RSS FeedWeekend Wordery: In Praise of Y’all
I grew up in Northwest Florida, so I am, geographically at least, a southerner. But I don’t have a southern accent—maybe just a touch here and there, but hardly anyone recognizes it. I don’t say “own” for the word on; I do not pronounce my name with two syllables (“gee-um”); and I do not use such phrases as “used to could.”
But I do sometimes stress the initial syllable of umbrella rather than the second. And I do, from time to time, employ the second-person plural pronoun y’all.
Now, English has an official second-person plural pronoun: you. But, on its own, you is not always adequate to the task of providing actionable information. In certain contexts, it must be supplemented, as in: “You two get out of here,” or “You are all invited.” Otherwise, you can’t tell from the context whether, for example, both of you should get out or just one of you; or if you and your whole group are invited, or just you alone. This ambiguity inevitably necessitates a request for clarification, usually including an explanation of the reason for confusion, followed by the requested clarification, and then an apology; obviously, much of that exchange would be optional, but is often socially expected.
No such problem exists in any of the European languages I’m familiar with, where typically both the pronoun and the verb inflection tell you whether the meaning is singular or plural. And it need not be a problem for us, either, because y’all is a perfectly serviceable candidate for a second-person plural pronoun in English—indeed, it already is one, whether “official” or not. So I guess the more relevant point to make is this: y’all isn’t stupid; on the contrary, it is a very useful addition to the language. And it’s time for y’all to embrace it.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoughpteighbteau
Last week I blogged about spelling reform in response to a post Matt Yglesias wrote a while back. I mentioned “Ghoti,” the re-spelling of fish (with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation) that illustrates the absurd possibilities of letter combinations in English. Another example is “Ghoughpteighbteau.” Try to work it out, if you’re in a sporting mood. I’ll even drop a hint or two in the comments. Otherwise, go straight to the answer here.
One more thing I wanted to comment on: Yglesias says “we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes.” But by and large that is not true. English spelling is mostly predictable and follows regular rules. According to Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct, about 84% of English words follow regular, predictable spelling patterns. And the words with the weirdest spellings (like people, women, done) are among the most commonly used words, which makes them relatively easy to memorize.
But the crux of Yglesias’ point still stands: it’s pretty hard for non-native speakers and even native speakers with little educational capital to reach levels of spelling attainment required to succeed in any venture where written communication is important. It is worth mentioning however that the reason isn’t just that English is so loopy. It’s that people who have attained sophisticated written language skills are generally intolerant of and biased against those who have not—even when there are plenty of complementary signals of intelligence and skill available. It would be interesting to explore those biases and find out how deep they run. Pretty deep, I’d guess.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoti out of Water
Matt Yglesias thinks that a language in which spelling bees are possible is a language that needs to simplify and regularize its spelling.
For a long time, of course, English words were spelled irregularly because spelling simply wasn’t regularized. But for the past 150 years or so spelling words “correctly” has been an important class signifier, even as we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes. Thus it’s possible for “correct” spelling to differ from country to country, and it’s harder than it needs to be for children to learn how to spell. And it’s worth noting that the adverse impact falls especially hard on children from a low socioeconomic background. It would be one thing to teach such kids a finite set of spelling rules, but to ask a child to master a vast set of brute-force memorizations creates a situation wherein whether or not his parents know how to spell “correctly” is going to be a major factor in his own success.
If you look at French or Russian or Spanish (to name some languages I’m familiar with) by contrast, if you know how the language works it’s very easy to relate what a word sounds like to how it’s spelled. English is full of stuff like the “ough” letter combination that’s pronounced all kinds of ways (”thought,” “thorough,” “tough”) words that are pronounced two different ways (”wound,” “bow”) and nutty spellings like “stomach” that have nothing to do with how the word is said.
Yglesias is obviously not the first to wish for more consistency between written symbols and spoken sounds in English. George Bernard Shaw, noted fellow traveller of this cause (and others), illustrated the absurdity of English spelling by suggesting the word fish be spelled “ghoti”—with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation.
I don’t disagree with Yglesias’ inclination to help people thrive by making it easier to learn standard written English. Far from it. But, as I suspect everybody intuitively recognizes, broad-based spelling reform is doomed to fail. There are some fairly obvious and boring reasons for this: inertia, absence of a central body with authority to disseminate new standards, too many speakers in too many places, etc. The more interesting reason is that spelling-reform advocates may misjudge the purpose of a system of writing.
