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 can't get no satisfying

at a poetry reading tonight, a short poet approached the mic and said 'let me just shortify this real fast.' later, the mc offered to 'shortify' the mic for a poet in a wheelchair (i believe she was in a wheelchair... my view of her was completely obstructed by a wall. It's possible she was also short.)

anyway, the interesting thing about 'shortifying' is that it forms a minimal pair with another more traditional word: 'shortening.' why didn't the poets say 'i'm going to shorten the mic'?

i have an intuition about this, but i've having trouble locating its origin. i believe it means that there is a state of 'shortness' or and when we 'shortify' we're bringing objects into accord with it. that is, the verb form actually takes what was once an attribute of people and turns it into an identity that a group of people share.

i'm reminded of my last post, and i think this applies to 'greening' as well, but that undermines my hypothesis that it's the verb form -ify-ing that creates the effect. mystery still unsolved!!

i wonder if the blogger on noncompositional, which i discovered earlier today, would have anything to say about that?

junie b. good

a friend sent me this link to the new york times website recently. (i think it will require a sign-in, but should be free.) apparently a series of children's books is bringing the great grammar debate home to the parents of kindergarten-age kids.

junie b. is the name of the back-talking trouble-making main character of the series. junie narrates the book and her kindergarten and first-grade reading level make themselves seen in the text of the book. according to the article, the narration contains misspelled words, improper subject-verb agreement and incorrectly conjugated irregular past tense verbs.

many parents favor the spunky heroine and the books' humor, but just as many are incensed that they expose kids to potentially harmful improper grammar and bratty behavior. this forum on about.com is a treasure trove of popular opinions about usage and grammar. this is another incarnation of the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate that has raged in linguistics departments and usage textbooks for several decades. bluntly, prescriptivists believe that grammar rules exist for a reason and that deviations from what is currently known as standard english should be corrected. descriptivists acknowledge the room for variation in linguistic standards and try to describe 'deviations,' rather than eliminate them. real people, of course, hold all kinds of positions in between. what we'll call 'prescriptivist' parents believe that reading improper grammar will cause their kids to have lower reading scores and trouble with grammar themselves. 'descriptivists' believe that junie b.'s speech is normal for a young child and not harmful.

as with most things, i believe the right position is somewhere in the middle. a bit of digging into both the ny times article and the about.com forum reveal this position: the books are good because they entertain children and encourage them to read. all kids make errors while they're leaning; it's probably interesting for them to read about a character who makes the same mistakes. but prescriptivists are realists in one respect; one can't go through life in our society using improper spelling and grammar and be taken seriously in school or business. proper grammar is a mark of status and education just like personal hygiene or polite behavior. i would personally argue that kids should learn to recognize mistakes so that they can understand the social implications of making them and make informed decisions about whether or not they want to. the junie b. books could provide a great tool for parents to teach the meta-analysis that asks not just 'why did junie say that?' but 'why did junie say it that way?'

green me up, scotty

i've had a couple of run ins with greening in recent days. espn (i've been watching a lot lately) is greening in san fransisco: an advertisement behind home plate currently says

let's green this city(.com, i think)

and, in route 66, where i'm currently working, the all-natural window spray i use to clean glass surfaces is called

greening the cleaning

in the first usage is a a standard infinitive verb following after a modal. in the second it is a past participle. it's a weird sentence fragment, almost like they're saying 'we are greening the cleaning' or 'you are greening the cleaning.'

for some reason, when i think of other verbs that occupy these sentence frames, they all end up sound very hip. i would say things like let's rock this city
or
rocking the cleaning.

so, whatever this 'to green' is, it sounds like something i want to do. more importantly, it sounds like some change i might want to bring over various mundane objects. used, as it is, in the context of advertisements and brand names, it must be something good.

'green' is widely used as an adjective meaning 'environmentally friendly' as in phrases like, 'we're a green store,' or 'the green party.' so it seems to be a way of encouraging hip people to convert their environs to the environmentally friendly. i also believe, though, that uses like these change how we think about the process of making things green. maybe it makes it seem gradual or plausible. maybe it makes it seem like something one person can begin by buying one product. advertisers must hope so. the only question now is: will greening catch on? the proof will be in the language.

the ascent of aave

aave, or african american vernacular english (a.k.a. black english or ebonics) is a dialect of english most often spoken by african americans. it's often considered to be a substandard version of english, though many have argued for it to be considered a separate language or an equally accepted dialect and view its substandard status as the result of racism and prejudice.

whichever side of this great debate you fall on, you can't dispute what i saw on espn a few days ago. a couple of their shows (i can't keep them straight--i think it was sports center and baseball tonight) feature two to four men talking. the men tend to be of varied ages and races, as we'd probably expect in this day and age. but i'm fairly sure that it's only in the last few years that any commentators have been using aave on the air while sitting behind a desk and wearing suits. one of the young african american hosts especially used some of the hallmarks of aave syntax, such as the possesive 'they' as in, "they offense weak because they quarterback ain't performing." (that's a made-up example. i should have written down what he really said.)

