School funding cuts: Grammar

Well, this is the saddest consequence of school funding cuts I've heard of yet:

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs

OK, it's the Onion, but it's a nice piece. Verbally and TMAally speaking, I think: You can't cut that ... cut the future, or the subjunctive. We don't really need the third-person singular -s at all. But don't cut the past — the present/past distinction is the historical core of Germanic verb morphology.

The reaction from educators:

"This is the end of an era," said Alicia Reynolds, a school district director in Tuscaloosa, AL. "For some of us, reading and writing about things not immediately taking place was almost as much a part of school as history class and social studies.""That is, until we were forced to drop history class and social studies a couple of months ago," Reynolds added.

The reaction from the right:

Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch … welcomed the cuts as proof that the American school system is taking a more forward-thinking approach to education and the dimension of time. "Our tax dollars should be spent preparing our children for the future, not for what has already happened," Hatch said at a recent press conference. "It's about time we stopped wasting everyone's time with who 'did' what or 'went' where. The past tense is, by definition, outdated." Said Hatch, "I can't even remember the last time I had to use it."

The reaction from the righter:

Some legislators are even calling for an end to teaching grammar itself, saying that in many inner-city school districts, where funding is most lacking, students rarely use grammar at all.

The Onion is smart enough that I want to figure that's a clear joke, something we can laugh at, but what they're poking fun at is so pervasive that I just can't.

New report: English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States

The Pew Hispanic Center has just released a report on the knowledge and use of English among Latinos in the United States. Check it out here.

If you have paid attention to the considerable body of scholarly literature on this subject, and if you know Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, the results are utterly unsurprising. But then if you rely on Lou Dobbs, Fox Noise and such for news on immigration, you'll be shocked.

They find "a dramatic increase in English-language ability" across generations, with English used especially at work, while Spanish fares better as home language. This survey and others, taken together,

provide a clear measure of how Hispanics believe that insufficient English language skill is an obstacle to their acceptance in the U.S.

So, new immigrants — and most other groups follow a similar pattern, from what little I know about it — are learning English as fast as they can, and they understand the value of it.

How is the learning of English today even an issue? Sadly, it still is, as confirmed by a recent Michael Reagan column, here.

Career options for linguists

See here. Hadn't thought of that.

Bush mispronounces again

I was in meetings and stuff all day yesterday but just caught a comment on the radio that Bush had botched Olmert's and Abbas's names at the big meeting yesterday — both names, in sequence. It happened in a statement he read at Annapolis, and the video is up at ThinkProgress.

• Olmert comes out like Omult or something — Bush often loses laterals (l-sounds) at the ends of syllables, and liquids (l and r sounds) are prone to getting moved around in speech errors and sound change, certainly. (Look up the history of pilgrim for one example.)
• I had wondered how in the world you could ruin Abbas but it turns out he blows the first name. Mahmoud comes out something like [ma.hú:ǝd], with a very clear stumble.

I know that he has worked hard to entirely ignore what is probably the single most important conflict in the world for seven years, but how is this is remotely possible? Even if they gave him the 'phonetic' cue cards like they have done in the past, how could anybody who follows politics not be able to say Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas smoothly? And I gather he left after the introductory meeting?

More on double modals

The double modal discussion rolls on, it seems like, with a couple more posts on the Log, most recently this. And another native speaker has weighed in, Suzette Haden-Elgin, on these fine constructions in the Ozarks, here (scroll down to November 21 or search 'double modal'). Her grammar and her intuitions about it could easily be quite different from my own western North Carolina ones, but I wanted to be clear about one point. It comes from this passage in her post:

In my own idiolect, "might could be" need not mean exactly the same thing as "maybe" and "perhaps." Suppose you tell me that my neighbor has been accused of stealing from the petty cash at his workplace, and you've asked me if I think he's really guilty of that. I might would then say one of these sequences in response to your question:

1. "Maybe." [Or "Perhaps."]
2. "Might could be."

Example #1, either version, is neutral; it just means what it says -- that I'm willing to accept as a possibility that my neighbor is guilty of the alleged pecadillo. Example #2, on the other hand, is biased. It means that I'm on my neighbor's side, leaning toward a belief that he didn't do what he's accused of, and inclined also to believe that even if he is guilty he had a reason for what he did that I would consider adequate justification for the action.