Spelling-reform advocates tend to assume that there’s something wrong when graphemes (units of written language) don’t match up neatly with phonemes (units of spoken language). But written language isn’t just about encoding units of sound. As Steven Pinker writes in the Language Instinct (excerpt here):
English spelling is not completely phonemic; sometimes letters encode phonemes, but sometimes a sequence of letters is specific to a morpheme. And a morphemic writing system is more useful than you might think. The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not to pronounce it. A morphemic spelling can help a reader distinguish homophones, like meet and mete. It can also tip off a reader that one word contains another (and not just a phonologically identical impostor). For example, spelling tells us that overcome contains come, so we know that its past tense must be overcame, whereas succumb just contains the sound “kum,” not the morpheme come, so its past tense is not succame but succumbed. Similarly, when something recedes, one has a recession, but when someone re-seeds a lawn, we have a re-seeding.
[...] Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the actual abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.
If serving as a pronunciation guide is not the sole purpose of written language, then simplifying and regularizing our spelling would interfere with other language functions, namely the morphemic function. I’m not sure what exactly would happen if we tried, but if spelling reform were even possible, it is not at all clear that the outcome would be beneficial to anyone—perhaps least of all to Matt Yglesias and those of us who are enriched by the nuanced contents of his mind as expressed through the sometimes complex and irregular spellings of written English.
More on Singular “They”
Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log explains how usage of the singular “they” works and why it is grammatically sound. The discussion was prompted by a statement made by President Obama during the Henry Louis Gates affair in Cambridge last year. Obama said:
. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.
Pullum explains:
Obama was trying to make a general claim about the stupidity of arresting some person x when there was already proof that x was in x‘s own home. The x in this paraphrase is intended as what a logician would call a bound variable. The issue at hand is which pronoun to use when expressing the same content in English. Now, Obama wasn’t intending to limit himself to the claim that arresting Professor Gates was stupid. Doubtless he would think that arresting Harvard president Drew Faust in her own home, if she got snippy after she had shown her driver’s license, would also be stupid — unless she had clearly committed an arrestable crime. And in contemporary Standard English, with antecedents like somebody or everyone or any citizen, people typically use the pronoun they for “bound variable” meanings in this sort of syntactic situation.
Strunk and White baldly assert that this is an error. They simply say don’t use they with syntactically singular antecedents like somebody. They don’t give a reason; and it is pretty clear they didn’t know anything much about the literary evidence that they has been grammatical and normal with singular antecedents for six or seven centuries. Strunk and White are just wrong about Standard English syntax, here as nearly everywhere else where they deal with grammar in their book The Elements of Style.
Of course, you have a perfect right to hold the opinion that they with a singular antecedent seems distasteful or ugly to you. In that case I would advise you not to use it. But don’t call it a grammatical error, because it clearly isn’t one, and never has been. Don’t say that it betokens a breakdown in our ability to tell singular from plural, because it doesn’t.
(Formatting in original.) So, the next time someone gets snooty about singular “they,” you can tell them that they are out of touch with six or seven hundred years’ worth of accepted usage.
Weekend Wordery: Singular ‘They’
Language Log thinks the singular ‘they’ is “just not that big of a deal.”
Weekend Wordery: Political Dictionary
Want to know who the copperheads were? The mugwumps? Shivercrats? And what about the Blue Dogs, the Yellow Dogs, and dog-whistle politics? Rubber chicken circuits, lame duck sessions, fishing expeditions? Aardvarking? Astroturfing? Franking privileges, sine die, or psephology?
If so, Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary may be just the thing for you.
Hat tip: Jonathan Bernstein.
Weekend Wordery: The Sadness of the Minor Third
A recently published study by Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab suggests that, at least among speakers of American English, the minor third tone interval conveys sadness in speech, just as it does in music. Particularly in D minor (the saddest of all keys), I’d add, though the study does not specifically support that further observation.
Via Scientific American.
Of Citizens, Subjects, and Smudges
A few days ago, just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, a rather gimmicky little story came out about a smudge under the word “citizens” in one of Thomas Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Using neat-o technology to analyze the smudge, document-preservation experts at the Library of Congress have revealed vestiges of the word “subjects.” (See the Washington Post graphic below.) Jefferson had first written the phrase “our fellow-subjects” before thinking better of it—presumably apprehending at that moment that the whole point of declaring independence was that we would no longer be the subjects of the English monarchy—and settling on “our fellow-citizens.”
