Language: December 2003 Archive Page

He wrote his plays in longhand. He took his time. He followed the news; he was politically brave. He wrote of the self and also of the world. He wrote for the stage and also for publication. He was theatrical; he was dialectical. He cultivated a public image; a small crowd of remarkable people intersected with the largely antisocial playwright: Emma Goldman, John Reed, Robert Edmond Jones, Paul Robeson, George Jean Nathan, Sean O?Casey, Hart Crane and, unhappily for O?Neill, Charlie Chaplin, who married his daughter. He made friends with a few important critics. He married someone who believed in his work. Winning big prizes did not protect him from savage assault. He argued with God. He hid from the world. He exhorted himself to write better, dig deeper, and he did. --Tony Kushner --The Genius of O'Neill (Times Literary Supplement)

Here's another good quote: "I can make no claim for O’Neill as one of the great writers, only as one of the greatest playwrights; for these two things, writing and playwriting, are not the same, and O’Neill’s work makes that clearer than any other’s." (Kushner is the author of "Angels in America.")

"Embedded," as in the reporters assigned to accompany military units during the war, beat out "blog" and "SARS (news - web sites)" as the top word of 2003, Web site yourDictionary.com (http://www.yourdictionary.com) said...."Shock-and-awe," the phrase the U.S. military used to describe the type of campaign it would wage in Iraq, topped other Iraq-related terms like "rush to war," "weapons of mass destruction" and "spider-hole" as the top phrase of 2003. --Web Site Picks Year's Most Deeply Embedded Word (Reuters/Yahoo)

Interesting... but should "spider-hole" really count as a phrase? I'd call that a single hyphenated word. If it remains in use, it may very well eventually drop the hyphen and turn into "spiderhole". I don't think a dictionary of the future will contain the word "shockandawe" or "rushtowar", so "spider-hole" seems to be in a different class here.

He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more.

--James Button reviews Don Watson's Death Sentence --Fighting the death sentence (The Age)

The article and the book being reviewed are very Austrailian. The other day, I couldn't find this book in the US Amazon.com database. Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

Thus we are pleased to announce the winners of The Chronicle's First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies). All selections are cited as listed in the program for the 119th MLA Annual Convention, to be held this month in San Diego. (In other words, no paper titles were made up.)...[T]he judges quickly reached consensus on Most Provocative Panel Title: "Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer." As luck would have it, Most Provocative Paper Title went to a presentation to be delivered during that same session: "'The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See': Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight's Tale," by Disa Gambera of the University of Utah. --Scott McLemee --Signifyin' at the MLA (Chronicle)

One of my favorite MLA paper titles was "The Semiotics of Sinatra," presented by the former chair of the University of Toronto's English department. (Yes, that's Frank Sinatra.)

Dennis Jerz tiene un excelente Literacy Weblog, hoy navegando su sitio, he encontrado un link a un super artículo, sobre Memes, Memex y Vannebar Bush... Aquí transcribiré solo algunos fragmentos. Pero lo más importante es que, dado que El Tao de Internet ya ha llegado a Vannebar Bush, Memes y Memex por caminos alternativos, es bueno leer a un especialista en el tema. --Laura Mansilla --Meme, Memex y Dennis Jerz  (El Tao de Internet)

Yo no habla Espanol, but using the on-site link to the Babelfish translator really opens up a world of scholarship and ideas.

This morning, while my son was at choir practice, I spent an hour reading through the paperback "Canterbury Tales" that I first read as an undergraduate. It's taking a while to get back my reading knowledge of middle English -- long enough to remind me how difficult even my own language can be.

The word "grammar," Mr. Ellis writes, had an old vernacular usage, meaning "the ability to do magic." That overtone survives in "grimoire," the term for a book of spells, as well as the word "glamour," which was originally "an illusion of beauty created through black magic."

A sorcerer, then, is a kind of scholar, and vice versa. --Scott McLemee

--The Devil and Bill Ellis (Chronicle)

"Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." (The Australian)
"Ladies and gentlemen -- we got him." (Time)
"Ladies and gentlemen: we got him." (Washington Times)
"Ladies and gentlemen... we got him." (ic Wales)
--Ladies and gentlemen [?] we got him. (Google News)

Interesting how the various news agencies are punctuating this catchphrase, which will probably soon be as overused as the "road map" metaphor in stories about Israel and Palestine.

This will give the news organizations something else to do besides stoking the public's fears about the flu.

