Language: April 2005 Archive Page

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

30% Yankee

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

--What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

[A] de-emphasis in the academy in recent years on the formal elements of poetry, in favor of the social, legal, historic, and cultural background to literature, has meant that even doctoral candidates in English need not concern themselves overly with poetic form. Another quick but, I think, telling example: I was serving on a panel of poetry judges, and as the panel proceeded to deliberate, one judge, a university professor and poet, chimed in to say that I and another of our colleagues seemed to be paying a lot of attention to the language in the poems. It was never entirely clear to me what was meant by this statement, but I suspect that the implication was that, in carefully examining a poet’s deployment of words, I had failed to give proper weight to the poet’s biography as it was suggested by the poems. --David Yezzi --The Fortunes of Formalism (New Criterion)

I teach blank verse (iambic pentameter), and required my Intro to Literary Study students to write sonnets. The poets in the class overwhelmingly prefer free verse, but enough "got into" the exercises that I consider the experience a success.

I'm a much better poetry editor than a poet. When I do write verse, it's solely to play with form. That's almost the opposite of the student poets whose feeling gush forth into their keyboards.

Students in my upper-level Media Aesthetics class have started exchanging glances and smirking every time I bring up T.S. Eliot -- a formalist who knew the rules well enough to break them to pieces when he needed to. ("Wallala leialala" anyone?)

The school argued a need for it's services by citing lower test scores in Marlborough, Hudson, Maynard and Clinton than in surrounding areas.

Set to open it's doors in the fall to 276 sixth- and seventh- grade students, the charter school plans to expand it's enrollment to 826 students in grades six through 12. --Schools department may join charter school lawsuit (Shrewsbury Chronicle)

Nobody's perfect, but three misuses of "it's" for "its" in two paragraphs suggests somebody doesn't know the rule.
Via Joanne Jacobs.

And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy building" has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants--the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its "public services" division "had quadrupled in just five years," and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002--a profit margin of 35 percent.)

[...]

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.--Naomi Klein --The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (The Nation)

Klein sees, in the global outpouring of support in the wake of December's tsunami, a crass, opportunistic colonialism. Instead of rebuilding the small fishing villages, the money will be used to build industrial fishing farms, and more tourist facilities.

Of course, rebuilding costs money. It's shocking to think of the displaced villagers still huddled in refugee camps after all this time, but Klein is using that emotional image not to draw attention to the villagers' plight, but as ammunition for a political statement.

And there's nothing wrong with that -- this is an opinion piece, not a news story. But I was bothered by Klein's selective use of Condoleezza Rice's January statement: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the U.S. government, but the heart of the American people. And I think it has paid great dividends for us."

Klein trims the quote, writing "Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as 'a wonderful opportunity' that 'has paid great dividends for us.'" As Klein puts it, Rice seems to be saying that the tsunami paid great dividends, but grammatically speaking, "opportunity" is just as plausiblly what she was referring to when she said "it". Taking the whole statement in context, I find it obvious that Rice was speaking of the American response to the tsunami, not to the tsunami itself.

Rice's original quotation was easily googlable, and since my expertise is in language, I can easily see what Klein has done to Rice's original statement in order to make her (Klein's) position stronger. But because I'm hardly an expert in international finace or global politics, I don't know what other detials Klein has similarly dressed up to suit her argument.

I found Klein's ethical argument about the nature of the "reconstruction" to be gripping and convincing. I actually started blogging this editorial out of a sense of outrage at the treatment of the tsunami victims. But her conclusion is an attack on Rice, and not a very effective one. It reminds me of the attacks against Bush for insisting that the U.S. government will never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country and our people. Of course, Republicans are just as silly when they act as if Al Gore really claimed to have invented the internet.

Grammar flaming is fun, but it doesn't change minds or solve problems. If you just want to incite your own loyal supporters, then that's another story.

You Get Transported To Another Dimension and Find This Weird Machine In A Maze And Then Some Other Stuff Happens, It's Really Cool --Jacqueline H. Lott --The Stupid Title Comp

What a stupid title for an adventure game.

Although the English word weblog is known in other languages, this has not prevented translations to appear. In Spanish, for example, weblog in general has apparently been translated using the journal-style kind of definition. In effect, in Spanish, weblogs are more commonly referred to as bitácoras, even though the word weblogs is well known. The word bitácora refers in the first place to the journals kept by captains of the old vessels that sailed across oceans, for example the ones used by Spaniards and Portuguese to arrive to the American continent in 1500. A bitácora is clearly different form a personal diary or diario íntimo in Spanish because it implies a trip. It is the account of events that happen during a long journey or physical movement from one place to another. This metaphor of movement in the Spanish language does not exist as clearly in English. Nevertheless, the word journal is used to call those weblogs that have a more personal or intimate tone. --Virginia Melián --Weblogs: nodes of participation in a global context? Non-expert publishing in many languagesDigital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy)

This seems to be a paper delivered at a conference called Digital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy.

I really hate PDFs... using Firefox, I can't copy and paste more than one line at a time from the HTML document that Google generated from the PDF original, so the process of posting an excerpt from a PDF is a royal pain.

First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. --John C. Dvorak --Understanding and Reading a Blog (for Newcomers) (Dvorak.org)

Interesting... Dvorak uses the masculine pronoun to describe "the traditional web-log," but uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe "the web diary." (See my handout on gender-neutral language.)

In the service, a penitent Charles will acknowledge and solemnly bewail his "manifold sins and wickedness" and promise to be faithful to Camilla. --Paul Majendie --Charles, Camilla Finally Tie Knot After 35 Years (Yahoo!)

Awkward grammar. While the author obviously meant "promise" as a verb, if you take "promise" as a noun, it seems to be the object of "bewail," suggesting that at a solemn religious service, the Prince of Wales will bewail his promise to be faithful to his new wife.