What more can I add to all the chatter about James Cameron’s Avatar? Not much, except to share my opinions. You probably already know all that you need to know about this movie, and I certainly don’t want to include any spoilers.
First of all, it’s absolutely essential to see it in 3-D, preferably in IMAX. The three-dimensional effects were absolutely convincing, especially in the outdoor scenes, giving the viewer the sense of being in the action rather than watching the action. The result was a thoroughly entertaining, amazing film. I was totally absorbed by it, having no trouble sitting for nearly three hours. (The Tempur-Pedic seats definitely helped! I guess that’s one of the benefits of seeing a movie in a theater that’s located in a furniture store.)
The linguistically sophisticated artificial language of the Na’vi was of course of interest to me, though it was really a minor part of the movie. Although the three-dimensionality allowed subtitles to hover well in front of the action — thereby making them less intrusive than they would be otherwise — it was still appropriate for Cameron to use the device of having the main Na’vi characters be more-or-less capable speakers of English as a second language. Doing so allowed him to get away with minimal use of subtitles. Perhaps I’ll write a follow-up post concerning their own language .
I was surprised to see some little kids at this showing (early Sunday afternoon). Either their parents had no idea that there would be so much violence, or they didn’t care. Avatar is basically a war movie, after all, so they should have cared.
As a war movie, it included every cliché in the book, and therein lies its major flaw. The flaw isn’t the lack of originality; I discount critics who observe that this movie has been made before. Yes, the theme and story line are taken from other efforts, but so what? It’s commonplace for plays and films to do this; even Shakespeare took story lines from elsewhere. No, the flaw is the piling on of cliché after cliché. Fortunately the action and the visual effects are so stunning that it’s almost possible to ignore this problem, but “almost” isn’t good enough. As an unsubtle metaphor for the Europeans’ destruction of American Indians and their lands, it was bound to be somewhat predictable — but it didn’t have to go to such extremes. The result was a collection of one- and two-dimensional characters who fell into situations that anyone in the audience would have expected.
Despite that flaw, and despite its transparent political correctness, Avatar is still a successful film. Aside from the special effects, the spectacular scenery and the attention to detail redeem the story. Go see it — warts and all!
A small linguistic question that has nothing to do with the movie: why is it that I have no trouble with the ostensibly misplaced modifier in the fourth sentence of my second paragraph above? By proximity, the participle “having” should modify “it,” yet the intended reading where it modifies “I” is definitely the dominant one to my eyes and ears. Something to ponder…
“I make order out of chaos.” This is how an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in years explains her transition from linguistics to statistics, when people think it’s a complete change of field. It’s how she explains it to non-linguists, of course — as I already knew the connection. But the phrasing really resonates with me. I’ve described elsewhere how the search for patterns and abstract generalizations is what unites linguistics and math teaching in my mind, but I rather like the step up the ladder of abstraction implied by “I make order out of chaos.”
It also got me thinking about why I like the mystery and science fiction genres in popular fiction. My liking for science fiction is no mystery, so to speak: anyone with a mathematical bent is likely to enjoy the conventions of that genre. But what about mysteries? I’d been thinking about that lately, and it occurred to me that mystery writers also make order out of chaos: the unsolved crime is cognitively chaotic, and the solution creates order out of it. Furthermore, the puzzle that’s often involved bears definite kinship to the kinds of puzzles we solve in both math and linguistics. Just a thought…
Like many other books that I enjoy, Simon Winchester’s non-fiction opus, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, won’t appeal to everyone. But if you’re interested in words — and the development of the English language in general — you won’t want to miss this compelling story of the 54-year-long construction of the OED. Something of a companion volume to The Professor and the Madman, we have here what Paul Harvey would call “the rest of the story.” It’s a reasonably comprehensive account of how the OED was built and what the contributors were like. It’s at least as much a human history as it is the story of a dictionary. You would probably expect it to be dry, but it isn’t. In fact, if anything, I would have liked more technical details. But that’s just me; most readers will prefer it the way it is.
Maybe I am inadvertently committing the Recency Fallacy, but it seems to me that up until last year or so the past participle of pet was petted:
“Where do your cats like to be petted?” <http://www.mihav.com/en/forum/share-amp-chat/where-do-your-cats-like-to-162014>
“pet; petted; petting” <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pet>
“The past participle of ‘to pet’ is ‘petted’.” <http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/19711-pet-petted.html>
But Barbara and I have recently noticed that several people we know have switched to pet as its own past participle. For example:
“My dog likes to be pet all the time.” <overheard>
“That cat really likes to be pet.” <overheard>
“Do snakes like to be petted?” <http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090310231953AAm1xeY>
Most interestingly, a post from the UK contains the sentence, “But, when my rabbit is laying down, he definitely likes to be pet around his whole body,” even though the headline (presumably written by someone else) reads, “How do i know my bunny likes being petted?” <http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091011130535AAHEC77>
It may or may not be relevant, but all the attested forms overheard by Barbara and me come from highly educated women — even our veterinarian — so it’s not an illiteracy. Somehow a weak verb has turned into a strong verb, which is the reverse of the natural course of events. (For example, work → wrought changed to work → worked.) We could gather some evidence of what’s going on by checking other verbs that rhyme with pet, some of which provide possibly explanatory paradigms:
set → set (possibly the model for pet → pet)
bet → bet (likewise)
let → let (likewise)
get → gotten (a different strong-verb paradigm)
jet → jetted (a regular, i.e. weak verb)
net → netted (regular)
wet → wetted (regular)
abet → abetted (regular)
whet → whetted (regular)
fret → fretted (regular)
vet → vetted (regular)
So these data don’t really explain why petted would become pet. And it’s interesting that all the surprising examples that I could find on the Web or in overheard speech have occurred in the phrase “likes to be pet”; maybe this has become new idiom that I’ve been unaware of, in which case the past participle remains petted elsewhere? Just a conjecture…
Junior Lauren Avery, one of the editors of Weston High School’s student newspaper, Wildcat Tracks, asked if she could interview me. Of course I said yes, and the result was a half-page article that focused on my transition from linguistics to teaching math. I was pleased with the depth and breadth of the writing, as well as by its unusually high degree of accuracy. “It’s much more accurate than Fox News,” I said to one of my colleagues.
“That’s not a very high bar,” she replied. She’s right, of course. This article was probably 99% accurate, which is as much as anyone could ask for — and I was just kidding about Fox News.
Here are a few excerpts from Lauren’s article:
Davidson’s smooth switch between two seemingly incompatible fields often surprises his students. Despite this, Davidson sees a great deal of similarities between linguistics and mathematics, and to this day he continues to pursue both subjects.
…
A linguist is a person who studies the origins and usage of ancient and modern languages…. By studying multiple languages instead of focusing on a single language, Davidson was able to begin to identify trends and patterns between languages, a concept that played a major role in his interest in mathematics later on.