As I understood Pullum's point, it was that the might in double modals might have become an adverb, basically like maybe. And for me, that works pretty well. Take this sentence:

• You might ought reconsider that.

For it, this works pretty well; I could probably interchange them in a lot of circumstances:

• You maybe ought reconsider that.

So, in her example above, the proposed equivalent would be maybe could be, not just naked maybe. If I said maybe could be to her hypothetical question, I'd be saying something really close to what might could be means — definitely expressing skepticism toward the neighbor's guilt, but not entirely excluding the possibility of guilt. I can't get at anything about justification for doing it from this, if the person did do it, but that's probably not central.

This stuff is so pragmatically complex and intonation and context carry so much weight that I'm far from sure exactly how to get at the possible differences between maybe + modal and might + modal. (And I'm the world's worst at syntactic intuitions, to boot.) But I also can't see an obvious parallel adverbial replacement for ought in ought could, ought might, ought would.

Let's just keep playing the modal game … .


The image is from here, and there really is a "Modal Game" — free download!

Shorter OED, 6th edition

Here you can find a review by Ed Rothstein of the 6th edition of the Shorter OED, and a few tidbits about a forthcoming book on the OED, Charlotte Brewer's Treasure-House of the Language: The living OED. It's a fine piece and all, but while the headline — "Menagerie, Not Museum, for Words that Live" — makes an important point, the piece itself doesn't make the dictionary or dictionary-making spring to life particularly.

Bart knows ...

Just now on the Simpsons, Bart said to the brother of Sideshow Bob, who was speaking in the same stilted English that Bob does:

You sound smart but you're dumb.

... or words to that effect. Brilliant: the Simpsons' writers are making a point to distinguish pedantic-sounding English from smart argumentation. I know, it's nowhere near as important as Labov's "Logic of Non-Standard English",* but it's a nice little move for a cartoon.

* This should link to "Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence", a related, popular piece by Labov, but I just see a link to the Atlantic, where that appeared.

Freud today

The American Psychoanalytic Association is in the news with a forthcoming study about the role of psychoanalysis today. It'll be in the American Journal of Psychiatry but I don't see a pre-print out yet. The story is floating around in various newspapers, like the NYT this morning, here. Here's the punchline, from the Times:

A new report … has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.”

I guess I find that pretty unsurprising, as far as Psychology goes, and the reason isn't a shocker either, in this quote from the chair of Psych at Northwestern:

The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.

Of course Freud and psychoanalysis are thriving in the humanities and there's the rub. Psychoanalysts and psychologists say things like this about those extensions or applications or whatever they are (again quoting from the article):

• The report complains of the wide gulf between the academic’s and the psychoanalyst’s approach and vocabulary, which has made their respective applications of Freud’s theories virtually unrecognizable to each other.
  
• “I honestly couldn’t understand what they’re talking about … .”
• Much of postmodern theorizing has harmed psychoanalysis, saying it has “rendered claims even more fuzzy and more difficult to assess.”

Sounds similar to complaints from linguists about how some of the same humanities folks have appropriated a lot of stuff from our field.

The Engine Room

Just caught wind of another language blog today — in the genre I'm coming to think of as copy-editing blogs. It's The Engine Room and they're putting up some good material with a UK focus. I actually check out a fair number of similar blogs, like Mighty Red Pen or Notes from the Copy Editor for example, and read them with pleasure, even though or maybe because they bring such a different perspective. Copy editors, obviously, are language professionals of another type, and the good ones I've known think about language in interesting and engaging ways. And, by god, can they clean up bad prose.

Given how often I rail about prescriptivists, I'm probably overdue for a refresher on a key point (one beaten to death on the Log and elsewhere): There's no disputing the value of a codified standard language. In real life, I live by the graces of good copy-editors. (And every so often I die by the hand of bad ones.) Just making sure everybody's clear on the distinction between what they do and the often bizarre quest of the peevologists.

Random note: After getting email about "Neuro-linguistic Psychology", I found Google ads on my gmail for NLP therapists. Which phobias should I start with?

ABC news: "Ancient language may die out due to personal feud"

Have we got a race to the bottom on coverage of endangered languages? I'm starting to wonder, especially after somebody passed this along from ABC News. Let's just write off the headline. First, we've recently talked about the bogus 'ancient languages' meme here. Second, when a language is down to two speakers in their 70s, saying it "may die out" is an understatement, regardless of the relationship between the speakers.

