Languages in the Big Apple

It’s always fun to watch smaller newspapers and online journals get
all worked up about the New York Times — they sneer at the snobbisms,
gloat at any typos or errors, and laugh when ‘trend’ pieces are
published long after the trend has dissolved.

So it was especially satisfying to pick up the Brooklyn Eagle and find
an article by Henrik Krogius bemoaning the frequent misuse of
who and whom by prominent writers, including the Times’
Gail Collins.

Krogius writes:

Commenting on the recent death of Leona Helmsley, New York Times
columnist Gail Collins referred to Harry Helmsley, “who she wed…”
Ms. Collins may have been signaling that she was too cool to obey
grammatical strictures, unless she simply didn’t know the difference.
And her copy editor, who likely knew the difference, may have felt
constrained about messing with the sacrosant copy of an op-ed page
regular. It may also be that “whom” has become altogether too
difficult a concept for a world in which the subject, predicate and
object are totally alien notions.

Take that! He goes on to tear apart novelist Emily Mitchell (The
Last Summer of the World), who apparently likes to sound smart by
saying “whom” when she should say “who.” All in all, a snarky piece,
but it’s somewhat redeemed by the fact that it reminds us of the
who/whom rule in fairly simple terms:

Failing to understand that “who” is the subject of a clause while
“whom” is the object of a verb or preposition, too many writers get
thrown off by modifiers places between this pronoun and the verb. The
modifiers don’t alter the basic grammatical structure.

Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) recently announced the introduction of a
bipartisan bill called the Plain Language in Government Communications
Act (HR 3584) that would require federal documents such as tax
returns, federal college aid applications, and Veterans Administration
forms to be written in “easy, simple-to-understand language.”

I can’t decide if this is a good thing or if it just means we’re all
getting stupider.

In any case, here’s what Rep. Braley had to say:

“Anyone who’s done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to
understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions,” Rep.
Braley said. “There is no reason why the federal government can’t
write these forms and other public documents in a way we can all
understand.

“Writing government documents in plain language will increase
government accountability and will save Americans time and money.
Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to
understand what the federal government is doing and what services it
is offering.

“I’m proud to introduce this bill to make it easier for Americans to
work with and understand their government.”

And here are the Federal Plain Language Guidelines for writing talk
that’s simple-like:

*Use short, simple words
*Use “you” and other pronouns to speak directly to readers
*Use short sentences and paragraphs
*Avoid legal, foreign, and technical jargon
*Avoid double negatives

And just in case you’re dying to see Plain Language in action, go to
plainlanguage.gov to see before-and-after examples.
Yeehaw.

How much thought goes into the naming of the latest fast-food concoctions? A lot.

To come up with a name for Wendy’s newest cheeseburger, a disgustingly enormous sandwich featuring two quarter-pound beef patties, two slices of cheese, and six strips of bacon, the company sought professional help. The result? The baconator.

Ew.

A recent article went behind the scenes to look at the “linguistics” in mainstream marketing.

William Lozito, CEO of Strategic Name Development, understood that in coming up with a name for the burger, he needed something “that reflected the burger’s formidable qualities.”

His wife and partner, Diane Prange, who also acts as the company’s “chief linguistics officer,” offers her own in-depth analysis:

The prefix describes the burger’s key distinction and “the suffix suggests something large and compelling, as in Terminator.”

But for all the lowest-common-denominator logic of the
baconator, Strategic Name Development is raking it in — it’s
expected to pull in $2.5 million this year alone. I want to be a
product namer, too!

The company, started by Lozito in 1993, took off three years later when he hired Prange, who is fluent in four languages and “revels in arcane data and word usage.” She confesses:

“My idea of a good time is to crawl into bed with printouts from the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Or maybe watching Terminator?

The language police descended upon a Pennsylvania woman last week for swearing at her toilet.

Dawn Herb, a resident of Scranton, PA, let her john know who was boss after it overflowed onto the bathroom floor. Luckily, her rant was overheard by a next-door neighbor, who also happened to be a policeman. His virgin ears were so distraught that he called up some fellow coppers, who raced to the scene of the crime and stuck Herb with a disorderly conduct charge before things got out of hand. Ms. Herb, who reportedly doesn’t remember exactly what she said to the poor toilet but admits using profanity, now faces up to $300 in fines and 90 days in jail.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she told The Times-Tribune, “I was in my house. It’s not like I was outside or drunk. The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling for my daughter to get the mop.”

Sure, lady. In her defense, she was potty-talking to her potty.

Source

Warning: this is a long one!

Living in a multicultural urban environment like New York can really skew your perception of racism in America. Sure, we get regular reminders of xenophobia in many forms – the uproar over Brooklyn’s Arabic school, for example – but more often than not, blatant racism is blurred by the diverse make-up of the city. If you’re a white person who hates brown people, you probably shouldn’t live here.

So it’s both surprising and sobering to come across letters such as this one, from KansasCity.com, in which a woman rants against people who live in America and can’t speak English.

