Confederacy of a Dunce - language

Awkward headlines

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:13:33 GMT

Today I came across a very confusing headline:

"Sugababes rubbish split reports"

Although I have the advantage of knowing what "Sugababes" means (London pop band of the past 10 years), my first (and maybe more) readings of the headline offered various kinds of interpretations. The headline (and the confusion it can cause) is a good example of British tabloid style (see this Language Log post for more examples) which can lead to ambiguity due to a pileup of nouns. In this case, all four words in the headline could be nouns; the trick is to find the verbs. The first possibility I considered started with "Sugababes [are] rubbish..." (a commonly held opinion but surely not that newsworthy) but this one breaks down with "split reports". The next thought was that the article had something to do with the group's trash (e.g. "we provide an investigative look at how this pop group is separating out recyclables"; or "there are conflicting reports about the Sugababes' rubbish"). Environmental stories are all the rage, but this is not the theme of the article either. Also unlikely is some kind of story about a food product ("rubbish split", perhaps something like a banana split where you add whatever ingredients are available?).

As it turns out, the trick is that "rubbish" is the verb here, meaning "to criticize". Thus the Sugababes are responding to reports that they are breaking up with a vigorous rebuttal (possibly to be followed by an actual break-up... only time will tell). The original article can be found here if for some inexplicable reason you are interested in finding out more.

dunce, PhD

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:58:34 GMT

Well, it's finally finished. I am now officially dunce, PhD.

By "finished", I mean that today I submitted the final, approved copy of my PhD thesis (in the UK, "dissertation" usually refers to undergraduate projects, and "thesis" to PhDs. Makes things confusing since "dissertation" is reserved for PhDs in the US), and my degree has been officially registered as complete by my institution.

It was interesting to see how things are done here, vs. some of my peers who completed and defended elsewhere. In particular, the PhD examination is very different. Most of the people I know defended their PhD before a panel of 4-6 experts. In some cases there is also a formal presentation before a public audience (typically a formality as the real deal is already done behind closed doors). Here, the defense (or as they call it here, viva voce, customarily abbreviated to "viva" except in formal documents) is conducted by only two people: an internal examiner (someone from my institution), and an external examiner. The viva is held behind closed doors and no one else is permitted to be present.

As the day of my viva approached I became more and more worried about it, despite the fact that I was very well prepared for it. After all, I have been working on this stuff for years and years (vs the typical UK 3-year PhD), have presented a lot of it at conferences, and written up parts of it for various papers. So I'm used to defending it as part of the review process, and have also become used to thinking about the research in terms of narrative (how best to tell the story of how it all fits together). I am also quite familiar with the research topics of my two examiners, and tried to anticipate the critical angles they might take (one of my examiners is an expert in bilingualism and cognition; the other in language development and cognitive neuroscience). Nonetheless I worked myself into quite a state - by the day of the viva I was a very pale and nervous imitation of myself.

But actually, the viva was a very pleasant process. My internal examiner started by telling me that they found my thesis very interesting and of high quality, and that I should expect all sorts of difficult and probing questions, but this is the way a viva is meant to be. He then explained the exact sequence of events. First, how I came to the research questions included in the thesis. Second, the most important aspects of the thesis, in my eyes, and the most important aims. Third, walking through the thesis in detail, chapter by chapter, addressing specific concerns. And last, broader issues, problems, and the general question of where we go from here. I should try and elaborate rather than answering briefly (um, perhaps they should not have made this suggestion). So I just started going from the beginning.

The story of how the thesis came to be is a rather convoluted one, as (like a lot of PhD research) it started with an entirely different purpose and gradually morphed into a very different animal. So it took me a while to tell that particular tale, mentioning some of the further tangents along the way. I was more concise when it came to explaining the main aims and questions of the thesis, and then we turned to the examiners' specific questions. After the first three or four (maybe a dozen pages into the introduction), they suggested that I not elaborate on every single question, or we'd never finish the viva. So instead of answering each question, and then justifying my answers, I just answered the questions. It was not hardball at all, mainly clarifications and the like. By the time we got to the end, the "big questions" were a bit of an anticlimax. I felt like I stumbled on a couple of them (at least as I started to answer), but they didn't notice. All in all, this took about three hours. At the end, they decided that my thesis was accepted without changes.

Actually there were a few little bits of touch-up I had to do, mainly dropping in a couple of footnotes to address minor theoretical points, and providing more statistical details in some cases where I'd glossed over them. This latter part actually turned out to be a lot more work than I wanted to do at this stage, but I managed to get it done just in time for verification and approval (it is the internal examiner's responsiblity to ensure that the final version is, indeed, acceptable).

Once this was done, I had to get the thesis printed and bound according to university regulations. After quite a lot of fiddling about (font selection, working to make sure the layout and design of my figures and tables were acceptable, double-checking and triple-checking), I created the final PDF and emailed it off to our local binder (Collis, Bird & Withey, N5. I was very happy with their service & would enthusiastically recommend it to others). And today I went to hand it in. Many of my colleagues remember this step fondly; many institutions have a "Thesis Person" (usually Thesis Lady) who checks the printed thesis with an extremely close eye for details (caliper measurements of margins, page overlay templates, measuring individual characters, and so on), and who is very likely to reject it on the basis of some tiny detail. Here, instead, there appears to be no such person. UCL does have a funny kind of format (European style: text running up the spine, so the spine lettering is upside down compared to my other [English] books on the shelf when the thesis is right side up) but a fairly limited set of requirements. So then it was just a matter of collecting the bound copies when they were ready, filling out a few forms, and delivering the thesis (plus a PDF on CD-ROM in an envelope pasted in the back cover) to Student Records.

And that's what I did today. No eagle-eyed Thesis Person inspecting the margins and other details, just a quick check that all the forms were completed, and now I have a form confirming that I have submitted the final copies of my thesis. I suppose there may be a Thesis Person behind the scenes who will complain about my font selection, and make me do the whole thing over again from scratch. But I like to think there is not. I have been told I will receive a confirmation letter in the next week or two.

And then all that is left is the graduation in September; apparently I am now a graduand (a term that is new to me. OED: "One about to be graduated or to receive a university degree".). A handy term to fill in the gap between completion and the official ceremony, but it leaves me wondering when exactly I actually earn the right to call myself PhD. Upon confirmation that I am on the "pass list"? Or does the actual moment only occur at that moment I go through graduation? Surely not the latter - attending graduation ceremony is optional. In which case there is little use for the term "graduand" save in referring to anticipation of the Graduation Ceremony Experience itself.

Speaking of which, I can hardly finish without referring to the graduation costume. Here are the details of the regulations concerning my graduation outfit (I will save photos for Saptember):

Hood: Of the slim shape (no, I don't know what this means) in silver grey cloth fully lined with red silk.

Gown: Of the same shape as that worn by Cambridge Doctors (I assume this means that we are the same shapes underneath as well!) in silver grey cloth with facings of red and sleeve linings of grey, a red cord and button on sleeves.

Cap: A round cap of black velvet with silver grey cord and tassels.

Doesn't that sound pretty?

On the latch

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:50:43 GMT

This morning we had a couple of workmen around to do some electrical work (also including some major rock breaking possibly more suited to a chain gang). They arrived bright and early -- early enough that they had to wait around a bit until 8am when they can make their noise. In my sleepy haze, I was not exactly prepared to untangle an unfamiliar British expression, but they threw it at me anyway:

One of them asked, "Can you put the door on the latch?"

It should have been obvious to me from the context (I blame the early hour), but I had trouble figuring out what he was talking about. After all, our front door is set up to lock from the outside. So if I left it latched, they would not be able to get in or out (the latch is disengaged with the key, not with the handle. Maybe there's a way to change this but why bother? I've only been locked out once - just after we moved in - and Mrs Dunce is too clever for that). I tried to explain that the door locks when it's closed, so putting it "on the latch" wouldn't work if they need to get in and out without my intervention. Actually my response turned out to be useful despite my confusion - the worker pulled the handle upwards, engaging the additional locks, so that the door was blocked from fully closing by the locks.

But it was definitely not "on the latch" according to my own US English interpretation ("on the latch" = "latched" in contrast to "open"). But as usual, I was wrong. Instead, "on the latch" seems to be more appropriately contrasted with "locked", as in this quote about east London from a travel guide (describing the stereotypical view of the East End)

Colourful local characters never stop arguing with each other, yet there's a sense of neighbourliness and community, where you can leave your door on the latch and everyone is a member of the pub darts league !

Or a University of Bristol warning:
Please never allow others to tail-gate you into the Units
NEVER leave unit doors on the latch
If on a Ground Floor then ensure your room windows are secured before you go out
Do not leave your room door ajar or unlocked - if found it will be shut
CONTACT HALL STAFF AT ONCE IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE FOUND AN INTRUDER.

So leaving something on the latch just means "shut but not locked". Not to be confused with "going for a slash" (see previous post) or "going on the lash" (a night out, including excessive alcohol consumption).

Going for a slash

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:42:38 GMT

There's no shortage of terms or phrases to refer to urination, and one of my favorites (if not really in my vocabulary) is the UK English term "slash", as in "going for a slash". Although I have not done any formal research on the use of this term, or even informal research beyond a bit of web searching (not even consulted any informants!), I consider myself an expert on the topic. The OED straightforwardly defines it as "an act of urination", with the earliest example from 1950. Although I have only heard this particular sense of "slash" used as a noun (the first time I heard the term was in an Attila the Stockbroker poem, which contained plenty more nearly incomprehensible British informal expressions), the OED also has a verb listing (as derived from the noun), with one classy example from Martin Amis (IF YOU ARE MY MOTHER, PLEASE SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH NOW!): (If you can slash in my bed (I thought) don't tell me you can't suck my cock.)

Like many other slang terms, the OED doesn't have a clear etymology of this sense of "slash": Of obscure origin, cf. Scots "slash" a large splash of liquid. To me this term has further connotations, of urination in a particularly informal manner (if urination can ever be said to be a formal act) and perhaps occurring in nonstandard venues - maybe referring to the temporary creation of visual art on, perhaps, the wall of a school, a snowbank, or the Bank of England. Often resembling a slash, at least when a male is doing it (I am not certain whether "slash" also refers to female urination - I have only heard it used to refer to the male act, but of course this may simply be for the sake of propriety ["powdering one's nose" etc]).

My own personal vocabulary in this domain has evolved over the years. The earliest I can remember, my own preferred terminology was "potty" (like so many other midwestern American children), although I am sure I used plenty of other terms earlier on. However, upon starting elementary school, social pressure quickly led to a few alterations. First of all, I was informed by a slightly older child that the semantic domain was divided into two primary terms, and I should adjust my behavior suitably. The term "potty" is fine, but refers to a clear liquid. For anything yellow, the term "pee" is more correct. Now I was convinced of the correctness of this so I mentally adjusted my term appropriately. However, I was also keenly aware that the Dunce home was not a place where one could freely experiment with terminology referring to taboo subjects (see the warning above). Fortunately, the phrase "going to the bathroom" served as a reasonable alternative (particularly appropriate if (a) one was unsure whether the term "pee" was worthy of having one's mouth washed out with soap, (b) one was not sure whether one's output would be transparent or colored, or (c) one might be intending to perform other activities not limited to urination).

At a certain point, however, "going to the bathroom" was deemed inappropriate, as a babyish term, and anyway inappropriate in a school context where in fact there were no opportunities for bathing ("Swirlies" do not count, nor do those unfortunate occasions where one enters a school restroom and finds oneself in the firing line [as it were] where young gentlemen are stepping backwards to see how far they can get before their urinal targeting abilities are exhausted). So "(going to/using) the restroom" became the more appropriate replacement, suitable for so many occasions. This same time also saw a massive boom in the popularity of swearing (outside the home only! Mmmmmmm soap) among a certain young gentleman's peer group, so of course the term "piss" also came into play (OED goes crazy with details of "piss". Although Now chiefly coarse slang lest I be tempted to call on the authority of the OED to justify my own usage). And about the same time I became very fond of (supposedly) comedic expressions ("bleed the lizard" and so on). Carefully restricting these uses to interactions with my peers (and occasionally teachers, with unpleasant consequences), and using more socially appropriate terms elsewhere.

I suppose the same is true today (with the exception that I no longer fear corporal punishment from teachers, and that I have discovered that most circumstances allow one to excuse oneself without announcing one's destination). But on those occasions where the specific destination must be mentioned (for example, asking where the appropriate facilities are located), I have been forced once again to adjust my terminology. "Restroom" just doesn't fly in the UK, and "bathroom" is the place where a bath is. Most appropriate terms appear to be "toilet" (hopelessly coarse in my brand of US English, at least to my ear) and "loo", although supposedly "WC" is also a contender. I usually find myself asking for the toilet - perhaps because my US pronunciation makes the word "loo" sound wrong (I only tried it a few times, but a few quizzical expressions led me to pick another term. Although really, what else could I have been asking for?). But if I'm going for a slash, I don't ask anyone where I ought to do it.

Are British children more neuter than US children?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:26:33 GMT

Over the past few days I've noticed a number of instances in which a British person has referred to a child (whose sex is unknown) with the pronoun "it", as in the following:

The smaller child has its eyes closed, and the bigger one its eyes open. (celebrity "news" story, LINK. Actually referring to one boy and one girl, but the writer does not appear to know which is which)

each child has its moment of glory as it goes up to collect a certificate proving its status as a "Young Egyptologist" (Swansea University, LINK).

To me the singular pronoun "it" sounds very strange when used to refer to a human, especially in the latter case where "it" is used multiple times; my initial feeling is that the use of "it" implies nonhuman characteristics (the only regular use I can think of hearing is offensive disparaging reference to someone of ambiguous gender). Oddly I don't have any such problem with singular "they" which seems like perhaps a more common (US English) way to avoid the "he/she" dilemma. Indeed, google search for this use (e.g. ..."child has its"...) seems to give an abundance of UK sites once other kinds of cases are discarded (like "Parenting any exceptional child has its challenges", or reference to "child" that is not human, such as node/hierarchical structures).

So it's probably just that "it" is more acceptable to refer to a child in UK English. A quick scan of some other options suggests that this may not be true of adults. For example, "person has its" doesn't seem to give the same kind of results (most of the "neutral references" tend to be from non-English-speaking countries, or referring to a legal "person" which may or may not be human). Nor does "human", and interestingly "teenager" doesn't seem to do it either. So maybe this use of "it" is only OK before a child hits puberty. But it's OK to use "it" to refer to it before then.

Warm spiced wine keeps the mold away

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:31:19 GMT

Today I received an email from an organization at my university about their winter party. You'd never guess what they're serving.

"There will be hot mold WINE and sizzling MINCE PIES offered to UCL Postgraduates ALL FOR FREE!"

Now it's rather unusual to have sizzling mince pies (usually they're room temperature and perhaps a little on the stale side), but my attention was drawn to the "mold wine". It's a classic sort of eggcorn for "mulled wine". I say "classic" because an unusual/uncommon word is replaced by a more common/better known one, and the reinterpretation sort of makes sense. And there are plenty of instances of its use out there (google "mold wine" or "mould wine" and you'll find quite a few, even discounting various other contexts where the two words can occur together).

In this case, "mulled" is hardly common, especially in this particular sense; before I looked it up in the OED I hadn't ever noticed any other use besides "mulled wine". The relevant definition looks like this "To warm (wine, beer, etc.) with the addition of sugar, spices, fruit, etc., to produce a hot drink (formerly sometimes thickened with beaten egg yolk)." So it's quite a narrow definition (implying a drink not normally served warm, with sugar/spices/etc added), and not so many modern drinks fit the bill, except during the festive season when traditional drinks get a look-in. And there is the much more common word "mold" (a homophone in my dialect) waiting in the wings. "Mold wine" sort of makes sense: mold is already associated with wine (in the sense of being corked), and it's easy to see how heating and addition of spices might be a good treatment against mold.

Mulled wine also is the source of another eggcorn, "glue wine" through the German word for it: Glühwein (trans: "glowing wine", presumably related to its warmth, see also the Swedish glögg which is like Glühwein only nastier, I think). No surprise that the false friend "Glue" makes an appearance here, especially among English speakers visiting German-speaking countries (one example here).

If only it got cold enough here that mulled wine (or similar drinks) actually tasted nice...

Gang names

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:49:49 GMT

On the way from our house to the bus stop, I walk through a handy pedestrial underpass to avoid crossing the very busy, high-speed deathtrap of a road that is Westbury Avenue (two "newsworthy" accidents in the last month alone: exhibit A, exhibit B). It's nice and well-lit, but on the other side is a large, plain wall which often attracts scrawled graffiti. It was recently painted over, but more graffiti has sprung up. It seems like it might be a roll of gang names, all written in black marker in the same handwriting. If so, I think some of the gang members might have gotten a bum deal when names were handed out. The list is below, in the order in which they appear. Is your gang name on there?

