Language: April 2004 Archive Page

In Dragon's Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It's personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything capable of generating friction has potential artistic application. I think of the sounds of a painting or etching or collage coming into being: fresh paint slapped with the flick of the brush onto taut canvas, acid eating away at a metal plate, paper torn and cut and pasted. Filtered through Dragon, these sonic waves become the choral voices of the atelier. --Unnaturally Speaking (accidentals and substantives)

Dragon's Naturally Speaking is voice-to-text software. I used it one semester when my carpal tunnel syndrome was killing me.

Here's the text Dragan thought it heard when the author colored a plastic plate with marker strokes:

With the bus to distance business assistance assistance with the only if the Pentagon and I think about that the think about that did it did that it with the submitted to think that the independent and that defendant at that it with the independent independent attempt to that defendant at the event of the equipment

Link via MGK.

Time to get my AARP card, apparently. I'm 22, and I have officially been "ma'am'ed" for the first time. --Donna Hibbs --Ma'amed for Life (Nothing Left to Do but Rant)

While pondering the language politics of the situation Donna describes, I was surprised when I realized that I would feel comfortable referring to a polite adolescent boy as "young man," but for some reason I wouldn't call a polite adolescent girl "young lady" -- the latter term seems to carry with it a scolding tone.

Obviously, the two terms should be perfectly balanced...

As a sign of friendliness to a young boy, I might call him "son," but a young girl I would call "sweetheart". Why wouldn't I call her "daughter"?

If I were annoyed with a female stranger who accosted me on the street, I might say, "Look lady, I'm just trying to buy a paper, " but I wouldn't say to a male stranger, "Look, gentleman..." I think that "Look, sir," could come across as patient and respectful, or insolent and aggressive, depending on how I pronounced "sir," but for some reason "Look, lady" is only something I would only use if I had passed a certain level of annoyance -- maybe becuase I worry that I'll sound like Jerry Lewis: "Laady! Hey, laaaady!"

Okay... the offspring-impaired among you may wish to skip to the next paragraph to avoid the upcoming parental sappiness... My son objects when I accidentally call him "sweetheart" becuase he knows I'm doing the "harried parent can't spit out the right name for the kid" thing.... My wife can still call my son "Sweetheart," but he knows my nickname for him is "Mister Boy" (it used to be "Mister Baby"). On the other hand, my wife is more likely to call our 2-year-old daughter "Miss Baby," while I call her "Sweetheart" or "Honey Bunny". I make it a point to try to compliment my daughter on her accomplishments, not just on being "sweet" or "pretty" (though she's undeniably both, to my parental eye).

I wouldn't refer to an annoying female stranger as a "pal" or "buddy," but when the tension level starts rising between me and another male I might find myself reaching for those words (and I'm thinking of a hypothetical "A stranger's umbrella has stabbed me in the back three times in the last thirty seconds while his coffe cup is dripping on my suitcase and he's invading my space and pushing me off balance" kind of thing -- something that would prompt an immediate outburst, not an intellectual disagreement I have with a colleague, or a student who takes a cell phone call in class). These friend-labels form a kind of rough alliance with my rhetorical opponent, as if I am acknowledging that we are both getting annoyed with each other, but that I see value in continuing the conversation. Maybe men have more of a cultural need to remind each other (and ourselves) that we are presently attempting to engage each other in conversation; the lack of continued conversational cues signalling our goodwill may signal that the aggression level will soon rise to the point that insults or fists will be next. But because male/female disagreements operate on a different power structure, the subtleties of that interaction aren't fully represented in the language of blunt confrontation (which probably serves the needs of men, since women can have epic fights with each other just by glaring, snubbing, fake-smiling, etc).

While I like to think I understand the value of gender-neutral language, I can see that I have nevertheless internalized quite a few linguistically encoded cultural message message about gender roles.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism", "Jewish" or "Jewish people", the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

• http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
• http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp
  

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, it's likely that most of the people currently using Google to search for "Jew" are those who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves. --An explanation of our search results [Or, Google and 'Jew': Why is This Search Different from all Other Searches?] (Google)

Since Google determines page rank based on the number of links leading to and from pages, there's an effort in the blogosphere to supply some more raw material for Google to use. So, here's a link to Wikipedia's article "Jew".

Notice, by the way, how carefully worded this statement is. Google doesn't come right out and say "The results for this search are not informative or relevant." Instead, it characterizes the results of other searches as being excellent, then acknowledges that this one is "different". (The subtitle I added in brackets is a reference to the line spoken by the youngest child in the household on Passover: "Why is this night different from all other nights?")

Back in the 1960s a model of color vision propounded by the late Russell L. De Valois, a Berkeley psychologist, had been interpreted as establishing that the categories red, yellow, green and blue were hardwired into the brain. That interpretation, however, fell apart after the model failed to predict the mix of frequencies that the eye perceives as "pure" colors (for instance, the model did not explain why the reddest-looking red contains a touch of blue). That left no physiological rationale for color categories. A more recent theory attributes universals in color vocabularies to the way the world is colored--that is, to the natural distribution of wavelengths. --Phillip E. Ross interviews linguistics professors.

--Draining the Language out of Color (Scientific American)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

--How Grammatically Sound Are You? (Quizilla)

The image is supposed to be of God from Monty Python's "Holy Grail."

Update: Snagged the image from Amanda's copy.

Do you know the origin of term BSOD aka ?Blue Screen of Death?? Well, the term ?Blue Screen of Death? was not the original acronym for BSOD. The original term meant the ?Black Screen of Death? and was seen when running under Windows 3.0. A user would attempt to run a DOS application and instead of the DOS application running, the entire screen would turn black with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner of the screen. --Wallace B. McClure --Origin of BSOD ['Blue Screen of Death'] (All About Wallym)

For Julie & Donna.

I'd like to propose a little exercise, so I beseech you, the readers of this blog, my teachers and friends, to think of a cliche` and provide an alternate solution to it. --Neha --Thinking Outside the Box (Wanderlust)

I have the image in my head of a chameleon trying to hide on a TV set that's playing a video of chameleons leaping to their deaths...

...and a nervous public speaker, trying to get through a speech at a nudist colony by trying to imagine everyone in their underwear...