Languages in the Big Apple

Here’s some good news: British researchers recently released a study claiming that profanity in the workplace can “boost morale and esprit de corps.”

“The study observed workers at a mail-order warehouse in England, which employed 14 people, and six focus groups of 10 to 20 people, two in England and six in the USA,” according to the Eastern Daily Press. “They included full-time and part-time workers in a variety of organisations, ranging from restaurants and retail, to a bank, nursing home and hospital.”

Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the University of East Anglia, adds, “For some people, the use of profanity is a way to create collegiality. For others, it’s a way to relieve stress.”

The study’s other shocking revelations include the fact that young people tend to swear more often than older folks, and that some people find swearing offensive – Baruch himself, actually. He’s quoted as saying: “Personally, I detest the use of profanity. I don’t use it myself and I think it’s something terrible to do.”

Hmm. If he finds it so appalling, why did he conduct a study on it? In any case, journalists got a little giddy in their coverage of the report; here are a few headlines, courtesy of USA Today:

F-Yeah! Swearing At Work Is OK, Study Finds

Office Expletives: H— Yeah!

That’s for $@#! Sure

What the …? Workplace profanity boosts morale: study

Hey-ho.. It’s eff to work we go

William Safire’s latest On Language article for the Sunday Times magazine takes a look at the meaning of the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” and how its usage has changed over the years. Lately, it’s been in vogue among the political set: Hillary Clinton said it would be required to believe General David Petraeus’ report on the progress of the war, Republican Mitt Romney in turn used it to question the validity of Clinton’s statement, and Senator John McCain used it as a noun, declaring that “It’s a willing suspension of disbelief that Senator Clinton thinks she knows more than General Petraeus.”

What’s all the hoopla about? And who, if anyone, used the phrase correctly? Safire first gives us a little history:

“The phrase ’suspension of disbelief ,’ ” noted the columnist Alan Nathan in The Washington Times, “is a literary term of art referring to one of Aristotle’s principles of theater in which the audience accepts fiction as reality so as to experience a catharsis, or a releasing of tensions to purify the soul.” He went on to characterize the general’s testimony as “more in keeping with Bertolt Brecht’s philosophy of Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing from that suspended belief, in order to maintain a clearheaded appreciation of the drama in focus.”

He then takes us from politics to poetics, pointing out that Coleridge and Wordsworth had plenty to say on the matter as well. Read the entire article here.

A new article in Science Daily reveals that toddlers are grasping language skills much earlier than expected, and “by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.”

Apparently the wee tykes are also able to discern which sounds to ignore – those, for example, that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue. If you’ve ever wondered why you have so much trouble rolling your ‘r’s, this is why – the most important period for acquiring the speech patterns and sounds of one’s native language is during a child’s first year. Sounds that don’t factor largely into the language a child is hearing – in our case, the rolled ‘r’ – are categorically ignored, causing our tongue and brain to develop accordingly.

This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English “r” and “l” sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.

So while linguists are finding that learning a new language as an adult isn’t as impossible as previously believed, your accent could be there forever.

Read the complete article: here

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a new book out entitled The Stuff of Thought, in which he argues that language is a display of our inner nature. Douglass Hofstadter wrote a thorough, if somewhat unfavorable, review for the LA Times.

That language reveals our inner nature is not a terribly revolutionary premise — language is, after all, our primary means of expression — but the book also tries to take the academic notion of semantics down from the ivory tower to show that the meanings of words matter more than we suspect.

Coining the term verbivores (a species that lives on words), Pinker argues that “our verbivorous, highly biased perception of reality differs radically from the findings of science yet allows us to thrive in a complex universe.”

Translation: there are many classes and “microclasses” of verbs, some of which incorporate alterations into their usage based on the objects which they describe, and some of which don’t.

These classifications are used to support “the idea that we sometimes frame events in terms of motion in physical space and sometimes in terms of motion in state-space”, a notion that makes it seem as though Pinker may have failed in plebeian-izing the theoretical study of semantics; still, it sounds like a good read.

Get the complete Los Angeles Times review here.

People in New York love to hate on newcomers. The fact is, the majority of people who live here aren’t natives, but that doesn’t stop them from pretending. After a few years in town, people are desperate to seem like old-timers, and part of what vindicates that claim is mocking the bumbling masses who move here each year. The easiest targets, of course, are college freshman.

There are so many schools in New York, but the most conspicuous college kids are undoubtedly NYU and Columbia students. This fall, the grumbling is in full effect.

Everyone from gawker to New York magazine has written something bemoaning the swarms of new students invading Union Square and Morningside Heights. Toda’s Metro section in the Times features an article telling students what not to do.

