The dangers of phrasebooks, The Onion's take

That is:

Ambassador Holding Phrasebook 'Pretty Sure' She Just Strengthened Ties With Pakistan

See here for full story.

Abhorrentible Blasphemecration!

If you're able to stop crying about the substance behind this This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, check out the pseudo-Palinisms in panel 3. (Click to embiggen.)

Nuff said.

Blah blah Whorf blah

Guy Deutscher's article in the NYT mag about the Whorf hypothesis has set me off. I'm sure the Log will cover it in greater (and better) detail, so just let me say one thing that always bugs me about these discussions. Yes, there are these studies that show that Germans think bridges have nice soft feminine attributes, while Spanish speakers think they have "manly properties" (to quote Deutscher). But it seems to me that that's a fact about how German and Spanish speakers are educated, not a fact that derives from the grammatical gender of the word 'bridge' in the language they speak. So the real test case would be to find out what an illiterate speaker of one of these languages thinks about bridges. I bet there's no gender effect. Mutter, mutter, mutter (gnashing of teeth)...

Dane County Place-Names: Halunkenburg

We often sing the praises of the late great Frederic Cassidy here, the founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Among of his many other remarkable projects was a book called Dane County Place-Names. It was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1968, which in turn grew from a paper from 1947 in American Speech. The book is still in print and readily available. Here's a random tidbit:

Northwestern Dane County was an area of contact, and sometimes conflict, between Anglo and other English-speaking Americans and German immigrants. Springfield Corners was apparently famous, according to Cassidy, as home to "a group of rough and spendthrift farmers who did much drinking and fighting", to the extent that the neighboring German populations came to call the place Halunkenburg, "Louts' town".

"Ebonics translator" followup ...

The Washington Times has a piece on what's being talked about as the 'Ebonics translator' jobs at the Drug Enforcement Agency. The headline includes "Effort isn't official recognition of language" and the article opens with a comment that the DEA "does not recognize Ebonics as a formal language". What the hell is a 'formal language' here? The DEA has a pressing practical need to understand how people talk, and ideology has them and many others struggling to deny this way of talking any kind of status, beyond 'street slang'.

Here's a quote from the article where an actual expert makes the point:

John Baugh, a director of African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and a specialist on linguistics, praised the DEA for seeking the translators and said he wishes other government agencies "would have an appreciation of the linguistic consequences of the slave trade."

Mr. Baugh said translators can be helpful because speakers of African American Vernacular English can easily be misunderstood by others … .

We're seeing the emergence of exactly the issue my earlier post was poking at with a stick: The government and the press are getting ground up in the gears between trying to deny that African-American Vernacular English is a 'language' and the need to have people on board who have real command of this variety.

The government and African-American English: language ideology and practice

The Guardian is running this piece by Chris McGreal, called:

US drug agency recruits speakers of 'street slang'
DEA seeks people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court

It's getting a lot of attention, and much of it along this kind of lines from what I've seen. (Yes, there had to be the Airplane video clip.) But there's a big, even massive, point about language in America in this story. The core of it is laid out in this quote from the article:

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language," said H Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor. "Yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand. It tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognising African-American speech."

Yes, and the government's de facto recognition that (most of) their employees can't understand some kinds of African-American speech makes a powerful point that should be used in future discussions about language and education.

"Linguistically, it's stupid"

Consumerist has this piece on

English Professor: I Was Booted From Starbucks Over Bagel Linguistics

… with the brilliant line "Just venti-ing". The prof refused to say that she did not want anything on her bagel:

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," the woman told The NY Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want... Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English."

Linguistically, this isn't so much stupid as irrelevant. But culturally, it's stupid beyond comprehension. And how does this have anything at all to do with 'correct English'? No wonder English departments are in deep trouble if they have professors like this.

It has a funny ending, though: The cops were called.

"Hit the slide"

People are eager for Word of the Year ideas by this time of year, already anticipating the January meeting of the American Dialect Society, coming up in Pittsburgh. (You've missed the abstract deadline but here's the announcement).

Ben Zimmer has a nice piece at Visual Thesaurus about the Steve Slater case whether it will yield any neologisms and therefore candidates for WoTY. I hadn't paid attention to this particular high profile trainwreck, but I do like this one:

to hit the slide.

Sounds like a pleasant escape from a bad situation. But, dude, take GOOD beer with you.

Lorenzo Dow Turner news

This link will take you to a story about a new exhibit at the Smithsonian about Lorenzo Dow Turner, called “Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Community through Language”. Turner was one of the great pioneers in understanding American language(s). He's most famous for his 1949 Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. (Most of the text is available from Google Books, here, and the book's ongoing importance is reflected in 490 citations in Google Scholar.)

Bad verbing, worse human: 'to euthanisia'

Wonkette brings us this photo:

Wonkette indicates that the photo is from the Austin airport garage. Pretty complex paint job -- two color! And pretty steady lettering. (You ever tried writing this kind of stuff on this kind of surface? Ain't easy.) But then 'to euthanasia' for 'to euthanize' and 'whom' for 'who', in the span of nine words. Almost makes you wonder if it's real, in the relevant sense ... . Hey, maybe it's more brilliance from the Arizona Department of Education.