Those *Fickle* Texans

I couldn't agree more. I think that's a great idea. I would like to support you in your mission.

Do you need a fundraiser to help defray the costs of going back to school to learn English? I can make brownies.

via Language Log

The Infuckingcredible infix

Nifty confluence of language posts this week. First, on Sunday Gaiman had this to say about infixing:

My favourite conversation about language and words was before we went on the air, when Ian told us not to swear (as Radio 3 is only allowed one serious swear word per show) and also not to answer any question with an enthusiastic "ABSOLUTELY!" (which is apparently what writers tend to do). And when I said that I thus presumed that "absofuckinglutely" was right out, Deborah Cameron (Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford) enthusiastically explained to me that swearing is the only example of infixing in the English language and I was happy, for I had learned something.

Then today on Mindhacks we get this aside in a post about Steven Pinker's new piece in TNR about the psychology/neuroscience of swearing:

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the 'fuck test'.

Simply insert the word 'fucking' into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the 'fucking' is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I've found so far.

Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.

So not only is "fucking" the only word to be infixed in English, when it is we can determine the stressed syllable of the root word!

Please, please let this week just END

My greatest achievement of the day? Coining the new term that's sure to be sweeping the nation anyday now: scair quotes. It may also be written as sc(air) quotes.

In case it's not clear, that's a combo term for air quotes and scare quotes. May be used thusly:

NRA Man1: Hilary Clinton wants to "protect" us and take away our guns.
Random Dude: Nice use of the scair quotes there, sparky.

What do you want from me? It's been a rough week.

Lunchtime Book Review: V.

Finished up my bday present from Earl's Donuts the other day and figured I'd try to sputter out some inconsequential ramblings on it. First though, I wanna cry. Thomas Pynchon was 24 when this book was published. When I was 24 I hadn't yet mastered a really good hangover (I don't drink that much or often, but I've got hangovers down pat now). If I'd been around in the early 60s, I'd have pooh-poohed him as yet another early bloomer, flaming out like a supernova before 30. So at least I don't look like an idiot for saying that prior to Pynchon's long and magnificent career.

I hadn't read any Pynchon since my teens? early 20s? somewhere around there. About 20 years ago I pushed through Gravity's Rainbowand remember very little about it to this day. When I think about it, I recall a scene making banana pancakes (which, honestly, could have been in Catch-22instead, as I read them around the same time) and an overwhelming connection to the TMBG song Road Movie to Berlin. Clearly, I've got to reread GR.

A huge cast of characters, multiple interconnected stories spanning 60-odd years, and a central, mysterious figure tying it all together. My first take after closing the book up Thursday at lunch (and I'm still sticking with that gut reaction today) is that V. is the apotheosis of the mechanization and dehumanization of the 20th century. As a humanist, Pynchon's most sympathetic characters are the ones out of place in the modern world: Benny the schlemiel, always at odds with the inanimate world; Stencil and his quest to live out his father's life of intrigue as he tracks the scent of the elusive V.; Stencil-pater and Hugh Godolphin, the Victorian and Edwardian servants of Britain. V. is not sympathetic. In every tale and incarnation, she is shrewd, cunning, manipulative, and increasingly less human. Hers is the cold, clockwork heart of the 20th century.

Malta plays a key role in the quest for V., so it is interesting that Pynchon describes it as timeless, a rock, unchanging, eternal. Obviously untrue in some regards, she does seem untouched by time until Messerschmidts drop their payloads:

Don't touch them, these walls. They carry the explosions for miles. The rock hears everything, and brings it to bone, up the fingers and arm, down through the bone-cage and bone-sticks and out again through the bone-webs. Its little passage through you is accident, merely in the nature of rock and bone: but it's as if you were given a reminder.

The vibration is impossible to talk about. Felt sound. Buzzing. The teeth buzz: Pain, a numb prickling along the jawbone, stifling concussion at the eardrums. Over and over. Mallet-blows as long as the raid, raids as long as the day. You never get used to it. You'd think we'd all have gone mad by now. What keeps me standing erect and away from the walls? And silent. A brute clinging to awareness, nothing else. Pure Maltese. Perhaps it is meant to go on forever. If "forever" still has any meaning.

Earl's Donuts and I had a brief IM chat when I'd finished. He hadn't read V. in years, but his take had been (and I'm over-simplifying here...elaborate in comments if you'd like, N.) that V. was Pynchon's symbol of time itself. Of course, that makes Malta's eternal nature even more significant.

Certainly it does make sense: V. is ever-present. V. is felled in an eternal place by machines that may be harbingers of an end to time. As V. lay dying, her body is picked over by children (those who have no sense of time). If the world is to end in a fire of our own design, it was dreamt of because of those bombers and because of that war. The children picking over V.'s corpse will be the generation to ignite that fire. But those children are Pynchon's contemporaries. What does that say?

Obviously, with as playful a writer as Pynchon, any first-pass analysis is going to be too facile. I could spend hours merely analyzing his character names, rich with meaning: Benny Profane; Herbert Stencil; Dudley Eigenvalue; Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. I could also spend hours at the V. portion of the Pynchon Wiki. Instead, I'll just cycle V. back into the bottom of my pile of books to read and go through it again in the next year or two.