most interesting to me, however, was the mcdonald's commercial that interrupted the show. the final tag line was, "get much love," or, "get much beef," or something. at any rate, it used 'much' to introduce a noun. i can see with with a helping verb as in, "i don't get much beef," or with another modifier as in, "get much more beef," or as the subject of a sentence: "much beef was damaged in the creation of this burger." but as a speaker of standard white english, i don't think the mcdonald's slogan is a construction i would ever use. though i haven't found it in any of the lists of aave syntactic indicators i've consulted, i have an intuition that this is a feature of aave. the only other example i can think of is from sir mix-a-lot's 90's rap, 'baby got back': "little in the middle, but she got much back."

i'm hypothesizing that the use of aave by announcers and in commercials are two sides of the same coin. the acceptability of the dialect in a formal setting (a sports commentary show) is directly linked to its economic utility in commercials. i'm deliberately avoiding saying which one causes the other, because i think that's harder to demonstrate. does the acceptance of aave from announcers prove to networks that it will get their attention in commercials? does the existence of young aave speakers with disposable income motivate advertisers to target them and thus inspire networks to hire aave speakers? consumers, programmers and advertisers are connected in a complicated circuit that i certainly don't understand. the juice that flows through it, though, is certainly money.

i'm hardly saying this is a victory for aave and its proponents. it's important not to confuse commercial viability with other kinds of acceptance. for example, there's a long way to go from sports center to an executive board meeting. but this is a great demonstration of the fact that migrations of language, up or down, are always accompanied by social and economic change. as the dollar goes, so goes the language.

usable up?

one of my monikers in cyberspace, unsumupable, has stirred up an interesting controversy lately. a particular friend approves of it heartily, but comments, "shouldn't it be 'unsumableup'?" how can one be 'right' when making up a new word? how can we possibly decide? of course, linguistics might offer a solution...

so, what's going on here? we have ourselves a verb, "to sum" or maybe "to sum up," and a couple of affixes, "un-" and "-able," which make it into an adjective. our dispute is over whether "-able" should attach to "sum up" as though it were a single verb or just to "sum," with "up" acting as a modifier.

i'm not considering renaming myself--i've been unsumupable too long and it's got a much nicer rhythm than unsumableup. but the question brings up a point that concerns a whole slew of verbs. some of these are discussed in this older Invented Usage post. a lot of verbs take following prepositions that seem to drastically change their meaning. "come up with" is definitely different than "come with," for example. and "to break in" is different than "to break."

in some cases, a noun can go between the verb and preposition, as in "i broke the baseball glove in." though it also seems acceptable to say "i broke in the baseball glove."

it's also very clear that some suffixes do belong on the first half of these verb-preposition pairs. the past tense, for instance, is clearly 'summed up,' not 'sum upped' and we definitely say 'summing up' not 'sum upping.' i'm trying to think of other suffixes to test my intuition about where the would attach, but they all involve creating a new word that's subject to my friend's skepticism. i would say 'sumupper' for someone who sums things up, but he's argued for 'summer up.' the 'correctness' of these forms comes down to the intuitions of native speakers, and in this case speakers disagree! (we also noted that someone spontaneously generated the form 'breakable in'... -1 for me.)

another friend commented on that post cited above that maybe these prepositions might not be completely separate entities, but might function as part of the verb itself. they may act as separable affixes (which exist in other languages like German) that go after some suffixes and before others.

linguists identify two classes of affixes: derivational and inflectional. derivational affixes change the part of speech of a word. -able, for instance, changes a word from a verb to an adjective. inflectional affixes do not change the part of speech and include more grammatical markers such as the plural -s and the past tense -ed. for the purposes of this post, it's also very important to note that derivational suffixes always attach closer to the root of the word than inflectional suffixes do. for instance, from institute we can derive institution (-tion), institutional (-al) and institutionalize (-ize), and then inflect it as institutionalizes or institutionalized. the -s or -ed would never occur closer to the root than intervening derivational suffixes.

so if prepositions in these verbs act as suffixes, we should be able to categorize them as derivational or inflectional and then determine where -able should go in relation to them. prepostions do not change the part of speech of the verb, a feature they share with inflectional affixes. but they seem to have a larger impact on the meaning of the word than most inflections--they have a semantic, rather than a grammatical function, much like derivational affixes.

some examples that almost stumped my skeptic friend were the suffixes "-mania" and "-nik" (as in beatnik, one who is zealous about the affixed verb to the point of silliness). i like "sumupnik" and "sumupmania" and i don't think anyone could defend "sumnik up" or "sumania up." he was tempted, however, to say "upsumnik" and "upsumania," which i find surprisingly reasonable. this also seems to support the theory that these prepositions are somewhat like the separable german prefixes and are represented as prefixes in some way. we can even find some 'real' examples like "off-putting" as the adjective of "to put off." at the very least, i think our analysis should clearly include a notion of unity--some forms seem to require the verb and preposition to act as a unit, no matter how you unite them.

