Mr. Verb

Etymology man

2012-01-30T07:15:00.005-06:00

You'll see this everywhere, but still ... today's xkcd. Click to embiggen.

Menominee Language Outrage

2012-01-29T20:31:00.000-06:00

Heard a really appalling story when I was up on the Menominee reservation this past week, involving a kid being punished for speaking Menominee in a Catholic school classroom in Shawano. The Shawano Leader published a brief article about it here. The version I heard was a bit more extreme (I guess the Leader was trying to be fair and balanced...), so I'll be interested to see what else comes out about it. I'm hoping it hits the news big time.

(HT to JMZ for the link to the article.)

Walkergate update

2012-01-28T16:51:00.000-06:00

Sorry that we've been on a bit of a hiatus here ... beginning of the semester, etc. People especially from out of state are asking about where things stand with the burgeoning corruption scandal surrounding Governor Scott Walker, now mostly known as Walkergate. Blue Cheddar is generally a good source for grassroots and progressive news from our state and they posted a nice overview earlier today, here. I have no idea what will ultimately come from the investigation, but it certainly seems to be going strong.

Quick update, Jan. 29: Jason Stein from the MJS has this additional historical context.

For-profits and the gutting of public higher ed

2012-01-15T07:53:00.000-06:00

I've been pointing out constantly for the last year that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is working hard to destroy the University of Wisconsin System, including UW–Madison. An amazing number of people, of various political stripes, have been asking me why he would want to do something so drastic. They think I've gone all lefty paranoid on them.

My answer has been this: Walker and his ilk want the University of Phoenix and Kaplan to replace UW. Every single thing in the world is an opportunity for profit, and there is no pretense of concern for actually educating people and no interest in the broader value of public higher education. Walker does whatever his minders tell him to do and the right-wing think-tank world is heavily invested (pun intended) in for-profit education. Hey, nobody gets rich off UW! No profit = no good.

Most rank-and-file people working in public higher ed aren't, I think, quite yet fully aware of how immediate and pervasive this threat is. The University of Phoenix, for example, had a half million students enrolled in 2010 and got $24,000,000,000 (yes, billion) in federal loans and grants (according to ABC News, here). HuffPo (graphic from here) has done lots of reporting on this and scholars in the field of education have done tons of research on it (most of which I don't know), but long story short, these corporations are expensive for students, don't invest a lot of actually educating students, have low graduation rates and very high default rates.

This morning's NYT has a piece on Mitt Romney's close ties to this industry, with the example being Full Sail University in Florida. He apparently said for-profits:

“hold down the cost of education” and help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt.

Nope. The Times says that the 21-month program in video game art costs $80,000, had a 14% on-time graduation rate and only 38% overall, and "students carried a median debt load of nearly $59,000 in federal and private loans in 2008".

There is a systematic and well-funded effort to destroy public higher ed. We're down to the end of the road here if we don't stop them now.

No relation

2012-01-14T10:05:00.006-06:00

"He's a quarterback, he's a winner, he's a TV draw, he's a verb." But he's not related.

(Mr. Fiskers image from here.)

Gotta go!

2012-01-12T22:00:00.002-06:00

Portland rocks! Plus its residents have a great sense of humor. In case you can't read it, above the figures it says "phlush". But I mostly love the little icons.

Occupy

2012-01-06T20:35:00.001-06:00

Votes are being counted, but it's gonna win. Take it to the bank.

Word of the Year

2012-01-06T18:20:00.000-06:00

I'll be tweeting WOTY activities. For the moment, a list of nominees has been provided by Ben Zimmer, here.

Right now, listening to incredible presentations about the Dictionary of American Regional English by Michael Paul Adams, Grant Barrett and Tom Purnell. I have now seen a copy of the last volume of DARE, touched it, and looked at it. Wow.

Language policy and the GOP field

2012-01-05T06:03:00.001-06:00

Here's a piece by Lesli Maxwell in Education Week noting that current Not Romney candidate Rick Santorum (along with Newt Gingrich) favors English as 'national language'. She had a slightly earlier piece about Romney's (the Not Not Romney's?) opposition to bilingual education, here.

About all of Team Verb is in Portland for the LSA or heading out there today. Lots of good stuff, including a celebration of the Dictionary of American Regional English. We'll have some commentary on the Word of the Year festivities, I'm sure.

Passive voice correctly characterized in the media!

2012-01-04T09:08:00.003-06:00

Numerous linguabloggers, especially at the Log, have spent a lot of time on what Geoffrey Pullum (in the link just given) reasonably calls a "campaign to get journalists to stop using the term 'passive' in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means." The blunder is so common that I was taken aback this morning to read this in a discussion of the Iowa Caucus results:

Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.

YES. That is actually the passive voice. Of course, the passage comes from Nate Silver of FiveThiryEight, who actually seems to know actual stuff, like numbers. If anybody's gonna recognize a passive, it's probably him.

I doubt that this will cheer Pullum, who's in deep on this battle, but I'm encouraged to see that it is not impossible for someone to refer to 'passive voice' in the media in a way that is consistent with how people who actually study things like the passive voice use the term.

Image from here, from the Village Voice.

Awareness of regional dialect: "Wisconsin accent"

2012-01-03T14:19:00.001-06:00

A relatively recent topic in regional variation in speech is what's known as 'enregisterment' or 'enregistration'. Johnstone et al. (2006, 78) provide the classic definition:

on the basis of historical research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews, [to] describe how a set of linguistic features that were once not noticed at all, then used and heard primarily as markers of socioeconomic class, have come to be linked increasingly to place and ‘enregistered’ . . . as a dialect.

The topic has since led to a special issue of American Speech (here, and the quote above was pulled from Michael Paul Adams' intro to the issue). Along with work on Pittburghese and other cool stuff, the issue included work on Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, giving evidence that regional speech patterns have been recognized in Wisconsin increasingly over the last century, especially in recent decades. Instead of features that marked class, in the Upper Midwest it's typically features that were once associated with immigrant populations, like 'stopping' (using a d sound for 'th' sounds, for instance).

One bit of evidence bearing on this question hasn't, to my knowledge, been talked about: We've got ever-better corpora which we can search, like the Google NGram Viewer, which we've played with here in the past. If you search for 'Wisconsin dialect' you don't really get anything to speak of, but 'Wisconsin accent' yields an interesting pattern, shown here compared to 'Minnesota accent' (I start with 1940 because nothing shows for 'Wisconsin accent' before then; as always, click to embiggen):

So, our western neighbor's speech pattern was apparently talked about somewhat earlier and somewhat more in books than ours. But these numbers are all relative, so compare this to a state of roughly similar size (i.e. in population):

If we generalize to 'Southern accent' you see some real presence (and btw, 'Upper Midwest accent' doesn't get you anything really):

It's not surprising that Wisconsin (and Minnesota) lag behind the South in this regard, just given the historical demographics of European settlement.

Oh yeah, just because:

Update, 3:30: Was kinda in a hurry before and didn't check the Library of Congress "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers". Checking 1836-1922 to see if yielded earlier attestation, I found only a few. A couple had 'Wisconsin' and a form of the verb 'accept' (i.e., these were OCR glitches). The others, it looks like, refer specifically to Wisconsin people with 'foreign', even specifically 'German' accents. That's highly consistent with the association of Wisconsin with immigrants and with immigrants who didn't speak English or, in this case, spoke it with an accent. Here's an early example, from the Omaha Bee:

Gee, there might be a little story in here.

Reference
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. “Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese.’” Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77–101.

Syntactic judgment (day)

2012-01-02T10:05:00.004-06:00

Found this on Facebook posted by Matt Pearson and attributed to Leston Buell... had to repost for the broader Mr. V audience!

Emmett Bennett and Linear B

2012-01-01T09:17:00.001-06:00

I found out yesterday that Emmett Bennett passed away two weeks ago here in Madison. He was an emeritus professor of Classics, where he taught for almost 30 years. As the NYT obit linked above describes, he played a key role in deciphering the early Greek texts in the script called Linear B, one of the amazing stories of philology. Unfortunately, I don't know the story well enough to tell any more than it's told in the obit or the sketch here. (I'll dig a little to see if I can find out more.)

