Boston accents and advertising

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.

Siri and accents

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

Nakation

This morning I heard on the radio a reference to "clothing optional vacations", which apparently extend to clothing-optional travel (or maybe I misunderstood!?!?). This is called, among the relevant population, a [ne:kenʃən], which is spelled nacation or nakation. This is not new (see here), just new to me.

Staycation is a now very established blend and it's attested since at least 2003 (see wikipedia) and has spawned a day similar blends, like daycation. Interestingly, one variant is, according to Wikipedia:

The alternate naycation (nay + "vacation") has been used to signify total abstention from travel.

I guess if the nekkid holiday version has encroached on this territory, that word failed, eh?

More importantly, staycation was on Lake Superior State's list of banned words last year (see again wikipedia). Man, it feels good to use those!

A question not (quite) asked

For a while, the issue of how to refer to the present decades bubbled in the blogosphere — should it be, for instance, called 'the aughts'? This never really resolved itself in speech, at least that I know of, and the decade is coming to a close. I was reminded of this on seeing David Segal's piece in the NYT this morning, "Naming the '00s". But he's not talking about what to call the decade in that sense, rather what cliche handle to give it, so that it can sit alongside the roaring '20s and the 'me decade' of the '70s. I'm with the poet Billy Collins on this one:

"Let’s call this one Bob.”

And that answers both questions; any reference to the decade could be done with that moniker, like this:

Yah, well, I remember back in Bob, the kids were all about the piercings.

And now it's time to work on learning to say '10 without putting an '0' in front of it ...

Image from here.

Unsettling interpretation of Chinese characters? 'busy'

We all know the Language Log debunking of the story that in Chinese, the character for crisis is made up of danger + opportunity. (Here's one example.) Yesterday I was talking to somebody who said that they no longer use the word busy, because the Chinese character for busy is made up of heart + kill(ed). If you google this, you get a ton of new-agey sites (many of them christian), many using 'dead' instead of 'kill/killed'. Really?

Whatever the facts and history, Science had an article on mental health in China a couple years ago (Greg Miller, "China: Healing the Metaphorical Heart") and he quotes Dominic Lee (a psychiatrist) as saying "There are more than 100 Chinese characters for emotion that contain the heart symbol in combination with others," so the cliche may have its heart in the right place, at least.

Of course I don't quite get how this logic encourages you to change speech or other behavior. To people drinking coffee, maybe you could try saying "In my language, you know, the word for 'coffee' is 'goat piss'."

Whatevs.

Facts, lyrics and double negatives

Adam Liptak has a piece in this morning's NYT on "The Chief Justice, Dylan and the Disappearing Double Negative".

The double negative in question is from Bob Dylan:

“The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “ ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).”

Then, the return to the topic:

On the other hand, Chief Justice Roberts gets the citation wrong, proving that he is neither an originalist nor a strict constructionist. What Mr. Dylan actually sings, of course, is, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

It’s true that many Web sites, including Mr. Dylan’s official one, reproduce the lyric as Chief Justice Roberts does. But a more careful Dylanist might have consulted his iPod. “It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation,” Professor Long said. “I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law review: when quoting, always check the quote with the original source, not someone else’s characterization of what the source said.”

I listened to Highway 61 Revisited and bobdylan.com and these 'facts' reflect what I saw/heard. But why would you assume that the version on the record is the version? I'm not sure what a 'poet' is, but I'm pretty sure Dylan is one. So, you might assume that he'd give priority to the text he wrote. But from what little I know about songwriters, they are pretty flexible about forms of the text. In some bands and for some songwriters, lyrics get written out, then sung. It could easily be that the print version is original in a pretty literal way.

I don't know how Dylan does it or sees it, but I'm guessing he doesn't really care.

Update, Monday, 5:30 a.m.: Completely forgot one of the key points I was going to make in the post: "When you got nothing" and "when you ain't got nothing" are basically equivalent sentences to me, metrically different and one maybe a little more emphatic than the other under the right circumstances, but a negligible difference. The written text differs more significantly on a set of points. Take the first part of the verse in question, in print:

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe

On the recording, it's this:

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're all drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you'd better take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe

I was listening under bad circumstances yesterday but wasn't entirely sure whether it was 'you'd better' or 'you better'.

That's the kind of amount of variation you get between printed and sung lyrics for lots of folks. I remember when I was a kid, and Dylan was new and edgy, finding some of his lyrics just weird, what I'd now recognize as ungrammatical.* Usually, I clearly remember thinking he was doing some kind of poetry = archaic language thing. "All precious gifts" is exactly such a case. Here, I'd have to cite the printed lyric, even in a scholarly article, just to get it to work.

