Regional stereotyping

A contributor has passed on one of those regional stereotype emails he'd just gotten from a colleague. It's about the South, with the predictable heavy focus on language. A couple of samples:

• Southern women know their cities dripping with Southern charm:
• Chawl'stn
• S'vanah
• Foat Wuth
• N'awlins
• Addlanna

• A Southerner knows that "fixin" can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adverb.
• In the South, y'all is singular, all y'all is plural.

As the person who passed it along said:

Calling fixin' an adverb is just people not understanding lexical categories, I imagine, and I know fixins as a noun, but not usually a fixin'. A shame they missed what's distinct about the southern verb. And singular y'all exists, but isn't common. I don't think of it as common in r-less regions and this person is putting on the r-less airs in a big way.

The thing closes with useful advice, at any rate:

• And to those of you [note continuity error: should be all y'all] who are still having a hard time understanding all this Southern stuff, bless your hearts, I hear they are fixin' to have classes on Southernness as a second language!
• And for those who are not from the South but have lived here for a long time, all y'all need a sign to hang on y'alls front porch that reads "I ain't from the South , but I got here as fast as I could."

By the way, that's Florence, Kentucky, not any of the ones in South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, leaving aside the ones that aren't clearly outside of y'all territory.

"To peel the bark off" somebody?

Everybody's heard about Bill Cunningham, who introduced McCain in Cincinnati the other day. He was hurling more crap than your average monkey can, including a demand that the media “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.” The phrase has been bugging me since.

I have a pretty good repertoire of colorful sayings, but couldn't make a connection here. But Joseph Cummins at Anythingforavote notes an important precedent, from the 1988 presidential race:

Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater famously said, re Dukakis: "I'll strip the bark off that little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate."

Still, what exactly does the phrase mean? The Dictionary of American Regional English has the noun bark meaning 'scalp' and to bark meaning 'to scalp', as well as to kill a squirrel by shooting off the limb it's on. I fervently hope this has nothing to do with any of that — and if it does, Cunningham should be in a lot more trouble than he is.

Atwater's quote sounds to me like he's going to destroy Dukakis, which could continue the old meaning(s). The recent use sounds like it's about exposing what the speaker assumes to be the real Obama.

Any ideas on what's going on here?

Image from here.

On CEO chancellors

A regular reader of this blog called my attention to this post by Stanley Fish, called aptly:

Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About the Job

It's about the catastrophic moves by the University of Colorado and University of West Virginia to hire non-academics as presidents, a politician in one case and a lobbyist in the other. Fish talks about the motivation of having "managers" in these positions and nods in the direction of this as a part of putting the nuts and bolts of academic operations in the hands of political/corporate powers.

The reader who passed along the link was concerned about the current UW–Madison chancellor's search. Here, we have a traditional requirement that chancellors be "tenurable members of the faculty". The word on the street is that the question was actually raised of whether we really needed that. I gather that the issue was resolved the right way and that the requirement will stand. In a recent meeting, I've heard that people were pressing some members of the search committee on how we'll be sure we're getting a chancellor who understands what faculty governance is about, and that's a more realistic concern, I think.

In other ways, too, things look better here than in Colorado — while our state support has slipped to well under 20%, Fish reports that the number in Colorado is 7%. Colorado's hardly a national leader in higher education, but that's bleak. (For once, I agree with Fish: "in what sense, exactly, is this a state university?") The challenges and problems Wisconsin faces are clearly national, even if some states (like Minnesota) are smart enough to avoid the worst of this trend.

I sure hope our search yields a new chancellor who pushes in the right direction.

Tagged with the historical meme

Somehow that title sounds like it's about being spray-painted by history buffs (maybe civil war reenactors?), but it's a new blog meme passed on by the Ridger over at the Greenbelt, a favorite blog for all of us at Team Verb. Here's the game:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

Now, Mr. V has been busy lately and as the resident historical linguist of our group, it apparently falls to me to do this. I'm teaching Gothic right now and Wulfila is an obvious target. He's not my 'favorite historical figure' in any usual senses — I wouldn't have particularly wanted to hang out with him — but he did something truly remarkable in translating at least most of the bible into Gothic and forging an alphabet to do it in (drawing heavily on Greek, of course). And we know plenty about him for a Germanic guy who lived in the fourth century C.E.

