Foreign Accent Syndrome, kind of, on the Simpsons

Homer Simpson, after a little incident involving being buried alive (long story), suddenly has a great operatic voice. I liked him better pointing a pistol at me (see pic), but what's the deal here? Groening playing on the story of foreign accent syndrome?

How good can it get?

Lisa: Dad, you contributed to our culture!
Homer: I didn't mean to!

Seems like one of the best episodes ever.

Oh yeah, by the way, Go Pack Go!

"The Google" for older adults

I still haven't gotten around to the r in aptronym (or even responded to the Ridger's comments), haven't said a word about the stuff in the Seed article by Uriagereka I linked to (and which various people have commented on, both on this blog and in private). Let me just note in passing that I just heard intrícacies on the radio — in an ad, not free speech. Reminded me that it sure seems like the intégral pronunciation is everywhere right now (recency illusion?). I'm surprised that a really cursory check doesn't reveal anything big on that, but it was VERY cursory.

Be that all as it is, you gotta read the new Onion. Like this piece, "Google Launches 'The Google' for Older Adults." Of course Bush famously used 'the Google' in a press conference last year, but it's part of a package of ways of mocking ignorance of the digital age grammatically. Better known, I suppose, is "the internets."

Just fyi: There is nothing at "thegoogle.com" or "the-google.com".

Madison, Wisc.: City of Aptronyms

Since reading about aptronyms, names that fit their holders, at Away with Words and on the Freakonomics blog, we've all been having the occasional smile as we notice new ones.

Like any town this size, we have lots of aptronyms in the local scene. There is a Dr. Bonebrake — said to be a bone guy (though I haven't confirmed that), to give one example.

The City of Madison is really strong in this regard. Our waste and recycling person is George Dreckman, who's kind of a local personality. The missus (not her real name) got her new bike license yesterday, with a letter, as she pointed out, signed by Bicycle Registration Coordinator John Rider. Our Common Council includes alders named Clear, Judge and Solomon. No wonder our town is relatively well run. I don't even need to mention the pronunciation maven Miss Pronouncer (a French name? OK, I confess, not her real name either).

Where will it go from here? My hopes are on a leader for the Republican Assembly minority leader named Dr. Eeevil. (OK, my hopes are on a Republican minority in the Assembly generally, but that's off topic ... .)

Talk like Bush!

I gotta find some time to actually write a little, but for now, read this and this! Samples of how Bush is being told to pronounce hard foreign names like 'Caracas'.

Just don't think Bush is the only one to do it ... Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" also involved crib notes. (See below.)

Or if you're truly boring and want to read something about the evolution of language by a linguist, see here.

Whorf-Sapir … explains soccer!

No time to blog right now, but check THIS piece out.

The doc is definitely right: The new meds are helping out. I didn't even scream on reading this article. Soon, if I mix in the right amount of booze, maybe I'll be able to watch Bush press conferences.

Gotta run …

[ʍ]at's that?

As things go on the set of tubes known as the internet, I try to be pretty careful about copyright and intellectual property rights. In talking to lawyers and law professors (informally), the broad practice seems to be this: Post what you want as long as it's not obviously restricted, credit sources and if somebody objects, you'll hear about it and have to take it down.

But I never expected to have to deal with the issue more directly. Ha. This week, I got the URL of a YouTube piece from Family Guy about cool whip, where Stewie repeated and pointedly pronounces whip with a voiceless [ʍ]. That video is available here and a pretty funny parody of it here, with the original soundtrack. (Watch at least one of these!)

Then, I found a YouTube video called "Family Guy cool whip while wherid!", with lots of [ʍ] stuff in it — including a pretty odd S&M kind of scene (must have missed that episode). I tried repeatedly to post it to this blog, but it didn't link and I now discover (see here) that "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation". What a drag. As the title suggests, it runs through a set of voiceless pronunciations with wh spellings, and ends on weird with that initial. That's as close as I want to come to copyright conflict, and it deprives us of a cool video.

Increasingly, English speakers have lost this sound, merging it with plain old [w], so that witch and which, weather and whether, why and Y sound alike. The beginning of merger is usually dated back to Middle English, as part of the broader simplification of initial h+consonant clusters, like hl-, hr-, hn-, all of which were present in Old English. But it's conditioned in kind of cool ways too. This is just the last cluster standing. (Or maybe it's a Cluster's Last Stand?). So, it adds to the humor that it's a kid producing it, and doing it so emphatically.

