You might be forgiven for thinking that the merry band of lexicographers at Oxford Dictionaries were trolling us all when they announced their word of the year for 2015: ‘’. Judging from the many incredulous responses to the news, everyone knows that ‘’, described as a pictograph, is definitely not a word. It doesn’t even go in the dictionary (even if it has a lot of feelings)!

Is this idea just a limp-wristed media stunt to get down with today’s youth, or is there perhaps something to it? Even if you don’t heart emojis or their use, it’s hard to deny their growing impact on the cultural life and language of the internet. Could emojis and other such symbols ever be words? To find out, they’d have to walk like a word, talk like a word (and quack like a duck, or some kind of serious abductive test like that). And to know that, we’d first have to know what a word even is.

It might surprise you, but it turns out that defining exactly what a word is is not easy. From the Ancient Greeks onwards, philosophers and linguists have been wrestling with this very question. So far, defining “word” is still an unresolved linguistic mystery.

So what IS a word? It’s complicated. Margaret Masterman’s 1954 philosophy of language paper on the subject categorizes three common, yet distinctly unhelpful responses to this question:

1. “Everybody knows what a word is.”
2. “Nobody knows what a word is.”
3. “From the point of view of logic and philosophy, it doesn’t matter anyway what a word is, since the statement is what matters, not the word.” 

Essentially, most people assume we already know what a word is, but no one really knows for sure because languages can be weirder than expected in the ways they choose to encapsulate meanings. Often linguists avoid eye contact with the definition and end up using other technical labels that behave better, such as morphemes, lexemes, graphemes, roots, stems, tokens, etc.—all of which overlap with some notion of the word.

If it’s not in the Dictionary, it’s not a Word

On a naive level, most of us are pretty sure we know what a word is. It’s one of the first concepts we absorb as soon as we learn to read. As reported by A. Sterl Artley’s 1975 paper, a British study of children suggested that, before the advent of literacy, it’s quite likely that we had no meaningful idea of the existence of words, though we were using them. Words become more salient once we enter the textual realm. Visually, they’re handily delimited by spaces. But words can still exist outside of the written symbol, such as in spoken or gestural languages that do not have a written form. It’s not the act of being written down or being bounded by white space that defines what a word is.

Perhaps we instinctively know what a word is and what it ought to look like because we’re used to looking it up in a dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries defines the word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.” (You might note that as it stands this definition doesn’t actively exclude emojis, which are also, like writing, meaningful symbols in a textual medium). Dictionaries end up by default as our linguistic authorities for the regular working state of the language. They record most known words and their common meanings. So, we might assume if a word happens to be in the dictionary, then it’s a word. If it’s not in the dictionary, it’s not a word.

So is an emoji not a word because it’s not in the dictionary?

If we decide to “pin our faith blindly to the Oxford Dictionary,” as Masterman would have it, there isn’t really a problem. For most, dictionary definitions work fine for typical words (so please don’t throw out your dictionaries just yet). But a dictionary is still only a guide to language, not a definitive source of it. Lexicographers have to choose and record new words from somewhere and generally they track how people actually and popularly use language. “The common idea that it is the dictionary that ‘defines’ the word, or that gives it its meaning … is a common error, and one that is directly or indirectly responsible for some of the common blocks and imperfections in communication,” Artley quotes. Truth be told, not all senses of a word are even captured by your standard dictionary entry, particularly when we include figurative usage. So while dictionaries are pretty useful, lexicographers are ultimately not the boss of you when it comes to what makes a word a word.

There are actually plenty of words we use that never make it to the dictionary. These include certain names, acronyms, slang terms, technical jargon, long compounds and the like. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to include these words in the dictionary, often because their meaning can be reasonably derived from their components, such as in the case of certain compound words composed in a language like German. In a similar way, a compound phrase in English such as “government tobacco price support program“, separated by spaces, is also actually a single word — which is not always recorded in the dictionary.

Sure, maybe you can’t use these non-dictionary words to win a Scrabble game but they are still words and we still use them. Evidently, we can’t just depend on the authority of a dictionary to determine whether something is a proper word in every case. And if in the future a novel unit of communication such as, oh, I don’t know, the emoji, nudges its way into a respectable dictionary, does that automatically make it a word? Rather than naively pointing to a dictionary for proof of ‘wordhood’, we clearly need something more.

Can Emojis Behave Like Words?

Does an emoji behave like words that we know and ❤? We’ve previously discussed how emojis and their relatives, emoticons and reaction gifs, are providing a whole new level of rich paralinguistic information in the internet age that was formerly lacking in written communication. Emotive nuances and intentions, once conveyed through whole phrases, can now be added to sentences through a handful of pictographs, which softens easily misunderstood statements. In this role, emojis have been described as a kind of richer (or sillier) set of punctuations for the web. However, the increasingly inventive and more complex use of emojis, both alone and with traditional writing suggests that emojis may be developing into something more linguistically significant—if not actual words, at least more word-like than we might have expected when they were first introduced.

An emoji translation of Les Misérables, apparently.

The words we’re more familiar with are composed alphabetically in their written form and phonetically in their spoken form. However, if we look at the many languages of the world, words can have their little quirks. Emojis are pictographs—but so are Chinese words and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Emoji pictographs are not arbitrary forms disconnected from their real concepts, in the Saussurean sense—but neither are onomatopoeic words or words in sign languages, where some signs can have a meaningful relationship to the action or object being conveyed. Sign languages, too, show that words can be gestural and don’t have to be spoken or written.

One persuasive argument against emojis is that they don’t participate in morphological or grammatical processes in the same way as words do. The word ‘organization‘ for example, is made up of word parts organ + –ize + –ation, each of which contributes some meaning to the overall term. An emoji can’t be broken down any further but is a single standalone unit. Similarly if I want to refer to more than one of something, such as a cat, I’d have to add a plural suffix –s to make it ‘cats‘.  “s” is not really what we use when translated into emoji.

But in this study of words and word compositionality, Mark Aronoff presents data from Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) showing that words, surprisingly, are the most basic linguistic unit of the language. They can’t be broken down into smaller morphological parts—similar to emojis. Speaking of Chinese, ABSL also has no inflectional morphology, meaning things like grammatical plurals aren’t shown by altering the word. Some have pointed out that because emojis can’t be pronounced, they can’t be real words. But likewise ABSL does not seem to have a familiar ‘phonological’ system (usually consisting of typical handshapes and movements) that allows words to be pronounced consistently. Instead, like emojis, each word is one conventionalized sign.

And if that wasn’t enough, it appears a very rudimentary emoji syntax is starting to emerge, with strict patterns developing on sequential emoji ordering that most people adhere to without even knowing it. Computational linguist Tyler Schnoebelen apparently found sequences such as the example below, in which weeping occurs before a broken heart, to be a more common order than the reverse (although logically they could be in any order to represent the same sad state):

But it turns out we can point to an even older example of an emoji-like symbol becoming word-like and infiltrating both the English language and the Oxford English Dictionary: I❤NY or “I Love New York”. It’s due to this iconic 1977 logo that caused ❤ to be widely read (and pronounced) as a symbolic alternative for the verb ‘love’. The symbol then developed another humorous reading as the more literal ‘heart’, which became a widespread colloquial synonym of ‘love’. Most don’t have trouble reading or pronouncing this symbol in writing. This verb sense subsequently entered the OED in 2011. So in a sense, an emoji symbol has already ‘become’ a word and entered the dictionary.

All this is not to say that emojis are words, but that they shouldn’t be discounted as a new and unusual force in language simply because they don’t look like other, more traditional words. The truth is that “word” is complicated to define. Can an emoji ever be one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Whether they are ultimately words or not, what’s clear is that they’re straddling the divide between fast-paced human speech and codified writing and emerging as something quite fascinating in the world of human communication.

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In 1996, linguist D’Armond Speers became notorious for attempting to raise his baby son Alec as the world’s first native speaker of Klingon, an invented language from the Star Trek universe. Speers eventually abandoned the experiment when his son showed a marked reluctance, at the tender age of five, to use the language, but that hasn’t stopped other Klingon enthusiasts from attempting the same feat. Which just goes to show two universally acknowledged truths: one, linguists often enjoy experimenting on small babies; and two, people can get very obsessive about artificial languages.

Conlangs

‘Constructed language’, or conlang, is the term commonly used to describe invented languages created by language enthusiasts. Unlike natural languages, they don’t develop organically from a speech community. Nonetheless, they can tell us a lot about how human languages work. And it’s clear that they inspire a certain kind of deep devotion in some people.

Since the Middle Ages, when the unofficial patron saint of nerds, Hildegard von Bingen, invented Lingua Ignota around 1150, there have been hundreds of artificial languages created. Now you might ask: Why would anyone create an entirely new language when we already have around 6,000 natural languages in the world today? Unlike many critically endangered languages, Klingon, which was invented by linguist Marc Okrand in 1984 and has a vocabulary of just a few thousand words, is currently experiencing an exponential growth in the number of learners. (Fun fact: Klingon has a myriad of words for hi-tech futuristic concepts, but does not have words for basic things like table or hello.) Why are artificial languages embraced while some natural human languages languish in obscurity?

One frustration language idealists have about human languages is that it’s a messy business. Languages are not always logical or regular—as much as some may want them to be—and exceptions abound. They’re not easy to learn. They’re constantly changing, misbehaving, splintering off into dialects, seemingly unstable to some of the more linguistically conservative among us. How, some have wondered, will the world’s many different cultures ever manage to communicate with each other, much less understand one another?

The Search for a Universal Language

Let’s consider constructed international auxiliary languages like Volapük, Interlingua, and Ido, as well as the one best known to the public: Esperanto. In an attempt to be universal, these languages were essentially cobbled together from bits and pieces of major European languages, with familiar though simplified grammar rules, supposedly making them easier to learn (for Europeans at least). Volapük, based on German, ultimately failed due to its creator’s refusal to relinquish control over the language’s development. Esperanto, on the other hand, has been studied around the world and has been allowed to develop through real usage—to the point where it’s now the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. It even has around 1,000 current native speakers, though many of them wouldn’t consider Esperanto their dominant language. Despite being around for over a hundred years, Esperanto has yet to become the world’s universal language. But will it eventually succeed?

I’m not sure anyone really believes Esperanto will ultimately unite the world into one happy language community (even if it was invented to promote world peace), though it does have the advantage of being widely known. One criticism of Esperanto is that though it was designed top down with rationality and regularity in mind, it lacked an underlying cultural community. It was meant to be easy for everyone to learn and use, but who wants to speak a language that’s purely functional? After all, people don’t learn popular natural languages such as French or Mandarin because they’re easy, but because they’d like access to the culture in which the language is situated. For non-speakers, it’s not exactly easy to pinpoint what Esperanto “culture” actually is—it’s all a bit too neutrally international.

Compared to the relatively slow adoption of Esperanto, why has the world of fantasy languages like Klingon from Star Trek, Na’vi from Avatar, the Elvish languages from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Dothraki from Game of Thrones, enjoyed so much immediate and enthusiastic attention? People can be intensely devoted to these fictional languages. It’s only recently that serious study has been done on the artificial languages found in narratives from literature and film, as Ria Cheyne discusses in “Created Languages in Science Fiction.” What’s interesting is that, unlike Esperanto, some of these fictional languages have often been created with real linguistic complexity, designed to be inaccessible and were never meant to be used like a natural language. But that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to learn it.

Why We Relish the Challenge

Invented languages found in literature are really examples of linguistic artistry, language for art’s sake, not necessarily for real world utility or universality. As Cheyne points out, the conlangs that appear in science fiction may have many communicative functions, but they ultimately serve to show how different the speakers are from humans—how very alien.

It’s through these unfamiliar alien languages that readers can often be exposed to other world viewpoints and play with ideas in that universe—linguistic relativity in space so to speak. Fictional languages like Klingon are deliberately designed not to be easy and familiar, but difficult and very different. At the same time, these languages are an unfinished puzzle and open to anyone wanting to participate in their development of a speech community.

Strangely enough, the more ‘alien’ the language, the more we can learn about our own messy human languages and how ‘weird‘ they can seem. Marc Okrand, the creator of Klingon, explains how he deliberately tried to violate human language universals in order to make Klingon seem alien, from the unusual set of sounds in its phoneme inventory to using uncommon syntactic rules, such as the object-verb-subject word order seen only in about 1% of the world’s languages. These elements incidentally make Klingon similar to a few of the world’s endangered natural languages that aren’t so well beloved. It also makes Klingon, still a growing language, fairly difficult to master, much less generate true native speakers. (Though apparently many enthusiastic though sadly ungrammatical fans are totally fine with “seriously bad Klingon” for their weddings, parties, anything).

Although to outsiders it might seem bemusing—maybe even a little wacky—to get so excited about fictional languages, the number of users is increasing rapidly. More than 250,000 copies of Okrand’s Klingon dictionary have been sold (though the number of fluent speakers is considerably less). The deliberate ‘alien’ complexities of Klingon, designed to be difficult for an English speaker to learn, have not stopped its fans from expanding its range. You can now enjoy Shakespeare (or Wil’yam Sheq’spir) in the ‘original Klingon‘ for example. Even Duolingo is getting in on it, with a plan to launch a Klingon language course. Klingon, which was only invented some twenty-five years ago compared to Esperanto’s 125, is arguably already one of the more widely used or influential fictional languages in the world.

So why has the learning of Klingon and other fictional languages become so popular, despite their difficulties? Some endangered languages are also difficult to learn, yet don’t inspire the same kind of intense interest. It could be that fictional languages provide an instant, inclusive, cultural back story for that language, something that Esperanto has been slow to develop. You can immediately define what kind of society and culture uses a certain conlang, because it’s part of the world-building of a story—and learners are welcome participants in developing that culture. The Klingons, for instance, are described as a warrior race, with certain ideas about aggression and honor. (We also know that apparently Klingons enjoy the opera and eating serpent worms.) Whether admired or despised, it allows the dedicated to be a part of that culture—in the same way that we may engage French culture by learning French. This ultimately has a motivating, imaginative, and enriching power for language learning and community building that other constructed languages might have to build from the ground up.

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Politicians of all stripes and the irrepressible Gretchen Wieners, a character from the cult film Mean Girls, have one surprising thing in common: they all want to make “fetch” happen. That is, in a world of high-stakes politics (high school or otherwise), they’re all trying to make friends and influence people—through the magic of language manipulation. Sadly for Gretchen, “fetch” just isn’t going to happen, but at least the notion of “making fetch happen” (meaning to successfully start a cultural/linguistic trend) probably has—and it turns out politicians are pretty good at it. Throughout political history, scholars have been fascinated by the powerful words—speeches, slogans, catchphrases, and political cant—used by public figures to sway their audiences into massive undertakings, from matters of war to peace to defining the national identity. But can language really be used as a weapon of mass persuasion—and just how easy is it to accomplish?

“Language is an important force in shaping the political,” according to Daniel T. Rodgers, who views American political language throughout history as “a field of combat: words are weapons to be used, battlegrounds to be conquered or defended.” In the matter of swaying public opinion, political rhetoric can get pretty vicious. It’s easy enough to trade well-worn slurs and suffer the social consequences. But what we’re beginning to see is that the more subtle the manipulation of language and the more unobtrusive the word-as-weapon becomes, the more insidious its effect on an unsuspecting public.

How to Make Neologisms Happen

So how does this all work? The answer is naturally more complex than we can cover here. Let’s first look at how neologisms might catch on in a language. Unfortunately, we don’t exactly have the secret formula for how to make fetch happen. However, if certain conditions are met, a new term or word sense can have a pretty decent chance of loitering with intent in a language. Linguist Allan Metcalf in Predicting New Words cooks up what he calls FUDGE, a handy mnemonic for the main factors necessary for a new term to thrive in the language:

Frequency – The term should be used repeatedly
Unobtrusiveness – The term shouldn’t be too noticeably weird, so it’s easy to pick up
Diversity – The term should be used across different groups
Generating new forms and meanings – The term should be able to be used flexibly in different ways
Endurance – The concept the term refers to should be long-lasting

“On Message”

So how does this play out in political language, propaganda, and mass persuasion? Public figures like politicians have a huge advantage over the Gretchen Wieners of the world when it comes to making political fetch happen. For one thing, well-known powerful figures automatically have the attention of the public. Mass media institutions, from the press to social media, follow them around, broadcasting, sharing, and reinterpreting their every word, on repeat, even if they actively disagree with their agenda and ideology.

In the realm of political theater, if you want to “make fetch happen” you crucially have to stay “on message”. As we consume that message again and again, we are also being taught how to receive it. Against the “shock and awe” onslaught of mass repetition, new phrases and meanings are rarely questioned, and are picked up and used without much pushback. However, staying “on message” once meant robotically repeating the same easily digestible party-line slogans and carefully crafted catchphrases. You’ll always have your obvious “cheese eating surrender monkeys“-type political slurs, but can we always track the political intentions behind more benign phrases like “climate change“—a politically motivated term that sneakily replaced the use of “global warming” when our backs were turned? These days, subtlety is key, especially with growing public awareness and a certain level of cynicism. Once this trick of political rhetoric is made too obvious, it becomes much less effective. Mass persuasion has to be linguistically unobtrusive.