This is in regard to Zdenko Bergl’s letter “Coming to America” (10/5). I agree with Mr. Bergl, who has no sympathy for immigrants who do not learn English. They are just as capable as the immigrants from long ago.

My family came to America from Sicily. They also attended English classes and became U.S. citizens. They were true Americans who loved our country. They and the other immigrants from long ago learned to speak English and adopted the ways of the American people. Why can’t the new immigrants?

I get very upset when I go shopping to hear the salespeople speaking in their language instead of English. I get upset when products we buy today are printed in Spanish. Why Spanish? Why not in Italian, Russian, German, Arabic, etc.? Why has Spanish become our second language? Why can’t the new immigrants use English in America because that is our language?

If the immigrants want to use their own language in their home or with their own people, that’s great. But they should learn English if they want to live in our great country.

Virginia G. - Kansas City

Why Spanish? Well, Virginia, maybe because the Latino population makes up the largest minority group in the country? The question should be, Why not Spanish? The fact is, she and so many other racists continue to misuse the immigrant argument. Yes, the United States is a country of immigrants, many of whom were treated at some point or another with prejudice and contempt. But what these people fail to realize is how everything is arbitrary. Like Saussure’s declaration about the link between signifier and signified, so, too, is the fact that our country chose English as our national language instead of German. (It was a close call.) But what good is there in sanctifying English? Trust me, Virginia, it ain’t going anywhere. The treatment of the most prominent language in the world as a precious, disappearing commodity reminds me of an interview I once saw on a college campus about the importance of Women’s Studies. One boy, when asked what he thought about the department, replied proudly:

“I don’t see any buildings dedicated to Men’s Studies, do you?”

Take a look around, buddy. The whole bloody campus is dedicated to Men’s Studies. And giving Virginia Woolf a room of her own won’t wipe you or your manhood off the map. Nor will the Spanish on your cereal box.

In American universities, most introductory foreign language classes are taught in English, under the assumption that an explicit understanding of the language’s grammar is essential before the language itself can be picked up.

In many other countries, in fact most of Western Europe, the opposite approach is taken: classes are taught entirely in the foreign language, with the hope that as the language itself is absorbed by students, so will its grammar. The argument between teaching grammar explicitly or implicitly is an interesting one.

In this article by ESL teacher Larry M. Lynch, both methods are examined.

In the argument for explicitly-taught grammar, Lynch explains that for “Logical-Mathematical and Verbal-Linguistic intelligence learners,” understanding a foreign language in terms of its structural foundation is the basis for fluency. Once the structure is learned, students can more easily fill in vocabulary and idiomatic gaps because of their comprehension of the linguistic foundation.

On the other hand, implicitly-taught grammar calls for more “natural, communicative situations”. This view aims to teach foreign tongues in the same way that mother tongues are learned — complete immersion. This exposure often proves more effective in sharpening the ear of the student, and making him/her more comfortable in conversing. In this method, the words come first, and the structural rules fall into place later.

So, which method is better? In considering the arguments alone, there’s something to be said for both. But if you look at evidence, the implicit-teaching might well be more successful. Native English speakers can often write very well in foreign languages because we’ve had so much grammar drilled into us from the beginning of our education, but when it comes to speaking, we sort of choke. Likewise, foreigners in America (or any English-speaking country) tend to speak more fluidly and with less apprehension, perhaps because they’ve practiced the oral aspects of English much more than we do foreign languages in our classrooms.

Is it because we learned grammar first? Possibly, however, it could also be the stigma we attach to speaking French in France, or Italian in Italy, or whatever language in wherever — we worry about our accent, our feminine/masculine endings, etc., to the point where conversations become terrifying.

Lynch responds to the question rather equivocally:

“Although it is essential to teach elements of language and develop communicative abilities in our students, there is no one best way to introduce and provide practice in them.”

If you were to guess the etymology of the word malapropism, it would make sense to believe that it’s a scientific term taken from “mal,” (bad, wrong, evil) and “apropos” — that is, an inappropriate term, or “the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one.”

In fact, the word comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals. While Sheridan was playing off the French term, mal à propos, his slippery-tongued character ultimately gave birth to a high-profile linguistic topic of study.

There’s a specific type of malapropism, appropriately known as an eggcorn, that Michael Erart’s Um… explains beautifully:

An eggcorn is “a word is mispronounced or misheard once. Then an individual continues to use the wrong form, insisting it’s correct and often inventing little stories — what linguists call ‘folk etymologies’ — to justify them. One reason classical malapropisms persist in a person’s vocabulary is that one can conceive how, even in the incorrect form, the badly-chosen words make sense”.

“Eggcorn” does, after all, sound like acorn, and an acorn is, after all, kind of shaped like an egg. “Exercise regiment” sounds a lot more disciplined and hard-core than “exercise regimen,” and “for all intensive purposes” technically makes just as much sense as “for all intents and purposes.”

Erarts gathers eggcorns from a few different places, including linguist Arnold Zwicky’s languagelog.com (the site that coined the term) and the official eggcorn archive. Check them out for more examples of Mrs. Malaprop’s progeny.

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.