so maybe it's even more complicated than we previously thought! maybe we treat the verb and preposition as a unit in cases where we're turning it into a noun, separately when we're adding inflections and we can disagree about whether they're a unit or not when we're making them into an adjective. this kind of thing drives syntacticians nuts... to derive rules, they have to first agree on what seems right to them as native speakers. they often go "sumupnik, upsumnik, sumupnik, upsumnik. which sounds right to me?" i, for one, don't trust my intuition that much.

my guess is that when we decide to make a compound we've never heard before, we search for a familiar template to use when constructing it so that others will quickly understand the relationship we're trying to express between the parts. how do we decide which verbs should go in the same template? some possibilities: semantic or syntactic similarity--we look for the verb that takes the most similar objects and indirect objects and gives them the most similar relationship to the one we're trying to express; prosody--we think of a familiar rhythmic template that closely matches the new verb; frequency--we use whatever pattern occurs in the most verbs that we know and use often. or maybe it's some mixture of various methods. once a form has been used enough, though, it doesn't matter how it got started. it becomes convention--arbitrary and good enough, like all language.

usage, as always, offers another solution: a google search for "unsumupable" returns 38 hits (only the first four relate to me), while "unsumuableup" returns zero. draw your own conclusions.

Google bag!

So we get a lot of hits from google. Not surprisingly, our blog fails to answer many of these wayward searchers questions. For example, a high-degree of Invented Usage visitors seem to have some fascination with Mango, Chris Kattan's character from Saturday Night Live. In my infinite magnanimousness, I'm going to present these erstwhile readers the information they seek:

(1) A one-time reader from New York would like to know the definition of the phrase "that's what I'm talking about".

"That's what I'm talking about!!!" - Frank Costanza

(2) A reader from Canada would like to find a sentence containing the word "profusely".

Here it goes: After watching Alanis Morissette perform the Fergie song "My Humps", Scott bled profusely from his ears and eyes.

(3) One person would like to know when Google was invented. Here you go:

www.google.com was born on September 14, 1997. (When this writer was Thirteen.)

(4) A reader would apparently like some poems to get high with.

My advice:

Step 1: Drive to local bookstore.

Step 2: Locate the poetry section. This will typically be quite difficult, so I recommend asking a Sales Associate for directions. They'll likely have to ask the manager. Use this time to twiddle your thumbs or browse the Political Science section in order to appear hip.

Step 3: Upon locating the poetry section, browse the anthologies. What you're looking for is an anthology made with thin paper and one that preferably contains the work of Emily Dickinson. A Norton Anthology of Poetry would be optimal.

Step 4: Purchase the book or not. It is unlikely anyone would notice its absence. (If you've located the Norton Anthology of Poetry, just steal it. That thing is f**king expensive!)

Step 5: If you've not already done so, contact your neighborhood drug dealer to secure the necessary quantity of marijuana.

Step 6: Tear out pages from your book and use them to roll a joint. You'll require some kind of biodegradable adhesive for this.

Step 7: Smoke and repeat as necessary.

Well, that's it with reader requests for now! I'll be sure to roll out these answers periodically. If we can't be relevant to 80% of our audience, then what's the point?

thethesisis full of errors!

greetings, gentle readers! i apologize, once again, for the long hiatus. this post will give a brief preview of the fruits of the labor that has kept me from blogging ere these long weeks. my thesis about typos is nearing completion, and, believe it or not, i actually have some interesting conclusions to show for it! what follows is a synopsis of what my thesis will become over the next couple of weeks... *knocks on wood*.

many of the studies of typos i read are inadequate to describe naturalistic typing (that is, speech over IM, for instance), because they test people doing transcription typing, or they gather their corpora (sets of linguistic material--in this case, errors) from published works. neither of these data sets is appropriate for comparing the errors made in typing to the errors made in speaking; published typos are very selective because they are only those that escaped the notice of several proof-readers and editors. transcription studies don't work because they involve a perceptual element, reading, that a) doesn't occur in speech and b) might change the types of errors made in ways that are, as yet, unpredictable.

so i brought 20 undergrads into the lab and made them (paid them to) have IM conversations. they used software that recorded each of their keystrokes including the backspace key. These 10 conversations generated almost 350 typos, including things that were clearly 'edits' (planned utterances that were deleted before being sent). My spreadsheet called 'Typos that Matter' contains 192 rows. These are typos that involve individual letters or sounds. They will be the focus of my study!

one of the main observations made about speech errors is their striking regularity. for example, in speech, consonants only slip with other consonants and vowels only slip with other vowels. Gary Dell, one of the big speech error guys, uses a set of four rules, including this consonant-vowel category effect, to identify 'human-like' speech errors. Other rules include the phonotactic regularity effect--speech errors do not cause combinations of letters that are illegal in the language being spoken. For example, in English, you can't begin a word with 'tk,' so that combination never occurs at the beginning of a word as a result of an error.

it's immediately apparent that typos do not obey these same regularities. adjacent letters often slip, regardless of whether they are consonants or vowels, and illegal combinations occur fairly frequently.

another important difference concerns the volume of errors in speech versus typing. I brought half as many participants into the lab to have conversations over the phone. they produced only 5 Errors that Matter. the ratio of speech to typing errors in this setting is something on the order of 1 to 20.