Lucifer
Satan 666
TMD
Flying Sqod
NPK
Love of Money
SW1 Crew
Assasins
Rowdey
Shower
Mob
Mob H Town
Buger Bar
Clap Town South
28

My favorite among these is Love of Money, which is a great gang name for reasons that are made clear in T.E.Cliffe Leslie's 1862 essay of the same title.

And I can hardly pick on those names that evoke evil or violence, as these sorts of names are crucial for instilling a sense of dread and fear. Included among these are Lucifer, Satan 666, Assasins, Mob, Mob H Town ("H" possibly referring to Haringey [local area] or Hackney [nearby and with perhaps more street cred than H'gey]), and to a lesser extent Rowdey, and possibly Flying Sqod. The latter is especially notable, as at the time of writing it yields exactly zero Google hits (Did you mean: "flying squad". No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.). No doubt this is a clever ploy to separate oneself from the zillions of Flying Squads out there (Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for "flying squad").

It's also fine to self-identify with a particular location as this follows a long tradition of geographically based gang names. Here we have Clap Town South perhaps referring to Clapton in east London, or Clapham in south London (see the similarly named Clap Town Kids from Clapham who have received some attention in the press), Mob H Town as mentioned before, and the SW1 Crew (SW1 referring to a London postcode with serious credibility on the streets, being home to Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street).

Then we have the cryptic ones, which are also just fine as they protect the identity from the authorities. For example, TMD. Could this be noted author Thomas M. Disch? Or maybe this person suffers from temporomandibular joint disorder (also known as TMJ) and has adopted its name as a statment of strength through adversity. NPK is much easier to figure out; this name is clearly a reference to fertilizer (N: Nitrogen, P: Phosphorous, K: Potassium). 28 is cryptic as well. It could either refer to the atomic number of nickel (hence a very clever reference to wealth, a subtle take on "Love of Money" mentioned above), or perhaps a shout-out to street hero Zbiegniew Brzezinski who was born on March 28, 1928.

And finally, there are the real losers. I think these are the gang members who were not present when the names were being handed out, and were assigned names for their insult value. I'm talking about Buger Bar (presumably this name is a degenerate form of Burger Bar, aka fast food joint, and I suspect its owner is above average in girth and displacement), and even worse, Shower, presumably a filthy young gentleman whose name must be a form of comedic opposition. Perhaps I, the Dunce, should count myself among their number.

From the names, I think these are all young gentlemen; ladies' names on such lists tend to contain one or more of the following: {Miss, Ms, Lady, Queen, Baby}, as in MS FLYING SQOD. Anyway, I look forward to meeting these young gentlemen and discussing their branding strategy in great detail.

Using pubs

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:12:08 GMT

I've read a number of pub reviews (mainly at Beer in the Evening which include the word "use", as in "I use this pub regularly" (source), "I used this pub a lot in the early 70s" (source), "I used this pub for the first time today" (source). To my midwestern US English ear the verb "use" sounds very strange in this context; my strongest interpretation is a running visit (if you will) to use the toilet and nothing more. But in the examples above (and the many others you find using search terms like "(use OR used OR using) (this OR that OR the) pub") quite clearly indicate a more leisurely sort of visit, likely involving having a drink or three, and possibly some craic as well. Of course US English permits the use of "use" when there is a specific purpose designated ("we used the pub for our party", "we have been using this pub as a meeting place", but "use" on its own doesn't quite sem kosher.

However, it seems like a very ordinary (UK) English usage and I wondered whether it extended to other institutions besides the public house (the only context in which I have noticed its use). Restaurants? YES (apparently, don't use this one). Hotels? YES (use this one). Museums? Apparently so ("a broader range of people used the museum": link).

So it seems like speakers of UK English can use just about any establishment, while I can only use their toilets.

You guys

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:15:43 GMT

For many Americans whose dialect doesn't include the handy pronoun "y'all" or "youse", the phrase "you guys" serves as a very handy second person plural of perhaps a rather informal register. But it also has the interesting property that, at least in this particular form, the word "guy" no longer necessarily refers to men. "You guys" can refer not only to a group of men, or a mixed group of men and women, but even to a group only of women:

I’m not here to make friends with you guys. -- contestant on season 7 of America's Next Top Model engaged in light conversation with some other (female) contestants.

As far as I know, UK English does not have a comparable phrase deployed in similar situations (although of course there's no shortage of ways to express second-person-plural should the need truly arise); the closest equivalent I can think of is "lads" which is obligatorily masculine.* Indeed, I've seen some female UK-ites take offense to being addressed as part of "you guys". This is no surprise, because it seems to me that only this particular use of "guy" permits female reference. (Not just "you guys". "Guys" can also stand alone in this manner when used for second person reference: "Guys, you'll never believe this forwarded email I just got")

For example, it would not sound at all right** to say "a guy" to refer to a female person (assuming one is not making a specific point about masculine appearance or manner, e.g. "one of the guys"). Plural "guys" also doesn't sound right when used to refer to a group ("All the guys were there. Bob, Mike, Tom, Donna, and Louise"). If I start talking about "sexy guys" there is no possibility that I am talking about a group that includes women. In fact, modifying "guys" with any sort of adjective seems to remove women from the equation, even in the pronoun(ish) sense:

"You guys" = can include women.
"You sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"Sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"You stupid guys" = doesn't include women.
"You female guys" = doesn't make sense.

Quantification, hmmmm, this seems OK in the female-permitted sense of "you guys", but only when used in the second person. Third person female guys are still a no-no:

"You three guys" = can include women.
"Three guys" = none of whom are women.

Of course this subject has attracted more scholarly attention, and at least to some, "you guys" is a hugely big deal. The excitement practically drips off the page in George Jochnowitz's 1983 article "Another View of You Guys" (appearing in American Speech, 1983) "The rapid spread of you guys through the United States during the last decade [i.e., the 1970s] is the only major change in the prononimal system of English that has occurred since the loss of thou and thee four centuries ago". At the time of writing, (Jochnowitz claimed) "you guys" was the most frequently used second person plural pronoun in the United States, although I'm not sure whether he includes the ambiguous "you" in his count. He also points out that the pronoun is somewhat broken compared to others (you can say "You linguists" but not "you guys linguists"). So, what do you guys think?

* There's a wikipedia entry here which (at the moment) claims that "chaps" is "increasingly used for people of either sex". But I can't think of any cases in which I've actually heard the word "chaps" used in this manner (except perhaps where someone has used it in a weak attempt at comic effect, complete with faux upper class accent).

** All judgments are according to my own intuition only. Your mileage may vary. If so please leave a comment.

*** How can I not mention Guy Fawkes, the etymological grandfather of "you guys"?

Life ain't easy for a boy named Sue

Mon, 14 May 2007 15:09:58 GMT

Mrs. Dunce and I spent the past weekend in Glasgow, my first trip to Scotland. I was representing my workplace at a large Deaf event, trying to spread the word about the research we are doing, and to possibly recruit some Scottish BSL signers to participate in some of our studies. It was also a really great opportunity to practice my signing.

But I discovered something rather unfortunate when I started introducing myself to people. In BSL, as in many other sign languages, people often have "sign names", sort of like a signed nickname used in place of fingerspelling someone's actual name. My own sign name was given to me when I first met with a group of deaf researchers, after suffering an unfortunate broken-glasses incident which left me peering through the one remaining lens. It looks exactly like this: LINK.¹

In the southeast (including London), this sign also means "to peep" (as in peeping through a keyhole, and maybe something like a peeping Tom). Perhaps with a vaguely naughty connotation, but nothing too extreme (unless everyone has been having a laugh at my expense....). In Scotland, however, this sign means "pervert", and not a nice, amusing sort of pervert either. When I introduced myself to a Scottish signer for the first time, I got a classic double-take. He asked me if that was really my sign name. When I told him that indeed it was, he proceeded to explain that I should really think about changing my name (maybe something more like "tea", a similarly shaped sign, but at the corner of the mouth. Or maybe something more like "monocle", which is in front of the eye, but with a more open hand). The Deaf equivalent of "Bill, or George, or anything but Sue", I suppose.

Other than the embarrassment of introducing myself "Hi, my name is Pervert", things seemed to go quite well. I chatted to lots of different people about our research and the different things people here are working on, maybe 3/4 of the time in sign language, and only 1/4 of the time in English. I'd rehearsed quite a bit of my patter about the research, but was most worried about not being able to understand people (especially unfamiliar people, in an unfamiliar setting). But as my co-workers predicted, it was no trouble at all.

Next time I'll write about Glasgow itself; we thoroughly enjoyed our long weekend there.

¹A curious coincidence: this same handshape positioned on the forehead means "know-nothing" or "dunce". But I got this sign name before I chose the name of "Dunce" (that only happened when I started up this blog, and found myself faced with the difficult challenge of coming up with a title which, I felt, had to fulfill certain characteristics). >

Pot plants or plants in pots

Wed, 02 May 2007 15:13:58 GMT

This week is another hectic one at work, as we're being moved into a new lab/office zone on Friday. So we've been scrambling around packing and labeling years' worth of important items. And noticing that the important:junk ratio is impressively low. But because we didn't have much notice of the moving date, it's much more a matter of throwing everything into cartons, and sorting out the junk later. At least we have professional movers to actually sling the cartons around, so it's not as bad as if we'd been moving things ourselves (in our recent house move, there was some discussion of the merits of moving versus leaving things like dirt [or "compost" if you like. We should have moved the compost {dirt} after all....]).

During the preparation for moving, an interesting difference between British and American English surfaced. One of the PhD students asked whether the movers would take care of our pot plants, or if we should move them ourselves. In US English, this question has a very different meaning, which might not be so appropriate to bring up so boldly in a workplace discussion (I know, this is academia. But still!!!!). You see, pot plants look like this in Britain:

But American pot plants are a little bit different:

In Britain, the term "pot plants" simply means "plants in pots" (unfortunately I don't discuss gardening enough to know what sort of plants can be considered "pot plants" if they're placed in the appropriate receptacles, nor which sorts of receptacles "pot plants" are allowed to be in). But in US English the term is dominated by "pot", an especially common American slang term for marijuana¹ (more often called "cannabis" in British English, and let's not get into the minefield of slang terms [I think you could probably select just about any word and claim it's a slang term for cannabis]). So if an American hears that a grad student is wondering about moving pot plants around, they sure won't be surprised. But if that student is talking about it at a lab meeting, they must be high.

¹Etymology of "pot" in this sense is unknown, according to the OED: Origin uncertain and disputed. The most popular theory explains the word as being derived from the supposed Mexican Spanish words *potiguaya or *potaguaya (cannabis leaves), or *potación de guaya, (literally ‘drink of grief’), supposedly denoting a drink of wine or brandy in which marijuana buds were steeped; however, no corroborating evidence has been found to support the use of any of these terms in Spanish (although *potiguaya is recorded in an English glossary of drug terminology slightly earlier than the earliest example of the present word.
The US-favored term "marijuana" also has rather murky origins once you cross the border: From Mexican Spanish "mariguana", "marihuana", of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that the Spanish word is from Nahuatl "mallihuan" prisoner. Forms [containing] "j" appear to be an English innovation (attested later also in French): occasional recent examples in Spanish prob. show English influence. Influence of a folk etymology from the Spanish personal name "María-Juana" or its familiar form "Mari-Juana" has frequently been suggested; if so this would appear to have occurred within English.
Good ol' British "cannabis" comes straight on from Latin or Greek.

Negation gone wild!

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:01:31 GMT

I heard the most amazing sentence on the bus this morning. It was good enough I had to write it down immediately. Have a read and tell me what you think she was trying to get across.

"I couldn't have forgotten not to tell her don't need to quit work."

Of course there's a missing pronoun between "her" and "don't", but it's really the complicated mess of negations that does my head in.

Pizza Time?

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:15:12 GMT

I've had plenty to say in the past about unusual and/or unpleasant pizza toppings, but I'm afraid an even higher standard has been set. Without further ado, let me show you a pizza flyer that recently appeared at Dunce Manor:

Yes, it appears to be an ordinary pizza, topped with pepperoni, green peppers, onions, and GIGANTICALLY HUGE SLICES OF LIME. A very unpleasant combination indeed. Oddly enough, lime does not actually feature in any of the pizzas on offer. So I started wondering why someone might have decided to call their company "Pizza Lime" if lime cannot actually be purchased as a pizza topping.

Googling the phrase "pizza lime" gives very little info, except that "Pizza Lime" is apparently the name given to the monthly discussion forum held by the Trinidad & Tobago Computer Society (originally held at Pizza Hut until the computerers were forced away by price increases). I didn't think that helped all that much, so then I turned to my old friend the OED. Maybe there's a sense of "lime" I'm not aware of.

Starting with the verbs, there are all sorts of senses which could, in principle, be applied to pizza. But most of them less than appealing. There's Lime(verb, 1), 2a: "To smear ... with bird-lime, for the purpose of catching birds", 4: "to foul, defile", and any number of other senses related to CaO. But not really anything you'd want near your pizza (the citrus version a far lesser evil). Or maybe Lime(verb, 3), "to impregnate (a bitch)". Hmmm... a home-delivery pizza might be an aphrodisiac in certain circumstances, but I doubt this is their intent. Or else Lime(verb, 4), "to hang about the streets" (all examples of this term in the OED come from Trinidad, Tobago or Barbados). Pizza you eat while carnally loitering, befouled in bird-lime. Mmmm good. So maybe "lime" is a noun.

I think I've already safely ruled out Lime(noun, 1): CaO and other various noxious substances you really don't want to have on a pizza. Lime(noun, 2) is the citrus fruit (Citrus Medica, var. acida, and some of its relatives), which is the leading contender so far (I've ruled out the sense of lime as a lime-green color since the pictured pizza is not green). Lime(noun, 3) is no better: the tree also known as linden. Maybe the obsolete sense Lime(noun, 4) "Limit, end" (one solitary example in the OED, from ~1420), or the only remaining one, Lime(noun, 5) "colloquial abbreviation of 'limelight'", mainly Australian. This is quite tenuous but is at least a better possibility than carnal befoulment.

Finally I took a wander over to a less exhaustively researched realm of linguistic information, the Urban Dictionary. The very first entry, well.... "A fanfiction or chapter of a fanfiction in which characters graphically fool around, but do not actually have sex.". But most of the rest come back to Trinidad, not just loitering, but in a pleasant sense of hanging out. So maybe it's like a Trini pizza party (in that case, it's too bad they didn't have any Trini pizzas on offer. The Lime Special contains mushroom, fresh garlic, pepperoni, spicy beef and red onion).

Of course one other possibility is that the term "lime" is a last-minute adjustment of some kind. Perhaps the shop was intended to be called "Pizza Time" but had to change its name due to an already-established competitor by that name or something similar. It would be quite easy to change a "Pizza Time" sign into one that says "Pizza Lime".

The one other odd thing about the flyer is that they give no physical address. I'm always very hesitant to order from a place whose location is totally unknown. I prefer to know which grim industrial estate is the source of my dinner.

Called or named?

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:04:44 GMT

Another one of those odd little differences between US and UK English caught my ear again the other evening, when I overheard someone (UK) talking about a family acquaintance: "Their youngest son is called William". It caught my ear because it still sounds strange to me; my snap judgement about my own use of "called" goes something like this: "a dog is called Spot, a person is named William (although you might call him Will)." The use of "call" seems sort of OK in other contexts ("Will they call their son William?" seems just as good as "Will they name their son William?", and maybe even better), but the original example seems vaguely amiss for some reason. It seems to me that this sort of use of "call" (referring to someone's given name) is much more common in UK than in US English. Some of my linguistically savvy colleagues from the UK concur; they would never say "he is named William" (Or at least they claim they would never say it) but only "He is called William" or "His name is William".

It's a little hard to find information on this contrast online: there are so many situations where legal documents use phrases like "called or named", and also numerous instances referring to translated texts where an original term in another language covers both possibilities in English (most of the web texts that came up were related to Biblical translation, but this also seems to be the case for Old English "yclept" and "hight"). But eventually I did find at least some online discussions about this distinction many of which fail to recognize that there are dialectal differences (in addition to whatever other points the writers are making), leading to comments like this one where a (US English) writer seems particularly upset when he sees "call" used in this way: "Any time I read something like this where a person is "called" and then it lists their name, it just sounds so wrong and ignorant. I would argue that there's no option, exception, or exemption for not writing or saying it as 'The CEO was NAMED John Smith.'". A follow-up post suggests that "call" should only be used when it does not refer to someone's given name (it's ok for nicknames, aliases, and so on). Neither of these posters gave any suggestions about the penalties for violating this rule, but I'd imagine they would be quite serious indeed (drawing/quartering/heads on pikes)*.

