Oh no, animal language again !?!?!?

If this blog was about stuff I really understand, I wouldn't touch this topic any more than I would recursion in Pirahã or Mormon history, topics I'm ignorant of but fascinated by. So too with animal communication.

Tonight, PBS had some auction on instead of the News Hour, the Stanley Cup game hadn't started yet and the Missus and I wanted to catch a little news. We happened on to ABC News, a pretty sad operation, from what I could see. Those guys shouldn't be allowed to get autographs from Gwen Ifill.

Anyway, that's what I thought before .... this piece came on, "Scientists teach language to primates". Check out this (Kanzi is a bonobo and Fields a researcher, unless I've reversed the names):

"Qualitatively, there is no difference between Kanzi's language and my language," Fields said. "It's a matter of degree."

The key to ensuring they grasp the language, the researchers said, is to start teaching them when they are young, just like you would with human babies.

"Language is culturally acquired. Its not learned," said Fields. "It's acquired in the immediate postnatal antogyny of the organisms life. The only organism capable of learning language are babies."

Is this insane drivel showing up on the evening news or have I missed a bunch of groundbreaking work on animal communication?

Reminds me of an old Lou Reed lyric:

Animal Language
Miss Riley had a dog
she used to keep it in her backyard
And when the dog began to bark
all the neighbors began to shout
Then came a stormy night
Miss Riley let her dog out
And when the neighbors found him 'round
they put a gun down his mouth and shot him down
and he went

Ooohhh-wow, bow-wow
Ooohhh-wow, bow-wow

Miss Murphy had a cat
on her lap it sat
And once in a great big while
it looked like that Cheshire cat did smile
But often it used to chase
anything that crossed its face
But one day it got so hot
that Cheshire cat had a blood clot
and she said

Ooohhh-meow, me-meow
Ooohhh-meow, me-meow

Meow

And then the dog met the cat
the dog was hot and the cat was wet
Then came some sweaty dude
he put a board between the two
Then they couldn't get at it
got frustrated all about it
So they did the only thing you could do
they took the dude's sweat and shot it up between the two
and they said

Ooohhh-wow, bow-wow
Ooohhh-wow, bow, me, wow

"Enhanced interrogation"

Ring, ring, ring.
Hello?
Karl, it's for you.

Seems like "Genius Boy" Rove and company haven't been answering the clue phone: Any time you're doing stuff that compares unfavorably to what the Nazis and the Soviets did, you have a problem. When it's about torture, you've got a serious problem. That's where we're at with "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

Today's NYT has a front page piece called "Interrogation methods criticized" with this in the third graph:

experts say … interrogation methods … are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Ouch. And it gets worse: People talk about this stuff violating "American values, call it "immoral", etc.

And then Andrew Sullivan has a big piece comparing current US practices to what the Nazis did, here. Turns out, the Brown Shirts used the phrase "verschärfte Vernehmung" for their 'harsh' techniques. Sullivan makes a deal out of how that's German for 'enhanced interrogation' — it fits the actual sense, but you probably won't find 'enhanced' for verschärft in a German-English dictionary. ('Enhanced' is one of those sleazy political euphemisms.) What's frightening is that the Nazis apparently initially didn't allow some things that Bush and Rumsfeld have, like hypothermia.

Josh Micah Marshall said this on Talking Point Memo:

There are way too many facile comparisons of whatever group or individual we dislike to Nazis. But when the shoe fits.

Part of what's striking here, of course, is how many mainstream folks are now drawing these comparison.

Holmberg's Mistake: More on Everett and Pirahã

The media buzz has died down now on the claims by Dan Everett about Pirahã since the New Yorker piece, but Everett's views continue to haunt me, in part because of the kind of exoticization of these people and their language and in part because what he claims just seems so unlikely to be true. With those two elements, it somehow called to mind the questions of a hoax about the Tasaday (overview here).

By chance, I just started reading Charles Mann's 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Mann is a science journalist, and the book got basically positive reviews from what I've seen, like this one on H-NET, although it's not so much 'new revelations' but as synthesis of scholarly work, including by Alfred Crosby and Wisconsin's own Bill Cronon. His first chapter is called "Holmberg's mistake", which is named (the quote is from an interview with Indian Country Today, here.) :

… after an anthropologist who described one group of very poor, hunting-and-gathering South American Indians as a timeless remnant of the Stone Age when they were in fact a persecuted people who had been driven into the forest by brutal ranchers.

This point is a major theme of the book. Holmberg was working with the Sirionó. Mann gives a long synopsis of Holmberg's work, including this (p. 9):

they had no clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments (not even rattles and drums", no art or design (except necklaces of animal teeth), and amost no religion (the Sirionó "conception of the universe" was "almost completely uncrystallized"). Incredibly, they could not count beyond three or make fire … .

It turns out, these people were the last remnants of a much larger community that had been killed by epidemics, and driven into the forest by ranchers. According to Mann, they lost 95% of their population within a generation, resulting in a population so small that people were forced to mate with relatives.

Sound familiar? This matches the New Yorker description of the Pirahã remarkably well. Holmberg's conclusion that they were holdovers of the Stone Age was, Mann writes, "as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and had concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving." In poking around a little, I see only one place where somebody's made a direct connection between these two stories (it's a brief comment, here). But similar reactions to Everett's stuff is out there (like here).

I can't judge the correctness of Everett's claims about the Pirahã language, but you have to be bothered by a portrayal that follows these old cliches so closely. It's like he's pulled out this stuff just to raise some hell about generative grammar. There are plenty of serious questions about generative grammar, but the productive discussions lie elsewhere.

Another hyperforeignism

Watching the Indy 500 after a long rain delay. (Danica Patrick made a big pass into second just a while back.) Talking about an earlier brush between two drivers today, a close call, the announcer said that they'd already had a tête-à-tête, pronounced without the last consonant: tate-uh-tay, basically.

The pronunciation is surely a hyperforeignism (see here) — based on the assumption that in French, you don't pronounce final consonants — one I don't remember hearing before. (It surprised the Missus too.)

The meaning is also odd: I think of that as meaning 'private' and that's confirmed by several sources, dictionaries and online. This happened in front of 300,000 people and millions of TV viewers. This seemed to be used more like they went head to head or something.

Why we become educators ... or not

The other day, I watched for a few minutes as a Madison bus driver, one who drives a wheelchair accessible bus, brought somebody for what was obviously a medical appointment. It must have taken her 5 minutes or more to get this one person out of the bus, a lot of it pretty cumbersome and real physical work. She wasn't exactly smiling, but even at some distance, she had a look of satisfaction about her. When I see stuff like that, I'm always reminded how many of us got into this business from a deep-seated belief that higher education is something that fundamentally helps improve society: An educated society — specifically one where every smart, energetic person has ready access to the best chance to learn — is a better society.

When I was getting into this biz, a bunch of decades ago now, mine was a moderate political position: Not about what to burn down, but about what to build, how to create a better society through education. We were willing to face steep odds of finding a job, work for far less than we could get in industry, and work 80 hours a week once we got a job.