…
To his current and former students, Davidson’s ability to switch between two fields has given them a new perspective about choosing a career in the future. “It lets me think that it’s not really too late to change what you are passionate about,” said junior Mir Bokhari.
…
Davidson’s switch between two fields has affected him both as a teacher and as a person, and it reflects some valuable lessons concerning education. “You never know if sometimes something you’re interested in can come back. My jobs make use of all the linguistics I had done 20 years earlier in new contexts. My linguistics training helped in math,” Davidson said. “There are surprising connections. Nothing you learn is ever wasted.”
Congratulations to the Weston High School Theater Company for another first-rate production! The last time I saw Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan must have been at least 20 years ago, so I didn’t remember much about it except for some bits of plot and theme. In particular, I didn’t remember — or, more likely, I had never known — that this 1938–1943 play was so influential on subsequent 20th-century dramatic literature. Non-Aristotelian drama seems routine to us today, but it was revolutionary at the time, as director John Minigan points out in his program notes. Political and moral issues in this play are evident and often unresolved, making it a good choice for high-school performers and audiences. Several memes common throughout folklore and literature pervade the play: anonymous visits by the gods, the search for a good person à la Diogenes, and cross-dressing by a woman who needs to pretend to be a man.
Several actors stood out in Friday’s performance. At the top of the list must be Ben Heath, whose enthusiastic portrayal of airplane pilot Yang Sun grabbed the audience’s attention and held it throughout the play. Only slightly less vivid was Katherine Donahue, who gave an unexpectedly nuanced performance as prostitute Shen Te and her alter ego Shui Ta. I say “unexpectedly” because Katherine’s roles in past productions have always given her the opportunity to be larger than life — even over the top. I knew that she excelled in those conditions, but I hadn’t known that she could so successfully represent both the sweet Shen Te and the ruthless Shui Ta. (These roles had to be played by the same person, as Shui Ta is merely the male disguise that Shen Te adopts whenever she needs to be fierce.) I also have to mention the three gods, who serve in a dual capacity as both a Greek chorus and the instigators of the plot. But, unlike the typical chorus, actors Mikey Bullister, Laurel Kulow, and Diana Flanagan created three contrasting roles: to my mind Mikey came across as a politican, Laurel as a whiny teenager, and Diana as a demanding boss. The combination was effective and amusing, as was Reid Gilbard’s portrayal of Wong, the water seller. All of the rest of the large cast — Eric Doyle, Luc Pomerance, Matthew Chernick, Nike Power, Peter Birren, Halle O’Conor, Lucy Hastings, Tara Kulas, Geoffrey Binney, Jamie Goulart, Katelyn Engler, Jessica Ober, Lexie Burkus, Gabe Nelson, Haley Knapp, Hannah Dodson, Cailin McCormack, Kimmie Remis, Erica Kwiatkowski, Alessandra Haley, Grace Harper, Daniel Donahue, and Athina Kalemos — also deserve recognition, as the entire performance was strong and convincing.
The small pit orchestra — Tommy Fitzgerald, Myles McMann, Nike Power, and Odin Enzmann — was outstanding in their supporting role in this play, which was definitely not a musical although it contained songs and other musical accompaniment. Lighting and sound must have been flawless, as they were unobtrusively perfect, just the way they should be. Finally, perhaps the most impressive aspect of the production was the amazing set, which was gorgeous and dramatic from my seat in the second row.
And now for a few linguistic points. As I said in the first graf above, I saw a performance of this play at least 20 years ago. But I had already known the work, since I had read it — in the original German — as a college freshman over 40 years ago. Needless to say, I don’t really remember that experience. But I do remember a couple of peculiarities in the standard translation by the well-known Eric Bentley, who had been a professor at Harvard just a year or two before I arrived there as a student. Actually, all I really remember is the title, which contains both of these peculiarities. Brecht’s title for the play is Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, and the alert reader surely notices the two surprises. First, why does Bentley translate “Mensch” as “woman”, when it really means “person”? My guess is that it’s because the person in question is in fact a woman, but it seems to me that this translation dulls the impact of the opening, when the gods are looking for a good person, not specifically for a good woman. Second, how does “Sezuan” become “Setzuan” rather than “Szechwan”? I’m not claiming that “Szechwan” is in any way a reasonable transliteration of the Chinese word, but merely that it’s the standard English one. The rendition “Setzuan” is neither German nor English! My best guess here is that the interpolated “t” is meant to help us pronounce the German word, since German “z” is pronounced “ts.” In any case, Bentley’s translation is the one that was used in the Weston production, and it is (title aside) a seamless and as far as I can tell accurate translation. It certainly worked well in this performance.
At this week’s Math Department meeting, we spent the first 15 minutes or so discussing what we do to help “struggling students” succeed in our courses — particularly what resources we provide. Something was bothering me about the whole discussion, so I waited a few minutes before I said anything. Then I realized what was bothering me: the participle “struggling” was apparently being used as a synonym for “unsuccessful.”
This usage has long seemed completely wrong to me. To my mind, I have some students who struggle and do well. I also have some students who are unsuccessful — precisely because they don’t struggle.
It all comes down, of course, to the meaning of the verb “struggle.” Let’s see what a couple of reputable dictionaries say about the matter. In each case I’ve selected the appropriate sense of the word:
- to make strenuous…efforts in the face of difficulties… <struggling with the problem>
- to proceed with difficulty or with great effort <struggled through the high grass> <struggling to make a living>
—Merriam-Webster
- to be strenuously engaged with a problem, a task, or an undertaking
- to progress with difficulty <struggled with calculus>
—American Heritage Dictionary
Linguists, of course, always insist on being descriptive rather than prescriptive, and yet they usually rely on introspection or on the use of a small number of informants. I suppose a more accurate technique in this context would be to survey a large number of people and find out how they use the word “struggle”; I have no idea what we would find, but at least the dictionary definitions make it absolutely clear to me that we should stop using this verb as a synonym for “be unsucessful.”
On another front, we spent the next 25 minutes of the department meeting discussing how to solve the equation x2 = 2x. I told my Algebra II class about this, since we’re currently transitioning from quadratic functions to exponential functions, and one of their homework problems called for a comparison between y = x2 and y = 2x. They found it an unlikely topic for a meeting — and they were especially surprised that we were so geeky that the meeting ran ten minutes over before anybody looked at the clock and noticed that we had gone past the announced end of the meeting.
