Slang and infixation

A while ago, I mentioned that Oxford had sent, via a minion, Michael Adams' new book, Slang: The people's poetry. Well, I've read it. It's a great read, something you can give to non-linguists, and I'm going to do a string of posts on it over the coming week or so.

For now, to kick things off, let's return to this recent post about flam-bam-bouyant. I made a casual joke about how maybe we were developing or could develop a new pattern of infixation. Adams has set me straight: He lays out a remarkably broad set of infixing patterns, enough that this bam is sadly unremarkable. These are virtually all very familiar, like Ned Flanders' -diddly- and the -iz- made famous by Snoop Dog where the bomb can become the bizzomb. (He suggests that readers see gizoogle.com for plenty more.) Bam's got plenty of company.

By the way, he devotes a fair bit of time to phrasal insertions (the typical Flanders pattern, I bet), including a beautiful treatment of the middle initial inserted in Jesus H. Christ. It's presumably historical, maybe from Greek spellings of the first three letters of the first name, rendered in Medieval Latin with IHC. That is, the eta gets written as 'H'. Others get it via Jesus Hominum Salvator. But I had completely forgotten the Belushi line in the Blues Brothers, where he gets religion and responds to James Brown (as a preacher) with "Yes, yes, Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ, I have seen the light!"

Anyway, infixing of various sorts is more present and more complex than I realized when I dashed off that little post.

Language and genes tidbit

Well, more than a tidbit, but I'm so tired of the massive hype on this general topic that understatement is the only way to go. And I wouldn't have posted on this except that the big guns like the Log and Talking Brains (certainly a big gun on this topic if not yet among the most widely read language blogs) haven't gotten to it yet, it seems.

Various news outlets (like the NYT here) have run stories about the effects of FOXP2, hailed not long ago as 'the language gene' and such (sigh), on mice. The basic story is that if you put some version of this into a mouse, they make somewhat different sounds. As far as I can tell, Gary Marcus gets it right:

People shouldn’t think of this as the one language gene but as part of a broader cascade of genes.

You all know where this image is from, but … .

Pronouncing the supremes: Sotomayor edition

Wow, I should not have been surprised by some people in the media stumbling a little on Judge Sotomayor's name — it's unfamiliar to a lot of people and the stress pattern of the Spanish form isn't obvious maybe. But I didn't expect to hear outrage over a modestly Spanish-like pronunciation. Wrong again, as a National Review writer proves here, and this confirms. Mark Krikorian asks about whether to go with the "Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er". He clearly wants it anglicized, saying apparently about the native-like stress pattern, "it sticks in my craw":

Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English.

Unnatural? Limits? SO-tuh-my-er sound utterly horrible to my native English-speaking ear, if we're taking a freaking vote. Having learned about the story from Wonkette (here), there's little left to be said that Wonkette didn't say:

Pronouncing a proper noun in its natural Spanish way “is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.” How is this “giving in to” anything?

I'll let you, gentle reader, click through for the Rest of the Story. (And remember, Wonkette is the very embodiment of 'snark.')



Image from the ToBI folks at Ohio State, here. (If you don't know about ToBI, check it out.)

Flam-bam-boyant?

Frank Rich's NYT column this morning is about gay marriage and related issues. He starts with a riff on American Idol so long that I almost abandoned reading the column. (Sorry, kids, but this trot'em-out-and-put'em-down TV really bugs me.)

I was somewhat surprised (but shouldn't have been) to read that Rolling Stone had described one of the finalists as “flam-bam-boyantly queeny". The adjective was once a pretty common name (as in the pic, from here) but has changed with the times, I guess.

But I was more struck by the infixed bam. We've got the famous cases of "fucking insertion" (outfuckingrageous) and "Homeric infixation" (saxomaphone), but could we be getting a new one? Seems like it's driven here by the rhyme and probably has limited contexts where it would work generally. A quick Google search doesn't reveal any hits even for this form.