You can see some of his documents here, including tables of symbols he worked out. You may think that a Classics prof working on ancient clay tablets wouldn't be too cutting edge, but he was using punch cards back in the 1940s, held a patent (it looks like), and worked to figure out ancient bookkeeping.

For now, it's another reminder of the Wisconsin tradition, not only in ancient languages but also in the use of new technologies and the value of thinking broadly.

Image from here, the first page of a piece in the American Journal of Archeology from 1950.

Uff da! Recall edition

2011-12-30T15:03:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-29T10:49:00.004-06:00

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

2011-12-29T08:14:00.007-06:00

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!

2011-12-26T15:43:00.009-06:00

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-

2011-12-26T15:39:00.000-06:00

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!?!?!?

2011-12-17T17:59:00.002-06:00

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"

2011-12-16T08:57:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-11T10:04:00.005-06:00

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

2011-12-11T09:22:00.001-06:00

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

2011-12-07T13:15:00.001-06:00

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

2011-12-02T13:14:00.005-06:00

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.

LINGUIST list blog

2011-11-29T15:42:00.001-06:00

Let's welcome a new linguablog to the blogosphere ... The LINGUIST List: Official blog of the LINGUIST list.

"From irregular verbs, a career"

2011-11-29T08:03:00.001-06:00

How's that for a section title? It's from the big flashy piece in Science Times about Steven Pinker, mostly about his new book.

Full-time proofreader sought

2011-11-27T15:06:00.001-06:00

Apply in the governor's office or at the state GOP hq, I guess … see 'lastest' tweet below, from the party's official website.

Can't make this stuff up, folks.

'are'/'our' confusion from Scott Walker

2011-11-27T14:05:00.001-06:00

Scott Walker may be polishing up his resume, now that the recall signature effort has likely passed the halfway mark (here) less than two weeks after it started. If so, he should use grammar check and have some folks look it over before he sends it out.

He (or somebody on his staff on his behalf) tweets regularly. Most of the stuff is utterly mundane … see the middle one in the picture here, about him being damp from the Badgers game (it was raining). And sometimes they have political barbs ... see the third one, where he refers to the White House holiday tree as a Christmas tree, as he has consistently referred to the Wisconsin one, contrary to now-normal usage.

But whoever wrote today's tweet (top one in the pic) blew it. I've seen 'are'/'our' confusion in spelling before and hear people pronounce 'our' like 'are', basically [aɹ] or [aɻ].

Linguists are always quick to stress how trivial spelling is, even in a prescriptivist/standard context, but this kind of thing can stick and take on a life of its own if it seems to confirm a view people already are inclined to hold about somebody, I guess — remember Dan Quayle and 'potatoe'?

The skewing of the UW budget

2011-11-27T09:12:00.001-06:00

At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, we've watched the budget steadily get warped and skewed. For at least two decades, faculty and administrators have been expressing the concern that cuts, often large but more importantly relentless over time, will damage or destroy this institution. With the current cuts, we're now there.

The Faculty Senate will discuss a resolution about this at its next meeting. I want to call your attention to two points from it: Counting the new cuts (both the base cut and the 'lapse' which is now pretty widely understood to be destined to be a permanent cut), from 2001 until the current budget, our General Purpose Revenue from the State (that is, the basic state support for UW) has changed pretty clearly, in 2010 adjusted dollars:

2001 Now
$370 million $206.5 million

That is, we're now getting 55.8% of what we were basically a decade ago from the state.

At the same time, tuition has shifted even more dramatically:

2001 Now
$5,044 per student $8,987 per student

That's a 78% increase.

Those two pieces are what cover the basic costs of undergraduate education.

WOTY

2011-11-25T07:23:00.001-06:00

Yes, the rusty old WOTY machine has been dragged (drug?) out of the barn, cleaned off and oiled up. Oxford University Press has fired its opening salvo, squeezed middle, described here and defined as:

the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those people on low or middle incomes.

The reaction from the American Dialect Society list and other Americans has been surprise, I guess. (Whatevs, my preferred current post on the OUP blog is about giving thanks for beer, here.)

I've heard and seen various suggestions already, aside from the discussions on the Log (like this). In the past, we here at Team Verb have tended to tilt at windmills on this topic (hey, peevologist is a cool word, dammit), but this year, let me play Captain Obvious:

The 2012 Word of the Year should be …

occupy.

Yes, I realize that the Global Language Monitor has made it their WOTY, which no doubt will cost it many votes at the ADS meeting. Still.

By the way, just before the WOTY festivities in Portland in early January, there will be a session about the Dictionary of American Regional English, our beloved DARE. Be there.

Image from everywhere, basically, but taken from here.

What's up with 'uppity'?

2011-11-23T10:56:00.001-06:00

I'm guessing you know by now that Rush Limbaugh has called Michelle Obama "uppity" and that he was defended by Glenn Beck. A new piece on the AtlanticWire by Elsbeth Reeve starts with this:

A lot of people have no idea that the word "uppity," when applied to black people, has racist connotations, but it's getting harder and harder to understand how public figures, in particular, are able to maintain their ignorance of the term's history. President Obama has been a well-known public figure for several years and his conservative critics, in particular, keep making the "uppity" mistake.

Gee, it's hard for me to read this even as ironic. That there might be an American English speaker who doesn't know it's racist. Maybe. I know a lot of clueless people, nobody that clueless. But can you even choke out a joke about Limbaugh and Beck not knowing exactly what they're doing? I didn't think so.

Still, there's a question in here about language use. My sense is that people don't use the word uppity much anymore except in highly ironic ways. So, I did a quick NgramViewer check on it and a set of words with closely related meanings, namely: haughty, presumptuous, conceited, arrogant. Here's the result (click to embiggen):

If you go to the NgramViewer and play around, say with shortening the time depth to 1950 or so, you'll see that uppity has actually increased in frequency, though it's stayed relatively low, compared to the others. In fact, everything else but 'arrogant' has declined over time. (Why the other words have declined is a whole nother question.)

What would account for the uptick in uppity? A simple google search didn't shed any light but I happened to try an Ngram for uppity women and uppity woman. It was about the only collocation I could come up with that sounded like anything you might hear. The result:

If you google those, you get the goldmine I didn't find with a simple(r) search. It turns out, then, that it's not just an ironic use of the term, but a kind of 'taking back' of a once-negative phrase.

ADS on fb

2011-11-22T10:14:00.001-06:00

The American Dialect Society is really moving along, racing past me in the dark, on the tech front ... they're on the Facebook, now, here. I know the kids are all about the fb.

Enjoy, along with all your txting and destroying the language.

Chomsky vs. Pullum: More Linguistics Wars?

2011-11-20T11:37:00.001-06:00

The LINGUIST list just posted a discussion note by Geoff Pullum about a talk by Noam Chomsky at University College London, here. To folks in the field, these are familiar themes and of course these are two major figures who've been having this discussion for decades. Still, it's a good update in some ways.

I haven't seen much in the blogosphere yet about this, though Biolingüística has covered it (scroll down below the LINGUIST post to see the real commentary) and Replicated Typo. I suspect there'll be more coming. In the meantime, I'd be curious what our readers think about the substance of this (i.e., let's not belabor the silliness about NSF funding).

Update, Monday 1:30: See now this response. Maybe we'll get some real discussion going here ...

Fun with Germanic historical linguistics ...

2011-11-18T13:17:00.001-06:00

A normal mortal can only respond to that subject line with "fun ≠ Germanic historical linguistics", but Germanic historical linguists are not normal, I suppose. This blog has a tradition of historical linguistic geekery (start here and read from there). Time for an update ...