Clearly, without mass media to report and shape “the message” and encourage its general use, it’s harder for new terms to catch on. As Michael Silverstein, in his study on the poetics of politics, puts it:

We, the potential electorate […] learn how to listen to and look at political communication […] always over the shoulders of media commentators and shapers of ‘message.’ We have to appreciate, then, how political speech in the multi-layered jumble of the mass media is like articulate noise shouted into a chasm, a canyon. If it doesn’t just dissipate and disappear, it echoes in particular ways as it is picked up and selectively repeated and interpretatively reshaped by a mediating press and other institutions in the public sphere.

As an example, in 2006, media commentators, such as Hendrik Herzberg of the New Yorker, observed the emergence of a new, “ungrammatical” term being used called “Democrat Party”, in place of the official “Democratic Party”. “Democrat”, a noun, was being used as an adjective, which served to sever the central notion of democracy from the party’s name and turn it into a party of Democrats. It was a minute change, but Herzberg suggested that “there’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. ‘Democrat Party’ is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt.” He attributed the near uniform use of it among Republicans like Frank Luntz and New Gingrich, who was responsible for the infamous 1990 memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” And the mainstream media followed suit, using the term “Democrat” as an adjective rather than as a noun in similar ways and in new contexts, spreading it even further.

Who Are You and Who Do You Fear?

In politics, it’s really not just a matter of ushering in a neologism for the pure joy of seeing language change. You also have to somehow make people want to own and use these new terms. In the political realm, the most successful terms are often noun phrases composed of common words instead of newly coined words. The new terms and nuances being introduced are calculated to frame and control the narrative that’s being told, to deflect opposition and obscure information, to bring up positive or negative images—ultimately to further a political agenda. Somehow, these new terms are chosen, widely disseminated, and instantly infused with persuasive symbolism or emotive nuance that is not always clearly defined—yet clearly works.

When it comes to making a new political catchphrase stick, emotions can run high. The subtle rhetoric in these terms seems to almost force a stance on identity and the values you hold. This boils down to two basic emotional systems; namely, deciding which group you belong to and which group you fear. It’s the timeless question of us vs. them. Take note of recent constructions such as “anchor babies,” “liberal media,” “anti-union,” “tax relief,” or the phrase, “the war on terror/women/Christmas/etc.” Virtually any issue can be re-jigged to be more positive or negative. Depending on who you identify with, you’ll tend to use and share that group’s communication styles.

It’s clear that politics has learned a lot from advertising. Michael Silverstein sees branding and political messages as closely related in their abilities to manipulate values and identity.

‘Brand’ implies potential stories, the most important being how people, as potential and actual consumers, project cultural values onto the commodity so as to organize their relationship of use of that commodity.

So brands persuade people to buy them and buy into them (and not their competitors), which also projects a particular lifestyle choice. Just like brand advertising, political language shapes an audience’s emotional identity by giving them something to be a part of (with ideological goals to work towards), and something to watch out for (a competing force to fight against or values to despise). This fascinating linguistic manipulation of emotion and identity is particularly effective in an age where information can be shared across vast distances in a split second, and in increasingly sophisticated and subtle ways.

So in politics, it’s not just a question of making fetch happen for the fun of it. New terms, new meanings, are carefully chosen to exploit your hopes and fears. But exactly how is language weaponized? You may be surprised at how little it actually takes.

In part two, Lingua Obscura will delve deeper into the art of political persuasion through language. (It turns out it involves linguistic cliffhangers…and a leap of faith.)

The post The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion: How Politicians Make “Fetch” Happen (Part I) appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Death and taxes are two things nobody loves. Put them together and you have the “death tax,” a gruesome, almost frightening concept. But a “death tax” is just an “estate tax” on the rich that most people will never have to deal with. Our blind acceptance that taxes are bad means that we are quick to adopt ominous phrases like “death tax.” For similar reasons, we never really stop to question seemingly neutral terms like tax relief or tax haven. What kind of heartless monster would be against tax relief or be in favor of death taxes anyway?

Perhaps responsible citizen type monsters who enjoy using public infrastructures like roads, electricity, and the interwebs? Taxes, a healthy part of civic life, pay for a lot of necessary things. Nevertheless, we believe that taxes are such a crippling burden that we need the figurative equivalent of a cure from illness to deal with them. Anyone who tells us differently must be selling something. But linguist George Lakoff points out that each word in these seemingly innocuous phrases frames exactly how we’re supposed to think, even if we’re unaware of it. And all it took was two little words. As he wrote:

The phrase “Tax relief”…got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for “relief.” For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party…The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add “tax” to “relief” and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

Regardless of where you stand on political issues, it’s pretty mind-boggling that mass persuasion can be wrapped up in the tiniest of linguistic bonbons which we then unwittingly consume without questioning them. But are these terms just innocently calling it the way they see it? Nora Miller, in analyzing the metaphors behind framed terms like “death taxes,” points out:

As Frank Luntz put it…”nobody really knows what an estate is, but they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die.” So the Republican machine changed the frame by changing the name—the estate tax became the “death tax.” Now, even though 98 percent of people will never pay this tax…most people polled favor repeal of this tax, because “taxing at death is immoral.”

We can be easily swayed by political catchphrases and advertising slogans that are intentionally crafted to convince and direct us into making certain choices. It doesn’t have to be complicated; in fact, the simpler the words, the more effective it often is. Why does this work on us?

Even before George Orwell’s 1984 popularized the idea of political doublespeak, it was being expertly wielded by politicians of an earlier age in rousing speeches and propaganda efforts. In 1972, the American historian Henry Steele Commager noted that:

Corruption of language is a special form of deception which [the Nixon] Administration, through its Madison Avenue mercenaries, has brought to a high level of perfection. Bombing is “protective reaction”, precision bombing is “surgical strikes”, concentration camps are “pacification centers” or “refugee camps” … Bombs […] dropped on one of your own villages are excused as “friendly fire”; a bombed house becomes automatically a “military structure.”

Notice that most of these linguistic machinations hide behind simple nominal compounds, which are much harder to unpack than a longer sentence or phrase. What has emerged in recent times as crucially important to controlling public opinion and communication is “framing” the debate—using language effectively to define the issues and tell the story you want to tell. As we’ve seen, the digital age and a willing mass media have made it easier for politicians to turn a carefully curated new phrase into a popular, highly repeatable term. However, staying strictly on message with memorized talking points can make a political speaker seem disingenuous (even if they honestly believe what they’re saying).

How it Works in Advertising

So, the linguistics of mass persuasion have become necessarily more sophisticated to handle the challenges of an increasingly cynical public. It has to seem authentic—and not deliberately manipulative—to work. You might have noticed, for instance, how the advertising world is rife with “authentic” storytelling, which uses beautifully shot images, symbolism, and language to generate emotional narratives. Yes, language can subtly frame a story for us, lead us down the garden path—but then what? There’s actually an insidious little rhetorical trick being used that we’re often blind to. Surprisingly, the trick is to seemingly give up control of the narrative and let these framed ‘stories’ all end on a kind of cliffhanger, which we then mentally fill in to determine the outcome.

“Persuasion by hinting” might seem like a fuzzy leap of faith but modern advertising has already trained us to resolve omitted information just the way we’re supposed to. Consider constructions such as “20% more/quieter/cleaner/bigger/faster!” (than what?). These are all comparatives that aren’t actually being compared to anything at all. They’re grammatically unresolved phrases and we’re gently led to expect something there. So we fill-in-the-blank ourselves, within the frame of the new narratives we’ve been fed, in an act that seems to be totally under our control, but isn’t.

Sneaky.

How it Works in Politics

Political language likewise has made effective use of setting up a story—and then getting the audience to “fill in” the blanks, as Lakoff puts it. Political language exploits unspoken cliffhangers in two ways: framing an emotional narrative and a desire for a linguistic resolution. Essentially, you become the storyteller in a political “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, with all your choices already mapped out for you.

Just how are we led to fill in the blanks the right way? Consider the notorious 1994 GOPAC memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” (which reveals that the cynical use of weaponized political language is alive and well). The memo lists positive and negative words for Republican members to use towards allies and opponents. It does contain charged words, like failure or crisis. But there are also more neutral sounding words such as deeper or they and them. We might ask why these harmless words, which had undergone focus group testing for their efficacy, would be considered useful word weapons?

In “Truth Is a Linguistic Question,” Dwight Bolinger outlines how linguistic strategies that cleverly omit information are used in mass persuasion. Broadly defined words, such as those innocent pronouns (they, them) in the GOPAC memo, can be manipulated and turned negative in the right contexts. In the political sphere we often hear vague yet alarming statements such as, “they say…”, “they’re going to tell you…”, or “they hate our values…” But who are they? We don’t really know, but we fill it in according to our own social biases and—given the right sort of frame—it can be effective.

Of course, context is everything. Words may appear innocent enough in a dictionary, but in practice their impact may vary. To understand how a word or phrase may be manipulated, we need to understand the kinds of terms that surround it. In the words of the linguist J. R. Firth, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

Collocations: Understanding the Context

Collocations are the words that are commonly found around a certain word more often than chance. Some neutral words may, over time, develop more negative or positive nuances because of their collocations (I previously wrote about this on words like migrant, immigrant, and refugee). Collocations really reveal something about the biases that are current in a community, regardless of ideology. It also means that a speaker can appeal to an audience’s values using what appears to be neutral words (according to the dictionary) that just happen to pack a persuasive punch.

Take the word rabid. If you had to “fill in the blank” by using it in a phrase, what’s the first noun that comes to mind? Rabid dog? Rabid fan? How about rabid feminist? The choice may tell you a bit about your underlying assumptions. Oxford Dictionaries encountered recent criticism for negatively gendering their definitions without reason. Examples like a rabid feminist, nagging wife, or her high, grating voice consistently showed up in their definitions of words (rabid, nagging, and grating, respectively) that don’t have to be gendered at all. So analyzing collocations can tell us a lot about the hidden senses that a word may be developing.

With enough consensus and repetition, words can be manipulated to acquire particular nuances through their collocations. If you encounter the phrase rabid feminist repeatedly in uniformly negative contexts, you may just mentally fill in the blanks when you encounter the word feminist, even if you don’t hold those views yourself. It’s this gray area of underlying value judgements, their associated imagery, and emotional inferences that political language seeks to exploit. A new phrase like anchor baby contains two perfectly harmless words. But once they’re put together and repeatedly used in a negative context, the phrase becomes a slur.

In the realm of political persuasion, sophisticated language use can be very effective in swaying an audience. We are encouraged to “choose” out of a limited set of choices, to fill in obvious information, to resolve the cliffhanger in an already fully-framed narrative—all without necessarily being aware of it. As we engage with politics, it’s important to remember how powerful words can ultimately be, and how easily we can be persuaded by them.

The post The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion Part 2: Choose Your Own Adventure appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Ah, the topsy-turvy world of language innovation, where the lion lies down with the lamb, nouns suddenly become verbs, and “verbing weirds language.” Consider popular internet memes like “Let me librarian that for you” and “Do you even science, bro?” in which “librarian” and “science” are nouns weirdly disguised as verbs. So is this a playful new linguistic construction or is it time to roll our eyes at the internet, again?

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

The dicey practice of turning a noun into a verb has long been a square on the language pedant’s bingo game. Take examples like dialoguing, actioning, efforting, or transiting. (No really, please take them away.) It’s easy to see why these awkward constructions might elicit, as Fowler put it, “cries of anguish.” Why use these nouns as verbs at all when there are already perfectly good verbs like talk, act, etc. that mean the same thing? Is the jargon-riddled business world impacting (first used as a verb c. 1600) how we speak now? Can we just boycott (thanks, Captain Charles Boycott) them and Houdini our way out of this mess?

The conversion of nouns into verbs is not actually a new phenomenon. Some call it “verbing,” which sounds like a new dance craze, while linguistic nerds call it denominalization. Benjamin Franklin preferred to call it “awkward and abominable.” (And many modern language pundits apparently are still fighting the good fight on his behalf). But before you join them and “out-Herod Herod” over denominal verbs, know that Shakespeare was also quite the inveterate verber—one among many—because nouns have been verbing their way all over the English language for quite some time. While some examples might be questionable, denominal verbs can also be useful. We shouldn’t write them all off just yet.

The Common-Or-Garden Denominal Verb

Some people are only happy with denominal verbs when it rains. We’re also not fazed by them when buttering our bread, lacing our shoes, elbowing our way out of a crowd or petitioning the president to stop bombing villages. We can now email, text, friend, and blog without difficulty. These everyday denominal verbs have long been accepted as ordinary verbs through their frequent usage.

But denominal verbs are also extraordinary—they act as vivid linguistic shortcuts. By just converting a noun to a verb, unique information is conveyed (and enriches the language with new rhetorical imagery). This works because if you know the properties of the noun, you can quickly determine the likely meaning of the verb. Rain rains, emails are emailed, and if you bike somewhere, you’re not exactly traveling in a car. Using the noun instead of a verb would otherwise require a longer expression. Compare “We got out by nudging others out of our way with our elbows” (more literal) with “We elbowed our way out” (more figurative). It’s remarkably economical, following Gricean principles of conversation, since denominal verbs are really more like verbalized sentences, Eve V. Clark and Herbert H. Clark explain in their 1979 study, “When Nouns Surface as Verbs.” The more concrete and unambiguous the noun’s meaning, the more easily it’s accepted as a verb. After considering over 1,300 examples of denominal verbs from TV, radio, newspapers, and novels, it’s no surprise that Clark and Clark found that the majority of them come from nouns that “denote a palpable object.”

How We Understand “Innovative” Verbs We’ve Never Heard Before

Denominal verbs are even more interesting than you think. One amazing feature of language innovation is our ability to invent and understand words we’ve never heard before. Enter “innovative” denominal verbs: they’re created on the fly and can somehow be understood by a non-mind reading listener instantly. Some examples include, “Will you cigarette me” (Mae West), “We all Wayned and Cagneyed” (New York Times Magazine), or “My sister Houdini’d her way out of the locked closet.”

Invented verbs from proper nouns are a linguistic phenomenon that YOLO for the moment. They rarely last long enough to make it to a dictionary (except as idioms separated from the original noun, such as “boycott” or “lynch”). For that reason many might discount these neologisms as insignificant ephemera, but the fact is that this kind of creative verbing is prolific in modern speech, particularly in internet culture—and it’s changing how we all use language.

So how are we supposed to understand verbs we’ve never heard before when they’re not even in the dictionary? Somehow we manage to figure it out. As Matt Damon might say: “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

According to Clark and Clark, when it comes to creating innovative denominal verbs, you need to draw on a shared cultural knowledge of the original noun. Verbing works if you can reasonably assume that the salient features of the noun are so obvious that the verb sense would be easy to figure out. The context provides additional semantic clues. So, if you know the stereotypical properties of a noun like brick (it’s an inert rectangular block), you can reasonably figure out what it means to say “I bricked my phone,” even if you’ve never seen the word used like this before. (To emphasize: “I did something to my phone to render it as useless as an inert rectangular block,” meaning it’s “like a brick,” which becomes a stand in for “I broke my phone”).

Proper nouns as verbs are trickier. It seems weird to use a person’s name as a verb, but we do all it the time. In order to understand expressions like “My sister Houdini’d her way out of a locked closet” or “He Kanye Wested me before I could say anything,” we need special information about who Houdini or Kanye West are and what they’re best known for in popular culture. While brick has a well-defined sense, a name refers to a person who might have any number of potential senses that could change over time. Proper noun type verbs have to be constructed carefully because a listener has to juggle multiple theories in order to reach the intended meaning, even with context clues. Kanye West might be famous for many things, but you’d have to both agree that contextually, it’s probably that notorious incident involving Taylor Swift that has emerged as a salient pop cultural reference.

So innovative verbs can have a “shifting sense and denotation—one that depends on the time, place and circumstances of their use.” Contextually, we understand that the verb in “bricking a phone” can be different than in “bricking a fireplace.” If your listeners don’t share the same cultural knowledge, you might end up bricking your shiny new denominal verb. A pre-1979 example like “General Motors was Ralph Nadered into stopping production of the Corvair” might refer to one thing, but unless Ralph Nader has always been up to the same old trick, “To Ralph Nader an election” after the 2000 US presidential election might mean something else entirely to the next generation.

Why We Verb On the Internet

Verbing can be a faster and fresher way to convey tired information. And it can do so with a sense of humor and surprise. The internet and social media have made it easier than ever to share neologisms, but it’s not just about creating new words. It’s also about creating new forms. The internet loves linguistic shortcuts, because memes. (This new construction of because + noun has become popular online and replaces having to explain something in a longwinded fashion). Verbing likewise thrives in a fast-paced, short attention span internet culture, which is all about the viral sharing and remixing of pop culture memes. If you get the reference, you too can be a member. After all, punchlines are no fun if they have to be over explained.

But this isn’t your gran’s verbing—instead of a single noun or name, it’s the internet meme itself that provides the contextual framework. In the line, “She houdini’d out of a locked closet,” it’s the phrase “locked closet” and the subject’s name recognition that helps a listener understand what “houdini” means. But without knowledge of the well-known expression “Let me Google that for you,” the phrase “Let me librarian that for you” is harder to understand. If you don’t know the internet meme “Do you even lift, bro?” (which expresses skepticism for someone’s knowledge), you won’t really get the “Do you even science, bro?” meme. These memes tell us exactly how we’re supposed to understand these new verbs, as though we were dealing with a more concrete noun.