Not all discussions on this matter are restricted to colonial prescriptivists. This discussion, for example, includes comments from US and UK speakers (tending toward the view that "called" is somewhat less acceptable in US English). Or this discussion, a seriously anoraky exchange about the TV series Firefly, concerning whether a character referred to as "the Shepherd" might be using the name "Book" as an alias ("[he] never actually says his name: 'Book. I'm called Book.'"). The discussion wanders into the basic priciple of magic, questions of identity, whether the use of "called" has been established in the Firefly lexicon as carrying any particular meaning, and so on, before one quite sensible suggestion that this may simply reflect Anglophilic tendencies on the part of the writer rather than being laden with deep meaning (cf. the calling of Paul).

Of course there's also the question of "called" vs. "named" for inanimate entities, which I think sheds some light on the UK usage for humans too. This discussion on Englishforums.com is about whether a computer file or website should be called or named, e.g. "blah.html". In this case it seems to be fairly well agreed: when it is being assigned its name in the first place, "named" would be used, but subsequent reference would use "called": I named the file "blah.html", and nobody has changed its name since then so it is still called "blah.html". This seems to be the same as the UK use of "named" for humans; its use is restricted to the assignment of a name in the first place. Thenceforth that person can only be called by that name, as naming has already happened. So the question really is why "named" is used less restrictively by US English speakers when it comes to referring to people by name.

* Right on cue comes a lovely posting on the Language Log about just how to deal with this kind of rage: The 12 step program in language anger management

Signing in the workplace

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:13:49 GMT

My current post is at a newly-established research centre investigating various aspects of language and deafness. Non-signing staff are (very strongly) encouraged to learn BSL and use it regularly, not only to gain familiarity with the language they're researching, and to allow them to converse with participants in their sign language experiments, but also, especially, to provide a more inclusive atmosphere for deaf members of staff (it's great to have intepreters around, but impossible for interpreters to cover every conversation). Of course this includes everyday topics of idle conversation (Celebrity Big Brother, yesterday's darts championship and just why in hell I'd waste my time watching it, weekend/holiday activities, and so on) and ordinary day-to-day practical work-related stuff (what's wrong with the printer, when is everyone free for the next meeting, does anyone have a contact in research administration who can explain the new budget system, would people please remember to flush, and so on). But it also includes discussion of research topics, usually extremely specific and complicated (e.g. a recent discussion about the architecture of the language system, which led us to attempt to find a set of BSL signs that move vertically, but for which the vertical movement does or does not refer to actual vertical movement [contrast LIGHTNING {depicting motion of lightning striking downward} with HOUSE {moving downward to outline a typical house}]. And what kind of movement might be implied in those signs' English translations, and how close those translations might be, and the pluses and minuses of different ways we might conduct some experiments, and how the results might be interpreted, and so on).

I've been using BSL quite a lot lately (after a bit of a slump over the Christmas break, where I didn't see any signers for a couple of weeks), and feel like I'm able to get by fairly well on a lot of topics, at least when I'm conversing one-on-one with someone whose signing is familiar (I used to have a lot of trouble understanding left-handed BSL [mirror image of right-handed BSL], but that's not a problem any more as my most frequent conversational partner is left-handed). One-on-one conversations are still far easier as the signals of non-comprehension are easier to spot (and it's less intrusive to sign something like REPEAT/AGAIN [+facial expression something like "sorry, I'm totally lost"]); this is not specific to sign language, though. I'm also getting quite good at comprehending fingerspelling, although I still can't usually manage to work out full-speed native signing (it doesn't take many REPEAT/AGAIN signals before a signer will slow down on his/her own).

Most of my problems with BSL comprehension now seem to be related to individual signs, rather than just totally missing everything. For example, one morning last week a colleague signed something like this: I STAND BUS, DOOR OPEN. I SEE YOU, SAY-HI, YOU TURN-AROUND-GO-AWAY, MANY-PEOPLE BEHIND-YOU CROWD BUS (the gloss roughly indicates what he signed, and is almost certainly not correct. In English he might have said something like "I was standing on the bus, when the doors opened I saw you standing outside. But you stepped aside without noticing, and a bunch of other people got on". [I hate getting onto a crowded bus where I have to stand; I'd rather wait for the next bus where I might get a seat on the upper deck]). But I completely failed to comprehend the sign BUS, so I missed the entire context of the event in which I must have blanked him (to blank: look right at someone you know but not acknowledge their presence. Quite common in Dunce life as I often fail to recognize people I've met before. In contrast to Mrs. Dunce who has a steel-trap mind when it comes to faces). Or sometimes my comprehension errors are based on simple misinterpretation of a sign: like when my colleague signed G-G WORK AT-HOME? (Meaning "Is G. working at home today?" The sign glossed as "G-G" is two instances of the fingerspelled letter "G", a common way to refer to a person who does not have a name-sign. In this case, the first initial of my boss). I misunderstood "G-G" as the sign UMBRELLA (the two signs have quite similar handshapes and locations, and the motion of the hands is fairly similar). After all, it was raining, and I was rather wet. So I thought he was asking whether I came to work but left my umbrella at home. Plus, I usually use a different sign to refer to her ("G-V"), often accompanied by a pointing pronoun (I produce "G-V" then point toward her office). It was especially frustrating because he was also mouthing "umbrella" while producing the sign (English mouth patterns are often produced along with certain signs). But I'm really terrible at speechreading (and the mouth patterns were very similar in any case), so this didn't help me one iota.

In producing signs, I've also made quite a bit of a change over the past few months. Before, if I wasn't sure of a sign, I'd replace it with the fingerspelled English word. Sometimes this would lead a signer to prompt me with the correct BSL sign, but often they'd just let it slide in the interest of communication (they understood me, so why interrupt to correct me). But as my vocabulary has grown, I've become more confident in guessing at the correct sign, even if I'm not sure. And I (mostly) tend to get at least something right (maybe the right handshape, doing the right sort of motion, but in the wrong place). And it seems like these kinds of errors are more often corrected immediately (or else not comprehended, in which case I have to spell an English word, and more often than not a signer will show me the correct sign). I've also started focusing more on trying to produce grammatically correct BSL, and here's where I still have a lot of trouble. Especially because so often an ungrammatical sentence can be understood just fine--especially by signers who are expecting a particular kind of ungrammaticality based on English. We do have a weekly BSL class (for staff and students at the research centre) but only certain aspects of BSL grammar (e.g. pointing pronouns, reference to space and locations, word order for questions, some classifier constructions), have been addressed in detail (for example, it's been drilled into us that questions like "Where do you work?" should be signed with the "question word" last: YOU WORK WHERE [facial expression indicating that this is a question, rather than YOU WORK SOMEWHERE]). I'm quite certain that I make numerous grammatical errors in BSL; I just don't know what most of them are yet. Except for one type, related to the insidious effects of English....

As I mentioned before, many BSL signs are accompanied by mouth-patterns based on the English words. Often this is to disambiguate between homonymous signs (ALLIGATOR and CROCODILE are signed the same, but with different mouth patterns). This is not always the case, though; there are many cases where English mouth-patterns are not correct. For example, there are some signs which have obligatory mouth patterns that are not related to English words. For example, NEAR (index fingers extended, in contact with each other with palms back, located in front of the chest; right index finger makes a very short "hop"-type motion forward [see what I mean about the difficulty of describing a sign using words?!]) is accompanied by pursed lips, while FAR (same starting position; right index finger makes a long forward arc) is accompanied by puffed cheeks and exhaled breath. Mouthing English "near" or "far" in these cases is just plain wrong, but it seems very hard to resist. It's even harder for pointing pronouns ("I", "you", "they") and so on which don't have any associated mouth movements. I just about always find myself mouthing the English pronouns in these cases. And all sorts of other parts of English sentences which are not needed in BSL: I might sign I ASK G-G IF TOMORROW EVENING SHE GO PUB (possibly grammatically incorrect) but simultaneously mouth, in English "I'll ask G if tomorrow evening she's gonna go to the pub." Or even worse, describing objects or actions in detail. Like for example (from our BSL class), describing what an office window looks like. You'd start with a generic sign WINDOW, then sign forms depicting the arrangement and shape of panes, the window frame, etc (the order probably depends on certain things I'm not yet aware of). But while producing these kinds of descriptions, my mouth is running a mile a minute: "Window, it's got 4 panes, top panes round top, flat around. bottom panes square, frame all around. Opens up [as in, lower panes slide up to open it]. Outside little balcony, square, this wide." All of my English mouth patterns are synchronized with a particular sign (e.g. the "4 panes" occurs along with a handshape moving to depict a 2x2 layout of panes). I know this running commentary in English isn't correct, but it's really hard to resist.

double eight, double zero

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:38:38 GMT

It's time once again for one of my regular visits to the differences between UK and US English. For a while I was thinking about being disheartened, after paying a number of visits to the amazing blog separated by a common language> ("Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK"). After all, she writes nicely coherent posts, all focused on the topic of interesting UK/US English differences, while I only occasionally visit the topic, and tend to ramble off the topic at the drop of the hat (or at the sight of something shiny). Anyway, today's topic is related to numbers.

I've always been interested in numbers, obsessively so. As an introverted, socially inept youngster I spent quite a lot of time counting (sometimes counting cars, or steps, or names in a telephone book, or sometimes not counting anything but just counting subvocally to see how far I could get [some of these activities continue to the present day]) and organizing things by fours (a special number, you know [please disregard any suggestions to the contrary]). And my memory is still full of numbers I don't need to remember any more (phone numbers all the way back, locker combinations, six-digit product identification codes from a job I left more than 10 years ago, and on and on and on and on). So it's very strange when a simple difference between US and UK English causes me real trouble with numbers. And I'm not talking about the fairly well-known "billion problem". No, this is much simpler: British speakers, when reciting a sequence of digits like telephone numbers, account numbers and so on (I don't know whether it also happens when people are listing post-decimal digits for some reason, but I bet it does), are quite prone to use the word "double" instead of repeating a digit (and less often, to use the word "treble" [triple] when three digits are all the same). As in the examples on this "Telephoning in English" site. At least to me, this seems very uncommon in US English (when reciting a string of digits, anyway). For some reason, I'm thrown for a loop whenever this happens. And not just when I'm trying to hold a number just long enough to write it down, but even when I'm writing digits as I hear them. I have to direct some attention toward converting "double eight" into two eights, which disrupts my attention/memory just enough that I'm sure to miss out on (or just "miss out" in UK English, I think) one of the following digits.

I should note that this doesn't always happen. 999 (UK version of 911) is pronounced "nine nine nine", and telephone numbers beginning with 0800 are "oh-eight-hundred".

The original Dunce

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:42:38 GMT

A recent post on the Language Log discussing the relationship between grammar and ethics/morality included a digression on the etymology of the term "dunce". As I was unfamiliar with this story, and because I've adopted the name myself, but especially because "dunce" has such an interested trajectory, I thought it was definitely worth covering here (quotes shamelessly c&p'd from the Oxford English Dictionary).

The term "dunce" (n.) is broadly described like this: "[a]n application of the name of John Duns Scotus, the celebrated scholastic eologian, called ‘Doctor Subtilis’ the Subtle Doctor, who died in 1308. His works on theology, philosophy, and logic, were textbooks in the Universities, in which (as at Oxford) his followers, called Scotists, were a predominating Scholastic sect, until the 16th c., when the system was attacked with ridicule, first by the humanists, and then by the reformers, as a farrago of needless entities, and useless distinctions. The Dunsmen or Dunses, on their side, railed against the 'new learning', and the name Duns or Dunce, already synonymous with 'cavilling sophist' or 'hair-splitter', soon passed into the sense of 'dull obstinate person impervious to the new learning', and of 'blockhead incapable of learning or scholarship'."

1. The first sense of "dunce" (listed as Obsolete and appearing in examples between 1527 and 1641) is strictly linked to the individual: "The personal name Duns used attrib. 'Duns man', a disciple or follower of Duns Scotus, a Scotist, a schoolman; hence, a subtle, sophistical reasoner."

2. The second sense (also Obsolete) was used during the same period, and reference moved beyond the man himself to encompass his writings: "A copy of the works of Duns Scotus; a textbook of scholastic theology or logic embodying his teaching; a comment or gloss by or after the manner of Scotus.".

3. Next the term extended another step further to the third sense (also Obsolete, examples from 1577 and 1611), referring to followers of Duns (and also carrying the connotation of overly petty quibbling): "A disciple or adherent of Duns Scotus, a Duns man, a Scotist; a hair-splitting reasoner; a cavilling sophist."

4. And then it turns even uglier, the fourth sense listed (also Obsolete, appearing in examples from 1579-1742) has lost any positive connotations previous uses might have had: "One whose study of books has left him dull and stupid, or imparted no liberal education; a dull pedant." Such as the quote from Devil's Banquet (T.Adams, 1614), "When a man courts to be a Doctor in all Arts, hee lightly proues a dunce in many".

5. Which brings us to the modern usage which has been stripped of its bookishness (from the late 1500s onward": "One who shows no capacity for learning; a dull-witted, stupid person; a dullard, blockhead.".

This etymological trajectory is a fantastic example of a word's meaning going from one extreme to another. It also matches well with my own nature, although in my case perhaps it's more related to Thomas Dun than to John Duns Scotus (and that ain't no wikipedia link neither; a [sense #4] Dunce like me has to find a more complete and detailed entry). I have buried my nose so deeply in books, and become so consumed by ever-shrinking minutiae that it was inevitable that every last bit of intellect has been drained from me. Now I can barely follow the plot twists and turns of your average episode of America's Next Top Model (cycle 7) as I sit drooling on the couch.

My current local news

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 12:15:41 GMT

Lest you think my sneering at the quality of local news is limited to my old hometown newspaper, let me share with you a story from my current local weekly.

Sex shop hoax by builders

CROUCH End was bracing itself for its first sex shop shop - but it all turned out to be a hoax.

A shopfitter working on the conversion of a shop in Topsfield Parade scrawled an announcement that a sex shop was opening there as a joke.

Eyebrows were raised by shoppers and local business owners when the note appeared last Monday morning in the window of the former HAM Estates office on Topsfield Parade, Crouch End, brazenly declaring: "This is new Crouch Hill sex shop".

It wasn't long before nearby workers and passers-by started asking questions, but things started sounding fishy when a Journal reporter made some inquiries.

Sniggering builders admitted that the sex shop sign had been a joke.

The note was removed by Wednesday lunchtime. When the truth - that the shop was going to be a rather less racy estate agents - was revealed, some local shopkeepers seemed a little disappointed.

One said: "It would have been more exciting than another estate agents." Another said: "My reaction was 'brilliant!' and At least it's not another clothes shop."

But not everyone was fooled. "I knew it was a fake," said Pizza Hut manager Jason Ireton. "The note was on the outside. Obviously you are not going to get a sex shop in this area.

This story has it all: sex, comedy, quotes from local notables, even a very-badly written sentence that jumps out and smacks you in the face with its badness (I refer of course to the phrase "as a joke" which really wants to modify the nearby verb phrase "was opening" rather than the intended verb "scrawled").

(link to story, but who knows how long the link will remain active).

Acronymically speaking

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 13:54:52 GMT

A while back I stumbled across the Acronym Finder. It's always interesting (to me) to put in people's initials and see what else comes up. Before I continue, a brief digression into acronyms and related terms (from the Acronym Finder's "about" page): "An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from each of the first letters of a descriptive phrase or by combining the initial letters or parts of words from the phrase.... An acronym is actually a type of abbreviation. Our database contains abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms and we make no distinction between them in our database or on our site. We are more interested in defining "acronyms" for you than we are in trying to properly distinguish between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms."

So now to my own initials: Only seven are listed; the top-rated entries are Desert Patrol Vehicle and Diver Propulsion Vehicle, and if I had to pick one of them, it would be Dynamically Positioned Vessel. The related Acronym Attic gives quite a few more (48, in contrast to the 7 "carefully reviewed and edited" DPVs in Acronym Finder; acronyms found in the Acronym Attic have not been reviewed by humans), including a few I'd be proud to represent. Description of Plant Viruses, Delivering Profitable Value, but perhaps the best of all is Disease Pest and Vermin. If you wonder what DPV stands for, you can't do much worse than Disease Pest and Vermin.

For Mrs. Dunce there are some choices. Her full married name has no entries in the Acronym Finder, and only four in the Attic (Annual Register of Book Values? Architects Registration Board of Victoria?). Before she joined the land of the Vs, she had 44 to choose from in the Acronym Finder. Top-rated options incude Arbitrageur, Airbag, Anti-Roll Bar, and the Armee Revolutionnaire Bretonne; other good choices are Armored Rifle Battalion, American Royal Barbecue, or the Ann Arbor, MI airport code. And I don't even want to go into the Attic where more than 100 ARBs await me. Well, ok then, but don't say I didn't warn you (Approves Rice Burning? Automatic Rubber Banding? Australian Roo Bar? And Rear on Board? Abuse the Right Back?). Clearly it's a good thing she joined up with the Vs. Where she can take her pick of a reasonable 14, including Antiretroviral, Approximate Retail Value, or any number of vehicles that are armed, armored or airborne (Armed Robotic Vehicle, anyone?). The Attic has 62, all of a classy nature (e.g. Anti Rabies Vaccination, Adding Real Value, Animal Rights and Vegetarianism).