And times are harder than ever. Tuition is through the roof and classes are increasingly packed like airline seats. Faculty and staff positions are not being replaced here (last year, History lost five faculty and got one replacement, according to one person there, English here just lost five faculty this spring, I heard, and other departments are truly collapsing due to departures, including at least one that was until recently a powerhouse nationally), TA positions are being cut (Linguistics 101 fills instantly at a 360 student cap, and they were just cut from four to three TAs for the fall), and the average raise for faculty was ca. 4% last year. Worst, there's now an $8,000 per year surcharge assessed on Project Assistantships, for 'tuition remission': You bring in money to hire a grad student, you pay the University $8,000 for the privilege.

But it turns out, the administration isn't suffering with those below them. A couple of weeks ago, I got a one-page sheet called "The CEO pay plan comes to L&S". L&S is the College of Letters & Science. I didn't run the numbers, but the median raise among their staff was clearly double digits (yup, over 2.5 times what the faculty's was), and there are 'assistant deans' (including former clerical people) who are earning almost $100,000. Almost a quarter million dollars went into raises for the couple dozen people who work in that office. And the Grad School just created a .75 time position to focus on grad funding — a completely new position. I wonder where that $100,000 came from. Would have probably funded five TAs/PAs, even with the new surcharge. How disconnected is the administration that they didn't anticipate the rage that's now starting to brew among grad students, faculty, classified staff and academic staff?

Well, I guess the administrators truly do not share our priorities or goals: They've chosen to line their own pockets (anybody want to calculate the trajectory of deans' salaries versus faculty/staff/TA salaries over the last 20 years?) while they are cutting deep into resources to teach students. I've heard that Ireland was a net exporter of food to England during the potato famine. It's getting kind of like that.

Spelling: A new low on language in politics?

Well, of course not, but it's sort of tragically stupid. As John McCain's campaign continues its crash and burn, there's this. Obama just criticized McCain's assessment of the war as unrealistic:

Senator McCain required a flack jacket, ten armored Humvees, two Apache attack helicopters, and 100 soldiers with rifles by his side to stroll through a market in Baghdad just a few weeks ago.

McCain's comeback? He concludes:

By the way, Senator Obama, it's a 'flak' jacket, not a 'flack' jacket.

The reports on liberal blogs (like this) make the key points: flack is acknowledged as an accepted spelling (New Oxford American and Merriam-Webster's both give it) some young underling typed this up, not Sen. Obama himself.

So, it's not a new low for language and politics, but it's got to be a sign of a dead campaign walking.

The MLA report

As noted a couple days back, the Modern Language Association has released its eagerly awaited (or, for some, deeply dreaded) report on foreign language departments (here). I've seen very little reaction so far — Inside Higher Ed has something here, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, too, but it's behind a pay wall. This topic has been a theme here for a while (a search this blog for 'language department' will get you the key posts).

The MLA's report gets a lot of important things right. They sketch a "two-tiered system", dominated by literature faculty:

It would be difficult to exaggerate the frustration this rigid and hierarchical model evokes among language specialists who work under its conditions. Their antagonism is not toward the study of literature--far from it--but toward the organization of literary study in a way that monopolizes the upper-division curriculum, devalues the early years of language learning, and impedes the development of a unified language-and-content curriculum across the four-year college or university sequence. This two-track model endows one set of language professionals not only with autonomy in designing their curricula but also with the power to set the goals that the other set of professionals must pursue. In this model, humanists do research while language specialists provide technical support and basic training. The more autonomous group--the literature faculty--may find it difficult to see the advantages of sharing some of its decision-making power over the curriculum as a whole. We hope to convince this group that it is in our common interest to devise new models.

The authors conclude, "The two-tiered configuration has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve." Very true assessment and I hope they succeed.

MLA’s executive director "stressed that the report was not 'against literature' but arguing for a 'multiplicity of approaches' of which literary study is one part" (Inside Higher Ed). The idea that the place of literary study is not privileged above all else seems simple, but those in power don't give up without a struggle, even when the ship is sinking fast. Every language department I know well has been damaged by this literary hegemony, and non-lit people may have to pry power from the cold, dead hands of those who've been in charge. But the transition needs to happen, fast.

But why dwell on drowned rats, let's turn to solutions: The goal the report sets for language programs is to train students with "deep translingual and transcultural competence"(too jargony, guys, ease up) and getting there means having "multiple paths to the major", and a dramatically broader curriculum.

I argued earlier that the University of Wisconsin's Department of German has turned this corner. The lit program is basically dead at the grad level: they have some talented students, I gather, but too few to teach many courses, despite the fact that they have about 10 faculty in German lit. But a smaller group of faculty is thriving and drawing students interested in second language acquisition, Dutch, linguistics, immigration, German-American Studies. A grad student from that department even wrote in to agree with my impressions, and further conversations with folks there support them as well. Indeed, the report notes the same sentiment expressed on this blog back then:

Many colleges and universities have made a successful transition toward this broad understanding of language study, and we urge others to follow.

When the deans and central administration at Wisconsin demand that our language departments heed this MLA report, German should argue vigorously that they have in fact been leading the way, for 15 years or so. And they should insist that the University needs to step up and support the grossly understaffed (= non-lit) parts of the program.

Specifically in the realm of linguistics, our usual focus here, the authors argue:

The presence of linguists and second language acquisition specialists on language department faculties is also an essential part of this vision. Linguists enrich the foreign language major through their ability to offer courses in second language acquisition, applied linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, history of the language, and discourse analysis. In addition to learning the history and underlying structure of a particular language, students should be offered the opportunity to take general courses in such areas as language and cognition, language and power, bilingualism, language and identity, language and gender, language and myth, language and artificial intelligence, and language and the imagination. These courses appeal broadly to students who major in languages as well as to those who do not.

From the whole report, some won't be entirely sure that they're endorsing linguistics as a full and equal partner in this (rather than pushing 'cultural' stuff that is very close to literary study, like film and art history), but Wisconsin's linguists in German cover about all of that territory in a serious way.

Let's build a pluralistic approach to language departments and get this ship righted.

"If there's only two songs in ya, boy …

Whaddya want from me?" That's a question that the President (Old What's His Name) asks the narrator in the song, "Number three". (It's by They Might Be Giants, TMBG.) The narrator's gone to ask the Prez about writer's block.

If you don't know the song, here are two excerpts, first the chorus (and opening lyrics):

There's just two songs in me and I just wrote the third
Don't know where I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words
Spent my whole life just digging up my music's shallow grave
For the two songs in me and the third one I just made

And, the last verse:

So I bought myself some denim pants
And a silver guitar
But I politely told the ladies
"You'll still have to call me Sir
Because I have to keep my self-respect
I'll never be a star
Since there's just two songs in me
And this is Number Three"

If you do any kind of writing, this probably strikes a chord with you, maybe a horror-movie-minor-key-on-the-pipe-organ chord. If you review papers for academic journals, how often do you want to start a review like this:

Dear Editor,
It's well known across our tiny field that the author of the manuscript you sent me for review only had two articles in them. Why am I now sitting at my desk reviewing their third for possible publication in your journal?