Furloughs, language and politics

State workers in Wisconsin are pretty upset about getting 16 days of furlough over the next two years, including University of Wisconsin employees.

First, to the politics. Of course this is all the rage as a budget cutting measure. Among the major institutions passing out the furloughs are the University of Maryland, Arizona State, Clemson, Utah State, while other states (Illinois, I gather) have simply 'rescinded' big chunks of their universities' budgets. For most people at a university, a furlough is simply a temporary pay cut: We can't or won't actually work less. Some proposed steps, like actually closing offices on the Friday after Thanksgiving, are utterly without consequence — that's a day I work at home anyway, for example.

In some ways, I'd rather take a small pay cut than lose more faculty and staff, but there are massive problems with applying this to everyone at the university. A tremendous amount of the core work at UW-Madison is done by academic staff, from instructional people to very high level administrators. If you furlough them across the board, though, you need to consider their funding:

That is, core state funding (GPR) is less than a quarter of their pay, while most of it comes from grants and gifts. Politically, the deal is that many want "everybody to share the pain" but it's pretty stupid for non-state-paid people to share it. Why not then have the captains of industry be furloughed and take that money? Of course the federal grant funds that are paying about a quarter of academic staff funds cannot be hijacked here. This might be a good time to remind our elected leaders that less than 20% of our budget comes from the state. In fact, the latest word from the UW-System says (emphasis added):

Facing a combination of budget cuts, employee furloughs, and canceled pay plans, the UW System will contribute at least $211 million in GPR savings to help close the State’s budget gap – equal to 9.2% of taxpayer support for the public university. The UW System will be required to contribute an additional $34.6 million in revenues from other sources to address the growing State funding shortfall.

This is not good. The Department of Corrections, it's being said, may furlough employees and then pay overtime to cover the shifts. Brilliant.

Second, to language. Furlough is one of the surprisingly large number of Dutch loanwords in English, from verlof. The semantic development is an interesting one, though. It was and is widely used as a specifically military term for 'leave', so a positive thing. Judging from OED Online, it was extended to any kind of leave from work long ago. Merriam-Webster gives the verb with one meaning of 'to lay off from work', but without any chronological information. It's got that old euphemistic feeling to it — though hardly as bad as 'enhanced interrogation' for 'torture'. Any idea how old that meaning is?

Spanish in southern California

Nice post about language and immigration here on one of the LA Times blogs, image from the article as you'll see when you read it — and you should read it, especially if you don't get the text.

The journalist, Hector Tobar, talks to a leading sociolinguist who has written a ton about Spanish-English contact and related matters. Here's a key chunk or two:

In the end, English remains the dominant tongue of Southern California. "In the long run, Spanish is really the threatened language here," said Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College.

The effect of Spanish speakers on the Southern California linguistic universe is heard mostly in new words and phrases constantly being added to the local English lexicon -- like "no mas" and "carne asada." In this sense, Spanish is merely adding a little flavor to American English, as German, Yiddish and other languages have before it.

…

Still, the underlying structure of California English has not changed, Fought said.

Hurrah, more clear reporting on a pressing issue concerning language.

Tagging "bad" grammar

In last Friday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, staff columnist Jim Stingl ran a piece on a local English teacher's reaction to a grafitto in her neighborhood that read as follows:

Where da bitches at?

Here's the text of the teacher's corrective:

Hey, Tagger!

We’d like you to work on your grammar, please!

Your tag SHOULD read as follows: Where are the female dogs?

1. The use of the verb are allows you to write a COMPLETE SENTENCE. (Without it, you have a fragment, of course – missing the predicate of the sentence. The subject is dogs.)

2. Proper spelling of the article the is NOT da.

3. Slang is not appropriate, even in most casual writings (unless, of course, it’s being used as part of dialogue, but even this particular use wouldn’t be appropriate for a general audience such as the passers-by who are subjected to your work.)

4. The use of at is not included here, as the word itself is a preposition, which shouldn’t be used at the end of a statement.