1. His name really does mean 'little wolf' — wulfs + ila — like Attila means 'little daddy' (atta + ila).
2. The Gothic bible of course doesn't bear his name anywhere, but a number of sources not long after him talk about his work.
3. His father is thought to have been a Goth.
4. His mother was apparently Cappadocian Greek, from a family probably captured by Gothic raiders.
5. He was a big proponent of the "Arian heresy" and successful in converting lots of Goths to this form of Christianity, which kept Christianity divided doctrinally for a long time.
   
6. There's long been speculation about whether his work helped inspire Cyril in developing an alphabet for Slavic.
   
7. The famous Codex Argenteus, the main manuscript of Gothic, was presumably done in Ravenna (a Gothic cultural center in northern Italy) a couple centuries after Wulfila's time. The alphabet there differs in some ways from some other documents in Gothic. For example, Argenteus uses a Latin-like s symbol, while a Bible inscription found on a little sheet of lead in a fifth-century tomb in Hács-Béndekpuszta, Hungary (along with the Codex Ambrosianus) uses basically a Greek sigma.

On the last point, look at this reconstruction of the Hács piece:

Going up to the raised dot on the second line, it transliterates like this:

ni þanaseiþs im in þamma fairƕau
'no/not still am in this world'
'I'm no longer in this world'

Compare that to the same chunk from the Codex Argenteus :

PS: I'm happy to play the game, but don't want to bug other bloggers.

The UW fund-raising machine

This piece in the NYT this morning gives the latest info on donations raised by public and private universities in the US. Of course the big privates own this game, with Stanford alone raising $832 million in fiscal 2007. Yes, that's almost one billion dollars in a single year. That amount would be an impressive total endowment for almost any school in the country. For those of us who see easy access to high-quality higher education as a central part of a healthy society, this is unsettling for various reasons not discussed in the article, especially for state universities. For example, large chunks of that money is directed to specific areas, which may or may not serve the real needs of universities suffering the collapse of traditional public funds.

Wisconsin is on that list, of course, and very high up for a public institution. And Wisconsin has been very aggressive about raising this kind of money. But if you look at the graphic (linked in the on-line version, printed in the morning edition), you'll see that our rate of increase is extremely low.

Joke placenames: Berserkistan

I've written before about the placename element -stan and its use. It's not only for playing on American ignorance of Central Asia, but gets extended to the U.S., as noted earlier: Dumbfuckistan = 'parts of the United States that voted for Bush'.

A couple of times, most recently this morning on the radio, I've heard Berserkistan, basically meaning, as far as I can tell, the transparent 'crazy land'. This cracks me up for a presumably unintended reason: I can't hear that joke without thinking of it as the land of the original guys called berserkr, the warrior cult — not the metal band. That's a stamp you don't want in your passport.

Sports slang

With -4º F this morning in Madison, lots of folks are happily thinking about the start of spring training, at least those who find an implicit promise of the coming of spring in there. (Winter does strange things to the mind, at times.)

Some other sports are already rolling, literally. Sunday's Daytona 500 saw the "Car of Tomorrow" become the "Car of Today", still known as the C.O.T. The use of regional English in NASCAR broadcasts has serious potential as a dissertation topic, but even minor naming patterns are remarkable: The announcers call each other by last names often, for example, like "Hammond, what do you have to say from the pits?", where first names are the only way to go for most TV. You still get classic southern nicknames showing up, such as Dale Earnhardt, Jr. being referred to as June Bug (pretty common nickname for young men, I gather).

But just after I was pondering this matter while watching the prologue to the Tour of California (sadly sponsored by biotech firm Amgen) the other night, a regular reader alerted me to this (see also here, just scroll down.) It's Rory Sutherland's race diary. I really like that riders in the stage races do on-line diaries — gives you a feel for how they see things. But he's from Oz and wants great Aussie quotes and slang.

Oh yeah, don't forget to vote today, Wisconsinites, whether you consider yourself a Sconnie, a Cheesehead, or somebody from Wisco.

Excuses for a February Party

This from the Wisconsin Almanac, under "Excuses for a February Party":
[Feb.]18 Elm Farm Ollie Day.
On February 18 the Elm Farm Ollie Fan Club of Madison honors the anniversary of the first time a cow flew in an airplane. As part of the celebration of the St. Louis International Air Exposition in 1930, Elm Farm Ollie was milked in flight, then little containers of her milk were parachuted over the city.

Another goalie video

I'm not sure whether comment is possible or necessary here, but this isn't like any McDonald's ad I've ever seen …

The evolution of 'Democrat' (adj.)?