Just as an example, you know, hypothetically speaking. With academic writing, you need more than two articles, but you can recycle, add filler, reinterpret in a new framework, etc., and lots of people do get tenure off of two ideas, often even one, and we're not talking about theory-of-relativity ideas here.

I had my two little ideas and got the tenure (controllable with medication); with retirement, I can finally rest on those wilted laurels. But when I started writing here, that TMBG song would not leave my head, no matter how much I stared at the laptop screen, watched Gilligan's Island reruns, swilled rye whiskey straight from the bottle, or took the pills the nice doctor gave me. That was September.

Now, I have a list of ideas I don't have time to get to, half of which I'll forget any minute. It turns out, if you start writing, people send feedback that leads you off course and off the map.

The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

The example du jour is Romance loanwords in Irish and problems of Celtic etymology, inspired by Danca's comment a couple of posts back; let's see if it pans out. And yeah, that's me in the photo, on the right.

Putting some science in prescriptivism!

Well, pseudo-science, of course, and it's almost about language change. Most people probably know Gresham's Law, originally an economic principle but pretty widely applied since. Informally, it's often put this way:

Bad money drives good money out of circulation.

I happened to get a link this morning to this piece of wretched journalism. The author isn't directly identified beyond "Mr. Kilpatrick", but it looks like it's our old friend James J. Kilpatrick, already honored among linguists (here). It starts with a big rant (his word) about the stupidity of the phrase "it remains to be seen", particularly offensive in a recent use by the NYT. (Don't ask.) But he's just warming up:

Consider another offense, i.e., the Times' addiction to "last" in a temporal context. A typical example appeared in an editorial five months ago:

"Over the last three decades, the number of overweight children in America has tripled to 16 percent ..."

This is the trouble with the adjective "last" : It is a coin worn down by Gresham's Law. At one time it meant only "final," i.e., the ultimate, the conclusion, the absolute end of something. The ninth inning is the last inning; the rites of burial are the last rites; Hamlet dies in the last act; Browning's last duchess was more than merely his most recent duchess; and when Sophie Tucker died in 1966, she was the last of the red-hot mamas.

The first meaning of "last" is still one of absolute finality, but usage has worn it down. In common usage, the last word no longer means the last word.

Just for the record, as far as I know, the word is an old superlative from late, and it's hard for me to get the point of using last only to refer to a closed set, rather than as the final or ultimate in a list so far. Anyway, I can't really think of using last week, as in the one just past, as an error at any level. (Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage gives some background, tracing it to 1927, and they endorse the obvious, sane view on this.)

But look at the appeal to Gresham: Last has been 'worn down by time', which sounds like the semantic bleaching so central to much grammatlicalization work. More directly, it has the ring of historical linguistics in the Romantic Age, where language change was deterioration from an earlier, purer state. Loss of morphological case marking and such clearly showed the decline of language over time. Prescriptivists have a wide streak of this running down their backs, of course, but I'm not used to seeing it underpinned with principles from economics. Change is bad enough, but now, the worst changes win, I suppose.

Nouning isn't always bad

Last night, Jon Stewart talked about the empussification of the Democrats, of course on the issue of funding for the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. He set the stage with a couple of references to the Dems as pussies; otherwise it probably wouldn't have been clear to a lot of people.

I know pussified 'lame, weak, effeminate', whatever the historical connection to pusillanimous may be. But the participle makes a verb to pussify a necessary step from point A to point B. To make it mean 'somebody who has had this done to them', you need the em-, I guess. From there, I guess, it must be just one step to his noun.

What a tangled derivational web we weave:

pussy (fig.) > pussify > empussify > empussified, empussification.

Breaking: MLA report released

Here you can read the long-awaited Modern Language Association report on "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World". (See earlier discussion here.)

I see a huge fan, spinning wildly. I see some vast blob of something brown and organic-looking moving toward it. Oh. My. God. They're about to collide. Run, run for your lives!

I'll have more to say later, but right now I'm busier than … [dramatic pause, while I consider which colorful expression to run with] … a one-eyed cat watchin' two mouse holes. [Disappointed by that choice? Google busier than a and take your pick. The billygoat one I didn't know before but it seemed a little out there for the context. One-legged man in an asskicking contest is tired, ditto for one-armed paperhanger with the hives (or other serious itches).]

Is the mc- prefix changing?

On the occasion of McDonalds' recently renewed effort to have mcjob excised from the dictionary (see here) …

The Stephanie Miller Show (nationally syndicated, and on the air here in Madison) has developed a formula or construction that is almost a snowclone. It's a name, of this sort:

X-y Mc-YZ

Each letter is a monosyllabic word. These are coined to mock scandal-ridden Republicans and others. Most common are the lecherous Squeezy McFeelpants and his international pals like Scottish/English Mashie McGrabass/McGrabArse, along with Drunky McPukeshoes, a slam at Tom Delay (who is usually played in sound clips where he slurs words). Former White House "official spokesliar" Scott McClellan was Puffy McMoonface. (Note the little capitalization issue: I'm tempted to start both elements of the last name with caps.) They've talked on the show about these formulas, toying with ideas for how to name particular people.

I noticed a while back that Jon Stewart had used this formula, I think with some original form, though I don't recall what it was. Now, whitehouse.org has Bush talking about the death of Jerry Falwell, calling him "beloved McJesus huckster".

Wonkette has been ragging hard on John McCain of late, calling him Walnuts in part as an allusion to the view that he's crazy. This could easily have become X-y McWalnuts, but they've left it to their readers/commenters, who did it with a twist: McBatshit McCrazy.

The established use of productive mc- is clearly pejorative: mcjob is the best known. Go to Urban Dictionary and you'll see that most of the items they list are directly connected to the source form: McDonalds. Many, in fact, are about people with mcjobs or the work itself: mcslave, mctard, mcshift, etc., and most of the rest about bad food and its effects, like mcsquirts. The image above (from here) gives you the picture.

The whitehouse.org usage surely still aims at the cheap/sleazy, franchise/commercial aspect of Falwell's ministry, but the Stephanie Miller Show has built it into a bigger construction and made it more political. Is there more evidence out there on this? There must be.

Update, 9:55 am, by Joe: ads-l has a thread starting on this topic probably within an hour of when this post went up. Grey's Anatomy apparently has some thing about "McDreamy" (according to a message from Mark Peters), presumably in a different meaning from the 'sleazy' or specifically 'politically reprehensible' ones.

Grey's goes back to 2005 (maybe Stephanie Miller was doing it earlier? Or got it from there?) and has a string of mc-'s without negative connotations, it sounds like. Best, though, is a note from Alice Faber on ads-l: "Stitchy McYarnpants' blog goes back (at least) to September 2004." Man, don't you need a knitted 6-pack holder?

Update, 1:00 pm: Damn, Language Log covered this topic last year, and I didn't even think to check. Oh well, kind of Sloppy McSlopperson, I guess.