Now, I don’t want to dampen anyone’s patriotic revelry, but this is really not a matter of great historical import. The revised phrase didn’t even make it into the final Declaration. Frankly, the story illustrates little more than elementary editorial acumen on Jefferson’s part. But all the hype does make this a perfectly reasonable time to draw attention to what is really important about Jefferson’s first draft. There is a much more significant smudge, figuratively speaking, which appears in the very next sentence, as Jefferson launches into a rapturous crescendo of rhetoric against the king’s support of the slave trade, the final grievance adduced in the first draft:
he has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative [i.e., his veto -JH] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
(Bold mine.) The humanitarian force of this epic passage simply dwarfs the rest of the declaration’s bill of particulars. Aside from a few rough patches (e.g., “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die”?), this is truly spine-tingling prose of Shakespearean dimension. Moreover, the passage would have placed the new nation firmly on the side of universal human rights. Needless to say, it didn’t. No remnant of it survived into the final text. The “execrable commerce” had powerful protectors in the New World just as it had in the Old, and Jefferson’s masterful finale was unceremoniously dumped by the Continental Congress. Some of our fellow citizens were to remain subjects after all.
Kindness in an Unkindness of Ravens
Common Raven, Corvus corax, showing off at Bryce Canyon National Park, USA. Image: United States National Park Service (Public Domain)
You’d think that ravens—looking all black and bedraggled as they do, and croaking their gruff baritone croaks as they do—would be sort of, well, evil. Or at least brutally indifferent to others’ suffering. And they are! But, in a beyond-good-and-evil kind of way, they are also surprisingly sympathetic to other ravens with whom they have formed social bonds.
A new study of the Common Raven, Corvus corax, examines what are called “affiliative behaviors”—various forms of touching and preening—among ravens in the minutes after one of them has been in a fight. Researchers placed 11 ravens (raised in captivity) from four nests in a large outdoor aviary outfitted to be as natural for the birds as possible. GrrlScientist recounts:
Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar began their study by documenting the frequency of affiliative behaviors in these birds, using a standard protocol developed for primate research. They watched the aftermath of 152 fights between these juvenile ravens during the following 23-month period of time, and recorded the identities of the aggressor, the victim and the bystanders (nearby flock members), along with the intensity of the conflict (a chase flight or hitting were rated as “high intensity”, whilst a forced retreat was “low intensity”). All affiliative (“consoling”) behaviors — defined as contact sitting, preening or beak-to-beak or beak-to-body touching between the victim of the conflict and an individual flock member — were recorded during the ten minutes following each conflict. These post-conflict time periods (PC) were then matched to a control period (MC) for the same victim raven on the next possible day and the frequency and nature of the affiliative interactions that occurred in those time periods were compared….
The ravens were two to three times more likely to exhibit affiliative behaviors immediately following a conflict (the PC period) than at other, controlled times not immediately following a conflict (the MC period). And they favored those ravens they were closer to. GrrlScientist:
Basically, affiliative behaviors occurred most often when the flock member had a closer social bond with the victim raven than with the aggressor. Furthermore, the team observed an increasing probability of unsolicited bystander affiliations after more intense conflicts (when the victim was more likely to be distressed)….
“The findings of this study represent an important step towards understanding how ravens manage their social relationships and balance the costs of group-living,” Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar write. “Furthermore, they suggest that ravens may be responsive to the emotional needs of others.”
The function of the post-conflict affiliative behavior is, one must admit, not perfectly clear. But a leading hypothesis (developed in studies of chimps) contends that its function is to console: to alleviate the victim’s distress, and to do so out of empathy.
If that hypothesis is correct, it will give the lie to the (not-exactly-common) English word for an aggregation of Corvus corax, “an unkindness of ravens.” It seems these corvids just don’t want to live according to our labels.
Via GrrlScientist.
Source:
Fraser, O., & Bugnyar, T. (2010). Do Ravens Show Consolation? Responses to Distressed Others. PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010605
Weekend Wordery: Nicaraguan Sign Language
Yuri Mejia, a student at the Escuelita de Bluefields school, signing “friend” in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Credit: Christina Gomez-Mira; courtesy of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc.
Until the early 1980s, deaf children in Nicaragua were mostly kept at home and did not attend school. They did not learn any kind of systematic sign language. But after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, determined efforts were made to improve the country’s education system, which had until then been one of the poorest in Latin America.
Deaf children were put into schools and taught Spanish, lipreading, and fingerspelling signs—with dismal results. However, outside the classroom, the children began to improvise signs to communicate with each other. At first their signs were like pantomime, and each child signed differently from every other child. But when a second wave of very young children enrolled in the deaf schools, something remarkable happened. The younger children signed more fluidly, more expressively, and with more complex and systematic combinations. They had spontaneously standardized their grammar. By the mid-80s, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) was well established.