I don't usually fret too much about prescriptivism, and I have a feeling that by engaging this reaction in the present forum I'm basically preaching to the choir, but here goes ...

The tag was written in a variety of English known to linguists as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Distinct from standard American English, AAVE shares a number of features with English-based creole languages, as well as regional dialects of English spoken in the British Isles, North America, and the Caribbean.

Re: point 1 – The absence of a copula verb (form of be) in the tag is normal in AAVE declarative sentences. This structural pattern is found in many of the world's languages, including Russian and Hebrew, and does not indicate lack of "completeness" in a sentence. One could just as easily argue such a zero-copula sentence is communicatively economical, since there is no ambiguity as to what the grammatical subject is.

Re: point 2 – Dental fricatives (represented in standard English spelling by "th") are not found in most of the world's languages, including AAVE. The spelling of [da] accurately reflects the phonetic shape of this word.

Re: point 3 – If "slang" is not appropriate in most non-quotations, then the anonymous tagger finds him/herself in good literary company, that is, with the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, and Faulkner. One should also mention that bitch and female dog are not synonymous here. A glance into the Oxford English Dictionary is illuminating. Definition 2.a for the noun bitch reads as follows "Applied opprobriously to a woman; strictly, a lewd or sensual woman. Not now in decent use; but formerly common in literature." Here, the tagger is following in the footsteps of writers such as Shakespeare, Kipling, and D. H. Lawrence.

Re: point 4 – Preposition stranding is not only entirely normal in all registers of written and spoken English (consult any current major manual of style, such as CMS), it is in fact unavoidable in many cases, e.g.: That surface is not to be written on. Again, AAVE grammar is line with that of dozens of other languages.

Image above from here.

UW budget news

Well, Mr. V is back on language topics, so I can toss in the latest on the budget situation in Wisconsin: UW has started a website, here, for updates. There's nothing new there that I can tell, but as a colleague said, this puts it all together in one place. More importantly, this is a place to check for news. Biddy Martin has pretty clearly been working to improve the flow of information and this looks like a part of that effort.

Latin diplomas and numen lumen

The NY Times this morning has an interesting op-ed piece today by classicist Christopher Francese, called "A degree in English" talking about the difficulties of diplomas in Latin. He writes:

diploma Latin is some of the most depressing and long-winded legalese you can find. Hiding behind the lovely calligraphy are maddening syntax and appalling neologisms. How do you say the name of every college town in Latin? You shouldn’t have to.

All this calls to mind the University of Wisconsin motto, numen lumen. That's a controversy of a different sort: numen is 'divinity', so you have this half-hidden reference to a diety for a public university, a famously secular one. (One version of the story on this is available here.)

But I don't mind this ceremonial use of Latin as much as Francese does. You have to think of it more like heavy metal umlauts or something.

State worker morale fatally wounded, and the Madison Initiative passes

Language? Yeah, I guess we used to do language around here, back before the University furloughed all those who aren't lucky enough to be retired like I am.

For non-UW readers, we heard yesterday that state workers can expect to be furloughed for 8 working days per year for the next two years. Of course faculty won't start canceling classes or anything, so it's just a temporary pay cut. It doesn't seem like it'll save that much money with a ca. 7 billion dollar deficit (on a ca. 20 billion budget!), so that as a still-active colleague quipped yesterday, the most likely concrete effect will be to kill all morale among all state workers. Oh, and they revoked the promised 2% pay increase too!

But everybody with a wisc.edu account has been flooded today with announcements that the Madison Initiative passed the Board of Regents (and see here for a local news take). The lone dissent was a student member of the Board, who …

wondered if the initiative was nothing more than a short-term fix for long-term funding problems that are dogging higher education.

Well, yeah. It's not going to fix the real problems and everybody knows that. This shows something pretty remarkable though: After years of a really ineffective chancellor, we have somebody in that office now with the brains and energy to make something happen. Biddy Martin is still probably figuring out the layout of Bascom Hall and she's made a real impact on things. That gives us some hope that we'll win some coming battles.

