a manifesto and call for submissions

language is constantly changing. this truism has always been the foundation of this blog, but i wonder whether i've ever really written about it directly. language changes. i can't begin to think of a counter argument. who believes that it doesn't? even the most stalwart grammar nazis must admit, grudgingly, that language does change.

language changes according to some predictable patterns, some semantic, some syntactic, some phonetic. but it also changes according to the whims of inventing users, which are unpredictable to the same extent that human life and action is unpredictable.

sometimes the way language changes even changes. new technologies emerge that make new transformations possible, like typographic change. what it means for language to change changes. rules and norms can also change, allowing whole ranges of invented usages to emerge or gain legitimacy.

an invented usage is the leading edge that exposes a change in language. very rarely does any of them make a splash on its own, but they often indicate a certain change or even a change in the way change happens that can have far-reaching social, psychological, political or technological roots and implications.

invented usages also have effects beyond their meaning, beyond their connotation or denotation. they make us uncomfortable. they make us laugh or take each other more seriously or less seriously. they make some people angry.

'why?' is a question i've meant to address for a while. why does change in language affect us? i've arrived, of course, at my own answer. because that's what bloggers do.

language surrounds us like the whole world. we are born into it, we work with it our entire lives, and we pass out of it. and no one person can have any measure of control over it. only a handful can string together a single sentence that lasts for a decade. even fewer can actually change the language itself for any amount of time. who has the power to create and destroy words, or alter their meanings forever?

and yet, language changes. no wonder people who strive to perfect language are so frustrated when a mob they don't know, don't like, don't respect, and consider uneducated, change it effortlessly and without a second thought.

meanings, and our ability to express them, are precious. in fact, they're the ground we stand on. invented usages are the joining of things we never thought were the same; they're the tearing apart of one thing we thought shouldn't ever be broken.

Invented Usage tries to celebrate, or at least tolerate those changes in all their mechanisms and forms. though we all use language differently, i find some comfort in the fact that invented usages come into being because we all change it in similar ways. change ultimately takes place because we continue to make the same mistakes and innovations as people we've never met, the way channels form because drops repeatedly take the same path down a slope.

on Invented Usage, a manifesto and a call for submissions aren't incompatible, because invented usages come from everywhere.

so send in your invented usages, right to inventedusage@gmail.com. send in an invented usage, and i'll post about it. send in posts, and i'll post them. all my favorite blogs (photoshopdisasters.com, thingsyoungerthanmccain.com, do it this way. maybe, with the power of the internet, we can all be in this together.

Introducing The Interrationale

Another shameless blog plug: I have recently started a new blog as a creative outlet as well: The Interrationale.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is very accessible, at all, since it is essentially just place to put detailed research notes as I read up on some schools of thought that I didn't get to study in college.

The result is all the clarity and cohesiveness of Western Marxist social theory expressed in the vivid, dynamic idiom of analytic philosophy.

That said, I would treat it as a personal favor if anybody read and reacted to it. It actually is going to have a lot to do with language and rhetoric, since one of my main sources is Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action.

Ultimately, one goal I have is to build to a rigorous answer to this question: how is computing and especially the internet communication changing society?

what's in an error?

seb's recent post raises several interesting questions. the one that currently interests me most is: what is the definition of a speech error?

for most of the cognitive and linguistic literature on speech errors, it's something like 'an utterance that doesn't correspond to the utterance the speaker intended to produce.' people that use this definition are generally studying instances like "cattleships and bruisers" being produced when "battleships and cruisers" was intended. these are known as errors of performance. what this definition (sometimes explicitly) excludes are errors of competence. these are substitutions like "spicket" for "spigot." for most linguists, if you think that word is "spicket," intend to say it that way, and execute it properly, you haven't made an error.

or have you? clearly, for grammarians, using the word "spicket" where better-educated speakers would use "spigot" is an error. it's a violation of, as seb says, "the way things are" in the language at this point in time.

what's the disconnect here? grammarians are talking about the Language as it is recorded in dictionaries and linguists are talking about the intention a speaker has to make a particular utterance without regard to its correctness in the Language as a whole. this seems to be Saussure's parole and langue distinction in action. langue was his term for the language as a whole unified entity, whereas parole was the individual utterance spoken at a particular moment in an absolutely unique context.