NSL has afforded psycholinguists the unique opportunity to study a language in its infancy. New research led by Jennie Pyers elaborates the deep implications that language acquisition has for the development of other kinds of cognitive function. The study involved two cohorts of NSL signers: a group of pioneers whose early form of NSL lacked specific conventions for indicating spatial position (e.g., right, left, over, under); and a younger group who had learned the more developed NSL that did include basic spatial vocabulary. Ed Yong describes:
Pyers compared the abilities of people from both groups, now fully grown adults, in two spatial tests. First, she led them into a small room with a single red wall. She hid a token in one corner of the room, blindfolded the [subjects] and spun them around until they lost their bearings. When she removed the blindfold, the [subjects] had to say where the token was. The second test, like the first, involved hiding a token in the corner of a room, but this time the room was a tabletop model that was rotated while the [subjects] were blindfolded.
In both tests, the second group of adults (who learned the more advanced form of NSL) outperformed the first group. Even though their memories and ability to understand the tasks were just as good, the expanded vocabulary of geographical gestures that they learned as children also gave them better spatial abilities well into adulthood.
[...] Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.”
This is a step beyond evidence that language shapes our experience. It is evidence that the development of certain types of cognitive function is contingent upon language acquisition.
References:
- Pyers’ paper at PNAS: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914044107 (Note that this link will not reach its target until the post-embargo publication window opens. It might take a few weeks for that to happen.)
- Photo via NSF.
Weekend Wordery: “Socialism” vs. “Capitalism”
A Pew Research survey last month looked at whether people responded positively or negatively to various descriptors of political ideology, with the results shown in this graph:
The interesting takeaway is supposed to be that attitudes about “capitalism” and “socialism” are not correlated with each other. (More detail here.)
My reaction: why go to all the trouble of planning and executing a survey like this just to find out whether people react positively or negatively to various words? Shouldn’t you look for interesting correlations (other than party identification and demographics) that might give clues as to why people react the way they do? As is, the survey appears designed to produce little more than sensationalist teasers about how Democrats love socialism and how Republicans are surprisingly cool towards militias.
What do people think those words mean? Couldn’t you try to tease that out, just a hair? And why would you not allow for some gradations of intensity? At least, say, a “neutral” reaction. Again, as is, it seems like the survey is rigged to exaggerate markers of partisan ideology.
It’s all fine and good to explore ideological divides. But is this kind of survey really telling us anything? And if not, why bother?
Via the Monkey Cage.
Mr. Churchill, the Quotable
Is there no one alive today as quotable as Winston Churchill was? Or does it just seem that way? Anyway, I really like this one:
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.
Obviously, at some point a reputation for aphorism begins to be embellished and the subject is mythologized. Like Yogi Berra, Churchill probably didn’t say a lot of the stuff he said. He just didn’t say it better.
Pre-Weekend Wordery: The Adjectival Kitchen Sink
Ezra Klein shares this:
A friend of mine used to say that the rhetorical separation between good food and bad food came down to adjectives. Onion omelet? Pass. Caramelized onion omelet? Sure. Chicken? What do you mean, chicken? Roast chicken? Sure. Vegetable salad? Yawn. Spring vegetable salad? I’ll take a look. And it’s easy to go on: Potatoes vs. roast potatoes, fish vs. seared tuna, beans vs. farmers market fava beans.
There are a lot of vegetables (and assorted other non-meat items) that can be prepared in a lot of different ways. But if you’re not interested enough in the dish to explain what’s in it and how it was made, it’s a pretty good signal to potential buyers that it’s not very good. You don’t see menu items labeled “meat” and you shouldn’t see menu items labeled “veggie.” It’s like a large, blinking, sign: “THIS WILL NOT TASTE VERY GOOD.”
No doubt it’s true: adjectives are often helpful. But not always! My complaints about contemporary menu drafting are more often in the opposite direction: way too much quasi-descriptive embellishment.
I’ve come to think the adjective-seared jumble-aya of today’s menus is also a pretty good signal of a dish (or restaurant) to avoid. It’s as if contemporary menus are caught in some kind of rococo arms race, with each item buried deeper in modifying phrases than the last, to the point where it becomes a serious challenge to identify the noun portion of the meal. You know, something like: Applewood hickory-infused rosemary pine nut glaze reduction with lavender herb encoarsened fair trade sea salt and bianco Lombardo-Piranesi asparagus with ground truffle remoulade simmered in extra virgin vine-ripened Gaioli-in-Chianti and peppered 6-month chevre over a bed of wild, first shade harvest Guyana mache.