By the way, there are three solutions to this equation. One solution, 2, is immediately obvious; a second solution, 4, is not at all obvious until you give it some considerable thought, at which point it “becomes obvious.” The third solution can be estimated by looking at a graph. Finding this solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
I’ve had lunch twice so far at Pasha, a new Turkish restaurant in Arlington Center. Although I don’t know anything yet about their dinners, I can highly recommend it on the basis of the two lunches. If you’ve never had Turkish cuisine, you have to try it! Unsurprisingly it resembles Greek cuisine quite a bit — it’s unsurprising since the majority of Greek foods were originally Turkish, presumably in part because of the geographical proximity of the two countries but more because of the Ottoman Empire. Anyway, the very extensive menu includes a wide variety of meat, seafood, and veggie dishes, with the expected emphasis on lamb and eggplant. At our recent lunch we shared a perfectly done babaghannouj as a cold appetizer (though oddly with an Americanized French bread instead of pita), an unusual mucver as a hot appetizer (that’s fried stuffed zucchini with garlic yogurt sauce, accompanied by a small salad), and the delicious Sultan’s Boat as an entree (described as “beef and lamb marinated with Turkish spices, roasted with mashed potatoes and mozzarella cheese, served with bulgar and house salad”). Despite the bread and the mozzarella cheese (and the presence of lasagna on the menu), Pasha seems very authentic, if I can remember correctly from my visit to Turkey all too long ago — I think it was in 1978. And they do serve wine and beer; even though Turkey is an ostensibly Muslim nation, it’s a thoroughly secularized one.
My only complaint is a linguistic one. Because they chose to use a font that doesn’t include such essential Turkish letters as the undotted i (ı) or the ş and ç with cedillas — all distinct from the dotted i, the plain s, and the plain c — many of the Turkish words were incorrect. Somehow I suspect that that won’t bother very many of the patrons, but it bothered me.
Vincent Rossmeier has written a refreshing article in Salon entitled “Is the Internet melting our brains?” Essentially an interview with linguist Dennis Baron about his new book, A Better Pencil, the article counters much of the typical hand-wringing in the mainstream media and academia:
Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes.
While I’m sure that many of my students spend too much time on Facebook and too much time texting, I’m equally sure that their social relationships and their use of English were no better before they indulged in such activities. I’ve reserved Baron’s book from the library, and I’ll post a review here (but only after I’ve read it).
Just about everyone can speak, so we all have an opinion about language. Just about everyone can count, so we all have an opinion about math. Everyone’s an expert. After reading uninformed opinions about both, I decided to compare and contrast. Off the top of my head I can think of three points of comparison and four points of contrast; if I were writing a thesis on this subject I would undoubtedly find many more.
First let’s look at some similarities that go beyond what I hinted at in the first paragraph:
- For some reason, people who state their uninformed opinions in public almost always take the conservative side of issues in both of these areas. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, given the general tenor of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other instances of talk radio and its television allies. But it’s still striking that your typical layperson wants to preserve or resurrect obsolete grammar “rules,” wants dictionaries to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, thinks that some languages are inferior to others, etc. And it’s equally striking that the same typical layperson advocates “back to basics” approaches in mathematics and thinks that math is all about memorization of facts, rote algorithms, and the like.
- Members of the general public are confused equally about what linguists and mathematicians do. They think that a linguist is someone who speaks several languages fluently, so why should they ask a linguist for an expert scientific opinion about language in general or English in particular? Similarly, they think that a mathematician is someone who calculates quickly and accurately, so why should they ask a mathematician for an expert scientific opinion on learning mathematical concepts?
- Because the general public understands neither subject, they are confused about the connections between the two. The fact that I moved from studying linguistics to teaching math sounds like a complete change of direction, not a natural evolution. It’s the rare person who sees cryptology as a connection or bridge between the two, or who understands that in some sense math is a language (only in some sense, I hasten to add), or who can imagine that one can apply mathematics in any way to the study of language.
So much for the similarities. Are there ways in which we can contrast the general public’s opinions about language and math? Sure. Here are a few:
- People freely profess ignorance about math. When someone at a party asks what you do, and you say that you’re a math teacher, the most common response is, “I was never any good at math.” Rarely are they ashamed. Often they even seem proud of it. But no one admits to be ignorant about reading, writing, and speaking.
- On what might be the same lines, people at least have some idea that there is such a thing as a mathematician, even if they don’t know what mathematicians do. (“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,” according to Alfred Renyi.) But when I tell people that I majored in linguistics, the usual response is either a blank stare or “What’s that?”
- Perhaps as a consequence of the previous observation, a great many myths about language float around in the popular culture, but there are not nearly so many myths about math.
- Everyone thinks they can teach English — they can’t, of course — but very few people think they can teach math.
Perhaps in a later post I’ll give some citations to exemplify these seven points, but this will do for now.
Near the end of my B Block precalculus class this morning, a couple of juniors happen to mention this blog and asked me to give a shout-out here to B Block. I said I would do so.
But first, of course, being a linguistics geek, I had to go research the origin and connotations of the word “shout-out” — with or without a hyphen. Of several sources, the Wikipedia article seemed pretty reliable. (They* aren’t always, of course.) It’s short enough to quote in its entirety. Here’s most of it:
A shout-out is a greeting or acknowledgment of a person, group, or organization of significance. It is often done as a sign of respect, synonymous with “giving props”.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term back to 1990, and notes that in the United States the term is particularly used among fans and performers of rap music (shout-outs are of particular significance in hip-hop culture), while in the United Kingdom it is particularly associated with the rave and club subculture. On either side of the Atlantic, the term is not limited to those groups. Contestants on game shows almost always are given an opportunity to “shout out” to friends and family watching the show on television at home, and other entertainment media that involve one-time appearances by regular people (such as talk shows) also occasionally allow shout-outs.
It’s not surprising that a term originating from rap and hip-hop would be popular among a group of white and Asian teens.
And so…I am happy to give a shout-out to B Block! (But don’t feel slighted if you’re in C, E, or G; it was B Block that asked. Ask, and you shall receive.)
——–
*I know. I used a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent. But the meaning would change to something completely incorrect if I wrote “it isn’t” here instead of “they aren’t.” Sometimes rules need to be broken. (And I had to put this footnote in, since Abby commented on how unusual it is to have footnotes in a blog.)
I recently read Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget, entitled The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. While this book is fascinating, it’s also deeply flawed — especially for those of us who love lists, not to mention those of us who love thesauri and other reference books.
On the plus side, Kendall teaches us a lot about Roget’s background as a scientist and physician. We learn about his compulsive list-making as a child, whether it be names of farm animals in Latin or lists of the bones in the human body. We learn about his organization of all the concepts of the English language in later life. And we learn a little — but not nearly enough — about Roget’s mental problems and how he coped with them. These problems were relevant, indeed central, to the decision to create the first thesaurus in 1852. Compiling lists of words apparently helped Roget cope with depression, anxiety, and probably Asperger’s, though Kendall only barely touches on the last of these.
On the minus side, the reader gains almost no sense (despite the subtitle) of the importance of the thesaurus to Roget’s life and to the world. It’s just one incident among many. I was looking for details — lots of details — about how the thesaurus was compiled. The lack of details is rather ironic, given the subject of the book. And it reminds me of my issues with The Professor and the Madman. The other flaw is the offhand consideration of the likelihood that Roget had Asperger’s, though of course neither the name nor the disorder was known in the 19th Century. These flaws were not enough to deter me from finishing The Man Who Made Lists, but they certainly reduced my enjoyment of the book and meant that I learned far less from it than I had hoped.