Its retention is usually regarded as, at least in part, a kind of spelling pronunciation kept alive by schools. (For broad discussion of such things, see this paper: Blevins, Juliette. 2006. “New perspectives on English sound patterns: ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in evolutionary phonology,” Journal of English Linguistics 34.6-25.) And that opens the door to hypercorrection: If speakers lack the [ʍ], they might produce it for [w]. (That may have happened in the history of whit, from Germanic *wihti- and connected to wight.)

Morphological analysis in pop culture

I keep expecting to read an insightful analysis of this ad somewhere on a language-related blog, but haven't seen it pop up yet. It's the new "More Taste League" commercial for Miller Lite, yes, for the record, Wisconsin's lamest single product.

At one point in the commercial, they give a set of snowclone-like phrases:

• the yin and the yang
• the oy and the vey
• the bada and the bing
• the chimi and the changa

Look at the ordering … a known phrase to build from, then a phrase pressed onto the template, then one of those rhyming reduplication deals (dear readers, and you know who you are, please give us the lowdown on such phrases), then finally a monomorphemic word. And the phonological weight increases over the set too. We go from Chinese (traditional 陰陽, I think), to Yiddish, American pseudo-Italian (?), and American Spanish (see here for one history of the word — I had my first one in Tucson just after 1980, I think). Man, that's freaking poetry.

Does this also feel vaguely related to the degrammaticalization stuff? These writers are slicing up words and treating the pieces as nouns ... playfully.

More endangered languages ...

NPR just ran a little piece on the Harrison et al. project on endangered languages. Nice thing is, they included a lot of little sound files, words or phrases in endangered languages. Audio should be up here in a few hours, here. But the best thing is to check out the project's map directly, here.

Major update: See here. Apparently reports on the project (maybe the project itself) didn't exactly get some major facts right, and in some serious ways.

Word of the Year ... early thoughts

Let's be clear: I'm not slacking off (except in the subgenius sense — I've always pulled the wool over my own eyes). Just been pretty down after a harsh attack on the recent Petraeus / Betray us post. No, it wasn't a rightwing nut job going off on me about treason. It was a contributor to this blog who indelicately noted, in so many words, that Petraeus can't be an aptronym. And they wouldn't buy my argument that it's about homophony.

Over on ADS, there's been some early stirring on WOTY candidates. One of my lackies will, I trust, nominate peevology / peevologist for most useful, if not Word of the Year directly. Aptronym isn't new but seems to have picked up some steam this year. I'm not overwhelmed by the suggestions I've heard so far ... .

PS: Nice piece in the NYT today about endangered languages, here. (Thanks, anon.)

The REAL bin Laden-Chomsky connection

Normally, I follow doctor's orders, like "don't ever read or listen to far rightwing psychos." But a regular reader of this blog yesterday mentioned the Chomsky reference in the latest bin Laden tape. I've been so busy that I'd only vaguely registered that bit of info; in the meantime, it's become bigger than the Threat of President Hillary on rightwing blogs.

Somehow, I felt I wasn't getting the whole story. But MindHacks to the rescue … here. Key excerpt from their revelation of the rest of the transcript:

People of America: while the cognitive revolution started within your own shores and changed the face of the world, it seems the lessons of the destruction of behaviourism have not been learnt. …

Now that the spector of connectionism has raised its ugly head and has been inappropriately glorified by the power of technological corporations, our understanding of the role of transformational grammars in language development is threatened. …

The infallible methodologies are the comparative study of world languages and lesion analyses of those who must be treated with mercy owing to their acquired dysphasias. …

Brilliant.

Keillor on Colbert

Everybody in the US, probably, knows the stereotype of fast-talking northerners and slow-talking southerners. (It's also topic of an upcoming talk by some linguists, I gather, including a local or two.)

Just caught the rerun of last night's Colbert Report, featuring Garrison Keillor. Barely over him saying tundra with an [ʊ], Keillor really surprised me: He described Minnesotans as slow-talking!

Miscellanea

Little things are starting to pile up that don't or no longer warrant full posts …

• Petraeus = Betray us is suddenly a very famous aptronym. It's been popping up of late, but now has exploded: see here, or catch how MoveOn was condemned in Congress today for using it.
• Over at Greenbelt, the Ridger has picked up something here from the news feed (on the right) that I just couldn't figure out what to do with: Some Army billboards in the Chicago area aiming to recruit Arabic speakers. A guy is offended because he can't read them. Part of what gave me pause was the one line in English: "If you can read this, call Mohamed." The 'if you can read this' thing is kind of cute (and gets a ton of g-hits, like "If you can read this ... consider yourself in the minority"), but even though it's a very common given name, in this context 'call Mohamed' sounds like some odd euphemism somehow. Thanks, Ridger, I owe you.
  