While many of these verbs may not last, it’s evident that verbing under the influence of memes has changed the way we talk. It may be weird, but somehow it ends up working. Because language.

The post Do You Even Language, Bro? Understanding Why Nouns Become Verbs appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

So it entirely slipped my mind that Lingua Obscura recently turned one (yay!) and is now a veritable toddler among columns, bless its little pointy head. Thank you to all who read her, or him or them… If you’re now scratching your heads over how an inanimate linguistics column suddenly became human, let me introduce you to my much maligned friend Personification.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Personification is weird…yet entirely natural. It’s the odd practice of pretending things are people. When we personify, we apply human attributes to inanimate objects, to nature, to animals, or to abstract concepts, sometimes complete with dramatic stories about their social roles, emotions and intentions. We can observe this linguistically through features like unexpected pronoun use or certain animate verbs and adjectives that are usually only applied to people. A common example is how ships and other vessels traditionally have a feminine gender in English (even if the ship happens to be a “man-of-war“). French yachtswoman Isabelle Autissier provides a perfect example:

“I spent three years… with this boat and I am very close to her. Now I am here and she is alone and that is pretty difficult.”

Why would Autissier do this? There’s a strange empathy in words like “she is alone” applied to an object that can’t possibly have a sense of loneliness. This isn’t the artifice of poetry, but everyday language. On the face of it, the concept of personification seems pretty crazy, the stuff of fantasy and magical thinking.

You might think, like many a respectable scientist, that it has no place in our earth logic, because not only is it not real, it is objectively false (and therefore unscientific), since inanimate objects do not have feelings or intentions (and if animals do, we can’t possibly know for sure). Yet personification is not only wildly popular in language use (even if we don’t always notice it), it’s a fascinating psychological phenomenon that reveals a lot about social cognition and how we might understand the world.

It’s easy enough to find examples everywhere in language. We’re constantly making everything human. We start in childhood, in the way we express how we see the world in sentences like “the cloud wants to go that way.” Casual language gives us low-key linguistic memes like “let me introduce you to my friend karma/prozac/plaintext,” which props up anything you like as human. But this is not about memes being a thing. Here’s another recent example (complete with emotional backstory):

“The Americans is the kind of show that should inspire the TV industry to throw Emmys at it like elderly men throw bits of bread to the ducks at the park, but not only does it not get the audience it deserves, it doesn’t get the industry accolades either.”

So why do we want clouds, ships, even corporations, among so many other lifeless entities, to be people?

You’re probably familiar with personification (along with its fraternal twin anthropomorphism) as a rather tired literary trope in poetry and allegory. Though widely used throughout Western literature it’s often derided by some literary critics as an “unimportant” and “reality-drained” type of symbolic language, according to Morton W. Bloomfield in “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory.” Bloomfield points out, “Personification was defended and praised in the eighteenth century for the very qualities—imaginative creativity, boldness, concentration, passion—that it has since been considered deficient in.”

Personification as a respectable device of language was perhaps cruelly murdered in cold blood ever since John Ruskin coined the rather negative term “pathetic fallacy” to refer to the practice of attributing human feelings to depictions of nature in what he considered second-rate poetry. Take these lines:

They rowed her in across the rolling foam—
The cruel, crawling foam. (Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke)

Ruskin declared, because “the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl,” the literary device here was an error of truth, producing  “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” Personifications for some, more than other types of metaphorical language that also play fast and loose with the truth, have been damned as unnecessary falsehoods. But perhaps in the whimsical world of poetry bare facts don’t matter.

It turns out that, following Ruskin, scientists also have a problem with “pathetic fallacy” (or “cute silliness”) as a device for teaching scientific facts, such as in these examples:

“Air hates to be crowded, and when compressed it will try and escape to an area of lower pressure.”

“Because it gets colder as you go up, the atmosphere wants to convect.“

Like immiscible polar and non-polar liquids, science and personification don’t mix. Mainstream science is not a little contemptuous of the ‘unscientific’ practice of personification, such as anthropomorphizing animals in order to reach an understanding of their emotional states. Scientists often argue that rendering scientific information in overly human terms is a surefire way to make it harder to learn science, particularly for impressionable children (who apparently will believe anything you tell them).

What’s so wrong with personification anyway? Many assume personification just became a thing in language because of a tendency towards animism, a very unscientific belief that non-human entities such as animals, plants, mountains etc, have a spiritual life. If you happily accept that a mountain might be a god, you’re more likely to attribute human characteristics to all sorts of objects, or so the theory goes, because animism is assumed to be primitive or unsophisticated. The claim is that personification is intuitively used by children or the “uneducated classes” who don’t know any better.

Pascal Boyer shows otherwise, citing cognitive and experimental studies that suggest children, early on, know perfectly well what is animate and inanimate and in fact their world knowledge is not only complex, it also requires sophisticated theorizing about objects. They don’t anthropomorphize because it’s intuitive, stemming from a child-animism that blindly believes everything is alive. When children personify, it’s often in a context of being encouraged to play and personification has been shown to aid learning rather than to obstruct it. Boyer points out that in experiments, “young children are confident that an imaginary item, described as ‘sleepy’ may well be ‘furious’, but that it certainly cannot be ‘made of metal’.” In Boyer’s view, even for young children (as well as for scientists) personification is actually paradoxical and counterintuitive—it is salient because it grabs attention. It may make no factual sense, but it’s somehow completely natural and all too human. We all have a tendency to personify, whether we believe in gods or not. It’s not just for kids, trolling scientists or poetic pretence.

By personifying, we often assume social roles and identities for objects and attribute intentions and emotions to them. This not only tells us a lot about our own cognitive states, it increases empathy and understanding. For example, studies have shown that the act of anthropomorphizing can alleviate loneliness and promote social connection (think Tom Hank’s friend Wilson, the irrepressible volleyball in Castaway).

Despite science’s general reluctance to approve of personification techniques as a teaching aid, this is really a natural way for people to express information—personification does often help us to understand concepts through human analogy. By turning objects into individuals, we can relate emotionally to their ‘histories,’ making them more memorable and studies have shown this does help kids learn.

A curious case of how deeply natural personification might be in cognition was examined over a hundred years ago, in the work of psychologist Mary Whiton Calkin and others. Calkin ran experiments on what is now termed ordinal-linguistic personification, a variant of grapheme synesthesia (pdf). Astonishingly, Calkin’s work generated little follow up research until quite recently. More well-known forms of synesthesia are those based on color distinctions and other basic senses such as sound, touch and taste. But there’s also a cognitive condition where some people personify numbers and letters and distinguish these graphemes through animate attributes. Graphemes may often have a gender or social status in relation to other graphemes, or generate feelings of like or dislike, or have very elaborate back histories. Calkin called these ‘dramatizations’ and reported elaborate personifications such as:

The post Personification is Your Friend: the Language of Inanimate Objects appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

War happens when words no longer work. Yet war is declared at the very point when words are at their most powerful. It’s an odd kind of paradox. In a time of war, the familiar words of your own language can become even more significant, as language is linked to the idea of home. For those caught in the conflict, far from home, severing that link can be confronting. The bleak experience of solitary prisoners of war, left forgotten for years, can show how captivity, isolation and exile can cause profound and poignant language loss.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

The language I have learn’d these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego:
[…]
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now:
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

Thus speaks Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, in Shakespeare’s Richard II. His very first fear upon learning of his banishment and exile? Never being able to speak his native language again. The fear is a real one.

What if you could no longer use your own language? If you were alone, imprisoned, and had no support from fellow refugees who spoke your language? Linguistic isolation as a punishment has a lasting psychological impact.

We’re social creatures, and as a kind of “solitary linguistic confinement“, having no one to talk to can be as mentally devastating and lonely as physical isolation from human contact. Consider the story reported by Peter Jay Honigsberg, of an innocent 16 year old boy taken from Afghanistan, who spent 8 years in Guantanamo Bay even after being quickly cleared of all wrongdoing, because no country would accept him. While all the other prisoners around him spoke English or Arabic, he only spoke Uzbek. He had no materials or support to learn other languages, nor an ongoing translator. For most of his time there, he could speak to no one meaningfully, and every morning he would wake up crying from severe loneliness.

Honigsberg argues that linguistic isolation in these conditions is akin to physical solitary confinement. There’s a reason solitary confinement is seen as the worst kind of punishment – it is inhuman. Even short periods of extreme isolation can have a profound effect on a prisoner’s mental health. Prevented from speaking your mother tongue under unbearable conditions such as this, in order to adapt and survive, what happens to your language? Do you lose it, if you can no longer use it? Can it really be possible to forget your native language?

As human beings, we need social contact with people, expressing ourselves through a language that we share, in a community we belong to. Our native language is so tightly bound to our concepts of national and personal identity. Even under the extreme trauma of war and imprisonment we might suppose that it would be impossible to lose your mother tongue. The very idea is unthinkable. How can you forget something that is so ingrained in the very definition of who you are?

For exiles, retaining their language can be the single most important connection to a homeland. To lose this linguistic link means not only losing a core part of your identity, but worse – you risk further ostracization from your own people in that place you call home.

Bowe Bergdahl, the recently released American prisoner of war held captive in Afghanistan, was reported to have had “trouble speaking English” when he returned home. At the time many responded incredulously to this news: could he really have forgotten his native language in just five years of captivity, after having spoken it for twenty-three years? What’s interesting is the implied shame that was read into his loss of language and its replacement with Pashto, the language of his captors. Though his English has since recovered, some critics took an extreme view that Bergdahl’s initial problems using his native language was tantamount to disloyalty and a sign of his anti-Americanism. Other American prisoners of war, it was argued, did not return home lacking the ability to speak their own mother tongue.

So how is it that some, such as John McCain who was also imprisoned for years, could remain resilient against first language loss, while for other prisoners, adapting to a hostile environment meant that their first language was adversely affected? Trauma doesn’t affect everyone equally. There are different ways of coping, and adopting the language of the people that surround you, in order to survive, is one. Learning this new language can have an unexpected effect on your native language.

It turns out that language attrition (the term for language decay), can start occurring even in ordinary second language learning. Language classes and immersion environments aren’t particularly traumatic (although nervous learners might think otherwise). Yet it’s well-documented that first language attrition can arise the more a learner is immersed in a second language. Benjamin J. Levy et al., showed that word retrieval for a first language gradually becomes more inhibited as the second language is practiced more frequently. It has to do with how we store and retrieve words. In essence, the second language starts pushing out the first in this huge cognitive task of memory retrieval. Adept bilingual speakers can cognitively compartmentalize or code-switch to keep both languages active but for many learners, taking on a new language can often be at the expense of the native fluency of another. This is more likely to happen if learners are unaware of this possibility, so the unexpected attrition can often be a source of shame and confusion. It can provoke negative reactions, as many assume your fluency reflects your connection to your national identity. In effect, forgetting your first language is a betrayal of who you are.

It’s important to realize that language attrition can happen on many levels. It’s one thing to struggle to remember certain words. It’s quite another to forget how to use your first language so completely that you need a translator. Most people might assume language attrition means no longer being natively fluent in your own language. Can this be possible?

Yes, there are in fact plenty of documented cases of people losing their first language completely by switching over to a new language. But this happens mostly to speakers who learn a second language as children, before puberty. The younger they acquire it, the closer those speakers will be to native speakers — as if they’d had no exposure to their first language at all.

By contrast, a first language tends to be pretty resilient if it’s used through adulthood. It’s much rarer for adults to undergo extreme first language attrition — but it does happen. In cases of forced linguistic isolation, such as for prisoners of war or refugees, it’s hard to measure how much trauma can play a part in hastening language attrition. Studies have shown that a negative view of a language from personal tragedy or persecution can play a strong part in more extreme language loss. For example, some German Jewish immigrants reportedly developed an aversion to German after the second world war, which may have an impact on language loss. But first language attrition can still occur despite a deep connection to a language, place and people.

When Toshimasa Meguro finally returned home to Japan after 53 years as an exiled prisoner of war in Siberia, he spoke in Russian, having forgotten most of his Japanese. Though his wife and children were Russian, he never lost his attachment to Japan, which makes it all the more surprising that he should have lost his native language. In a similarly horrific, Kafkaesque nightmare, the last Japanese POW in Kazakhstan, Tetsuro Ahiko, had spent 60 years away from home due to an unfortunate transliteration error in his name, shunted from place to place, long after many of his comrades had been repatriated. Despite a strong longing for his homeland, he’d so completely forgotten his Japanese that he needed a translator. There are a handful of such cases, where exiles, far from home, may have retained the ghostly memory of a few words in their first language but are otherwise unable to function as native speakers in it. Are these cases of ‘use it or lost it’?

If a speaker can regain fluency in their first language faster than a novice of the language, even after unbearable linguistic isolation, it suggests the first language is not really lost, merely dormant. There are certainly anecdotal cases of immigrant speakers who have not spoken their first language for many years — yet still remain fluent.

Then there’s the extraordinarily tragic case of András Toma. A forgotten prisoner of war, he was left to languish in a Russian psychiatric hospital from 1947, where he could not talk to anyone. Russian officials had decided he must be mentally ill for speaking an unknown, invented gibberish. This ‘gibberish’ language was finally discovered to be Hungarian, when a Hungarian speaking doctor came across him by chance in 1997, after an astonishing 55 years of captivity. (Hungarian, of course, is in the separate Finno-Ugric language family and to many speakers of Indo-European languages, it might seem like an unfamiliar alien language). The long years of imprisonment in a mental facility had impaired Toma’s social understanding until he was nearly autistic. Though silent at first, he eventually began speaking Hungarian, even if it was often out of context. He had not lost his first language even after years of disuse, perhaps because there was nothing to replace it.

So a first language can be impaired by immersion in a second language, but can it truly be lost? It’s hard to say. Vestiges of a native language may always persist in memory despite long disuse. But for many of those experiencing the horrors of linguistic isolation and exile, perhaps the key to survival is to forget the language of a land they may never return to.

The post Language Loss in a Time of War appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

If you’re a fan of hot dogs wrapped in dough (or sometimes bacon), rejoice! Because apparently April 24th is National Pig in a Blanket Day. “Pig in a blanket” is, as most people know, a humble dish enjoyed throughout the world in its many regional guises (in the German version ‘Würstchen I’m Schlafrock,‘ the sausage trades its blanket for a practical dressing gown, possibly while wearing socks and sandals). Of course, if you aren’t familiar with the dish, you might wonder why anyone would bother celebrating such a thing, considering its amusing yet rather unappetizing name.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

While not quite as off-putting as “faire Garbage,” a dish that was once innocently enjoyed by medieval offal-fanciers before the word became synonymous with rubbish, the term “pig in a blanket” is bit of a puzzle. It gives us a mere figurative suggestion of what the dish could be like, but unless we’re in the cultural know, it would be difficult to figure out what it is, much less celebrate it.

“Pig in a blanket” joins an odd class of other whimsically named (and often much beloved) traditional dishes that seem to have little relation to their ingredients. Instead, they wear the traces of their playful and evocative etymological histories on their sleeves. Nobody blinks at “hot dog,” a kind of disgusting term for such a popular food, but supposedly the slang name originated with 19th century college jokes about sausages containing dog meat. Linguists are still debating hot dog’s actual history, which just goes to show how attached some people can get to food terminology. Consider these other colorful food names:

Toad in the hole (sausages baked in a batter),
Ants on a log (raisins on peanut butter on a celery stick),
Devil/Angel on horseback (dates or oysters wrapped in bacon),
Bubble and Squeak (fried potato and cabbage),
Spotted Dick (sometimes known as spotted Richard in polite circles, a kind of pudding with raisins and custard),
Hush puppies (deep fried cornbread balls),
Love in disguise (a Welsh dish of stuffed and boiled heart).

Though there are those who might be inclined to blame the Brits and their infamous cuisine for some of these, food names that sound inventively unappetizing are not limited to English.

To celebrate a dish is to appreciate the social, cultural, and linguistic elements that come with it. Food may be a necessary fuel for human survival, but that’s clearly not all it is. We don’t just consume food silently. We talk about it until it infuses our speech with food-related metaphor in strange new ways. What’s the beef with that?

Human beings feed on metaphors as ways of talking about something else: we hunger for, cannibalize, spice it up, sugar coat, hash things out, sink our teeth into, and find something difficult to swallow or hard to digest so we cough it up and then have a bone to pick with someone, which is their just desserts.

So Michael Owen Jones notes in The Journal of American Folklore. It turns out that food is a complex symbolic language in itself that can be just as culturally complicated to navigate as a foreign language. The cuisines we prefer can be markers of not just ethnicity, but also class, age, gender, and other aspects of identity. We know that food can be symbolic and meaningful when it comes to observing holidays, but Jones points out that even an ordinary meal or basic ingredients can cause inadvertent offense or misunderstandings. One person’s high prestige food may be considered low class by another:

For example, in 1972-73 the American Food for Peace Program sent yellow corn from the United States to Botswana for distribution in schools as drought relief. Shamed and humiliated by the tons of yellow grain given them as food, secondary school students in Serowe rioted, burning the headmaster’s car and destroying stockpiles of it. Only white maize is fit for human consumption; yellow is fed to animals.