Never, ever mispronounce Houston:

“Houston Street, the Lower Manhattan thoroughfare that put the Ho in SoHo, is pronounced HOW-ston. Unlike the city in Texas, which was named for the first president of the short-lived Republic of Texas, Samuel Houston, Houston Street is named for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress who married into a powerful Manhattan family that owned some of the land on which the street is built. The street name was shortened to Houston is the early 1800s.”

Calling Houston HOW-ston is basically equivalent to walking down the street in overalls with a blade of grass between your teeth or tattooing the word “hick” across your forehead. Very embarassing.

But one can’t help but feel sorry for these wide-eyed new students. Yes, they’re annoying, in a loud-mouthed, perpetually-drunk-on-the-subway, let’s-go-out-in-a-group-of-twenty-people type way, but to act like we’ve never been new in New York is just a lie (except for the tiny sliver of people who were actually born and raised here). Laugh at them, sure, but don’t be actin’ all superior-like, because even if you have been here for five years or longer, chances are you grew up somewhere in Iowa.

A recent study found that the ‘language’ (or system of nonsensical noises) mothers use to communicate with their babies is pretty much universal. According to the “>LA Times:

“Researchers from UCLA recorded eight American, native English-speaking mothers speaking in various intonations to both adults and children, then played the recordings to 26 male and female members of a nonindustrialized culture in South America called the Shuar. The mothers were asked to react verbally to photographs of babies and adults engaged in various activities comprising four categories: prohibitive, approval, comfort and attention.”

The Shuar mamas scored highly. In fact, they were able to surmise with 73% accuracy whether the American women were speaking to adults or to babies by listening to the pitch, loudness, and rate of speech.

This makes sense — it’s probably just as instinctual to use a high-pitched coo for a baby as it is for a newborn puppy. But Greg Bryant, the professor at UCLA who led the study, was also concerned with why these noises appeal to wee babes:

“Babies have immature perceptual systems, and they need extra enhanced input. So you’re spoon feeding them, essentially, which helps them understand… With exaggerated sound effects, you get enhanced perception. When people talk to adults, they rely more on words.”

Now let’s look at David Crystal’s How Language Works to find out more about ‘dude discourse’.

If girls are all about cooing, sing-songy, questioning conversation peppered with we and you, guys are more like, Let’s Talk About Me.

According to Crystal:

“Men are much more likely to interrupt (more than three times as much, in some studies), to dispute what has been said, to ignore or respond poorly to what has been said, to introduce more new topics into the conversation, and to make more declarations of fact or opinion.”

Sounds like a good time, right? But just as the lady-talk rules are simply products of the unspoken rules of social conduct, this description of men’s speech habits strikes me as somewhat oversimplified. Granted, Crystal does admit that none of these patterns are inherent to gender:

“Men are seen to reflect in their conversational dominance the power they have traditionally received from society; women, likewise, exercise the supporting role that they have been taught to adopt — in this case, helping the conversation along and providing men with opportunities to express this dominance.”

Even with this concession, the explanation feels outdated for a book published in 2005. I mean, thinking about it, I just really feel like my womanly-emotive adjectives are going to explode. Doesn’t it make you, like, soooo sad to hear the girls and guys stereotyped like this? Mmmhhm? Don’t you think, maybe, that we could all benefit from a little Judith Butler-style performative gender in our everyday conversations?

At least for the sake of a balanced discussion.

The most obvious way to tell whether a speaker is a man or a woman is to rely on pitch — a low-pitched speaker is usually a man, and a high-pitched speaker a woman.

But there are other, more subtle linguistic differences. In certain languages, such as Japanese and Thai, there are structural choices built into their systems of speaking that allow phonology, grammar, and vocabulary to be used differently by men and women to denote the sex of the speaker.

While English has no such system, linguists have concluded that there are singularities in the way each sex expresses itself. David Crystal, author of How Language Works, writes:

“Among the words and phrases that women are supposed to use more often are such emotive adjectives as super and lovely, exclamations such as Goodness me and Oh dear, and intensifiers such as so or such. This use of intensifiers has been noted in several languages, including German, French, and Russian.”

Isn’t that too precious? While it sounds at first like a loaded stereotype, it actually might be true. How often do you hear a guy call something lovely? Not very often. Crystal also says that women are more likely to ask questions during conversations and to “make more use of positive and encouraging ‘noises’ (such as mhm), use a wider intonational range and a more marked rhythmical stress, and make greater use of the pronouns you and we“.

Again, from experience, I guess I’d agree. But it’s still a little annoying, and isn’t that just a construct of the role of women in society? More to follow…