A crew of people at the Universität Tübingen in Germany have assembled a pretty remarkable set of Merkverse for learning key bits of historical phonology and morphology of German and Germanic. A Merkvers can be translated as 'mnemonic rhyme' or something, but that doesn't do it justice ... there's a long tradition going back to the earliest writings in German of these little rhymes. (The image here, from here, is of one for the Runic alphabet.)

You really have to know German to get these, but one of the things you have to do with earlier Germanic languages is learn the series of strong verbs, seven classes from ride, rode, ridden and sing, sang, sung, and so on. Here's the one for that for Old High German (there's another one for Middle High German):

Althochdeutsche Merkwörter für die Ablautreihen

rîtan, zîhan, solcherlei —stehen in der ersten Reih'.
liogan und ziohan —schließt die zweite Reihe an.
Willst die Reihe drei du findan, —denk an werfan und an bindan.
neman, stelan, wissen wir, —passen nur in Reihe vier.
geban wird ganz ungeniert —in der Reihe fünf notiert.
graban, slahan, dies Gewaechs —kennen wir in Reihe sechs.
haltan und der Rest, Ihr Lieben, —hat redupliziert in sieben.

(aus Osnabrück?)

If you're a student of the history of German, your life just got a little more fun.

And a big wag of the monk's habit to pr. (Or whatever you do with a monk's habit.)

eWAVE - electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English

2011-11-18T13:02:00.004-06:00

Folks interested in a variety of topics dealing with data from English varieties around the world, especially morphosyntactic features, will want to check out the new electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE). Very cool resource!

Bucky (the deer, not the badger) for President!

2011-11-15T16:04:00.005-06:00

Definitely check out this link! It contains the Best. Line. Ever: Meanwhile, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted that his recent rise in the polls is not a fluke: “The American people want an adult, and no one has a stronger record of adultery than I do.”

Boston accents and advertising

2011-11-15T13:40:00.001-06:00

An alert reader of this blog, M.O., sends along this pic an an ad for Maker's Mark with a Boston (should that be Bahston?) accent …

Nice. Very nice.

Recall Walker!

2011-11-14T17:16:00.001-06:00

United Wisconsin is organizing the recall effort against the Koch Brothers' pawn in Wisconsin, "Governor" Scott Walker. Some of us are eager to take United's class on how to collect sigs for the recall effort, and have been visiting their website trying to get the schedule, etc. Apparently, a lot of us: Their website has been down all afternoon. Here's a screen shot of what they have up now:

If you're in-state, let's get to work. If you're out of state, please lend a hand if you can, say, financially. And if you don't think he should be recalled, wait, what?

Update, 8:30 pm. Looks like this was actually a distributed denial of service attack, see here. Wonder whose money is behind this?

http://www.americandialect.org/

2011-11-13T00:05:00.001-06:00

The American Dialect Society has finished a major webpage update, here. Might be worth calling attention to the student membership and there's a nice plug for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Check it out.

"Tim McGraw hates [lexical] semantic change."

2011-11-11T15:59:00.000-06:00

A very perceptive student emailed with a link to the Tim McGraw video "I miss back when", saying:

when I heard the refrain of this song, all I thought was "wow, Tim Mcgraw really hates semantic change".

Yup.

Linguistics tattoos, etc.

2011-11-08T07:34:00.001-06:00

Science Times now has an online slide show about science tattoos, here. The author of the piece, Carl Zimmer, long ago did something on linguistics tattoos, featuring a tiny glottal stop (here). A couple of years ago, a bunch of posts on lingua-blogs and elsewhere mentioned other linguistics tattoos, including an IPA vowel chart on the Log (here).

The slide show reminded me, though, that I occasionally hear people talk about linguistics tattoos and other graphics associated with our field. The image here is of a bowling shirt from a bowling team that some UW–Madison grad students started some years ago, The Gutturals. It's the IPA symbol for an epiglottal plosive, a prototypical guttural. (I don't know if they got a lot of gutteral reactions, though, or even guttural reactions.)

So, a question, gentle readers: Aside from t-shirts, what's your favorite image of linguistics in a non-linguistics context?

“Why do languages decay?"

2011-11-06T10:33:00.001-06:00

If you're even an occasional reader of the work (ha) of Team Verb, you know our motto:

Language changes.
Deal with it.
Revel in it.

We've often linked to new issues of SpecGram, once known as the Speculative Grammarian. But the latest issue includes a contribution that deftly slices away our reason for being. Or maybe jabs at it with a rusty blade. I mean the "Ask Mr. Language Person" piece answering the question above. It begins:

Hwæt! Languages don’t decay, they change over... okay, I just can’t go on perpetuating this myth that languages don’t decay. They do. They decay because speakers are lazy. The prescriptivist language mavens are right.

Hwaet indeed. This may be the most closely argued piece of linguistics since Verner wrote on the voicing of Germanic fricatives, or at least since "Remarks on Nominalization".

We urge you to read the piece. Then come back to us. If we ever gain the courage to tilt at the change windmill again. Or do we change our motto to 'language decays' and go from there?

Yours,
Team Verb

Image from here.

English going to hell. Even in ENGLAND!

2011-11-05T12:11:00.001-05:00

John, of Literacy Blog fame, called our attention (see here) to a story from the Telegraph about:

Bright pupils struggling with basic grammar, says top head

Turns out that it's one of the top schools (a 'private' school … now that does mean a 'public' school in U.S. terms, right?).

The move comes after the Government announced earlier this year that pupils would lose marks in GCSE exams for poor spelling, punctuation and grammar amid concerns over falling standards of English.

Just one little piece of evidence for falling standard, please. Just one?

University of Wisconsin – Madison pay: -25% in 10 years

2011-11-04T11:57:00.002-05:00

There's been a ton of talk about how badly state employees, including UW-Madison workers, have fared in recent years. Here's a graphic from the Wisconsin University Union (WUU) showing the basic effects of the pay plan over the last decade. We've lost a quarter of our real income over the last decade. As always, click to embiggen.

This is the current state of affairs, before the huge cuts and lapses kick in.

Grad student workers, classified staff and increasingly academic staff are reaching crisis mode now, and I've heard faculty talk about struggling to cover basic expenses.

Time to stand up and work for the recall. While there's still a University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Google Translate "already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old"

2011-11-03T08:56:00.003-05:00

Wow. That's the claim of a headline of a Slate story by Jeremy Kingsley, here. In the body of the story, they use a somewhat different formulation:

Today, the [Google] algorithm has an understanding of language something like a 10-year-old’s, but its rate of improvement is fast exceeding human language-learning development.

That makes more sense, and I can imagine that a journalist trying to explain how GoogleTranslate works would reach for this kind of comparison. Note that the two claims are different: one about comprehension and one about production.

But whichever claim you take, it's an empirical claim of sorts. So, I tried it with a little chunk of Spanish (from here), figuring that lots of our readers know Spanish and that it's probably one of the better developed languages (compared to Albanian and Azerbaijani, which it also does). This is the original:

La Historia de la lengua espanola, de Rafael Lapesa, es obra de ejemplaridad casi unica en el campo linguistico y literario. Hace medio siglo que llego al publico por primera vez, y desde entonces ha formado, enriquecido y deleitado a muchas generaciones de estudiosos. Esta edicion recoge la ultima reelaboracion que el maestro Lapesa hizo con exigente entusiasmo, aumentando su volumen original en mas de un tercio. Y de nuevo se impone concluir: nadie como Rafael Lapesa ha descrito la historia de nuestra lengua; nadie ha sabido contarla con tanta eficacia, con tanto encanto. Mediante la vision sucesiva de los distintos estados del espanol, Lapesa logro fundir historia, lenguaje, cultura y vida. Su libro alcanza cohesion superior al concebir como inseparables la lengua y la literatura. Los grandes autores y obras aparecen caracterizados en su estilo de forma inolvidable. La belleza de las creaciones individuales se suma asi a la oscura labor del pueblo. En el dominio de los materiales brillan las cualidades relevantes de Lapesa: saber exacto, equilibrio, serena objetividad, talante generoso, claridad pura (casi sin tecnicismos), compenetracion mental y sensitiva con lo tratado, modestia, sacrificio. Memorable Historia la que (desde el pasado y desde el presente) construyo el maestro. Para todo hispanohablante ha sido, es y ha de seguir siendo obra especialmente querida.