Those who know me will not be surprised that I still have an old copy of Roget’s International Thesaurus, a copy that my father gave me when I was eight years old. As I say, people won’t be surprised that I have this, though they might be surprised that I could lay my hands on it so readily. Anyway, when I was eight, this “new edition” of the thesaurus had been out for nine years, so it slightly predates my own birth. It’s instructive to contrast the arrangement and organization of this edition with the modern alphabetical lists of synonyms that still claim the name “thesaurus.” My copy, published by Crowell, contains the following remarks in the Publishers’ Preface [note the subtle placement of the apostrophe]:
The basic principle of Dr. Peter Roget’s original Thesaurus was the grouping of words according to their ideas rather than the listing of words, as dictionaries do, according to the alphabet. This principle — the secret of Roget’s success — has been scrupulously preserved in the various Crowell editions for over sixty years. [Italics as in original]
The difficulty with grouping words by ideas is that it can be very difficult to find a word, so this edition of the thesaurus contains an index that’s nearly as long as the body of the book. Be that as it may, Roget’s idiosyncratic organization of all possible concepts is a delight, as long as you don’t take it as a given truth. The schema is hierarchical and multi-level. For example, suppose you were thinking about prime numbers, but you couldn’t remember the terminology prime number. You would, of course, look under Class I (abstract relations), Section V (Number), Part 1 (Number in the Abstract), Category 84 (Number), Subcategory 2. You knew that, didn’t you?
Well, no, of course you didn’t; that’s why you needed the huge index. Anyhow, the subcategory in question reads as follows:
complement, subtrahend, multiplicand, multiplier, multiplicator, multiple, submultiple, coefficient, dividend, divisor, factor, quotient, fraction, mixed number, numerator, denominator, decimal, mixed decimal, circulating decimal, repetend, common measure, aliquot part, reciprocal, prime number, totient, quota, differential, integral, fluxion, fluent, power, root, radix, base, exponent, index, logarithm, antilogarithm, modulus.
Note that this is most definitely not a list of synonyms! It’s a list of words that are conceptually related in some way. Reading it, you spot the term you were looking for (“prime number”) and your mind is also captured by a great many other words that are closely or loosely connected. What a loss to use a modern so-called thesaurus, where you probably can’t even find “prime number” unless you already know the phrase, and then you’ll simply find that there are no synonyms.
You can browse through Roget’s Thesaurus and learn something new on any page. All you are likely to learn from a modern thesaurus is some pretentious near-synonyms that will make you a worse writer.
If you can’t travel to Venice in the real world, the next best thing is to travel vicariously in the novels of Donna Leon. Formally speaking, these novels are squarely in the mystery genre, but Leon devotes as much attention to her locale (Venice, of course) and her characters (primarily Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family) as she does to the plot of the mystery. Some readers might find this balance disappointing, but the books are much the richer for it.
The Girl of His Dreams is the latest in Leon’s Brunetti series. The characters continue from Blood from a Stone and Death at La Fenice, both of which I read last year; the stories are independent. This time we have a lot about religion: the Roman Catholic church, Catholic priests, and a somewhat vague alternative but Christian religion that might be a cult or at least a scam. The teenagers are a little less stereotypical now, perhaps because they’re older. There is also a continuation of two themes from Blood from a Stone, ethnic prejudice and the presence of foreigners in Venice. This time the foreign group is Gypsies, who have fled from the former Yugoslavia during the conflicts there. Political issues infuse the novel, ranging from the treatment of Gypsies to the word itself to the Venetians’ attitude toward the Church. Leon’s pace is fairly slow and deliberate, but the book is never boring. Do read it.
A small linguistic note:
Leon is an American living in Venice, so she wrote the book in English, though Italian and Venetian are sprinkled lightly throughout to add an air of authenticity. The linguistic issue arises when two characters decide whether to call each other by the familiar or the polite second-person pronoun. I’m familiar with this issue in French and German, and I’ve asked Spanish-speakers about it in Spanish, but I don’t know much about it in Italian. Nevertheless, I understand that an Italian author could simply make a point by having a character say “tu” or “voi.” This distinction is nearly impossible to translate into English, thereby requiring some sort of circumlocation or paraphrase. But the English-speaking writer can simply have her characters say something like, “Shall we call each other tu?” or even “Shall we use the familiar form of the pronoun?” The latter, of course, would be unbearably pedantic and implausible, so we have to assume that the reader will understand “tu” from context or from familiarity with other Romance languages.
What’s a meme? Well, those of us who have spent too many years on the Internet (from its inception in 1969, actually, when it was called the ARPAnet) and those of us who have read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, know what a meme is. Although the Wikipedia article on memes is far too long and leaves a lot to be desired, it definitely includes the correct definition:
A meme…comprises any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.
That’s clear enough, so why is the word used incorrectly these days by so many people, some of whom should definitely know better but most of whom have never learned what a meme really is? Many writers seem to think that a meme is an informal quiz or questionnaire that is passed around by email or by the Web, often of the “you are a _____” variety. Now you can see both the similarities and the differences here: Do they propagate themselves, or do users intentionally transmit them? Are they cultural ideas and behaviors, or are they questionnaires? The word is definitely losing most of its import these days!
As a teacher, I suppose I’d better cite some sources for this claim. I’m sure that some of my colleagues would be aghast that I cited Wikipedia as my source for the correct use of a word, but so be it. As for the current incorrect use, I am reluctant to cite either email messages or websites of friends — for obvious reasons — but I can probably find similar use by strangers without much effort. Let’s see… most of the initial hits from a Google search actually lead to the correct usage (much to my surprise), but I’m sure I can also find the usage I object to… OK, here are a few:
That’s enough. You get the idea. What’s up here?
I have recently read two unconnected but closely related non-fiction books: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea, and The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. Probably I should have read them in the reverse order, but it was Shea’s 2008 book that impelled me to go back and read Winchester’s, which was written ten years earlier.
As the subtitle to Shea’s book suggests, he successfully took on the self-assigned task of reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a year. You may wonder why anyone would do such a thing — one of my colleagues would uncharitably claim that Shea must have too muich time on his hands — but never mind, the book is well worth reading on several counts even without a compelling answer to that question. First of all, any reader has to be simply astounded that anyone could accomplish such a feat: it has a fascination similar to any story of the accomplishment of a long-lasting unlikely challenge. Second, the details surrounding the endeavor are of interest to any compulsive reader (not that I would know anyone in that category), ranging from Shea’s physical arrangements for the effort to the effects on his eyes, his body, and his relationships. Third, Reading the OED does not merely recount the story of what Shea did but also includes lots of notes on many interesting words that he encountered along the way. Definitely a niche book, I suppose, but go read it if you’re a lover of words and dictionaries. And if you didn’t grow up with a dictionary in every room, it’s never too late to start.
