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There’s some good discussion of the “communicative approach” going on at Renee’s and Dorothea’s. Check it out.

Back in the green youth of Languagehat (the blog, not the blogmeister) I wrote a post on coincidence. That precedent established, I follow up with an account of my televisionary experiences of last night in the hope that they will astonish you as they did me. If not, I apologize and advise awaiting better posts.

We here at the Languagehattery, having surveyed the evening’s offerings, decided to watch The River (He liu), a 1997 movie by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. It didn’t sound very cheerful, but the Time Out Film Guide review mentioned a scene at the Tanshui (Tamsui) River, near which I used to teach college, and concluded “Looks like a future classic,” so we decided to give it a try. When we turned to the WE channel, however, they were showing a movie with Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson; it quickly developed that this was an entirely different 1984 movie also called The River. It didn’t sound that interesting (“Farming family battles severe storms, a bank threatening to reposses their farm, and other hard times in a battle to save and hold on to their farm”), so we went with our second choice, a 1991 British movie called Under Suspicion that featured Liam Neeson and was described as “tautly entertaining, with cunning plot.” We switched to Bravo and were nonplussed to find ourselves not in Brighton but in Puerto Rico, with no Liam Neeson in sight. It turned out that this was an entirely different 2000 movie, also called Under Suspicion, starring Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman! (In both cases, it was not the Times television listing that was at fault, because the Guide button on our remote control provided the same erroneous information.) I’ve never had that happen even once; to have it happen on two different channels at the same time on the same evening is surely extraordinary. (Oh, if you’re curious, the Freeman/Hackman movie is fairly well done and has, needless to say, great acting, but the ending is so stupid and pointless it makes one want to throw the tv across the room.)

Incidentally, in trying to Google various items for this post, I kept getting the following response:

Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in a minute or so.

I’ve never seen that before on Google. Coincidence? I think not.

An interesting account by Zinovy Zinik (via Chris) of expatriate culture; I’ll have to look for this magazine:

It is called The Bell, after Herzen’s journal, but in appearance it is a cross between the New Yorker and one of those thick brochures that sit in the pocket of the seat in front of you on an aeroplane. It’s a glossy magazine with a purpose—to represent the diverse ideas of the Russian intelligentsia all over the world, unhindered by the power struggle going on inside Russia. Interestingly, it has appeared at a time when censorship has practically been abandoned in Russia as a means of coercing public opinion, except in those cases where the reputation of those in power is concerned. These instances are eliminated either by physical intimidation or self-imposed silence. So the necessity of a Bell abroad is more or less unquestionable.

I don’t spend much time on Chomsky, Pinker, and the legions of evolutionary psychologists who claim language is innate (“nativists”), but Scott Martens over at Pedantry does, and today he provides a nice long assault on their line of thinking; I’ll reproduce here the heart of the portion about language:

However, the adaptationist/nativist program has offered no insight into the neurobiology of language. It has not managed to identify genes or biochemical mechanisms that underlie language. It has not offered any useful knowledge to translators, lexicographers, language educators or people interested in natural language processing. All the progress made in those fields have come from people whose work either has no bearing on the central theses of language nativists or denies at least some nativist claims outright.
And, people outside the nativist community largely believe language is a lot like walking. Given the physiology of our senses, the structure of our mouths, throats and lungs, the properties of the human nervous system in general, and the structure of the environment in which children are immersed, language is simply the optimal solution to the problem of communication, and virtually every infant discovers it unless they are prevented from doing so by some serious physical condition. If this is the case, then there is nothing in the genome at all that specifies linguistic behaviour, or even has any sort of direct influence on it except in the trivial case where it interferes with the form of our bodies. It makes no sense to talk about innate linguistic knowledge or a language “instinct.”
This programme has—over the last decade especially—shed a lot of light on language. Every meaningful advance in natural language processing since 1980 has come from some kind of interactionist or empirical theoretical base, not from attempts to uncover innate knowledge about language. All meaningful work in lexicography, translation studies and language education has been predicated on the idea that language is firmly grounded in time and place and that it is part of the social structure of the culture in which language is spoken. No linguistic universal has ever been found other than those trivially associated with the physical restrictions of bodies and limited working memory.

Bravo, sir—I doff my headgear in your general direction.