In the piece itself, consider two tiny points. First, the men "should be doing their bit to pass their language on to other people in their community." Says who? These people have made choices. We might hope that people choose to keep community languages alive, but it's not my place to tell these guys to do it. These two "grumpy old men" are probably fathers and grandfathers and they decided for some reason at some point not to speak Zoque de Tabasco to the kids around them.

Second, look at the goal: It's described variously as passing the language on, preserving it, saving, documenting and maintaining it, etc. … a vast range of goals. At this point, you might document this tongue, but you won't 'save' it in any real sense. There's one way that languages normally survive from generation to generation: You speak it to kids. A lot. That, in fact, is how Spanish and Japanese and Cherokee were and are passed on to new native speakers — you don't have to have tape recordings, language classes, linguists providing expert advice.

By the way, for those who've heard of Zoque: There's a set of languages by this name and the others have larger numbers of speakers at present.

Hat tip to Angela for the link.

Indian English in the NYT

The NYT this morning has a piece about "Careers Give India’s Women New Independence". After a couple of opening paragraphs, you read this:

So when Shubha Khaddar, 23, trudges home from work and stops to pick up something for dinner, she rarely finds herself alone. “You’ll find 10 other girls like you coming back with sabji,” Ms. Khaddar said, sabji being Hindi for vegetables.

As she left one recent morning for the public relations firm where she works, her parting words to Pallavi Maddala, 23, her roommate and a software engineer, were to bring back some idlis, or steamed rice cakes, for dinner. She would be home late. Besides, idlis would be a low-fat option.

You can't be surprised by a couple of food items with names many Americans might not know, and the journalist, Somini Sengupta, probably couldn't pass up the juxtaposition with concerns about fat among young women (something that runs through the article). But we soon get things you might not expect: The same Ms. Khaddar describes herself as in transition "between being “completely independent” and “a homely chick,” meaning, in Indian English, a life of domesticity." There's a gloss I most definitely needed. And the piece closes with generational rather than national English, albeit mostly orthographic. Another woman reports that she would soon move out of the apartment.

“Yeah, eventually most of us get there!” she said in a text message. “The same thing’s happened 2 my roomie, hence the msg. R u or any of your friends looking 4 a place 2 stay?”

Ahhhhh, I like linguistic variation.

Seasonal weight gain and neuro-linguistics! Holiday edition

One of the cool things about not being too smart is that you feel constantly amazed by little things that probably aren't really that amazing to smart people. The Google news feed on this blog provides me a steady stream of those things, like this one: There is a whole school of what looks like a hypnosis-based therapy called "Neuro-Linguistic Psychology". The Natural Language Processing folks must know about this since these guys also use "NLP" as their abbreviation. NLP and neuro-linguistics are both really important things, but I never expected them to help with holiday weight gain!

In the end, this is nowhere close to being as surreal as the Packers-Lions halftime show ... the Goo-Goo Dolls are playing with this army of ballerina-like dancers swirling around in the mists of the fog machines. Somebody was abusing some serious substance when they came up with that.

Image from here.

"Inflection"

A while back, Jan Freeman was asking a few linguist bloggers about what their own language peeves were. I think at the time I may well have denied having any and at least don't think I came up with anything plausible. Recently, though, I've noticed a usage that actually bugs me in the way that peevologists have peeves: The use of inflection for intonation. Now, if you talk and think about language a lot, you may use inflection in its morphological sense pretty often and this other meaning is disconcerting.

This came into focus pretty sharply a couple weeks ago with a Safire column where he uses the word in this way a few times. This morning, waiting for the Packers to face the Lions, I finally got around to looking at what dictionaries say about it, figuring that I was just stodgy here and that it's an utterly unremarkable use. Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate suggests as much; it has this meaning second, after only the really basic historical meaning of 'to bend or curve':

change in pitch or loudness of the voice

I really wouldn't have included 'loudness' in here, just pitch, but pitch, loudness and duration are so intertwined in prosodic stuff that it's hard to object. But the Oxford English Dictionary On-line doesn't get to this until its fifth entry:

Modulation of the voice; in speaking or singing: a change in the pitch or tone of the voice.

Maybe this is more common American usage than British? (Separated by a Common Language hasn't treated it that I see.)