Here's what GoogleTranslate spits out:

The History of the Spanish language, Rafael Lapesa is exemplary work almost unique in the field of languages and literature. Half a century ago who came to the public for the first time, and has since formed, enriched and delighted many generations of scholars. This edition includes the latest reworking the teacher did Lapesa demanding enthusiasm, increasing its original volume in more than one third. And again imposed conclude: anyone like Rafael Lapesa has described the history of our language, no one has been able to tell it so effectively with so much charm. Through the vision of successive various states of Spanish, melt achievement Lapesa history, language, culture and life. His book reaches cohesion conceived as inseparable than language and literature. Major authors and works are characterized in an unforgettable style. The beauty of individual creations joins the dark work of the people. In the domain of materials relevant qualities shine Lapesa: exact knowledge, balance, objectivity, calm, generous spirit, pure brightness (almost non-technical), sensory and mental rapport with the treaty, modesty, sacrifice. That Memorable History (from the past and from the present) built the master. For all speaking has been, is and must remain a work especially dear.

I don't talk to 10-year-olds that often, but while this is a really impressive automatic result (to me at least), I wonder how we judge the program's level of 'understanding' of a language? And if we have a metric, is this 10-year-old-like?

In terms of production, it's not close to the syntactic patterns that a kid of that age would have, right? I'm a little surprised that it's not better on pro-drop and don't get why it seems to have simply skipped some words … I could see using an English possessive instead of 'de', but I don't get why "Para todo hispanohablante" comes out as "For all speaking".

But I'm in favor of anything that involves "the dark work of the people", to which I now return …

English as a Second F*cking Language

2011-11-02T16:57:00.001-05:00

The grammar.net grammar blog contest reminded me as how much blogging there is specifically for English L2 learners and teachers. Here at Mr. V, we enjoy language learning and swearing, and this book aims at both audiences. Over the course of the book, it wears a little thin (how many times is the f-word funny?) but I imagine lots of learners learning stuff they don't know from it.

Viewer/reader discretion advised, less for the four-letter words than for gender issues.

How's your viscus feeling today?

2011-11-01T08:43:00.003-05:00

I know Mr. Verb is all about, you guessed it, verbs, but here's a cool adjective blend I heard on the radio yesterday: "I had a gutteral reaction to it." Isn't that awesome? "gut reaction" + "visceral reaction" = "gutteral reaction."

Grant proposal advice

2011-11-01T08:14:00.000-05:00

Science Times has a nice interview with the famous brain scientist Michael Gazzaniga this morning (here), including this from the bit called "Midnight Labs and Martini Time":

On Grant Proposals
This whole idea that you write up an experiment laying out all methods and questions you’re going to answer beforehand; it’s nonsense. That’s not the way it works. You’re just trying whatever it is you’re trying; you don’t know what’s going to happen, and then whoosh! — the thing pours right out there and generates the next questions, questions you never would have thought of before.

And the winner is ...

2011-10-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

My sense is that most of our readers aren't into the Grammar.net grammar blog contest, but just in case, here are the winners.

1st place: A Clil To Climb
2nd place: Grammar Girl
3rd place: Arrant Pedantry

I know the second and third, but haven't been able to get the winner to open.

Tense, moody AND irregular ...

2011-10-29T14:13:00.000-05:00

Look, I know that the Log has cornered the market on these images, but we GOTTA cover this one.

New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 40

2011-10-29T11:13:00.000-05:00

Field report here from Georgetown, where the 40th NWAV is taking place. Yesterday's program included a great panel by a bunch of the founders of the conference and this subfield of linguistics. (See picture of Dennis Preston. Click to embiggen.) That panel and other speakers have stressed points that are key pieces of how most University of Wisconsin – Madison linguists are thinking, especially heavy stress on inclusiveness across theoretical perspectives/subfields and real emphasis on public service and outreach.

By the way, next year will be at Indiana University.

Chomsky on twitter

2011-10-27T13:23:00.001-05:00

Say, how come this isn't all over the linguablogs? Nathan Jurgenson at Salon has written a piece called this:

Why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter
When the linguist claims that social media is "shallow," he isn't very deep or convincing

Maybe the uproar is among journalism folks rather than linguists here?

Siri and accents

2011-10-26T20:23:00.002-05:00

Just for fun: Siri apparently fails on a Scottish accent. Here.

Cryptography in the news

2011-10-25T13:40:00.001-05:00

We've posted a bit in the past (here) about the famous Voynich manuscript. Today, the NY Times' Science Times has a cool story about a piece of notable cryptography, here. Nice example of how new tools help us solve old problems.

Dismantling education in Wisconsin, very quickly

2011-10-22T11:29:00.000-05:00

Wisconsin readers of this blog probably almost all know about the new budget cuts the University of Wisconsin System is suddenly facing. After a $250,000,000 cut to the System over the biennium, it was announced last week that this would be upped by over $65,000,000 more. Now, that number has risen to more like $111,000,000. The numbers aren't final and official yet, but we're probably looking at cuts of over $360,000,000 to the System over two years. Here's a clear version of what we know at this point, and as usual Sifting & Winnowing is an excellent place to go for info.

At the same time, yesterday on Wisconsin Public Radio, we heard that the governor of this state is backing a proposal that would eliminate English and math requirements for high school graduation, allowing them to be replaced with vocational training. (Here's a good summary of that.) Many of us have long suspected that Walker's promises of job growth were based on the Texas model — minimum wage jobs without benefits, etc., rather than jobs that would truly move Wisconsin forward as an economic power — and this looks thoroughly consistent with that.

Image from here.

British dialects in the news

2011-10-21T11:31:00.001-05:00

Here's a nice piece on contemporary language and dialect issues in Britain, by leading sociolinguist Paul Kerswill and published in the Sun. We've said a little about dialect and the British show EastEnders here in the past (here), but this is about a reality show, The Only Way is Essex, or TOWIE.

I haven't seen the show and don't know enough about British dialects today to have anything to say anyhow, but maybe some readers can comment on Kerswill's analysis? Sure looks to me like a good example of laying out language variation and change stuff for a lay audience.

More English Only in Michigan

2011-10-19T14:02:00.002-05:00

See this story. Here's the start of the piece:

Six languages were heard spoken at Spartan Stadium last weekend during the annual football showdown between Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, state Rep. Kenneth Kurtz, R-Coldwater, said.

Those watching at home heard the game in one language — English, Kurtz noted.

"Why? Because that's the language," he said.

"We're a nation of immigrants. We've come together under one system of government, one Constitution, and that Constitution is in English," Kurtz added.
If language use today is determined by the original language of documents (or speakers? cultures?), there may be big changes coming on various fronts, but what I want to know is what six languages were spoken and how the heck Kurtz knows?

Lingua-blog scandal?!?!?!

2011-10-18T15:48:00.000-05:00

Grammar.net is holding its 2011 Best Grammar Blog contest now (here), and I just got this email:

Dear bloggers!

Yesterday, October 17, at 11.59 p.m. PST the contest for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 was supposed to end. The competition was intense; voters were doing their best to support their favorite blogs. The winners will be announced on Friday, October 21st. Unfortunately, we had to disqualify two blogs. But we would still like to have real winners, so we have extended the voting until Thursday, October 20th, 11.59 p.m. PST.

We will continue to monitor the voting process and hope the competition will be fair (each person can vote only once).

Contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Grammar.net team
contest@grammar.net
It's all about grammar!

Wow, voting rigging on a grammar blog contest?!?!? I had checked in a couple of time out of curiosity ... it's really about grammar blogs and not linguistics blogs, so it's not something that we have promoted here. But a scandal! Linguabloggers cared enough to cheat!