Écrite en 1920 et jouée pour la première fois à Prague l'année suivante, cette pièce de théâtre, intitulée Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), introduit le terme robot, qui remplacera dorénavant celui d'automate. La pièce de Capek fut acclamée dans le monde entier. -- Dennis G. Jerz (via an anonymous translator) --Le règne des robots (L'Encyclopédie de L'Agora)

An editor from a Quebec online encyclopedia just asked me to approve a French translation of my web page on RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). The request would have been more gracious if it had come before the translation was posted, but I already knew some of it had been put into Wikipedia's RUR article, and I helped edit that page, so I'm OK with this.

One problem -- I don't know French... I guess I'll ask Seton Hill's French teacher to take a look at it for me (if she has time).

I've been tweaking the original page since I first posted it when I was a grad student, and a reader recently took me to task (politely) for recommending the Toward the Radical Center translation, so I suppose this page needs even more work yet.

"We want to find out what your working conditions are, anything that we can do to help you," Otwell tells the young women at the factory. He speaks in English slowly, for the benefit of an Arabic translator, who then turns to an Arabic-speaking sign-language translator to sign Otwell's questions to the seamstresses. | The girls' hands start flying as they tell Otwell about their hated boss. --Tara Copp --Iraq behind the cameras: a different reality (Knox Studio/Scripps Howard)

The angle of this story is that TV cameras cover the bombings and the protests, but don't cover the everyday progress that shows that parts of Iraq are improving, with the help of the U.S. forces. Regardless of the political context, I found this linguistic viginette oddly touching.

OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the "Find words" button. (Keep it short to get the best results.) In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first. --Reverse Dictionary

My inbox is rather full at the moment, but I did manage to fish out this gem that Jim sent last week. Looks like it uses the content of wikipedia to fuel its searches.

"Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK.... This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head? --Alfie Kohn --Five Reasons to Stop Saying 'Good Job!' (AlfieKohn.org)

Kohn suggests that, instead of praising a child for drawing a picture ("Good drawing!") we instead respond more neutrally, focusing our attention on what the child accomplished. ("You drew a big mountain! You sure used a lot of purple!")

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I'd have to read more of Kohn's work to decide how I feel it applies to my own teaching. Students who are used to being praised for effort can be flustered in college, where (most of the time, or at least in my classes anyway) simply expending effort is not good enough.

Found via Pedablogue. (Good job, Mike!)

Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. "This gives us patterns which are kind of the same -- and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.".... [T]he system learned incorrectly that "Palestinian suicide bomber" and "suicide bomber" were the same, and that "killing 20 people" is the same as "killing 20 Israelis", said Barzilay. These mistakes made by the system are "due to how reporters are reporting," she said. "In some sense... the teacher here is what the reporter writes," she said. Kimberly Patch --Software paraphrases sentences (TRN)

The Palestine/Israel detail is presented as an example of pro-Israel reporter bias, but I'm not so sure. If, according to the sample of news reportage being examined, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians, and if the ways in which Israelis were killed (civilians killed in marketplaces by suicide bombers, and also soldiers killed by armed combatants) was more newsworthy than the ways in which Palestinians were killed (armed combatants killed by soldiers and some innocent bystanders killed by soldiers) then the computer's "mistake" might be understandable. But I'm not informed enough about the research involved to be able to make any reliable statement; of course the computer isn't responding to what really happened in the world, it's responding to the way a certain group of reporters described what their research tells them happened in the world. Of course, the results are going to reflect human biases, but the sample fed into the computer is affected by such things as how likely a news source that reflects a particular worldview will publish an online English edition.

On a lighter note...

Speaking at a press conference, researchers shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and coughed into their hands before insisting, "Of course this software won't be marketed to students intending to fool turnitit.com. Whatever gave you that idea?"

She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it's probably mostly in fun. --Oliver Pritchett reviews Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss --Pay attention: it's important!  (The Telegraph)

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." -- "Fooot in Mouth" winner US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld --Donald Rumsfeld 'honoured' for confusing comments (Plain English Campaign)

When I first read the "unknown unknowns" statement, I thought it was definitely too confusing for a sound bite, but important in that it demonstrates that the known and the unknown are much more complex than a "memorize what the teacher says and spit it back on the quiz" education leads us to believe. Rumsfeld wasn't babbling or struggling with the language. Granted, he could have probably made his point better with a venn diagram.