the two domains are so distinct that they even have completely different ways of defining what an error is. yet it strikes me as part of the mystery of language that langue is built completely from parole. and, in turn, parole is built on langue; we each learn how to form utterances by taking in a ton of language, riddled with error though they may be.

what interests me further is this: the two constructions stand in very different relations to the speaking subject. he's sort of surrounded by langue while in control of parole. but both definitions of error have to do with the speakers' intention. what does this mean for educational policy? what does it mean for humanity? stay tuned?

on scrabble

seb makes an interesting suggestion, though i'm inclined to think he's just upset that i used the word 'sunns' in online scrabble. he suggests that "there's room for an invented usage scrabble variant." and, as usual, i'm inclined to disagree!

how do i reconcile my love of scrabble with my "anarchic linguistic crusade"? very simply. scrabble is a game, and games have to have rules. the best games have just enough rules so that they're hard but not impossible. they achieve a certain balance that i've never really articulated well. they create situations in which you're forced to make difficult strategic decisions: gain short term to lose long term? help myself or hurt my opponent? conserve resources but risk being unable to use them later?

scrabble achieves this through a complicated calculus of points and letter frequencies. letters that are harder to use are worth more points, which, if you replace 'letters' with 'resources', is a pretty popular conceit in games, it seems to me. scrabble just happens to use language as the environment for this balancing act.

to make language an appropriate game environment, it has to be solidified. this crystalization, of course, is artificial, even though we tend to believe that it's not. i'm certainly willing to accept the tyranny of the dictionary if it makes for a good game, just as i'm willing to accept the fact that there are only four aces in a deck of cards.

i still haven't read wittgenstein, but he did famously say that language is a game. once again, i'm inclined to disagree. language doesn't have rules--it has conventions that change constantly. it's not designed to be balanced--it's not designed at all. and it's cooperative, not competitive. there are no resources to be conserved or advantages to be gained by the actual use of language--it's a tool for achieving those advantages, if one is so inclined.

when it comes to scrabble, i'm not even that interested in the words. yes, it's easier to use your resources if you know a lot of them, but who cares what 'sunns' means? it's just five one-point tiles that got me 14 points.

i wanna be a grammatologist.

so, on a personal note, i'm casting about for a career. glamorous unpaid internships beckon, as does linguistics grad school. but my real passion turns out to be completely fictitious. worse than that, it's just a grammatical derivation of 'grammatology'.

'of grammatology' is one of jacques derrida's best known works; it's something like the bible (ahem!) of deconstruction. (i've never gotten through the whole thing, nor, unfortunately, do i have a copy in front of me.) in it, derrida outlines (literally--he sets the boundaries) of a non-science known as grammatology. on the one hand, it's a semiotics--a study of signs. on the other hand, it examines the foundations of the possibility of human knowledge. the tenets of the book never add up to a course of action for a positive science or a philosophy that one could live by. grammatology would always be stuck examining its own foundations in a never-ending self-reflexive mess of critical theory and no one would ever read the whole thing (ahem).

a google search for the term 'grammatologist' asked if i really wanted 'dermatologist,' but i think it's too late for med school. grammatologist returns only 763 hits, but they're some of the most interesting i've encountered.

-most appropriately, in an somewhat clumsy interview, jacques himself explains that there's no such thing as a grammatologist.
-a language log post about the history of the word grammelot and the tediousness of academic review in the blogosphere.
-a post on rhizome.org about a piece of pynchonian net art by mark amerika called 'phon:e:me,' which features a character who 'moonlights as an applied grammatologist' (it can be viewed with firefox, btw).
-and last, but not least, a mysterious message board discussion about martial arts, easter philosophy, and language.

but i think grammatology is more legit than a lot of people who use the term realize. i'm currently applying to a couple of linguistics graduate programs that focus on an phenomena known as 'grammaticization' or 'grammaticalization' (don't worry, linguists, i'm not going to say grammaticization is the same as grammatology!) grammaticization is a process of language change whereby new words and structures form from old bits of linguistic material. a canonical example is 'gonna.' 'going to' used to have a strictly physical meaning, but somehow developed the metaphorical meaning of future or intention. that semantic meaning became phonologically different from the physical 'going to,' which is still used (no one would ever say 'i'm gonna the store'), effectively making 'gonna' a new word or grammatical marker. (i don't really have an adequate grasp of all this yet!)