So even the names we give to some regional or traditional foods can be an important way to engage in cultural communication and validate personal identity. Those who know and love certain foods by their most peculiar names are unwitting participants in a secret code and club that can reveal a lot about who they are and where they come from.

Regardless, these peculiar food monikers seem odd in a gourmet-obsessed age where the naming of food and the language used around food has come to be seen as serious business. Studies in sound symbolism and branding have shown how the very vowels used in a product name can persuade us that a particular item is larger or smaller, fatter or thinner, heavier or lighter for example. Dan Jurafsky’s book Language and Food describes how participants of a study comparing the hypothetical ice cream names “Frish” or “Frosh” rated “Frosh” smoother, creamier, and richer than “Frish.” Even though the words only differ in a single vowel sound—whether they have a back vowel (as in words like “frosh” or “large”) or front vowel (as in “frish” or “thin”)—this has an effect on how we might view a product. Get the name right and it can certainly have an impact on how much you can sell.

The way food is described tends to use a kind of culinary linguistics specifically designed to make dishes sound more delicious, high quality, and intriguing. Linguists Ann D. Zwicky and Arnold M. Zwicky explored the rhetorically tasty register of the American menu and found that the kind of language used to describe food can be as important as the actual dishes themselves.

While menus need to convey the right kind of information about a dish as concisely as possible, much like a news headline, this brevity is often flouted by surreptitious and persuasive advertising elements to entice customers. “Sautéed shrimp in garlic butter” is a good basic description, while “zesty garlic butter” might make a dish seem more delicious. “Tasty” adjectives such as “fresh” or “hot” can go a long way in persuading a customer to try something, while words that actually refer to taste, such as “bitter,” “salty” or “sour” are rarely used. Fanciful participles such as “married,” “kissed,” “accented,”and “hand-crafted” can often be part of a menu’s persuasive arsenal, suggesting high quality cooking or ingredients without really saying anything substantive about the dish.

Of course the language of haute cuisine in American English menus is decidedly French. Zwicky and Zwicky found that while English was fine for plain-spoken menus, restaurants that wanted to convey an air of foodie sophistication might translate their entire menus into French, even if the cuisine was something else, like Italian. Whether the French use was appropriate or grammatical for a restaurant’s clientele was immaterial and sometimes French words would be used by default without translation, such as the Italian “lumache” into French “escargots.” Even the mere appearance of “le” (considered by most Americans as the default French article) is apparently enough to imbue a menu with a seemingly high class air, such as “le crabmeat cocktail.” When French words aren’t available, French word order might even be used, such as Gourmet magazine’s curious custom of using the inverted French naming pattern for recipes, such as “Vegetable Melange Posvolsky” (a recipe submitted by reader Miriam Podiameni Posvolsky) and “Chicken Breasts with Port Sauce The Greenhouse” (a recipe by The Greenhouse restaurant).

So in le monde de la cuisine Americaine, anything translated into French (or barring that, vaguely European) is automatically sophisticated and excitingly mysterious. The names don’t even have to be explained. This means that if you come across an intriguingly fancy French dessert such as “pets de nonne,” don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything like “nun’s farts.“ As for the Italian pasta “strozzapreti,” take and eat, no priests were strangled during the making of it. Probably.

Considering the importance of culinary linguistics in making food sound tasty or elegant, it’s interesting that so many whimsically named regional foods focus instead on telling a story that often sounds neither delicious nor sophisticated. How do such odd names stick around in our food lexicon? Strangely named foods are really doing the same thing as mystery French indiscriminately applied to menus. It’s all a kind of language play, but with a different symbolic function. French described dishes are evocative of high quality cuisine, reflective of social class. Meanwhile names that are silly, fun, lower class or even disgusting are ultimately very memorable, and can evoke a childlike comfort in food. These more humble regional dishes can inspire a longstanding affection and nostalgia—all good motivations for celebrating a traditional food.

The post Putting Words in your Mouth: The Whimsical Language of Food appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Allow me to introduce Mr Plornishmaroontigoonter. Lord Podsnap, Count Smorltork, and Sir Clupkins Clogwog. Not to mention the dowager Lady Snuphanuph. As for Serjeant Buzfuz, Miss Snevellicci, Mrs. Wrymug, and the Porkenhams… who the dickens are all these people? Why do they have such weird names?

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

They are the best of names, they are the worst of names, from an age of onomastic wisdom and hypocoristic foolishness, an epoch of… well you get the picture. You may recognize this raggle-taggle cast of minor characters, in all their rich variety, as stemming from the fevered imaginings of one Charles Dickens.

Yes, Charles Dickens: the former child factory worker, law clerk, social justice activist, wannabe actor and famed (though not always appreciated) author of some very long novels from a more verbose Victorian age. Also, Charles Dickens: linguistic innovator.

Scholars and critics have noted that Dickens wrote with an ebullient linguistic flair and not just because he used quite a lot of words. He’s been described as a “professor of slang,” in the way he depicts regional accents and idiolects, for one thing. Though eye dialect has often been accused of being a kind of linguistic prejudice, by separating the characters who use substandard speech from the norm, judicious use of it can flesh out a diversity of characters from different social backgrounds, sometimes serving as a way to highlight poverty, class issues, or social injustice. Given his impoverished childhood, these were all things Dickens was keen to represent in his works. Even the lowliest, most fleeting minor character in a Dickens novel, regardless of wealth or education, can have an individual personality and humanity… and it’s interesting how Dickens expertly wields language to do this, in even the smallest degree.

Of course, some may consider the prose stylings of Charles Dickens a bit overwrought and irrelevant to contemporary life. (If you believe this “scientific evaluation,” he writes no better than the dark and stormy posturings of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, because statistics never lie.) If you’re not a huge fan, you might say that Charles Dickens gives you the creeps… and you would be right, because he was the first to coin the expression, in David Copperfield (1849): “She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps.'” The truth is, Dickens was something of a linguistic revolutionary in his day and his influence on the English language can still be seen today. Other common expressions we use today, such as to “clap eyes” on someone, “butter-fingers,” “slow-coach,” and even “fairy story” were all things Dickens said first.

But Dickens’ linguistic creativity is not just about how he used language in his prose, not just about how he depicted dialects or slang, and certainly not just about how many new expressions he coined. The thing about his works that most readers notice is this: Charles Dickens was a past master in the creative naming of his characters.

Of course, the characters in his works are often so unique and well drawn that their names enter the language, as in “scrooge,” the British slang term for umbrella “gamp,” or the once popular slang term “podsnappery.” But there’s even more to these colorful character names. They aren’t just unusual for the sake of it. Remarkably, it’s Dickens’ inventive construction of the names themselves that can round out the story of a character’s motivations, nature or background. As readers we can have certain psychological responses to names we’ve never heard before, along with the sound symbolism and allusions we find in some product names.

Even for minor characters who are but briefly mentioned, in the Dickensian world, knowing just their names is sometimes enough to know the most important features about them. What might you think of a Mr. Murdstone or a Mr. Pecksniff if you knew nothing else about them? Dickens was adept at linguistically manipulating a name in different memorable ways to persuade readers in one direction or another and many scholars have attempted to study the whys and wherefores of how he manages this. Elizabeth Hope Gordon, in a study of naming practices in the works of Dickens, notes “it is not an easy matter to say just why these names should seem to be so appropriate, but in some instances the sound of the word produces an impression similar to that caused by the character itself, and in others there is an inexplicable ‘eternal fitness’ that baffles investigation.”

The linguistic richness of character names we find in Dickens is something we’ll probably never see the like of again in literature and there’s a good reason for that. Gordon points out that in a more contemporary literary world we tend to value realism and the commonplace in narrative and this has an impact on the ways characters are named. The naming of characters has to now seem neutral or subtle, unaffected by an “obsolete” fondness for weird, grotesque, or descriptive names that can pass a clue onto the reader, even indirectly, about the nature of the character. Charles Dickens, with his obdurate penchant for whimsical names, was perhaps lucky to write in a kind of golden age of onomastics and he certainly took that to heart. His friend and biographer John Forster wrote that Dickens always kept a running list of possible names suitable for all sorts of characters, by borrowing names he came across or changing base words to suit the occasion, according to de Laski in “The Psychological Attitude of Charles Dickens toward Surnames.” Dickens practically played word ladder with many of his invented names until he was satisfied that they were just right, with Martin Chuzzlewit going through iterations like Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, Chuzzlewig before finally landing on the Chuzzlewit we all know and love.

In earlier or more overtly tongue-in-cheek writings Dickens used (sometimes clumsily) directly descriptive names or puns on names, at times modified, such as “Lord Mutanhed” or the scientific gentlemen Messrs. Pessel and Mortair. Scholars show how eventually Dickens not only used known names, directly descriptive names, or names that were spelled differently, as other writers do, but employed a host of sophisticated linguistic techniques to invent expressive character names. Dickens, in designing his unique names, mixed and matched, for example, obsolete, yet still meaningful words and their vaguely suggestive senses. He phonetically manipulated sounds and spelling variants, merging some words with other allusions into portmanteaus. He used onomatopoeia and sound symbolism with seemingly regular surname suffixes to form the final words that we would all recognize as a believable name, and a believable character.

In a name like “Murdstone” we see a figuratively descriptive portmanteau (murder + stone), giving the right kind of villainous sense to the character. The not quite wealthy Sophronia Akershem (acre + sham) shows exactly how much she might be worth in her surname, which is made seemingly legitimate with the common surname suffix –ham/-hem. The repulsive physician Haggage joins together heavy allusions like hag, baggage, haggard. Poor but honest Bob Cratchit has to “scratch” out a living, by dropping the sibilant “s,” which Gordon finds expressive of weakness: “Sleary, the owner of the circus, whose muddled head is never sober and never quite drunk, has in his name the objectionable sl sound that occurs in slush and sleazy, and the elements of leer, blear, bleary.” Dickens often used a kind of “baby” phonetics to soften names or make them more subtle, such as in the names Mudge (Smudge), Tommy Traddles (Straddles) or the names Toundling (Foundling) and Tatkin (Catkin).

It’s surprising how much even a slightly altered name can playfully flesh out a character with an expressive backstory by using vague figurative allusions to similar words and their senses. Though more neutral naming styles used in contemporary literature are all well and good for the depiction of realism, this change in the literary fashion of names means that writers have largely lost access to a richer linguistic symbolism of names, whether subtle and unsubtle, successful or unsuccessful, that we so often find in the characters that thrive in the world of Charles Dickens. What’s in a name? Sometimes, for a minor character, it’s everything.

The post Charles Dickens and the Linguistic Art of the Minor Character appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Commencement! Is it really the beginning of the end of “these so-called best years” of your life as Toni Morrison once put it? Commencement (known as graduation in other parts of the world) is a modern rite of passage, marking that moment when fresh-faced graduates, who have spent four mostly blameless years pulling all-nighters, are finally thrust out into the adult world to seek their fortune. But before this happens, they get advice, lots and lots of advice, from those venerable members of society who have come before them.

The season of commencement speeches has developed something of a following over the last few decades. Speeches in all their forms are shared and quoted, and not just among nerdy appreciators of the speech genre. Commencement speeches have inspired, motivated and captivated many, for their words of wisdom, words of experience, of failures and successes, funny words, poignant words, words to live and grow by. Just what makes the words found in commencement speeches so wonderful and life-affirming for so many?

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Researcher Markella B. Rutherford has a theory. Over the last hundred years, as our sense of individualism has grown and prospered, the idea of moral choice and the public understanding of morality has also become highly individualistic. While this can certainly be celebrated for freeing many from the more restrictive social rules of the past, it also seems to have left a kind of modern malaise, an age of anxiety in its wake. To put it simply, without an “objective” moral authority or rigid social structure, how can we be certain we’re doing the right thing?

In “Authority, Autonomy, and Ambivalence: Moral Choice in Twentieth-Century Commencement Speeches”, Rutherford examines how the rhetoric and language of commencement speeches have gradually developed a more subjective moral emphasis over time, coupled with a sense of unease, reflecting the cultural uncertainties in contemporary society. Rutherford finds the prevailing language is all about personal choice, not just moral choice, but personal, civic, career, spiritual, economic choices—even your choice of attitude and, for that matter, how to make choices. With great freedom, perhaps, comes quite a bit of confusion. Everything is up for debate, which may be a worthwhile road to take, but also a hard one.

If that doesn’t sound like fun, how would you have liked to attend this stirring 1923 commencement speech by R. A. Carter, at the aptly named Paine College?

Some one has well said: “Everywhere and at all times, the men who have had definite convictions upon the great issues, and have courageously chosen righteousness, are the men who have directed the course of nations.” Also, you must have the ability to go the route morally…. You must not think that you can select the Commandments which you will keep and reject those which you do not like. The moral code of mankind, crystallized into the Ten Commandments by Moses, is the result of the reasoned experience of men who lived ages before Moses. Observation and experience convinced thoughtful men long ages ago that it is harmful to the individual, as well as to the community, to lie, to steal, to kill, and to commit adultery…

(History does not record whether R. A. Carter developed a nervous tic from shaking his finger at the audience during the entirety of that speech but the probability is high).

Luckily, these days, commencement speeches are one way people can be inspired, and guided through the mire of daily life, by good (or at the very least famous) people. It’s become a big deal. Commencement was once just marked by simple student speeches. From the 1920s onwards they grew into much larger affairs as it became customary to invite honored keynote speakers. Notable speakers nowadays are not just the usual respectable business, political, and academic types. The stern admonishments of the past have given way to more “touchy-feely” sharing of life experiences, in language that people can relate to. Writers, actors, comedians, talk show hosts and even a few college dropouts now number among those whose speeches are most beloved.

So what do they have to tell us? Do these speakers, from such disparate backgrounds, have anything in common when it comes to giving advice to youth (or the confused at heart)? We decided to take a brief look at some of the most celebrated commencement speeches of the last fifteen years to see just how language is being used to inspire the next generation. Here’s what we found.

A chart of word frequencies by topic from ten major commencement speeches. (Mobile visitors may prefer to open this chart in a new tab.)

(The usual top ten commencement suspects, David Foster Wallace, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Stephen Colbert, Robert Krulwich, Bradley Whitford, J.K. Rowling, George Saunders, Conan O’Brien and Steve Jobs’ speeches participated in this linguistic experiment. As a word of caution, our cozy sample of ten speeches, no matter how inspiring, won’t be able to give us any definitive trends, but they will show us some of their broad commonalities and interesting tendencies).

So it appears the most frequently used words among our notable speakers are the riveting: “like,” “just,” “people,” “life,” “know”—which could almost be a kind of micro poem of general ambivalence. These speeches are like, just about people and life, you know? It so happens that terms that are more functional and less meaningful such as “like,” “don’t,” and “yes” are often discarded during text analysis because they do pop up in ordinary speech a lot, yet don’t really tell us what the text is about. As David Foster Wallace once said,

“There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.”

He probably wasn’t referring to boring function words, but a closer look at the linguistic trends in our chosen speeches tells a richer story. Even if seemingly banal words don’t tell us the what, they may tell us the how of how language is being used to motivate an audience.

Anecdotally speaking, our friend R. A. Carter might have said that in his day, strong prohibitions like “you must/you must not” were probably de rigueur for any morally upright commencement speech. In keeping with Rutherford’s findings, in our sample, “mustn’t” appears exactly zero times, while “must” pops up in statements like “you must be your own guide” (Bradley Whitford). In the meantime, the not dissimilar “don’t” crops up in speeches, not to warn or dictate moral behaviors, but to encourage: “Don’t lose faith… don’t settle.” (Toni Morrison).

An interesting trend is “like”, the most frequently occurring word in our sample. It is not, as you might imagine, used by older speechmakers, like, trying to be all cool with the youngsters. However “like” is often used in rhetorically rich similes, perhaps in an effort to get a new generation of listeners to feel, to relate and to understand their past experiences.

“Wisdom is like frequent–flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you’re trying to do something else.” (Barbara Kingsolver).

Check out the many colorful ways similes are used in a concordance of these commencement speeches expressions.

A tantalizing concordance of the uses of ‘like’ in our sample.

It’s clear that all of our speakers find them a useful and expressive way to tell stories. A word like “yes” may not tell us much about the specific issues that concern commencement speakers, but they certainly use that word a lot, reflecting the drive towards more positive personal choices.

Yes they can! How “yes” is used in commencement speeches.

Though all speeches have specific concerns, whether it be political, environmental or social justice issues, the language that they have in common are all things we grapple with daily. Consider how often these speeches address failure and of course, the ever-present love.

Failure, according to commencement speakers, is the best way to learn.

Commencement speeches on Love.

What we found from our little experiment is that commencement speeches seem to have a great deal in common in their language use, despite the strong individualism of their speakers. It’s interesting that, through simple topic modeling, we did find some intriguing subtopics that somewhat aligned through the speakers’ occupations and interests — talk show host comedians such as Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert amusingly aligned together, while the literary David Foster Wallace, George Saunders and Toni Morrison banded together into a writers’ club. JK Rowling and Steve Jobs, who both famously had their successes stemming from failure, rose to the top together. Politically and environmentally inclined Bradley Whitford and Barbara Kingsolver aligned together in pushing for community action.

