Languages in the Big Apple

A spoonerism is a type of linguistical blunder made when the sounds of successive words are accidentally transposed. For example, Hervert Hoober instead of Herbert Hoover, fighting a liar instead of lighting a fire, etc.

The term was named for Rev. William Archibald Spooner, an English scholar whose slippery tongue supposedly made it hard for him to speak without “spoonering.”

Michael Erard’s highly-publicized new book, Um…Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean, begins with a great spoonerism from the Thesaurus of Humor, published in 1940:

“I want some hot poppered butt corn—I mean cot buttered bop corn—that is—corn buttered pop butt, or rather cuttered pot born, I mean— oh well, gimme some peanuts.”

Humorous? Maybe in 1940. But Um… goes on to provide a useful and engaging look at how we speak.

Erard, who earned a Master’s in Linguistics and a PhD in English from the University of Texas, uses this book, which he calls “a work of applied blunderologly”, to examine why spoonerisms and other verbal blunders happen.

And happen they do — an average English speaker botches some part of the spoken language between seven and twenty-two times a day. Erard categorizes these errors into either slips of the tongue (such as “I have to smoke my coffee with a cigarette”) or speech disfluencies (repeated words or sounds such as “um,” “uh,” “like,” etc.) These filler words make up as much as five to eight percent of the words we speak every day. In certain parts of Southern California, I’d, like, guess that percentage is, like, way higher.

As Erart points out, we tend to strive for and respect a certain level of linguistical purity — what he calls “an aesthetic of umlessness” — but this desire for flawless speech may be too lofty a goal. As one Dutch linguist cited in the book reminds us, “uh” is a pretty universal sound across all languages. Um… both embraces and untangles the phenomenon in what is an all-around engrossing and informative work.

In my last post I argued that language should belong to everybody. I was lying. It shouldn’t. The word “rape”, for example, shouldn’t belong to anybody who isn’t talking about, well, rape.

• Problem: Freddy likes to say, “I got raped by my biology final” instead of, “Gee. That biology final sure was tough!”
• My take: Ew.

• Problem: “The Yankees are really raping the Red Sox this season.”
• My take: Rapists are winners! Yay! Wait, what?

Sometimes these misogynistic bastards manage to evoke rape imagery without even using the word. As in:

Sandy: “So, Brad, I hear you’ve taken up gardening.”
Brad: “Yeah, I’ve been sticking my dick in that a little.”

You could argue that “sticking your dick” into something isn’t necessarily rape (the garden was asking for it, I swear!), but it’s still not a very pleasant image to conjure. And in the case of the horny biology final, a penis is given to an inanimate object. Phallocentrism in full effect.

Ultimately my problems with “rape” are identical to those that render any word offensive: by using the term lightly, we ignore and belittle the gravity of its literal meaning or original context.

So then, why can’t I stop calling things “retarded”? I guess our sensitivity is limited to the things we care about. I have no real connection to anyone who’s actually retarded, but hearing “rape” pisses me off because I’m a girl with a feminist agenda. Alas.

I suppose I’d be willing to make a deal of some sort. I’ll stop saying “retarded” if you stop saying “rape”? But in the muddled Venn Diagram that is derogation, a fair trade isn’t really possible. Maybe we’ve got to stay on the “Everyone Can Say Everything” Train a little longer, until every insult is equally impotent.

In the meantime, keep your voice down.

It’s a time-worn question: Who owns a word?

In trying to answer, I’ve come to recognize myself as a huge hypocrite. In this post, I’ll cover the pro-appropriation argument; in the next, I’ll show the flip-side.

So, who owns a word? My initial response is anybody and everybody. This can often mean trouble. Examples:

• Problem: Freddy gets mad when his friends joke about being “alcoholics” because his father’s alcoholism destroyed the family.
• My take: I think it’s funny to call anyone who drinks too much an alcoholic. And usually when you joke about people being alcoholics, it turns out they actually kind of are…

• Problem: Lilah doesn’t like it when “anorexic” is used to describe people who aren’t because she was hospitalized for the eating disorder.
• My take: Skinny people should be ridiculed as much as they are envied; I say calling them anorexic — or “ana” — is just dandy. Also, real anorexics are neurotic and annoying. We should make fun of them more often.

• Problem: Lisa has two siblings with Down Syndrome; she feels hurt and angry when people use the word “retarded”.
• My take: I’m a little torn here. I realize its offensive nature, and it pains my heart to think about it, but sometimes I let it slip. I can’t help it!

How very post-p.c. But is that really a problem? In the end, a word is just a word. Right? As any third-wave feminist will tell you, a derogatory term loses its power when it becomes the property of the people it’s meant to subjugate.

We all know the story — African-Americans have taken back n*gger, gays have nabbed fag and dyke, and feminists have stolen bitch, c*nt, whore, etc.

Language-mutilation in the form of appropriation — it’s a theory to which I like to subscribe. It’s both empowering, and, well, convenient.

So I’m currently in the middle of a slightly unhealthy obsession with Evelyn Waugh. I’ve devoured seven of his fourteen novels and most recently, Fathers and Sons, the epic saga of the famous literary family written by his grandson, Alexander Waugh.

I won’t go into why Evelyn’s the greatest novelist who ever lived, nor will I bore you salivating over his dialogue sequences (so good).

No, what I really want to talk about is the colloquialisms of Waugh’s upper-crust subjects, particularly their penchant for inventing fancy versions of adjectives by adding “-making” as a suffix.

It works wonders. Check it out:

If something is embarrassing, it’s “simply too shy-making.”
Whatever makes you feel nauseous is “ill-making.”
Whatever you take to feel better is “better-making.”

You get the idea.

When and why did this linguistic construct disappear? It’s so practical! So perfectly concise! So user-friendly! Put away your thesaurus; just say how you feel and add “-making” at the end.

You’d think the simplicity of the construct alone would have kept it around to this day. Maybe it still exists in the U.K., but I’ve certainly never heard anyone use it in New York.

Wait. That’s a lie. One of my professors from college said “shy-making” once. But she was a writing teacher, and a Catholic, so there’s no doubt in my mind that she was just giving a shout-out to old Evy-poo.

I googled “shy-making” to see what I could dig up. A bunch of British blogs had links to something called the Splendidizer, a language-beautification operation on the now-defunct website for Bright Young Things, the movie inspired by Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The Splendidizer could supposedly turn any boring paragraph into prose that Lady Agatha Runcible herself would find laugh-making.

The Splendidizer may be gone, but it’s time to bring this ingenious idiom back to life on our own. To let it die out completely would be too sad-making. New York, consider this a call to action.