both of the above facts are evidence that typos occur because of very different processes than speech errors do. however, the fact that made me want to study this in the first place is the similarity of some typos to speech errors. there is a set of typos that behave almost the same way as speech errors--these errors are of a specific type known as 'non-contextual substitutions.' in these cases, a letter is removed completely and replaced with another letter that does not exist in the surrounding utterance. "fright" typed for "bright" is a good example of this, whereas "rbight" for "bright" is a contextual exchange.

when i examined only single letter non-contextual substitution errors, a striking pattern emerged: they follow Dell's rules very very closely, almost entirely, as speech errors do. except one rule to which i'll return later.

since one class of errors follows cognitive constraints while others seem to ignore them completely, i plan to propose that there are two separate mechanisms responsible for typos. non-contextual substitutions (and perhaps other types of errors) are caused by errors in planning and internal speech--the same things that cause spoken errors. exchanges and other types of errors occur after planning at a lower level of processing and aren't susceptible to the filters or structures that make phonotactic and consonant-vowel category violations impossible. that's pretty neat!

the Dell rule that non-contextual substitutions do violate with abandon is known as the initialness effect. in speech errors involving consonants, the first consonant in a word is much more likely to be involved in an error than consonants at the end or middle of words are. the same is not true for typing errors! in fact, of the 22 non-contextual substitutions involving consonants that i've checked for consistency with Dell's rules, 16 violate the initialness effect. this is a striking effect that might point to a major difference in processing and planning across the two media.

so, not only are there different articulatory problems with typing than there are with speech, but perhaps the medium in which we do our articulation actually effects the way we plan and retrieve speech. i would try to claim this as empirical evidence that contemporary media theorists are correct--that communication technologies effect our cognition in a profound way--but that's a lot to say in 20 pages, and linguists don't take kindly to much of my favorite media theory...

look for a future post on plans for further research!

a new get rich quick scheme

Hey kids. Being something of a sponge at the moment, I've been nursing a variety of ways to turn a quick buck. My latest such idea is a children's book, which--in my estimation--would be near and dear to the philosophy of Invented Usage. Currently, the project is nameless. So for now I'm referring to it as the "A-Z Kid's Book Fake Dictionary Type Thing." By now, mind you, I mean right now. If you ask me about it, I'll probably call it something else.

Here's the premise. A book of words A-Z that are misused but not illogically so. Here's an example:


So you've got a picture of a portly, mean looking man cutting the hair of an apparently distraught child. Barbarous is the word, but here it means to take on the qualities of a barber. You get the idea, I'm sure. If you're interested in checking out the rest of my sketches, I have A through I posted online OVER HERE!!!

For now, this is my get rich quick scheme. I've even found an artist to illustrate it! If it doesn't work, I've been pondering starting a Fantasy WNBA league. With all the publicity Don Imus has been bringing to women's basketball, it's a guaranteed cash crop. Who wouldn't want to make friendly wagers on the trials and tribulations of nappy haired HOSsiers?

usage-based douging

one of my main complaints with formal stystems of syntax and semantics is that, if and when they acknowledge the importance of meaning in usage, they treat it as a concrete and knowable object. for instance, in my syntax class, we learned that a word is (presumably this means 'is stored in the brain as') an ordered triple, , consisting of x, the sound of the word; y, the syntactic category of the word (is it a noun, a mass noun, a verb? does it require a direct object?); and z, the meaning of the word and its logical relationship to other words.

this approach creates some fairly obvious problems, especially if one rejects chomsky's competence/performance distinction and acknowledges that people have disputes and confusion about what words mean all the time.

a great example (and a hilarious invented usage!) is the verb 'to doug,' which has been widely circulated in my co-ed house here at brown. it's a humorous adaptation of existing linguistic material (namely Doug's name), and I think it orginated in the passive form: "you've been douged!".

i don't provide the definition or the exact origin story because these are both somewhat disputed. there are at least two origin stories floating around (and I personally believe the meaning may have been added as an afterthought to the utterance anyway). this is a pretty common case in normal language, too. consider all the idioms we use daily without knowing their origins (let the cat out of the bag? what!?). in addition, there are certain fine points of usage that people don't agree on. for example, can only Doug doug? does douging have to be an unintentional act? and so on.

now, for all this fuzziness and lack of formal definition, there are some amazing consistencies in the usage of 'to doug.' i presented some house members with fill-in-the-blank sentences, and their answers were very elucidating. for instance:

"He ____ her too often for comfort."
- dougs, douged
"Tom ate all of Dick's food without realizing it was Dick's, though he knew it was not what he, Tom, had ordered. What a prototypical _____!"
- douging
"In fact, Tom engages in ____ almost daily!"
- douging, dougage, douggery

so, how can we account for both the inconsistencies and the consistencies with one theory? should we, like chomsky, ignore the 'anomalous' utterances that don't fit with our rigid structural categorization of 'to doug'? should we declare speakers who don't know the 'real' meaning incompetent, and imagine a perfect, ideal speaker who has a perfect representation of the meaning of 'to doug' in her head? how can such a 'real' meaning exist for a word that was made up mere months ago?