I've asked a couple of other linguists, and they seem to agree that this is a less than fortunate accident of lexical semantics, but it doesn't seem to bother anybody like it does me. Haven't talked to non-linguists about it, mostly just assuming that there's not much to say there.

Go Pack go!

Bad verb

Tom Delay, in case you hadn't heard, has said that he'd like to bitch-slap Paul Krugman, NYT op-ed columnist and object of lots of bile from the right. Keith Olbermann tonight defined 'to bitch slap' as to slap someone like a bitch would. In fact, there's ambiguity in how people have come to understand the word, like in the Urban Dictionary entries, here: For some, the agent is the bitch and for others it's the recipient of the slap. I don't use the term myself and don't have any idea.

Some real money ...

In Germany at least, the study of regional language is getting some bucks: Check this out. 14 million euros for this — a real currency, not dollars. (That's about 21 million dollars right now.) And regionalsprache.de — REDE, as they're calling it — is already up if you read German, and the image is from there, in fact.

Double modals

"The Log", as Mr. V has taken to calling it, is abuzz with double modals this morning, first with Ben Zimmer's post on Mike Huckabee using one and then a northeastern (!) US citation. Geoff Pullum has just suggested that might has become an adverb in might could, might oughta, might should. Since the Log doesn't do comments, I'll make my first post here in many months … as a native double-modal user and someone who knows less than any linguist should about how to make sense of them. Basically, Pullum's idea is really appealing intuitively.

For some speakers, I suspect this isn't doubling of any or all modals, but only the might, ought, should forms, what I think are listed as 'past tense' forms in grammars. And it's certainly not just might in the first slot: I have those listed, and ought could, ought might, ought should. Maybe the ought has become an adverb too? Would oughta doesn't sound bad but after a half hour of thinking about this, I'm deep into judgment burnout and maybe that's off the mark.

In checking out the 1994 Mishoe & Montgomery paper from American Speech that Mr. V referred to in an earlier post, I find a much bigger set of forms than I would have thought of (this from p. 9):


Might does seem to have a pretty dominant role here in the first slot. Almost all sound familiar, but a lot are clearly ungrammatical for me (may didn't, must didn't), but I don't see ought in first position, except for a reference to Marianna DiPaolo's Texas data, with oughta + modal. What's the status of oughta vs. ought? Both sound utterly fine to me, but the oughta form doesn't sound nearly as stigmatized to me ... I probably still use those pretty often, far more than prototypical double modals in normal speech.

I'm curious to see how this topic develops.

Blogal* trivia …reading level

Well, when the hip kids start doing it, eventually the stodgy folks like old man Verb will join in. (OK, not always ... piercing's pretty much out.) I'm a little worried to count as 'postgrad' here. Sounds way too high-falutin'. Time to lower the bar?


* I've been feeling the need for a real, usable adjective for 'blog-related'. For now, it's blogal. It gets a ton of g-hits, of course, and some in this basic meaning.

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.

Word of the Year overload?

I think Jan Freeman has a point (as she often does):

The WOTY season now rivals our endless holiday shopfest, stretching from Halloween into January, when the American Dialect Society, granddaddy of the WOTY, finally weighs in. … Still, I can't help thinking that 10 weeks of WOTY fever is about eight weeks more than anyone wants.

That said, I'm hoping one of our Verbistes will nominate her creation, peevology, at the granddaddy of all WOTY festivities in Chicago in early January.

Ed Gein

One of the unexpected things that this blog has ended up doing is talking about Wisconsin stuff to a mostly non-Wisconsin audience. I've heard directly and indirectly from people learning bits about Wisconsin English, following our budget battle from afar, and so on.

If you don't have a Wisconsin connection, or some morbid obsession, you may not recognize the picture here, or even know who Ed Gein was. He was arrested 50 years ago today. I don't have the stomach to go into his various deeds, alleged or known, but suffice it to say that he is widely regarded as the inspiration for a string of famous horror movies: Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.

Language jail?

Before we get down to business: I bought a bottle of juice at the Wisconsin Union yesterday and while checking out, one of the kids working there said about his hair that his mom had "cut it with a clippers". Singular clippers, in the wild in Madison, Wisc.

