Apparently poster has become a verb. If Harvard says so, it must be true. This sign appears on the gate of the fence that separates Harvard Yard on the south from the Science Center and Memorial Hall on the north:
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I recently read OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf. For some unaccountable reason this book has only two customer reviews on Amazon; there must be some good reason for that. Anyway, Metcalf tells you everything you ever wanted to know about “OK,” starting with the true story of its etymology. No, OK doesn’t come from “Old Kinderhook,” as most people believe. (Actually, most people have absolutely no opinion on the matter.) Nor does it come from Finnish, or an American Indian language, or any other fanciful source. But you’ll have to read the book to find out the truth. Unlike most other people, he cites sources rather than spouting unsupported assertions. On the plus side, Metcalf has written an informative, well-documented account that’s easy to read. On the minus side, it’s somewhat repetitive, despite coming in at only 224 pages. Oh, no! We missed OK Day, which was two days ago. But you can still “like” OK Day on Facebook. More than two hundred of us have done so, even if only two posted reviews on Amazon.
I have posted the slides from my linguistics talk, but I’m not sure how useful they are without audio. The talk, after all, was an oral presentation accompanied by slides, not a visual presentation accompanied by audio. So I’m going to try to overlay an audio track. In the meantime, you can find the slides here.
Yesterday evening I delivered the first lecture in our new Beyond the Classroom series, described as follows:
My talk was called “Making Order Out of Chaos: A Conversation about Linguistics.” We had 53 attendees, an excellent turnout for a fairly technical presentation, and I was delighted by the audience’s enthusiastic response. Everything went very well, though we ran out of time near the end and I had to skip a detailed slide that would have added ten more minutes. I also promised the audience that I would post my list of recommended resources right here. The missing slide needs some considerable commentary — it’s definitely not a standalone piece — so let’s start with the recommended resources (four books, three websites):
I also recommended Wikipedia as a rich source of surprisingly reliable information about linguistics (and math), even though one wouldn’t want to trust it for areas like history, politics, and biography. The slide I had to skip was a summative list of some of the various branches of linguistics. My plan was to build it up line by line. Here is the finished result, where the black type represents notes on my intended commentary:
Here is that intended commentary: The list goes from the smallest level of detail to the largest level to the biggest picture. For example:
Saw an absolutely fascinating movie yesterday at the ICA: Utopia in Four Movements. This engaging film, which premiered last year at Sundance, is unusual in at least two ways. First, although it has music and voice-over like most documentaries, both are live rather than recorded in the film. Music was provided in real time by The Quavers, and voice-over was done by filmmaker Sam Green. The film itself was compelling enough, but Green’s narration was striking for its clarity and perfect timing. I was astonished to learn in the Q&A that followed the screening that Green is not a professional actor; you would never know it from the quality of his delivery. The second unusual feature of the film is that one quarter of it dealt with Esperanto. How often do you come across something like that? The entire documentary was about different utopian movements, ranging from Esperanto to shopping malls — yes, shopping malls —but the inspiring but ultimately unsuccessful vision of Esperanto was of course what most captured my attention. Go see it if you get the chance.
BSP*: Come hear my talk on linguistics at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, February 1, at the Weston Public Library! Here’s a description:
*Blatant self-promotion
Why do so many of my students use incorrect names for various polygons? They claim that they are merely recalling what they have been taught; maybe this is so, maybe not. I suppose there are two major possibilities:
Since this is Weston, I would prefer to believe it’s #1…but I have to admit that it might be #2, even in Weston. Of course we shouldn’t just throw around the claim that certain names are incorrect without producing an argument for what the correct names are. Some of my students want to look in Wikipedia or count Google hits, but those methods lead to popularity contests, not truths. As I said in an earlier post, you can usually trust Wikipedia for mathematical information, but names occupy a middle ground between math and English, so Wikipedia is less reliable in this case than with pure math. As a better starting point, here is Wolfram Mathworld’s reasonably authoritative list of names for polygons with n sides:
Let’s see what we can do with this list. I make the following observations:
Even though counting Google hits is a useless way to decide these issues, let’s check them out just for fun:
Oh — I also promised a discussion of two-sided polygons, didn’t I? Most people think they don’t exist, so they don’t need to be named. (Unicorns don’t exist, but they still have a name. Hmm….) Actually, however, they do exist: for example, start at the North Pole, draw a line segment along the prime meridian until it reaches the South Pole, and then draw another line segment from the North Pole along the 90° longitude line, also stopping at the South Pole. Voilà: a two-sided polygon! You may think I’ve cheated, since this polygon exists on the surface of a sphere, not on a plane, but it might be worth imagining that you lived on the surface of a sphere, not on a plane… Anyway, I’ve never heard the term digon before; I’ve seen biangle and bigon, however. Be sure to pronounce bigon with a long i, and think of the famous saying, “Let bigons be bigons.” Again we can check Google hits, useless though it may be: 14,600 hits for “digon,” 487 for “biangle,” and 7,330 for “bigon.” Even though “biangle” loses the popularity contest, I suspect that it’s the best choice, since it’s consistent with the general principle: use Latin names for polygons with four sides or fewer, Greek names for those with more than four sides, and hybrid names for none.
So what’s not to love about this book? Just don’t expect Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, which is a much lighter and less consequential work. Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch is a serious, in-depth, expert analysis of conversational Yiddish and the culture that surrounds it. Despite the title, it’s not all about kvetching, though kvetching does play a starring role. So of course I do have one kvetch about this otherwise excellent book: I listened to a quarter of the audiobook version before turning in desperation to the much more satisfactory print version, since Wex’s own narration is intolerable. He reads with a sing-song intonation in which every declarative sentence sounds like a question — or, I should say, it sounds like a question? Of course the one advantage of the audiobook is that you know that the pronunciations of Yiddish are accurate, but it’s not worth it: the English is un-listenable-to, however you would say that in Yiddish.
