BEAVERS.

Beavers are overrunning Language Log today. First there was Bill Poser’s impressive post on Carrier beaver words (which describe not only beavers of various sizes but ‘newly mated beaver couple,’ ‘beaver channel under the ice,’ and ‘pair of beaver lodges built close together behind one dam,’ inter alia); then Mark Liberman followed up with Beaver vocabulary from another culture, describing the arcane castorcentric terms of MIT (given “as they would be pronounced in the archaic Building 20 dialect”). My only quarrel with the latter is the final element, billed as “the informative and inspiring ritual chant of the MIT Women’s Track and Field and Cross Country squad”:

E to the u du dx,
E to the x, dx.
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,
3 point 1 4 1 5 9.
Integral, radical, mu, dv
Slipstick, sliderule, MIT!

(I have omitted the introit and final, since they are not relevant here.) Now, in the first place, I am pretty sure that the proper formulation is “e to the x dy dx,” and I was a math major before switching to linguistics, so I’ll bow to my own authority. In the second place, I object to the labeling of this as an MIT chant. I’m sure it has been so used, but I heard it many years ago (minus the MIT reference, of course) as the unforgettable chant of the Caltech cheerleading squad, with which I am familiar as a graduate of an institution whose football team was so execrable Caltech was the only team it could regularly beat. And I have evidence that it is of ancient lineage, to wit the primitive version quoted (probably misquoted) in this International Slide Rule Yahoo! Group message (emphasis added):

Steven,
Here are two that Gene Shoemaker used at Caltech in the mid forties. These
are both listed on pages 22 & 23 in David Levy’s biography “Shoemaker by
Levy, The Man Who Made an Impact”
e to the x the x the x
e to the x the x the x
e to the x the x the x
e to the x dx [delta x]
Sliiii . . . de rule! Tech tech tech tech tech tech tech!!!
Cotan, tangent, cosine, sine
3.14159!
Sliiii . . . de rule! Tech tech tech tech tech tech tech!!!
Enjoy!
Dave

West Coast representing, yo.

Comments

  1. Now, in the first place, I am pretty sure that the proper formulation is “e to the x dy dx,”
    Not in the version chanted at MIT, I’m afraid. The Tech Cheer (whatever its origins) is the one Mark Liberman quoted.

  2. The Oregon State totem is a Beaver, too, but I think that their lore tends in the female genitalia direction. At least, that’s what the U. of Oregon Ducks claim.
    The Ducks will play my home-state Minnesota Gophers this year. I suppose the loser will be declared the silliest football totem of all, except for the Delaware Fighting Blue Hens.

  3. Not in the version chanted at MIT, I’m afraid.
    That’s as may be. I was talking about the proper version.
    (How long can I keep dissing MIT before a squad comes over to take me out?)
    zizka: If the Ducks lose, they should change their name to the Geoducks — The Name Nobody Can Pronounce.

  4. Telling no lie, here, my alma mater, Evergreen State College, has as its totem the Geoduck. The most phallic looking creature in existence. (Sports weren’t regarded very seriously there.)

  5. Santa Cruz has the Banana Slug. Quite phallic enough for most people. My brother has observed them making love. I won’t go into detail, except that large amounts of slime are involved.

  6. Chris Schulman says

    Doubtless there are many variations on the MIT cheer. For posterity’s sake, Rice University’s version is:
    E to the x, dy dx
    E to the x, dx
    Secant tangent cosine sine
    3.14159
    Cube root, square root, BTU
    Compass, sliderule, go Rice U!

  7. That first one quoted by Levy sounds like it started out as Aristophanes:
    FROGS (off stage)
    Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,
    Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!
    E-to-the-ex, the-ex, the-ex,
    E-to-the-ex, the-ex, the ex!
    Would that make this cheer 2400 years old?

  8. This is the way I remember reading it, about 35 years ago, probably in Sports Illustrated, and credited to RPI. I’m not exactly sure of the dy dx, but you’ll note the metrical superiority of the remainder
    e to the x, dy dx
    tangent secant cosine sine
    3.14159
    square root, cube root, log of pi
    disintegrate them
    RPI!

  9. in my calculus book we are taught e to the u du dx where u represents a function and the du dx is the chain rule part of it or something like that.