But I'm writing now about another Madisonian: "Mr. Right", a fine columnist for our fine free weekly, the Isthmus. His latest column (here) is about the f-word. Specifically, he got a letter from a guy worried about being sent to "language jail" for using it at work. Wow, that's an image I don't think I'd thought of before. If you google it (using quotation marks to get only the exact phrase), you find very few uses of this.

More importantly, Mr. Right nails the answer here (as he often does on a wide range of topics, it seems like). Here's an excerpt:

Send you to Language Jail? F**k that! If the vice-president of the United States, one Richard B. Cheney, can use the F-word on the floor of the United States Senate, as he did in 2004 when Senator Patrick Leahy asked him about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq, then it's hard for me to imagine a place where you shouldn't use it, with the possible exception of church. For the fact is, the F-word, which long ruled as the King of All Cuss Words, the one that had your mom racing to the bathroom for a bar of soap, is on the decline. And by that I mean it gets used in mixed company so often these days that it's starting to lose its power. For instance, on "Deadwood," HBO's potty-mouthed Western, it gets used 1.48 times per minute.

And we know that because someone was fup-ucked enough to count the number of times, then post it on the web, complete with ten-minute breakdowns. But they needn't have bothered, because we're going to be hearing a lot more of the F-word in the coming years, each instance sapping its strength a little more, until all that's left is a word that means "darn" or "very," as in "Darn you!" or "That's very awesome!" Still, I have to hand it to the F-word, it's had a long, noble reign. …

… I don't know, we just seem to like to set aside certain words, endow them with special powers. They're "The Words That Shall Not Be Used." And I can't wait until we land on the next one so I can let it slip at staff meetings.

That's not just right, it's smart … although fup-ucked doesn't work for me. And oh yeah, I don't know if the count is real, but the Deadwood thing is out there: Click here.

Kudos, Mr. Right!

More gibberish in the comics!

You do read Tom Tomorrow, right? (If not, I'll forgive you if you quickly click here and start seeing what you've been missing.) His latest strip, in that link, contains another gibberish reference! I've shown that frame on the right.

I'm not sure this helps with the P.S. Mueller strip from a couple of weeks back, but ...

"Euskera, the Very Ancient Basque Language, Struggles for Respect"

A recent post about the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Basque language policy got a set of comments, including a suggestion that linguists respond with letters. I didn't have a chance to (though it made my 'to do' list), but today, the WSJ's website runs a bunch of responses, under the headline given above. A mixed bag, as you'd have to expect, but worth looking at.

Even the new headline continues a bad streak: Ben Zimmer, in another comment on the original post, pointed out something linguists see constantly, namely that certain languages are regarded as 'ancient'. He's links to a good Bill Poser post on the Log about that, declaring that 'ancient' "apparently means that the language is exotic and associated with putatively ancient mysteries." In the current headline, that's a possible reading I suppose, but it just seems kind of hard to miss the fact that the pretty significant number of people today who are speaking Basque natively are not themselves 'ancient' in any way that I've ever noticed in my contacts with them.

Image from here.

Morphology in Action

My colleague Rand Valentine & I both noticed this wonderful sign hanging on the front of a local supermarket:

Re-Grand Opening!

I've been thinking about it and I think it's actually very smart. It's not a Grand Re-Opening, because that would imply that they had been closed, which they haven't been. Rather, they're having a grand opening, again; i.e. 're-' has scope over 'grand opening'. So it makes perfect sense.

Neologism contest

Just heard from Word Play Café about their neologism contest, here. That's a pretty cute idea.

"Linguistics from the Left"

First, if you haven't read Tecumseh Fitch's guest post on Language Log responding to Sally Thomason's attack on his Nature article from a while back, you should. It's here.

Yesterday, I posted a quick link to something from the American Enterprise Institute, called "Reforming the Politically Correct University". It includes a paper from John McWhorter, a very good linguist, one who taught at Stanford and Berkeley before going to the Manhattan Institute and touring to lecture on what I would describe as rightwing topics. His paper is called "Linguistics from the Left: The truth about Black English that the academy doesn't want you to know." I won't quote from it — he asks that people not, though the paper is readily available here — and so can't respond in detail, but the on-line summary from the conference program is this:

John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute shows how the field of linguistics has departed from its original mission of investigating how languages and dialects differ among groups, and has increasingly become a vehicle for leftist political advocacy.

