'sh' ([ʃ]). Would it sound better with just [s]?

Image from here.

Google search: Tolzmann plagiarism

Once again this blog is getting a stream of hits for searches like "Tolzmann plagiarism", including a bunch today. If you're looking for that, please search this blog for "Tolzmann" and read the comments. Assuming the most recent ones are accurate, he did suffer consequences for his actions, though hardly the worst he could have gotten. It's an ugly story, but I appreciate those who've passed along relevant information. Let's hope this is the last time his name ever appears on this blog.

Maybe THIS will bring more state funding?

From a regular reader of this blog, a note from Newsweek:

Hottest Big State School
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wis.

Growing up in Wisconsin, Laura Sullivan was raised on Badger mania. But she was initially afraid that she would get lost in Madison amid 41,000 students, 140 undergraduate majors and nearly 700 student organizations. So when her high-school German class visited, Sullivan says she was shocked to find that she immediately felt at home. The tree-filled campus of nearly 1,000 acres looked to her exactly like a college should. It occurred to her that its enormity actually meant "endless opportunities," she says. It is the old traditions graduates remember most, including Picnic Point, declared by one newspaper to be "the kissing-est spot in North America."

Our success in football, basketball and ice hockey hasn't brought state support. Being at the top of the heap in getting federal grants doesn't seem to matter. Maybe this will do the trick?

But really: Isn't there a crucial conflict between 'hottest' in contemporary usage and 'kissing-est'? The latter calls forth some fond memory of undergraduate romance; the former sounds like something I'd be embarrassed to be associated with. Maybe Campus Gone Wild isn't the strategy we need? If you read the whole Newsweek article, it becomes clear that this is hot as in 'hot stock', but it's pretty awkward here.

Geertz on government

A while back, I read Charles Mann's 1491, an engaging book showing how profoundly American peoples had reshaped the environment before the arrival of Columbus. Watching the unraveling of things in Washington now keeps bringing me back to a quote from that work (p. 257) paraphrasing the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, that all states can be described as one of these types:

• Pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy;
• Populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people's will;
• "great beast", in which the rulers' power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and
• "great fraud", in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority.
  

"Global war on verbs"

OK, I've still got limited email and will for a while, it looks like, but I can't let this pass: The title of the post is from TPM, and aimed at Mitt Romney's efforts to rebrand Bush's failed imperial efforts:

There's not a global war on terror. There's a global war being waged by the terrorists and if I am president, there will be a global war waged on the terrorists and we will win.

A few months ago, someone posted on another political website this question:

What next? The war on verbs & adjectives?

In fact, the phrase "war on verbs" gets lots of g-hits. Should I gather the family and head for Canada?

The Midwest: Out here in the middle

Out here in the middle
You can park on the street
Step up to the counter
Nearly always get a seat
Nobody steals
Nobody cheats
Wish you were here my love
Wish you were here my love

—Robert Earl Keen, "Out here in the middle", from Farm Fresh Onions, 2003

Just as I unexpectedly found myself without significant internet access for a couple of days (don't ask — but it did not involve legal or medical professionals, at least), Wishdig posted his report on his very nice poll about what states make up the "Midwest". I won't make lots of suggestions about how he might pursue the topic, but let me give a little hint: Dennis Preston's perceptual dialectology would provide a nice model for thinking about this, and even getting a nice project out of it, if anybody needs one.

Anyhow, I've long been fascinated by the sense of regional identity here — so sharply different from the way Texans or Southerners, for example, identify with their regions. The Robert Earl Keene lyric above gets at a key piece for me, "out here in the middle".

Wishydig notes in the comments that some states, like Wisconsin, are too far north to be 'Midwestern'. Here (where it's currently too hot to feel 'northern'), we call our region the Upper Midwest. I know the Lower Midwest well (better than you might think, maybe better than I want to) and it's interesting that in Illinois, Indiana, and so on people never really talk of themselves as 'lower Midwest' as far as I know: Those areas are the 'heartland', the core 'Midwest'. Up here, we're a very distinct area, but still often defined as Midwestern. Some people talk about the 'northern tier' and such, but weather forecasts and such usually call us the Upper Midwest.

But for those of us interested in language, it's striking how profoundly the Midwest does NOT correspond to a dialect area on any standard view. The Midlands area (map from here — Cynthia Clopper is a young linguist doing important work on regional English right now) would look like the obvious 'Midwestern dialect', so case closed, right? Nope: A whole literature is devoted to the question of whether the Midlands exists as a dialect area. It's argued by such people (Carver for vocabulary, Davis & Houck more generally) that this is a "transition zone" between north and south.

