Blogstapo

Looks like I've finally got a reasonable internet connection again ... maybe being 'off the grid' isn't what I thought it would be.

Anyway, last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. I won't go into the back story, but O'Reilly on Fox Noise (as Keith Olberman has dubbed them) has in essence called Kos as bad as the Nazis.

Anyhow, Colbert set it up with comments about "hate blogging", including a reference to the blogstapo. Key thing is, he pronounced it with a 'sh' ([ʃ]). Would it sound better with just [s]?

Image from here.

Public perceptions of linguistics

Much linguistic blogging focuses on public perceptions and representations of our field. That was certainly part of what got me into the game from the very beginning (here). Everybody from Language Log on down deals with it in various ways and the public side of the equation ranges from the BBC and professional mavens to the Comedy Channel. The punchline is usually that people feel free to publish about linguistics and language in the highest-profile place without knowing their larynx from a hole in the ground. A major theme is profoundly bad presentation of science (see here for one account of why we get so much of it), but often it's funny (here) and more often it's sad and stupid (here).

One of the reasons I started reading Polyglot Conspiracy regularly was precisely her perspective on this topic (e.g. here). Now PC has tackled one of the worst and ugliest examples, here, about the full cycle of stupidity from ignorant journalism to really ignorant blog posts, all about the work of Mary Bucholtz. (And don't miss the Language Log post by Mark Liberman if you haven't seen it.) If you haven't read the threads on this, do — I won't rehash them all here. The punch line is that linguistics is useless and unscientific (compared to what? Economics? String theory? Creation science?).

At the heart of this, as PC notes (in part implicitly), is a profound anti-intellectualism, and it's one our society suffers from at the very highest levels. People who don't believe in evolution shouldn't have access to medicines that are effective against new strains of infection. (Can't find the cartoon illustrating that.) Speech and hearing science (including stuff like cochlear implants), speech recognition and synthesis, other computational work, forensic linguistics, language teaching/learning, and so on is all done in collaboration with people from other fields, but linguistics is central to tons of it. Sure, you might say, but Bucholtz's work on language and identity doesn't involve any of that. Not true, actually (her CV shows that Bucholtz has done forensic work, like many sociolinguists), but I think the real issue for a lot of these people is that they don't understand the value of basic research generally — they're interested in engineering, not science. Part of the value of blogs and such is the chance to fight the kind of batter PC, LL and many others are taking up. But it might be a long one. A New Yorker cartoon has a judge talking to a humanoid-looking creature:

At your current rate of evolution, I can see no other choice but to give you ten to twenty million years.

Image from here.

A new language blog and the broader landscape

Just learned about the Linguistics Zone over the weekend, and it's sought out a fairly clear slot among language blogs: Seems like there's a big public out there interested in language and linguistics but without formal background of any sort in the academic discipline. The posts on LZ offer edifying sketches on topics from pronunciation to Gricean maxims. But it's not Ling 101 on-line, certainly: At points, it's oriented toward usage, and gives explicit advice on various points.

One footnote: LZ uses verbification rather verbing, the form in pretty wide usage among linguists. Despite its the origin of its fame (that is, Calvin & Hobbes), verbing sounds utterly normal, while verbification strikes me as a form I'd only use ironically: "Nice piece of verbification there, Mr. President. Impeach now!"

But this calls to mind something I've wondered about for a while: Charting the linguistics blogging landscape. But think about the established ones, many of which cover more than one niche: We've got everything from Language Log as the serious and professional flagship to a set of linguistics grad students blogs. There are some really excellent technical blogs on particular areas (Phonoloblog springs to mind), a few good blogs written by journalists, then a good set of basically socio-oriented ones and a ton of usage-oriented blogs. It's really a pretty rich world we've got going here.

There is probably no adequate way to describe how random the start of this blog was and that utter purposelessness is still visible in the ramshackle string of topics, themes, levels of assumed knowledges and tones that show up here from day to day. So, old Mr. Verb is the pinball of this little world, probably, to the extent that this is a linguistics blog.

Miscellanea — blogospheric and other

Was out and about too much yesterday to post, but a few scattered tidbits:

Polyglot conspiracy, working from the left coast (LSA Summer Institute), picked up and ran with the also too deal, here. I particularly like the notion that this has some discourse angle to it.

We're certainly developing tons of stuff in that realm now. Mrs. Verb (not her real name) often remarks on how "at all" in the language of people in service jobs (so, 98% of the population?) no longer indicates anything scalar: "Would you like the check at all?" (And no bitching about service workers' language, OK?)

Celebrating the 4th yesterday, Rebecca at the OUP Blog posted a BBQ quiz, here, … with a wonderful Homer Simpson quote about cookouts:

Homer Simpson had a point, “you don’t make friends with salad.”

Anatoly Liberman also has a column there, by the way, along with Ben Zimmer, so there's plenty of etymology happening at OUP Blog.

On a less happy Independence Day note, I got about 30 seconds of Lou Dobbs ranting about immigrants yesterday. He was pushing English Only — it sounds like in the form of cutting off everything in languages other than English in the government — when a panelist representing LULAC (sorry, no time to track down who it was, and his name wasn't on the screen) noted that such a move would hurt legal immigrants as well as the "illegals" Dobbs is obsessed with. It looked like Dobbs didn't quite get the point. He tried to say something about how if you're a legal immigrant you should already know English (or that's how I heard it as I was doing something else.) Maybe he should learn a little bit of immigration history, like the long tradition of public bilingual education, printing of official documents in many languages, and on and on. At least I now know why I avoid watching him.

Art versus error

Many years ago, I knew a (dead-serious professional) artist who did collages. She showed me this piece she'd done one time and I asked her about how and why she'd gotten this one particular effect. She looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Look, I don't THINK about this stuff or analyze it." Then a couple years later, a (semi-professional, but really talented) singer and lyricist I knew showed me some lyrics he'd written. I saw a really weird, obscure pattern and asked him if he knew that was there. He looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Are you asking whether I control my art?" Since then, I'm not so quick to question creative stuff in that kind of way.

So, when I noted (and quoted via cut-and-paste) the following comment, I saw something but didn't consider changing it, figuring it could well be playing with language, maybe even some kind of allusion to German:

a breath of fresh air in the overly stuffy, crowded, shrill, and cranky world of language-loathing, linguo-ignormauses

Today, I got a message from the author of those words correcting it to ignoramuses. If I'd been copyediting it, I would have sent a query to the author, but, hey, it's the freakin' blogosphere.

Some good verbs

Every now and again, I look at traffic patterns for this blog ... especially how people get here. Just a month or two ago, those were largely random searches for strings that happen to appear here — don't even bother asking. Now, to the delight of the residents of Verbtown, it looks like most hits are coming from people who've bookmarked us, or reached us through links on linguistics various blogs. The little street through our neighborhood has some traffic.

Just now, instead of working on one of the several serious ideas for posts that are bubbling in my aged brain, I checked on these referrals and found this google search:

what are some good verbs

Got your answer right here: Mrs. Verb, now she's a great Verb. It's not her real name, of course, and if it was, it'd be her married name. But she's great. And at the Verb family reunion (coming up soon back in Springfield), everybody says "now, she's a good one." And my great uncle, Daniel Webster Verb, he was good too. Served in WWI, like his grandfather, who fought honorably for the Union. Of the kids, well, our youngest daughter is of course the apple of our verbal eye. Not such a big 'doer' (see graphic), but cute as a button.

So, random google searcher, those are some good Verbs. I guess there are some bad Verbs too, but you didn't ask about them.