I have just discovered that there is a group of Gypsies called Sinti (or Sinto) that is apparently distinct from the Roma, but I am unable to find detailed information other than that they mostly hail from northern and western Europe (Germany, France, the Netherlands, &c.). It seems to be politically correct in Germany to speak of “Sinti and Roma” rather than “Zigeuner” (Gypsies). If anyone out there knows more (for example, whether there are linguistic differences), I would be much obliged if you’d pass it on. It’s very hard on me when both the internet and my excessively laden bookshelves fail me.

Addendum. And that goes for the Jenisch (or Yenish or Yeniche) too.

Answer. The learned Bob Cohen has provided the following information in the comments section, which pretty much clears the matter up; thanks, Bob!

Speaking of “Roma and Sinti” is like saying “Jews and Sephardim”. The Sinti dialect is definately Rromanes, but not intelligible to speakers of Kalderash or Balkan Rromanes. They mix in a lot of German influence and lack the heavily Romanian influences of Kalderash/Vlashiko…. As for Jenische, it isn’t very much spoken any more—there is a Jenische web page for Swiss Jenische, they seem to have been a non-Rroma group who adapted and intermarried with Rroma.

I’m reading Mark Mazower‘s thorough and well-written book Inside Hitler’s Greece and was struck by his remark: “During the Second World War Greek poets would produce a body of work comparable in quality to the British war poetry of 1914-18. Two Nobel laureates, Seferis and Elytis, and other major poets… wrote some of their finest poems in those years.” Much as I love modern Greek poetry, I’ve been neglecting it lately, and this sent me back to my Collected Poems of Seferis. I thought about reproducing his wartime poem “The Figure of Fate” (Oct. 1, 1941), but it’s a bit long and depressing (“How did we fall, my friend, into the pit of fear./ It wasn’t your fate, nor was it decreed for me,/ we never sold or bought this kind of merchandise;/ who is he who commands and murders behind our backs?”). So instead I offer this gem from his last prewar collection, uncharacteristically tiny, a pure burst of lyricism.

The Jasmin
Whether it’s dusk
or dawn’s first light
the jasmin stays
always white.

The translation (and the spelling) are by Keeley and Sherrard. Here’s the original (in transcription; dh = voiced th, as in “then”):

Ite vradhyázi
ite féngi
méni lefkó
to yasemí.

Well, that’s my take on graduate school (and by extension academia as a profession), but Naomi is more sanguine (though she acknowledges the need to solve some pressing problems). If any of you have been through it and have thoughtful things to say about it, I suggest you drop by her place and join the discussion; if you hated it as much as I did and simply want to spew vitriol, please do so in my comments section, where it will be appreciated.

Update (Sept. 2025). I have supplied archived links for the blog and the post, but alas, the comments are gone with the wind.

That’s the title of William Safire’s language column in today’s Times Magazine, and it’s the first one in a long time that not only eludes my carping but gladdens my heart. I can finally come clean and confess that not until I was an adult did I realize that the phrase was “duct tape” and not “duck tape.” I was very embarrassed when I realized my mistake, but it turns out that the reason I had that impression was that it was “duck tape” when I was a child:

The original name of the cloth-backed, waterproof adhesive product was duck tape, developed for the United States Army by the Permacel division of Johnson & Johnson to keep moisture out of ammunition cases. The earliest civilian use I can find is in an advertisement by Gimbels department store in June 1942 (antedating the O.E.D. entry by three decades—nobody but nobody beats this column), which substitutes our product for the ”ladder tape” that usually holds together Venetian blinds. For $2.99, Gimbels—now defunct—would provide blinds ”in cream with cream tape or in white with duck tape.”…

The first citation I can find for the alternative spelling is in 1970, when the Larry Plotnik Company of Chelsea, Mass., went bust and had to unload 14,000 rolls of what it advertised as duct tape. Three years later, The Times reported that to combat the infiltration of cold air, a contractor placed ”duct tape—a fiber tape used to seal the joints in heating ducts—over the openings.”

As the t spelling stuck, the Henkel Consumer Adhesives Company registered the name ”Duck brand duct tape,” now the No. 1 brand in the United States. Even prom outfits are made from it.

The duckiness in the nomenclature persists because the essence of the product is its impermeability. A duck is a waterfowl, its feathers designed by nature to repel water. The simile using this quality was first cited by the novelist Charles Kingsley in 1871 to deride fallacious reasoning: ”All else is a ‘paralogism’ and runs off them like water off a duck’s back.” The expression means ”without apparent effect.” And that, Chico, is why a duck.