"His Ohio accent was thick enough to sound southern"

That quote is from the front page of this morning's NYT, here, in a piece by Damien Cave. (The article itself is grim; it pretty much made me want to puke: It was about the efforts to find the missing soldiers south of Bagdad, a situation where there's no doubt what US forces are trying to achieve, and it has graphic descriptions of the aftermath of combat, involving dead and wounded soldiers, with more graphic pictures.)

One of the big debates in American dialectology has been the role of the "Midlands" dialect: People draw that area differently on maps, but it's generally a narrow band running through the lower Midwest, covering a lot of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. The question is whether it's a mere 'transitional area' between North and South (Davis & Houck in American Speech and various others have argued this) or a 'real' dialect unto itself (Dennis Preston and others hold this position). The quote in the subject line seems to assume (uncritically, I imagine) the transitional area view: I'm guessing that he's figuring that Ohio, classic whitebread Midwest, doesn't really have much of an accent, and if you have one, it's because you lean toward the North or the South.

In fact, northern Ohio (Cleveland, etc.) is Northern and southeastern Ohio is Southern. As usual, state borders don't match dialect boundaries. These traditional views are based on production – how people talk – rather than how people perceive dialects (either 'perceive' as in how they think they sound when they hear them or how they imagine them to be). Erica Benson of UW-Eau Claire, a key member of the Wisconsin Englishes Project, actually explored how Ohio fits in production and perception in a nice 2003 article: "Folk linguistic perceptions and the mapping of dialect boundaries." American Speech 78.307-330. (She's done a lot of work on constructions like the car needs washed and gas is expensive anymore, features pretty characteristic of the Midlands.)

The map above is her summary map, showing how Ohio dialects look if you consider both production and perception. In part of her perceptual work in Ohio, she gave people maps of the state/region and asked them to identify where people speak distinctively. A lot of people described southeastern Ohio as speaking "hillbilly". It's quite possible that the captain they were quoting is from that area. In that case, it wasn't his "Ohio accent" per se, but the particular Ohio accent he has.

But there's another angle that might play a role: The kind of dialect in question is closely associated with the military. Here's how John Fought describes the role of r-ful Southern (from here):

Over the past century, it appears, the Rful inland varieties of both Northern and Southern speech have continued to gain population and influence not only within their own primary areas, but also at the expense of the Rless coastal varieties. The changing pattern of economic concentration within the country may be driving this shift. Whatever the reason, the cultural importance of Rful Southern now extends far beyond its old upland geographic base. It has long been the prevailing dialect of the military services (except possibly for the Navy), of NASCAR and other auto sports, and of country music, whose performers are expected to imitate it unless they are native speakers, as is Dolly Parton. Rful Southern is naturally associated with the thriving “Redneck” subculture so expertly lampooned by the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, also a native speaker of Rful Southern. In many parts of the country outside its large home territory, even where it is not the dominant dialect, it is strongly represented. Although it is hard to be sure, it seems that not long ago, Rful Southern overtook Rful Northern as the variety of American English spoken by the greatest number of people.

I don't know how long it's been so, but there's definitely something to this. For example, I heard a story recently of a linguist who was on a plane next to a career military guy who had monophthongization of /ai/ (that is, he said something like 'ah' for 'I' and so on). They talk for a while and the linguist asks the guy where he's from. Minnesota, born and bred. So, maybe the native dialect of the soldier in this story was strengthened by his association with the military. (As a captain, we can assume he's been in for a long time and identifies powerfully with the military.)

I still wish we weren't reading stories like this in the newspaper.

Reason

Michiko Kakutani has a review of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, in today's NYT. I'm hardly a big Gore fan, though I have voted for him, and I'm not sure quite what to make of his recent public moves. But assuming that Kakutani gets his views right, he's making a really important point:

Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? The role of higher education in a society being run like this, on these values, requires little additional comment, though Gore probably has plenty on that. Anybody read this book yet?

Jon Stewart on Tony Blair and George Bush

After talking about Blair's departure from the world stage and then running a send-up montage of George and Tony cavorting at the height of their relationship:

The end of an era. Or rather, the end of many errors.

Sounded completely seamless, and the interpretation of the joke wasn't impeded in the least by the r-ful vs. r-less difference. (The map, from here, shows areas where white Americans have been reported to be r-less.) That is, for the joke to work, you have to be able to interpret the last word of the first sentence as error, as said by a speaker who doesn't produce full r sounds at the end of syllables, even though you do get an r before the s at the end of the second sentence. But then, it seems like everybody gets the joke with the name r-ful dialects, where the humor is in the possible confusion with awful dialects.

OK, it's true: Nothing ruins a joke like explaining it.

A forced, but kind of cool, bilingual pun

The Stephanie Miller Show has the best voice person I've ever heard, Jim Ward. He knows how to pronounce a bunch of languages, including German, so that he is especially effective with foreign accents. They just reported on how a Swiss firm is apparently marketing men's underwear that protects the wearer from cell phone radiation (see here — I have no clue about its truth). So, Ward goes on this riff as a spokesman for the company (with surprisingly good Swiss intonation, emblematic switches into bits of Swiss German), ending by saying that they've decided to call the new product Lead-erhosen. Get it? I'm rolling on the floor here. The hyphen signals where he made a critical pause.

English only: The simple truth

Last week's Onion has this News in Brief item:

Idaho Legislature Declares English Only Language They Know
May 18, 2007 | Issue 43•2

BOISE, ID—The Idaho Legislature passed a unanimous resolution Monday declaring English the only language the elected assembly knows how to speak, write, or understand.

"We're putting into law a general feeling that everyone here has had for years: English is the only language we know, and English is the only language we want to know," Lt. Gov. James E. Risch said during a press conference outside the State Capitol building. "It's a good language, serves us well in matters of communication, and we can't think of any good reason to go around knowing some other language that we have no use for."

The legislature is expected to pass a separate resolution later this week officially declaring out-of-towners "suspicious."

Has any academic treatise gotten to the roots of the "English Only" movement so cleanly and directly?

Of course, the same section includes a brilliant piece called "Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things", ending with the note that the professor was granted tenure 15 years earlier for doing this.

Business cards

A blog I started reading very early on was Nancy Friedman's Away with words. It must have been when I was starting to wonder about how language gets thought and talked about beyond the field of linguistics. I like it in part because it's a perspective that was (and is still) so very new to me (the business of business naming, etc.) but also because she has a good eye, sharp design on her pages. A person could go to work for a company like that.

I've been swamped recently and haven't been blogging much or even keeping up on reading blogs. The interference has been just odds and ends after traveling a couple weeks ago, but I'm finally catching up over the last couple of days. In the course of that, I visited Away with Words. In the "May Linkfest", there's a link to a company that makes the wildest, coolest business cards I've ever seen, here.

Wonder what they could come up with for linguists?

Correction, Monday, 11:20 am: Nancy Friedman writes in to point out that it's actually a compilation of cards from a set of companies. Still, you gotta check out the cards.