Surely there’s some middle ground here. I mean, there must be a point at which modifier gumbo becomes counterproductive in piquing our appetites.
Weekend Birdery/Wordery: “Birdbrain”
I don’t think anyone actually uses the pejorative “birdbrain” anymore, but somehow we all know what it means. Maybe from children’s shows or something.
In researching this post, I’ve come to believe that “birdbrain” usage survives now solely as a cheesy trope of news, journal, and (eh hem) blog writing, where it is offered up as an illustration of colloquial folly, a straw man that the author proceeds to dispatch by adducing the latest research in avian intelligence. We at weekend wordery disdain such stale hackery.
On the other hand, we at weekend birdery are not above the occasional prose gimick when necessary. So, whether or not the existence of the term “birdbrain” implicates a widespread belief that birds are stupid, it would be a pernicious myth if it did. And any myth as pernicious as this one should be dispelled at every opportunity, even one fabricated entirely for the purpose of setting it right.
Therefore I am announcing a series of posts, beginning with this one, to illustrate just how smart birds can be. First, a caveat: For the most part, all animals—present conspecifics included—are dumb. But with that proviso, birds are not, relatively speaking, a particularly dumb class of animals. (Note: if you can conjure David Attenborough’s voice in your mind’s ear, cue it up now:) And indeed, as we’ll see over the course of this series, birds are, quite often, remarkably clever. And the cleverest of all the birds…are the corvids.
Corvids, a family that includes crows and jays (as well as rooks, ravens, and magpies), have displayed a measure of cunning that surpasses not only other birds, but also most mammals—even, in some respects, the non-human great apes. Here’s a sampling of what research and observation have taught us about corvid intelligence:
- An individual European Magpie can recognize itself in a mirror (a rare capacity for non-mammals).
- Carrion Crows in Japan have been observed dropping hard nuts in crosswalks, waiting for cars to drive over them and crack their shells. (See for yourself.)
- Ravens have exhibited the ability to tactically deceive one another in order to hoarde food or to raid each others’ stashes.
- Western Scrub Jays have demonstrated episodic memory (that is, memory of specific past events ) and the ability to plan for future contingencies based on past experience and observation. (Via Ed Yong.)
- Rooks have evinced an elementary understanding of Archimedes’ Principle, dropping rocks into a tall cylinder to raise the water level therein, so that they could reach a worm floating on the surface. (Watch it. Via Ed Yong, again.)
- Many corvids are known to use tools—for example, a stick to get a grub out of a small hole. But the New Caledonian Crow can make and modify tools (like hooks) and can even use tools to make or acquire other tools.
I’ll explore some of these studies and others in more detail in posts to follow.
A New Caledonian crow uses a stick tool to extract mealworms from a drilled log in the Oxford laboratory.
Weekend Wordery: Permanent Filibuster
Jonathan Bernstein wants to clear up some confusion in the way we talk about obstructionism in the United States Senate. In particular, he wants us all to work from the same definition of the word filibuster:
To filibuster is to insist that a bill or nomination needs 60 votes to pass. A filibuster is a requirement that a bill or nomination takes 60 votes to pass.
The term filibuster predates the cloture rule from which the 60-vote requirement derives. But since the advent of the cloture rule, adopted in 19171, it has become possible to divide filibusters into two categories: the unbreakable, Big-F, full monty Filibuster with enough support to survive cloture; and the mere hindrance, little-f, small fry filibustering, in which the opposition knows it cannot survive cloture, but impedes the bill anyway with whatever parliamentary tactics are available.
Bernstein asks us to embrace the Big F as The Filibuster proper; the rest is just “stalling” or “delay.” But at the same time, Bernstein says, the distinction is not about whether the obstructionists actually succeed in blocking the bill or nomination. A filibuster can fail, after all, if it can’t garner 41 votes. “The decision that matters—the one that makes it a filibuster—is the decision to try to find 41 votes to block the bill or nomination,” he writes.
The sad fact is, the Senate minority is basically in perpetual pursuit of those 41 votes. And it’s a rare event for a senator to make a distinction between merely opposing a measure, and filibustering it. All of which means we are living in…the Era of Permanent Filibuster.
- Senate Rule 22, adopted in 1917, established a 2/3 majority requirement for ending debate. The rule was modified in 1975 to require just 3/5, or 60 of 100. [↩]