so, great, grammaticization happens according to certain predictable patterns. what does this have to do with grammatology? well, for semioticians, everything has a grammar. signs don't function as signs (don't convey their intended meaning, let's provisionally say) unless they're properly deployed within a grammatical structure. let's take a fairly literal and real-world example: street signs are a system of signs. they have a syntax--spatial, rather than temporal. the 'stop' sign at the end of my block is turned upside down, so it sort of reads 'pots,' but it still functions as a sign--we still stop at it. however, a friend and i, driving up i-35, saw a truck hauling a sign saying 'NW 63rd street, exit only' across a bridge. we did not interpret that sign to mean that we were approaching 63rd street, because it wasn't within the correct syntactic structure (namely, on a stationary pole over the highway). some errors impair meaning and some don't. if the same 'error' (saying 'gonna' for 'going to') is made over and over, it can enable a new sign to emerge within the same grammatical structure (i wish i could think of an example to apply this to street signs).

if linguists are studying the way new grammatical categories and words and structures form, what if they arrived at a generalizable model for how grammars grow and change? what if we could apply these phenomena of repeated error and re-interpretation to all systems of meaning and explain how totalities form, change, die? wouldn't it be sweet to be a grammatologist?

"A mere ripple in cow-infested waters"

A moment of Zen, courtesy of analytic philosophy:

"It might still be said, however, that the dependence of cow thoughts on distal cows is assymetrically dependent on their dependence on disjunctions of proximal cow projections; distal cows wouldn't evoke COW tokens but that they project proximal whiffs or glimpses or snaps or crackles or . . . well, or what? Since, after all, cow spotting can be mediated by theory to any extent you like, the barest whiff or glimpse of cow can do the job for an observer who is suitably attuned. Less, indeed, than a whiff or glimpse; a mere ripple of cow-infested waters may suffice to turn the trick."
(Jerry Fodor, "A Theory of Content, II: The Theory," in Stich & Warfield's Mental Representations)

identity crisis

the identity property is pretty central to a lot of endeavors. if there's one thing our logical proofs, self-congratulatory objectivism and philosophical arguments rest on, it's the fact that "A is A."

of course, this is a perfect example of why traditional logical assumptions and standards shouldn't be applied wholesale to the study of language. in philosophy of language "A is A" is the foundation for the idea that any statement is identical to itself. this works alright for physical objects, but when it comes to language, there are never two identical statements. there are never two identical statements. there are never two identical statements.

the first A is not the same as the second A. in the most trivial sense, they're in different places on the page. they're articulated at different times, drawn slightly differently or pronounced slightly differently. the fact that these types of differences don't count as differences is the most primary function of language. as derrida says, language is repetition and difference. language is, by pretty much anyone's definition, made of repeating elements. but each repetition involves a difference. it's that whole can't-step-in-the-same-river-twice thing.

to say "A is A" is true is not a tautology. it's not a definition handed down by god or a self-evident truth about the universe. it should be seen as a statement of our most basic assumptions about language. assumptions probably isn't even the right word because it's something even stronger than an assumption. it's the nature of language's functioning to flatten out certain differences, especially the differences that context and repetition throw into the works.

i'm not saying "A is A" is not true. it IS true precisely because we understand two separate tokens of the same bit of language (two of the same statement, two "A"s) to be the same thing. and we have this understanding because of the nature of language. and that's a shaky place to build your logic!

how to speak and write postmodern

just got this link from a friend, who apparently thought it had my name on it:
how to write and speak postmodern
it's an excellent crash course in how to be a jerk.

but, as another friend says, if anyone can get any mileage out of this, it's invented usage. so i'll just say that postmodernism (poststructuralism, too) gets a bad rap for being so convoluted and buzz-wordy. but these phrases (and the invention of them!) do important theoretical work for the philosophers that use them (although it's true that they will just make you sound pompous if you use them at too many receptions).

for example, a philosopher might choose to use an obscure phrase coined by another philosopher and only understood by philosophy students without explicating it. he might do this, and do it legitimately, to make his own writing less accessible. this can actually be useful, if, for instance, he wants to point to the context of another philosopher's work and use the term in the way the other philosopher used it and ensure that only people who understand this earlier philosopher even bother to tackle his argument. scientific papers often do the same thing when they quote a paper or refer to a school of thought they just don't do it postmodernly (yet).