Walking on the same ground with giants

I just finished reading The Boys of Winter: The untold story of a coach, a dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, by Wayne Coffey (Three Rivers Press, 2005). It tells the famous “Miracle on Ice” story, of course, with a focus on Coach Herb Brooks. People who know infinitely more about literature and sports than I do often say that baseball lends itself well to literature — outdoor summer setting, slow pace, whatever — and it seems like hockey doesn’t. (The Quebec shortstory “The hockey sweater” is an exception, I guess.) Coffey set himself a challenge, interweaving the story of one (already familiar, to many) game with the lives of players and the coach. In ways, he succeeds in the end, like with a complex portrayal of Brooks, brutal on players but also fundamentally human. The book starts with Brooks’ funeral, maybe the most human place you could start.

Coffey does underplay themes that many of us would have felt compelled to focus on, like the nationalism surrounding this US-Soviet battle at the height of the Cold War. Still, he gets some things cold right: Being on the ice brings out intensity I’ve never seen anywhere else; this book tells the classic stories of kids playing on outdoor rinks by the lights of dad’s old Rambler, the obsessions of hockey families and fans in Boston and the Iron Range, and so on. He gets things that click for skaters, like when Mark Johnson (coach of the Wisconsin women’s hockey team, national champs last year and this) says “There’s nothing more pure than skating on a sheet of ice under the stars”.

Many of hockey’s transcendental moments come when teamwork is perfect: The breakout pass from your defenseman as a defender crashes in on him that pulls you as a winger to just the right place for the shot on goal, or picking up a pass down low while having your head up to tap it out to the centerman in the high slot for an open shot. (And, yes, getting the assist is almost always better than getting the goal.) Coffey quotes one of the Russians on why the Americans won that game:” They were team”. A good friend of mine, one of the best players I’ve ever skated with, says that hockey is “an hour of fucking up for that one tiny moment of getting it just right.” Yeah, and that’s usually not about you getting it right, but you and a teammate or two. You feel that a little in this book.

Another thing about the game is this constant awareness of the value of tenacity: Whatever happens, you are struggling to stay in the play. As you fall to the ice after getting hit or losing an edge, you’re planning how to get up fastest and where to get to. One of my best moments in hockey ever was a month or so ago when I scored a goal simply by staying in the play through various twists and turns, moving around, passing, getting banged around in front of the goal. The goal itself was ‘picking up the trash’ as they say (an easy rebound goal), but my heart rate had been completely maxed out for 20 seconds by that point. I skated back to the bench and tapped gloves with folks, then a teammate said “we’re gonna stop calling you Mr. Verb and start calling you Mr. Tenacity”. If I had been hit by a bus going out the door of the rink, I would have died happy. That’s at the very lowest level of hockey, an “old farts scrimmage”, as it’s known. In the 1980 game, there’s an example of tenacity at the very highest level: At the very end of the first period, an American fired a shot from center ice, as the Soviets were just about to go to the locker room. The famous Soviet goalie Tretiak stopped the shot but allowed a big rebound with a couple of seconds left. Mark Johnson was just coming onto the ice and screamed down to pick up the puck, skate around Tretiak and pop the puck past him to tie the game with 1 second left. That changed the game.

Johnson was in many ways a hero of that game and yet Coffey talks about him walking around unrecognized in public. His success with the women’s team is changing that, surely. Part of his growing reputation is that he is said to be very decent with and to the players. In the Shell, the University’s ice rink, he’s regarded with awe. When he walks through during a scrimmage, everybody on the bench stops talking and watches him. Passing him outside the Shell, I've had somebody run up and tell me in a whisper, "god, that was Mark Johnson and he spoke to him." I see the chancellor and governor around town on occasion and they don't get that reaction. Johnson smiles and nods or says hi when you pass him carrying your gear and stick ... no glad handing, just greeting fellow hockey players whose best feats on the ice will be stuff he mastered at age 8. And every time we know we’re walking past a real legend when we see him. Now, there's a guy who could act like he's god and get away with it, but he seems utterly human.

Berto's syntax

Bush is said to call Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez "Berto", which has got to strike him better than Rove's apparent nickname from the boss ("Turd Blossom") would. Still, the AG is known in many circles today as the "Torture Czar" for his role in creating the framework for what will presumably turn out to be inhumane treatment of detainees.

Anyhow, there's an AP story out on Berto (I read it here at Talking Points Memo), where he's quoted this way:

"Being able to go and having a very candid conversation and telling the president: 'Mr. President, this cannot be done. You can't do this,' -- I think you want that," Gonzales told reporters this week. "And I think having a personal relationship makes that, quite frankly, much easier always to deliver bad news."

Can this quote possibly be accurate? (TPM is focused on its apparent dishonesty, but that's another kettle of rattlesnakes.) In the first sentence, it's got to be able to go and have ... and tell, right? I don't think I know this as a kind of stylistic overreaching (see the Ridger's comment on the last post). And the last sentence is flat ungrammatical to me too: something could make it easier to deliver bad news, but that doesn't work here — maybe if you ended the sentence after easier. Even then, the word order seems impossible: The always needs to be much earlier. That's three really odd things in a tiny quote. Note that mavens never really jump on this stuff — objections to sentences that aren't English (at least for me) never seem to make it in. These don't seem like typical spoken performance errors. In fact, this is so mangled that I wonder if the AP blew the quotes or something.

Whatever we call him, I guess we won't be calling Berto "articulate".

Slashed by Occam's Razor

This morning, I had the privilege of hearing an international group of extremely good historians debating methods and theories. I was intrigued by how many of them were talking about using “narratology”, working on “identity construction” with authors of historical documents, and urging that historians rely more heavily on “literary theory”. Eventually, Foucault got mentioned. Someone asked a question about this, basically wondering how serious these folks actually took such things. They quoted this passage (reportedly from a journal called Poetics Today):

Literary analysis is much less predicated upon correctness or provability of findings or the incontrovertibility of evidence. Instead, its "success" relies on such parameters as originality, appropriateness, inventiveness, or "insight value": it may be measured by our degree of satisfaction with what is revealed or illuminated about a text.

Even (or especially) the people who were speaking most fervently for the postmodernist perspective rushed to distance themselves from the view in that quote. "This is where I have to draw a line", said one, "I am a historian." "We cannot abandon the truth criterion", said another. Whatever their goals and measures of success, they all expressly believe in correctness, provability, and the strength of evidence. It was kinda hip to flirt with that stuff, but when this concrete claim came up about what literary analysis aims to do, it was like somebody was screaming ‘fire’ in their crowded theater: Panic gripped the audience and they fled en masse.

It turns out, all these historians agree fundamentally about the value of working closely with primary materials (what some might call ‘data’) and taking seriously what they find there. They also seem to agree on the need to interpret that material carefully and critically and in principled ways, using tools appropriate to reaching the particular goal at hand (what some would call ‘methods, theories’).