Yes, I am jealous that Mrs. Dunce's initials (not counting her full married name) could be considered an acronym (as they are pronounceable as a word) while mine are only an initialism.

Nouny headlines

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:10:57 GMT

Here's a headline I saw today (maybe not technically a headline as it was actually printed on a placard to advertise a story in one of today's newspapers, but it's still a lot like a headline), which oddly seems to be made up entirely of nouns:

CITY LAWYER MURDER TRIAL DRAMA

OK, perhaps there's some ambiguity with the word "murder" (is "murder trial" a noun-noun compound or a verb-noun compound), but its nouniness was enough to catch my eye ("something is wrong with that headline", said my eye). There's no shortage of recommendations to avoid "noun strings", but at least the ambiguity in this one is fairly limited. But I have one real complaint: it's missing the word "fury" which no good tabloid newspaper noun string headline (how's that for a noun string?) should be without.

The ownuss is on me to avoid talking a load of dribble

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:19:25 GMT

At the moment, we Dunces are currently involved in the difficult, stressful process of searching for a house to buy. Instead of writing about mortgages, leaseholds, freeholds, (I'm glazing over just writing the words), I thought I'd revisit the language topic of eggcorns, described in the online Eggcorn Database> as a type of linguistic error reflecting "spontaneous reshapings of known expressions", such as the use of "eggcorn" instead of "acorn". I've recently run into a few interesting examples:

owness instead of "onus": as in "Folks who are going to be watching this film [Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ] need to educate themselves about how to watch the film. The owness is on churches as well as synagogues." (CNN Live Sunday transcript). Google lists over 200 hits for "owness is on", vs. 774,000 (searching for "owness" on its own gives an assortment of things, not all of which are eggcorns for "onus", such as "Sickness and Owness" which I guess means "the state of 'OW'!!", or "U2 Albums in Order of must-owness"). This is a characteristic example of an eggcorn: onus (etymological origin, Latin onus, "burden, load" [OED]) is a very uncommon word, and its replacement "owness" (or "oweness", with its 52 google hits "oweness is on") can quite nicely be interpreted as "a state of owing someone something" ("owe" coming from a totally different etymological origin than "onus"). Once you start looking for variants of an eggcorn it's often not hard to find interesting variants, such as one instance of "ownuss", "...if you do not get a gas cert then the ownuss is on you to keep records to show that you at least checked things out...". I'd imagine this is some sort of link between owning and responsibility.

dribble instead of "drivel". I first noticed this one in the spoken form (by someone I know who will remain anonymous). Because I know this person fairly well (and perhaps because my social graces are somewhat lacking) I had no hesitation at all in prodding them for more details. "It makes sense," said my informant, "because it's like they don't think about what they're saying and it just sort of dribbles out of their mouth like spit." This is an especially good example, as it brings the meaning of "drivel" back to some of its former uses: OED's first definition of the noun "drivel", with examples from the 14th century "Spittle flowing from the mouth; slaver, dribblings. Now rare.". The subsequent evolution of "drivel", "Idiotic utterance; silly nonsense; twaddle." is first attested in 1852. It's a little harder to find Google examples (unless you cheat by looking for drivel and dribble together, to see whether anyone else has written about this comparison. Which they have, but I figured I may as well avoid their examples and find some for myself), since "dribble" is a perfectly acceptable word in the right contexts. But it's not too hard; you just need to come up with a decent phrase in which "drivel" should appear, and replace it with "dribble". Here's one: "talking a lot of dribble" (a forum posting, someone appears to be making an idle thread of legal action against another forum poster who is "talking a lot of dribble" on some topic related to The Legend of Zelda). Just one example does not demonstrate a highly-used eggcorn, but it's encouraging. Then I struck the motherlode (or "motherload" as often eggcorned), "load of dribble". Would you believe nearly 800 Google hits? From my totally unscientific investigation of the first few instances of "load of dribble" I would suggest that this phrase is almost always used in a ranting context, and seems to correlate quite well with the use of run-on sentences and other language uses which might be considered anomalous, variant and/or wrong.

untilmatum instead of "ultimatum". Google only shows a handful of them (depending how many fingers you have, if you prefer to interpret "handful" in the literal sense [which is not actually a literal sense of "handful" because the way hands work, a handful is not actually likely to contain fingers {unless they have been removed from someone else's hand(s), for example, in which case there is no requirement that there be exactly five of them, but I digress}]), but this is such a beautiful example of an eggcorn I couldn't pass it by. You obviously wait until you have no other choice before delivering an untilmatum.

How confusing

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:21:41 GMT

There's a TV ad running currently for a company offering some sort of insurance advice through their website: "confused.com". Most of the ad consists of various satisfied customers (or actors portraying same) extolling the virtues of "confused.com". But this is one of those cases where the spoken-aloud URL sounds totally ambiguous to me: it could be either "confused-dot-com" or "confuse-dot-com". This isn't uncommon at all (think of other cases where a word ending with "d" is followed by a word starting with "d", e.g. "red rum" vs "red drum"), but in this case it's potentially damaging to business -- of course the owners of "confuse.com" have created their own "insurance information portal" which looks suspiciously like a link farm, spam blog, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure this is just a coincidence....

American mispronunciation

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:36:16 GMT

It's no secret that numerous British locations are ripe for mispronunciation, especially by American visitors (much to the amusement/irritation of locals). Places like Leicester (pronounced more like "Lester"*), Birmingham, Nottingham (and plenty of other -hams which mostly are pronounced more like "Birming'm", "Notting'm" and so on), the Thames ("tems"), and the list just goes on and on. But this entry is concerned about every once in a while when it goes the other way, where for a few certain places in the US, even BBC presenters (usually excellent in their correct pronunciation of various locales) repeatedly slip up. And we're not talking obscure anomalies like Versailles, Indiana (pronounced like "ver SAILS", of course). The three I've noticed the most are the city of Houston (TX), and the states Maryland and Michigan.

Houston: The correct pronunciation is of course something like "HYOO-ston" (where the last vowel is actually our old friend the schwa, English's favorite vowel in unstressed syllables, but as I already decided not to bother with any sort of unusual transcription characters, I'm sorta stuck making asides like this. Should have just embedded schwas and been done with it). As in "Houston, we've had a problem" (NASA audio link. Named after Sam Houston, who apparently pronounced his name that way. The British pronunciation is more like "HOO-ston", perhaps this is how the name of the "original Houston" (in Scotland) is pronounced (it's a minor enough place I've never heard its name said aloud). It's not simply a pronunciation difference between US and UK English overall, as the word "huge" has the same onset as the US pronunciation of "Houston" in both languages. The UK pronunciation is also not likely to be an extension of the pronunciation from other terms beginning with "HOU": the most common ones being "HOUR, HOUSE, HOUND" all of which would suggest pronouncing Houston as "HOUSE-ton". As, in fact, is the correct pronunciation of Houston Street in New York City.

Maryland: This is a particularly obvious one, possibly related to a tendency I've noticed in British English to give equal stress to different parts of compound words or compound-like words (terms "dandruff" and "vineyard" are pronounced as "DAN-druff" and "VIN-yurd" in US English, but more like "DAN-DRUFF" and "VINE-YARD" in UK English). The US pronunciation is something like "MAR-u-lund" (gosh, a couple of schwas would be so useful, but now it's far too late), while the UK pronunciation is "MARy-LAND". Like the name Mary + "land". I guess this is a straight-up trade for the zillions of US English speakers (including myself) who just cannot manage to correctly pronounce Marylebone (in London). I'm avoiding discussion of how the first syllable of Maryland should be pronounced (like "Mary"? or like "merry"? or like "marry"?), because my particular dialect doesn't distinguish between these vowels, and no doubt I'm mispronouncing it as far as the locals are concerned.

And then we get to Michigan, the one that seems to rile me the most of the three. I'm not sure I've ever heard a UK speaker pronouncing the name of this state correctly. The correct pronunciation is "MISH-i-gan" (more schwas needed in those unstressed syllables, gah!), but the standard UK English pronunciation is "MITCH-i-gan". If anything, I would have expected UK English speakers to get this right, following the slightly greater tendency of UK English to persist with slightly French pronunciations of words of French origin (such as the nasalized vowel at the end of the word "restaurant", although maybe this is just a sign of snootiness. A speaker of US English who nasalized that vowel would no doubt be asked to leave the country). Well, maybe it has something to do with guessing the pronunciation. There are plenty of words beginning in (consonant+ICH) or (consonant cluster+ICH), but most of them are either prefixed forms beginning with "bi" or "di" (bichromate, dichotomy, dichromate), in which the (consonant+ICH) is broken across multiple syllables, or highly obscure words (cichar, fichu, kichel, lich [less obscure if you're a nerd), lichi, nichil, vichy). There are a few common names which go all over the place (Michelle, Nicholas, Michael, Richard), but perhaps the deciding factor is the only really common word on the list, "rich". Pronounced like the UK English version of "Michigan". As usual, it can all be blamed on money.

* I'm not bothering with IPA when describing correct pronunciations, hence my descriptions may not be exactly right. But I think they get the idea across.

Impending assessment

Fri, 26 May 2006 11:37:24 GMT

In two weeks' time, I'll receive my first formal assessment in British Sign Language... taking the test for CACDP (Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People) Level 1 certification. The test criteria (taken from the CACDP's website>) are whether the person is able to:

identify and use simple, commonly used expressions, question forms and conventions associated with BSL/ISL*;
request and provide information appropriate to the context;
express themselves in the language clearly enough so that a sympathetic native user of the language would understand questions and contributions.

*ISL = Irish Sign Language; CACDP certification is available in either.

The test is conducted face-to-face with a fluent signer, and takes about 10 minutes, with three components: basic conversation (what's your name, what do you do for a living, etc.), question and answer, and storytelling (take a minute or so to tell a story based on a series of pictures). Everyone seems fairly confident that I will breeze through it, mainly because I get a lot more practice than the others in my class (I share an office with three fluent signers, and the informal rule is that I should try to use BSL first in office conversations, particularly those of a social nature). But that doesn't help when it comes to the examination jitters -- the assessment was arranged yesterday and I've already had my first "Level 1 assessment nightmare". I swear this blog isn't going to turn into a dream journal, but here goes anyway:

The format of the Level 1 exam was a little different than specified above: it was a panel interview in a large auditorium. The content was a bit different as well: I was asked to describe my Ph.D. thesis research in BSL and answer questions of a technical nature. I had of course not prepared for this type of examination, instead rehearsing things like "I grew up in America, now I live in north London. I work as a language researcher and I have a wife and a cat." Needless to say this was not suitable to deal with (signed) questions like "how can you justify making a distinction between conceptual, nonlinguistic representations and semantic representations that are strictly verbal in nature?". The only thing missing (or not missing as the case may be) was that I was fully clothed.

Accessible research

Wed, 03 May 2006 12:21:12 GMT

One real challenge for me as a wannabe scientist is communicating my work effectively. I've had plenty of practice writing for an advanced audience (peer-reviewed publications in academic journals) but practically none intended for the general public. Until now, that is. I was recently asked to write a short piece about the sign language research I've involved in, to be published in a magazine whose primary readership is British signers. Fortunately I received plenty of feedback from one of my colleagues, a native signer who is substantially more experienced in writing for the community. It'll be interesting to see how people respond to it (if they respond at all). But I thought I'd post the article here as well, just to give a general idea of the kind of work I'm doing with sign language. All flaws, overstatements and errors of any kind are strictly my own and should not be attributed to my co-authors in any way. If you'd like to see the "academic journal" paper reporting this work please drop me a line.

Words, signs and imagery: when the language makes the difference.

In spoken languages, the way most words sound or are written has nothing to do with the actual thing each word represents. For example, neither the sound of the English word "hammer", nor its written form, have any resemblance to a hammer. Nor do the sounds of words for hammer in other languages ("kakas" in Hungarian, "martello" in Italian, "kanazuchi" in Japanese, "mlot" in Polish to mention but a few). This fact has led to a view held by many researchers: that "language" can be defined, in part, by the fact that words do not resemble the things they refer to. However, this view is based almost entirely upon research on spoken languages. Words referring to real-world things and events almost never resemble those things and events, because the languages are limited to sounds that can be produced by voice.

On the other hand, signed languagescan express far more information about the real world. In BSL, for example, numerous signs look like the object or action they refer to. For example, the sign HAMMER is produced by moving a fist up and down, resembling the typical use of a hammer, and the sign SCISSORS is produced by moving the index and middle fingers outward and inward, as if they were a pair of scissors. This sort of similarity between things in the world, and the form of signs, has often led people who know little about signed languages to the wrong conclusion that sign languages are somehow inferior to spoken languages, we know that research on sign languages shows otherwise.

We conducted an experiment designed to test whether the visual information of BSL signs affects native signers' judgements of similarity between different kinds of objects and actions, compared to English words which do not resemble things and events in the world. We used three types of signs/words: tools (e.g. SCISSORS, BROOM), tool-actions (e.g. DRILLING, DRAWING), and body-actions (e.g. SLAPPING, PUNCHING). The difference between objects (tools) and actions (tool actions and body actions) seems to be extremely important in understanding how language works, especially as they have very different roles in sentences (objects are nouns, actions are usually verbs). In BSL, all three kinds of signs are visually linked to their meanings, but tools and tool-actions are especially similar. For both of them, BSL signs look like the act of using a tool, while for body-actions, the signs look like the body movements:

Stills from BSL video clips used in the experiment. Arrows reflect direction of movement.

In this experiment, we showed BSL signers groups of three video-clips and asked them to decide which two of the signs were the most similar in meaning. We also asked English speakers to do a similar task, but using spoken words instead of video-clips. This kind of task has been used quite often to examine words' meanings in spoken languages, and speakers of a language tend to agree highly in their judgements. Because we wanted to look at the effect of the visual properties of signs, we looked at signers' and speakers' judgements of signs and words referring to tool actions. BSL signers were twice as likely to judge tool actions as more similar to tools than to body actions, while instead English speakers were four times as likely to judge tool actions as more similar to body actions. For example, SAWING and SPANNER were chosen as similar by BSL users 77% of the time, while English speakers chose them only 5% of the time; in contrast, SAWING and SCRATCHING were chosen as similar by BSL users only 5% of the time, but English speakers chose them 50% of the time.

The visual properties of signs are quite important in signed languages. Because BSL signs for both tools and tool-actions are so similar to each other, resembling the act of using a tool, BSL signers were far more likely to think of the two as very similar in meaning. This was very different from English speakers who thought of objects and actions as extremely different in meaning, even though both of them were related to tools. These results show that language cannot be defined by a lack of resemblance to things in the world, and that research on signed languages is an important part of understanding language itself as a whole.

Language maps 3: Some other language spoke here

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:10:34 GMT

After I looked for the heavily English-speaking counties (failing to find the jewel in Montana's crown, the elusive 100% of Powder River County), the next step was to examine where English is least-spoken, at least according to the US Census. Judging from the English map I posted yesterday, it was a no-brainer to wander along the Mexican border and find areas where Spanish is especially dominant.

Although I wasn't exhaustive in my search, I think I did pretty well finding Maverick County, where a shade under 8% speak English as their first language (38,560 Spanish speakers, 91% of the population. 375 Kickapoo speakers, and a handful of Aztecan and German speakers round out the mix). Maverick County has a Wikipedia entry that is even less informative than usual, but plenty of historical information can be found at the Handbook of Texas Online (for example, that "[d]uring the decade before the Civil War, the area was a haven for outlaws, slave hunters, and other disreputable people"). The county seat, Eagle Pass, is "The Best Way to Mexico!!!" and "where yeehaw meets ole'" according to its website>.

It's easy enough to find counties where Spanish is dominant, but not nearly so easy to find counties where yet another language besides English and Spanish is the most commonly spoken (at least according to the US Census). I noticed one quite easily when I peeked at the language map of Alaska. In the Bethel Census Area, there are 9,005 speakers of Yupik (an Eskimo language also spoken in Siberia, more info here), amounting to more than 63% of the population, vs only 4,950 English speakers (less than 35%). This area is in the midst of the Yukon Delta (and Bethel itself is apparently often called the "armpit of Alaska" by other Alaskans: Wikipedia link [hardly NPOV in wiki terms]). Here> is an interesting local news site, and here> is a nice local photo site. As far as the Bethel Census Area goes, the Wikipedia entry posed me a clear challenge: "Bethel Census Area is one of only 38 county-level census divisions of the United States where the most spoken language is not English and one of only 3 where it is neither English nor Spanish.". I immediately decided I had to find the other two.

