Uff da! Recall edition

The fight against the de-democraticization of Wisconsin has been filled with good, clean humor of the sort that our state is known for. Of all the buttons around (and the pics below are a few samples from the collection of one member of Team Verb who's been buying them up, like lots of people.)

But for all the regional character and humor of the protest buttons, I don't think I'd seen one with regional language on it. Thanks to D.D., though, the Mr. Verb Blogal Archives now include the specimen pictured here.

If you live in Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest generally, you know the exclamation Uff da!  (If not, Wikipedia gives the basics). It's traced to Norwegian (though there are some wrinkles there), and means (following Wikipedia) "used when something is unpleasant, uncomfortable, hurtful, annoying, sad, or irritating". Well, Governor, finally a list where you can check every box!

Dialect Coach Robert Easton Dies

Robert Easton dies at 81; Henry Higgins of Hollywood

Robert Easton, dialect coach, has died. In 1999 I sat behind him at a Methods in Dialectology conference in Newfoundland and watched him take phonetic notes of the speaker, a Canadian from the area. Fascinating. (I couldn't tell you the topic of the speaker's presentation.) A colorful and interesting person.


Picture from the DARE Newsletter 2002

The Uncola

The classic exception to the rule that un- attaches to adjectives (setting aside the other un- that attaches to verbs) was "the Uncola," which used to be a slogan for 7-up. But now the delightful people at VW have provided me with another one.

No rodents in my lab!

Caught a nice eggcorn - at least I think it counts as one - on the UW L&S Honors Program description of a grant where a first- or second-year undergraduate gets to do a project with a professor over the summer:

The ultimate purpose of the apprenticeship is to allow talented students to learn what research is and how it is conducted within a discipline by participating in actual, cutting-edge research. You will not be a "gopher" in a professor's lab, but will have a significant opportunity to develop research skills and explore the research process while laying the groundwork for future junior and senior research projects.

I like the way they put "gopher" in quotes. And you can see why someone would make the association - not only are the two words homonyms, but rodents are sometimes found in labs. Not usually in a linguist's lab, but they probably weren't thinking of us as the prototypical lab-having professor...

Old school paleo-

The American Dialect Society list (ads-l) has had a little traffic lately about the names that Ron Paul's followers have given themselves or that they've been given by others, including these:

Paulbots, Paulinists, Paulites, Paultards, Ron-Paulians, Paul[l]ination, Paulunteers

I've been wondering for a while about another terms associated with him, curiosity that was spurred by this morning's front page NYT piece about his unwillingness to distance himself from support from the extreme right. The article, by Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski, talks a fair bit about paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians. The contrast to neo-conservatives or neo-cons (and neo-liberals too, I guess) is clear and we have paleo- in lots of neutral, scientific contexts. Beyond that, it's pretty negative, it seems like. Looking around on Urban Dictionary, the uses of paleo- look mostly negative, like references to tech/IT, such as paleoadmin, defined there as:

An IT professional who has been running the same outdated systems for longer than you've been alive and who refuses to adopt more functional equipment and methods out of fear of having to do new things. Typically prefers equipment & software with the maximum amount of overhead so he can always look busy.

People probably aren't running out to label themselves that way. And I won't even try to talk about the paleo-diet thing.

The Wikipedia entry for paleoconservative describes the term as "somewhat tongue-in-cheek", but it sounds far worse than that to my ear. Sounds a little close to calling yourself a Neanderthal, but given their political views, Neanderthals should be gravely offended.

The French having fun with their language!?!?!?

Oui, cher amis, c'est vrai ça, as they say.

Last summer, the latest edition of the classic French dictionary Le Petit Larousse contained a contest. As described briefly in the graphic here (cliquez à embigger, could we say?), they slipped in a couple of fake words, with a prize of 100,000 € — real money, for the moment at least — going to somebody who finds them.

I love the idea, fun with words in a pretty cool way. But even setting aside that our stereotypes about French views of their language are exactly stereotypes, I wouldn't have particularly expected this from Larousse, which makes it even cooler somehow.

I remain really excited about the culture of superstar lexicographers we have now in the US — Ben Zimmer on NPR just yesterday, Michael Paul Adams still a familiar name from his encounters with Colbert and his writings about slang, and Erin McKean (When somebody mentioned her name recently, a young person all but screamed 'Oh. My. God. I LOVE her.)* And the press about the new American Heritage Dictionary is cool (like this podcast, though I'm growing weary of the little thing about the end of print dictionaries.)


Oh yeah, so, I finally got around to checking the answers today ...

HYPERGRIPHE
et
AU JET

* Ha. Did you even notice that I didn't mention the superstar of all superstar dictionary-related things in the whole universe? Because I knew you'd think of DARE instantly anyway.

"Korean language scientifically superior"

The press seems to endlessly repeat stuff people believe about language. The Google news feed for 'linguistics' just handed over a big forkful of this:

Korean language scientifically superior
Dec 16, 2011 (The Korea Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD/ANN) -- As a scholar who has spent the past four decades studying his mother-tongue and language in general, professor Sohn Ho-min should know what he's talking about when he says Korean is the world's most superior language.