Public perceptions of linguistics

Much linguistic blogging focuses on public perceptions and representations of our field. That was certainly part of what got me into the game from the very beginning (here). Everybody from Language Log on down deals with it in various ways and the public side of the equation ranges from the BBC and professional mavens to the Comedy Channel. The punchline is usually that people feel free to publish about linguistics and language in the highest-profile place without knowing their larynx from a hole in the ground. A major theme is profoundly bad presentation of science (see here for one account of why we get so much of it), but often it's funny (here) and more often it's sad and stupid (here).

One of the reasons I started reading Polyglot Conspiracy regularly was precisely her perspective on this topic (e.g. here). Now PC has tackled one of the worst and ugliest examples, here, about the full cycle of stupidity from ignorant journalism to really ignorant blog posts, all about the work of Mary Bucholtz. (And don't miss the Language Log post by Mark Liberman if you haven't seen it.) If you haven't read the threads on this, do — I won't rehash them all here. The punch line is that linguistics is useless and unscientific (compared to what? Economics? String theory? Creation science?).

At the heart of this, as PC notes (in part implicitly), is a profound anti-intellectualism, and it's one our society suffers from at the very highest levels. People who don't believe in evolution shouldn't have access to medicines that are effective against new strains of infection. (Can't find the cartoon illustrating that.) Speech and hearing science (including stuff like cochlear implants), speech recognition and synthesis, other computational work, forensic linguistics, language teaching/learning, and so on is all done in collaboration with people from other fields, but linguistics is central to tons of it. Sure, you might say, but Bucholtz's work on language and identity doesn't involve any of that. Not true, actually (her CV shows that Bucholtz has done forensic work, like many sociolinguists), but I think the real issue for a lot of these people is that they don't understand the value of basic research generally — they're interested in engineering, not science. Part of the value of blogs and such is the chance to fight the kind of batter PC, LL and many others are taking up. But it might be a long one. A New Yorker cartoon has a judge talking to a humanoid-looking creature:

At your current rate of evolution, I can see no other choice but to give you ten to twenty million years.

Image from here.

Infrastructure

The Minnesota bridge collapse tragedy has everybody talking about infrastructure suddenly, how we've let it collapse in this country and how much it would cost if we decided to fix it. (Hey, don't assume we will: we haven't rebuilt New Orleans.) I've been watching the decline since 1980. I don't know that it started then but that's when I became acutely aware of it and, yes, it does correspond to the fundamentally anti-government Reagan Revolution. Right now, the talk is about bridge safety, but the context is obvious: levee systems, imported and domestic food safety, and so on.

Of course the same neglect of basics is killing higher education: Can we finally stop worrying about giving chancellors and deans Enron salaries, and start working on rebuilding a healthy institution?

A sad day: The passing of W.P. Lehmann

A while back, I talked about the University of Wisconsin's remarkable tradition in linguistics, especially historical linguistics, stretching back over the last century. We've now lost a major link in that chain: Winfred P. Lehmann passed away on August 1. In addition to the LINGUIST notice, the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at the University of Texas, which he led for decades, has posted a note, here.

Professor Lehmann earned an MA in Germanic Linguistics and a PhD in the same field here in 1941. He was one of the most prolific linguists of the 20th century and made particularly important contributions to Germanic philology and linguistics, Indo-European studies and linguistic typology — with publications running from 1940 until last year, and even this year, with his on-line Grammar of Proto-Germanic.

I believe he was the only person to serve as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association (when they included 'language' and not just literature, a day which may come again). Heavily involved since the early days in what was then known as 'machine translation', he was committed to using technological innovations, and the LRC has done significant work in web publishing, including posting classic works in historical linguistics.

His passing is a real loss, and sorely felt here in Wisconsin.

Piled higher and deeper

To all of my grad students, grad students I work with or know and all those who read this blog: Do not, under any circumstances, visit PhD Comics. It contains no useful information and will simply rob you of valuable time to work on your dissertation chapter / prelim proposal / grant proposal / [fill in the blank with whatever I'm next expecting to see from you]. Although I'm wiping tears of laughter from my eyes after reading some of these strips, there isn't even any crass entertainment valuable in them.

It would, however, be super slick to have this strip running on campus. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Glottopedia

How new technology gets adopted in practice is something I'd love to know a ton more about, but it's really surprised me how variable the reaction has been to current web-based innovation. In particular, recently I've heard a couple of very senior colleagues talk about investing fair amounts of time editing wikipedia material. (Bodes well — we should have great entries if these folks are working on them!)