Well, the French map from my first "Language map" entry was staring me in the face, so I thought I ought to start with the darkest French-speaking areas marked there. In the Northeast, there were a few possibilities, but all of them fell far short with more than 75% English speakers (Aroostook County, Maine: 22.37% French speakers; Androscoggin County, Maine: 14.29%; Coos County, NH: only 16.17%). So the next natural possibility was Louisiana, full of French-speaking Cajuns. But again, far short: the best I could find was St. Martin Parish (26.65% French speakers, but 69.74% English). Even Acadia Parish only clocked in with a miserable 17.27% French speaking rate. My next unsuccessful try was German, as there are a few highly German parts of the northern Plains (a few counties in the Dakotas), but the best I found there was McIntosh County, North Dakota (35.55% German, but over 64% English).

This was starting to get frustrating, but then I reconsidered the example of Yupik. What about other indigenous languages spoken only in certain parts of the country? When you think of native American languages, Navajo is the first to come to mind (at least if you are me). And it turns out to be the right place to look: as the Wikipedia entry puts it, "The Navajo people are one of the very few Native American tribes that still use the native language of their tribe in everyday usage.". As it turns out, the MLA site even offers a Navajo map, reproduced below:

And in two counties, Navajo is indeed the most-spoken language. In Apache County, Arizona, they are a majority: 36,775 Navajo speakers (58.39%) to only 24,180 English speakers (38.39%). McKinley County, New Mexico is the third non-English, non-Spanish county: 30,900 Navajo speakers (45.79%), 26,250 English speakers (38.9%), but also a significant number of Zuni (9.04%) and Spanish (5.72%) speakers. Navajo County, Arizona falls a little short (60% English, 25% Navajo). Now that I've solved the mystery I've somewhat run out of steam, but I can't leave without a link to the official site of the Navajo Nation>.

Language maps 2: English spoke here.

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:05:38 GMT

In my previous entry, I started playing around with the MLA Language Map. Today I decided to do some more investigations, this time starting with the English map, which shows the percentage of people in each county who speak English as their first language:

First, I thought I'd try and find the county in which the greatest percentage of respondents are English speakers. Guessing from the legend on the map above, it looks like I should be able to find one county with 99.58% English speakers. Looking at the map, though, gives an idea about how hard this may be: vast stretches of the midwest and southeast are marked with the darkest color, including almost all of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. It was trivially easy to find counties at 98% or higher (just wander around Mississippi and Alabama) but was extremely hard to cross the 99 barrier.

Where do you find the elusive 99? How about "up in the hills"? The Ozarks was where I found my first, and so far only, 99: Searcy County, Arkansas (99.06%, with only 64 Spanish speakers and 8 Italians). The Wikipedia entry is especially dry (even for a "county" entry) so I offer you some information about the controversy concerning the 1998 election for sheriff (pos-c.com link).

Encouraged by this success, I checked various other Ozark counties without finding any other 99s. Next stop, Appalachia. And surprise, West Virgina brought in the second 99+ (Pleasants County, 99.10%, only 63 Spanish speakers). Here's> a small site with some local information (and the dry-as-a-bone Wikipedia entry). It also has a bridge>. But Pleasants County is as high as I managed to get. Can anyone do better? You can do searches here.

Next entry: counties where very few people speak English. Of course you would expect to find most of these in the Southwest where Spanish is spoken by a significant population, but there are three counties in the US where a language besides Spanish or English is the most commonly spoken. I have found two of them at the moment, but the third is proving elusive so far.

Language maps

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:29:53 GMT

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently launched a new version of their US Language Map which displays language information from the 2000 US Census at variously fine levels of detail (main page here; map page here). One of the most important developments of this map is the ability to display speaker information as a percentage of the population (previous versions just showed raw numbers which gave excessively high weights to urban areas). The percentage-based maps give a very nice impression of linguistic distributions (although note that maps for different languages use different scales:

German:

Italian:

French:

You can also get details of where various languages are spoken (complete list of languages reported to the US Census, LINK). For example, Shawnee> is spoken by 490 respondents in the entire US: 140 in Oklahoma, 110 in Ohio, 65 in West Virginia, 25 in Ohio and the rest in other states. Or Luxembourgian which is apparently spoken by 834 respondents (more in Wisconsin and Iowa than anywhere else). Surprisingly, neither Jedi nor Klingon appear on the list.

Education in flux

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:19:16 GMT

A memo was circulated recently by the anonymous educational institute next door to my workplace, concerning upcoming construction works that apparently may be so disruptive as to cause, erm, significant issues of a personal nature:

FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

...To confirm that scaffolding will be erected to the side of (Anonymous) building, on the Service Road Exit ramp, on Wednesday 12 April;

Repair work carried out on Thursday 13 April, and the Scaffolding dismantled and removed on Good Friday 14 April 2006....

The (Anonymous) Institute apologies for any incontinence caused while this necessary maintenance work is carried out.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Launching!

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:35:11 GMT

The past week or two have been really busy as we prepare for the launch of the new research centre where I am gainfully employed. This week is National Science Week so it's a very sensible time to launch a major new centre. The launch also (very nearly) coincides with the third anniversary of the British government's formal recognition of BSL as a language in its own right (18 March 2003; press release from the RNID, official government statement).*

To give you an idea of what the centre is all about, here is the official press release announcing the Centre award. I will be working primarily on projects related to language processing in signed and spoken languages (ok, not ALL signed and spoken languages, but starting off with BSL and English). More on that once the projects are actually underway -- at the moment I'm doing a lot of work wrapping up an assortment of previous projects.

*I should note that official recognition of BSL does not mean that BSL is an official language of the UK. Only that the government has recognized that BSL is a "real language". BSL is still not mentioned on the UK DirectGov pages concerning official languages, even though it's indisputably a British language, with thousands of native signers living in the country. So what is mentioned? English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic are definitely official (when we took the "Life in the UK" test, we were given the option of taking it in any of these three languages). The DirectGov page also gives space to Cornish, even though the last native Cornish speaker apparently died in 1777, and thus it can really be considered only a historical curiosity rather than a true language (check out this excellent post on Language Log for more info about the case of Cornish).

Talking in my sleep

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:52:20 GMT

I've discovered that I not only talk in my sleep (most recently, something about "In a true democracy, blahblahblahrrrrmmmm....."), but I've recently started using sign language as well. A couple of nights ago I woke up Mrs. Dunce with sign language (or maybe she was already awake since they were quiet signs); I was dutifully practicing my BSL and asking someone about their job:

<pointing> WORK WHERE <pointing> ("Where do you work?").

I was dreaming about trying to have a BSL conversation in the dark, without my glasses on. Needless to say I wasn't able to understand their response (if any).

When is data like rabbits?

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:16:24 GMT

When it/they is/are multiplying.

This weekend I came across a Microsoft poster advertising some sort of data management system, presumably aimed at workers who are suffering from information overload (both the poster and the system are aimed at such people, so feel free to attach the "presumably" clause wherever you prefer). This problem was illustrated by a harried-looking employee-type, thinking (or perhaps actually saying; I don't recall whether it was in a speech balloon or thought balloon)
"This data is multiplying like rabbits."

Readers of a grammatically conservative disposition (SNOOTs, in the terminology of one particular such individual) will no doubt have already reacted in some way to this brief sentence; depending on one's level of grammatical conservatism and dramatic character, such reactions might range from a sigh and small headshake all the way up to retching, gasping and shouting (which may in turn elicit sigh/headshake reactions from the retcher/shouter's companions depending on relative tolerance for public displays of overdramatic reactions). Although my own reaction at the time may have been more on the sigh/headshake side of things (Mrs. Dunce may disagree), the sentence really stuck in my head as something very wrong. It starts with the question of whether "data" can be used as a singular noun (you know, datum = the correct singular term, and all that). As a frequent cruncher of data myself, I am very strongly biased toward strictly plural use of the term "data" and singular uses like "This data is..." are somewhat irritating to me.*

But even if "data" in this instance is allowed to take a singular verb (and also the "This" instead of "These", which I didn't even mention but causes me similar discomfort), there's still a problem with its relation to the figurative language in the predicate: the singular reading is very much at odds with the laws of nature and the way in which rabbits multiply. If you have only one rabbit (or any other animal**), it's not very likely to multiply on its own (excepting certain initial state conditions). So the parallel between rabbits and data is a very clunky one, especially if "data" is (syntactically) singular. This clunkiness extends to many other instances of "is multiplying/breeding like rabbits" found in the wild (Google results), a substantial number of which are collectives ("unwanted mail", "roster of customers", "bad news", "the number of _____"; plus loads of, erm, invective directed at particular groups, such as "the Catholic religion", "an immigrant group", "white trash", "Moslem population" and so on). In all of these cases it's not the groups themselves that are multiplying/breeding but the individuals. However, this kind of use is not at all uncommon; in fact, "is multiplying/breeding like rabbits" is nearly as common as "are multiplying/breeding like rabbits" (503 and 677 Google hits respectively).

*I should note that the typical "wrong" use of "data" with a singular verb is not really as a singular noun, but instead as a collective term (like "family", "team" and so on). If "data" is a collective noun, it should by all rights be used with a singular verb (in US English at least; UK English is another story). All I can say is that I use "data" with plural verbs. I should also note, however, that my 100% plural use of the term "data" is accomplished by use of some additional terms derived from "data", term which might almost be considered "cheating". For example, instead of "datum" I tend to use "datapoint" or "data point". Hardly the most efficient way to singularize a plural term; it's almost like saying "a dogs-individual" when you mean "a dog". I similarly avoid the "collective" problem by using the term "dataset".

**Any other animal except, apparently, some sort of grass mite. Tribbles don't count because they are not real, as far as I know anyway.

Signing mania

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:22:14 GMT

Like last week, this week has remained insanely busy at work. A couple of days have been mostly taken up by courses related to British Sign Language and communication strategies: both of these have required a very high level of concentration. I realize now that in normal conversations or everyday activities, my eyes wander a lot (perhaps related to my limited attention span, nervous energy, and all my other similar characteristics). But this just doesn't work when you're trying to communicate using sign language (and/or lipreading). After a day on the course I feel like my eyes are ready to bug out and my brain is ready to explode. The first few course meetings I found myself taking a lot of notes, but this was quite counterproductive as it's not really possible to watch the signs while writing, and it's not at all easy to summarize a signform in a concise manner (especially as my drawing skills don't extend beyond the logos for heavy metal bands). I found myself writing lots of things like this:

WHAT: RH, palm F index up, waggle "don't go there", make Q face. Which means...
For the sign "WHAT", using the Right Hand, palm forward, index finger pointing up, make a waggling motion ("don't go there" as the nearest approximation to the motion and location), while making a facial expression that signifies a question.

WORK: chest, LH palm R/in, thumb in base, RH same shape chop L on thumb base 2x. Which means...
The sign "WORK" is made near the chest: the left hand palm is halfway between pointing right and inward, with the thumb tucked in. This left hand provides the base for the sign. The right hand is formed in approximately the same shape, and makes two chopping motions against the base of the left thumb.

Needless to say, I can miss quite a few signed sentences while I'm writing even the most concise notes I can, and it's not so easy to interpret my notes later . Even assuming I've gotten all the details right, which is not always the case. BSL is flexible but there are certain phonological* requirements (hands may move in certain ways but not others; hand shapes may vary to some extent in some ways but not others, etc.). So I decided to stop taking notes, and suddenly I felt like I was picking up a lot more information (although maybe it was just more practice).

We've finally gotten to the stage where our instructors are weaning us off English syntactic structures: now that we have a small BSL vocabulary, it's time for us to start thinking about putting them into appropriate order for BSL. For example, English questions begin with a WH-word, while BSL questions (sentences too, for that matter) begin with the main topic, and have the WH-sign towards the end:
English: Where do you work?
BSL approximate equivalent: you work where you?

The multiple use of the pointing pronoun I've glossed as "you" in BSL is quite common, but differs in different expressions and different signers, in ways I don't have a clue about so far. It reminds me of reflexives ("sich" in German, erm, there's one in Italian too,...) but seems somehow different.

Fortunately, all of my other officemates (and the centre's senior researcher whose office is just around the corner) are BSL signers. Only one of them is deaf, so I will need to make a real effort to try and use sign as much as possible if I am to improve.

*The term "phonology" and its derivational variants are used in an analogical sense from spoken languages, in which "phonology" refers to the sound system of a particular language. For example, in English the -ng sound cannot appear at the beginning of a word; certain consonants don't (typically) appear in sequence (counterexamples for any pair of consonants can be found, but "phonologically illegal" combinations are quite unusual and often appear across the parts of a compound word, like HD which can be found in "BIRTHDAY"). These kinds of constraints are also present in sign languages, but rather than referring to sound, they refer to movement, position, handshape, and so on. But the term phonology is used even though there's nothing "phono" about them.

Signing and mis-signing

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 17:59:41 GMT

One of the most challenging aspects of my new post is that I must get up to speed with British Sign Language (BSL). Many years ago I did take a class in American Sign Language¹, but as many people are very surprised to learn, knowledge of one sign language does not automatically bring with it knowledge of any other. Even the fingerspelled alphabets are completely different, despite the fact that the letters themselves are exactly the same (I am ignoring the difference between "zee" and "zed", and the even more subtle difference between "aitch" and "haitch"). Fortunately, I have many colleagues at the same early stage of BSL, and a weekly course is being offered in house. So far we've covered the rough basics (fingerspelling and numbers; getting someone's attention; introductions and basic getting-to-know-you topics; London locations and transport options; how viciously cold it is outside and what kind of crazy idiot is wearing short sleeves on a day like this. Erm, maybe that last one was just a conversation rather than a lesson. But I wasn't cold!). Once the research centre opens its doors (moving-in day is next Tuesday), there will be a lot more opportunity (read that as a positive spin on "necessity") to converse in sign language as there are quite a few fluent signers around, and all the non-signers are required to achieve a certain level of competence relatively quickly. For now, however, a "BSL Lunch Club" has been set up: a good number of "real" signers join us newbies for lunch and conversation. At the moment there's a substantial gap between the groups; mainly because we're mostly limited to Tarzan-sign ("Me name Dunce me work in 'ology' learn-learn sign language hard ok thank-you?") as soon as the conversation turns away from our constrained practice exchanges. But it's an excellent way to get a good sense of the mechanics of BSL conversations, to get used to following conversations & understand how turn-taking and interruption work, and also to learn a lot of vocabulary under battlefield conditions. OK maybe not "battlefield conditions" but definitely mentally-taxing conditions -- I found the Lunch Club much more difficult than the class itself. But it's all being quite useful at helping me to absorb the course content.

¹I have to admit my shameful sign language past here. I took a short ASL course when I was in 8th grade (or thereabouts), as part of "Project KEY" ("Kokomo Enrichment of Youth", i.e. the school system's gifted and talented program). Not long thereafter, our church was putting on a children's musical, by the name of Papa John's Garden (a musical that occasionally provides the soundtrack to my nightmares even decades later). And someone got the idea that the musical would be particularly enhanced if sign language interpretation were provided. Since I had learned sign language, I was the natural choice. I don't remember exactly, but I think I was asked if I could do it. At that age, the only answer I could possibly give was "of course I can"; because to say otherwise would have been an admission of ignorance.
I went and met with the instructors of my course, who gave me some good starting advice about sign language interpretation in such circumstances. They advised me first, that at the beginning of the musical I should introduce the names of the main characters, fingerspelling them first and then providing a corresponding sign name (i.e. a short sign that refers to a character; think of it as a nickname) so that I wouldn't need to spell each name every time it occurred. And second (but more importantly), to practice, practice and practice on the lines and lyrics. Of course I didn't, although I may have pretended to do so (sitting stage right during rehearsals, daydreaming but with my fingers vaguely fluttering so it would look like I was concentrating on the signs).
And then the day arrived: SHOWTIME (actually, SHOWTIMES: I'm pretty sure there were multiple performances). And was I prepared? Definitely not. I hadn't really thought of sign names for any of the characters (except for "PJ", abbreviation for "Papa John", [the only adult character in the musical, and a character who maybe you don't really want your children to be around]). I didn't know the signs for most of the words in the musical; in fact, I didn't know most of the words. I thought maybe I would come down with a devastating illness of some kind, but I'd used up all my devastating illnesses already to stay home from school on various occasions. So then the curtain went up. Well, there was no curtain, but there I was standing stage right, with a spotlight shining on me. And they were off, singing and talking and all that. And I was keeping up, with an impressive flurry of sign language interpretation! Or at least, I was moving my hands along with the music, making sure they were formed in legitimate ASL handshapes most of the time. After one of the performances, someone came up to me and thanked me for my interpretation. She said that she knew a little sign language (and with that my heart sank)... but not enough to keep up most of the time. Hooray! With that, my secret was safe, and I avoided punishment for making a mockery of sign language. Thank goodness there were no Deaf people in the audience; it would have been a serious insult.

