Archives for August 2002

There is an article in today’s NY Times about verlan, the French backwards slang (verlan is verlan for l’envers ‘the reverse’). Well and good; it’s an interesting subject. But after a lead-in defining the term, the article goes on:

Within a couple of decades, Verlan has spread from the peripheral housing projects of France’s poorest immigrants, heavily populated with Africans and North African Arabs, and gained widespread popularity among young people across France. It has seeped into film dialogue, advertising campaigns, French rap and hip-hop music, the mainstream media. It has even made it into some of the country’s leading dictionaries.

A language of alienation that has, paradoxically, also become a means of integration, Verlan expresses France’s love-hate relationship with its immigrant community and has begun to attract a number of scholarly studies.

Ah, so it’s some newfangled thing, a product of those strange Arab immigrants! Except it’s not. As they eventually mention, in a tossed-off sentence in the seventh graf, “The first documented uses of Verlan date to the 19th century, when it was used as a code language among criminals, said the French scholar Louis-Jean Calvet.” Then it’s back to the immigrants and their entertaining ways, so beloved of reporters the world over.

This is just silly. Verlan is a venerable form of inner-city slang comparable to the Cockney rhyming-slang of London; it is in no way new, not even to “the attention of a wider public” (which they claim discovered it in the 1980s). I knew about it when I was first studying French forty years ago, and it was not considered new then. Of course it’s been used by criminals and defiant youth; these are prime users of slang everywhere. And of course immigrants (in this case North African Arabs) are represented in both groups. To make that the focus of the article is ridiculous… and sadly inevitable, given the blinders that come with being a reporter.

I found an interesting list of language books via the comments at Prentiss Riddle’s Language; I was put off by the recommendation for Mario Pei’s books, which are fun but nutritionally empty, but fortunately I persevered, and came across this: “Jim Quinn’s amusing little book is the antiparticle to the pop grammarians; he actually looks things up instead of just fulminating.” Which reminded me that it was my bounden duty to tell y’all about Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek. Some years ago Barnes & Noble was selling remaindered copies for a dollar, and I bought several to give away (and of course wish I had bought more); my own copy is always within arm’s reach, ready to provide ammunition against unfounded prejudices. Let me quote his “Special Preface for You, The Lover of Our Language”:

If this book doesn’t make you angry, it wasn’t worth writing….
It attacks no use of language.
It defends all the words and phrases and sentences you have been trying to stamp out: Finalize. Hopefully. Between you and I….
This book defends all those constructions—not on the grounds that anyone can say what they please (though of course they can)—but on the grounds that all those constructions are grammatically correct.

His basic technique is to show that every maligned usage turns up in Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, etc., and to ask the entirely reasonable question, Whose language sense would you rather trust, a great writer’s or Edwin Newman’s? He has a great deal of fun with Newman, Safire, John Simon, and the other mandarins of “good English,” and shows them tying themselves into knots trying to “correct” sentences there was nothing wrong with in the first place. The book is, alas, long out of print, but it’s available from online bookstores, and of course there’s your friendly local library (if they haven’t put it on the For Sale table, but don’t get me started on that). Try it, you’ll like it. It’s the perfect antidote to David Foster Wallace (see below).

And for an excellent shorthand equivalent (just theory, no examples), try Alan Pagliere’s article at, of all places, The Vocabula Review (home of linguistic curmudgeonry).

Update (Nov. 2007): Alan now has a blog.

All right, that’s a bit misleading—no linguists were harmed in the making of this article—but no more so than the Times’ headline, “How to Say Lemur and Quiddich in 11 Languages” (which led me to expect a quirky new dictionary). Reg. req., and if you don’t want to take the trouble, here are the parts about languages:

As a Yale undergraduate, she planned to study comparative linguistics. She studied Latin in high school, picked up French and German from her father’s translation of vocal concerts and later her own classical singing and learned Russian in college. But, early in her sophomore year, she was shopping for one course to fill her distribution requirements and was urged by a friend to try physical anthropology.
Dr. [Eleanor] Sterling, who still resembles a graduate student in jangling silver bracelets and a peasant skirt, was riveted by the professor, who studied lemurs in Madagascar. “I was mesmerized by how she spoke.” Dr. Sterling said. “I took every class she taught from then on. I’m sure I would have been happy doing something else. But that was the turning point.”
Dr. Sterling’s gift for language complements her science. “I was lucky to come from a linguistic background to this,” she said.
To write a book about the natural history of Vietnam, which will coincide with a museum exhibit next year, she had to read the so-called gray literature — unpublished papers, many in Vietnamese. So she hired a tutor. She is fluent in Swahili, from African fieldwork, hard at work on Spanish and has lately taken up Lao and Burmese, for a total of 11 languages.
Her husband suggested a novel study method when Dr. Sterling set out to polish her Spanish for a speech in Bolivia. A nephew was peppering her with questions about Harry Potter. She had read the books in English but strained for details. So she re-read them in translation. “Killing two birds,” Dr. Sterling said, using an unlikely figure of speech given her profession, “with one stone.”

An impressive woman, no?

Pat claims he got this amazing interactive map via me, but I’ve never seen it, so I’m crediting him. It’s sort of like the closed-loop artifact in P. Schuyler Miller’s “As Never Was” (classic 1944 sf). Anyway, check it out.

Avva, in the course of a discussion of the diamond industry and its ethnic makeup, makes the following observation (after someone has pointed out that language changes of its own accord):
“Language develops, of course, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have my opinion about the changes.”
This expresses a paradox that has plagued me ever since I began studying linguistics. A linguist has, ex officio, no opinion regarding the facts of the language; it would be like a physicist preferring one subatomic particle to another. Yet a linguist with any feel for the language can’t help but have such opinions; I, at any rate, can’t. I accept certain developments with a cheerful and welcoming heart; “hopefully” as a sentence adverb is an example. Others, like “disinterested” to mean “uninterested,” I have come to accept, however grudgingly, as semantic changes that I have to live with (though I personally will never use the new sense). But there are some that fill me with insensate rage, however unseemly it may be in a person with scientific training, and I fear I will never come to terms with them. Such a thing is the growing use of “may have” to mean “might have”: “If he had started running earlier, he may have caught the ball.” No, no, I cry (soundlessly) every time I see this—he might have caught it! A few years ago, when I began to notice this phenomenon, I started to keep a record of occurrences, but it eventually became futile; it would now make more sense to record instances of the correct usage. And what am I, proud holder of an M.Phil. in linguistics from one of our finer educational bazaars, doing talking about “correct” usage? Correct is whatever native speakers say! Yes, yes, quite correct… eppur si muove lo stomaco. It’s probably just as well I went into editing, where this irrational attitude is an asset.

An excellent article on Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit (often called Eskimo); via MeFi.

Update (Aug. 2022). I updated the dead link, and thought while I was at it I’d add a chunk from the article, as I usually do:

In English, and in most other European languages, a sentence is a string of beads. Each bead is a tiny little word, and the beads are strung together to make meaning.

I am happy to be here.
Je suis content d’être ici.
Yo estoy contento de estar aquí.

But in Inuktitut the words are like Lego™ blocks, intricate pieces locked together to produce a nugget of meaning.

quviasuktunga tamaaniinnama
(happy + I here + in + be + because I)

How about this word, produced at random: Pariliarumaniralauqsimanngittunga, “I never said I wanted to go to Paris.”

These words are produced by a grammatical system that is much more regular than anything in English. Inuit students like studying grammar. They get pleasure out of seeing the logical flow of something they always took for granted. The grammar is not only precise, it is complex.

In Inuktitut, there are several hundred basic verb endings, as well as variations depending on the sound system. Take, for example, the verb root malik – “follow.”

maliktunga — “I follow”
malikkassik — “because you two follow”
malikkit — “follow them!”
malikkuttikkuk — “if we two followed those two”
malingmangaakku — “whether I followed her”

A simpler example of Inuktitut word-building is ui, a husband. An uiviniq is a former husband. (“Would he have to be dead to be called a uiviniq?” Mallon once asked one of his co-teachers. She paused thoughtfully for a moment and replied, “It would depend on what he had done.”)

I’m also shocked to see that I didn’t bother noting that it was written by Alexina Kublu and Mick Mallon. Sloppy, sloppy twenty-year-earlier me!