so the implication is that using the language means you know the background. hopefully the instructions in the article linked above don't ACTUALLY produce coherent-sounding postmodern speak. but all language users run the risk that people aren't using the language according to the conventions we expect.

all jargon, and particularly university jargon, IS exclusive and jerky. it makes academic literature hard to get a foot hold in. it DOES perpetuate the status quo in university teaching because you are more likely to need a professor to help you get that foot hold. but postmodernism is good because it tries to acknowledge these things. and postmodern-speak, if used properly (i mean, according to convention... that was a close one!), is good because it's efficient at acknowledging things. it allows you to say 'yes, i know my speech reflects my education/educational system and european-descended middle-class background; yes i KNOW my use of these terms is contradictory or circular at some level; i'm aware of the arguments of philosophers who wrote on the topic and used these terms; BUT...' all at the same moment that you're starting to engage with the topic and making a further argument, which you obviously consider to be valid and worth talking about or you wouldn't have bothered, given all the above caveats you just made.

now that's an invented usage that packs a whallop!

post kia eyan kia feni!

i've only recently discovered the world of constructed languages (or 'conlangs' if you're in the know). a constructed language differs from a natural language (natlang) because it is designed by a person or people, rather than evolving as natlangs do.

esperanto is perhaps the most famous conlang. it was developed for international communication in the hopes of fostering peace. wikipedia estimates that there are 100,000 to 2 million fluent speakers of esperanto and 1,000 native speakers.

other well-known conlangs are those created by j.r.r. tolkien for his fantasy characters to speak. while these fictitious languages can't be said to have evolved 'as natural languages do,' tolkien famously evolved them himself, creating a world full of languages that were realistically related and distributed according to the movements of populations. some langs, though fictional, are constructed to be as realistic as possible.

people also create conlangs for philosophical reasons, especially to test the sapir-whorf hypothesis, which, at its strongest, states that the range of thought is limited by the range of language. Loglan is philosophical a language meant to limit or eliminate ambiguitity. for instance, one cannot express a finite verb without also expressing a tense eliminating ambiguities such as the english "i am going to the store" (later? right now?). Láadan is another fascinating philosophical language. It was made by Suzette Haden Elgin as part of a fictional work and also to determine whether western natlangs are systematically male-oriented. each sentence in Láadan ends with a tonal (one of the few tonal conlangs!) particle that expresses the mood of the sentence: fact, hearsay believed to be true, hearsay believed to be false, etc. just check out wikipedia's list of conlangs and be amazed at the number of people who have constructed whole languages and the diversity of their reasons for doing so!

now, journey with me to a small corner of the internet where one much-maligned little conlang lives. Kalusa is not listed on wikipedia. and i might be wrong, but i think it's the first unplanned conlang. the kalusa corpus is created one entry at a time by any user. each entry must have an english translation. then other users can vote on the acceptability of the entry. if an entry's score falls too low, it is removed from the corpus. users can search the corpus by english or kalusan keywords. it began with four simple sentences posted in may.

not exactly how a natlang develops, but closer than most conlangs get. it's hard to classify kalusa according to the typical taxonomy of conlangs. it's not exactly an artlang since it's not used in fiction; not really an engineered language since it has no philosophical purpose and isn't really engineered at all. i guess it's kind of an auxillary language, but most of those are created for some political purpose (like esperanto). at its heart, i think it should be called a language game.

i was immensely excited when i first found kalusa because it's all invented usage! what could be better than a totally open-minded community of language inventors trying only to encourage each other to understand and play by certain rules of a language game? isn't that a perfect little utopia of how language could work?

as it turns out though, where there's language there's always controversy. the forum on the kalusa site is often filled with interesting and open exchanges of information and curiosity; but it also reveals that everyone thinks they know what kalusa should be. gary, aka gregor samsa posts:

The earliest utterances of the language should deal with the most basic daily needs of the people who speak the language, and not with "existentialism" and "hyperinfracaniphilia". Therefore, rather than allowing contributors to add random (and often "goofy") sentences and words, a large collection of simple sentences dealing with the daily concerns of the people would be provided in English; sentences such as "It is time to plant the corn." and "Father has gone to the marketplace."