British and American corn

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:55:00 GMT

It's time for another language digression, and this time the topic is corn. Of course the topic is corn, I am a Hoosier after all (OED: Hoosier: a. a native or inhabitant of the state of Indiana. b. An inexperienced, awkward, or unsophisticated person.). It's always struck me as odd that not only do British pizzas often come with sweetcorn as a topping, but also that they call it "sweetcorn" in the first place. We Hoosiers would just call it "corn", and we sure know about corn¹. As it turns out, this is one of those sneaky linguistic differences that easily passes under the radar. In American English (see dictionary.com), "corn" refers specifically to a plant known as Zea mays, and the grains or kernels thereof. And also an ear of the same. This plant, in British English, goes by "maize", because UK "corn" is fairly synonymous with US "grain": a more general term referring to any type of cereal (OED: wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc.), and often simply refers to the main crop of a particular area. UK "sweetcorn" is the edible part of maize, I suppose (to be honest, I haven't ever noticed British speakers using the term "maize", but sometimes I suppress my Hoosier heritage by limiting my conversations about grain and cereals). Apparently (i.e., according to the OED), US usage of "corn" is a shortened form of the original (British) reference to maize as "Indian corn" (i.e., that cereal grown by the Indians). I guess the "Indian" part was dropped when the Indians "decided" to move west to land where cultivating crops was more of a challenge. Anyway, if you're a Hoosier in the UK looking for a cornfield, don't be surprised if it doesn't have any corn in it.

¹For example, the custom of "corning houses" at Halloween. Feral youths go into cornfields and collect loads of corn kernels (quite dry at this time of year, as they've been left to go to seed, or to be fed to pigs, or something. Erm, you can see I'm only loosely acquainted with agricultural practice). When thrown at houses, the kernels make a rattling noise, just like, ummm, there's corn being thrown at your house. It's really fun and a great alternative to driving up and down the main drag. Never mind the much-reviled slogan for a rather low-rent amusement park, "There's more than corn in Indiana" (proper retort: "There's soybeans too").

Balderdash and Piffle - Episode M

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 14:35:15 GMT

Last week I wrote anout BBC's series "Balderdash and Piffle", a program about words and the stories behind them made in collaboration with the Oxford English Dictionary (that post is here). I was especially bothered by all the fluff that was included in the attempt to create some suspense, and to make the show more interesting or accessible. Well, yesterday was the second episode of the series, focusing upon the letter M. My hopes were not high, and rightly so as this episode seemed to include even more fluff. It started with an investigation of the term "management-speak" which, the show's presenter argued, is frequent enough in the language that it warrants an entry in the OED. Well, that seems straightforward enough, right? Just assemble an assortment of evidence showing consistent use over a period, submit it to the OED who will decide whether it warrants an entry. Well, that's not entertaining enough. So before the dénouement (SPOILER: the answer is "yes"), there was a lengthy and painful digression showing how ineffective Churchill's wartime speechifying would have been, had it been implemented and delivered in the application context of a management-speak framework paradigm. Ho! Ho! Ho! How silly it would have been if his speeches had been delivered in management-speak with crucial supplemental information provided by Powerpoint(TM). We'd all be speaking German today, jawohl! Und so weiter.

Another "fluff" element of Balderdash and Piffle I didn't mention before: various famous individuals telling the delighted viewers about their favorite word beginning with this week's letter. I can tell you that Germaine Greer's favorite M-word is "moan" (in the sense of "to complain"). Why this matters I cannot say, but just in case I should choose one for myself (I'll decide by the time I finish this entry).

Another sizable chunk of the show investigated the origin of the phrase "the full Monty". Various unsubstantiated theories have been put forward: "Perhaps. the most plausible is that it is from a colloquial shortening of the name of Montague Maurice Burton (1885-1952), men's tailor, and referred originally to the purchase of a complete three-piece suit. Also popular but unsubstantiated is the belief that the phrase is somehow derived from Monty, the nickname of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976)." After substantial investigation, on-site interviews with individuals somehow connected with the two Montys, and some other digressions, various unsubstantiated theories remain unsubstantiated. However, an early piece of evidence for this term was found: a 1982 Manchester telephone directory which listed The Full Monty Chippy. Not exactly headline news, though.

Perhaps the best part of this week's program relates to the term "Mackem" (someone who comes from Sunderland, or a supporter of the Premiership's worst football club at this moment [won 1, drew 3, lost 16]). This term didn't appear in the OED (until now!), but is widely used (at least regionally). The piece may have been more interesting because it did not involve an annoying presenter, but instead focused upon a local publicity effort to find the origin of the term, and also because it really focused upon the word: the regional extent of its use, the semantic breadth of reference, and also trying to find printed documentation of its use (also raising the issue of difficulty in finding such evidence for terms that are much more common in speech than in writing). The segment also featured some brief interviews with young Newcastle football supporters (Newcastle and Sunderland are fierce local rivals) who provided helpful and amusing definitions of Mackem ("It's a _______ ________", "*******", "%£%@$%", and so on).

But I reserve my greatest vitriol for (what felt like) the longest segment in the program: exploring the term "man" (to me it's mainly interesting because of the amount of detail in the OED's etymology). It featured my favorite presenter who seems to relish the idea of providing filler fluff for the program, and went on and on about how shocking it is that "Man" once meant "Person", not just "Adult Male Person". This segment reached its low (and a low I doubt can be exceeded in future episodes) when the presenter made her way to the Cerne Abbas Giant (another link, National Trust link) (if you don't know about the Giant, follow one of the links or the following won't make much sense). While an overhead (helicopter) shot showed the presenter standing on the Giant's phallus (removed by the Victorians but returned to him later), she reminded us that a phallus does not make a man; she then made her way to the Giant's head! Aha! That is what makes a man! A brain! Not what's down below! This segment irritated me so much I intentionally soiled myself. I can't wait till next week's episode.

Anyway, now it's time for my favorite word beginning with "M". There are just so many to choose from. "Myth" has been a word of some discussion in the Dunce household (Mrs. Dunce wonders whether its origin is related to the cult of Mithras. Answer unknown so far), but I can't really call it a favorite. For now, I think I'll go with "maim": OED: "Originally: to disable, wound, cause bodily hurt or disfigurement to. Subsequently: to deprive of (the use of) a limb, etc.; to mutilate; to cripple." Documented uses of "maim" in the OED range from centuries old (Chaucer, c1395) to quite new (Maya Angelou, 1981). And there is some debate about the ultimate origin of the term, which comes to us from Anglo-Norman (mahaigner, maheimer, mahemer, mahimer, maigner, mehainer), and Old/Middle French (mahaignier, mehaignier, meshaignier). I was having a lot of trouble deciding between "maim" and "mayhem". Turns out I shouldn't have bothered; "mayhem" originated as a variant of "maim".

Balderdash and Piffle

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:49:08 GMT

Yesterday was the first episode of BBC's series "Balderdash and Piffle", a television program about words and the stories behind them (made in collaboration with the Oxford English Dictionary). I'm extremely interested in this topic (see references to BBC's Word Hunt from my "nerd post" in July) but was rather skeptical about how the topic would translate to television. Sadly, I have to report that the answer is "not very well". The episode was brought to you by the letter "P" (all the words under investigation [except one] started with "P"). I suppose this is as good a theme as any, given the lack of similarity of any other kind among the words and phrases in question.

The main aim of the investigation was to find conclusive evidence of a particular usage (for example, "gay" [the one non-P word] used to mean "homosexual". Earliest such documented use 1935) predating the earliest instance in the OED's current records. And this, on its own, makes for very dull television: either a particular piece of evidence is definitive or not. In order to liven things up, an annoying presenter wandered around, visiting various members of the public who had found potential pieces of evidence (or even, visiting the National Archives looking for early evidence herself), then presenting this evidence to an OED panel. When the panel found the evidence insufficient (quite reasonably, I thought) she tried to wheedle (wheedle: Origin obscure. Possibly a survival in a specialized application of OE. "waedlian" to beg, orig. to be poor, from "waedl" poverty. - OED) and beg for the evidence to be accepted anyway (in a most unseemly fashion). She did have one instance of success: the term "ploughman's lunch" to refer to (essentially) a cheese & pickle sandwich, but this took a convoluted path laden with television-friendly fodder. First she visited a number of pubs (where ploughmen's lunches are served), then without success, went to visit some ploughmen (and did some plowing herself, you know, because she was talking to ploughmen). Still no success so then she visited someone associated with the British cheese industry, who directed her to someone who was responsible for cheese-related publicity in the 1950s and 60s, and indeed this person had some early advertising materials (unfortunately, undated) which predated the earliest documented usage. But then, finally, we followed her to the National Archives where she (eventually) breathlessly waved a few dated records of ploughmen's lunch publicity. And hooray, this evidence was good enough for the suits at the OED. But only a tiny smidgen of this segment had anything to do with words or phrases.

Other p-words were included, I guess, to fill out the program. "Pig", for example, is one of the few English words that actually seems to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. This was enough to launch a piece on pigs (and piglets, for of course the term "pig" originally referred only to the young of the species; once the term expanded to include swine in general, the term "piglet" was adopted to fill the gap). Similarly, there was a long (and quite entertaining) diversion into "polari" (an argot/cant used by various underworldly sorts, taken up by gay communities on sea and in London [EDIT: As Chig commented below, use of Polari was certainly not restricted to London]), mainly consisting of older Polarists reminiscing about some of their favorite terms. In passing there was another visit to the OED panel with supposed evidence for the homosexual sense of "gay", all rejected as ambiguous, thanks to coreference with the Gay 90s and very frequent use of "gay" in other senses. This is one of those cases where, most likely, the only acceptable evidence would be an overt definition or explanation in context (for example, one of OED's examples, from 1955, goes like this "Most of the officers at the station had been ‘gay’..an American euphemism for homosexual."). By setting a goal of providing definitive, conclusive proof, the OED has made this a difficult (but reasonable) task, but one ill-suited to television.

There is one real benefit to this series, however (in addition to gaining additional linguistic evidence which will be incorporated into the OED). In conjunction with it, the OED is making (some of) its online content available to members of the public (ordinarily there is a substantial subscription charge. Fortunately my institution subscribes). Words beginning with "P" are now available for browsing by the public (go here to play), and the full content of the OED can be browsed for 48 hours after transmission of the program (so you have 28 hours from the time I post this message). Judging from the list, I guess we should also expect B and M to follow. Possibly N too ("naff" was mentioned in the discussion of "polari", but no indication was made that its origin was also being investigated. In fact, its etymology was presented as an acronym N.A.F.F., but the current OED entry suggests that this is a "later rationalization" rather than an origin). I'm sure I will eagerly watch the additional episodes, but will be similarly disappointed. The world is just not ready for a proper etymological television series without the fluff.

Ungrammaticality in the wild

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:56:29 GMT

In reading today's news I came across a sentence that seemed so horribly ungrammatical that I decided I had to rant about it. I found it in an article in the Guardian with the headline Defiant Bush defends wiretapping powers. The headline itself is an interesting example of a "garden path" sentence. "Defiant Bush defends wiretapping" would be a perfectly good sentence, and it seems to me that "wiretapping" occurs much more often as a noun than as an adjective (I don't have any firm data; "wiretap" is not such a common word). In the above headline, however, it's used as an adjective, modifying the noun "powers". When I first read it, I was briefly "garden pathed": the word "powers" seemed anomalous and I had to think a moment in order to correctly comprehend the sentence. That's not ungrammatical, though, just potentially difficult.

The ungrammaticality comes in the first subheading (or whatever it's called in the online news biz): "Democrats scent blood after reining in privileges". I thought that surely it should be "smell blood"; isn't "scent" a noun? But before charging in with a rant on the theme of "SCENT IS A NOUN AND ONLY A NOUN, AND ANYONE WHO USES IT AS A VERB SHOULD BE DRAWN AND QUARTERED", I thought I'd sniff around the various uses of "scent". Of course "scent" can be used as a verb in a transitive sense, meaning to infuse something with a different smell (for example, Google search for "scented the * with" finds assorted sentences of the form "X scented the Y with Z") but in this instance the Democrats do not seem to be infusing blood with any particular aroma. As it turns out, however, "scent" has centuries of history as a verb, particularly in the context of hunting ("scent blood" as essentially synonymous to my preferred "smell blood"); the Oxford English Dictionary gives an example (c.1400): "Whan hares be ygete with the kynde of a conynge..the houndes lust nor sentith hem nought so wele." So I definitely shouldn't rant about what seems like an entirely correct use of the verb "scent". I am somewhat vindicated by the observation that "scent blood" is far less common than "smell blood" (1040 Google hits for the former, 89,900 for the latter), and that "scent" is far more commonly used as a noun than a verb (even in British English; the British National Corpus of 100 million words includes 851 instances of scent used as a noun, vs. only 27 as a verb). So it's not ungrammatical, just unusual. Some might say, however, that a sufficiently unusual form of expression may as well be considered ungrammatical. It depends on how you define "ungrammatical", which is perhaps a question for another day (if you are the keeper of the "rules of grammar" [part of the OED definition of "ungrammatical"] please step forward as I have a few questions for you).

My blogging language

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:22:30 GMT

While writing a previous entry I noticed a high frequency of the term "fortunately" in my posts. Perhaps I've had many fortunate experiences, or perhaps I've been telling lots of tales involving possible misfortune, but in which the worst possibilities did not come to pass. Or maybe I just like the word "fortunately". Anyway, since I've been doing some simplistic work analyzing corpora of texts, I thought I'd turn these analyses on my own blog entries and see what other atypical patterns of word choice are present in my writings (up to and including my last entry). I am focusing here strictly upon word frequency: what uncommon words do I use especially frequently? what common words do I use less frequently than would be expected? And what do I write about the most, just in terms of the content words I recycle again and again?

For the sake of simplicity I am using a somewhat out-of-date word frequency database (Kucera & Francis, 1967. Information on the corpus can be found here); this was once the accepted source of word frequency information (approximately 1,000,000 words from 500 different sources), although much larger texts have since supplanted this database (for example, the British National Corpus> is based on 100m words). To give you an idea of the distribution, here are a few of the most common words in the K&F corpus and how often each one occurred:

THE 69971
OF 36411
AND 28852
TO 26149
A 23237
IN 21341
THAT 10595
IS 10099
WAS 9816
HE 9543

I combined all the text of my blog entries (including titles, picture captions, and the text of hyperlinks, but not including dates, category labels or comments) and calculated how often each word occurred (a handy online tool for doing this can be found here). I discarded all words that occurred less than five times, and obtained K&F frequency values for each of the remaining words (a handy tool to do this and more can be found here). My ten most frequently used words were quite similar to the K&F set (above):

THE 3218
A 1663
OF 1646
TO 1477
AND 1242
IN 994
I 942
IS 602
FOR 478
IT 470

There are generally similar patterns between the two although I am clearly talking about myself more than the K&F sources ("I" is the 7th most popular word in my writing, and 20th most common in the K&F corpus), and less about other men ("HE" is #10 in K&F, but barely squeaks into the top 50 in my list).

When it comes to "fortunately" (and words like it), unfortunately I neglected to consider an important aspect of the K&F frequency database: it seems that certain kinds of derivational terms were counted under their stem rather than as a specific wordform. So "fortunately" (which I have used 40 times) did not ever occur in the K&F database. Nonetheless, a list of my most frequently used words that never occur in the database is still somewhat informative about my usage tendencies. Among those that don't occur for derivational reasons are (in decreasing order of frequency)

especially (50)
seems (50)
fortunately (40)
words (33)
times (31)
folks (27)
things (25)
minutes (23)
probably (23)
definitely (22)

So it's not just "fortunately" but quite a few other similar adverbs that characterize my writing. Some other terms that I use frequently but don't appear in the database are contractions (I'll, 51; that's, 32; I'd, 31; there's, 21) or abbreviations (ABV, 40; UK, 33; OED, 23). Once all of the above are excluded we are left with the terms that I definitely produce more frequently than the database would predict:

dunce (61) (no surprise there)

bike (39) (I am quite bike-obsessed, and perhaps this abbreviation for "bicycle" is more popular now than in the mid-60s? It's been around since the 1880s, though.)

blog (30) (a very new term: OED's earliest citation is 1999, although the source "weblog" is seen as far back (!) as 1993.)

google (24) (rarely used except in cricket until 1996)

Tallinn (19) (I guess there was not so much mention of Soviet cities in the [American] texts that made up the K&F corpus).

website (14) (another new one; OED's first citation ("WEB site") is from 1993)

spam (14) (The product made of pork shoulder and ham certainly existed in the sixties, but this dirty little secret was brushed under the rug as far as the frequency corpus goes. Spam as a verb dates back only to 1991, again according to OED [but which does not mention the Monty Python origin)

So there are a few (but not many) quite predictable terms that I use more often than the corpus would predict. Now how about the other direction? I selected the 200 most frequent words in the K&F database and checked which (if any) I used less than five times. There were four such words: (wept, 507; united, 482; government, 417; knew, 395). "Wept" and "knew" are irritating because these are clearly derived from "weep" and "know" (why do these appear in the database, but "especially", "seems" and "fortunately" do not? Probably because they're irregular, but still...). I don't use the word "weep" in regular conversation unless I'm being dramatic, but am surprised not to have mentioned "knew" given my constant discussions that seem related to knowledge). "United" and "government": my infrequent use of these terms is probably a very good sign that I'm not a political blogger (I get riled up enough writing about traffic, meal times; classifications of nerds and so on).