*Early on and into the 1970s, I bought Dylan records, listened to them a ton, and had trouble figuring out why I was doing it: My sense at the time was that he couldn't play, couldn't sing, his songs were weird and he talked funny. But I kept listening.

Patchouli …

This one is for one of our contributors, who has an intense dislike of patchouli: Bumper sticker just spotted on Madison's ultra-hip Willy Street:

Patchouli is not a bath

More substantative posts are coming, I promise. In the mean time, see some of you at the Obama rally tonight, if I can get in …

Loose ends …

As I try to sweep up the debris of a semester that's gone way too fast, a few loose ends …

(1) The Rothenberg Report has a piece on the meteoric rise of Mike Huckabee in the Republican field, with this:

In a sense, Huckabee is the second coming of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who now seems about as relevant as a typewriter at a bloggers’ convention.

Wow, political writing with a fresh yet relevant image. Go, Stuart R.! Googling the exact string typewriter at a bloggers’ convention, I find only a set of quotes of the Rothenberg piece, including this brilliant quip at Eunomia:

That Seems Unfair To The Typewriter
A typewriter at a bloggers’ convention would at least have the advantage of being unusual and something of a curiosity. Some of the younger bloggers may have never seen one outside of a museum. I’m afraid Fred Thompson is no longer that interesting.

(2) Jack White, of the White Stripes, just now on NPR was talking about "all those words that start with r" that he doesn't like: retro, recreate, etc. Come'on, dude, let's do some morphological analysis here … they start with re-, of course.

(3) In a more consequential piece, NPR just reported that "Monkeys Estimate as Well as Humans", at least two monkeys compared to a set of Duke University undergrads. There may be blogging gold in the report, but no time to mine it now ... .

(4) John Morgridge (once CEO of Cisco) and his wife Tashia have donated 175 million dollars to help mostly low-income Wisconsin kids attend public universities and colleges in the state. We shouldn't have to rely on gifts for this, but you have to appreciate these folks stepping up like this.

(5) My post from yesterday afternoon worked its magic … the National Weather Service is calling for a high of 32º F today … and sunny. That'll help clear the streets.

Image from here.

"A dark ride"

The Wisconsin Union includes a Rathskeller — with murals done originally by German immigrant artists and a set of great local and regional beers on tap. I go to the Union often for meetings, and occasionally to grab a bite between meetings. For a while, I've noticed that the staff — who usually wear t-shirts or something identifying them as working at the Union — often have shirts that say something like …

The Rathskeller: This is a dark ride.

In the literal sense (here), it's hardly a stretch ... except that the vehicle is your feet. (Roller blading or skateboarding would be frowned on, and we park our bikes outside.) But then I wondered if there was more to it, and saw in the wikipedia entry linked above this line:

On The John Larroquette Show Larroquette's character hung a carnival sign in his office during the first episode: "This is a Dark Ride." He suggested the sign should also be posted "at the end of the birth canal."

Hmmmm. I liked the notion of the Rath as carnival ride, but the notion that the Rath is the path to your birth (as an adult, presumably — a rite of passage allusion?) would be pretty good.

If anybody knows the story or has ideas on this slogan/t-shirt, I'd love to hear from you.

Image from here.

Hank Hill is the King

On King of the Hill, Hank discovers a co-op, CornuCO-OPia. When he cooks the stuff, Peggy says …

If this is food, what have we been eating?

Yup, good question. The rediscovery of real food, by real people.

If you don't recognize the subject line, click here.

Miscellanea

Little things are starting to pile up that don't or no longer warrant full posts …

• Petraeus = Betray us is suddenly a very famous aptronym. It's been popping up of late, but now has exploded: see here, or catch how MoveOn was condemned in Congress today for using it.
• Over at Greenbelt, the Ridger has picked up something here from the news feed (on the right) that I just couldn't figure out what to do with: Some Army billboards in the Chicago area aiming to recruit Arabic speakers. A guy is offended because he can't read them. Part of what gave me pause was the one line in English: "If you can read this, call Mohamed." The 'if you can read this' thing is kind of cute (and gets a ton of g-hits, like "If you can read this ... consider yourself in the minority"), but even though it's a very common given name, in this context 'call Mohamed' sounds like some odd euphemism somehow. Thanks, Ridger, I owe you.
  
• And Mark Liberman just beat me to a piece in a Straight Dope column from last week's Onion, about the shrinking-American-vocabulary hoax.
• Omniglot — the blog is something I hadn't read until just recently and he picks up on the degrammaticalization here, with some interesting comments. Separated by a Common Language also had a nice post on the topic, with some pieces of the puzzle that were new to me.