In the meantime, I'm ready for a beer.

Tuition and need-based aid

The Stranded Preposition made, as SP is wont to do, a very nice point about yesterday's post, specifically the graphic ...

One question, any chance of showing the same graphic with the cost of tuition next to the financial aid?

Well, I've just dumped the numbers into Excel — yesterday's on need-based aid plus tuition from here. I adjusted the scale (total aid in 1,000s but tuition in full numbers). There are four relevant tuition rates, undergrad and grad and resident and non-resident.

Click on image to see a view that you can make sense of. And if you prefer the numbers:

Basically, we're a little lower than anybody but Iowa for in-state undergrad, in the middle of the pack for in-state grad, and fourth highest in out-of-state grad, but ridiculously behind in aid. The cost of non-resident grad tuition is a huge problem, for reasons that have to wait for another post.

I'm in a hurry right now and haven't had time to ponder these, but hope this might promote a little discussion. I really want to understand this issue and all of us involved in higher education need to.

The Madison Initiative

I've been sweating what to make of the Madison Initiative for a long time, and not making much progress. This is, in the briefest and most simplistic of terms, the chancellor's proposal to up tuition significantly on those from better-off families and put the money toward need-based financial aid and increasing access to high-demand courses. It's hard to oppose those two things, but it's not without real problems. My strong sense is that any barriers to higher education for talented people are bad and having to jump through the hoops of getting financial aid is a barrier.

One local blogger at The Education Optimist has tackled this with gusto and if you care about the issue, I urge you to read her posts. Media coverage has been until very recently entirely one-sided and I'm glad to have this side of the issue articulated so clearly by Sara Goldrick-Rab, but it doesn't really resolve things for me.* She's provided evidence for the core concern I noted above, but the current situation with regard to need-based financial aid is unspeakably bad — a disgrace to this university, as the graphic shows. Faculty and staff are contributing now to a big campaign for need-based aid but even a real success there won't be more than a drop in the bucket.

The only real answer, it seems clear, is massive increases in public support for higher education. In a sense, this initiative might be one shot at keeping the place from collapsing until we can address the fundamental issues. And we have to do that.

*I should mention that I'm in close agreement with her on any number of other issues, like this, and have now started reading that blog regularly.

Syntactic Hypercorrection

On the front page of the print version of today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a nice example of a common syntactic hypercorrection in English, the substitution of "whom" for "who". This particular example is interesting. Since "whom" occurs here in a non-case-marked position (if you don't assume ellipsis) and Objective is the default case in such positions in English (e.g., "Will it be Danny? – No, not him/*he."), that might have reinforced the headline writer's (likely unconscious) decision to use the Objective "whom."

Fixies in the news

Yup, I suppose this makes sense, as the wave of faux collective coinages goes: A fixie of hipsters.

Image from here.

Language and genes: Say what?

This article talks about efforts to correlate language and genes in Africa. The project is pretty familiar and the language-gene connection has plenty of controversial angles, but something's gone horribly wrong in the press coverage here:

Christopher Ehret, a noted specialist in African historical linguistics at UCLA and a member of Tishkoff's team, said his analysis of tribal languages revealed striking patterns of migration across Africa.

"When people move, they borrow words from the people where they settle," he said. Those new words inserted into older languages, he said, can tell us when the newcomers arrived.

For example, Ehret said, the "click" language still spoken among people as varied as the San of South Africa, the Pygmy tribes of Central and West Africa and the Hadze people far to the east may well be the original spoken language of all humans - and the genes of those distant click speakers indicate they share a common ancestry, the scientists noted.

There isn't a click language, or even a single family of click languages, but a number of distinct families. For example, I think the genetic affiliation of Hadze is regarded as uncertain. The deal of making it sound like the original human language is still being spoken out there somewhere is several steps over the edge.

Who knows what's going on here, but you gotta figure Ehret was grossly misquoted.