Finally, I looked at all of those words that appear both in the frequency database and my own writing. I did some statistical tricks¹ in order to assess which words occurred unexpectedly often in my writing (as predicted by K&F frequencies), and which words occurred unexpectedly rarely. Here are the results:

My "unexpectedly often" words came from specific topic areas which I must admit I've spent perhaps too much time on: the consumption of alcohol (pub, ale, beer, cider), transportation (zebra, bus, cycle, traffic, destination, commute, London, route), language (noun, etymological, Albanian, verb, slang), and other more specific matters which have drawn my attention (marmalade, Portuguese, quince; slug, bug; badminton). Strangely very little about music ("festival" had a z-score of +1.79 but I've also referred to beer festivals). I should also note here that "toilet" still appears more often in my language than would be expected. I'm still the same little boy who got in trouble on a third grade assignment to write sentences including the words from that week's spelling list. All of my sentences included the word "toilet", and I was therefore given the opportunity to write "toilet" another 500 times. It clearly didn't cure me of it. In general, I also used content words (the, a, an, to, etc.) more often than would be expected from the corpus; perhaps this comes from my (attempted) conversational tone.

When it comes to words I didn't use as often as would be expected, there were a lot of male terms (men, himself, man, "John", Mr., him), and a lot more terms which you'd expect to see a lot on your bog-standard political blog (system, social, state, development, program, action, war, court, general, power, against, society, American, freedom, business). Am I intentionally avoiding these hot-button topics? Yeah, I guess so.

¹Technical note: Frequency data like these are notoriously exponentially distributed, so in order to do this comparison I first transformed frequency by taking the logarithm, then converted the log frequencies into z-scores within each sample (K&F z-score for "the" = 4.16; K&F z-score for a word with frequency 1 = -3.22). I took the difference between K&F z-score and the z-score derived from my own word frequencies as a measure of the difference beyond the distributional patterns.

When is next Thursday?

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 10:51:22 GMT

Yesterday one of my colleagues circulated an email about a future event, specifying the time as "just before the lab meeting next Thursday". It set off a whole bundle of confusion (does she mean "The next Thursday we will experience", or "Thursday of next week"?) and got me thinking about this kind of reference to time.

There are quite a few ways to express a future day of the week: my own variant of English makes a strong distinction between "This Thursday" and "Next Thursday". The former refers to the next Thursday that will be experienced, while "Next Thursday" is the Thursday that follows "This Thursday". This is in addition to the simple "Thursday" which is essentially synonymous with "This Thursday". "This" and "Next" when used with days don't seem to work the same as "This" and "Next" in other contexts (I would use "This bus" only if it can be seen, otherwise "The next bus" to refer to the bus-equivalent of "This Thursday"), and there are additional constraints. For example, if today is Wednesday (which it is not), it doesn't sound correct to say "This Thursday" when "Tomorrow" is a possibility (unless I have lost track of which day it is [sadly this is a fairly common occurrence]). So in this circumstance "This Thursday" has been replaced by "Tomorrow" while "Next Thursday" remains "Thursday of next week". And it also gets awkward once Thursday of a particular week has passed; if today is Friday, "this Thursday" used in a future tense then means "Thursday of next week" ("this Thursday" may also be used in the past tense in order to mean "The previous Thursday"; fortunately English verbs allow this ambiguity to be avoided), but "next Thursday" is much more ambiguous (it could mean "Thursday of next week", although I still typically use it to mean "the second Thursday in the future". But the use of "next" for a day 13 days in the future may be a bit much). My distinction between "This" and "Next" does not depend on the boundary between weeks; I would still use "This Monday" to refer to the upcoming Monday even if today is Thursday (which it is not), and "Next Monday" to refer to the following one.

However, other English speakers do not typically use "This Thursday" as I do (I also occasionally use "This coming Thursday" or "This past Thursday", but this kind of disambiguation is not really necessary). Hence the confusion arising from my cow-orker's email (She meant "Next Thursday" in the sense in which I use it, but other colleagues misinterpreted it as meaning "This Thursday"). This may be because British English uses "next" differently, thanks to the "week" expression. UK "Thursday week" apparently has the same meaning as my "Next Thursday", and UK "Next Thursday" has the same meaning as my "This Thursday" (one of OED's definitions of "week" is "Seven days after the day specified"). Here's an instance of someone who ran into the next/week problem (The blogger's user info suggests that this is also a US/UK translation difference); and here is a discussion related to learning English as a second language. It's unclear to me whether such expressions also apply for a day that has just passed (if today is Wednesday [which it is not], is "Tuesday week" six or 13 days in the future?). Or expressions like "Next Tuesday week" which just make my head spin.

"I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" (Image no longer hotlinked, sorry about that!)

There goes the neighborhood

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:14:03 GMT

As if yesterday's entry about the alleged comings and goings of alleged felon 50 Cent wasn't enough, my bike ride home gave me another cause for concern. I was riding home near north London's Clissold Park, when up a block or so ahead I saw a guy pop out from between some parked cars and knock another cyclist off his bike with a big stick. At first I thought I must be seeing things because it's a fairly busy street, and it was nowhere near dark. Then I thought it might be some sort of domestic dispute, but ruled this out fairly quickly as the attacker (and two others) then ignored the victim and went for his bike, trying to unfasten his briefcase from his bike rack. I'm not sure what I would have done had I been the only witness (perhaps shouted "HEY" in as deep and burly a voice as I could muster, which has been successful at dispersing groups of youths a couple of times in the past), but fortunately there were a couple of other cyclists who saw the same thing. We all stopped and ran them off empty-handed (thinking about it afterwards, I'm quite glad we didn't catch any of them), then sort of milled around waiting for the police to arrive (quite quick, thanks to active curtain-twitchers in the area) and the adrenaline to dissipate.

Fortunately the victim was not injured (other than some bruising) and the attackers didn't manage to get anything of value. But this is not at all a pleasant turn of events. I'm aware of other areas in north London where cyclists have been targeted in the past (Somers Town in particular), but these cases tend to be situations where gangs of youths are involved, rather than adults. These guys were all about 18 with buzzcuts and ill-fitting tracksuits. I'm pretty sure they're Polish, not just from their appearance (and the recent increase in the Polish population in the area), but also (and this is a surprise, coming from me) their linguistic characteristics. They were exchanging a few words as we approached, containing quite a variety of fricatives/affricates that are not at all commonly heard in English¹ (which can be briefly and informally described as "lots of sounds like 'zh'"). The Wikipedia entry on the Polish language gives a more-detailed breakdown: consonants like voiced alveolo-palatal fricatives (as in "would you"), voiceless alveolo-palatal affricates (as in "what's your"), voiced alveolar affricates (as in "woods"), and many others. Anyway, my cursory knowledge of phonology (along with a few other factors) led me to conclude rather conclusively that there are some bad Polish apples within a mile or so of home.

¹In case you're wondering, English fricatives are f, v, th as in "thin", th as in "there", s, z, sh as in "she", the sound of "s" in "measure" (this one is closest to the "Polish sound" at least to my ear), and "h" as in "ham".

Linguistically kicked to the curb

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 11:56:08 GMT

On my recent trip to Belgium I met up with my cousin, a Kentucky Colonel> biding his time in the Low Countries until the revolution takes place. Among the bits of witty banter he set me a pair of etymological challenges, which I took up, confident in my ability to provide quick and easy answers for both. Yet instead I must report only disappointment at this stage as I have been so far completely unable to find even speculative answers for either one. I'm continuing for now to keep my eyes open, but here are the puzzling terms (their relative obscurity being a testament to the Colonel's character, I am certain):

1. ingham. From the horse's mouth, "The term for the rope that is used to support the tympan and frisket when printing with common wood presses or Washington-style presses.", and pictured here (Colonel points out 'the "ingham" is pictured on the left and is partly obscured by the typman (lower part) and frisket (upper part)'). For readers unfamiliar with traditional printing methods, I should point out that a frisket is " A thin iron frame hinged to the tympan, having tapes or paper strips stretched across it, for keeping the sheet in position while printing." (OED, from French "frisquette", origin unknown). The tympan of course is "An appliance in a printing-press, interposed between the platen or impression-cylinder and the sheet to be printed, in order to soften and equalize the pressure; in a hand press consisting of two frames (outer and inner tympan) with sheets of parchment or strong linen stretched upon them, and inclosing a packing either of blanket, rubber, or other soft substance, or sheets of paper, cardboard, cloth, or other harder material, according to the nature of the work to be printed." (OED again, from the Latin "tympanum", drum, wheel for raising weights, etc.). Ingham, however, does not appear in the OED (nor any of the other dictionaries I consulted). It's a relatively common surname, a place in Michigan, even the name of a printing company> (but I suspect the company name postdates the term). There was a family of Inghams involved in the printing business after the Civil War (Sullivan County, PA), but no mention of any devices bearing their names. Not knowing much about the workings of such presses, I am led to wonder when the rope ("Ingham") may have come into use. But without answers at this moment. Perhaps consulting some dead trees about the development of printing presses might reveal the answer (or at least give some clues) but that will have to wait until I'm in the library for some legitimate reason.

2. Maut (mott? maught? mought? mawt? møt?). Spelled phonetically, this was a term of insult, directed at the Colonel at a young age. According to his post-hoc analysis, the term depicts a position on the scale of nerdhood somewhere below a "spaz", i.e., extreme social ineptitude, grossness in physical appearance and manner, and certain unsuitability for dating purposes. I had never heard this term, and thought perhaps it could be of local origin (South Bend, IN or surrounding areas). Perhaps coming from one of the dominant language groups in the area (Polish? German? [No, "maut" means "duty" in German]. Other North European?). Looking up various spellings (coupled with other terms like nerd, geek, spaz) didn't give any real insight (I saw the Scrabble 4-letter-word list quite a few times, but nothing useful). I was severely hampered by my ignorance of the correct spelling of this term, but learned a few interesting things. Did you know that the MAUT Scholarship (McGill Association of University Teachers) was established in memory of 14 women murdered at the Ecole Polytechnic in December 1989 because they were women, and is intended to encourage women to enter the Faculty of Engineering? The term "motley" and its connection to fools also occurred to me ("motley" is listed by the OED as an obsolete term used for fools), but I'm not aware of any such terms derived from "motley" out there. Perhaps it's a reference to Mott the Hoople? The image sort of fits:

Anyway, I am left without a good answer to this one too. Suggestions or ideas most welcome.

Absorbubbles

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 11:58:16 GMT

There is no shortage of pseudo-scientific terminology being used in avertisements. My favorite at the moment is the legendary Boswelox (TM) for which I can do no better than the official statement (taken from the link above, under the heading "The science behind the scenes"): "Boswelox(TM) is a breakthrough phyto-complex created by L’Oréal Paris that combines a power dose of boswellia serrata extract and manganese, which help reduce the appearance of lines caused by facial micro-contractions.". I'm not sure what a "power dose" is (concentrate, perhaps?) but boswellia serrata is also known as frankincense oil. Perhaps it's a "breakthough" in the phyto-complex (plant-derived compound) world because no one has thought to combine the two (Your frankincense?! In my manganese?!). Needless to say Boswelox(TM) has been trademarked in the UK so don't think of making your own Boswelox shampoo, perfume, haircare product or essential oil (I am not a trademark expert but you may be able to get away with Boswelox soup or clothing).

There is one such term which for some reason irritates me more than the rest, and that is "Absorbubbles", featured in Charmin toilet paper (the storyline of the advertisement linked above goes like this: "A young bear calls her dad when there is very little toilet paper left and she badly needs the toilet, however he tells his daughter that Charmin has Absorbubbles and she does not need to use as much." Thank goodness for the miraculous Absorbubbles (trademarked, of course). I'm not sure why I'm so bothered about Absorbubbles: maybe it's the mental image of soap bubbles each with its own tiny payload of human waste, perhaps it's the awkwardly repeated "b" (four bees in a word [three pronounced] is a lot, especially since one has been absorbed by the compounding process), or perhaps it's linguistic in nature.

"Absorbubbles" is a verb-noun compound (the verb comes first), and in which the noun ("bubble") is the entity which does the absorbing (i.e. the subject of the sentence depicting what is going on when an Absorbubble does what it's supposed to do) I'm not going to get into whether it is an AGENT or not as this is a matter of some debate). English verb-noun compounds tend to be of another sort; the first ones that come to my mind are NOUN-VERB(-ER) like "widowmaker", "corkscrew" (if "screw" is an action [quiet at the back!]). Wikipedia gives a decent treatment of compounding, giving examples of "browbeat", "sidestep" and "manhandle", all of which are N-V as well ("Compound verbs composed of a noun and verb are comparatively rare, and the noun is generally not the direct object of the verb. In English, compounds such as *bread-bake or *car-drive do not exist."). I have had a lot of trouble coming up with examples of true verb-noun compounds in English, and even more finding instances like "Absorbubbles" where the noun is the subject of the verb. The Wikipedia article linked above gives two examples ("call girl" and "playboy", the latter of which is an instance like "Absorbubbles" where the boy does the playing), but both of these are ambiguous as both "call" and "play" are syntactically ambiguous (they could be either a noun or a verb). Examples I've come up with myself are "jump-rope", "popcorn", "repairman". So they do exist and don't sound too bad (repeated exposure has a lot to do with this), but all of the "verbs" involved could instead be nouns, while this is not the case for "absorb" which does not have a noun homonym. I'm still looking for an unambiguous verb-noun compound (OK, "bubble" could also be a verb, but this is unlikely as it's pluralized [No one is going to convince me that "bubbles" in this sense is a verb, marked as third person present).

There's also a semantic component to my problems with "Absorbubbles" which I alluded to before. What do bubbles do? They float, and they pop. Who thought of putting bubbles on toilet paper, intended to absorb vile waste, then float away and pop, releasing their contents (most likely over someone's food). Needless to say I will avoid Absorbubbles as long as I can.

Riding the bike more?

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 14:20:40 GMT

It's a busy day today (totally back to normal as far as work is concerned) so I don't have time to write much. I wasn't going to write anything at all but this changed my mind. I was walking my bike along the pavements near Euston Station (too gridlocked to ride at that point, and those who ride their cycles on pavements [US = "sidewalks"] are idiots) and was approached by someone from BBC radio (at least that's what he said). He asked me "After the events of last week do you find you're cycling more?" I replied that no, I cycle every day¹, and that I think everyone should cycle more, so he wasn't interested in talking to me any more. I'm sure he found someone, and I can only imagine the story he ended up with. After the break, (oh yeah, if it's BBC there won't be a break) meet a terrified commuter who took to the pushbike to avoid public transport hell, and met a hell of his own on the snarled streets of London. Sigh. Or maybe he was just looking for someone whose commute was altered by the closure of the Piccadilly line. That could have been me except these days I prefer to take the bus if I'm not on the bike.

¹ Not exactly true as I will accept many excuses to leave the bike behind.

A side note, a reader of one of my previous posts reported being "disappointed ... in that there isn't a British term for speed bump. That seems like the quintessential American term that could be improved by a spot of the Queen's English." I must have forgotten to take my clever pill that day, for there is in fact a truly British term for a speed bump: "sleeping policeman". I was aware of this term but have never heard it used. But it's in the UK lexicon, at least enough to warrant a (side) entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (under "sleeping" and "policeman", A person or object regarded as a deterrent or obstacle. In phr. sleeping policeman: a ramp in the road intended to jolt a moving motor vehicle, thereby encouraging motorists to reduce their speed.).

Of nerds, spazzes, wonks and dweebs

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 14:01:37 GMT

A brief question ("Where does the word ‘nerd’ come from?") on Arcite's Day> (a blog tenuously linked to mine, in that we both contain Diamond Geezer> on our blogrolls) led me to wonder about the origins of the vocabulary of insult. There's an interesting discussion on the typology of social misfits at the cul de sac and this discussion thread [among many others], but as these terms are extremely flexible in use (one man's geek may be another man's nerd; exactly what distinguishes a swot from a boffin may simply reflect local preferences rather than universals, and who uses terms "egghead" and "sissy" to refer to nerds these days?), I decided instead to look at the origins of some of these terms (there are just too many of them to cover the entire spectrum of them, so I just picked some that seemed interesting). Unless specified otherwise my references are taken from the Oxford English dictionary (the definitions may reflect UK use, but the etymological information is quite well-documented).