Winchester’s book is much more of a popularization. Basically it tells the tale of two men in Victorian England: James Murray, “the professor” and the principal editor of the OED for decades during the creation of its first edition; and Dr. William Chester Minor, “the madman” and the most prolific contributor of source material to the OED over the same decades. I wish this book had been around during my father’s life, not only because he was a lover of words and dictionaries but also because of one of the stories he used to tell as a psychiatrist. It concerned a visitor to the large mental hospital where my father was the director; the visitor stopped to ask for directions from the first person he saw, and the reply turned out to be detailed, complex, and accurate. It turned out that the person giving directions was a patient in the hospital. When the visitor expressed surprise, the reply was, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
I’m sure you’ve heard that line before in other contexts, but this (probably apocryphal) story is the context for it that always sticks in my mind. It continued to resonate for me in The Professor and the Madman, where Minor is portrayed as a deeply paranoid schizophrenic who spent most of his adult life confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, as a sentence for shooting a man whom he had mistakenly believed to have broken into his apartment. Winchester tells the entwined stories of Murray and Minor, but mostly Minor’s, which is the more fascinating or the more sensationalistic one, depending on your view of such things. In any case, I did find it fascinating, but I wish there had been more details of the lexicographic procedures used for researching a writing a gigantic dictionary in pre-computer days. If you’re not a dictionary lover, read it for the story of Minor’s life and mind; if you are a dictionary lover, read it not only for that story but also for the account of how the OED was constructed. And, in either case, read it as intellectual history: Winchester’s portrait of the times provides more than just a glimpse of what was happening in Britain then.
Following up on yesterday’s footnote, I need to mention another linguistic annoyance: the misuse of the word “Spanish.” Yes, it correctly describes the language that is spoken not only in Spain but also in much of Central and South America, but it’s not the right word for the culture, the food, or the people — unless, of course, you’re talking about Spain itself. For the Western Hemisphere we have the perfectly good words “Hispanic” and “Latino.” Anyway, my local neighborhood convenience store changed owners recently, and now it advertises “Spanish & American Foods,” as you can see in this picture. (I couldn’t find an angle that would avoid the intrusive stop sign, but you can still read it pretty well.)
Needless to say, I found lot of Latin American items inside the store but very little food from Spain. They do, however, primarily carry the Goya Foods brand, and it’s of interest that Goya was indeed founded by a couple from Spain. Goya, however, clearly uses the words “Spanish,” “Hispanic,” and “Latino” correctly on their website.
Kudos* to the Weston High School Theater Company for its outstanding production of Midsummer Night’s Dream the past three nights. Among the excellent cast, I first want to mention Katherine Donahue (Helena) and Anna Been (Hermia), who were exceptionally effective against each other (and sometimes against the male leads) portraying convincingly fierce women. You’ll say that of course girls are always stronger than the guys in high school drama productions, but in this case that wasn’t quite true: far and away the best performance was given by Brian Cowe in his amazingly intense, madcap rendition of Puck. All I can say is, “Wow!”
*I can’t refrain from observing that “kudos” is a singular noun, and it irritates me when I hear or see a reference to “another kudo” or the like. If only more people studied Greek, they would know that of course κυδος is simply a third-declension neuter noun in its nominative singular form. Now I know that it actually looks misleadingly like a second-declension masculine, but… OK, OK, end of rant.
Just getting around to blogging this, but there was a fascinating article a few weeks ago in the Boston Globe, made all the more relevant to me because it mentioned several of my Weston students and was written by the mother of one of those students. Ellen Freeman Roth’s article, headlined “Not your father’s nicknames when teens talk to parents,” explored what kids call their parents and their parents’ friends:
Lisa and Michael Josephson of Old Greenwich, Conn., are Mama Jo and Papa Jo, names coined by their daughter’s friend. Timothy Sweet of Watertown began calling his father “Sweet Man” a dozen years ago on a Boy Scout trip. Sweet likewise has nicknames for his friends’ parents, including “Glenzo” for Glen and “Pina” for Patricia.
Sarah Switlik, 18, a Babson College student from Princeton, N.J., said her mother, Pam, wasn’t thrilled at first when Sarah called her P-Money. “Initially my mom said, ‘Really, Sarah,’ exasperatedly. Now when she’s texting she signs off, ‘Love, P$.’ It makes her feel like one of the girls.”
…
Caroline Gaulin, 22, of Greenwich, Conn., yelled “My bad, G-Dog!” to her father, Dan, during a basketball game to make light of an error she’d made. “After that we started calling him G-Dog,” she said. “Now he loves it.”
Teachers are almost always called by title and surname at Weston, but at CSA we’re all on a first-name basis. These customs run counter to expectations and fly in the face of the customs for naming of parents and parents’ friends, at least based on my predictions. There are probably some interesting class issues here. Although I grew up calling my parents “Mom” and “Dad,” I called all my other relatives and my parents’s friends by their first names: it was Lillian and Leonard, not Aunt Lillian and Uncle Leonard; Luke and Gen, not Mr. and Mrs. Garner. But Barbara grew up more formally, with Aunts and Uncles and surnames with titles. I’ll have to ask my CSA students what they do; I’ll predict big differences between Weston and Dorchester.
Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, certainly understands cultural sensitivity with his global perspective:
“What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book?” he said. “You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That’s not going to help you master… English. So you really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child’s time trying to learn a word that they’ll never ever use again?”
He added that some words — such as chow mein — might be useful.
Oh, well, it’s Texas. Weston is much too enlightened for such attitudes. We take our global perspectives seriously, as you can see from the list of current projects, which include Giant Chinese Dragons & Lions, Uganda Professional Development Project, Columbian Exchange, Rhythm Kids: An African Drumming Experience, and Bringing the Art Experience of Ecuador into the Classroom.
Barbara and I went to see My Fair Lady at the Opera House last night. Not surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed this production of the greatest musical in history. 24-year-old Lisa O’Hare was especially effective in her outstanding performance as Eliza. Unfortunately Christopher Cazenove was rather ordinary and unimpressive as Henry Higgins. The rest of the cast ranged from good to excellent; Tim Jerome deserves special mention for his almost-over-the-top rendition of the comic role of Alfred P. Doolittle.
Although it has been 26 years since the last time I saw My Fair Lady, I still know it practically by heart, since it’s unquestionably my favorite musical ever. So I was intrigued by some of the changes from the classic productions of the original cast and the movie. In particular, the director turned “With a Little Bit of Luck” into a highly entertaining production number, “Show Me” into attendance by Eliza at a suffragette rally, and the Ascot scene into mourning for King Edward VII (the date of the action was moved from 1912 to 1910). All of these amounted to a lagniappe for the audience — enhancing the original conception of this musical rather than destroying it.