but the shared basic needs of kalusa users are NOT corn and marketplaces. in fact, the most shared things among kalusans are probably philosophy, linguistics and the internet. but if you believe, as gary does, that kalusa should be naturalistic (a common goal among conlangers), then for some reason we have to make believe that it started in the days of one syllable words. additionally, he proposes some sort of central control to keep people focused on such basic vocabulary before allowing departures. unfortunately for gary, the development of a language like kalusa would be fundamentally influenced by the technology surrounding it (not to mention that all its creators speak english). it will never begin with one-syllable words for corn because words for 'internet' and 'existentialism' are more interesting and more useful to its speakers.

dedalvs, another disatisfied kalusan, writes: (to an unkown poster)

If one were just to look at your entries, the obvious conclusion is that you have no idea how /s/-reduplication works (one need only look at /fortusortu/, to figure that out). But that isn't quite the truth. You've been against it, and everything else that didn't quite make sense to you, from the beginning, and so you just coined a bunch of obviously ungrammatical, nonsensical, or just plain ugly words to make the whole process seem ridiculous. Well, no need to bother any more. Just use your trick to continue getting as many votes as you want, delete all the sentences you don't like, and start coining away until you're satisfied. If you decide you're interested in an interactive language, though, let us all know, so we can come back. Until then, enjoy.

careful what you wish for! as i've said before, a language (any language) can't truly be interactive, because it's not an object that exists outside of people. because it belongs to many people all at once (those with certain types of power -- in this case, the ability to win votes), it is subject to wild 'ungrammatical' 'nonsensical' or 'ugly' changes. even if the person to whom dedalvs refers is dumb (doesn't know how s-reduplication works!) or mean (uses tricks! hijacks the language for irony's sake!), he/she is still a participant in the language. that is, to someone who approaches the language as a new user, the trick/nonsense/sarcastic words are just as good as the 'real' ones. what's real in a lang anyway?

i'll post again soon about the actual grammar of kalusan and my own adventures with coinage. but, of course, politics come first!

a tomato is a vegetable

such a vegetable, in fact, that people frequently have to remind each other that it's 'actually' a fruit. these are often the same people who like to correct grammar mistakes in conversation:

Me and Bob are going to add some tomatoes and other vegetables to the pasta.

You know tomato is actually a fruit. And I think you mean 'Bob and I.'

Oh, then you must not have meant to start a sentence with a conjunction just now...

anyway. we can tell that the tomato IS a vegetable because that fact organizes things physically in the world. for example:
1. the produce aisle.
2. the garden patch.
3. the hamburger. ask a friend: "have you ever tried fruit on your hamburger? it's actually great..."
4. it tastes like a vegetable, whatever that means.
and so on.

that is, the 'technical' definitions of a fruit ('the sweet and fleshy product of a tree or other plant that contains seed and can be eaten as food') and a vegetable ('edible part of a plant cultivated for food', thank you dictionary.com) are useful in some speech communities: scientific, botanical; but are incomplete and unable to explain certain facts about the physical tomato (it goes in the vegetable section of the supermarket). nevermind for the moment that 'vegetable' seems to include 'fruit' under these definitions. i'm fairly sure that in most speech settings they're a binary. enough to make the point, at least.

Scott gets credit for the observation that 'fruit' is by far the privileged side of the 'fruit'/'vegetable' binary. consider calling a person a 'fruit;' this is either a derrogative term for a homosexual man (but not nearly as offensive as some other words) or just a goofy person. calling someone a 'vegetable,' on the other hand, is an offensive way of saying that they are literally comatose or brain-dead, or a very offensive way of saying that they are a 'couch potato.' consider the brave tomato, following its instincts in spite of confusion from humans and jeers from the other fruits.

the Essentialist school of philosophy (and philosophy of language), which claims that any specific type of entity can be defined as a class such that every member of that class must share some finite list of characteristics (thank you wikipedia), would have a hard time with the tomato. poor confused tomato. it seems trivial, but figures like the tomato, which straddle two or more categories, have major implications in certain fields: the weeks-old fetus - human or not? the transgendered person - male or female? meaning - inside or outside of language? the answers to these questions are essentially decided by the usage of the terms, which can never be completely controlled by dictionaries, laws or experimentation.