Somebody has to know the inside scoop. Dish please!

Getting worse ... Proto-Human word order

2011-10-17T10:59:00.003-05:00

So, USA Today has picked up the Proto-Human word order story and locked in on a part I was really hoping might go unnoticed in the press:

In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[Gell-Mann and Ruhlen] dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.

Sigh. This creates the impression that there's actual scholarly debate surrounding reconstructing Proto-Human word order. It's true Bickerton made arguments 30 years ago for SVO as the starting point of human language, but it's hardly the core point of the (very controversial) proposal he makes in The Roots of Language. I don't recall offhand that this particular point provoked much discussion at the time.

PS: The people who pursue the study of language are called linguists and the field linguistics. Us pseudonymous bloggers make typos but we don't have USA Today's staff to comb for typos.

PPS: My personal copy of the book has faded in almost exactly the way shown in the pic here ... the purplish stayed on the jacket where it was protected by books next to it and the spine turned that same weird color with exposure to light. Since when do online photos of books (this one on Amazon) reflect current state of the jacket?

More on evolution, language and gender ...

2011-10-16T16:31:00.001-05:00

Just ran across this on Salon:

Why do men and women talk differently?A new book argues that guys argue and girls overshare for a reason: Evolution.

It's about a new book by John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, and his new book, Duels and Duets. I haven't seen the book and may never read it, so I'll leave it to others to sort out what's what, but here's the barest synopsis:

Men, he argues, use antagonistic speech, or “duels,” to show off their strength and prove themselves to women. Women, meanwhile, use quieter speech patterns to bond with each other — and help protect themselves against aggressive men. And, according to Locke, this is a pattern that has been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

The comments are pretty interesting, and they don't seem inhibited by not having read the book. This one is typical:

Please stop publishing evo-psych bullshit. It's an unverifiable pseudoscience.

Not mutually intelligible dialects of American English in the news

2011-10-16T15:59:00.002-05:00

... or at least a classic failure to communicate. No discourse analysis needed, I suppose. Visit here for the real item (and the usual tons of cool stuff that Tom Tomorrow has). And as always, click to embiggen.

Gotta go, late for my bongo session downtown.

Proto-Human and Yodic syntax

2011-10-15T16:33:00.002-05:00

I first read earlier this week about new work on the word order of the earliest human speech (first in a footnote to a post on the Log on an entirely different subject, see here). The work is by Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen, two proponents of the notion that many characteristics of the earliest human patterns of speech are well within our reach, and it was published in — wait for it — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The abstract opens with this:

Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language.

The blood pressure of almost every trained, working historical linguist in North America skyrockets on reading that. Just ask one. But here's the big take-home from the story:

The word order in the ancestral language was SOV. Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion.

I had been pondering whether it was worthwhile to write about the story. The evidence for Proto-Human, as it's often called, is insanely controversial, to give it the most positive spin, and whether syntax can be reconstructed in a significant way is also still controversial. (There's reasonable evidence that some elements of it can be, but that gets us as far off the ground as a good high-jumper, while Proto-Human word order is a trip to Mars.) I had decided that it wasn't worth it. But then …

Alert Linguistics major Carla Oppenheimer passed on word of a couple of news stories on this to a member of Team Verb:

Life's Little Mysteries (again, under the rubric 'Weird'): "The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded"
HuffPost Weird News: "Yoda Language Study: New Research Shows Human Ancestors Spoke Like Star Wars Character"

YES!!!! Finally, a level of seriousness that Proto-Human so richly deserves!

So, I'm thinking, is this how Yoda speaks? I tried entering some simple English SVO sentences into the Yoda-Speak Generator (yup, it's real: here). A bunch came out SVO with 'yes, hmmm' added at the end. But in many cases the object was topicalized: 'Yoda has odd syntax' came out as 'Odd syntax, Yoda has. Yes, hmmm.' That's actually OSV, one of the rarest word order patterns known.

But that's not the key pattern if you put in more complex sentences. Try this:

I will tell you about the earliest human language.

and you get this:

Tell you about the earliest human language, I will. Yeesssssss.

So, the Yoda generalization here is that he topicalizes like mad, a generalization among many explored years ago on Language Log, like here, in the aptly titled "Unclear of Yoda's syntax the principles are, if any". Certainly, whatever generalizations are possible, Yodic is not SOV.

At the same time, comparing Proto-Human word order to the speech of a Star Wars character seems just right.

I(mage from the Life's Little Mysteries story.)

Discourse Analysis in the news

2011-10-14T07:36:00.000-05:00

... from the latest print Onion. (Yeah, where else?)

So, you ask whether Deborah Tannen has started writing for the Onion. Nah.

By the way, I was pretty frustrated by the blog spam attack in September, and it took a while for it to stop (after reporting the attack, etc.) Time to get rolling again ...

Blog spam attack

2011-09-17T15:45:00.000-05:00

Well, comments will be monitored for a while. Under spam comment attack. Happens pretty often, but usually just a couple at a time. In this case, it's a couple a minute over an extended period of time. And if the URL is really what the site is about, it's the most useless commercial crap you could put on this blog.

Old school translation humor?

2011-09-10T10:15:00.001-05:00

The recent passing of Eugene Nida has gone more or less unremarked on in linguistics blogs, at least those that I follow. It has been huge news among missionary types, judging from a quick Google search. This reflects his career, I suppose, but he actually did do real work in linguistics — the image is the cover of a book he published with the University of Michigan Press.

While there's a lot of importance to be said about missionary linguistics and probably about his role in it, I'm not going to deal with that now. I have far less significant stuff in mind.

The NYT did a long obit on Nida (here). They laid out his contribution to translation as being in his “dynamic equivalence” or “functional equivalence” approach, that is, the effort to provide idiomatic translations rather than literal, word-by-word ones. I don't know the history of translation at all, but he certainly wasn't the first to do this by any stretch. But again, my purpose is a lower one.

The obit ends with this note:

Translated back into English, some of the Bible passages produced using Mr. Nida’s method yield a resonant poetry. As The New York Times reported in a 1955 article about his work, “‘I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’”

Is this a print instance of what some now call 'BabelFish humor'? Or a sophisticated statement about metaphor and language change (since it's within a small region)? I'm going with colonialist-era exoticization of languages/cultures readers don't have any clue about.

Add these to your trolley

2011-09-08T11:48:00.004-05:00

One of my students forwarded to me this link to an interesting BBC Magazine article on Americanisms that some Brits find annoying. Just as interesting are the 1295 comments.

Frank & Ernest rule the world

2011-09-07T06:11:00.004-05:00

Somebody gave me this last night ...

(Here's the link to the real version … in color, even!)

A lot of American English speakers don't produce an actual 'n' in a word like can't. We instead nasalize the vowel, [kæ̃t], sometimes also with a final glottal stop instead of the 't'. The story is that this happens when the nasal is followed in the same syllable by another consonant, so that you have an 'n' in can but not can't. But in Atlantis, some of us can flap the 't' and so don't have a full nasal here either. (We don't lose the contrast, just the 'n': nasalization on the vowel keeps antic versus attic clear.)

In other words, some of us DO have a lost consonant of Atlantis. Kinda.

New linguablog: The Diacritics

2011-09-06T07:21:00.003-05:00

Just found out about another language blog: The Diacritics. Former ling undergrads, now law students.

Read it.

another awesome blend

2011-09-01T07:34:00.006-05:00

FOOTBALLMAGEDDON!!!
(For those of you poor souls who don't live in Madison, WI, some explanation is called for. We're having a "rare weekday football game" tonight - some 80,000 people will attend - and our inboxes have been filled with dire warnings about what it's going to do to traffic, given that classes start tomorrow and students are still moving in and everything is generally chaos on campus.)
HT to a friend of a friend on Facebook.

Slow Science

2011-08-25T12:12:00.004-05:00

I like the 'slow food' movement a lot, and for a lot of reasons. Slow Science has been around for a while, but I just learned of a new manifesto from France. Here's the link, and there's an English version.