A map of main topics from commencement speeches and how the speakers related to them and each other. Try dragging it around! (Mobile visitors may prefer to open this map in a new tab.)

Failure, success, happiness, regret, kindness, love, freedom, community—these are the words that today’s commencement speakers have in common, and even in these modern times of anxiety, loneliness and ambivalence, they’re not afraid to share.

Credits: Data visualizations are based on the wonderful works of Jim Vallandingham and Mike Bostok. Topic Modeling was hit on the head with a MALLET. CasualConc provided the concordances.

The post The Delightful Language of Commencement appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Let’s face it, there is no depth to which linguists will not sink in their hunt for the oddities of language. And that includes getting to the bottom of some of the weirdly versatile uses of strong, coarse, foul, no good, very bad language.

Now you may think that strong language is useful only when practicing to be a longshoreman in the comfort of your own home (or so I assume), but no. As it turns out not only is strong language a powerful invective that you may not wish to use in front of a policeman, in casual speech it’s often used in innovative and productive ways that have changed colloquial American English grammar—rather unexpectedly.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

We saw, for instance, how abso-bloody-lutely fan-freaking-tastic it could be to add a swear word infix to a humble polysyllabic like “Minne-fucking-sota,” in a process called “expletive infixation.” But while expletive infixation may be used for emphasis in casual speech, its usage is still fairly marked. It hasn’t made as insidious an infiltration into mainstream language as one other surprisingly popular curse word: ass. If you’re unconvinced about the grammatical versatility of “ass,” worry not, the linguists are on it!

Just to emphasize, yes, there are actual serious-ass, um, analyses about the word “ass.” (Well, perhaps not that serious). The Annals of Improbable Research recently popularized one such study—a short paper in Snippets Journal by linguist Daniel Siddiqi on the subject of “ass” as a modern intensifier, which gained some mainstream attention. I say “modern,” but in fact fancy-ass examples of the phenomenon have been noted as far back as the 1920s. Even before Siddiqi, there’s been abundant scholarship on the subject, including Diana Elgersma’s elegantly titled 1998 paper “Serious-ass morphology: The anal emphatic in English.”

So what is the so-called “ass” intensifier?

Once, we were all happy enough using rather dull words like “very” and “really” as intensifiers, as in “a very big car” or “a really crazy idea.” They’ve often become so (another intensifier) overused and diluted in effect that many complain bitterly about their use at all. In casual speech, using “-ass” as an intensifier suffix attached to an adjective, we might express the same ideas as the more colorful “a big-ass car” and “a crazy-ass idea.” Obviously, we’re not talking about actual posteriors being big or crazy, so the curse word has developed into a kind of functional linguistic morpheme, carrying a more effective and emphatic weight. Although this is still a marked form that you mostly find in colloquial contexts, it’s getting increasingly common for the “-ass” intensifier to make appearances in mainstream media, as the linguistic register of record becomes ever more casual, perhaps in an effort to become more approachable.

As a highly productive new grammatical construction, “-ass” also has rules and boundaries. For example Siddiqi notes that “-ass” doesn’t act like other suffixes that can attach to adjectives, such as those that form adverbs like “quickly.” So while you can say “I run quickly” you can’t say “I run quick-ass”* (* signifies an ungrammatical form) in the same way. It’s also hard for the intensifier construction to appear finally, so that while we can say “the night is very cold,” you usually can’t say things like “the night is cold-ass.“*

You can however, say, “she’s a bad-ass” and “his boss is a hard-ass,” in which “-ass” is a suffix that seems to be more of a nominalizer, meaning it turns the adjective into a noun. Elgersma posits that this is where the origin of common forms like “big-ass,” “dumb-ass,” “weird-ass,” “crazy-ass,” “lame-ass,” “sweet-ass” come from. But the suffix has now also become generally productive, able to be attached to many a short adjective, such as “that’s one tasty-ass donut” (hopefully never to be taken literally). Longer tri-syllabic adjectives can even be understood in these kinds of context, such as “that’s one reflective-ass mirror!” (That mirror has an exceedingly reflective surface).

You would never think that the word “ass” could give us so much in the way of grammatical delights, but wait, there’s more! Your ass might be interested in a marvelous new pronoun of colloquial American English: you guessed it, “ass.” Those who want to see this new pronoun in action should definitely check out the old BBC Fry and Laurie skit “My Ass”, which plays around with the versatility of “ass“:

“Stephen: Do you recall what it was I said to you the last time you were in here?

Hugh: Well sir. You told me to move my ass, and haul my ass, and not to sit on my ass, because if I did, you would personally rearrange my ass.”

John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden’s 2006 squib presents evidence that this kind of usage of “ass” (your ass, his/her ass, their asses etc.), the collective expressions which they refer to as “your ass,” constitutes a new and rather unusual “universal” pronoun for colloquial American English. Take this paraphrased example:

their asses sure know how to jam…

my ass handed the old chick her ten bucks…

his ass claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks to buy an ice cream sandwich…

I told his ass I needed the fuckin’ money.

Again, none of this action is literally being done by any actual bottoms—instead the construction “possessive pronoun” + “ass” is standing in for a pronoun of a most peculiar kind. It’s a pronominal construction that can overlap many types of pronouns that, like Clark Kent and Superman, are usually are never seen in the same place at the same time. That means in the contexts where you find subjects such as “he/she/they” you won’t find non-reflexive objects such as “him/her/them,” where you won’t find reflexive objects such as “himself/herself/themselves.” Except, you find “your ass” everywhere:

a. As a direct object (reflexive)

But most people do believe OJ bought his ass out of jailtime.

But most people do believe OJ bought himself out of jailtime.

But most people do believe OJ bought him* out of jailtime.

(i.e. You can replace “his ass” with himself, but not “him,” otherwise it doesn’t have the same meaning)

b. As a direct object (nonreflexive)

First Newton, Alexander, and Moore make an ass out of Pangborn. The more he whined about it, the more they nailed his ass.

First Newton, Alexander, and Moore make an ass out of Pangborn. The more he whined about it, the more they nailed him.

First Newton, Alexander, and Moore make an ass out of Pangborn. The more he whined about it, the more they nailed himself.*

c. As a subject (nonreflexive)

His ass claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks …

He claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks …

Himself* claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks …

(Modified examples from John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. Interested language nerds are encouraged to click through to the John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden paper, in which further proofs and examples of “your ass” as a universal pronoun are presented in dizzying detail).

“Your ass” therefore has some interesting grammatical things to reveal about language, because if it is indeed a “universal” pronoun, it’s a pronoun that isn’t supposed to behave in quite this way according to many leading syntactic theories.

Though to many, the radical inventiveness of some strong language constructions can seem butt-ugly (to use another Elgersma emphatic), there is something obviously compelling for many about the way it extends the grammatical uses of colloquial language—functions that we may not even be able to express commonly. There’s perhaps a reason these expressions have become so popular and widely used, encroaching on more mainstream language. Consider that most speakers would no longer even associate “ass” expressions with the literal meaning anymore. Consider that, like many other linguistic innovations, they can add a color and richness to expressions that would be blander with regular emphatics or pronouns. Lastly, consider the playful weirdness of the idea that from strong, once taboo language, it seems actual grammatical functions are emerging. Now that’s a crazy-ass thought.

The post In Which We Get to the Bottom of Some Crazy-Ass Language appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

If you’re lost, all you need to navigate is to look up at the night sky. Look for Polaris, the North Star. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. The constellations were identified long ago by northern astronomers and their names and meanings made famous through story. But for those of us in the southern hemisphere, it’s a different story, a different world, yet with the same map. For one thing the night sky in the southern hemisphere is a bright mess of stars, from the Milky Way and other galaxies, seemingly impossible to pick apart. For another, the constellations sort of appear upside down, if they appear at all (good luck trying to find the Big Dipper).

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Having a sense where you are isn’t just a matter of knowing the stars. And relying on old maps and old names to describe a different view of the world isn’t just for astronomers. There’s a curious parallel, where linguistics, the environment, and culture intersect: consider the toponym or the place name. Toponymy is a little-studied branch of linguistics which nevertheless holds a lot of the answers to how we situate ourselves in the world—where are we, and how do we tell others what we have seen here? It’s all in the history of the place name. Indeed, without the stars, whimsical linguists might be able to navigate their way around by place name, up hill and down dale, as long as they understand its etymology. But what happens when the name comes from another place, or from a borrowed language, with no bearing on the new landscape?

Most of you are aware that place names often describe topographical features that were historically most prominent to a community, such as mountains (Mont-réal), rivers/streams (Cats-kill), valleys (Croy-don), fields (Shef-field), and farms (Birming-ham). These names were once meaningful and were constructed to be useful and informative. Over time, their meanings can become obscure as the social memory fades. They still, however, retain an important history we can absorb. In names like “Gatwick” (goat + farm), “Keswick” (cheese + farm), “Warwick” (weir/dam + farm) we might start to recognize repeatable patterns in naming. Though there may be no goats or farms left under the flight path at Gatwick Airport for instance, the name gives us a certain feeling for the language of that place, a connection to the environment, even if the component meanings have now become opaque.

Lisa Radding and John Western point out that even if over time a name has lost its original meaning, we often try to understand and connect to a place by developing folk etymologies and histories about it. For instance, many might intuitively believe that buffalos once roamed Western New York, for which the city Buffalo must have been named. But apparently “Buffalo” is actually a corruption of the French “Beau Fleuve” (a fine river), possibly referring to the Niagara.

Why is this important, to have a place name with a sense of history and meaning? Thomas F. Thornton believes “as linguistic artifacts […], place names tell us something not only about the structure and content of the physical environment itself but also […] toponyms, both by themselves and in the context of narratives, songs, and everyday speech, provide valuable insights into the ways humans experience the world.” Even when we don’t know the language, we can derive certain ideas from the landscape we see around us and the old place names still in use. Consider tri-state names of native American origin, such as Minisink, Neversink, Navesink, Musquapsink, or a group like Netcong, Hopatcong, Musconetcong, Pohatcong, Lopatcong, etc. If you know the region, you’ll absorb the idea that suffixes -sink and -cong might have something to do with place or land (there’s still some dispute about what they refer to), and that these are unique to that part of the country.

When people are disconnected from their places, we lose a lot more than just a name. We lose an understanding of what that community finds important. To modern minds, a large concept such as a mountain or a country might seem fairly obvious to mark with a name, but Thomas Waterman, a prominent anthropologist working on Native American place names in the 1920s, pointed out that “a special name will often be given to a rock no larger than a kitchen table while, on the other hand, what we consider the large and important features of a region’s geography have no names at all.” The Yuroks in California provided Waterman with twelve places names on the slopes of a mountain for example, but no name for the mountain itself. Canadians, likewise, delight in the popular story that explorer Jacques Cartier apparently waved his hand around vaguely, asking what the country was called, and the Iroquois people helpfully obliged by telling him “kanata” (a village), which became the modern day Canada.

For most explorers and pioneers, however, it seems native place names were nothing more than a strange and unfamiliar language. After many months of travel, new places were often started with a borrowed history, named for nostalgia, in honor of places they had left, or even in some cases, fled. In the case of Portland, Oregon, the two founders, Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine and Asa Lovejoy of Boston, Massachusetts both desperately wanted the hometown advantage in naming the new town. Pettygrove insisted on Portland and Lovejoy on Boston. (They weren’t very inventive). After flipping a coin, now known as the Portland Penny, best out of three, Boston lost and Portland (Maine) won (’twas ever thus). So now the weird new Portland is arguably more well-known at large, having made a unique story for itself, while old Portland was Portland before it was cool. Everyone’s happy except perhaps for the many other Portlands out there in the United States alone, who never get any attention.

At least there’s an interesting story behind it. For many other towns and developments, sometimes homesickness or nostalgia have nothing to do with it. The modern practice of place naming has in some ways completely severed the sense of place and belonging from the name. Toponyms from another place, such as Europe, were often imported into a new area, replacing a native place name, with its strong links to culture, history, language and the environment, sometimes for no other reason than fashion. Names, like Portland or more famously Springfield (there’s a Springfield in every state in America supposedly), are used over and over and it’s up to its inhabitants to build up the unique sense of place over time.

Said Waterman:

The way we have of ignoring the Indian place names and plastering on the map such atrocities as Brownsville (English and French), Hydaburg (American Indian and German) and silly names like Cloverdale and Bella Vista, from novels, mythology, poetry and geography of the Old World and the New is to be deplored.

In fact, while traveling in Florida recently I had the slightly odd experience of touring one bleak new suburban development after another, in which the empty streets had street names with no one around to use them, no homes, no life. It was explained that the roads were probably all named in one fell swoop by the property developer, after family members, investors, passersby, and possibly the developer’s dentist’s favorite cat. It’s not hard to see why, even as these developments might gradually fill up with families, they may still seem soulless, ephemeral, and interchangeable with other bland subdivisions in other parts of the country. All for a lack of history and a connection of language to the land.

*****

Interested in more armchair tourism? Read “Around the World in 13 Reviews,” from our friends at Public Books.

The post How to Navigate by Nostalgia: The Linguistics of Place Names appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

“Sea of Dudes” is my next band name.

Obviously that would be any reasonable linguist’s response to a title such as this recent one from Bloomberg: “Artificial Intelligence Has a ‘Sea of Dudes’ Problem.” But what makes “Sea of Dudes” a better band name than, say, “Artificial Intelligence?”

We’ve seen how important it can be to name places meaningfully and how, in a way, it’s become a lost art. Of course there’s a hidden art to naming many things of cultural interest, and there are shifts to keep in mind, such as the changing fashion in people’s names from different eras, the names of status items such as cars, even startup company names… and yes, also band names.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

“My next band name” has become a meme for a kind of tangential joyfulness in identifying the weird and wonderful phrasings in language… that can also double as your next band name. Consider such gems as “French Toast Emergency,” “The Thanksgiving Uncles,” “Librarians in Uproar,” or “Giraffe Aristocracy,” next band name submissions found on Reddit or the obligatory tumblr hosted by sci-fi author John Scalzi. Whether you like them as effective band names or not (some of them seem like they were actually generated by artificial intelligence), most people will get the joke—there’s something unusual, compelling or eye-catching about each of these expressions. They’re unexpected words to find together, they make you sit up and take notice.

There’s something else apart from this—a native speaker’s understanding of this subculture comes with a kind of social sixth sense about why phrases like these might make good band names. Compare the diverse mix of (real) band names like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Apples in Stereo, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, The The, and the almost unpronounceable !!! (Chk Chk Chk). The question is, with such a wide range of styles, how do we even know what makes a good band name?

For that matter, as Adrienne Lehrer has pointed out, in sentences like “John is hungry” vs “Fido is hungry” how do we know who we should probably give the dog food to? “John” and “Fido” are just arbitrary signs, but there’s something else that tells us one is likely to be human and one is likely to be a dog: the cultural context. That’s also a reason why Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue” got so hot under the collar about his name that he was ready to kill the man who gave it to him: “My name is Sue! How do you do? Now you’re gonna die!” (You see, the world of onomastics, or naming, can get pretty exciting).

The answer to the question of why certain combinations of words make good band names, surprisingly, is related to the fact that people don’t really know what words mean, according to linguist Mark Aronoff. Rather, we connect words and names—even names that we may never have come across before—that exist in the same semantic space, absorbing their recurring patterns. It tells us a lot about how we might form new members of that class.

Consider the peculiarities of the marketing of car names. Aronoff shows how names of cultural items like car names inhabit particular semantic spaces. How do we really know what a Chevrolet is or understand what kind of prestige it’s supposed to convey if we’ve never come across that name before? Is it a luxury car or a budget-friendly one? What about a Cadillac or Bel Air or a Fairlane? What’s interesting here is that if you’re familiar with the American car, you can only really understand the value of a particular model not from the name alone (since it may have no particular meaning when it launches as a product), but from the other cars in the same space and where they’re placed. Aronoff points out that a car’s name, which might start out as a luxury brand, eventually can be downgraded and devalued over time as new marketing names take over, usually at the top of the hierarchy and old, lower prestige names are shelved (later to be revitalized as classic cars perhaps, through the magic of nostalgia).

So, that’s kind of odd if you think about it. Rather than getting the meaning through a single word, as we commonly think we do, we may need a class of words to define the true appropriateness of certain names. And these words and expressions can just come randomly from other sources, just as new parents, independently of each other, shift trends and fashions in baby names across eras as older, more common names are devalued.

When we think of classes of things that are rooted in nature, such as animal species, it’s easier (though still not quite black and white) to say that something belongs to a particular group. For example, some might have problems identifying a penguin as a bird, but would have fewer problems identifying, say, a sparrow as one. So there’s a sense in which each class has a stereotypical or prototypical form, as well as edge cases that don’t always fit so neatly into the paradigm—but at least they have a scientific classification to fall back on.