I was attacking DFW’s long Harper’s essay on usage in a comment on MeFi today, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got, and I finally couldn’t resist letting him have it at length. Wallace’s long, long article pretends to be a review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but that’s just the pretext for yet another in the endless series of rants about how proper usage is being forgotten and language is going to hell in a handbasket that probably started in ancient Sumer and will continue until the sun goes supernova. Wallace uses cleverer rhetoric than most (establishing a folksy/learned persona that is intended to convince you of both his bona fides and his credentials, and conceding enough of his opponents’ arguments that he hopes to disarm the less truculent of them), but what he’s selling is the same old snake oil: “You’ve got to learn and use all those fourth-grade grammar rules—it’s really important!” He proudly admits to being what in his family is called a SNOOT (his caps), and when he admits that some of those rules are actually silly he says (on p. 51 of the original article) “…people who insist on them… are that very most pathetic and dangerous sort of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong” (again, his caps). Truer words were never spoke. Let’s take it from the top.

p. 41, fn. 3: “SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic…” What does he mean here by “à clef“? A roman à clef is a novel with a key, a key which if you possess it (by being in the know) allows you to decipher which characters represent which real people. This is not how he uses “SNOOT” (if it were, it would be a coded designation for a single person, his mother perhaps); the word is simply family jargon. We are forced to conclude he does not know how to use the French phrase he deploys so snappily.

p. 42, fn. 8: “From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and repeatedly Wedgied.” Why the capital W? We go to Webster’s Third and find the answer: Wedgies is thus written. But wait! The definition is “trademark—used for shoes having a wedge heel.” In other words, it has nothing whatever to do with the colloquial usage he is trying to write down (having to do with the malicious pulling up of underwear). He is more intent on proving that he knows how to use a big dictionary than in reading what it says there.

p. 43: “…the notoriously liberal Webster’s Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included such terms as heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them.” The lie direct: “heighth” is labeled “chiefly dial[ect]” and “irregardless” “nonstand[ard].” Does he think nobody’s going to check up on him?

Same page, next paragraph: “We regular citizens…” This sort of smarmy regular-guy rhetoric from someone who knows you know he’s a famous author and who is setting himself up as an all-knowing authority makes me sick.

p. 44, fn. 14: “q.v. this from the January ’62 Atlantic“: This is the first of at least three occasions on which he misuses “q.v.” as if it were “v.” (vide, Latin for ‘see’). Q.v. stands for quod vide ‘which see’ and is used after a reference to the thing seen.

p. 45: “These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists.” Comp theorists? I Googled “comp theorist” and got three (count ’em) hits, all lower-case and all apparently using “comp” for “composition.” So there are two issues here: why is he using such an obscure phrase (I’m still not clear on what “comp theorists” are or why they are “hard-core academics”), and why does he upper-case the C? [For “comp theorists,” see second Addendum below.]

Next paragraph: “…Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via ‘freewriting,’ ‘brainstorming,’ ‘journaling,’ a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology.” But descriptivism in the relevant sense (describing the observed usage of language rather than prescribing how it should be used) has nothing to do with “freewriting” and the like; you can be “self-exploratory and -expressive” using the most traditional Oxbridge prose style (and indeed many have). He’s trying to tar scientific linguists with any brush that comes to hand.

p. 46, fn. 19: “Standard Written English (SWE) is also sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the inditement-emphasis is the same.” “Inditement” means ‘act of composing, giving literary or formal expression to’; I have no idea how he’s using it here and I don’t think he does either.