this is why usage-based theories of grammar are so freakin' sweet! if we appeal to actual observable facts about usage, a lot of these issues fall out very neatly indeed.

a word's meaning is a function of the way we (average speakers!) use the word. scratch that--everything (syntax, spelling, pronunciation, meaning) are functions of usage!

that is, i heard a friend say 'you've been douged!', and because i am a native english speaker with experience with sentence frames like this, i knew 'doug'--regardless of its meaning--must be a verb that can take a direct object. then i saw a friend's t-shirt (this is a real thing), that says 'See Doug. See Doug doug. Doug Doug, doug!' and understood that 'to doug' is a regular verb just like the other verbs i've seen in that type of sentence my whole life. then, i heard a friend say 'i'm going to doug you!' and another friend say 'you can't--if it's intentional, it's not douging,' and i understood something new about the meaning of 'to doug' and the appropriate contexts for its use. on the back of the aforementioned t-shirt, it says 'you've been douged!', so i assume the past perfect (or whatever) form of the verb is spelled with one 'g.' enough counter-examples, or a counter-example from a particularly reputable source, might lead me to change this mental representation, though. (at this time, the t-shirt is the most reputable source available.)

when we learn a new word, we don't learn it all at once as an ordered triple, and its meaning isn't necessarily part of the original package. what we learn about words is ways that they might be used. these ways include syntactic and phonetic contexts as well as real-world contexts including socio-linguistic factors like social acceptability, formality levels, and so on. meaning falls out as a result of contextualized usage. we can explicitly define the word, as is done in dictionaries, but this is a) not necessary (as in the case of douging) and b) it still constitutes a particular type of context. we never--NEVER EVER--encounter words without a context that tells us something about their acceptability!

usage-based theories can empirically use statistical distributions to explain certain facts about language. for instance, the mass noun form of the word, 'douggery' or 'dougage', is not exactly disputed, but it's generally not that well known. this might be because it's very infrequent. we would expect this form to be less stable, less well-defined and more prone to change over time, because speakers have a weak representation of it in their brains. they haven't stored up enough examples to know how to use it properly in all situations. the phrase 'you've been douged', however, occurs very commonly and is therefore unlikely to be changed or used differently. spelling is another good example--there aren't enough instances of the written word yet to know whether one 'g' or two is more acceptable.

people can and do make mistakes in language. this is how language changes, and why we are sometimes not understood. usage-based grammar can explain both our competencies and our incompetencies using a very simple apparatus: we store and compare each example of a word we encounter. in addition, it explains our messing-up without appealing to a hard and fast prescriptive distinction between right and wrong. instead, different tokens of the same word are simply more or less acceptable.

an invented usage like 'to doug' is a great example because of its unsolidified state, but in some ways it's just like any other word; the same arguments i've made here can be applied to all language in general. now, go out there and try not to doug one another!

what are you gonna do with that degree, open a linguistics shop?

Alan M. Perlman, language expert, laughs in the face of the uselessness of a linguistics degree. He's a forensic linguist specially trained to help attorneys interpret the law to the semantic letter and appear as an expert witness on matters of authorship. His website says "We all leave linguistic fingerprints on everything we write. If they are there, Alan will find them."

He's a linguistic superhero! Or he's at least like one of those guys on CSI. (Incidentally, I found Alan's website because it was an advertisement in my gmail screen; it ran above an email about my linguistics experiment.) Check out this page, which contains a curriculum vitae that lists a linguistics B.A. from Brown University. It also lists the legal applications of his varied experiences with language and linguistics which include speech writing, teaching, and writing a dissertation at the University of Chicago on code-switching. See also Alan's writings about why linguists can hold up their heads as useful members of society!

And Mr. Perlman is not alone. The intriguing domain name 'thetext.com' is owned by the Forensic Linguistics Institute, and LanguageHat wrote briefly about the phenomena in October 2003.

One envisions a cozy office on the main street of a small town (although Alan M. Perlman's address is listed as Highland Park, IL). One might assemble not only forensic linguists but also translators and advisers for a whole range of professions; advertisers, politicians, editors, software designers and diplomats could all use a little technically and legally sound advice about language now and again.

Look out world. We know you've held the smoking gun of language, and now we're dusting for fingerprints!

where have i been?

i've wondered it myself. Sadly, the world of actual linguistics has left me little time for the forum that kept me interested in linguistics when 'the establishment' wouldn't touch my sophomore butt with a ten-foot pole! (see this guy's website for even bolder rantings and his self-published play, 'cyprus,' by briggs)
there are a lot of interesting posts floating around in my head, but i've got no time to do them justice these days. so this one will be an explanation of what i do with my time and what it makes me think about writing.

first and foremost, my thesis! i'm about to start collecting data on a linguistics project that's been near and dear to my heart for a while now. i'll post more about it after i have some data so i don't risk biasing friends who might be subjects. it's about language and technology--suffice it to say i'm psyched!

other classes are good too. in introduction to linguistic anthropology, i have to record the speech of a local speech community. i've picked the CS department. (also, thanks to Dave for writing the software for my above mentioned thesis. i have my own software! yay!)