Many readers probably know this similar thing: slow-science.org, but any manifesto that starts out with 'we don't blog' and 'we don't tweet' may be trying my patience a little. (Of course they actually write 'we don't twitter', which is kind of endearing.)

Really, I guess I'd been expecting some kind of organized backlash to the speeding up of everything in research.

So, verbistas, what do you make of the initiative?

Image from here.

Earthquake humor?

2011-08-23T14:24:00.002-05:00

On the Randi Rhodes show just now, the guest host is Nicole Sandler was just reading tweets about the east coast earthquake. In the hope that there weren't serious injuries or damage, here's a language-related bit of humor:

I was rotf, but not l-ing.

I don't know why, but it seems funny.

V Bar: Watering hole for syntacticians

2011-08-05T08:30:00.002-05:00

Some of our readers no doubt know that there's a watering hole for syntacticians in Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport. A reader has sent along this image of it ...

Makes me thirsty, but I'm not sure if Merge translates here into shaken versus stirred.

A big tip of the bowler, or more modern headgear, to PTR.

Debtpocalypse

2011-07-25T14:38:00.000-05:00

It had to happen. See here.

Bankster

2011-07-25T13:38:00.003-05:00

The word bankster, a negative term for (especially big) bankers, has gotten really common since the major bank bailout. (Today, it gets 2.24 million raw google hits.) But it's not THAT established ... OED Online doesn't have it.

It was interesting, I thought, to see the old -ster suffix being productive in the current scene. It used to be highly productive and we still have lots of examples around and not all really old. I had just uncritically reckoned that it was that suffix, with the negative semantics probably by association to terms like huckster, gangster, shyster, and so on.

But in UrbanDictionary and other sources, it's treated as a blend of banker and gangster. Not sure I buy that. Anybody got any info or arguments on this?

The best history of the word I've seen so far is Nancy Friedman's discussion here (with reference to other stuff), but she doesn't probe the etymological angle particularly. She talks about it being used from fringe right people, but today it's widespread in progressive circles, definitely (but maybe also used by the far right still?) And while you're at it, check out the Culturomics data on this word (and compare it to gangster, etc.). It's never been really common, but it's older than you might think and had a big bump during the Depression:

The sharp rise might be consistent with it being coined in the media or something. Appropriate that it's come back now, eh?

Anyway, I'd be curious if others know more about this one.

Sincerestly

2011-07-16T07:42:00.005-05:00

You ARE a member of the Colbert Super PAC, aren't you? Good. That means you got his latest message, declaring that this new organization 'has been hailed in the national press as everything from "legal" to "dangerous."'
There's actually no particular language angle here, really, save that he signs the letter 'sincerestly'.

Just kidding. It's classic Colbertian poety, of course, through and through. That includes a nice bit of nouning:

Donate now. Donate often. Make a difference. Make a donate.

Yes, Stephen, together, let's make a better tomorrow, tomorrow.

taking the gold in the olympics of blending???

2011-07-13T19:50:00.007-05:00

The headline says "Redistricting? No, Fitzwalkermandering". Okay, for those of you who are not Wisconsinites (I'm sorry), Fitzwalkerstan (another gold) is the name for our state under the insane politics of the day - for the Fitzgerald brothers (Senate Majority Leader Scott and Assembly Speaker Jeff) and our own governator, Scott Walker. But then there's "gerrymander," which the article says (and the always trustworthy Wikipedia verifies) comes from another governor, Eldrige Gerry of Massachusetts, who in 1812 redrew a legislative district in the shape of a salamander to benefit his delightfully-named Democratic-Republican Party. So blend on top of blend, wahoo!

Idiomizer

2011-07-12T07:08:00.005-05:00

Got a message last week from Harlan Collins at www.idiomizer.com. I wasn't even aware of the project, but it looks like good clean fun, and I know a lot of our readers are polyglots … here's your chance.

Enjoy!

I recall a different time...

2011-07-09T20:47:00.007-05:00

Headline: Breaking: Senate President Russell Pearce Recalled In Arizona, Must Run For Re-Election Or Resign

I've noticed for a while now that we're all (myself included) using "recall" to mean "stand for a recall election". But doesn't it mean to lose a recall election? Dictionaries, as usual, are unhelpful - here's the closest Merriam-Webster comes: "to call back (was recalled to active duty); (a pitcher recalled from the minors)". Just wonderin'.

History of English in 10 minutes

2011-06-27T16:19:00.003-05:00

Has this one hit the language blogs?

Big tip of the era-appropriate headwear to John from the Literacy Blog.

NSF Lingiustics Program under threat

2011-06-22T10:05:00.004-05:00

Many readers of this blog are members of the Linguistic Society of America, so will have gotten this already, but it warrants posting, if only as a reminder. Just unbelievable, the depth of this attack on scientific research of all kinds: trying to eliminate the entire directorate for Social, Behaviorial and Economic Sciences at NSF.

Dear Colleagues,

The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice & Science (CJS) is considering changing the 2012 appropriation to eliminate the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate at the NSF, which includes the Linguistics Program. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), a coalition to which the LSA belongs supporting Federal funding for the social sciences, is encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and Senators, urging the House to continue to support the human sciences at NSF. Having had the privilege of serving recently as one of the Assistant Directors of the NSF, heading up the SBE directorate, I want to endorse COSSA's request, believing that eliminating SBE would be disastrous for the human sciences in the US and for linguistics in particular.

So the LSA is now encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and US Senators, ideally before the CJS Subcommittee meeting on 7 July, or before the full House Appropriations Committee meeting on 13 July, and at least before the floor discussion scheduled for the week of 25 July. You may want to copy Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf R-VA and Ranking Member Chakah Fattah D-PA and perhaps other members of the Subcommittee (http://www.appropriations.house.gov/Subcommittees/Subcommittee/?IssueID=34794) and Appropriations Committee Chair Harold Rogers (R-KY) and Ranking Member Norm Dicks (D-WA) (http://www.appropriations.house.gov). You can find contact information for your representative using the “Write Your Representative” feature at https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml, and you will find a list of Senators, sortable by state, at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

We all lead busy lives and if you prefer to send something more or less ready made I suggest something along the lines of the letter available at http://www.lsadc.org/info/NSFSBEletter.pdf. You may copy and paste the text from this letter (make sure the formatting has copied appropriately) and if you have the opportunity to elaborate and to tell your representatives something about our field, you may want to address one or more of the following points:

a. some of us study language as a branch of biology (biolinguistics), in such a way that the field has become a lead science within the cognitive sciences more broadly and within emerging neuroscience.
b. much work in linguistics feeds work on applied linguistics, which is the basis for the major worldwide industry of second language teaching.
c. with the development of new communication technologies, work in computational linguistics has been playing an increasing role in the development of new technologies as we seek more effective automated techniques of text analysis, including machine translation.
d. work in linguistics has become important in developing therapies for aphasia and language disorders in patients suffering from strokes, Alzheimer's and other diseases.
e. study of language variation has been instrumental in thwarting the extermination of some endangered languages and in addressing social and political issues in matters of language use.
f. work on the acquisition of language, both first and second language acquisition, has played a leading role in the learning sciences generally.
g. linguists have been funded by directorates such as Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education & Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering, large-scale cross-directorate programs like Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), and more focused inter-directorate programs like CreativeIT and Social Computational Systems (SoCS); none of this would happen without SBE and the Linguistics Program.

Support will be particularly valuable if your representatives are from the Republican party. Furthermore, you might strengthen your argument by pointing to NSF-supported work being conducted at a university in the representative's area.