Not even We Are Scientists have come up with a workable scientific classification for band names. When it comes to cultural classes, we can’t depend on science, even though there is a still a system in place. We actually depend on others within the same linguistic and subcultural group to define the edges of meaning for us. So when we make up names for things, we’ll follow certain patterns and trends so that the name we come up with is appropriate and can be understood to be belonging to that class. Adrienne Lehrer follows on from Aronoff’s work and shows that car names do often follow the same patterns, such as being named after (speedy) animals (Impala, Jaguar, Mustang, Rabbit), places (Malibu, Bel Air, Torino, Monte Carlo), and astronomy (Mercury, Galaxie, Taurus, Nova) for example.

Meanwhile, back in the green room, Lehrer shows that there’s a variety of conventions for rock band names that can be used—as long as it’s unconventional. She finds, for example, that the unconventionality of rock n’ roll life is often expressed through unusual syntax or syntactic violations (e.g. The Who or Faster Pussycat or even !!! as we’ve seen), as well as language play and puns. In fact, band names can be linguistically very inventive and innovative, more so than other invented names for things like products or organizations, and are much less hemmed in by conventional constraints.

At the same time, there are still strong styles, particularly in sub-genres of music. Short names beginning with “The” and a common noun is an obvious pattern from the mid-twentieth century (“The Beatles,” “The Monkees,” “The Animals,” “The Kinks”)  that’s seen a revival in recent times. Lehrer focuses on the heavy metal genre as one of the classes with more obvious linguistic patterns… usually involving death (as I said, onomastics is terribly exciting, if not downright injurious to your health). Death (Megadeth, Slayer) of course, and other perils, such as dangerous animals (King Cobra, White Snake), weapons (Guns n’ Roses, Iron Maiden), drugs and unhealthy substances (Poison), and, er, religion (Black Sabbath, Leviticus).

In fact, the top overused words in the heavy metal genre, according to this list, which spawned the inevitable heavy metal band name generator are death, black, dark, blood, dead, hell, war, necro, soul, night, fall, hate, god, evil, kill. So it’s clear to see heavy metal bands have a lot on their minds. But more than just a bunch of gloomy words (which I’m claiming now as my next heavy metal band name), the patterns that exist in this genre and others tell us how we can recognize new band names as appropriately heavy metal, or indie rock, or hip hop, or the like. Although I suppose band names can sometimes draw meaning from their component words (Vampire Weekend, does it really do what it says on the tin?), it’s ultimately the existence of the other, similarly patterned names in the same semantic field that gives us a truer sense of whether your next band name is a good one. For names that might otherwise be meaningless, it makes all the difference to be guided by (other) voices.

The post The Linguistics of My Next Band Name appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

“You have hissed all my mystery lectures. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted a whole worm. You will leave by the next town drain.”

Perhaps no Oxford don has been quite so celebrated for his error-prone speech than the absent-minded Reverend William A. Spooner, who lent his name to the often comical practice of switching around the speech sounds of different words. (“You have missed all my history lectures. I saw you light a fire in the back quad; in fact, you have wasted a whole term. You will leave by the next down train.”). Whether Reverend Spooner ever said those actual words or not, it’s true that spoonerisms and other such slips of the tongue can reveal some pretty interesting things about language—how we associate and map words and sounds in our brains.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

We’re often told we should use language “correctly” but in fact performance errors are a natural part of speaking language. Everyone makes speech errors, and not just while attempting tongue twisters. From spoonerisms (“Can I sew you to another sheet?”) to malapropisms (“No one is the suppository of all wisdom”)  to portmanteaus (“And you quit footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich, we’re paying for some of their squirmishes that have been going on for centuries.“), unintentional speech errors, as we’ve seen, are often accidentally humorous. The same innovative linguistic processes can be used to develop neologisms to great effect, not just for comedic purposes like punning but for attention-grabbing memorability in naming. From Brexit to Brangelina, whether you stick a spork in the tofurkey just before your Jazzercise class… or neither of these things, it’s curious how these Frankensteinian word forms, accidental or deliberate, still maintain a palpable sense of their own original identity, even as they’ve been broken apart and cobbled back together into monstrous new creatures.

Linguist Victoria A. Fromkin, an enthusiastic collector of speech errors, shows how these twists and turns of the tongue reveal the real underlying structures of language. Speech error data can tell us a lot about how we mentally anticipate the discrete speech sound segments that we inadvertently swap around and substitute for others as we stumble over our words. Speech errors occur for all sorts of sound structures from substitution (“cuff of coffee”), omission (“fresh clear water” -> “flesh queer water“), perseverance of the same sound (“irrepraceable”) to metathesis (transposing elements such as in the classic spoonerism) (“ad hoc” -> “odd hack“). This can also happen with full syllables, not just single consonants or vowels (“stress and pitch” -> “piss and stretch“). Mentally, we’re already prepared with a map of the right sounds to produce, so that sometimes they influence each other during the speech performance.

Then there’s the question of what speech errors reveal about how we organize our mental lexicon. David Fay and Anne Cutler look at malapropisms and the related semantic errors we often make in speech. Malapropisms of course are so named from Mrs Malaprop (from the French mal à propos, or inappropriately), a character from Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, who was wont to use wrong words that happened to sound like the ones she wanted to use (“He is the very pine-apple of politeness!” -> pinnacle). Though it’s often viewed as stemming from ignorance, especially when politicians are making these amusing gaffes, it’s a fairly common speech error that can occur even if the speaker knows full well what the meanings of both the words are. In a similar way, we may naturally make other semantic speech errors such as anticipating what we mean to say in our heads… and confusingly replacing it with its opposite. We may also replace the word with a related word (“Don’t burn your fingers“/”Don’t burn your toes“) or in an even more confusing operation replace the word with another word that sounds like a related word (heritage/legacy -> heresy). As Fay and Cutler show, we mentally recognize and associate similar features of words, in terms of phonetics, stress patterns, and even related syntactic and semantic features in our mental lexicon. The more features two words have in common, the more easily they can be malapropped.

It’s these kinds of natural speech processes that also allow us to be playful with language in the way we coin new words. In the case of the portmanteau word (as popularized by Lewis Carroll) or blend (as linguists would have it), it’s developed into a trend, with new portmanteaus of all kinds abounding in modern speech. In a portmanteau, parts of words are stitched together resulting in a lexical monster of a word. Margaret M. Bryant states that blends are definitely on the increase in English, particularly since the early 19th century, when this method of coining new words was relatively rare. Robert Withington points out that (at least by the 1930s), it was also fairly rare to use proper names in a portmanteau. Fast forward to present day and we’re up to our eyeballs in portmanteaus, both good and bad. It’s not uncommon to have novel blends like Brangelina (Brad + Angelina) and Brexit (Britain + Exit) being bandied about, sometimes even found in serious publications discussing serious news, which is unprecedented for the oft-comical neologism.

So there are a couple of interesting things to say about that. Now, instead of just regular words being pulled apart and then merged into an often unholy marriage (I’m just going to leave jorts and jeggings here), fans and social observers of celebrities may mark a (well-known) couple’s relationship by lexically joining them at the hip. And just like other speech errors, there’s a science to how these blends can be best stitched together. For example, why wouldn’t we refer to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as “Angelinad” or any number of possible permutations of bits of their names?

While blends have been increasingly used in many different areas, from the media, science, sport, politics to naming companies and products, many of these are now accepted as lexicalized, regular words. Who would even remember that “vitamin” once came from “vital” and “mineral“? In the same way we can still understand words and their meanings, even if they’ve undergone a kind of linguistic mutation process, the blends that work best still retain a memory of the parts of the words they’re composed of and bring those meanings to the neologism they’ve formed. One might say that Brexit was a socially successful branding exercise in this sense.

When they’re formed of names, those names have to be fairly well-known for the meaning of the word to be derived from their parts. At the same time, the two parts to the portmanteau have to be somewhat recognizable as those names, at least until the neologism becomes more widely known. There has to be an “instantaneous suggestion of its component parts”, as Withington puts it. In “Brangelina” the first syllable “Bran” has enough of a phonetic resemblance to “Brad” that fulfills this requirement, both in sound and in stress, and also happens to completely contain “Angelina.” The opposite rendering “Angelinad” does not have enough of a phonetic resemblance to “Brad” that it would be a failed blend. Consider other popular pairing portmanteau names such as Kimye (Kim + Kanye), where “Kimye” has enough of a phonetic and stress similarity to “Kanye” and also contains Kim, that it likewise works as a joint celebrity couple name.

Increasingly, blends are being used to draw two disparate suggestions into one concept. Though portmanteaus have been seen as comical, their increasingly widespread use shows they can also be an effective and innovative way to pair up two ideas succinctly, the reverse of speech errors like malapropisms and spoonerisms, with all their surreal whimsy. Not bad for a weird marriage of words, introduced by a slip of the tongue. At the very least, perhaps they’ll give us “a few laughs to break up the monogamy.”

The post The Monstrous Words Lurking in Your Language appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Surely you remember that infamous gentleman whale Mister Splashy Pants?

Championed by Greenpeace as a symbol of the whale resistance against hunting, he was cunningly named by popular vote in an internet poll. (And incidentally became a cautionary tale for those who unwittingly unleash the creative juices of the internet). Despite some grumbling from various quarters that the name wasn’t beautiful or serious enough, the popularity of the nickname was undeniable, and it stuck.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, the winner of another internet poll (this time for an intrepid polar research ship) was roundly rejected in favor of the more respectable RRS Sir David Attenborough.

The crowd favorite? The rather juvenile, if expressive, Boaty McBoatface. Denied for being too frivolous, apparently.

You might think these denizens of the sea have nothing more in common than their respective jumping of sharks (or at least of whales) when it comes to descriptive yet ridiculous nicknames. In fact they also reveal a few linguistic curiosities about the peculiar nicknaming meme seemingly obsessed with other people’s pants, faces, boots… and that’s just for starters.

Consider older slang terms involving pants, such as fancypants and smartypants, both of which apparently took off from 1939 onwards (though there have been similar constructions even in the 19th century). What’s so interesting about these pants? In answer to a Slate article about other similar recent ‘pants’ constructions such as Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Michael Showalter’s Mr. Funny Pants, Mark Liberman posits that the recent use of this may be a kind of extended cutesy baby talk, similar to aggressively positive nicknaming constructions with endings such as “-pie” (as in “sweetie-pie“) to “-poo” (“sweetie-poo”) and “-pants” (“sweetie-pants“).

Then there are other, less affectionate examples such as “Mr Cranky Pants” and “Miss Sulky Pants,” which apparently attribute feelings to pants, fancy or otherwise, that can’t possibly have them. Mr Cranky Face and Miss Sulky Face would perhaps make more sense, and indeed would probably be acceptable variants (if you ask your average fifth grader). These constructions seem fairly productive, so we can use all kinds of descriptors when making up these names, such as “Mr. Gloomy Pants” or “Ms JSTOR McJSTORface” (though that one’s a bit of a mouthful). So the word “pants,” like “face” in these constructions, seems to be a kind of part-for-whole stand-in for ourselves, and really, who are we if not our pants?

Liberman does question whether this uncouth commentary about other people’s pants (and by extension their faces) are really all that frequent anyway. But whether they are or not, it seems the popular response and engagement with these nicknames can’t be denied (even if names like Boaty McBoatface ultimately are). There’s something to them that apparently tickles our collective cultural funny bone.

What about related expressions such as “bossyboots” or the less common “smartyboots,” also known as “clever clogs” in some parts of the world? It seems that by extension, synonyms for pants and other references to parts of the body can often be slotted in, in just the same way. And does “smart-ass” have anything to do with the rather more clothed “smartypants“? We’d have to ask some clever trousers to find out, and they should probably have some kind of holier than thou title.

Yes, sir, Capt’n Tightpants!

“Capt’n Tightpants” and “Farmer McShootypants” and other such examples could band together to show that disrespectful honorifics (such as name titles) in this kind of meme aren’t just limited to the regular Mr/Miss/Mrs etc. Any kind of title can be used.

We can see that there are a few playful variants here, and some might argue they’re not all related, but here’s what they all have in common:

1. a descriptive word (such as “shooty”, “sulky”, “bossy”, “smarty”, etc.),
2. that’s sometimes reduplicated (“boaty (mc)boat(face)”) or with an additional related descriptor (“hooty (mc)owl(face)“),
3. with some kind of part of the body (clothed or unclothed) and variants thereof (“face,” “ass,” “pants,” “trousers,” “boots,” “clogs,” etc.),
4. together with a weird combination of optional naming conventions, such as the use of honorifics (“Captain”, “Sir”, “Mrs/Ms/Miss/Mr”) or a common surname prefix (such as “Mc–“).

So what could be going on here? It appears, quite a lot.

The titles we append to names, such as “Doctor,” “General,” “Professor,” etc. are part of honorific speech usually conferred as a sign of respect, but as Asif Agha points out, “Honorific speech is not used only for paying respect or conferring honor; it serves many other interactional agendas, such as control and domination, irony, innuendo, and masked aggression.” In this kind of naming construction, clearly honorifics are added in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek way.

“Mc-“, which has long been a popular, almost clichéd way to express something easily digestible, mass-marketed or even of low quality, takes in those meanings as well as the original surname prefix to suggest a faux family history. (Oh yes, the McBoatfaces, we know them well). All these elements convey a sense of, not just cute humor that can end up endearing an outlandish name to the public, but a healthy heaping of disrespect for the powers that be, or towards the thing or person named so descriptively.

How so? Perhaps it’s not just baby talk. The popularity of these kinds of descriptive names is evidence of a certain cultural fascination with a little known area of study: derogatory epithets by children. By using a kind of juvenile linguistics of naming, often very serious contexts can be humorously undercut by these expressively ridiculous nicknames for maximum rhetorical impact. This may be dismissed by some as immature, but it seems this trend is growing. (People, kids are getting into your language and innovating and influencing the way you refer to others). It’s interesting that the technical term for nicknaming, “hypocorism,” is taken from Ancient Greek forms that mean “to play the child” or to speak in the manner of children (ὑποκορίζομαι ‎(hupokorízomai, “I speak in the language of children”)).

The hypocoristic language of children can be at times sharp and even cruel, but ultimately is about conveying ridicule, good-natured or not. The types of schoolyard ridicule can be categorized as certain forms, but in particular, attacking the way people look, perhaps by the seat of their pants, is a common way for children to mock others. David J. Winslow describes childish insults based on appearance for instance, with epithets such as “Brown Butt,” “Bracey Face,” “Goggle Eyes,” “Bubble Lip,” which certainly echo other nicknames we’ve seen.

Furthermore, they’re descriptive in an interesting way, especially when conventions are flouted or expanded upon, such as with the common negative convention “big fat –” which is usually used in reference to appearance, e.g. “big fat bubble lip.” In the absence of a clever or unique way to insult, children may often draw on these simple negative phrasings, even if the description is blandly literal, and as Winslow points out, derogatory epithets may attack the central identity of a person, through their real name or perhaps how they see themselves. Consider the 1962 film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” in which an older Bette Davis yells the childish insult “All right, Blanche Hudson! Miss Big Fat Movie Star! Miss Rotten Stinking Actress!” It’s not such a great leap from this to adding parts of people’s appearance, such as their pants, in the complete insult, as in “So sue me, Mr. Big Fat Lawyer Pants!”

These popular nicknaming memes take linguistic elements from honorific discourse, common naming patterns, and the descriptive and epithetic conventions of children’s slang, all focused on humorously boiling down a person’s character to an essential element of mockery: their pants. (Or face, or other parts of their person and wardrobe, but mostly pants). It makes for some colorful and often inventive language, whether you’re a whale or a boat. Wouldn’t you say so, Readers McReadypants?

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The post The Linguistics of Other People’s Pants (and Other Dishonorific Epithets) appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

“Headless Body Found in Topless Bar” (New York Post)
“Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious” (The Sun)
“Nature Sends Her Egrets” (San Jose Mercury)
“Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” (NPR)

Consider the headline: a bunch of words carefully crafted to grab your attention when you least expect it… and then entice you to spread it far and wide, sometimes in spectacular viral fashion. And that’s just for starters. Before you even get to all the news that’s fit to print, the headline is already way ahead of you, with succinct and surprising spoilers—that can only really be understood if you click. By the time you read a headline, you may already have become incensed by provocative questions, been amused by puns and wordplay or have had your faith restored in humanity by viral clickbait.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

In an online age where attention spans are worn thin by information overload, these are remarkable feats for a bunch of words, yet headlines get little respect around here. From titillating tabloid titles to clickbait chicanery, headlines these days have often been derided as the empty calories of information, sensationalist trickery, “the art of exaggerating without actually lying” as Otto Friedrich put it.

Why do we even pay so much attention to headlines, when millions are made up and forgotten every day? Some are more memorable than others (particularly when clever wordplay is involved), yet good or bad, there is a common language of headlines. Visual placement aside, there’s a long history to how humble copy editors have developed the weird linguistic tricks that intrigue, shock, and amuse an otherwise cynical audience. What you’ll learn may surprise you (or not).