Language-oriented bloggers, including me, have made a lot of the use of cropping in political speech: Bush and others have picked up the old Joe McCarthy cropping of Democratic to Democrat. I've seen a few signs here and there lately of this form where it pretty clearly wasn't intended to be pejorative, but I don't recall it being noted anywhere yet.

I half-consciously noted such a use on, I think, NPR a while back by an elected Democratic politician, but didn't even note who it was and have since caught a couple other uses where it was clearly neutral, either from the context or from knowing the politics of the speaker. Today, the decidedly left-leaning Raw Story uses it in a headline (using a screen capture since the actual link doesn't use that form):

There, on the right side of the second line, you can see. At the same time, today's Wisconsin State Journal — a Republican paper to be sure, but hardly the most knuckle-dragging operation around — has a headline:

Democrat choice is tough for some

Is this a cropping that's losing it's sting?

Language decline = threat to democracy

This just passed along by a regular reader.


We've all gotten used to the cries about the decline of language and the decline of civilization, but this one sounds a kind of unique note. Yeah, whatevs.

The Vowel Wars rage on …

I've blogged about it forever, but the anti-Wesconsin crew is out again, here, in the local Madison media. What's currently the last comment, by maggieg, nails it:

Different parts of the country pronounce different letters and/or words differently than what we are used to here in our state. To them, the way they pronounce Wisconsin is correct according to its spelling. I suggest that the person(s) upset about the way it is pronounced start paying attention to the different speech patterns around the country. The individuals who say Wisconsin differently than we natives do are not trying to be offensive, it is what they grew up with … .

Hurrah, a reasonable point!

Now, let's get a little more detailed (sorry for those who don't know about the Northern Cities Shift and such — you can read earlier posts on that). I'm still waiting for somebody out there to note that in southeast Wisconsin, [ɪ] lowering is part of a robust regional pattern. Interesting little sociolinguistic issue attached to this: Will we get a lexical exception here on the state name, while other high front lax vowels continue to lower? So, will we hear Wisconsin but whiskers showing up as wheskers? Or is this a sign of growing resistance to the Northern Cities Shift? Some people seem to be thinking that NCS is pretty fractured here anyway, so the latter seems possible.

Obama in Madison

Well, Barack Obama arrived in Madison tonight and the Kohl Center was jammed to the rafters to hear him. (I wonder how many got turned away.) He gave a broad, inspiring speech to an excited audience. And he was blending away … he's been talking about being a hopemonger for a while (and it gets tons of g-hits), but I didn't yet know Obamacan until tonight (see here for details).

Patchouli …

This one is for one of our contributors, who has an intense dislike of patchouli: Bumper sticker just spotted on Madison's ultra-hip Willy Street:

Patchouli is not a bath

More substantative posts are coming, I promise. In the mean time, see some of you at the Obama rally tonight, if I can get in …

Peevology: Quip of the day

OK, the day is still young to declare anything 'X of the day', especially for any of you who sleep, but this should hold up until midnight:

The liturgical core of peevology is the ritual lamentation of lost causes.

– Mark Liberman, here

Strong/weak verbs and meaning in English …

In a comment on a recent post, hh raises an excellent question:

there's an interesting directionality to the irregularity. I wonder whether, in causative/inchoative pairs where only one is irregular, it's always the inchoative?

Now, I'm not worthy to answer any questions about word forms, especially not those raised by someone who understands morphology, but out here in the blogosphere, qualifications apparently play no role in letting loose. So, despite my complete ignorance of the vast literature on this general area, where all relevant data have surely been fully analyzed, here goes …

In looking at causative/inchoative pairs, I wasn't seeing any variation in inflection that I could spot, so I tried from the other direction: Below is a list of English verbs where regular/irregular inflection is said to correlate with some difference in meaning.* I'll just list the strong forms, since the weak forms are pretty clear, unless there are two distinct forms beyond -ed.

• bid, bade, bidden (vs. bid, bid, bid)
  
• blow, blew, blown
• cost, cost, cost
• get, got, gotten (vs. got)
• hang, hung, hung
• heave hove, hove
• knit, knit, knit
• shine, shone, shone
• slay, slew, slain
• speed, sped, sped
• stave, stove, stove
• work, wrought, wrought (archaic, of course, as they note)
  

The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (see Jan's comment on the earlier post**) treats virtually all of these. Bid, bid, bid is said to be preferred for 'to make a bid', but "in other senses" bade is "most common". Regular staved seems restricted to 'to stave off', and they have slayed primarily in the theatrical sense of 'to be a great hit with'. I had to look up blowed to be sure that it was in the fixed phrases like 'I'll be blowed' (in addition to dialect), but even that sounds pretty marginal to me.