• And Mark Liberman just beat me to a piece in a Straight Dope column from last week's Onion, about the shrinking-American-vocabulary hoax.
• Omniglot — the blog is something I hadn't read until just recently and he picks up on the degrammaticalization here, with some interesting comments. Separated by a Common Language also had a nice post on the topic, with some pieces of the puzzle that were new to me.
  

Oh no, it's not just semantics anymore!

Here, the Pocono Record has broadened the war on the scientific study of language ... in talking about Larry Craig's problems (well, one small subset of them, those connected to this career as an elected official), they write:

He's launching a whole new campaign in linguistics, revolving around what the word "intend" really means.

This sure looks like a situation that used to be described with "mere semantics" or something. Now, our whole field is tied into this creep lying.

And yes, that was a real band, it appears — see here.

When do we look up words?

Me, I'm a pretty heavy dictionary user ... I look up words to see if there's some meaning I don't have a handle on even when it's not immediately relevant, or wondering if there's some etymological wrinkle, or just to see when the word is first attested, whatever. You just don't know what you might learn about language, history, technology. And that's pure pleasurable curiosity, since my work with language doesn't involve words in any serious way.

With the most famous generation of American lexicographers since Noah Webster — the good-god-almighty dictionary people like Ben Zimmer, Erin McKean, Jesse Sheidlower — you read their stuff and know they love words like Montgomery Burns loves gold bullion. I figure they wear out paper dictionaries faster than toothbrushes.

Contrast that with William Safire — he makes his living off of talking about words, but seems to be very choosy about when he touches a dictionary. As noted before (search 'Safire'), I started blogging in part to vent about Safire's amateurish meanderings. And I learned, as the bumper sticker has it: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." But, as Elvis Costello said so well, "Oh, I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused".* Amused but curious: One of his constant blunders is failing to look up the words he's discussing in the dictionary. Why, then, of all columns, does he start out "Redact this" today with:

When with-it users of language need a word to describe a suddenly increasing activity, we either create a new one — a neologism like blog, a borrowing like au courant — or we dust off a somewhat-related old word and give it a whole new meaning.

First off, for the kids, with-it means 'up-to-date' or something. He actually had his assistant look up redact in OED, to pull a citation from 1432? Then, the meaning has changed, and he doesn't raise hell about it? What makes this change OK when a gazillion others aren't?

OK, maybe I don't care that much.

I'm bored
I'm the chairman of the bored

— Iggy Pop

* In honor of his affection for threadbare platitudes, I thought about constructing this post entirely out of cliches from beyond his cultural realm. Too hard. My average writing time per post is now up to about 2 minutes, 45 seconds, way too high.

A twist on language and politics

I happened to see a Democratic representative from the Wisconsin assembly yesterday, one who's serving now on the committee working to resolve the insane budget disputes here, including a barely survivable budget for higher education versus one with draconian cuts in higher ed. I had a chance to speak to him briefly and ask how it was going. He said:

Well, when you have one budget that's in English and another one that's in Sanskrit, you've got a problem.

Sadly, I didn't have a chance to explain to him that Wisconsin is one of few public universities where he could actually get help on that. But that won't last forever.

An even better aptronym

Alberto Gonzo Laws.

It's around on the web, and I happened to hear it just now.

And a tiny footnote to Monica's baseball posts: The other night, I caught a player saying serieses as a plural for series. Didn't sound like a performance error to the extent you can catch that.

the second-best game

Although I love hockey with all my heart, I advocate polyamory (at least with respect to sports), and baseball is right up there. And of course part of what's so great about baseball is the announcers, who speak a strange and wonderful dialect of English. They possess a weird ability to change the valence of verbs, adding predicates wherever they please (stranded the bases loaded). But this one stopped me cold - and I heard it twice, on two consecutive days, so it wasn't a speech error:

If that gets through, the Brewers take the lead.

The thing is, it's an irrealis conditional - the ball didn't get through. (And they weren't showing the play while saying it.) I'm used to the baseball use of present tense form for future time reference: The series starts tomorrow. But this is yet another use of present tense. Wikipedia (source of all knowledge) says "zero conditionals" can be formed this way, but that's supposed to be under realis conditions (If it rains, we're in deep doodoo). Contrary-to-fact past conditionals normally take past perfect or would+have (If you had told me..., If you woulda told me...), but present tense is just downright weird, at least to me. I guess it's an extension of the in-the-moment narration use: the announcer wants to make you feel like you're there, seeing the play as it happens.