I’ve been told that the reason I like My Fair Lady so much might be that I have a background in linguistics, but I’m not at all sure that that’s it. Yes, the linguistic aspects of the musical certainly add extra meaning and interest for me, but they certainly aren’t the main theme of the show. Besides, I loved My Fair Lady before I became a linguist. Actually, I’m more intrigued by its meaning to me as a teacher. Or should I be referring to Shaw’s Pygmalion, on which most of My Fair Lady (except for the unfortunate last scene) is very closely based? The Greek myth of Pygmalion is always a cautionary tale for teachers, since we run the risk of taking credit for our students’ achievements — and, by extension, blame for their failures. The entire way that Professor Henry Higgins thinks of Eliza as his personal creation is all too tempting, especially in the current political climate in which teachers are supposed to be “accountable” for what their students do. I’m not going to get on the subject of merit pay now while reviewing a play, but it’s surprisingly relevant. More on this later, perhaps.
Before the show we had dinner at Ivy; I’ll post a review in a couple of days.
What math teacher could resist a mystery titled The Witch of Agnesi. Of course if you’re neither a math teacher nor a mathematician, you’re probably scratching your head right now, wondering, “What is he talking about?”
Well, the Witch of Agnesi is actually not the name of a witch, nor is Agnesi a town in Italy, as you might suppose. We need to digress for a moment to indulge in a brief math lesson, and then we can return to reviewing Robert Spiller’s mystery novel. Consider a curve that is described by the following equation:
If, say, we let a = 2, its graph looks like this:
And why, you may ask, is this curve called the Witch of Agnesi? Well, therein lies the solution to the mystery.
Some students erroneously think that the name comes from the shape of the curve, which they somewhat dubiously imagine looks like a witch’s hat. Others think — and have thought over the centuries — that the curve is so-called because it was first discovered by Maria Agnesi, who was a witch.
Those people, at least, are half right, or maybe one-third right. The curve was actually discovered by Fermat, but it was published by the great Italian mathematician Maria Agnesi, who published it in 1748 in a book that MathWorld calls “the first surviving mathematical work written by a woman.” But the name of the curve — the key to solving the mystery — comes from a mistranslation, an event that warms the heart of anyone who has studied linguistics. Here we have slightly varying accounts. In the mystery novel, Spiller’s protagonist Bonnie Pinkwater (a math teacher, of course) explains the mistranslation to her precalculus class this way:
“The famous French Mathematician [sic] Pierre de Fermat…had given the curve the Italian name versiera, which simply means a curve that turns…. Maria used the same name…when she spoke of the curve in her Analytic Institutions. She embellished and extended Fermat’s ideas, making large portions of the Mathematics her own.
“Now the scene shifts some fifty years hence. Maria Agnesi is dead. John Colson, a British Mathematician and linguist at Cambridge University, decides to translate Analytic Institutions into English. He did an admirable job except for this one word.”
Nex to versiera she wrote aversiera and underlined the new word…. “He mistook versiera for this almost identical cousin…with disastrous results…. The word aversiera means bride of the devil.”
Passing over the discrepancy between Fermat (last name) and Maria (first name) — does that remind anyone of Obama and Hillary? — and the odd capitalization of Mathematician and Mathematics, we note how a single letter can make a big difference. But it’s still surprising that a linguist would miss an initial a- of all things. MacTutor provides the explanation: just remember to quote the noun along with its preceding definite article. It’s easy to mistake la versiera for l’aversiera.
Unfortunately, however, Spiller himself may have gotten at least one of the words wrong. Then again, maybe not: as sources differ on the details (how appropriate that the devil is in the details in this case). The initial name for the curve is versiera according to Spiller, versiera according to the reliable website MacTutor History of Mathematics, and averisera according to the equally reliable website MathWorld. Hmmm… And the erroneous reading by Colson was aversiera according to Spiller, aversiera according to MacTutor, and avversiera according to MathWorld. So maybe Spiller is right. This bears further research; stay tuned.
Anyway, I seem to have gotten off the subject of reviewing the novel. You can see now why I just had to check the book out of the library and read it. In general it’s a competent story that fits squarely into the traditional genre of the amateur private detective with a sidekick. As is traditional, there is a series of murders (or perhaps, being a math teacher, I should call it a sequence of murders; no summation is involved). As is traditional, there is effective use of red herrings. The plot is effective, even though it slows down in the middle of the book. The account of various Wiccan characters is sympathetic without being patronizing. There is a small amount of character development and suspense; one student, in particular, turns out not to be what he first seems to be — always a useful object lesson for teachers. The sidekick is altogether too much of a Sensitive New-Age Guy; I suppose he’s just as convincing as the nerdy science teacher in Academy X, but surely it’s not realistic to have a science teacher who’s a more sympathetic character than a math teacher.  The setting in eastern Colorado is convincing without being obtrusive. Finally, the ending is an effective surprise.
Altogether a pleasant read, as they say — even though there isn’t nearly enough math in it.
P.S.: I suppose this seems to be yet another in my continuing series of reviews of novels that relate to high schools, but there’s an important difference between this one and the previous ones. In those earlier cases the school itself was a character in the novel, often in some sense the main character and usually an elite school. But Spiller’s novel is only incidentally school-related, and it’s clearly a very mixed-income and low-income public school, complete with students and teachers who live in trailer parks. Students are victims, and the protagonist is a teacher, and almost all of the characters are teachers, students, or parents — but it’s still not a book about a school, nor is it meant to be. Like most novels, it’s a book about people; the protagonist just happens to be a math teacher.
On May 5, as you will recall, I posted an article about a proposed new class for the Saturday Course, temporarily code-named Geolinguistics. Well, that course has indeed come into existence, and I am just finishing teaching it for the second time. Now called Labyrinth of Languages, it has a new course description:
Have you ever wondered about exploring other languages — what they’re like, how they’re related, and who speaks them where? If so, this is the course for you. Each week we’ll focus on an important language or region of the world. We’ll try to answer a lot of fascinating questions along the way. For instance, is Chinese really a single language with many dialects? Why is English so widespread around the world? And why did Spanish and Portuguese spread around so much of the world as well? Speaking of Spanish, what else do they speak in Spain? Does everyone there speak Spanish? Have you heard of Catalan? What about Basque? Lots of Spaniards speak those two languages. Do you know whether there are more English speakers or
Hindi speakers in the world? Did you know that Turkish is related to Mongolian? How could that be? And why is Irish related to Urdu, a language spoken in Pakistan? Take a lot of languages and a pinch of geography, toss them into your cauldron, stir twice counterclockwise, and you’ve got this course!
I taught this to a group of sixth-graders for six weeks in September and October, and then to a group of fifth-graders for another six weeks in October–December, with (IMHO) considerable success. As always, the reality didn’t quite match the description, but it came remarkably close. The kids were great, ranging from enthusiastic to knowledgeable, with a great many being both. By a strange coincidence, my class was 50% Chinese in the first go-round (five of the ten kids), so I did a bit more Chinese than anticipated, especially since one student was extraordinarily opinionated — and with the knowledge to back up her strong opinions. For instance, she was unhappy when I said that Japanese originally didn’t have any writing system so they borrowed kanji characters from Chinese: “They didn’t borrow our characters — they stole them! And they never returned them.”