then, i'm taking speech prosody. we're studying pitch contours (how people raise and lower the tone of their voice). again with the software: i downloaded this great program called 'praat' (available for all operating systems--just google 'praat'), that lets you manipulate and visualize sounds in all kinds of interesting ways. some friends i and had fun reversing our voices and trying to speak backwards.

last but certainly not least, i'm taking an mcm (modern culture and media) class called 'media archaeology: information, discourse, networks.' it's right up my alley, focusing on the interaction of technology and... well, kind of everything... but let's say artistic genre for now. we're reading a lot of great theory (Vannevar Bush, Marshall McLuhan, Foucault) and looking at neat web art. see especially 'dakota' by young-hae chang. is it a poem? is it a movie? no one knows! its' web art! (make sure your computer's sound is on!)

then, my job at the vocab lab (or 'voca blab.' ha!) is at an important stage. we've started bringing in subjects to take a first draft of our vocabulary test, which will one day be part of a national literacy exam. i've been spending a couple of hours a day testing subjects and preparing software (boy! that word again! i'm so technological these days). i'll be writing an article for the indy about the process of bias and sensitivity review that all educational materials have to undergo these days. i've been thinking about the issue a lot, especially since i've been involved first hand and read part of diane ravitch's 'the language police' over break. keep an eye out for that one!unfortunately, it's another blog post that's been lost to the real world.

in my free time, i've been involved with rush at the frat (co-ed), where people do all kinds of interesting linguistic innovation. the most recent example is 'douging,' which, perhaps more so than the rest of these blurbs, definitely merits a post all of its own. stay tuned, faithful inventors!

a tangential blog

one can never have enough blogs. so here's another.

|, or a tale of semiotic mystery

i've been seeing this symbol for a few months now: |, and wondering what it is. i've mostly encountered it on facebook, and never took the time to record where it occurred (this post would be a lot better and more professional if i had).

for some reason it struck me as being exceptionally meaningful. it tended to occur in photo captions, and in correspondences (like wall posts) between boyfriends and girlfriends. i, being me, thought 'how cool! people have taken this apparently meaningless symbol, |, and imbued it with all this romantic meaning. it clearly functions as a sign! what a great invented usage. i better blog about that!'

so i set out to discover the root of the meaning of |.

turns out you can't search for punctuation. (this is also the reason i didn't have the guts to title this post simply, '|'.) smilies (:-D) are also unsearchable. and, let's be honest, google is really my only resource for these kinds of things. i was at a loss!

i did try wikipedia's article on internet slang, to no avail, and found this interesting internet-slang-eliminating dictionary, but it proved just as useless in this case.

but then i consulted a friend who is wise in the ways of pop culture. she immediately asked me if i use firefox to view the facebook posts i mentioned above. i do, in fact, use firefox. she informed me that firefox misinterprets a certain piece of internet slang as |. what i should have been seeing was the internet symbol, '< 3', which some browsers and instant messaging programs display as an actual heart: <3. (i suppose that will look like | if you use firefox!)

at first i was a little disappointed that people were sticking to this iconic representation rather than branching out into the more abstract as i'd first assumed. but really, it's pretty interesting that i was able to glean such an accurate idea of its meaning just from the context of the symbol's use. this just goes to show that | could quite plausibly function as a symbol of love. it would just require that readers be exposed to a couple of instances in which they could gather that meaning from context.

this has already happened to '< 3', which doesn't look so much like a heart, and the standard drawn heart that doesn't really look like the anatomical heart, and the anatomical heart that doesn't actually have much connection to love itself. these connections are already conventionally defined and therefore easy to use quickly. but they're conventionally defined nonetheless, the way i thought | was!

score one for the arbitrariness of signs!

Behold! the new digital idiocy

Hark! My newest digital project is beginning to take form as it shall for some time. Ladies and Gentlemen without a safety net: I shall now amputate. I shall now contort.

Click on the gate to enter "the new digital idiocy".

grammar nazis, explain yourselfs!

(note, this post probably won't make a lot of sense unless you're familiar with facebook.com, the social networking website, and the 'groups' contained therein.)

it has come to my attention that there is a young breed of grammar nazis with a loud, proud presence on the facebook. a facebook search for ‘grammar’ returned 500+ hits for group names. a lot of these are grammar school reunion type groups, but even more are dedicated to proper grammar, or, more accurately, to hating improper grammar. i intended to look at all 500 and count how many were pro-grammar nazism and how many were against, but honestly, i just couldn't take it after about 10 pages of group profiles. (and my search, of course, didn't hit groups about vocabulary, spelling, or punctuation!) suffice it to say, of my sampling, the ratio of nazi to non-nazi groups was about 7 to 1.

this might not appear very worrisome at first glance--after all, has facebook so far proven to be an effective launch pad for political causes? and the ratio of, say, pro-drinking to anti-drinking groups is probably much higher than 7 to 1. yes, they're frivolous and often ironic. so i'm just taking the website, and people's willingness to join these groups as some general indicator of the vague fancies of my generation. the thing that does, honestly, make me feel a bit threatened is the vehemence and violence with which groups (from both sides of the aisle) attack their causes and each other.