  10. It’s (e to the x)du/dv, (e to the x)dv….and if you don’t recognize the significance of that, it’s good thing you changed majors. 😉
    Also, it’s integral, square root, du/dv.
    I don’t about Caltech, but at MIT this cheer goes back at least to the 1930s and probably before.

  11. Ruth Phelps says

    The CalTech chant was:

    E to the x, dy, dx
    E to the x, dx
    Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
    3 point 1, 4, 1, 5 9
    Square root, cube root, Q.E.D.
    Slipstick sliderule, CIT.

  12. Thanks for reviving this ancient thread, and your memory of the CalTech chant jibes with mine.

  13. Caltech with t not T.

    Has anyone used these chants since the days of sliderules?

  14. Caltech with t not T.

    Quite right, of course; I lazily copied from Ruth’s comment.

  15. @Y: It’s still used all the time, “slide rule” and all, at MIT.

  16. David Marjanović says

    David Levy’s biography “Shoemaker by Levy, The Man Who Made an Impact”

    *giggle*

  17. John Cowan says

    At Berzerkley it is (IIRC):

    e to the x dy dx,
    e to the y dy,
    Cosine, secant, tangent, sine,
    3.14159,
    Square root, cube root, Q.E.D.,
    Slipstick, slide rule, ‘ray U.C.!

    Note the different second line.

    Then there’s the Cornell hymn (melody by Charles Ives):

    High above Cayuga’s waters,
    Comes a mighty yell,
    Fifty thousand sons of Ezra,
    Call themselves Cornell.

    But at the University of Pennsylvania (per my father) it was sung thus:

    High above Cayuga’s ditches,
    Comes a fearsome smell,
    Fifty thousand sons of bitches,
    Call themselves Cornell.

  18. i’ve also heard, but i have no idea where (definitely not my cornell-grad father; probably not tom lehrer…):

    high above cayuga’s waters
    there’s an awful smell
    some say it’s cayuga’s waters
    some say it’s cornell

  19. I think rozele’s version is the standard parody. It’s certainly the only one I’ve heard.

  20. I was interested by this in the Wikipedia entry for Carrier:

    Number is marked only on nouns denoting human beings and dogs, and these distinguish only singular and plural.

    Compare at Tłı̨chǫ:

    The name Dogrib is an English adaptation of their own name, Tłı̨chǫ Done (or Thlingchadinne) – “Dog-Flank People”, referring to their fabled descent from a supernatural dog-man.

    I believe I once of heard of another instance of dogs being grammatically special (having their own noun class or agreement markers), or being just behind human beings on the animacy scale, or something like that, in another language, but I can’t recall anything more specific. I wonder if this rings a bell with anyone else.

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s not unusual for “higher animals” to get lumped together with people grammatically, of course. (Happens all the time in Niger-Congo, for example.)

    What counts as “higher” is variable, though. In Kusaal it’s dogs, cats, cows, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys and the like, though it depends on how the speaker happens to be regarding the animal in question at that point, rather than being some sort of hard-and-fast lexical thing. But bigger animals are more likely to get “human” pronouns than smaller, and domesticated more likely than wild. In Swahili it seems to be broader, including even fish, for example.

    What other domesticated (as opposed to wild) animals were there in Dogrib traditional culture?

  22. David Marjanović says

    I believe I once of heard of another instance of dogs being grammatically special (having their own noun class or agreement markers), or being just behind human beings on the animacy scale, or something like that, in another language, but I can’t recall anything more specific. I wonder if this rings a bell with anyone else.

    There are places in New Guinea where cassowaries are classified with humans as a matter of taxonomy; I have no idea if that extends into grammar.

    (Cassowaries are almost as mean as humans…)

  23. Cassowaries are almost as mean as humans…

    But not without their charms.

  24. David Eddyshaw says

    Not quite the same (Mandinka being admirably free of all that gender/noun class business) but Denis Creissels’ Le malinké de Kita has a text at the end which is an excerpt from a history of Mali recited by the celebrated griot Kélémonson Diabaté, starting (as is traditional) with the Creation. In this telling, the first dog was made from Adam’s flesh, prior to the creation of Eve. Creissels says that this version is “fort peu orthodoxe”, for some reason. (Eve’s motive for taking the Forbidden Fruit here is to find out whether Adam has been cheating on her with other women …)

  25. Ain’t nothing but the dog in me!

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