Wow, that's quite a claim — presumably not written by McWhorter. There is surely some political advocacy in the field, but we've abandoned our mission for that? Bold.

In fact, the paper just argues this about Black English, African-American English (AAE), or Ebonics. Some points he makes are right in some ways and to varying degrees, but a lot consists of very partisan readings. For example, he argues that relatively few particular features have been studied in great detail (those emphasizing African heritage, etc.) when what we really needed was good basic description. It's true that emphasis has been put on such features, I guess, but this also ignores how good basic description got shoved to the back burner in many circles for decades. And sociolinguistics, where much (most?) AAE work was happening was and to an extent is about remarkably limited points: a few vowels, or the presence of r at the ends of syllables. Even in terms of American dialects, we know stunningly little about Appalachian English, for example, far less than about AAE. (That's now changing thanks to excellent work by Kirk Hazen and others.)

I won't say more for now, but once the paper is posted more officially and open for discussion, I hope to come back to it.

Language coverage goes off the rails ... Darwin and language

I start thinking 'well, language coverage can't get much worse' and then I read "Word Court" tonight: "Darwin's ideas at work with language too". Turns out to be about a now-old piece on verb regularization in Nature (discussed here), but this take on it is just howlingly off-target. One simple example:

English is "essentially the child of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon". Children, if I have a vague clue about the genetics, get roughly half of their genetic material from each parent. English gets a fraction of its vocabulary — how much depends on just what you're measuring — from Norman French and virtually no core structure. This isn't so much in the DNA of English: Crudely speaking, it's much more nuture than nature. Is there no level at which stuff like this gets checked by people who know something about the facts?

You should also read this … no time to comment now, but the American Enterprise Institute is publishing work on linguistics … .

A quandary

Every so often, blogs that allow comments, like this one, get blog spam, also known as 'comment spam'. I've gotten a few, not necessarily commercial, like a plea to give my heart to Jesus. And some people walk close to the line without crossing it -- yesterday's locavore post came from an email (not a comment) sent by folks from Oxford UP. I figure that's legit.

Just now, a new comment came on this old post, advertising Leinie's. Now, beer is generally a good thing, and Wisconsin beer is better. But blog spam because I post about Wisconsin? I'm torn.

CEO pay in higher ed, bigger and badder

I've written before about the poison that is CEO pay for university administrators, but if you haven't seen it, look at this from the NYT on:

Increased Compensation Puts More College Presidents in the Million-Dollar Club

Here's a key quote:

“If your aspiration is to be a college president, that is a way to become a millionaire,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, Calif. “That was inconceivable 20 years ago.”

Some of these guys are getting 2 mill per annum. I know the dollar's not worth much anymore, but please. I can't put it any better than a loyal reader of this blog did:

I think this is more bad news that some compartments of the modern university, e.g., the admin, business school and athletics for example, are playing by different rules than the rest of the university. Think of the grad students who could be funded by a fraction of these salaries.

Tip of the safety orange hunting cap to tp.

Let the games begin! A vote for "locavore"

For Word of the Year, that is, or WOTY as the hip kids call it. Of course, the topic's been rolling, maybe roiling, on ads-l for a while, but Oxford University Press has just announced their choice on their language blog: locavore. Read the full story here, with a good set of runner-ups (or runners up, if you prefer). Here's the core of the piece:

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

“The word ‘locavore’ shows how food-lovers can enjoy what they eat while still appreciating the impact they have on the environment,” said Ben Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “It’s significant in that it brings together eating and ecology in a new way.”

I don't really use the word really, but do take advantage of how easy it is to eat locally and well here in Wisconsin.

Image from here. Makes me hungry.

Finally, some real science news

Even though I've been too busy to blog much lately, I have been keeping up on science journalism. The NYT invests tons of resources in their "Science Times "section, and I enjoy Science and Nature more than the next guy. But when you think "America's finest news source", you're not just talking Paris Hilton's dog. The Onion has been good lately. The stories are better than the headlines, well, when there are stories with the headlines:

• Female Serial Killer Has To Work Twice As Hard To Achieve Notoriety
• Democratic Candidates Turn On Clinton
• Taco Bell Launches New 'Morning After' Burrito

OK, that middle one is a little far-fetched, I'll grant. But click on their "Science & Technology" link and you're up in the thin air of the great minds. Things are rich:

• New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most
• Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils
• Study: Casual Sex Only Rewarding For First Few Decades
  

But I'm looking at core science coverage, here. Is this how science reporting feels most of the time to most of us? In fact, this may be the second best Onion article on science since this:

• National Science Foundation: Science Hard

Basque in the WSJ

Haven't seen coverage of this but the Wall Street Journal ran this last week about Basque, by Keith Johnson. (I assume no relation to the phonetician by that name.) Maybe linguists just don't read the WSJ?