i use the word 'cause' carefully in that last sentence. each group on facebook has a category designation, and the most common by far among grammar nazi groups is 'common interests: beliefs and causes'. they're positively militant! several of the group names/descriptions involve the joke 'bad grammar makes me [sic],' but several are even stronger, such as 'bad grammar makes me want to shit myself and die' or 'bad grammar kills kittens.'

aside from the violently titled groups, there are the social pressure groups, which seem to fall into two main categories, with a bit of overlap in the middle: judgmental, and sexual. the judgemental groups are mostly of the 'i judge you when you use bad grammar' variety. the description of the group 'Correct grammar is your friend,' to take one example among many, reads:

Your and you're are not the same thing.
Ur, u, r, and any other stupid abbreviation are not words.
How about we learn how to use correct grammar and spelling so our generation doesn't look like retards?

the groups i'm calling sexual rely on the notion, as do so many causes and ad campaigns, that sex sells. (a search i never thought i'd try, 'grammar sex,' returned 16 groups, about half of which were on topic.) they have names like 'good grammar is sexy,' 'proper grammar is a turn on,' and 'girls like guys with proper grammar.' and isn't that just a coercion off a different color?

of course, i'm not the first to notice this phenomenon. already there is a backlash in the facebook community--that outspoken eighth group that is anti-grammar nazi. these groups have names like 'bad grammar just had sex with your bf/gf,' and 'educated people against grammar and spelling.' a post on the message board of 'bad grammar feels good and sounds cool' (bgfgasc) reveals the depth of hatred between the two camps (i'm sorry for the length--i can't resist posting the whole thing.):

this group is a threat to all who use language.
grammar is not a joke!
grammar does not exist for the purpose of being raped by inexpressive and incoherent fools like yourselves! manipulating grammar to form thoughts and ideas is what allows human progress to occur!
you think shakespeare didn't care about grammar? thornton wilder? shel silverstein?
you fools, with your screwed up syntax and abuse of punctuation, will bring the downfall of language itself!
and such a slippery slope! what's next?
you all simply don't realize what kind of greatness can be achieved by using good grammar in speech and in writing because you don't have the ability or the will.
think about this: [sic--watch as he struggles not to end the sentence with a preposition!] how can bad grammar feel good without the good grammar to which to compare it? when you've reached the point where you don't know the difference between good grammar and bad, how will it feel good anymore?
but seriously. grammar is important. your use of it is what expresses your true intentions.

rape? fools? human progress? downfall of language!!? a group member responds:

"you fools, with your screwed up syntax and abuse of punctuation, will bring the downfall of language itself!"

We can only hope.

there are, of course, more moderate groups like 'good grammar: not entirely unimportant,' but their message boards are equally abuzz with members correcting each others' grammar (even a member of bgfgasc writes, "We're talking about speaking with bad grammar, right? Because poor grammar in writing is bad bad bad.") and railing against the opposite group.

lest you assume i will wholeheartedly come down on the grammar-free side of the debate, let me say that i find many of these groups almost as disturbing as their proper grammar counterparts. first, they use the same rhetorical tactics (sex, death), as the grammar nazis. second, almost all of the groups i've cited so far use the same fallacious reasoning about what grammar is and how it works. personally, i blame the schools.

most, if not all of these groups treat grammar as a set of rules of the type you learn in middle school. and that's fine. be as pro or anti the teaching of grammar as you want. but in a deeper sense, language IS grammar. a lot of group descriptions, and especially discussion board posts, act as though language could exist without a grammar. (another post at bgfgasc: "To have no universal laws of grammar would be like physics without math to explain it"... ... ... WHAT!?) then they argue that this would be good and freeing, or that it's dangerous to the possibility of communication.

both positions are patently absurd because, and i can't stress this enough, even our mistakes are grammatical. EVERYTHING we do toward the end of communication involves grammar. 'improper' grammar follows patterns. speech errors, typos and mispellings are systematic. people who think they're eschewing grammatical rules to feel good and sound cool are sorely mistaken! they're just following even more deeply (cognitively?) ingrained rules that are so basic you don't even have to learn them in school! the same admonition goes for those who think others are 'breaking' the rules. they may break with certain conventions of erudite usage, but they'll never escape grammar or--god forbid--damage communication in any way. if people make mistakes that are too wild, they fail at communication, and that's the end of the story. if the same mistake occurs over and over again (and these are the mistakes grammar nazis are really afraid of), it's, first, psycholinguistically motivated, and second, it becomes the norm (or the rule, if it gains enough status). and that's how language changes.

i did find one group, 'El Club: Where Creativity And Originality Meets Punctuality And Grammar,' that seemed to have a reasonable political agenda. it bills itself as a safe space for spanish speakers to express themselves (in spanish, english, or spanglish) without worrying about grammatical norms. this makes sense because a minority or foreign group can be persecuted/excluded/marginalized for speaking improperly, and speaking properly in a foreign language might be especially difficult and socially intimidating. (interestingly, this group wasn't listed as a 'cause', but as a 'common interest: language' group.)

but, by and large, these groups that people choose to freely associate themselves with are argument for the sake of argument. they're all anti and very little pro. almost none of the groups posted anything resembling the 'beautiful' or 'free' language they claim their approaches will generate. they rhetorically marshal all the best and worst things in life: sex, death, illness, politics (don't think they don't talk about W.), violence, money, prestige, and acceptance, for what? for words? for apostrophes and commas? for a subject-verb agreement that will change in 50 years no matter what we do? that makes me sad for my generation.