On looking over that quote, though, I wonder if its author isn’t declaring literary analysis to be part of the arts, or some creative process divorced from research and scholarship — if you’ve abandoned “correctness or provability of findings or the incontrovertibility of evidence” as very high priorities, I find it hard to call it ‘scholarship’ any more.

But the issue of Occam’s Razor came up, where a social historian challenged a historian with more of a ‘cultural theory’ perspective. The latter, a very well-spoken person speaking in public in a formal setting opened his comments somewhat later by talking about …

the gash from which I’m still bleeding from.

Just in case you doubt the story about preposition doubling that appeared recently over on Language Log.

Dictionary of American Regional English update

Local paper has a piece on DARE, here. They talk about booya(h), the regional stew from this area, and some universally familiar items as well, like bubbler.

An old friend of this blog reminds me not to get too upset over the fact that they dusted off an old Safire quote for the story. Well, they call him the NYT's "language maven", at least.

And the Wisconsin Englishes guys are hitting the road again: They made the Beaver Dam Daily Citizen here. (That link may disappear in a few days.)

Coach Bob Johnson used to say "it's a great day for hockey". I guess yesterday was a great day for regional English.

Meta-verbing: to OED

Today's letters to the editor in the New York Times has an inset title "OED'ing" and a set of letters about a piece by Nora Ephron a couple days ago about Scrabble and general lexophilia (or whichever variant of that not-so-neo-logism you prefer).

I didn't comment on the Ephron piece, but to OED has a ring to it, doesn't it?

Falwell

The Missus reports that she drove down Madison's famously funky Willy Street tonight and saw a man carrying a sign saying something to the effect of "the king is dead" with a picture of Jerry Falwell on it. This random guy was walking in the street, by a row of parked cars. Mrs. Verb (not her real name) said the overall impression of the scene was clearly of somebody who was celebrating Falwell's death. That doesn't strike me as a healthy thing to do with your time and energy, but Falwell invited, or maybe prayed on his knees for, very harsh reactions.

Very little is certain in this world, save for death, but it is hard to imagine that history will not judge Falwell harshly, for the sometimes bizarre positions he took (see picture just above to the right) but also for the substance of the values he practiced.

In recent days, Pat Robertson's Regent University has been in the news with Monica Goodling's role in the Justice Dept scandals. As I read those stories of corruption, every time I heard or read 'Regent University', I always thought about how this went to the heart of the old "Moral Majority". Must have been stressful for Falwell, Robertson and many others.

I'm far past the age I expected to reach, so I'm working to be comfortable with my own mortality. Gonna happen, gotta face it. I just hope I don't leave a stain on human history when I go.

Update, Wed. 6:00 am: Check out this from Talking Points Memo: MSNBC ran a piece yesterday about Falwell quoting whitehouse.org as if it were a serious political website. Man, that's a Safirean level of research.

Appropriate library carrel behavior

You know the shtick: Those young folks, they love to alter signs. STOP + the war, etc.

One of the few, thin rays of joy (or maybe that's radioactive waste?) emanting from our rapidly crumbling infrastructure at Wisconsin is that we have lots of cool old stuff around because nothing ever gets repainted or refurbished. Well, Engineering and Business are pretty much so shiny new that it scares me to go by them, but they are wholly owned subsidiaries of our corporate masters and overlords at MegaCorp, Inc. No, I mean the traditional core areas that make up what we once called a "university": Letters & Science, Ag, Ed, Extension, and such. Places where people used to go to learn to think, to move up in the world, to contribute to social progress. Ahhhh, I'm getting all misty.

Anyhow, the carrels in the main library haven't been painted in decades (since the place was built, I'm guessing), long enough that there are NO SMOKING signs painted on the inside. I didn't get a picture of the best 'NO SNORING' variant, but you get the idea. I checked a few others in search of the one I've seen that's just dead-on perfect, but couldn't find it. I did find one banning an activity that would surprise me to see in a carrel, but one some 19-year-old surely took tremendous delight in putting up.

"Populist" views on immigrants learning English

CNN's Lou Dobbs has made himself quite a name by railing against illegal immigration recently. One notable piece of this stuff is his "populist" and "defending the middle class" rhetoric.

The progressive radio talkshow host Ed Schultz also makes a big point about being a populist, too: He talks a lot about hunting and fishing, is even a former pro football player, etc. In the context of talking about illegal immigration, he started his show a little while ago by talking about how we've got a problem with immigrants who are unable to speak and understand English — I missed the beginning, but it sounds like somebody screwed up his order at McDonald's or something. He went on for a while asking rhetoical questions about the need for a single language for a single country, etc. In the end, he stresses how this is a real problem, and how we've "just been afraid to address it".

What is it going to take to get some little modicum of sanity on this issue? As noted before in this corner of the ether, the basic information is readily available in easily accessible form:

James Crawford. 2000. At War with Diversity: US language policy in an age of anxiety. Multilingual Matters.

"If you come to the country, just learn the language," a caller just said. Well, fine, but that's not like mowing the grass ... it takes a while. Schultz is now asking whether the guy he met was failed by the public schools! Are there people today who've been to American schools and can't speak English?

Dear Bill, or "Safire unloaded"

Look, Bill, I know I haven't been writing much lately. Been really busy at work and stuff. Bill, this is hard; I've never written a letter like this before. But I just have to tell you: This isn't working. Sure, in the early days, when literally nobody was reading this blog, it was kinda fun to write this:

One of the real reasons every working linguist needs a blog is because it offers a chance to heap scorn on William Safire ... I figure that people just can't pound on his wretched, prescriptivist, Nixonian butt enough.

Seen in the light of your role in American history and your stunningly ill-informed rants and ramblings about words, that was gentle ribbing, just a couple old guys kidding around about how people talk. But the fire has gone out, Bill. You're not letting this relationship work: You need to be just wrong and stupid enough for me to mock and correct, but not so wrong and stupid to make that pointless.

Today's column is the end of the road for us, Bill. Your little thing about how "you're welcome" is turning 100 years old goes too far. I didn't even have to break out the dictionaries or google around to see how wrong you were: ads-l has posts by Barry Popik and Michael Coarrubias ripping you to shreds here. The former pulled a book off the shelf (I know, that's not your game, but you have a paid assistant to reach up there!) and found a pile of attestations before 1875. The latter sent you a damn Shakespeare quote with the phrase in it, which it sounds like you (lege: your assistant) ignored.

One of the real joys of teaching and research is seeing things develop: Students and colleagues learn new skills, find new evidence and we see things in new ways. You're not like that, BIll. You're a bug stuck in amber, Bill, never moving for all eternity. You should be ashamed of yourself. Go work on your golf game.

Goodbye, Bill.

Image from here.

Madison's [fə'nalɪdʒɪsts] on NPR

Huge piece just now on …

Phenology, the ancient art of tracking annual phenomena such as plant blooms and bird migrations, is now a crucial tool in tracking the Earth's warming.

Details here. Even with the context of plants blooming set up, and knowing this word (though it was not active vocabulary for me until now, probably), it was still hard not to get the other reading.

