Languages in the Big Apple

As a new report shows that only 20 percent of French students are
majoring in literature (compared to 50 percent of the previous
generation), Xavier Darcos, the Minister of Education in France is
worried that “France is in danger of becoming a nation of unemployed
sociologists unable to master speech or thought.”

Young people today are studying more “practical” fields such as
sociology and economics in order to secure a well-paid place in
France’s precarious job market.

But Darcos’ plan to revive interest in the French classics is seen by
some as a failure:

Traditionalists believe that the initiative is already doomed
because of the widely held view among the brightest students that
literary studies are a soft option for no-hopers. This trend is an
affront to the rich literary heritage that has produced writers such
as Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, they say. There is also
resentment that intellectual literati are losing their privileged
status in Gallic society that they say is being corrupted by
television, the internet and globalisation.

Sounds pretty grim. But the teachers of France are not surprised -
according to Jean-François Guennoc, a lecturer at Paris University:

“The average is 10 to 12 mistakes but I’ve counted up to 50 in a degree
paper.”

Quelle horreur!

Complete article

David Crystal’s book, How Language Works, includes an illuminating chapter on what exactly our eyes are doing when we read. Here’s a summary:

Both eyes work together as they search for an object, in quick jerky movements known as saccades. Between saccades are fixations, or periods of relative stability.

When we read, our eyes are alternating between saccades and fixations, taking in words not as linear lines of print but as larger visual units.

This “visual pattern of graphic features” is then transmitted to the retina; after that an optic nerves sends the pattern along to our brain for interpretation.

But the process of understanding what we read is a little more complicated, and there are a few different theories as to how we translate text into complete words with meanings. One of these theories is that we read by ear, or phonic mediation. This view argues that the process of reading individual words is indeed linear: letter-by-letter, our brain gathers the phonological sounds one at a time until a whole word, recognized by sound, is understood.

The other method claims that the “phonological bridge” is not necessary in any situation where the text is not read aloud. Instead, it emphasizes the partnership between graphology and semantics — that words are taken in by the brain as whole units, or read by eye. This process involves our peripheral vision to steer us towards the most important part of the page, leaving us to “guess” the significance of the leftover words to form a comprehensive understanding of the text as a whole.

You don’t buy the New York Post expecting the New York Times. Obviously. You slap down a few quarters, get on the subway, and breeze through the paper within about fifteen minutes. On a good day, you’ll come away feeling entertained and (somewhat) informed.

The people at the Post aren’t about hoity-toity language and opinions — they’re about jamming as much breaking news and gossip down your throat as you can handle. And they’re good at it. So good, in fact, that you’re willing to overlook their blatantly right-wing op-eds in exchange for a juicy Page Six.

And then there are the headlines.

After a close reading, you’ll notice that the Post seems to apply three unspoken rules to the art of headline writing:

1. Use incorrect spelling wherever possible
Through is thru, Brooklyn is B’klyn, says is sez, etc. Okay, so they’ve got their reasons — their headlines are invariably enormous, and there just isn’t enough space to spell out every word in 64 point font. But this habit of shortening words can make the entire paper feel like an AIM chat, to the point where you start asking yourself, “omg! r u 4 real?”

2. Awful Alliteration Always Appeals
It’s almost as if they think their average reader is still hooked on nursery rhymes. Or maybe there’s a daily contest for the writers, with a point system for each word in a headline that begins with the same letter. More than three Ps per headline, you get a raise? Today’s paper included five stories with Mother Goose-style repetition: “Spitzer Story Slammed”, “Post Panelists Pick Hillary”, “Tornado Twisted for 9 Miles”, “Mafia’s Mister Clean”, and “Asian Bigot Busted!” Say that three times fast.

3. Shameless Word Play is Fun!
The last headline rule of Post headline writing is that all puns are created equal; use them whenever possible. From today’s paper: “What a Welcome Matt!”, “TV Chef Out of Frying Pan”, “Moore ‘Bad News’”, “Kitty Litter: 63 Cats Left at Shelter”, “Vroom for Two at Top”, “Jetsue: Arab’s T-Shirt ‘Bias’ Rap”, and, finally, “Chime-Out for Big Ben — Big Ben is losing its bongs — temporarily”.

After pinpointing these trends, it makes a little more sense why sometimes after finishing the Post, you just feel a little…. cheesy. In a good way.

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.