After some tweaking, I settled on a six-week plan (one 75-minute class per week) that looks like this:
- The languages of Spain
- The countries and languages of the former Soviet Union (mostly Russian)
- Chinese
- Japanese
- Turkish and other Turkic languages
- How languages change over time and space (mostly English)
Of course there isn’t enough time to explore more than a smattering of each topic, but this whirlwind tour still gives kids a lot of meat to chew on. They learn about similarities of three of the languages in Spain (but not Basque!), the Cyrillic alphabet, the use of a few verb and noun endings in Russian, Chinese characters and compound nouns, the four Japanese writing systems, vowel harmony and the astounding lack of irregularities in Turkish, and how English has changed over the past 1100 years. They get a few tidbits of each language and learn something about the similarities and differences, the relationships and mysteries. And they learn that language is really speech, and writing is only a representation.
Since when did the meaning of the phrase “scavenger hunt” change so that it now refers to what is properly called a “treasure hunt”? When I was a kid, there was a clear distinction:
- In a scavenger hunt, you were given a list of items to bring back (either the actual items or a photo or some other evidence) in any order.
- In a treasure hunt, a sequence of clues let you from place to place in a specific order, and the prize was at the end.
This was a clear and useful distinction. But now it has gotten all muddied up. Over and over again in the past few years I have heard people at Weston say “scavenger hunt” when they mean “treasure hunt.” It’s very confusing. And yet it doesn’t seem to bother anyone! What’s the source of this travesty?
Let’s check some reference works. First, of course, everyone these days checks the trusty (or not-so-trusty) Wikipedia. It says, “A scavenger hunt is a game in which individuals or teams seek to find a number of specific items, or perform tasks, as given in a list. The goal is either to complete the list first, or to achieve the highest score within a given time limit.” Sounds like the correct meaning to me. Nothing about following sequential clues. There is a reference to the Great American Treasure Hunt, but that is indeed a treasure hunt in the traditional sense. So how did the meaning change? Or is this just a Weston anomaly, reflecting blissful ignorance of the real meaning of the word?
If Wikipedia is unconvincing, as it sometimes is, we’d better check some other reference works. Surely the American Heritage Dictionary is reliable and beyond reproach:
A game in which individuals or teams try to locate and bring back miscellaneous items on a list.
Finally, for those who think that even the American Heritage Dictionary is suspect, there’s good old reliable Nathan, I mean Merriam Webster:
a game in which players try to acquire without buying specified items within a time limit
So is Weston just being idiosyncratic? Or is this an all-of-Massachusetts thing? Inquiring minds want to know.
One Saturday last month, when I walked into the Saturday Course wearing my map jacket, the director brought up the idea that I should consider teaching a geography course. I was lukewarm to that idea, primarily because I couldn’t imagine how to make it interesting to fifth- and sixth-graders. The thought sat in the back of my mind during the morning and didn’t really go anywhere. Then, at lunch, we were talking about the new course suggestions that some of the kids had written on their evaluations; geography was mentioned again, as were languages. Perhaps this combo had been spurred by the very popular “Taste of Italy” course. In any case, a light bulb went on in my head. It has been years since I’ve taught anything that uses my extensive background and interest in linguistics, and I realized that it would combine wonderfully with geography. So I started thinking… How about this as a course for sixth-graders — just stream-of-consciousness, not yet a course description:
Each week this course would focus on an important language and/or region of the world. We will explore things like the geography of the region, names you should know, what languages are spoken where, and some characteristics of those languages. For example, one week might focus on China: what are its different ethnic groups…is Chinese a single language with many dialects?…do Chinese characters represent words or sounds? how do you pronounce Chinese transliteration (pinyin)?…how much of Asia does China take up?…is Tibet part of China…is Mongolia?…what’s China’s connection with Korea and Japan?…
Another week could focus on Iberia. Everyone knows that they speak Spanish in Spain…but kids won’t know about Catalan. How and why is it closer to French than to Spanish? Where else is it spoken? What about Galician — is it really just Portuguese? And why is Basque so utterly different from everything else? And where and why did Spanish and Portuguese spread around so much of the world?…Do they speak Spanish in all of Latin America?…And why is it called “Latin” America anyway?…
Another week could focus on the English-speaking world…why is English so widespread?…how does it vary in different English-speaking countries?…why do most of them border the sea?…what does English look like for a non-native speaker?… Then I’m thinking of the former Soviet Union one week, including a look at the enormous spread of the Turkic peoples into Central Asia and western China, and the Indian subcontinent for a fifth week (no particular order suggested yet). That would leave the last week for a pot-pourri, including the often-neglected Indonesia.
It would be interesting to see what prior knowledge kids come in with. For example, they probably know that China is the most populous country, but they probably don’t know that it’s more than 25% of the world’s population. And I’d bet that very few know that the U.S. has only 5% of the world’s people, or that India has more than three times our population. And surely none of them know that the aforementioned Indonesia has just about as many people as we do. Some interesting activities could include “guessing” quizzes, follow-up research, use of map pins, a “guess that language” activity….
This is obviously far too extensive for a six-week course as described, but it’s a good start.
Three days ago was Pi Day (3/14). Or maybe I should say 3.14 days ago, since that was Pi Day. Anyhow, a lot of the Weston math teachers celebrated it one way or another with our classes, and Kelly of course baked Pi Day brownies (why not a pie?), and two of my sophomores promised to visit my classes at 3/14 1:59 — but they forgot — and one of my physics colleagues sent around the beginnings of a pi mnemonic in the form of a parody of the beginning of Poe’s “The Raven”…
Just a routine Pi Day so far — not that any Pi Day is truly routine.
But then today I received an email from one of my 11th-grade students, in which he provided a link to the entire mnemonic. The full explanation reveals that the text includes an amazing 3835 digits of pi, all in the form of various literary parodies that more-or-less make sense and more-or-less scan. This example of constrained writing is quite a tour de force! Do check it out.
Oh — one more thing. One of my colleagues is eager to hear how it ends. What’s the last digit? Well, it turns out that the mnemonic ends with “The End,” of course.
If you are translating an archaic language into English, should your writing sound archaic? Or should it be readable? Altogether too many amateur translators think the former.
One of my colleagues inadvertently provided a lovely example yesterday. In precalculus class we have been studying cubic functions and other polynomials of lower and higher degree, so the subject of solving quadratic and cubic equations naturally arises. We all know the quadratic formula, and nobody in his right mind would want to memorize the cubic formula — you especially don’t want to memorize the quartic formula — but it would be helpful to gain an historical perspective on all this. (I, for one, firmly believe that mathematical understanding is almost always enhanced by learning the historical context.) So we looked at an excerpt from an ancient Egyptian papyrus:
Find a value eight of which does exceed two of its squares by six. Do apply as a factor the number of squares to the desired excess obtaining twelve.