The title, "Basque Inquisition" doesn't bode well, of course. Whether the assertive push for learning and using Basque in the region where it's traditionally been spoken is beyond what I can comment on — I'd be interested in hearing about how people see it compared to Quebec and other situations of linguistic minorities within national states.

But various parts of the article just don't make much sense. Like this: Basque "is an ancient language little suited to contemporary life." It's spoken by a ton of living people in Europe, which sort of suggest that it's not that ill-suited. And if Hebrew can be revived successfully .... . Anyhow, as a result of its antiquity:

Airport, science, Renaissance, democracy, government, and independence, for example, are all newly minted words with no roots in traditional Euskera: aireportu, zientzia, errenazimentu, demokrazia, gobernu, independentzia.

Wow, really? Compared to most languages where these words go back a millennium or two? At least we in English have our own native words for this kind of stuff — not like we'd have to build or borrow things like science, democracy or independence from other languages! And maybe you can't do math in Basque:

While Indo-European languages have similar roots for basic words like numbers -- three, drei, tres, trois -- counting in Euskera bears no relation: bat, bi, hiru, lau, and up to hamar, or 10.

Mr. Johnson, you might want to check out Hungary, Finland, Estonia for their numerals.

Well, at least the WSJ did some corrections, e.g. that a pig herder is urdain, not artzain.

Gibberish

So, we've had some discussions in the Verb family about what this means … any ideas? 

Public intellectuals and linguistics

I'm surprised that I haven't seen this in the world of lingblogs (or maybe it showed up a while back and I've forgotten it?), but last month Prospect magazine did a survey about the most important public intellectuals. (You can see results here.)

Chomsky is the runaway winner – basically doubling the vote tally for Umberto Eco, in second place. He's not there for the Minimalist Program, I imagine, but the list has some other linguistics (Pinker), cog sci (Dennett) and more general language-y stuff (Eco).

I'm a little puzzled at the graphic they used (shown here). I get a kind of low-key, professorial thing there, but what's with the facial expression?

More on language departments

The Chronicle of Higher Education is following up on its earlier reporting about the Modern Language Association report on a possible new direction for language departments (discussed and linked here).

While I thought the earlier articles were pretty good, this one is seriously flawed, although anything that calls for change in the fundamentally dysfunctional structure of almost all foreign language departments in the U.S. is helpful. But let's just leave aside the howler about Chomsky and the cartoonish sketch of the history of language teaching. What's in here?

You get a sense of desperation in language departments (especially German), which seems to be real enough from what I hear. For lit folks, that ship sailed long ago, with some famous literature programs in utter collapse. So, maybe that opens the door to real change. Still, I predict that many lit folks will pretend that this isn't about them. Ha.

The piece also provides a big endorsement of Georgetown's German Department. I don't know the operation, but have the impression that there's a lot of hype here. I just don't know about substance. They started their big reforms 10 years ago, but we don't learn how enrollments are faring, whether they are getting better results in student performance or student course evaluations. We need to see results of some sort before we can evaluate this.

More generally, I'm not entirely convinced that this change goes deep enough. How much sense does a Department of Language X really make today?

Washoe

Just read that Washoe has passed away at the age of 42. She played a pretty central role in the old debates over whether other primates might have language, and thus in debates about what makes human language distinct. Basically, people taught her as much American Sign Language as they could and the question was whether she was imitating things or actually using something we could call 'language'. I'm no expert, but the prudent view seems to be the former, surely.

The big blogs will cover it in more detail, I trust, but it's worth noting the media treatment so far: The NYT piece linked above has a headline of "Chimp of Many Words". But the first link on the NYT website that comes up on a search for Washoe, here, is an AP story called:

"Chimpanzee Who Knew Sign Language Dies"

I'll give the point to the NYT on this one.

Image from here, where you can learn much more about her.