And then, 10 minutes later the announcer (Steve Innskeep?) says, "let's put this in the passive tense". Mavens will go wild, I imagine.

Does nouning bad language?

Look, I love all language change equally. That's a principle. But, man, sometimes it's hard. If you have a Northwest Airlines frequent flier account, you probably got the glossy mailing about bonus miles for eating out:

Today's dine.
Tomorrow's travel.

That zero-derivation from to dine sounded a little forced to me, like an ad writer trying too hard to be pithy or something, but it's the inside that got me:

Then dine out by 6/30/07 and earn 250 Bonus Miles on every qualified dine of $25 or more.

That's just outright impossible for me. Maybe this is restaurant-reviewer language or something?

The bigger issue is aesthetic reactions to language change. I think we all have them, sometimes reaching the level of established pet peeves. Indeed, English Jack has just posted on a similar topic, here.

Update, Friday 2:00 pm: Jan Freeman has a distantly related piece on airline language, here.

Image from here. It's Paul Signac's "Dining Room".

a/an historical

Yesterday evening's Word Court by Barbara Wallraff in the local paper leads with a "simple rule" about the use of a and an: "If you hear the 'h', use 'a'." It always cracks me up to people who take themselves seriously say "an historical event". It's a nice example of how screwed up prescription can get. Wallraff unfortunately doesn't say anything about the history beyond "historically, not everyone did pronounce its 'h'", which is a shame. Most people reading her column don't know anything about the history of our indefinite article, nor about the reanalyses involving moving an n, etc. Sigh. People would find that much cooler, than the little and obvious lesson.

But I'm wondering about the continuation of the reduction of the indefinite article: I hear speakers use a when the following words begin with a vowel. In part, it's obvious rapid speech reduction, and speaker of some varieties (Southern) seem to do it a lot, but I suspect it's creeping along. That makes an historical even more of a stupid scrimmage fought as we retreat from old forms.

Imus/Maledicta followup

Well, in the course of a busy day (but a good busy, largely), and in between reading the fine comments from the Ridger and Ben Zimmer on the latest post, I had a conversation with a colleague who's attuned to matters of race and language. He praised Reinhold Aman for clarifying blunders in translation of Imus's slurs in the international press, but raised a question:

What was the appropriate target for a translation here?

He rightly points out that how Imus understood the word ho and how young African-Americans understand the word are almost surely different. Aman is clearly aware of that, but is taking the latter interpretation as the one that's relevant for translation. Building on that, I figure, Aman's use of Waiwa, the Bavarian equivalent of German Weiber (roughly 'broads'), for ho may well be giving Imus too much credit: For all we know, Imus was assuming 'prostitute'. Do you translate Imus's intent or the language he was crudely trying to ape? Translating nappy as 'diaper' might be just plain stupid, but it gets tougher once you get beyond that. I guess to be really accurate, you'd need to gloss both meanings and explain the mismatch.

Even as I type this, I'm listening to Jon Stewart's rerun from April 30 with "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore, who builds a nice routine around a distinction between ethics and efics. "Looking fresh" is a part of the latter that Larry wants to stress. Race and language is a topic that's everywhere today.

Maledicta

Today's must read (to borrow a phrase): Most readers of this blog know Maledicta: The international journal of verbal aggression. It was once a rite of passage for many linguists to publish there, as some Madison faculty did. (Anybody doing fieldwork on a less known language or dialect had an easy paper: "Cursing in [name of language here]".

Maledicta's founder and editor (and the author of many contributions), Reinhold Aman, has just guestposted a long piece to Language Log. It's Aman at his best — he's talking details of the gross mistranslations of the phrase that got Imus fired.

Safire: "Thinking linguistically"

Ya, right. Sometimes on the day our trash is picked up, I put off taking the can out to the street. I know it's got to be done, that it's not going to take that long, etc., but something about the job makes me put it off for a while until I finally figure "gotta get this over with before I forget." You see where this is going on the day when I normally post about Safire's latest.

Today's "On Language" is all about a (non-)problem with middle age, after a maven, Erik Smith, wrote in to assert that calling a 64-year-old (Harrison Ford) middle-aged says that Ford can expect to live to be 128. Actually, I think we'd prefer to use 'median-aged', 'at life's midpoint', or something for that. Obviously, where the midpoint of life falls can only be determined post facto and it seems both uncomfortable and absurd to give it much thought, really.

In fact, it never really occurred to me how far beyond the halfway point of my life I am. Gee, thanks, Prof. Erik Smith of Concordia University in Montreal. Wait a minute: The Concordia faculty directory shows no such person. What is that about? Safire making stuff up? Surely he's not protecting the guy's identity. Happier view: Probably getting scammed by one of the several excellent linguists on staff there. Need support for that view? There is a stat prof listed by this name at another university, in this country. OK, the spelling is different (c/k) and it is a common name. But hey.

Safire makes his transition this way by suggesting that he's "thinking linguistically and not statistically". Nobody addressed any statistical point (or other point about numbers) beyond misinterpreting the meaning of the common English word middle, and he doesn't go on to think linguistically, of course. At least he does deal with the usual meaning relying on OED, namely that middle age is "between young adulthood and old age". (And no, no references to work by language professionals beyond checking the OED.) In the end, he suggests that we should use midlife to refer to this stage of our moment on earth. While he calls it "untainted", surely the association with midlife crisis is too well-established for most of us for that to work. Google midlife and you'll see what I mean … it's about careers, relationships, neck pain, etc. "Untainted"? Nice one, Einstein. (Slow clapping.)

Ironically, after I've recently been using Jan Freeman's "The Word" as a contrast to Safire's "On Language" on ways of writing for a general public, Freeman's column today is actually called "May I do your homework?" It's about how high school kids write to her asking her, in essence, to do the research for their papers. (Professors all know this you-do-the-work, I'll-get-the-grade routine.) She rightly notes, "They were asking me to do the fun part of their assignment." The relevance to Safire is obvious: If most of us had his job, we'd be poring over cool data ourselves. He doesn't even just have his assistant collect stuff to pore over, but they send out fairly regular requests to ads-l asking people to do their research.

Acting like a verb

"Progress, you're a noun but you act like you're a verb." —Citgo commercial.

OK, it's ad language, so all bets are off. But doesn't this seem to suggest that the writer doesn't connect prógress (n.) with to progréss (v.)?

The pragmatics of praise

These people are just freakin' brilliant: Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic. Of course, I'm only in it for that one passing reference to "linguistic researchers." Truth be told, there's a reasonable discourse analysis dissertation in this topic — one that would be waaaaay too much fun to research.

If praise is accompanied by eye-rolling or starts with the word 'ooooh', it's probably sarcastic. But is ooooh really a word? That aside, Onion, this is the best reporting on pragmatics ever done on pragmatics.

In a recent comment, "Monica" asked why the horoscopes in the Onion had gone downhill so badly of late. I think they're just putting their energies into the video news.