Next up for the lunchtime read and review, the far more straightforward A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages...Especially Englishby Anthony Burgess. I read it back when I first bought it, but it obviously came to mind recently...I should give it a reread.

Genetic link to tonality?

Very cool research out of Scotland that appears to have found a genetic determinant for language type.

[Robert] Ladd and [Dan] Dediu compared 24 linguistic features—such as subject-verb word order, passive tense, and rounded vowels—with 981 versions of the two genes found in the 49 populations studied. Most of the language contrasts could be explained by geographic or historical differences. But tone seemed to be inextricably tied to the variations of ASPM and Microcephalin observed by the authors. The mutations were absent in populations that speak tonal languages, but abundant in nontonal speakers.

Of course, I'm a little concerned about one thing. Some (who am I kidding...many) idiots are going to latch onto the fact that the populations with the recent (~37K years) variation in the genes speak non-tonal languages. With snobbery and no understanding of either linguistics or evolution, these simpletons will conclude that tonal languages such as Chinese are "primitive" when compared to non-tonal languages.

How Language Works

Finished reading David Crystal's latest this weekend passed. It's a great linguistics primer, but not so basic that I wasn't able to learn a few things. This book, or one like it, should be required reading in high school.

Running the gamut from the anatomical bases of speech and hearing, through an overview of the study of grammar, all the way to the preservation of nearly-extinct languages, Crystal gives a pretty complete overview of the entire scope of linguistics. While the coverage is necessarily light in order to provide such breadth, it rarely feels shallow. There is enough detail throughout to whet the (hard? soft?) palate and provide entree to the topics under discussion. Further reading is, of course, encouraged.

While I'm not particularly interested in foreign language teaching techniques or children's acquisition of language, Crystal's breezy style made those relatively interesting. Of course, that means his coverage of my interests - language and grammar evolution, migration patterns of languages, the formation of pidgins and creoles - was really appealing to me. I'd have to think anyone else with interest in any of these topics would likewise be well-served.

I'd first read Crystal's The Stories of English which was a great read for me. That book pretty much hit my sweet spot. While How Language Works is broader, I still gleaned interesting information in reading it.

One caveat: Crystal is a descriptivist grammarian. For the hard-core, immovably prescriptivist out there, this might be a deal killer.

Philosmithical Musing

Rudely stolen from: The Illustrated Smiths

I, um, don't know what to say. Granted, Morrissey is our greatest living singer-songwriter, but who knew he had so much to say about the philosophy of language.

Stfu b4 i smak u old git!

It's Thursday, so someone is whining about text messaging and its "threat to traditional conventions in writing." The report from the State Examination Commission in Ireland found 15-year-olds "unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary".

Now, in the land of Joyce, I can see why they'd be lamenting any move toward Hemingwayesque stylings, but seriously! Prescriptivists really need to learn to get a grip. Couldn't it be a general trend away from literacy - rather than the rise of a new mode of communication - that is the problem? Is there something inherently bad about texting's "use of phonetic spelling"?

I can be as much of a hard-ass grammarian as the next overly educated prig; however, I don't get the hand wringing and breast beating that occurs every time a new pidgin or full-fledged dialect gains popularity. Fo' shizzle beyatches...ain't no thing but a chicken wing...tarry not over such trifles, lest ye perceivest a tempest where none be.

I love my mother tongue. It's the most dynamic, fluid, vital language in the world (I'm biased, can y'all tell?). No academy or crazy Culture Minister dictates what can or can't be said. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but English prevails. Eventually, all languages are absorbed into some dialect of English (I'm waiting for Khosian and the other African click-languages) and in time, even the "standard" gets many of those additions. Its grammar and spelling change according to fashion, whimsy, and local colouration, but English prevails.

As with telegraphs and radios before, English will survive the onslaught of texting teens. English prevails.

There are no holes in an electric bass or a snooker table

Decided a while ago that I need a(nother) hobby to distract me from writing, so I weighed the merits of a variety of choices - drifting, batik, rolling white dudes for their wallets - and settled on just picking up the bass. Sure, I could have chosen the piano/keyboard (and just used the keyboard I already own), but what fun would that be. So I lobbied for a bass for my birthday and lo, one appeared.

So far, I've actually demonstrated the tiniest bit of discipline: I'm endeavoring to practice for an hour or more a day; not letting myself meander too far afield; not letting myself over-focus, either. Granted, I can be disciplined for long stretches of time and then completely lose it for years. Just ask my tennis partners and people who used to see me lifting at 6am. Still, if I can make small amounts of headway each day and each week, I might actually stick with it.

Anyway, I picked up a book tonight that should be pretty helpful, but now I'm a little scared...

Let's look at it a different way. If you were to decide you wanted to learn to play snooker, for example, you wouldn't expect to get a 147 break on day one, would you? No, you'd build up to that - you'd work on your potting, study the angles, work on your game and basically take the whole thing in smaller steps.

OH GOD! I'VE HAD A STROKE! I CAN'T UNDERSTAND ENGLISH ANYMORE!!!

Oh! Nevermind. I understand English just fine...it's the English I don't understand, what with their boots not for feet, bonnets not for heads, and pasties not for boobs. Man, they talk funny.