(Image is of Ryan Braun, Brewer's heartthrob candidate for rookie of the year.)

I heart word-formation

OMG I just logged into Blogger and saw this notice:

You may have seen stories in the news recently about malware on Blogger, such has this one from the BBC or this one from Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Malware? Malware? wow. (But rest assured, Blogger was not affected by this malware.)

"Be friended" query

Doonesbury has a Facebook thing going now, and yesterday's had this sentence:

I thought I'd be friended exponentially by now if I just had a hotter picture.

I don't actually know much about Facebook and other SNSs (save for this),* but figure this must be specifically about adding 'friends', right? Any sense of spread in meaning? I've been wondering if stuff like this would make the jump into general usage.

*The only person associated with this blog who's on Facebook long and proudly joked about opening his profile to see "X has no friends at Wisconsin" or something.

Save Bucky

Even the Wisconsin Alumni Association is urging help for Bucky Badger, here.

New snow clone? No, old eggcorn

You would visit Polyglot Conspiracy regularly if only to bask in the brilliant glow of that blog name. But sometimes she gets the meat of the bat on a fast ball that you watch the reruns of for a while. So it was with "keyphrasal fun", looking at what searches had led people to her blog. Just played the game tonight, and found this:

great vowel shift in lame mans terms

I didn't even realize what this was until I read it out loud to the missus, and she said "snowclone!" It is … as Drew points out in the comments ... an eggcorn, not a snowclone (or, as my fingers just tried to make it, a snoneclow, which would be a kind of typographical spoonerism or something.)

lay man > lame man

It is, as Ben Z points out, in the eggcorn database, but I didn't find direct hits on Language Log or even by googling (although I'm real busy and only did the most cursory of searches.) Reanalysis of word boundaries with nasals is known in English: a nadder/an adder, an apkin/a napkin, an ewt/a newt are all talked about — not vouching for the histories here, of course. But this is different, I think: You get layman as a compound, and for some speakers the 'lay' part of the compound is probably not too transparent (I suppose I say 'lay public', but it's pretty marginal for me.) So, maybe somebody takes the little step to seeing layman as a really negative term.

PS to the searcher: Post a comment or email me and I'll happily send you refs on non-technical treatments of the Great Vowel Shift. And if you even wonder: I revere exactly this kind of creative use of language, like almost all readers of this blog. It's who we are, it's what we do.

Image from some story about Jesus explaining historical phonology to some layman.

Another aptronym?

Yesterday, somone pointed out a possible aptronym in an email. These are names that particularly fit their owners and Nancy Friedman has talked about them some here (and see the Freakonomics contest if you like the notion). The wikipedia entry includes examples like these:

• Margaret Court, tennis player
• Alicia Keys, musician (pianist)
• Bill Medley, singer, one half of The Righteous Brothers
• Chris Moneymaker, winner of 2003 World Series of Poker
• Anna Smashnova, tennis player
• Lake Speed, former Nascar driver

Better is the one found by following the links above, Paige Worthy, editor at Good magazine.

Just heard a new suggestion for one on the radio: General Petraeus read as Betray us.

Miss Pronouncer (or it that Mispronouncer?) in the news

As always, Ben Zimmer has his nose to the grindstone — holiday or no — and he's looking out for the Verbs. He alerted me to an LA Times article (here) about Wisconsin's famous Miss Pronouncer website. (Ben also coined a new adjective, Misterverbian, but that's one for another day.) Now, even on Labor Day, Nancy Friedman too has emailed on the subject. It's great to know that folks have your back — are helping you cover your own turf.

For the record, I've been going to MissPronouncer.com for years and lots of other linguists do too. Really, we need a resource for pronouncing proper names in this Wisconsin … Chequamegon National Forest is a stunning place (see image), but I didn't connect the placename I saw on maps with the string of sounds I heard on Public Radio until I'd been here a while. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's name doesn't pose a problem if you have been around Polish (even Polish names) at all, but it's joked about and mangled so often that a quick, safe reference is welcome for many, I'm sure. So, this website provides much useful information.

But people can't just leave good enough alone? (Or is that well enough? Gotcha.) As Ben points out, Miss Pronouncer rails against the familiar Wes-consin pronunciation:

The website has the tagline "And by the way, please slap anyone who says WESconsin!" -- word rage at its finest.