calling 'a tomato is a vegetable' a category error means several things. it means you rely on a certain scientific and physical definition to determine the 'actual' 'real' 'true' category of an object. it also means you believe much of the world is often making errors by not adhering to that standard definition. it might also mean you think that everything definitively fits in one category or the other, and that this category can be determined (a transsexual IS actually male or female, a fetus actually begins living at a particular instant) as long as you have enough physical evidence.

and, while that isn't necessarily bad, it does, like the questioning tomato, make me slightly uncomfortable.

quantum language theory

since handing in my paper for 'metaphor and thought' today, i've been able to finally formulate my own metaphor for the great divide in the philosophy of language that's been bouncing around in my head since i watched that 'elegant universe' documentary.

first there was the newtonian theory of physics, which was fairly over-simplified and deterministic. then (to over-simplify a bit myself), along came albert einstein and came up with a much better theory that explained a lot more phenomena and required a major shift in everyone's thinking about the universe. einstein was pretty smart, but toward the end of his life when people started to talk about quantum mechanics, he couldn't handle it. 'gott würfelt nicht,' he said, meaning, 'god doesn't play dice, the laws of nature aren't based on probabilities.'

this is the same position analytic philosophers are in. (i think it's a nice metaphor for them too... they get to be einstein!). they cannot believe there is not a truth 'out there' in the universe to be discovered (i think a lot of philosophers might consider themselves atheists, but i'm just saying... gott might würfle). Their theories work a lot better than older classical models of language, but just try telling a philosopher that reference isn't deterministic, that language doesn't have to have a strict dependence on the world, that the odds determining how a word is used depend on the odds that another word was used two weeks ago and so on..., that vagueness isn't a problem that needs to be solved. you'll get a funny look and a bad grade.

now imagine a contemporary university physics professor who not only doesn't teach quantum physics, but doesn't believe in it. if you told them that light is both a particle and a wave (a very post-structuralist move, by the way!), they would give you a funny look and a bad grade, but then they also might get fired for being 50 years behind the times (unless they had tenure, in which case they might just be ridiculed in the literature and discussed angrily in the cafeteria and department meetings... i don't know how these things work.)

granted, from my understanding, there are more outlandish theories out there (like string theory) that aren't widely accepted or taught in most physics courses. to continue the analogy, i'm not saying philosophy classes should start teaching all the craziest semiotics they can get their hands on. i'm also not saying there's no value to studying analytic philosophy. it's smart, it's interesting, and it maps out a lot of the territory of philosophy of language and shows where the problems are. i'm just saying that philosophy departments and classes exclude out of hand, for no apparent reason other than the fact that it would force them to rethink 100 years of their own research, a huge branch of thought about the same questions they claim to be asking.

some quest for knowledge, huh?

semantics and the body

I LOVE this book. Semantics and the Body by Horst Ruthrof is the missing link between post-structuralism and linguistics that I've been waiting for.

The author briefly summarizes the history of philosophy of language before really delving into the nitty-gritty of why traditional formal semantics can't handle essential things like negation and metaphor. It's clear he knows his stuff.

While he doesn't buy post-structuralism hook, line and sinker, he does make an important move that is clearly based on literary theory. Instead of beginning with 'normal' language or 'positive' statements and considering meatphor and negation as marginal phenomena that can be described later (as linguists do), he begins with these as things a philosophy of language must account for, and goes on from there.

Ruthrof does buy the claim that everything is textual. That is, in opposition to Lakoff et al., he doesn't think there's some realm of unmediated physical experience that we code into language via metaphor. He believes the body has an essential place in a theory of language because it is a mechanism for interacting with and encoding various perceptual sign systems. It is these non-verbal modes of signification that make ALL linguistic expressions meaningful.

Metaphor, then, simply highlights the play (and the slippage) between the various systems. There is a continuum from metaphor to literal speech that we must negotiate (with varying degrees of uncertainty) every day. This is a pretty elegant theory. It buys a lot of things (for example) a theory of metaphor that meshes with a theory of literal language, without a lot of the explanatory baggage that Lakoff needs to pull along (does each individual's experience shape their metaphorical domains? what is the role of historical change in moving from 'live' to 'dead' metaphors?).

Pay attention, philosophers of language: these divisions (literal/figurative; live/dead; negative/positive) are not as clear cut as formalism would like them to be. Admitting that is the first step toward getting help.