Decrease by this amount the square formed from half the factor of the number sought. This square has a side of two which should by increased by half the factor of the number sought. Remove from this as a factor the number of squares sought thus obtaining the desired value.
The unknown translator clearly wanted to make his English sound archaic. But he did this at the expense of readability! No actual spoken language ever sounded like this, and Middle Egyptian really was an actual spoken language.
So I took on the task of trying to find the original problem. (I always knew that my two semesters of Middle Egyptian in college would turn out to be useful some day.) Unfortunately I have not yet been able to locate the original, so I can’t honestly offer a more accurate translation. Even a very rough and very free paraphrase is impossible without the original Egyptian text (and, in any case, “traditore tradutore,” as they say). But here it is in algebraic language:
I’m looking for a certain quantity, x, such that 8x is 6 more than twice the square of x. Multiply the number of squares, 2, by the excess, 6, giving 12. Subtract this from the square of half of the multiplier of x. Add the square root of this number to half of the original multiplier of x. Then divide that sum by the original number of squares.
Note how awkward it is to express algebra in words rather than symbols, and even the mixture of words and symbols doesn’t help much. A modern translation is more readable, but still pretty opaque. Converting this text into plain algebra is a good exercise that helps to teach the value of a symbolic notation; see if you can derive the quadratic formula from it! This is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, we know that Xerox® isn’t a verb. For years we’ve been carefully trying to say, “I photocopied this document,” instead of “I Xeroxed this document.” But now the photo- prefix seems to be disappearing. Some people are even puzzled at the verb photocopy, asking if I mean copy.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a teacher, but somehow it’s not the same thing; copying a paper has all the wrong connotations. And yet, Xerox’s own website says copier throughout, not photocopier. Where did the photo go? More important, when did it go?
I am catching up on reading old posts in Tenser, said the Tensor, which labels itself as “the blog of a graduate student in linguistics. It’s about language, science fiction, computers and technology, comics, anime, and other geekery.” How could I resist? You shouldn’t resist either.
Anyway, the Tensor’s post of February 24 definitely rang a bell with me:
…when borrowing words into English, especially when their number is unclear and they tend to get used as mass nouns, you should invent singular forms for them as if they followed the high-prestige Latin pattern, regardless of their actual language of origin. Examples:
(First declension) The warrior class of ancient Japan were the samurai. Each samura traditionally carried two swords.
…
(Second declension neuter) Often for dessert at a Middle Eastern restaurant I will order a plate of baklava. Generally it comes on a plate containing several pieces, so that each person at the table can have their own baklavum.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even back-form an irregular third declension singular, as in:
I recommend the tempura. When eating it, be sure to dip every individual tempus in the special sauce provided. (Extra bonus: round trip Romance-language borrowing!)
Finally, if you’re really feeling ambitious, you can even do Latin-style number concord:
Traditionally, an order of nigiri sushi consists of two pieces. Each nigirus sushus is a ball of rice with fish or some other food laid on top.
This is all a lovely idea to complement the more usual invention of plural forms. In my household, for example — and in some others I know — we refer to Kleenices. Reversing the process certainly adds a little extra something. (But is it a je ne sais quoi or a lagniappe?)
How could I resist reading a blog entitled “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”? Yes, as you guessed, it turns out to be a blog that’s entirely written in Middle English!
Anyway, take a look at it and make a serious effort to read it. Even if your Middle English is rusty (you did read Chaucer in the original in high school, didn’t you?), you will find useful links in the left bar that will get you up to speed and back to the Middle Ages in no time. Yes, I know it sounds strange, but it’s no odder than the Society for Creative Anachronism, is it?
Everyone knows about the 2004 decision of the Massachusetts supreme court legalizing gay marriage, and everyone knows that laws banning gay marriage have been passed in many states and are in the pipeline in others, but out-of-staters may not be aware of the current state of such efforts in Massachusetts. It all hinges on a question of mathematical logic.
First of all, a bit of background. An initiative petition sponsored by opponents of gay marriage was signed by enough voters to have it sent to the state legislature, commonly known as The Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The legal process in Massachusetts is that the measure will be placed on the ballot if approved by at least 25% of the legislators meeting jointly as a constitutional convention. The legislature has twice refused to vote on the measure, presumably because it is opposed by more than 50% of the members but fewer than 75%. So our esteemed governor, Mitt Romney, as part of his efforts to shore up his new-found conservative credentials, brought a case before the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) to try to force the Great and General Court to vote. (Bear with me now about the names: the Supreme Judicial Court is truly a court; the Great and General Court is the legislature, not a court.) The SJC rightly refused to do so, unanimously declaring that it would be a violation of the separation of powers, but I am mystified by their claim that the legislature does have an obligation to vote. As I say, it all hinges on a question of mathematical logic. IANAL, of course, but the issue seems clear to me. In an article in the Boston Globe, Romney quotes a sentence from the state constitution:
Romney — weighing a run for GOP nomination for president — even sent a copy of the state constitution to all 109 lawmakers who voted to recess the special legislative session.
“The constitution quite plainly states that when a qualified petition is placed before them, the Legislature ‘shall vote.’ It does not say ‘may vote,’ or vote if procedures permit a vote, or vote if there are enough of the members in the chamber. It says, ‘shall vote.’” Romney said.
Not exactly, according to several legal experts, who say that reading of the constitution is flawed. They say that, for better or worse, lawmakers have acted within the bounds of the constitution, which stops short of ordering they vote up and down on the measure.
“That’s a nicely symbolic way of making his point, but it’s a little empty at the end of the day,” said David Yas, publisher of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. “The ballot initiative process is part our Democratic process, but so are the legislative tricks and treats.”
The tussle hinges on the interpretation of a single sentence in the constitution: “Final legislative action in the joint session upon any amendment shall be taken only by call of the yeas and nays.”
Supporters of the constitutional amendment, like Romney, say the sentence is a clear mandate that lawmakers must vote directly on the measure itself.
But that’s clearly wrong! You can’t just skip over the word “only”! The Globe article goes on to quote Lawrence Friedman, a constitutional law professor at the New England School of Law, who observed that the language “dictates the form of a vote, but does not mandate a vote.” Here’s an example that shows why the word “only” is so crucial:
Suppose I put the following notice at the top of a two-part test:
Calculators shall be used only on Part A.
(Yes, it’s a bit stuffy — lawyers’ language, not teachers’ language — but we’re really talking about laws here, not math tests.) If I had omitted the word “only,” it would be an injunction to use calculators on Part A, apparently requiring their use (as in Romney’s reading of the state constitution). It would be silent about Part B, which might or might not allow calculators. But the word “only” changes everything, reversing the logic to create the converse of the meaning; now it allows calculators on Part A and implicitly prohibits them on Part B. Similarly, the state constitution says “only by call of the yeas and nays,” meaning that they’re not allowed to vote by any other process, not that they must vote.
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