A few weeks back I read about the new Glottopedia project (language hat and Anggarrgoon both blogged about it), but only got around to checking it out this morning. It's being edited by a set of respected linguists (though representing a restricted range of theoretical approaches at this early stage), and it is really in its infancy — with a limited set of entries in German and English. There is, for example, not even a category for language change or historical linguistics yet.

The project has real promise, if it can gain critical mass of collaborators. Assuming it does, it'll be interesting to watch how its role evolves vis à vis the wikipedia material on linguistics and other on-line resources.

Update: I forgot to mention the LINGUIST project until Polyglot Conspiracy brought it up.

Image from here.

Stanley Fish on fixing higher education

Man, I just love Stanley Fish. Ever since the whole Alan Sokal affair, where a journal he edited, Social Text, unwittingly published a send-up of 'cultural studies' and physics that he did not begin to understand. He followed with a hilarious defense of his actions. (For Sokal's view, see here, especially "A physicist experiments with cultural studies".) About the loosest cannon out there, and paid like a pro athlete for it.

Today, good old Stanley Fish has an op-ed piece in the NYT called "Access vs. Quality". I'll just comment on two passages from the end of the piece. First …

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina.

Ouch. He's talking about state systems, clearly, but Wisconsin has been building a solid set of campuses around the state (Eau Claire has become a remarkable place, for example) for a long time, and people here should sting at being compared to Georgia on this point.

Now, the second …

The conditions that leave a university system depressed have been a long time in the making and will take time to reverse. Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Fish has made a career* out of provoking people and pushing the boundaries, to put it mildly. But this is the most mundane cliché of consensus views on higher ed. And it's profoundly, disturbingly wrong.

• Funding? You betcha.
• Tuition raises? "Access" is the first word in the title, but there's no mention, unless I missed it, of affordable education and that's a massive issue, even for the middle class these days. Fish knows full well what kind of debt students are carrying to get an education, and how the need to pay those debts guides career choices.
  
• 'High-profile' faculty? What we need is infrastructure, including more and better-paid staff, more grad student funding, more junior hires to bring new minds.

*Yes, many argue that his career trajectory has been a rocket going straight into the ground for decades, starting at places like Berkeley and Duke and ending up at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then Florida International University. But he's sure riding a rocket.

Comp Lit update: Not going gentle into that good night

In a string of posts (centered around this), I've said a little about the declaration by the dean of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin on how he would deal with the Department of Comparative Literature:

no new money will be invested in it. After current faculty members leave or retire, the department will come to an end.

The dean had offered them the opportunity to close the department voluntarily and they declined and it spiraled from there — with a lot of acrimony where nobody's handled things well, not the department, not the deans, certainly not the chancellor.

As somebody clued me in on earlier today, Comp Lit's website has some very significant updates. They are opting to rage against the dying of the light. Check it out, especially the stinging letter to the chancellor by a UW alum and major donor.

The pseudo-neuroscience of active Verbs

We Verbs are by nature an active bunch — you should see the volleyball game at the family reunion — but bad science journalism can overstate even our value. For example, see this from Mark Liberman on Language Log. The conclusion is very quotable:

Reading about science in the popular press … can be depressing, if you're laboring under the misapprehension that the goal is to understand and evaluate research, and to explain things to the public in a clear and interesting way. From this perspective, what you usually see is a process of progressive misunderstanding, distortion and exaggeration -- and you might conclude that science journalists are too lazy to read the original research reports, or too stupid to understand them, or too cynical and manipulative to care whether their stories bear any particular relationship to the truth.

But this misses the point, which is not provision of information, but rather moral uplift and reinforcement of cultural norms.

Sad but true. Happily, the image is from a source that shows directly how verbs increase physical activity.

"Syntactic atrocity"

That headline in the local paper yesterday caught my eye, of course. (Here's one version of the story. It was about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, what some people called the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest. The winning entry, which happens to be by a Madisonian, Jim Gleeson. The atrocity is this:

Gerald began -- but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash -- to pee.

OK, this isn't a well-formed sentence of English to me: "until buried" is impossible; I'd have to say "until they were buried". The shtick he's going with here is not just having a monstrously long clause buried within a short sentence, and interrupting before we know what's being interrupted. I actually find that clever.

Of course the organizers always comment on the winning entry:

Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State, called Gleeson's entry a "syntactic atrocity" that displays "a peculiar set of standards or values."

"If you think about it, unless it's a flashback, there's not very far you could get with that story."

Really? I could see a great story built around this. You could write a whole novel about a ten-minute span, or you could shift perspective when Gerald gets covered by lava.