At the end of the same footnote: “(Yr. SNOOT rev. cannot help observing, w/r/t these ads, that the opening r in Refer here should not be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipses—Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.)” Ironically, the Latin words he is here using as an independent sentence are themselves a dependent clause: Horace says “Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,” I am indignant whenever worthy Homer drowses (i.e., allows his attention to flag). All that quotation-grubbing only to show how poor his Latin is!

p. 47: “…Methodological Descriptivists seem either ignorant of this fact or oblivious to its consequences, as in for example one Charles Fries’s introduction to an epigone of Webster’s Third called The American College Dictionary.” This is the lowest kind of ad hominem, this condescending “one”—”some guy called Fries whose opinion we needn’t take seriously.” Charles Fries was a distinguished linguist and a president of the Linguistic Society of America, and he knew more about language than David Foster Wallace is ever likely to; the fact that Wallace is ignorant of him is a reflection on Wallace, not Fries. And matters degenerate from there; Wallace quotes Fries (comparing a dictionary to a book of chemistry or physics recording observed facts) and then says “This is so stupid it practically drools.” I will try to restrain myself and simply point out that that aspersion would be better cast on what Wallace says next:

An “authoritative” physics text presents the results of physicists’ observations and physicists’ theories about those observations. If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a “valid” theory in the textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply, the use becomes an ipso facto “valid” part of the language. Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not, finally, scientists but census-takers who happen to misconstrue the importance of “observed facts.” It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an “authoritative” ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.

The confusion (or drooling stupidity, if you prefer) is evident: linguists describe the observed facts of linguistic usage, not people’s beliefs about it; the comparison would be not to an ethics textbook but to a textbook of human behavior, and what would such a catalog of behavior be worth if it included only behavior the author approved of?

Now, still on p. 47, we come to two of the most glaring patches of nonsense in the whole essay. The paragraph immediately following the quote above begins:

Norm-wise, let’s keep in mind that language didn’t come into being because our hairy ancestors were sitting around the veldt with nothing better to do. Language was invented to serve certain specific purposes: “That mushroom is poisonous”; “Knock these two rocks together and you can start a fire”; “This shelter is mine!”

Need I point out that David Foster Wallace has not the faintest idea how language came into being (nor does anybody else)? And the suggestion that it was “invented” to serve “certain specific purposes”… well, Wallace tries to justify this with the second nonsense patch, footnote 23, which takes up half the page. It begins:

This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated below, and although the demonstration is extremely persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that again you’d probably be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.

The haughty tone is bad enough, but in fact nothing is “demonstrated” in the footnote. The first part is irrelevant maundering about an adolescent pot-smoker; he continues with a deep bow in the direction of Wittgenstein, whose “very complex and opaque and gnomic” argument is summarized to the point of absurdity, and concludes with a grandiose bit of hand-waving about “class, race, gender, morality, pluralism… You name it.” Nothing was delivered.

p. 48: He provides examples contrived to show how important it is to follow the rules:

Some of these rules really do seem to serve clarity, and precision. The injunction against two-way adverbs (“People who eat this often get sick”) is an obvious example, as are rules about other kinds of misplaced modifiers (“There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better than others”) and about relative pronouns’ proximity to the nouns they modify (“She’s the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day”).

Note that even these made-up examples are not actually ambiguous; say them aloud (or imagine them said aloud) and the meaning is clear.

p. 49: “I am 100-percent confident…” Hyphens are not used in this construction.

p. 50: “That ursine juggernaut bethought to sup upon my person!” This is not a correct use of “bethought,” which occurs only with a following reflexive pronoun and means ‘called to mind, reminded oneself’ (Charlotte Bronte: “I bethought myself of an expedient”). The word Wallace wants is “thought.” (This error is first cousin to “begrudgingly” used for “grudgingly.”)

p. 51: “Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not get rejected as an egghead or fag (see sub).” Sub is a preposition. The word Wallace is fumbling around for is infra ‘below.’

Same page: “Garner himself takes out after the s.i. rule in both SPLIT INFINITIVES and SUPERSTITIONS.” Doesn’t he mean “takes on” rather than “takes out after”?

p. 52: “…ask ‘s’up, s’goin on,’ pronouncing on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o” (there is supposed to be a macron over “oo” and a breve over “o”). I have lived in NYC for decades and have never heard a Young Urban Black, or anyone else, pronounce “on” in such a way. (On the same page he talks about “quadruple Wedgies”; see my remarks on p. 42 above.)

OK, even I am getting tired of this. It should be clear by now that Wallace is punching above his weight. He has no right to parade erudition he has no claim to, still less to condescend to people who know far more than he. But I have saved my favorite bit for last. In a long (and irrelevant, but large chunks of the essay are irrelevant, it’s Wallace’s little mannerism, owing nothing, I am sure, to his being paid by the word) attack on Academic English on p. 56, he mentions “pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition).” How did he manage not to blush?