Getting it right and making assumptions

Wisconsin has a glorious tradition in theoretical linguistics. While people don't talk about him in linguistic theory much any more, W. Freeman Twaddell was here in the early 20th c. and a central figure in phonemic theory. In that same field of phonology, our latest hire is an assistant professor in English (yes, English — where are those extra-slanty italics when you need them?), Eric Raimy, who walked in the door with a string of papers in places like Linguistic Inquiry and a co-edited book coming out with MIT Press. (In time, it'd be worth a post or two to start exploring some of the UW's history in the field, in fact.)

But when I look around campus today, a lot of our strength comes from people with a profound commitment to building a solid empirical base for their linguistic analyses. Frederic Cassidy's Dictionary of American Regional English reminds us of that, but we have a set of important reference works from here, like Rand Valentine's massive Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar (University of Toronto Press), the ongoing Spanish medieval dictionary project, the probably now equally large Menominee dictionary project, the German dialect archives of the Max Kade Institute, and on and on. You see this burning bright in our current students: One group has adopted the motto "data's nice". These guys are serious linguists — doing theoretical work, fully committed to making big generalizations — but they've grasped the importance of making sure you have the data right.

That preamble is just to say that I'm shaken by the uncritical assumptions I made in reading a book somebody happened to give me the other day: I see something in the book and start writing about it, just assuming it's right. It turns out, I learn thanks to detailed comments from Alma and the Ridger on that post, that this book isn't very reliable on its subject. Indeed, the key point — that some Mormon fundamentalists use archaic pronouns in some contexts — probably isn't right.

I'm still not entirely sure the particular example given is impossible: It was one guy imagining a really abject apology to Rulon Jeffs, leader of one particular separatist (if that's the right word) group on the Utah-Arizona border. It's possible that their usage differs and/or that this usage would be regarded among them as appropriate in a very serious situation, like the one portrayed. I'm much farther into the book now, and don't see a clear pattern of such usage in ordinary speech, and at the time I didn't think clearly about how marked that situation was, and so didn't lay that out clearly in the post.

Anyway, the generalization I was trying to mold looks clearly wrong, and it sprang from an uncritical assumption. If you're a serious person working on the science of language at the University of Wisconsin, that stings. In the end, a blog post is hardly a scholarly paper, but you want to get it right. An email exchange with a regular reader underscored this week that I have no coherent notion of what the ground rules of blogging are or should be. It's not journalism, not scholarship, not like any other kind of communication I engage in. What's odd is that this is starting to feel like writing, something I recognize only from having read books like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird and blogs like Rosina Lippi's Storytelling.

The Rutgers Optimality Archive says in its guidelines under 'publication status' that posting there "is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues." (I vaguely recall that it said 'moral equivalent' in the early days.) Posting here is, I suppose, the moral equivalent of talking during coffee breaks at a conference: You try to raise real issues, try hard to not say stupid stuff (unless it's a bad joke — like the end of this post), feel free to be snarky or worse about certain clearly deserving subjects (Safire's status as Commander of the Maven Army, a bloated and bubble-dwelling university administration, self-important plagiarists) but try harder to be decent to honest people (of different theoretical persuasions, religious convictions, etc.), like you would in real life.

But once more, typing ill-organized thoughts into this weird little box on a laptop screen has brought in points of view I wouldn't otherwise have easy access to, and a chance to learn stuff that matters. That's truly a fine thing. As the increasingly tattered shreds of my thin veil of pseudonymity flap in the spring breeze, it's time to get it right.

Image from here. It's an inside cover of Lucinda Williams' Essence, which includes a song called "Get right with God" …

I would burn [the] soles of my feet
burn the palms of both my hands
if I could learn and be complete
if I could walk righteously again.

Professional salaries

Hey, Mr V,
This should probably be just a comment on your last post, but somebody just sent me the google quote of the day:

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

- Evan Esar

No clue who Evan Esar is, but ain't that the truth?

Wildlife

Yesterday, late afternoon, I was working hard and looked out the window to see a smallish bird of prey eating a bird just beyond our yard, gray feathers flying in the air at it chewed away. Turns out, it was almost surely a peregrine falcon (image from here). I walked out to get a better look and got very close to it — 15 meters or so. It didn't react when a cyclist went by right next to it. A neighbor was out and about who knows birds and I asked him about it; he confirmed that it was peregrine. Said it had been in his backyard last week eating another bird.

Every time I see a bird of prey now, I think of the fate of dysfunctional departments (here). And that's a reminder: It's getting to be time for an update on local university finances/politics.

But for now, what a sleek, beautiful animal — even if it's a born killer.

Thee, thou, thine in contemporary American English?

I've just started reading a remarkable and disturbing book on Mormon Fundamentalists, called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. (These are not the LDS people many of us know, but rather hard-core polygamists you've heard about in the news, like Warren Jeffs.) I read it on the recommendation of one of our contributors, who's just finished wolfing it down.

There are some striking patterns in the language of the fundamentalists quoted and paraphrased in the book. This is most readily apparent in the language of 'revelations from God', which seem to be mostly rough and ready efforts to do King James English. But on p. 14, we get a hypothetical conversation with a sect leader:

I'm sorry I've done this to displease thee. What would thou have me do?

That's odd, I thought ... is it like the famous Quaker pattern of pronominal use? I knew about — have even heard scholarly papers on — Utah English, including ample attention to Mormon usage, like for heck as a near-curse. So, I google 'Mormon language' and get lots of stuff about the original plates that Joseph Smith found in upstate New York from which he translated the Book of Mormon. (There's quite a literature on this, it turns out; and sorry if I'm lacking on details of the history here — that's why I'm reading the book.)

In poking around a little longer, I found arguments from (mainstream) LDS leaders for a kind of hagiodialectal style difference (this one from here):

In our day the words thee, thou, thy, and thine are suitable for the language of prayer, not because of how they were used anciently, but because they are currently obsolete in common English discourse. Being unused in everyday communications, they are now available as a distinctive form of address in English, appropriate to symbolize respect, closeness, and reverence for the one being addressed.

Look at this passage from the book, in the same register (from p. 164 in a revelation):

And the thing that ye have thought concerning the One Mighty and Strong is correct. … For was not Moses the One Might and Strong … and art thou not One Mighty and Strong …?

We've got ye, adjectives after a noun (in a fixed phrase, granted), for in an archaic use, and art thou. When these people are quoted as speaking freely, they speak clear western English with lots of non-standard features, then various switches to this.

That you'd get this with fundamentalists is unsurprising: As Karen Armstrong says in The Battle for God (quoted in the book), fundamentalist movements are about "a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices from the past." In fact, the quote above about prayer suggests that it's not just fundamentalists, and only slightest milder views can be found among (what I take to be) protestants defending the language of the King James Bible, like here.

But in looking around on this issue, I see basically no mention of this pattern in Mormon English … the Quakers are constantly mentioned, as are British dialects that retain some of the older pronouns, etc. Wikipedia's thou entry even has a section of 'religious uses' but nothing there either.

Update: Definitely read the comments below, and also this additional post.

Why this gap?