So the logical-looking “duct tape” is actually a folk etymology, and my youthful wordhoard is vindicated. Thank you, Mr. Safire.

Addendum. I have just discovered this entry at The Vocabula Review:

duck tape Solecistic for duct tape. • In view of the possibility of a chemical, biological or nuclear dirty bomb attack, they were also told to have duck tape and plastic sheeting ready to seal doors and windows. USE duct tape. [Edinburgh Evening News] • [A couple more examples of this “misuse” are quoted—LH]

The term is duct tape, not duck tape though there is, from a company apparently trying to capitalize on people’s ignorance, Duck (brand) tape. Duct tape has fewer uses than we have perhaps been led to believe; duck tape, fewer still. More …

Now, that “More…” is a link, and when you click on it you discover that you have to log in as a paid subscriber to read the rest of the article. In other words, they charge money for this supercilious misinformation. Maybe they should get a subscription to the Times and read Safire.

Further addendum (Sept. 2022). Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has done a Big List post on this term, and it turns out that although the “duck” form is the original, it’s not because of its impermeability and it has nothing to do with ducks: “The duck comes from the original cloth foundation of the tape.” Not a surprise that Safire, alevasholem, got it wrong. [As ktschwarz says in an October 6 comment: “the ‘duck’ form is *not* the original. See the Big List revision.]

Suki Kim describes in today’s NY Times her experiences working as an interpreter as part of her research for a novel. She describes the cases, mostly dull, for which she translated depositions in “gloomy offices known as reporting services,” focusing on one in which she learned more than she wanted to know about a Korean storeowner from her block in the East Village. She concludes:

English, in some ways, struck me as a weapon, and not speaking it was the greatest economic handicap. And my role, as an interpreter, was not only to translate a witness’s testimony but also to relieve this pain somehow.
With each case, I kept forgetting my mission as a novelist, my responsibility to my heroine, Suzy. After Sept. 11, I ran to the family assistance center at the armory to volunteer as an interpreter. It became increasingly difficult to pass by a Korean market or a nail salon and watch some customers berate the workers, or condescend to them as though their lack of English suggested lower intelligence. I was often tempted to interrupt and act on behalf of the non-English-speaker. I was driven by a professional instinct. But it also signaled my shortcomings as an interpreter. An interpreter, of course, should never take sides.
I stopped interpreting soon after. And I did finish the novel. But the city has changed for me. I keep noticing lines. Between a customer and a worker. Between a prosecutor and a witness. Between Manhattan and the other boroughs. Between one who speaks English, and one who doesn’t.

An article from World Wide Words discusses the history of the word “forest,” which is more complicated than you might think:

The origin of the word forest is usually explained as coming from the late Latin phrase forestis silva, which was apparently applied to areas of land used by the Emperor Charlemagne for hunting. Here, silva meant “woodland” (as in “sylvan” and “silviculture”) and forestis meant “outdoor, outside” (apparently related to the Latin fores, “door”), so that forestis silva meant something like “beyond the main or central area of administration; outside the common law”. In time, the phrase became shortened to forest, but retained a sense of separateness and exclusion. It was this sense that the Normans brought with them when they invaded England in 1066. A forest for them and their successors was an area of unenclosed countryside, consisting of a highly variable mixture of woodland, heathland, scrub and agricultural land. Its purpose was to raise deer, which needed a variety of land—woodland to rest and hide in during the day, and more open land in which to feed at night….

By a process of transference, the meaning of the word forest gradually shifted, as the force of the old forest law declined after about 1500, from the legal area to the woodland within the forest, so giving us our modern sense of the word.

In between the two sections quoted above comes a discussion of forest law and what it entailed, and this should be read by anyone with a love for arcane and obsolete words: “The forests had an army of staff to look after them: seneschals, justiciars, regarders and verderers administered the forest laws…. The courts that heard offences were either courts of eyre (travelling courts to hear serious offences, from the Latin iterare, ‘to travel’, which also gives us words like ‘iteration’), or of swainmote (a court held three times a year principally to control the pasturage of pigs in the forest…)” And we get puture, assarts, agisters, fewmets, and “the ceremonial gralloching or evisceration of the deer after the kill.” Fun for one and all!