[Read more…]

One of the things I love about New York is the variety of languages you are exposed to in the course of your civic existence. I eavesdrop shamelessly on the conversations of my fellow straphangers, and sometimes when I’m stumped I break the rules of non-interaction and ask the person next to me what language they are speaking (most recent answers: Albanian and Armenian). Today on the N train to Times Square the woman across from me was reading a Korean book, and the woman next to me was reading a Hungarian magazine. On the 2 train from Times Square to Houston St. (I was off to see another Kurosawa movie, this time High and Low, not well known but the equal of the famous samurai movies if you ask me) I heard Spanish and Hebrew in my vicinity. In between, alas, I was the victim of one of the MTA’s impromptu stoppages—”Last stop on this train… there is a train experiencing mechanical difficulties at Chambers St. and there is no downtown service at this time…”—but I was able to give directions to Ground Zero to a family of clueless Midwestern tourists, who will now be able to report to their fellow Midwesterners that New Yorkers, contrary to rumor, are helpful and polite. And the train eventually did come and get me to Film Forum in time. So the universe showed its beneficent side despite initial appearances.

Addendum. See here for explanation of post title.

William Safire is on vacation, which is ordinarily a time to rejoice—the On Language column can for a few weeks be written by people who actually know something about language. But today’s column, by Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman, is a hopeless mishmosh. Its point is apparently to promote polite e-mails, which (though doubtless a Good Thing) is only tangentially concerned with language. Having realized this, they chose to lead in with a discussion of the word “virtual,” which, while indisputably appropriate for On Language, is only tangentially related to their main point. They then proceed to bungle the lead-in, discussing at some length the history of the (completely irrelevant) word “virtuous” while ignoring the question that is likely to be on the minds of anyone who bothers to read the column: how did “virtual” pass from meaning ‘possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities’ to (in their words) ‘existing in effect rather than in reality’? Languagehat is here to remedy the omission.

The transition is the meaning (OED’s number 3) ‘capable of producing a certain effect or result; effective’: “So vertuall was the speech of Paul a Prisoner, in the heart of his Judge” (W. Sclater, 1619). Now consider this quote (J. Smith, 1815): “Whatever is the real length of the leg b a [of a siphon], the virtual or acting length when in use, only extends from b to the surface of the fluid.” (Note the premodern commas in both quotes.) It’s natural to contrast the “virtual or acting” with the “real.” From there we get the OED’s meaning 4: ‘that is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually; admitting of being called by the name so far as the effect or result is concerned’: “Every proof a priori proceeds by Causes either real or virtual” (Waterland, 1734). Now the weight of reality has shifted; the “virtual,” once the powerful agent, is now opposed to the real, and the way to the modern electronic-ethereal is open.

While I’m on the subject of the Times Magazine, the cover story this week is “The Odds of That” by Lisa Belkin, who for a reporter does a pretty good job of presenting the uncomfortable, unintuitive scientific truth (though she tends to use “we” too much). It’s about coincidence, and the tagline “In paranoid times like these, people see connections where there aren’t any” pretty much sums it up. Since I recently posted a rant about coincidence, I thought I’d bring it to your attention. You can never have too much balloon-pricking.

I’m sure you are all aware that President Niyazov of Turkmenistan has renamed the calendar, but you may have been wondering (as was I) what the new names were. Wonder no more; Alex has provided them (and Avva has pointed my way thither):
January: Turkmenbashi (in honor of the President; it means ‘Head Turkmen’)
February: Navruz (the Persian New Year, except it doesn’t fall in February; Alex’s source says “in honor of the Turkmen flag”—maybe the flag is named “Navruz”??)
April: Gurbansoltan-eje (the President’s mother)
May: Makhtum Kuli (a Turkmen poet)
June: Oguz (a Turkmen military leader)
July: Gorkut (an epic hero)
August: Alp Arslan (a medieval commander)
September: Rukhnama (a book by the President)
October: Independence (the source only gives the translation).
The others are apparently unchanged.