NERD:
"An insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious. Now also: spec. a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication." The origin of "nerd", as it turns out, is a matter of some contention. In fact, "nerd" is one of the target words on the BBC Word Hunt list (a "major forthcoming BBC2 series"... intended to involve the public in helping to "rewrite 'the greatest book in the English language'."). The OED suggests that the origins of "nerd" may lie with Dr. Seuss: "nerd, a fictional animal in the children's story If I ran the Zoo (1950) by ‘Dr. Seuss’, depicted as a small, unkempt, humanoid creature with a large head and a comically disapproving expression. Alternatively, sometimes explained as a euphemistic alteration of TURD ... , although given the predominance of early spellings in -e-, this seems unlikely. The suggestion that the word is back-slang for DRUNK n. is also unsupported by the spellings, as is derivation from the name of Mortimer Snerd, a dummy used by the U.S. ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the 1930s."
So we start with a bit of a dead end. Perhaps the BBC series will discover a use of "nerd" predating the publication of Dr. Suess's original text, otherwise we'll have to stick with the possibility that Seuss may have invented nerds.

GEEK:
Most everyone knows the US slang term referring to sideshow performers (especially those who bite the heads off animals), but oddly it appears that this use of "geek" may be a "recent" development. OED suggests that "geek" may originate from the English regional term "geck" (although the origin is uncertain). "Geck" is defined as A fool, simpleton; one who is befooled or derided, a dupe, and has been documented as far back as the 16th century. It seems closely related to the verb "geck", to mock, deceive or cheat (derived in turn from the Germanic verb "gecken").

DWEEB:
Like many terms of nerddom, has a rather atypical spelling/sound pattern. Again the OED's etymology is uncertain (described as North American slang, with origin Probably from -dw (arbitrarily, or as in DWARF), + FEEB, c.f. WEED [feeb being of course short for feeble-minded, though I'm not sure about weed {except in the compound "dickweed", who knows if it's related}]). This seems fairly recent: OED's first quote is 1982, although Etymonline says 1968.

SPAZ:
For once no surprise, and no doubt as to the origin: abbreviation of SPASTIC. One of the OED's reference quotes is amusing (and brings in "square", another term I'm not able to cover): The term that American teen-agers now use as the opposite of ‘tough’ is ‘spaz’. A spaz is a person who is courteous to teachers, plans for a career..and believes in official values. A spaz is something like what adults still call a square. (1965). This term has a special place for me, as during my formative years (age 10) I had a very unfortunate resemblance to the film character Spaz (played by Jack Blum> in Meatballs (1979)). Fortunately the nickname didn't stick. As far as I know.

DORK:
And back we go to the realm of the (somewhat) unknown. Dork is not only a foolish or stupid person but also a Midwestern term for penis. Described as "Of uncertain origin: perhaps a variant of DIRK, influenced by DICK" (and the term "dirk" in this sense originates from the bladed weapon of the same name [the origin of this term is also not known, according to the OED]). Although terms of this nature are also freely used to describe nerds and their ilk, I'm going to step slowly and gingerly away from the topic of male genitals. After all I am talking about nerds.

WIMP:
Another instance of US slang, with early use in 1920 according to the OED. Again the origin is described as uncertain: perhaps from whimper (c.f. English dialect wimp (of a dog): to whine). I've seen it spelled as "whimp" but this is not listed in the OED. Etymonline cites the role of J. Wellington Wimpy, "a comparatively unaggressive character in "Popeye" comics", in increased subsequent use of this term.

SWOT:
I wasn't especially familiar with this one until I started looking for information on nerds. This is an English term with fairly straightforward origins: a dialectal variation of SWEAT, and used to refer to someone who works or studies hard (c.f. grind). I suspect it's not in such current use, people might think of me as a nerd if I start calling people swots.

BOFFIN:
Another term of UK origin, specifically referring to scientific or technical researchers, "boffin" is especially common in news articles deriding the work of scientists (Boffins create zombie dogs, Seaweed boffins seek local Vanuatu samples and many more). This one is also in the list for the BBC Word Hunt (see above), as the OED simply has no answer for its origin (Etymology unknown. Numerous conjectures have been made about the origin of the word but all lack foundation) but only suggests it has its origins somehow in World War II ("The term seems to have been first applied by members of the Royal Air Force to scientists working on radar"). I am not aware of the various conjectures, but the etymological guessing game is one that anyone can play, whether with or without evidence of any sort. The OED's frequent "unknowns" really highlight the difficulty of finding accurate source information for linguistic origins, even for terms that have come into use quite recently (relatively speaking).

TWIT:
As referring to "a fool, a stupid or ineffectual person" (which perhaps moves a bit far from "nerd" which implies some sort of intelligence along with the absence of other desirable traits), its origin is from the verb "twit" (light censure, reproach, scold, taunt) which seems to have been a popular term in the 1500s (and in much older sources as "atwite"). So a twit is someone you twit (or atwite), not to be confused with its extremely close lexical neighbor (described as "low slang" and "of obscure origin", and again I will edge carefully away from the gutter).

NINNY:
Like a twit, a ninny is a nerd without the intelligence. It also goes back to the 16th century. OED gives the now very familiar "origin uncertain" plus speculation. In this case the OED suggests that the origin may lie in the term "innocent" plus the diminutive -y, and points out its relation to the slightly-earlier-documented term "ninnyhammer" (a blockhead, fool, or braggart) (a nice instance of usage from 1712: "That Clod-pated, Numskull'd Ninny-hammer of yours....").

Given current trends in usage, I think I'd rather be a geek than a nerd, a spaz than a dweeb, a swot or boffin rather than a twit or a ninny, and definitely not a dork. Please feel free to comment on any important ones I've left out.

Recent speechifying

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 11:01:30 GMT

For work-related purposes I've needed to conduct a variety of text analyses, and thought I'd learn the ropes with some recent publically available texts. Why not choose recent speeches by politicans, I thought? Of course GW Bush's recent speech at Fort Bragg came to mind first.

In a first pass I simply counted the frequency of each word in his speech, then examined collocates (i.e. words occurring nearby) to unusually frequent words. Unsurprisingly the very most common words were closed-class (in decreasing order of frequency: the (442 times), and, to, of, in, our, a, is, we, are, that, their, they (76 times)). Most of those are also the most frequently occurring in the language as a whole, but the occurrence of pronouns "our", "we", "their", "they" is unusually high in Bush's speech (respectively 6th, 9th, 12th, 13th most common; in a "standard English corpus" [Kucera and Francis, 1967], those words are 136th, 41st, 40th and 30th). I then looked at the collocates of these terms to see what they co-occurred with. In decreasing order of frequency, the immediate collocates (just before or just after the target word) looked like this:

[of, and, to] OUR [troops, military, strategy, allies]
[and, that, as, if] WE [are, have, will, would, know]
[but, so, and, that] THEY [are, failed, can, have, know, need]
[lose, rebuild, defend] THEIR [own, country, lives, new]

This sort of analysis allows you to create your own speech based on generating random selections according to collocations (re-calculating at each content word, e.g. "Our troops are involved in the training to serve their leaders and 17 nations are German in Iraq.). Of course this is dependent on the corpus -- if you select only one speech, yours is likely to resemble that one quite a lot.

Next I looked at the most frequently occurring content words. Not much of a surprise that the leaders were Iraqi (64), Iraq (58), Iraqis (48), terrorists (46), freedom (40), forces (38), war (34), fight (30), military, security, troops (all 28). Combining the various forms of Iraq* gave 180 occurrences (thus falling just between "of" and "in"). Collocates look quite interesting too:

[the, of, new, train] IRAQI [security, forces, people, government, units]
[in] IRAQ [is] ("in Iraq" occurred 28 times; "Iraq is" occurred 18 times)
[help, the, as, helping] IRAQIS [build, to, will]
[of, our] FREEDOM [in, of]
[The] TERRORISTS [and insurgents, who]

It's interesting to contrast this with Tony Blair's recent speech to the European Parliament. Of course this was a speech with a very different purpose, so we wouldn't expect it to go IRAQ, TERROR, IRAQIS, FREEDOM, IRAQI, IRAQI, WAR, FIGHT, FREEDOM.... His most frequent words again include a lot of closed-class words, plus "Europe" (the [396 occurrences], of, to, in, and, it, a, is, Europe (116), that, we, be, I). A bit more "I" than George, and the content words are much different (Europe, people (44), European (36), debate (28), political (28), social (26), world (26)). Iraq and its variants didn't get a mention, and "terrorists" only twice. Here are some of Tony's preferred collocations:

I [have, want, believe, would]
[if,that] WE [have, are, should, can, need]
[the, modern] EUROPEAN [Union, defence, nations, Parliament]

And here's a Tony sentence generated in the same way: "I have to accept a Europe and to be active player in foreign policy."

I would play with this more, but now it's time to work with the tools instead.

Disposing of your extra words

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:50:56 GMT

There seems to be a strange tendency in these parts to use excessive words on public signage. I always thought it was a rule (if not a law) that a sign should express its message efficiently and briefly. Like the following, for example:

On the other hand, every day I ride to work, I pass an anti-littering sign. Not the various sorts of brief, effective signs like these...

,
,

but something very much like this:

I want to know why "provided" is included on the sign. If the bins were not provided, it would be pretty difficult to place all rubbish in them. And does it really matter whether rubbish-holders place their rubbish in the provided bins, or some other bins? To me the main goal would be to stop them ("from" goes here in US English) littering near the provided bins, not filling the provided bins with as much rubbish as possible (ideally, all of it). What really concerns me is that the aforementioned sign (and the image itself) is listed by "The Sign Factory-Falkirk" under the "Mandatory Signs" category. I don't have such a sign up, but perhaps I should. The category also includes some other overly-wordy signs (Lock This Door #1, Lock This Door #2, Lock This Door #3,, Shut This Door). If only every sign were as clear, efficient and effective as NO SPECTACLE WRANGLING.

Eatin' vittles

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 11:14:05 GMT

Some dispute has arisen concerning my use of the term "vittles" in my previous entry, and a concerned writer suggested that the term should be spelled "victuals" rather than "vittles". It's an interesting question, especially because of the complicated etymological path. There is no doubt that it comes from the Latin victualia ("provisions") but its route from there is interesting. Etymology Online suggests it was spelled "vitaylle" (singular form, c1303) and came by way of Old French vitaille (which in turn came from the Latin origin). The Oxford English dictionary gives a similar story (The variant OF. and mod.F. form victuaille has been assimilated to the [Latin] original, and a similar change in spelling has been made in English, while the pronunciation still represents the forms vittel, vittle.) But the EO entry is far more specific: Spelling altered 1523 to conform with [Latin], but pronunciation remains "vittles." This seems like an incredibly (unbelievably?) precise date. What happened in 1523 to cause this change? The papacy of Clement VII perhaps? Or is the precise dating a little too precise in this case? Anyway, the spelling of this word has gone through quite a few variants; we're lucky to have only two.

OED examples include
1303 vytayle
13?? vitaile
1375 vittale
1375 witale
c1385 vitayle
1399 vetaile
1400 vitell
1417 vitaill
1472 wetyl
1480 wittall
1482 vettell
1487 Vetale
1494 wyttell
1500 vetayll
1500 wetale
1523 victuayle
1538 vytel
1548 vitail
1559 victuall
1573 vittle
1599 vittell
1627 Victual
1847 fittle (dial.)

Plural uses have been there from the beginning (early 1300s, anyway), and it's quite unclear to me when the singular went out of use (in fact, dictionary searches suggest that it hasn't). So feel free to use any of the above spellings; if anyone complains, tell them you're not so keen on following fads.

EDIT: It's also necessary for me to acknowledge that not everyone agrees with me. Spelling.org is one such case: Most teachers have no idea that the word victuals is only correct spelling of "vittles"... [sic].

Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

Not so obligatory plurals

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 11:56:34 GMT

And with that it's another linguistic issue, raised on the pages of Sarmoung's secret diary. For those readers afraid to click the preceding link, he uses the phrase "SPECTACLE WRANGLING" to refer to individuals "trying to grab [his] glasses for comic routines" and subsequently wondered

I wasn't sure whether since the noun is "spectacles" it might not need to remain so. Trouser Wrangling? The plural just "sounded" wrong. But then "Glass Wrangling" doesn't sound too good either, although that's maybe for reasons of clarity. As for "Binocular Wrangling"...Hmm. Fortunately I don't have to deal with this sort of thing on an in-depth daily basis.

On the other hand, I do. Well, maybe I don't have to but perhaps I choose to. ... I think "spectacle wrangling" is the correct use. Look in analogy to the terminology one might use for wrangling other entities which are expressed in clear singular or plural forms, e.g. "cat wrangling" (not "cats wrangling", even if you're after a whole host of them). My intuition is that in this sort of form, "wrangling" is a noun and the terms like "spectacle", "trouser", "cat" are behaving more like adjectives to reflect a sort of habitual behavior. "Spectacle wrangling" is the act of wrangling spectacles (not "spectacle"), and you (surely!) wouldn't say "I had my spectacle wrangled". The same sort of thing seems to happen for other actions too ("spectacle breaking", "trouser peeling", "cat spotting"). In a strange sort of way the plural marker is removed when the spectacles (trousers, cats) are being acted upon and represented in a compound form, even in cases in which the singular form is never in common use.

The wikipedia entry for English plural has a brief discussion of these words (under the heading "Defective nouns"), using the technical term pluralia tantum to refer to those words for which a singular form does not exist (also including annals, billiards, measles, nuptials, thanks, tidings, vittles). An interesting distinction is between those which behave (syntactically) as a plural, vs. those which behave as singular:
My spectacles are filthy.
Billiards is a pursuit of vile men.

Although I don't have the time to go into a full investigation of the cause of this behavior (ie, why do even pluralia tantum words become singular in constructions of this sort), here's an interesting article dealing with related issues:
Why children sometimes say "mice-eater" (PDF)
and in A Linguistic Introduction to English Words (ch 5, PDF) Heidi Harley writes Note that the roots, pant-, scissor- or tong-, can occur without the plural suffix when part of a compound: pantleg, scissor factory, tong holder. This shows that the -s suffix on these words really is the regular plural marker. Within compounds, singular or plural is simply not relevant. We say lawn-mower, not *lawns-mower, even though any given lawn-mower could easily be intended to mow multiple lawns. So the existence of pantleg shows that the root pant- does exist independently of the suffix -s. The only strange thing in these cases is that the plural marking is required even when the meaning is singular.

Why does this happen? Who knows.

Tip of tongue yet again

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 12:18:54 GMT

But this time it was Mrs. Dunce's turn. It was last Friday, and we'd just staggered our way out of the auditorium after a Twisted Folk> show¹ and ran into a familiar face. Well, familiar to Mrs. Dunce anyway: apparently he was one of the few friendly individuals at DeathCorp (Mrs. Dunce's former employer which did a Hindenburg just before Christmas 2003). Some light conversation ensued (what a great gig, time has flown by, many former DeathCorp employees are now in similar posts at DeathCorp's former client MegaDeathTech), and then we parted ways. But all was clearly not well with Mrs. Dunce who had a pained expression on her face (Perhaps it could have been the lake fish from the African Kitchen Gallery, but I think not). She couldn't remember the bloke's name, no matter what sort of mental convolutions she went through. But definitely there was some sort of partial information which wasn't quite right, she thought it might be something like "Martin", but not quite. A relatively uncommon name, but not much else was coming to mind. Although I was not experiencing the TOT myself, it was obviously a painful one as it continued through the evening (our Tube ride was full of grimaces [I mean, Mrs. Dunce was making pained faces, not that the carriage was occupied by purple advertising characters]), and it seemed quite likely that rather than going to bed at the late hour, we were soon to be poring through boxes of papers to find a DeathCorp employee list. But somehow that didn't happen, and I assumed it had passed from mind or been peacefully resolved without incident. But suddenly today there was an email, only four days later the matter was resolved.

Mrs Dunce wrote, This morning on the tube it came to me. I was near with thinking that the guy at M Ward’s name was Martin, his name is ____ Martin.

And just like that his name is back, and I doubt she'll forget it for a long time. I blame the surname which can also be used as a forename (and perhaps some repression of Mrs. Dunce's horrific DeathCorp experiences). And as usual, the partial information available in the tip-of-the-tongue state proved to be right on, just in the wrong place.

Some names have been changed because I don't want former DeathCorp employees to descend upon my blog with abusive comments, nor for the individual in question to learn that Mrs. Dunce didn't remember his name.

¹The gig was fantastic, entirely thanks to M Ward> who is just an incredible musician. The first act, Currituck Co.> were interesting but a little too noodly at times (I'll see them again soon so I may change my mind), and Vetiver put me off. Mainly because of Devendra Banhart who just acted like a spoiled brat on stage (which is a shame because I really enjoy the music I've heard from him).