David W. Lightfoot, PhD
Past President, Linguistic Society of America
Professor of Linguistics,
Director, Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science,
Director, Communication, Culture & Technology Program, Georgetown University

[N + V-ing]

2011-06-18T13:37:00.004-05:00

As I was reading an article in today's NYT, the following sentence got me thinking about constituents of the structure [N+V-ing]: "Women driving remains a sensitive issue in Saudi Arabia." In true N+V nominal compounds in Germanic languages, as far as I'm aware, the noun is (nearly?) always an object; SUBJ+V compounds sound odd (almost certainly due to subject-object asymmetry and the structure of the VP). Prosody is helpful here to show that apparent compounds like "women driving" are in fact not compounds at all; cf. ['women 'driving] (two phonological words) vs. ['truck driving] (one). So the -ing form in a constituent like "women driving" must be a complement or adjunct modifying the head noun (as in this very sentence). It's cool when a subtle clue from outside syntax sheds light on a syntactic structure. Image is from here.

Law language and hyperformalism

2011-06-17T13:55:00.002-05:00

Been corresponding with colleagues in the Law School, who are wondering whether …

there is a special word for talking about hyperformalism in law .... you know, where the law gets so technical that it is actually undoing what it was put in place to do.

I don't know the answer, but I bet our readers (1) will and (2) can invent better answers.

Let the games begin!

British English Dialects in the Popular Media

2011-06-14T14:57:00.002-05:00

Regular followers of this blog include a lot of folks interested in patterns of regional variation in language, including English. The Economist has an interesting article on the robust health of British English dialects (at least on the phonetic level). It also refers to the sociophonetic work of Kevin Watson and Paul Kerswill at the University of Lancaster. The very nice graphic at left is taken from the article.

Wisconsin politics

2011-06-14T10:25:00.001-05:00

Here's a good recent statement about where our state is at politically. It's partisan, to be sure, but smart. Going to be an interesting day, week, summer ...

Lexical Morphology Joke!!!

2011-06-13T13:11:00.016-05:00

Last semester I taught intro to morphology, and one of the things we do in that class is go over the basics of Lexical Morphology. And in the course of that we talk about fun stuff like bookstore vs. *books-store, mice-infested vs. *rats-infested, and so on. So I was sitting around with a bunch of non-linguists, and we started talking about how every place has a place that they make fun of. e.g. the US in general has Polack jokes, although where my cousin Kate grew up in northern Wisconsin they were all Belgian jokes (really). And of course Canada has its Newfie jokes. One person said that when they lived in Pittsburgh, everything was West Virginia jokes. And he proceeded to tell us the following West Virginia joke (apologies to anyone from W VA; this is mention, not use): Q: How do you know that the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia? A: Because otherwise it would be called a teethbrush. !!! I just sat there with my head exploding for a while, and then offered to give them a half-hour lecture on the topic, which to my shock, they turned down.

lol update

2011-06-12T10:41:00.001-05:00

I was kinda starting to miss lol, without quite knowing it, until a young linguist, Tanner S., took a look at the development of acronyms and initialisms in recent American English (unpublished manuscript). Some of the data on lol and related terms is pretty cool:

lol-worthy, lolable, lolacaust, lolcano, lollercoaster, lolrus
roflcopter, roflsaurus

A few compounds I knew about (lolcat, etc.) and I'd heard some of these blends (though I googled lolrus to see what parts of the story I might be missing). And I had heard it as a verb and as an interjection, but hadn't particularly thought about it as a noun:

A picture is worth 1000 lolz.

Gee, maybe it hasn't ruined the language after all.

Image from here.

Fitzwalkerstan Liberation Movement

2011-06-07T09:37:00.004-05:00

I get that send around or posting pics of people isn't always a good thing, but one of our contributors passed along this, the latest from Walkerville, the thriving tent community around the Capitol:

The movement will soon take over the state, I hope. Back to linguistics soon ...

Old Norse translations like you probably haven't thought about Old Norse translations

2011-06-04T14:03:00.003-05:00

It's been quite a while since we trumpeted the übergeekish effort to put Star Wars into Old Norse (here, if you are the rare human being who doesn't have Tattúínárdœla Saga bookmarked.) That site is now up to new and equally innovative (though probably not as wildly popular!) work: They are providing translations of Eddic poems into the form they would have had when they were composed.

Wow.

The intelligence establishment and metaphor research

2011-06-03T08:34:00.003-05:00

We're all used to defense money going to language-related work ... language learning/teaching, speech recognition, corpus stuff, and on and on. You might not have expected work on metaphor there, but that's getting funded too, according to this piece in the Atlantic, by Alexis Madrigal.

In fact, here's a call for proposals out there from IARPA:

The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture. In the first phase of the two-phase program, performers will develop automated tools and techniques for recognizing, defining and categorizing linguistic metaphors associated with target concepts and found in large amounts of native-language text. The resulting conceptual metaphors will be validated using empirical social science methods. In the second phase, the program will characterize differing cultural perspectives associated with case studies of the types of interest to the Intelligence Community. Performers will apply the methodology established in the first phase and will identify the conceptual metaphors used by the various protagonists, organizing and structuring them to reveal the contrastive stances.

I guess my point is just that you NEVER know where funding will pop up.

(Image from the article.)

Degrammaticalization of ish

2011-05-31T15:56:00.000-05:00

Back in the winter, even before the political fires scorched Madison, some of us were talking about the famous case of 'ish' as degrammaticalization. That is, what has traditionally been a garden variety suffix forming adjectives (green > greenish) has been liberated to become a free word. So, to give the example from the post linked above, younger speakers can have this exchange (and even old people understand it):

Q: Is he rich?
A: Ish.

Now, in considering just how free ish now is, a really bright grad student and one local linguist came up, through various intermediate discussions, with the question of whether you could actually get the ish without something that it is meant to be attached recoverable in the context. That is, in the example above, the idea is that the answer is 'richish'. We've been looking around for examples where this connection isn't so clear, which would point to a more liberated form.

The other day, while in a VW dealership, the missus pointed out this:

So, some questions: (1) To speakers who have this form, is this a good sentence? (2) If so, the answer would be 'anyone-ish', right? Does anyone-ish work for anybody as a word?

Bilingualism research in the news

2011-05-30T16:47:00.003-05:00

Nice piece in Science Times on Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist who's contributed massively to our understanding of bilingualism, here.

After complaining so often about science journalism dealing with language and linguistics (well, who hasn't?), I have to note that the Q&A structure of this piece is really nice.

Image is of a Pet Shop Boys album cover, from here.

Lingodroid

2011-05-22T09:31:00.006-05:00

With that title, does the post even need content? This is all over a bunch of tech blogs, but I haven't seen it among the linguabloggers. Amar Toor probably gets it right (here) with:

Lingodroid robots develop their own language, quietly begin plotting against mankind

Hey, I live in Wisconsin. That's less scary than most state elected officials. And no, I'm not bothered in the least by whether or not this could reasonably be considered 'language'. I might have been until I read the word robotapocalypse. Game over.

Image from übergizmo.

Accent Discrimination

2011-05-10T09:38:00.005-05:00

I guess Amy Dickinson is the new Ann Landers - who knew? Anyway today's column has the headline "'Fargo' Accent Bothers Her", and the advice-seeker says she's met a man online and he seems wonderful, but he has this dreadful northern Michigan accent: "And it really is a discordant note to my ears." The most interesting part of her letter, though, is where she says "I came from a rural area in Wisconsin, and the first thing I worked on when I went off to college was the sloppy diction, etc., that I grew up with. Now, no one would guess where I was born." How sad that she didn't get to go to UW and participate in the wonderful Wisconsin Englishes project! [Shameless plug]
I was pleasantly surprised, though, that Amy responds with "I fail to see what is so awful about this," and goes on to say "when everyone in North America starts to sound like an anchorman, we will have lost something important, not to mention charming." We need to let her know there's no danger of that, and we also need to work harder on PR for knowledge of basic linguistics!

So ballsy!