My principal has selected me to give the first presentation in a proposed series of talks to be delivered by faculty and staff; the audience will consist of colleagues, students, parents, and community members. I’ve written a very rough description of what I’m intending to talk about (quoted below), but at a minimum the description needs polishing, and it may need significant revisions. For instance, I already know that I need to include something more about universals of language, I have to show that the presentation will be interactive, I want the focus to be about 90% on linguistics and only 10% on math (which may or may not be evident from the draft), and I have to make it clear that the questions asked in this description are merely examples of the kinds of questions that will be addressed and answered during the talk. So…let me know what suggestions you have! Here’s the draft description:
If you regularly see my Facebook status in your News Feed, you may have noticed that it said “I’m lost in Lexicon right now…” on October 17. This status confused some of my students. One of them asked, “How did you get lost in Lexington?” (Apparently he isn’t a very careful reader.) Another student asked me what it meant:
I assured her that there are plenty of people in Weston who have written books. Anyway, Lost in Lexicon: An adventure in words and numbers is indeed the title of a new book by Penny Noyce. It’s a work of fiction, somewhat in the spirit of The Phantom Toolbooth, aimed at readers in middle school (in my judgment). Of course the real reason I had to get a copy was not that the author lives in Weston (and is the mother of three of my former students), but that the focus of the book is words and numbers, as the subtitle shows. What could be a better combination? If you know children of the appropriate age (or older, for that matter), suggest this book to them. It’s both fun and informative, and should enhance or kindle interest in both math and language.
Why is it that so many people say “daylight savings time” when the correct phrase so clearly is “daylight saving time”???? Do they think it’s like a savings account, where you put an hour of daylight in at one time and withdraw it at other? Or is the problem the lack of a hyphen? Of course the phrase is supposed to be “daylight-saving time,” i.e. a time that saves daylight, where “daylight-saving” is used as an adjective (OK, technically it’s a participial phrase in which “daylight” is the direct object of the present participle “saving,” but it’s still used adjectivally). Things would be so much easier if we only spoke Latin. My closely related rant is about the many people who think that the end of DST (now November, formerly October) is actually the beginning! The reason that this is (or may be) closely related to the phenomenon described above is that those who don’t understand the adjectival nature of “daylight-saving” also don’t understand that it’s what the Brits call “summer time.” Of course you could argue that no daylight is actually being saved in this process; it’s just shifted from one end of the day to the other during the summer. But the theory is that you lose an hour while you’re asleep and gain an hour while you’re still awake, thus saving daylight for your waking hours. OK, enough of that. You may now return to your regularly scheduled activities.
Listen in on this conversation:
OK, what’s going on here? This is a composite conversation, but not a fictional one. I’ve been in the roles of Teachers 2 and 3. Let’s dissect three very different points of view about this issue. The first is exemplified in a recent misguided editorial in the Boston Globe, headlined “Teachers: Friends, not ‘friends’.” Here is an excerpt:
What we have here is a fine example of a straw-man argument. Who said that teachers “need social media to reinforce their lesson plans”? The Globe has simply invented a point of view from an imaginary opponent in order to argue against it. The issue isn’t whether we need social media; it’s simply whether it’s acceptable to accept friend requests. Part of the problem here is the ambiguity of the word “friend.” Facebook users certainly understand the two meanings of the word. Only a naive adult could possibly confuse the two meanings. Only a naive adult could believe that a student who friends me really thinks that I’m his friend in the usual meaning of the word. Many Facebook users have a ridiculous number of “friends”; while I have only 152, one of my former students has 3187. But no one could plausibly think that she considers 3187 people to be actual friends! I promised three very different points of view. The first one says that accepting friend requests from students is inappropriate; the second says that it’s OK; the third says that it’s something that teachers should do. (As an aside, note that many behaviors can be viewed as this sort of trichotomy. Pick a behavior; you can prohibit it, you can stay neutral, or you can encourage it.) The third point of view came to my attention twice in the past month. The first time was an article in Education Tech News, concerning the principal of All Saints Central School in Michigan. Here is an excerpt:
Notice the not-so-subtle use of the verb “accused” in the last sentence. The article goes on to show why it’s completely the wrong word choice. In reality, the majority have commended him for this connection. (Note that Hoving, like me, accepts friend requests from students but doesn’t initiate them.) Read the follow-up:
The second time I heard this view in the past month came in a conference with the parent of one of my students. She said that she insisted that her teenage children had to friend her, just so she could monitor what they’re putting on Facebook. (Yes, I know, the privacy settings complicate this claim, but it’s still a good idea.) For similar reasons she was pleased that they friend their teachers. We talked about the anonymous Teacher 1 in the dialog above (who remained anonymous, of course), and both of us agreed that there’s a simple solution to the problem of not wanting students to see inappropriate personal information about teachers. The solution is for teachers to follow the same advice that I give to students: don’t post anything that you don’t want the whole world to see! It ’s called the World Wide Web for a reason. Privacy is an illusion these days; when something is too personal for your teachers to see (if you’re a student) or too personal for your students to see (if you’re a teacher), then don’t post it! That’s my policy, and it should be yours. In conclusion, I have to say that I suppose there’s actually a fourth point of view: that teachers should initiate friend requests. But I don’t hear anyone arguing for that. Obviously I’m firmly with Hoving and Gerry on this issue. The Norton School Committee and the Boston Globe are badly off-base.
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> But Barbara and I have recently noticed that several people we know have switched to pet as its own past participle. For example:
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) 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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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 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:
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:
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:
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!”
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:
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. |
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