From tabloids to broadsheets, there’s definitely a dubious art to composing effective headlines, whether the story is a jubilant (“VE-Day – It’s All Over,” “Men Walk on the Moon“), rather grim (“Beatle John Lennon Slain,” “Hitler Dead“) or unusual (“Radio Fake Scares Nation“). In “Headlines: The Unappreciated Art,” Lynn Ludlow shows how the headline, considered an American invention, has moved from relatively benign or literal news captions (“The CONTINUATION of our weekly Newes, from the 24 of February to the 2 of March“, from one of the first London newspapers in 1625) to large lettered, urgent, staccato headlines such as “IMPORTANT. Assassination of President Lincoln.” (New York Herald, 1865).

By the end of the 19th century, editors had started playing around with the language of headlines, switching over to using the present tense in headlines, even for events past, and promoting verbs, making action seem more immediate and palpable. A headline like “FIRES GEN. M’ARTHUR,” (Chicago Tribune, 1951) fires on both of these cylinders, making the verb more prominent by removing the guy doing the firing altogether (a no name, no doubt), and making the action happen right NOW, as you’re reading it. Hurry and read, before the action ends!

Art form or not, short and sweet titles are often hard to figure out. Take a confusing example like “Dead Baby Names Racket,” which could be read a few ways, one much odder than the other (though who are we to question what dead babies like to name in their spare time?). It holds your attention because you read… and then have to reread. Short form headlines assume a lot of reader knowledge (who is Beatle John Lennon for instance?) to be understood, placing readers even closer to the news. We can see that headlines certainly don’t use language the way we might expect but their weird telegraphic forms still seem to condense and convey all the necessary information to readers. Headlines are often better understood and appreciated once stories are read, yet their powers of attraction are very much hinged on readers being able to anticipate what the headlines are referring to and develop some kind of emotion with respect to a story they haven’t even read yet. Once readers are curious enough to be led down the garden path and click/read, the headlines have won. How do they do this?

Linguist Deborah Schaffer shows that in lieu of real news or a respectable reputation, tabloids often make liberal use of “headlinese” to sensationalize stories. This means using an expressive, “connotation-rich” vocabulary that is attention-grabbing and promotes curiosity and a strong emotional connection for the reader, unsurprisingly, similar to advertising language, since “the average newspaper is simply a business enterprise that sells news and uses that lure to sell advertising space” (Otto Friedrich). Words like “sex,” “scandal,” “sizzling,” and “weird” can be used to sell anything, even if they’re unlikely stories like “Surgeon, 70, Makes 11 Nurses Pregnant,” “Marie Osmond puts her 5-yr-old son to work—and church is outraged,” “Lonely UFO Aliens Are Stealing Our Pets,” and “Michael J. Fox Outrages Hotel Guests During His Bizarre Island Honeymoon.” Readers are brought closer to the news in tabloid journalism, given a personal interest, asked to feel sympathy for the “heartbroken” in “tragic” circumstances, who may often be people we know intimately, on a first name or nickname basis—such as celebrities, our dear friends: “Test-Tube Baby for Burt & Loni: Friends Say It’s in the Works.”

You might also notice one weird trick (or several) from these tabloid headlines, moving to longer, conversational sentences that often contain “pseudo-quotes,” and emphasizing emotion and curiosity, that have been picked up by another type of headline.

Enter clickbait, the scourge of the internet. No one likes clickbait, and for good reason, but it’s surprisingly effective at generating viral interest, fast, which is exactly what news publications like. You’ll be outraged at the five or six different ways clickbait actually resembles regular headlines, and vice versa, and it will change everything. Until it doesn’t.

Because of its propensity to generate clicks on poor quality, empty, or fake content, clickbait has been seen as a kind of headline spam, so much so that Facebook plans to save your clicks by detecting the clickbait patterns that outrage us, and banning it forever.

However, while clickbait can take certain obvious linguistic forms that quickly grow ineffective once the trick is known, it’s still constantly evolving in the ways it makes use of language to attract attention, so much so that it’s often hard to define what kinds of headlines count as clickbait headlines. Clickbait, popularized by Buzzfeed (which denied ever using it) and Upworthy (which apologized for it), is problematic because it’s seen as manipulative, promising sensationalized content that it doesn’t deliver on. The backlash against the most obvious kinds of clickbait patterns has been almost universal, with Buzzfeed confidently claiming that “clickbait stopped working around 2009” and everyone else agreeing that clickbait, like any other kind of obvious cheap trick to claim your attention to sell something, is annoying.

Meanwhile, it appears something must be working with the actual linguistics of clickbait, because more and more mainstream news publications have been observed using clickbait styles, such as NPR’s “The World’s Most Trafficked Mammal Is One You May Never Have Heard Of.” Readers do click on these headlines, and when they find real or satisfying information, they might even engage and share the news. When used on actual news content, it seems that clickbait headline conventions can be a powerful force for the news. At least until Facebook bans NPR and others who make use of these linguistic patterns, that if anything, appear to be part of the natural evolution of headlines.

So what is it about clickbait language that’s so special, given that it looks quite like the tabloid headlines of old? Clickbait headlines have a few different ways to grab your attention. Like tabloids, clickbait titles have become more conversational and less telegraphic, which promotes the human, emotional angle. Where a tabloid headline might reveal “…and church is outraged” or “Michael J Fox Outrages…“, in a clickbait headline the experiencer of emotions becomes us, which is as close to the news as you can get: “you won’t believe what happened next,” “…you may never have heard of,” “… will surprise you…” The news builds a relationship directly with the reader, by anticipating how we might feel or what we might know about a situation and giving us a personal stake in the story.

Clickbait exploits what’s known as the curiosity gap, with just enough information to anticipate what the story might be about, which entices readers to click on the link to find out more. According to a 2015 study by researchers Blom and Hansen, one of the ways this is done is very simply through forward referencing to lure in readers. For example when we use a pronoun like he or she, it usually refers to a noun that’s been mentioned before, such as John or Mary (Mary read a book. She liked it). But for successful clickbait headlines, it’s reversed to great rhetorical effect (She did it, she read a book). Forward referencing is a cataphoric concept that promotes the mysterious, in which pronouns and pointers are mentioned in advance, and we only find out later what they refer to, adding to the suspense through a simple act of language. One of the main ways clickbait does this is to refer to words like “this“: “This is what racism looks like. (It will shock you).” And we can only uncover the curious mystery of what “this” is and how “it” will shock you, by clicking through to the story.

What we’ve seen is that headlines, whether they cover the news or just pretend to, have evolved in their language use to engage readers in increasingly complex ways (even if they are sometimes frustrating). Clickbait, though much hated because it wastes readers’ time, is yet another development in the evolution of headlines. From breathlessly truncated descriptions of news events, to clever, memorable wordplay to a much more connotation-rich emotional language that teases out our human curiosities, headlines, far from just being a mere introduction to the news of the world, are a story in themselves.

The post How Does the Language of Headlines Work? The Answer May Surprise You. appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Arrival, the forthcoming sci-fi drama, is that rare bird: a Hollywood film featuring a linguist as the main character. Among a handful of examples, the other big blockbuster that might come to mind is the 90s cult favorite Stargate, in which James Spader plays a kind of linguist, when he’s not busy being an Egyptologist. This time around, Amy Adams is in the linguistic hotseat, as Dr Louise Banks, who’s “… at the top of everyone’s list when it comes to translations,” says Forest Whitaker’s Colonel Weber. Many people, even army colonels, are prone to misunderstanding what it is that linguists actually do, which is not really to know all the languages, (including alien ones), but that’s okay.

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Despite the sometimes sloppy Hollywood depiction of linguistics and language, it’s great to finally see a linguist protagonist in a context more exciting than an nearly empty auditorium of bored undergraduates (though apparently that also happens in the movie, as a hat tip to reality perhaps?).

Fast-paced alien drama aside, Arrival is actually based on Ted Chiang’s quiet, contemplative sci-fi novella The Story of Your Life, in which linguistics takes center stage. In particular, the ways spoken and written language diverge and change the way we look at the world is a core theme, the point of the story, and also provides the heartbreaking twist. (The story is well worth reading, if you haven’t done so yet, and not just because there may be spoilers below). The Story of Your Life’s thought-provoking narrative certainly brings up more questions about language than it resolves.

Xenolinguistic questions such as “how do we talk to aliens?” (without the assistance of a hand-wavy universal translator) is an obvious one in sci-fi stories such as this, and there are real world parallels in linguistic fieldwork with a monolingual population. Without a shared communication system (such as another language) or perhaps a shared understanding of the world (such as being human), would we be able to grasp the basics of an alien language, and would aliens be able to understand ours? These are all fascinating questions that, alas, will have to remain unanswered until some clever aliens manage to explain Fermi’s paradox.

But there are even simpler and subtler linguistic curiosities in this story that highlight some of the assumptions we make about our own human languages. Language is messy, as we know, and aliens are probably even messier, let alone their speech sounds. Just like in the movies, it would be so much easier if there was some kind of useful technology that would help us record and dissect real linguistic forms in all their regular, codified glory. Like, say, writing.

Written language develops into a powerful linguistic force in Chiang’s story, in unexpected ways. The aliens’ speech, a “spoken” language labelled Heptapod A, sounds “vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur.” Not the easiest speech to mimic. So Dr. Louise Banks, assuming the well-travelled, high-tech aliens, despite their many legs, must have a writing system, resorts to trying to figure out their written symbols in order to learn this language in a more regular, pen-to-paper form. She discovers, to her surprise, that the aliens have a kind of semasiographic writing system, known as Heptapod B, that is so different from its speech form that it constitutes another, completely separate language, unrelated to the aliens’ spoken language. It has no real words, instead, it uses a well thought out calligraphic assemblage of ideogram symbols along a preconceived line.

What’s more, without going down a rabbit hole of too many spoilers, in a slightly implausible but interesting take on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Louise Banks finds that developing fluency in Heptapod B actually alters the way she perceives the world, in an extreme, deterministic way. Essentially, simply by writing a sentence in this mysterious Heptapod B language, Louise learns how to conceptualize and view her own future in limited ways, and even sees how futile it is to escape from it, to devastating effect. In fact the only way to complete a Heptapod B sentence is to know exactly how it ends, and by extension, this means knowing what will happen.

So just how weird is this depiction of writing? It turns out, not actually that weird (well, apart from the aliens). Are written and spoken language really two different things, and when beginning your sentences in written language, do you have to kind of know the future already? Or at least the future of how the sentence will end?

In a way, the answer is yes.

Now, for many, writing doesn’t just represent language, writing is language. With such a common myth bandied about, it may not occur to us that it’s different from spoken language, which frequently has been seen as the inferior and error-prone version of language. Surprisingly, it’s only been since the 20th century that “natural” language in the form of speech, warts and all, was given its due as a legitimate area of study. Writing has long been considered the one true form of language; when people debate so-called prescriptive grammar rules that turn out to be style or spelling rules, it’s really about the written form of language. And yet, written language is an invented technology, a relatively young upstart compared to our capacity for spoken languages (which had evolved by about 100,000 BC). It arose in a few places independently, starting from around 3000 BC, from Sumerian cuneiform to Egyptian hieroglyphics to Mayan scripts and Chinese logograms.

So language didn’t start with writing. Although there have been plenty of strong, silent types throughout history, most people would have used language by speaking it, as many cultures do today who have an oral tradition instead of a writing system. However, language has definitely evolved with writing. Linguistic registers, contexts, genres, perhaps even complex sentence structures, have developed through the explosive use of written language.

So the kind of language we use when we write, and the kind we use when we speak, are not the same. Children at an early age, for example, tend to write very much as they would speak. It takes time and practice before they learn to write in a more verbose written style, with embedded subordinate clauses and more complex syntactic structures. There’s an argument for treating written language as another dialect of English, as James C. Stalker suggests. Both forms can use slightly different language and rules. Just comparing a transcript of speech to a purely written text reveals how sentences may often not be formally completed, thoughts backtracked, and how clauses are more sequential and less complex than they would be in a written version. Similarly, in a language like French, the spoken and written forms can be so syntactically different there can be literacy difficulties for even native speakers as they learn the written language. Many linguistic archaisms such as certain verb tenses that aren’t really used in spoken French remain alive and well in its written form.

Peter Elbow points out that speech tends to be more “phatic,” which means speakers say a lot more about interpersonal relationships between themselves and their listeners, and less about pure content and information, compared to written language. In speech, participants continually collaborate to give and receive cues about the changing speech context. Speech can be a stream of consciousness, with unfinished utterances, half-formed thoughts, and a healthy smattering of messy slang. You don’t have to know how a sentence will end before you start it. It clearly doesn’t matter how many errors, performance or grammar-wise, you introduce into speech, because speech is ephemeral, and once spoken, is gone.

Meanwhile, the written form is indelible, well-defined, and its careful commitment to information storage may be the reason why people tend to regard it highly—in itself, it is complete. It is readable by any audience, even without speech cues. Elbow suggests that while speech is inherently social, and changes according to social context and cues, writing is solitary, and applies to all contexts—all visual and vocal cues have to be in the text itself. He suggests “that the function of writing is to record what we have already decided—not to figure out whether we believe it. If we were speaking, we would be much more likely to speak the train of thought as it comes to mind even though we’re not sure of our final opinion—as a way of making up our minds.”

The conceit of Heptapod B is that in order to write a sentence, you have to know exactly what will happen in the sentence in order to compose it with the right meanings. Taken to an extreme, it alters your scope of the future as you see what lies ahead. It may seem trivial to point out, but when we write, we very often already know what has to be said, and what we intend to say in writing (even if we don’t exactly know the future). The sentence is already complete and composed mentally before it’s written. This is what the technology of writing has brought to human language.

Compare this to newer communication uses of the same technology, through texting and instant messaging on social media, where written language has become so immediate and synchronous that writing is no longer what we understand as writing. Instead, it’s possibly evolving into a new form of language—a kind of “textual speech,” that linguists like John McWhorter have called “fingered speech.” The unfinished streams of thought, the social and visual cue sharing and the ephemeral nature of the text are all indicators of speech… which happens to be written.

Writing is evolving from a system of marks and symbols that carefully record linguistic information to a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants stream of ephemeral yet indelible speech. Perhaps it’s not so far off to consider an alien language in which a written form has become its own, powerful language that changes how we view the world. Something similar can be said for language here on earth.

The post Is Writing a Technology or a Language? Let’s Ask Some Aliens appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Poor punctuation: all rules and no play. Countless style guides over the ages have prescribed the exacting rules for where to put your em-dashes, your en-dashes, your commas, your Oxford commas, your colons—and let’s not even talk about the semi-colon, which has been known to incite fury and debate in even the mildest of punctiliously-inclined folk. Is there anything else so heavily regulated, codified, and coddled as these dull chicken scratchings of written language? Just… follow the rules and no one gets hurt.

“People don’t know why they get so upset about language,” says linguist David Crystal, but for some reason, they do, especially if you appear to break a rule about punctuation. Linguists like Crystal and Gloria E. Jacobs have all heartily assured us that there’s really nothing to fear about innovative linguistic uses of punctuation in the internet age—it certainly doesn’t mean the end of literacy for the texting generation, quite the opposite in fact… but to no avail. The moral panic is real

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

For instance, you may have heard recently that recalcitrant texters (and the journalists describing them) have been leaving off periods at the end of their perfectly good sentences for some reason. A recent study has determined that text messages ending with the humble period can weirdly seem less sincere (compared to the exact same messages with periods on a handwritten note). For some, adding a period in online text might even signify anger, according to Ben Crair in the New Republic:

“The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce ‘I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.’ … ‘No.’ shuts down the conversation; ‘No … ’ allows it to continue.”

Ok. The neutrality of the period has up until now been undisputed in written language. It just marks the full stop of a sentence, nothing more, and yet… You really wouldn’t think the loss of a tiny dot would elicit such interest.

So it seems far from being a boring and remorseful assemblage of dots and dashes, “punctuation is not so barren a field for the study of human nature as the reader may think”, says E. L. Thorndike, in the 1949 paper “The Psychology of Punctuation.” We might think the rules for punctuation are set in stone, but plenty of writers of the past have monkeyed around with punctuation styles, with certain marks going in and out of fashion, depending on who you read (looking at you, H.G. Wells). Thorndike points out that “more than one tenth of the punctuation marks in the first folio Shakespeare (1623) and the first printing (1611) of the King James version of the Bible were colons. They now number about 1.5%” (in contemporary texts). Unlike the decline of the colon, that sneaky ellipsis “…” has gone from an unknown quantity to being peppered all over the place, where “:” and “—” fear to tread. (And it being 1949, all these marks were probably counted by hand, which just goes to show how passionate some people can get about punctuation marks).

For philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (as translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen):

“there is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats”

—and not without reason. Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses intended by an absent author. Punctuation, in a sense, reminds you that language is really spoken, even if it’s written. Punctuation marks started petrifying in their current places as writers and printers developed codes and customs for the more silent literary language meant to make you sound as though you’ve been to college (as Kurt Vonnegut might have it). So learning to put the right punctuation in the right place among all the written words thus becomes less about speech and cadence and more about a display of literacy and prestige. Punctuation became marks of good grammar. Which I guess is not a bad thing in a crowded paragraph if punctuation gives you order and clarity of meaning and thought.