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?

science!

mike, a fellow student in my child language acquisition class, has posted an experiment (part of his final project) online... it strikes me as a fun task, and you can participate, even if you're not a child!

it's about the way we learn to recognize words in speech. i won't say too much else now, or risk biasing potential subjects, but perhaps after finals, i can recruit him to say a bit about his results.

enjoy!
test 1,
test 2,
test 3

ps - seems there's some paypal (as opposed to cash) money involved.

fake dictionaries

i've been sitting on this one for a while, admittedly, but there are two good reasons to be blogging about the phenomenon that is the fake dictionary genre. the first reason is that i was asked to review one called "mixtionary" by its publsiher, IDW publishing. the second is that i went to a small press book fair in manhattan last weekend (working for coral press www.coralpress.com), and discovered a couple of other prominent fake dictionaries. it occurs to me that the emergence of this genre and its commercial viability probably mean something about our relationship to words. let's see what it is!

the devil's dictionary (view online here) seems like a good place to start, and might be one of the earliest examples of the genre. written by ambrose bierce as a newspaper serial from 1886-1906, it was finally bookified in 1911. a cynical and satirical work, it purports to give the true definitions of common words for "enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humor and clean English to slang." thus, from the preface, the book is already directed to those who believe there is a right and a wrong way to use language. take, for example, the following entry:

OBSOLETE, adj.
No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer's attitude toward "obsolete" words is as true a measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not happen to be a competent reader.

as though words could be 'good' based on their aptness of meaning! there clearly seems to be a mindset here that meanings exist in the world, and to best express them we must simply be able to find the words that match.

a newer addition to the true-usage dictionary genre is maggie balistreri's 'evasion english dictionary.' the book is in its fourth printing with melville press, and is a list of trendy, throw-away, and other words the author generally considers useless or even misleading. the dictionary is touted as a mode of cultural critique, but unfortunately written as a personal attack. each definition is written as a statement the speaker might have said instead. for example, one of her ten definitions of 'like' is "I have finished my sentence." the word DOES function this way, and we all understand it to mean this on a daily basis. so why should i buy the book? what's so funny about the fact that 'like' has come to mean something new, and it keeps people from having to say "I have finished my sentence now. Is there anything YOU would like to say?"

the more i think about it, less i know where to start this critique. sure, it's easier to ask "does that make me a bad person?" than "doesn't that make me bad person?" but that's not the fault of any individual speaker, which m.b's rhetoric clearly implies. it also doesn't mean that 'does' MEANS 'doesn't' in any sense of the word 'mean'. and additionally, who says language shouldn't be easier to use? is it lazy or dishonest to ask the question one way rather than the other? is there no room for tact in linguistic prescriptivism? is it even possible to speak completely and literally at all times? watch how i pile up rhetorical questions i'm sure you know my answer to!

both dictionaries wittily point out interesting changes that occur in the language, but the odds that they actually mean anything about our culture are slim to none. there have always been hedge terms. there have always been more or less direct ways to say something. these facts are part of the flow of how language changes. we often abandon words once their meaning becomes too direct and transparent. but this is nothing to be afraid of, and especially nothing to be scornful and superior about.

mixtionary might be a special case, since it defines new, made up words, rather than giving 'true' definitions for words we use falsely. however, its project still has this 'were not using language properly' feel to it, since it seems to be proposing that we need to fill holes in the language. this, however, makes it a cute novelty and not much else.

it's got cartoons of situations in which the new words should be used (which are surprisingly female-centric... almost all of the main characters are women, and there is a disproportionately high number of words about shoes). the words are formed as portmanteau in a, once again, cute but uninventive way (as in 'fleeceo,' fleece + ceo... you can guess what it means). and, to be a nit-picky crossword puzzler for a minute, the words often do not match the definitions in part of speech ('blahtiful = blah + beautiful; a beautiful person who is vapid.')

so the book bills itself (sarcastically?) as "a guide to communicating efficiently in the modern world, in which new-fangled ideas and phenomena leave us at a loss for words." but the idea that anyone might read a book like this and actually adopt a word from it is about as absurd as the idea that people might stop being evasive after reading the evasion english dictionary.

i submit that the fake dictionary genre is intended for people who already care a lot about language and believe that other people don't. it creates a meaning/saying distinction that indicates we need some special training to really understand everyday language. perpetuating this attitude in a joking way strikes me as particularly dangerous, though i'm not sure why. maybe it's because it allows us to discount others' language by believing we know what they mean better than they do. readers can pat themselves on the back for knowing that, though the general public may go on changing language, the literati can always read the truth.

"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)