Beyond that, this list has some oddities, at least for my intuitions.

• First, going back to the original example that triggered this, while shined/shone is in there, outshine is listed only as strong.
  
• Second, I have no intuition at all about most of these, or didn't immediate consider them the same verb — hove is simply a nautical term or really archaic.
  
• For some others they don't count, I do have a clear sense: lit works for various figurative uses where lighted just doesn't — like 'to spin the tires on a car' ("Earnhardt really lit'em up coming out of the pits"). The strong form seems like it might be better generally for causative uses.

The hanged/hung distinction is maybe the best known of these pairs. It's historically driven: English used to have a transitive/intransitive pair here, parallel to lay/lie, set/sit, that collapsed for this verb, as they have for many people in those other two examples. But MWDEU comes to the right conclusion:

The distinction between hanged and hung is not an especially useful one … . It is, however, a simple one and certainly easy to remember. Therein lies its popularity. If you make a point of observing the distinction in your writing, you will not thereby become a better writer, but you will spare yourself the annoyance of being corrected for having done something that is not wrong.

Beautiful! And right! There's the case for following lots of prescriptions. But in the end, I'm not seeing a clear correlation in this little dataset. But surely there's more data and this question has been answered somewhere that I just don't know about.

*Data from the English strong verb appendix to the Oxford Duden German Dictionary — the first place I found such a list.

**Don't miss Jan's column today on language and politics, here.

David Brooks does sociolinguistics?

It's been a busy day, but can't let it pass without noting that ever-flailing NYT columnist and famed neuroendocrinologist David Brooks has now ventured into what I think is probably sociolinguistics:

The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment.

(The on-line version lacks a period at the end.)

NYT shining a shade less gray this morning?

I always assume pretty conservative usage from the NYT. More precisely, if dictionaries list two options, I expect to see the old-fashioned one in their page. So, I was a little surprised by this headline:

Clinton’s Fund-Raising Success Is Outshined by Obama’s

They used the verb form I would have, but I probably would have avoided a past participle in a prominent place, like a headline, because neither option — outshone or outshined — sounds completely comfortable.

Language and immigration: German-style

Not only in the U.S. are language and immigration a hot issue — something Mr. V has occasionally noted. In Germany, there's a lot of negative reaction to English loanwords from prescriptivists (and the American pinheads have nothing on these guys), as well as to the presence of languages other than German in contemporary Germany. But other currents are running right now …

First, it's nice to see some positive attention coming to loanwords from powerful groups in Germany. Check out this initiative (graphic from there):

"Wörter mit Migrationshintergrund"
Wir suchen das beste eingewanderte Wort.

That's basically 'immigrant words' or "words with a migration background", more stiffly translated, and "we're looking for the best immigrant word". This is being supported by the Goethe Institut, Deutscher Sprachrat, Duden, and others. If you read the materials, it's aimed at celebrating immigration, and lexical borrowing.

Second, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Society for the German Language) publishes a little journal called Der Sprachdienst. In the last 2007 issue, they ran a piece by Dennis Scheller-Boltz called:

McDonald's – McAnwalt* – McFit – McFlight.

The piece gives a pile of interesting data on how productive the Mc- prefix is in German right now, especially in company names. Amazingly, at least from my perspective, is that it means not only that a product is cheap and fast, but also that it's of good quality.

*Anwalt = attorney

Biking culture, winter note

There's a thing in the culture of road bikers about when you do and don't greet another cyclist on the road as you pass going opposite directions. Basically, if you're out on the open road where there aren't lots of riders, you wave or nod. If you pass close or are really out in the middle of nowhere, you yell hi. On city bikepaths, where you expect to be passing folks all the time, you never greet. When it's bitter cold, like -15º F, you might get a quick nod or an index finger lifted off the handlebar, kind of 'ah, another hardy soul'. So, the amount of acknowledgment of other riders is inversely proportional to the amount of bike traffic.

This morning, the streets were pretty empty of cars, with blinding snow and rapidly deteriorating conditions. Riding to and from hockey on city paths, several people said 'hi' and everybody was acknowledging each other with a nod or something. And there were still plenty of fresh bike tracks in the snow.