So what’s a punctuation mark to do in a messaging world? Frankly, internet or online speech is much less classy than formal writing. The use of punctuation in texting, online chat, and instant messaging has certainly evolved quite rapidly, sometimes past recognition for some. So much so that according to linguist Lauren Squires, internet language has developed into another register of language—some might say another dialect, with its own evolving distinctive forms and social meanings, intentions, and subtextual negotiations. Consider linguistic innovations such as acronyms (the old standby “brb,” often pronounced as written), abbreviations (the already outd8ed “gr8” beloved by flip-phoners old and new), spelling variants that reflect the sound of speech and emphasis within the text (“sooo gooood”) and of course also (omg) punctuation!!!!! There’s a lot to say about punctuation and its strange life slash sometimes mysterious disappearance in the internet age.

So who “killed” the period… and why? Was it with the em-dash in the library or the ellipses in the drawing room? Inquiring minds want to know. After a perfectly blameless life calmly separating sentences from each other, how did it start making people sound angry in online speech? As we know, what we conventionally think of as proper writing has, nowadays, very little to do with how language is used digitally. Strict rules from style guides that apply easily to formal writing no longer apply to messages that are often half-formed, half-finished, Gertrude Stein-style, run-on sentences. Punctuation likewise has gone out to play, not just in the construction of emoticons but in a myriad of different rhetorical ways.

With the more speech-like IM, texts, tweets, punctuation is just getting back to its roots, as a way to convey prosodic and speech cues in the absence of sound and vision. Like gifs, emoticons, and emojis, punctuation is another way for the short messages of internet language to use its limited linguistic resources to convey emotion, nuance, and paralinguistic cues, changing it from a purely written form into a kind of breathless and fast moving textual speech that’s really closer to spoken language than written language. Consider also that in internet language, emojis and emoticons occupy more of a meta status in conveying emotional cues—an angry emoticon is probably not sincerely as angry as you think but the overt, ironic semblance of anger.

Now from very little text, and a handful of symbols, you can read so much subtext thanks to the way punctuation use has evolved to subtly signal real speaker intentions. Punctuation, surprisingly, helps people negotiate social relationships online. You can convey genuine annoyance through a simple dot, a developing convention that is also increasingly read as such by all those who receive the message. A period, so useful and subdued in differentiating sentences in a large block of text, seems unnecessarily final and loaded with abrupt meaning in a sparser short form, especially as each separate message is already relatively easy to read without requiring a period. As a result there are often attempts to soften it with the ever popular ellipses and em-dashes (which has a special prestige for lovelorn punctuation fanciers apparently) or made more enthusiastic and emphatic with exclamation marks!!! Some punctuation marks, it seems, are less angry and more cooperative than others.

But it’s not just about the demise of the period. Any nuanced deviation from the norms of internet language might raise a few eyebrows, especially with messages that are very short. The navigation of social relationships online can take some getting used to lest you offend someone with an errant punctuation mark. The loss of a question mark in an innocent question like “what time” or even an overly abbreviated short word, such as “h” for “hi” has been suggested as displaying a lack of care or showing annoyance, and with more and more of us using punctuation less and less in online language, there’s a lot to read into the context when a mark does appear… even if the punctuation mark is acting, in the end, as just a punctuation mark.

And as for who killed the period? Though the current fashion is to use ellipses and em-dashes in texts to soften the blow of a sentence’s end, there’s really only one culprit: the new line break. It’s kind of made the period’s function redundant in instant messages, at least for neutrally separating messages from each other. But as a growing rhetorical innovation to signal negativity, rumors of its demise are perhaps greatly exaggerated—the period won’t be going away any time soon…

The post The Strange Life of Punctuation! appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

I was in Paris recently, where a friend of mine had tried wheedling an obdurate French-French shopkeeper to stay open, asking whether the shop was “fermé ou fermé-fermé?” (“Closed or closed-closed (really closed)?”).

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

I’ll make the tuna salad, and you make the SALAD-salad
Is he French or FRENCH-French?
Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?
Oh, we’re not LIVING-TOGETHER-living-together.

So why are we bent on repeating ourselves so much? It’s thanks to the tip-top, super-duper, hocus-pocus magic of reduplication, a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always). For example in Pangasinan, an Austronesian language, partial reduplication is used to indicate the plural:

manók ‘chicken’    manómanók ‘chickens’

Out of 368 languages recorded on the World Atlas of Language Structures, only 55 have no “productive reduplication” (English among them), which means there are quite a lot of people repeating themselves in quite a lot of languages all over the world, to express grammatical concepts. It’s a thing.

English has no productive reduplication, apparently.

Reduplication is a fascinating morphological process in many languages but researchers tend to poo-poo willy-nilly the presence of reduplication in languages like English (and French), where it happens as a kind of wordplay, on the level of discourse, rather than in well-defined grammatical rules. Rules-schmules! It’s not just idle chit-chat, there’s actually lots of interest to be said about the the quirky reduplication processes in English.

In the salad-salad paper, the type of reduplication found in the English examples above is called “contrastive focus reduplication,” which is a bit of a mouthful, even before you’ve had any salad to speak of. Essentially, in each of these examples, which could involve nouns, adjectives, verbs and sometimes longer expressions, the phenomenon of reduplication is being used to contrast a concept (often emphatically so), with its more prototypical self. So obviously a tuna salad isn’t as “salad” a salad as a salad-salad (you know, the kind with green leaves and a vague sense of health waved over it). Indeed, this is the stereotypical version of salad we’d all have to share in our cultural memory in order to understand this kind of wordplay, no matter what you fancy in your salads.

Fancy, or Fancy-Fancy?

It’s not just the French-French—speakers of other languages might also engage in this repetitive linguistic tic. Well, apparently not the Germans, so often accused of strictly following the rules of efficiency, but in Spanish for example:

No es una CASA-casa.
‘This isn’t a real [sic] house’

and in Russian:

On zheltyj-zheltyj, a ne limonno-zheltyj.
It’s YELLOW-yellow, not lemon-yellow.

It’s also been noted in Persian; and apparently the Italians do ‘raddoppiamento’ all the time, among many other languages. So although this contrastive phenomenon may not be actually universal (thanks Germans!), it’s interesting to see that this one particular kind of reduplication is somewhat widespread cross-linguistically, even if it has been neglected by researchers as “theoretically awkward or irrelevant,” according to Shih-ping Wang.

Meanwhile, Wang rounds up previous work that demonstrates that although we’re taught to avoid repetition and reduplication as native learners of English, it may not be such bad thing. Repetition has often been thought of negatively, as bad style (presumably not just by editors, but by editor-editors). And yet, all human beings learn to use it from childhood, making it a universally significant phenomenon that’s worth noticing. For Deborah Tannen (as quoted by Wang), repetition ‘‘is the central linguistic meaning-making strategy, a limitless resource for individual creativity and interpersonal involvement.’’ Some have even proposed that “repetition is definitely the most salient feature of poetry” (a great example being Billy Collins’ After the Funeral, which contains several instances of contrastive reduplication).

So as a creative linguistic process, it won’t surprise you to know that reduplication takes other forms in English, not just contrastive reduplication, as Gomeshi et al. show. For example there’s baby talk or copy reduplication (“choo-choo“), multiple partial reduplication (“hap-hap-happy” as in some song lyrics), the somewhat productive deprecative reduplication (“table-schmable“), rhyme combinations (“super-duper“), ablaut reduplication in which internal vowels change (“wishy-washy“) and intensive reduplication (“You are sick-sick-sick!”). Though perhaps not productive in a straightforward grammatical way, some forms of reduplication can be creatively produced, where a meaning can generally be understood, such as with deprecative reduplication or contrastive reduplication. People come up with new reduplicated expressions all the time.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

In other cases, reduplication in English can introduce new meanings and phrases to the language which might be harder to figure out (the meaning of the rather figurative “wishy-washy” for example, can’t be fully derived from its component parts). Wang does point out that often there’s a close association between some types of reduplication, such as ablaut reduplication, and sound symbolism. This can often give us a teensy-weensy clue as to how we should receive the reduplicated expression.

Although reduplication processes in English have been mostly ignored by linguists in favor of languages that prefer to repeat themselves as a grammatical rule, Gomeshi et al. also show that, despite being considered a process of wordplay, it actually is bound by certain rules and isn’t just free form. For example, in intensive reduplication such as “You are sick sick sick!”, “Let’s get out there and win win win!“, “Prices just keep going up up up,” the reduplication has to appear three times, and would sound fairly odd if it appeared only twice, as in the badly-formed *”you are sick sick!” or the lacklustre *”let’s get out there and win win.”

Similarly there are rules for when contrastive reduplication can pay attention to inflectional morphology, as in the “editor-editors” example above, or in the sentence “In fact I barely talked to him. Not TALK-talked” (*talked-talked) or “Not vans like ours [i.e., minivans], but VAN-vans” (*vans-vans), where the past tense suffix or the plural suffix isn’t copied over as you might expect. (This may or may not have any parallels to what we do with productive noun-noun compounds, where the first word must be singular, e.g. a maker of hats is a hat-maker, not a *hats-maker and a catcher of rats is a rat-catcher, not a *rats-catcher.) At the same time contrastive reduplication in English can be a different beast to your regular reduplication, because in some other cases whole predicates, with verb and object in tow, can be copied over entirely, as in “Did you TALK-ABOUT-IT-talk-about-it, or did you just mention it?“, “Well, he didn’t GIVE-IT-TO-ME-give-it-to-me (he only lent it to me).”

So even if reduplication and repetition in English are more loosey-goosey (loosier-goosier?) than they are in other languages, what’s clear is these creative processes certainly add a lot of idiomatic, poetic, sound symbolic color to the way we talk to and interact with each other. And that bears repeating.

The post The Nitty-Gritty on Reduplication: So Good, You Have to Say it Twice. appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

In an election defined by insults, invective and name-calling, Donald Trump has become known for his language of hate. His latest controversy was, as we know:

“Such a nasty woman.”

Perhaps unexpectedly, it became a rallying cry for ladies of the nasty persuasion everywhere (a hallowed profession with a long and illustrious history) as Donald Trump’s debate-night contribution to his meandering collection of regrettable insults towards Hillary Clinton (among others, such as women in general, other minorities, veterans, small babies, random strangers etc.) has mostly resulted in a bunch of playful internet memes celebrating the strengths of nasty women instead of the more outraged reaction he was probably going for (thanks in part to Miss Janet Jackson, if you’re nasty).

Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.

Given the vitriol of this long election season, I suppose it’s always good to find a bit of lighthearted relief somewhere. Internet memes may spring unbidden when these types of comments seem so out of place or ridiculous that it’s all too easy to pick up, make fun of, playfully remix, repeat. Reclaiming negative terms can work towards diluting the original meaning as others embrace new senses that develop from memes. But memes and other fads can also die as quickly as they arise (as fans of planking could tell you).

So while Donald Trump’s bumbling invective certainly has a mean-spirited shock factor about it, making it easy to meme-ify, it’s also troubling to see how the crude concepts he draws upon when insulting others may actually reflect the underlying social biases that we all still have to deal with. That is to say, invective, especially the abusive language and slurs that are more successful in offending others, draws readily upon the very shared images, ideas, senses, stereotypes and cultural assumptions we’re conditioned to accept as normal and expected.

Men are expected to be strong and aggressive, women are expected to be docile and deferential, and so the language that men and women use, or have used against them, is often subtly biased along gender lines, even if we don’t overtly notice it. An insult essentially is language, overt or covert, that accuses you of not behaving as you ought. Slurs attempt to socialize and condition your behavior to fit the desired characteristics of a particular group, by analogy. Whether you’re a man or a woman (or belong to some other social group), pointing out that you don’t seem like one, or how one should be, can often seem like the worst kind of insult. This changes how we use language to describe women in particular, because male, as Robin Lakoff has pointed out, is considered the norm, thus a “lady doctor” marks a difference from a regular doctor (who is generically male).

Is it true that “nasty” is more likely to be applied to describe women than men? Is there anything in the meaning of the word “nasty” itself that’s inherently biased? Well not really, on the surface of it. The etymology of nasty is sadly shrouded in mystery, but 9 out of 10 linguists (probably) might go out on a limb here and agree that its meaning is still not all that nice. (Unlike nice, which has undergone a rollicking semantic transformation from multiple negative meanings such as ignorant, foolish, wanton, cowardly to something a bit, well, nicer). Nasty inanimate objects are usually dirty, nasty weather is fairly horrible, and when nasty is directed at people, it takes on a nuance of “morally filthy, indecent.” Them’s fighting words.

And yes, “nasty” in itself is not nice. But Deborah Tannen is one linguist who has noted that, like the word “bossy,” “nasty” is also becoming subtly gendered in the way it’s directed at women who aren’t exactly adhering to social expectations of deferential, non-threatening femininity. We might perceive an insult like a “nasty woman” very differently from “nasty man.” A nasty woman is doubly derogative, because the sense is not just about a person who happens to be mean, but also chastises women for not behaving how good women behave.

Perhaps no other presidential candidate in history has promoted hate speech so widely without any obvious consequences than Donald Trump. What does this say about the American public’s acceptance of abusive language and slurs towards others in public life, especially by those who hope to lead us? The volatile ups and downs of hate language during the 2016 election seem to have been legitimized by the upset win of Trump’s campaign. We know the words and language we use can have an effect, but it’s not just because a word has a clear negative meaning that it can be offensive. Insults are insulting because we might collectively agree as a speech group that they’re offensive, because they act to put people in their place, and castigate those who don’t quite fit. This isn’t exactly new. Laura Gowing in “Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London” quotes a nasty woman of yesteryear, Edith Parsons, who allegedly leaned out of her cellar door to deliver a lengthy, run-on insult to her neighbor Sicilia Thornton:

“thou art an whore an arrant whore a bitche yea worse than a bitche thou goest sawghting up and downe the towne after knaves and art such a whott tayled whore that neither one nor two nor ten nor twenty knaves will scarce serve the”

and was promptly sued for defamation of character, which just goes to show bitches get stuff done, one way or another. It also goes to show that the power of these gendered terms, even in earlier times, was considered so severe that you had just cause to sue to protect from accusations that you weren’t behaving as ladies ought. Words matter, and slurs very definitely have an impact on public life.

Bitches get stuff done.

“Bitch” is one of the more well-known slurs for women that’s partway through a reclamation effort that’s battling a long history of invective use against women. It still packs a fairly offensive punch, even when used by women towards other women (e.g. “she’s such a bitch” would usually be considered rather negative). Now your friendly dog breeder may think very differently of bitches, but as gendered, dehumanizing insults directed at women, the mental images we receive are quite different. Women may often be compared to animals as a derogatory class of terms, in a very different way to how men might be compared to animals. A man who’s referred to as a “dog” (as in “you old dog”) isn’t really being insulted at all, if he was, he might be called “a son of a bitch” instead, relating it back to women. Only women are “catty” (negative) while a man might be “a cool cat” (positive). In fact, researchers have long noted how the classes of derogatory terms for men and women have certain skewed characteristics and reveal quite a lot about how we socially build up gender, and then how we make each other maintain these gender characteristics through the nasty language of invective.

Deborah James’ 1998 revealing study of gender-linked derogatory terms for men and women collected contemporary abusive language for men and women from college students. The study shows some interesting trends in the way slurs are directed at men and women. There were far more male-directed derogatory terms collected than expected, yet if we look more in depth at the slurs collected for men, they’re often not comparable to the level of offensiveness or abuse as slurs directed at women. Light examples included pipsqueak, jackass, rat, creep, beanpole, etc., which as it was noted, when used by men, were probably not even derogatory, even if they were slightly more negative when used by women.

Let’s consider terms that would make any editor brandishing a red pen quail, such as “cunt,” a taboo word which is currently the most offensive thing you can call a woman in the English language. It also happens to be an insult for a man (or sometimes even friendly mockery), though with a different kind of effect, and this is revealing of a trend that researchers have noted previously—that women are insulted through references to sexual morals or being compared to sub-human entities, while men are insulted by being associated with women and weakness/femininity.

So, abusive language directed at women might encompass unladylike sexual behavior, such as whore, slut, skank, pussy, cunt, dyke, twat, etc. or might compare women to sub-human animals, such as bitch, chick, dog, cow, horse, pig, porker. Meanwhile, insults for men largely stem from allusions to weakness and femininity, either from references to women or stereotypically feminine men, such as pussy, cunt, sissy, wimp, poofter, motherfucker, cocksucker, son of a bitch. While there are slurs that describe male genitals, these tend to be generally less offensive than female genitals and stick to describing non-sexual characteristics, such as mistreating others or stupidity, e.g. asshole, dick, prick, bonehead, knob, etc. This is pretty different from similar words used to refer to women. It’s interesting that in this 1998 study, the term “douchebag” was considered primarily a gendered slur towards women, though males in the study sometimes used the term to refer to other males, an insult in keeping with a “weak as a woman” characteristic. Today it’s become a common term for a male who treats others badly and almost never found directed at women, even though the origins are from a sexually-motivated slur for women.

As we can see, the language of invective attempts to condition, through verbal aggression, how women and men should really act, that women should behave like more well-behaved, self-effacing women and men should behave… well, not like women, well-behaved or otherwise. Either way the language of invective is not pleasant, so here’s hoping the nasty women and nasty men amongst us can pave the way to change.

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