Yup. Let's just overlook the significant legal problem of encouraging assault and battery. You're missing the fun and glory of Wisconsin and Wisconsin English if you rant about that ... getting so bent out of shape about something that feels so right to so many folks here is just, well, un-Wisconsin. Can you root for the Pack and complain about Wes-consin? Chomp down on a brat with kraut? Have another Leinie's while you're waiting for the bluegills to bite? I didn't think so. Even if they do it in [ɛ]llinois too (here).

Degrammaticalization as liberation

In recent decades a whole industry has sprung up pursuing grammaticalization, that is, how content words (like nouns or adjectives or, yes, verbs) become more grammatical elements, such as creating new inflections. (This discussion of grammaticalization is generally unsatisfying, but gives some basics.) A common example is how the English going to future has given us a new future auxiliary gonna. Today, we use that contraction with the future form — "We're gonna relax today" sounds normal — but you can't do it with the content verb to go — *We're gonna Fond du Lac. (OK, not everybody wants to go to Fondie, but it's not a bad town.)

This idea got interesting for many of us when it made meaty predictions, like the "unidirectionality hypothesis", namely that things can go from being less grammatical to being more grammatical but not the other way around: Prefixes and suffixes cannot, it is claimed, become independent lexical words. But good examples of this exist, like the way adjectival -ish has become a word meaning something like 'sort of, kind of, but not really or exactly', like in this made-up example:

Is he rich?
Ish.

I think these things are popping up everywhere right now in English, usually in sort of playful usage — which is how I interpret the -ish story. If they are blossoming all over, it's pretty well fatal to unidirectionality, but that remains to be seen. A contributor to this blog just passed me an example so wonderful that I have to give it here, from Martha Ratliff at Wayne State, heard on NPR a couple years ago:

My favorite liberation story: I heard an athlete on a girl's high school basketball team in Nebraska say, in a response to being called a "Huskette" (the boy athletes are "Huskies"): "I am not an ette! I never have been and never will be an ette!"

It works really well because ette has a very clear meaning here, 'girl athlete' and pretty clearly inferior to males. And of all team names, the Huskies don't lend themselves to a women's team. Plus a young woman who's serious about her round ball is truly not an ette, not in a day when she could be thinking about college scholarships and turning pro. But it's even cooler for the name — degrammaticalization is awkward as a term, liberation is far better.

Reminds me of the old slogan: Free the bound morpheme!

Image of (real) huskies from here.

Newsfeed nuggets

I felt pretty dumb the other day when a regular reader of this blog started telling me about something they'd found in the Google newsfeed (to your right on this blog) that I hadn't seen:

Becky Roeder, who did an MA in linguistics here a few years ago and her PhD at Michigan State in sociolinguistics, is now working at the University of Toronto. She's still remembered fondly here, and now she's come home in some sense: She's working on English in Thunder Bay, Ontario, surely part of the Upper Midwest under any reasonable definition. Here's the article from the Thunder Bay paper on her fieldwork. The word on the street around here is that the Wisconsin Englishes guys are cooking up something with Kate Remlinger, known for her work on Yooper. Heck, we could have a whole network covering the region if Becky runs with this topic.

Of course, after missing that important story, I felt obligated to start checking the newsfeed and stumbled immediately across this story on Kim Tu-bong, one-time leader of North Korea and notable historical linguist.

WordGirl!

No, no, this one's not about Erin McKean. The NYT has a tease this morning for tomorrow's edition, specifically an Arts & Leisure piece coming about a new PBS series called WordGirl. The premise, if I get it, may bend your brain a little, but it's kinda cool: Ordinary girl transforms into superhero who solves problems with her large vocabulary. If you dig a little, like into the Parents and Teachers link, you can see the idea expanded:

WordGirl continually saves the day with the help of her vocabulary and through her problem-solving skills.

I'm still a little nervous that this might be the "language = vocabulary" view of the world. But there are things about alliteration, onomatopoeia, synonyms and antonyms, and — crucially — Acting out verbs:

This lesson focuses on verbs through a variation on the game “Charades.” Students will learn new vocabulary (verbs) by silently acting out the meaning of the words.

Dudes, verbs are anything but silent. Trust me on this.

But my mind reels from the possibilities ... do we get expert commentary on animal communication built around the monkey (see picture)? Will she salvage the Bush legacy with flash cards to give him impressive polysyllabics flawlessly produced in news conferences? Will the evil Dr. Anti-symmetry be foiled? Is it just about English or will she have, say, a friend from Seoul so that she can talk about the glories of Korean tense obstruents? Would be a chance to talk about VOT being replaced by pitch differences as the crucial cue! Will an episode be set up for her to be able to say lexicographical?