"New Humanities"

Check out this video about the transformation of English at Rutgers, done by the department chair. The video itself is slick and about hustling money, I guess, but the idea of a "Center for New Humanities" has got real appeal. Around 5:45, note that he says the humanities "somewhat lost its way" and, more importantly, argues that the "real function of the humanities" is to be creative "to improve the quality of the world we live in".

Here is a department that's at least working hard to confront their situation.

Huckles: More redneck than you

A little note on the expression of regional identity in current American politics:

I just heard on NPR that the right reverend Mike Huckabee is touring southern states for the upcoming Super(duper) Tuesday. He's got "Sweet Home Alabama" as his background music and he's saying about Willard "Mittens" Romney that "a Southern man don't need him around anyhow" or some variant of that Lynyrd Skynyrd lyric.

He already endorsed the South Carolina flag (which includes the stars and bars) and then he was all I-cooked-a-squirrel-in-a-popcorn-popper. Isn't that the non plus ultra of rednecker than thou?* What's next? "Hell yeah, she's my first cousin, and we got married when she was 12"? Handing out copperheads and rattlers as a test of faith at campaign rallies? I assume he's already driving the General Lee to campaign stops.

We've gotten used to politicians exploiting regional and social identity crudely: Bush — scion of one of the richest families and the most powerful family in American politics — successfully sold himself as good old boy to non-elite Republicans. Is Huckles unraveling that ploy by being a real redneck, not a carefully crafted pseudo-redneck?

*Yup, that's an ill-turned phrase. Sorry.

Image from WisconsinHunter. People do it up here too.

Lax societies, lax languages

When this blog was young and curious, we poked sticks at the bizarre stuff language mavens, peevologists and other cranks were leaving on the sidewalk of public dialogue about language. That quickly got old and, besides, the stuff is icky and stinky. Still, every so often, I find a specimen so odd that it warrants passing mention.

Take the Vocabula Review and today's announcement titled "Language Guardian" — a title taken from a piece about them in the WSJ. First, look at that banner … seven flags with this claim below it:

A society is generally as lax as its language.

This makes a clear prediction, but one that's hard to test. How can we gauge the laxness of a language or of a society? I'm happy to gather the data and run the test if somebody can suggest how to measure these things. Is it slackness of the vocal folds (say, measured by muscle activity over a particular utterance) and the corruptness of politicians (measured by the wealth they accumulate in office)? Is it the looseness of the requirement that subjects of clauses be agents (cf. "the dollar doesn't buy much right now") correlated with having loose bowels? (Sorry but that's actually the first definition of lax in Merriam-Webster's.)

I want to know who ranks where – does the wheel on the Indian flag reflect the steady motion of an orderly society where careful usage is respected? Does the amount of spilled beer on Melbourne pub tables compared to that found in Newcastle mean that our friends in Oz are lagging far behind the Pommies linguistically? (Or maybe I'm misjudging barkeeping in those places?)

What does it mean that the more visually appealing flags of officially English-speaking countries aren't represented? I like the flag of the Bahamas and South Africa's bold design. Are those societies being implicitly considered too lax to merit inclusion? If so, I'd protest that pretty vigorously.

Then, consider this, excerpted from the WSJ article about the magazine:

Despite what linguists and lexicographers have been spouting for some years now, people -- including Wall Street Journal readers -- are interested in reading and writing and hearing clear, expressive, inspiring English.

Now, some of my best friends are linguists and lexicographers, and I pay some attention to what they spout. When and where has a linguist or lexicographer argued that people aren't interested in reading, writing and/or hearing "clear, expressive, inspiring English"? Do they even deal with such matters? Maybe the LSA should just own up and start a crusade for muddy, dull, deadening English? (Or did I miss something in the last Bulletin?)

Finally, here's the closing plea to subscribe:

Do you, too, prize well-spoken, well-written language? Do you believe all right is correct and alright is nonsense, that predominant is an adjective and predominate a verb, that blithering politicians ought not to be elected to higher office, that a society is generally as lax as its language?

Finally, we've got examples of usage, and I do love data, but is alright less clear, expressive or inspiring than all right? I'm deeply opposed to blithering politicians, but are we more worried about pols splitting infinitives or lying us into war?

All in all, the substance of the argument looks pretty incoherent and the Vocabula's own prose is deader than Strunk, but it's without a single copy-editing glitch or misspelling that I can find.