2011-04-30T13:52:00.005-05:00

One of our clever young linguistics majors, Colin Williams, asked me about the word "ballsy" the other day. He wondered if it wasn't in violation of the "inflection outside of derivation" mantra. It sure looks like a plural "-s" inside a derivational (N -> A) "-y" (cf. "hand/handy"). My tired old brain has been working overtime thinking about this. Somehow I want to say, no, no, no, there's a derivational suffix "-sy". But is there? I've come up with a (short) list of others like it: folksy, artsy, bluesy, gutsy, newsy, outdoorsy, sudsy... (I decided that "footsy" doesn't count because it's a noun.) It sure looks like the plural "s" on all of those. Especially "blues," "news," and "suds" - which don't occur without their "s" (in the same meaning). "Folksy" is a little weird, because the people referred to would usually be the folk rather than the folks. But for the rest: the arts, the blues, guts, the news, the outdoors, and suds - well, they do usually have their plural "-s" on them. Whaddya think?

2011-04-28T11:34:00.003-05:00

(Pix from here)

Here's something worth reading if you haven't handed out your evaluations in class yet. Before opening that envelope, before finding a student with a need to please and is willing to carry the envelope back to the department, before handing out those brand new #2 pencils the department will never see again, read this piece by the Onion, titled "Professor Deeply Hurt By Student's Evaluation."

You tell me, is this is comedy or reality?

“Students and the enormous revenue they bring in to our institution are a more valued commodity to us than faculty,” Dean James Hewitt said. “Although Rothberg is a distinguished, tenured professor with countless academic credentials and knowledge of 21 modern and ancient languages, there is absolutely no excuse for his boring Chad with his lectures. Chad must be entertained at all costs.”

The balance between keeping faculty and attracting students from a monetary perspective is not as easy as it sounds here,

"Keeping tuition low in the face of diminishing support from the state erodes and limits access when quality and access are vital to the state and the prospects of our graduates. UW–Madison has no desire to charge private tuition rates; we want only to get closer to our public peers. ... We will educate and graduate more Wisconsin students in four years, providing them with what they need to flourish and reducing their costs."

Discuss.

Of deals, devils and details: Budget reality check

2011-04-24T01:08:00.002-05:00

Note: The guest post below comes from someone concerned about the move for 'public authority' for UW-Madison.

The politics of public authority for UW-Madison seem to be unraveling. People who’re talking to key Republican lawmakers and their staffers are hearing things like “non-starter”, “no way” and “ain’t gonna happen”. The Chancellor has ginned up a lot of support on campus and in Madison, but statewide politics will likely kill this proposal.

But this deal is a monster and a lot of monsters don’t die easy. Let me give you a silver bullet for your pistol in case you meet the monster in a dark alley: This deal with Walker has been sold around vague flexibilities. The details we know, in fact, are mostly serious downsides, and many people aren’t even aware of them. Consider the budget implications of these two tidbits, one you may and one you may not know:

(1) In previous budget cuts, we’ve taken 40% of the total cut to UW-System, but this cut is 50-50 between us and System. That’s an extra $30 million base cut annually. No projected gains from flexibilities shows how that amount could be made up. The projections shown at the Faculty Senate and elsewhere basically conceal this fact: They project our budget as if it were starting from where we are now, not from $30 million less. How long would it take to recoup that amount in the base budget?

(2) We would no longer have a state pay plan. That means that our block grant would in the future not include any money for pay increases. Any. Ever. As salaries increase, we’d have to cover that from our own new monies. A 1% raise for the whole campus costs about $5 million right now, with benefits. So, a modest 3% raise would mean generating an extra $15 million per year in perpetuity. Chart that out over 10 years on a spreadsheet!

Bottom line, the current proposal guarantees us cuts, far deeper than if we stay with System.

Worse, there is not any of feigned promise of insurance of any kind against future cuts. The Virginia model contained the kinds of guarantees that Wisconsin’s proposal lacks. And the legislature still came back and cut them further.

There’s a real way forward here, one the legislature and the System may be willing to pursue: Much of the flexibility that people argue for — and much of which would be uncontroversially useful to our campus — can be achieved without public authority. And without the extremely damaging consequences outlined above. We need a concrete set of flexibilities that we can agree on, which will work for us within System and which the legislature can accept.

Public Authority, R.I.P.?

2011-04-18T08:19:00.004-05:00

Despite our recent silence, Team Verb is alive and well and mostly not even living underground here in Fitzwalkerstan. But we've been busy little badgers.* The current fight has been over the New Badger Partnership, originally a call for 'flexibility' for UW-Madison and now a proposal to make us a 'public authority', i.e. take a huge step toward privatization. This has deeply divided campus. It looks like the issue may be resolving itself in the legislature, with passage of public authority status now becoming unlikely.

According to WisPolitics, Robin Vos, Joint Finance Assembly Co-chair, said this on Sunday’s "UpFront with Mike Gousha":

He also said while he agrees with the guv’s vision of giving UW-Madison more flexibility, proposing the spin off was too much for lawmakers to digest in one budget cycle.

“I am positive that we are going to give some additional flexibility, but probably not all the way to allowing Madison to spin off and set its own tuition and all those things without more oversight,” he said on the show, which is produced in conjunction with WisPolitics.com.

And we'll be back to language very soon. Promise.

UPDATE, 12:00: A reader passed along this link about the honey badger (probably PG-13 or something in terms of language, but) hilarious. See the comments about why the honey badger rather than an actual badger is pictured here. And oh yeah, do NOT mess with a honey badger.

*A favorite slogan here is that Walker is "a weasel not a badger", along with lots of references to what badgers do when attacked or cornered. As you can read here, the little critters are said to be able to fight off bears and wolves.

Quick Wisconsin update

2011-04-03T10:57:00.003-05:00

This is a critical week for Wisconsin and its flagship university. Here are some highlights:

Monday, 3:30, Bascom Hall 272: Faculty Senate meeting. Another Committee of the Whole discussion of the proposed public authority. Also on the agenda is the issue of the University turning over faculty emails to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. (People in the know are telling me that there was/is a strong case to be made against handing over anything.)

Monday, 5:00: From Memphis to Madison: Honor History, Make History. Rally for Statewide Day of Action in conjunction with GOTV efforts. Features performances by Michelle Shocked, other musical acts, and speeches by the Reverend Jesse Jackson and other leaders of the movement.

Tuesday: Election day. The right now controls the State Supreme by 4-3. If Kloppenburg beats Prosser, that flips it.

Tuesday, 1:00: Fight back USA teach-in, Hillel. LIVE WEBCAST: Cornel West & Frances Fox Piven (hosting) ... Jeffrey Sachs, economist, Columbia University Heather McGhee, Demos Richard Trumka, president, AFL-CIO plus activist reports on Wisconsin, teacher unions, and anti-forclosure movement.

Yesterday was the Zombie walk again Walker. Pic from here.

"It's gonna take martial law"

2011-03-26T08:37:00.008-05:00

... as the great George Clinton said.

Seriously, it's getting hard to avoid thinking that we no longer live under rule of law in Wisconsin. Last week's publication of the anti-union law and the claim that it's now in force, all despite a (repeated) court injunction, would seem to ice that case. And if you read this, you surely long since know that UW History professor Bill Cronon is facing an order from the Republican Party of Wisconsin for the University to release all of his work emails that contain these words (see here and here):

Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.

As a seasoned administrator at the University told me last week, this list of keywords is "the clearest fishing expedition I've ever seen in a FOIA request". Now, I've never dealt with Freedom of Information Act requests, but I'll take their word for it.

A number of people around campus are now putting all those words into their signature files, so that all of their emails include all those terms. Here's one example:

If you would like to correspond with me about any of the topics below, please email me at ---------@gmail.com.

Republican, first amendment, Scott Walker, recall, free speech, collective bargaining, fearless sifting and winnowing, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, Mary Bell

Some have suggested making the keywords into poetry. Others are opening it up with the famous Sifting and Winnowing quote. Have fun.

What would public authority mean for the Wisconsin Idea?

2011-03-24T13:26:00.002-05:00

That's a huge question and suddenly a pressing one. Happily a real all-star panel has been assembled to address it. See here (and click to embiggen, as we linguists like to say):

On Wisconsin!