"When we say Korean is superior, we are basing this on scientific examination. The Korean language's method of making sound through a combination of vowels and consonants is very scientific and economical, even," professor Sohn of the University of Hawaii told a news conference in Seoul, Thursday.

Sohn just received the Korean Foundation Award for promoting Korean in the United States. Looks like he deserves it. Not sure, though, exactly how the combination of vowels and consonants in Korean is unique or superior.

There is a major meme about how Korean is a structurally unique and even 'superior' language, and it's not hard to get into conversations about why it is or isn't. Just search a string like "Korean language superior" and you'll get a sense of how widespread it is.

I suppose, given the subject line, that this post is one that will get hits from Google from people actually seeking an evaluation of the claim of Korean as "the world's most superior language". Here's an answer: No language is structurally superior to others in any scientific sense. Evidence to the contrary most welcome!

That said, the Korean alphabet is a thing of wonder and beauty. Celebrated, rightly, with a national holiday.

N'Ko is an ORTHOGRAPHY

The NYT Magazine has an interesting article by Tina Rosenberg about technology and endangered languages today. It's mostly a good article except for the author's utter inability to distinguish between a writing system and a language. Why oh why don't they run these things by a linguist before publishing them?

#What10kbuys at UW–Madison

You have heard, I imagine, about Romney offering to bet Perry $10,000 last night during the Republican debates, as TPM describes it:

without skipping a beat at the Saturday night debate here, Mitt Romney held out his hand and offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 that he didn’t change the health care text in his book.

It's getting quick political play (again, for TPM, see here). The hashtag in the subject line of this post has taken off ... a guy who's worth an estimated $200,000,000* (here) can throw away 10k without blinking but for us real people, it's more than a casual bet.

In our world, the answer to #What10kbuys is quick and easy: it would pay the salary of an experienced Teaching Assistant or Project Assistant, working over 15 hours a week for the full academic year.

I'll bet you $10,000 this haunts Mittens for a while.**


* At a 5% return on investment that would be an annual income of 10 million a year without touching the principal.


** No, I won't actually bet you that. A dollar, maybe.

WOTY update: Winning, winner

Katy Steinmetz of Time has her 'top ten buzzwords' list for the year out now, here. Occupy is number one. (Sorry if that's a spoiler for you!) There's some utterly expected stuff, like carmageddon, haktivist and Arab Spring. All those are sure to be discussed in Portland. Man- as a prefix came up last year, but she maybe pushes beyond what was out there then.

But the piece warrants a post here for another reason: Her runner-up is winning, winner, in the new Charlie Sheen sense. It continues a kind of tradition -- I recall 'jump the shark' coming up back when -- but the surprise for me is that this candidate seems to have some passionate supporters. I don't see it winning WOTY, but maybe least likely to succeed … .

Can't wait for Portland.

Alcoa Can't Wait

Thinking through the milieu in which audio recordings were made of participants in The Dictionary of Regional American English (DARE), one can't help coming across the name of Professor Miles Hanley. Prof. Hanley was professor of English at the University of Wisconsin from 1927 until his death in 1954. As such, he was here with Haugen, Joos, Twadell, Lehman, Heffner, and all the who's-who in philology/linguistics in Madison during the first half of the 20th century. From letters, we gather that he coordinated the hiring of one Dr. Frederick G. Cassidy, a newly minted Ph.D. from theUniversity of Michigan in 1939. Prof. Cassidy later was Chief Editor of DARE until passing off the duties to Joan Houston Hall.

In the faculty memorial resolution (=academic obit) that Profs. Hughes, Fowler and Cassidy wrote, it was noted that Prof. Hanley had made "some 1500 phonographic recordings." Joan Hall found two aluminum discs of Prof. Hanley. The one in the picture is of a female speaker from Danbury, Connecticut, dated November 4th, 1932. Copies of the discs can be found at the Library of Congress as the American Dialect Society Collection (a.k.a. The Hanley Collection; The Hanley Discs). Some of his collection is found elsewhere.

Three other little tidbits about Prof. Hanley. First is that John Kenyon received a Carnegie Institute grant in 1940 to work on what would become Kenyon and Knott's 1944 work, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English. It was to University of Wisconsin that he came, in part, because of Hanley's work cataloging 950,000 rhymes in poems (Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 15, 1940)--and we all know how important those rhymes are to language change.

Second, is Hanley's lexical relation with Ohio State Penitentiary inmate 58248 (Wis. State Journal, May 31, 1936).

The third bit, again of many interesting things about Prof. Hanley to those connected to UW-Madison in particular, is that he lived at the end of his life (and died) in the Fess Hotel (Madison Capital Times, Feb. 4, 1954), which we all know as the downtown Great Dane Brew Pub. Next time you enter the Great Dane, give pause for the recorder of aluminum discs.