Recently in the Language Category

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal." --Oxford University Press blog

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. "Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?" No. In our house, it'll always be: "Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?"

And I'll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building.

"Dad, I'm building a roof for the medical pod, but I need a hinge-y bit to make it open up. You know, one of those four-er flat hinge-y bits." --Giles Turnbull, The Morning News

A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby's mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago

I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what's in the report.  But "husband and wife" or "man and woman" would be more parallel. Given the context of this particular story, "two people" would also be fine.

In California, the governor's office reacts to hearing of a vulgar message hidden vertically in the first row of letters in this gubernatorial veto. As The Swamp puts it:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

If language is as instinctive  to  humans as  dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our  brains,  why,  you might  wonder,  is  the  English language in such a mess?  Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts  pen to paper? 
 

The contradiction begins in the fact that the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.   The  rules  people learn  (or  more  likely,  fail  to  learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought"  to  talk.    Scientists  studying  language propose  [descriptive]  rules,  describing  how  people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people  who  speak the language and ask them.  Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely different things, and there is a good  reason  that  scientists  focus  on  the descriptive rules. --Steven Pinker, The New Republic

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

Older words also making their debut as a result of renewed interest online: sock puppet (a false identity used to manipulate opinions in online forums) and fan fiction. (Via Guardian)

Here's a surprising statement I found in a news article, quoting a Yale psychology professor.

"Moms vary markedly in their roles as breadwinners from no income at all to really helping dads,"

The language implies that money-making is the father's responsibility, and the best rating on the scale that a woman can achieve is "helping" a man. While I recognize that the professor was very likely speaking in the context of roles within the family unit, presuming that the family includes both a mom and a dad whose achievements can be measured and compared meaningfully, Larry Summers was resoundingly skewered for making an off-the-cuff statement acknowledging the existence of the position that men have a biological advantage over women when it comes to math.

Oh, whoops, I double-checked that quote from the university professor.  That's not what he said. Here's what he REALLY said (emphasis added):

"Dads vary markedly in their roles as caretakers from not there at all to really helping moms," Kazdin said. (MSNBC.com)

Again, I recognize that Kazdin was answering a reporter's questions, speaking without notes or a chance to revise.  But I'm sure that any professor who made the first statement (ghettoizing breadwinning women into the role of spousal "helpers") would have caught some well-deserved flak.

Can you spot the double-standard?

Text-message shorthand conventions arose from the users, because the need to type quickly on a tiny keyboard was greater than the need to spell correctly and preserve the subtleties of punctuation. But as users find more ways to hash and remix their social networking, a new set of technical needs may give rise to new conventions.  Mike Arnzen alerted me to Microsyntax.org.

Many people don't remember that the use of '@' to indicate that a message was to be sent to a specific user's attention (a reply or a mention) is a convention that grew up with the service's earliest days.

We have some relatively mature conventions -- like hashtags ('#twitter' or '#ruby', for example) -- that have spread into wide use but are not directly supported by Twitter itself, and where different applications may support them in very different ways.

At the other extreme, we have new conventions appearing -- like CoTweet's use of '^' preceding initial of authors in group twitter accounts, my recent suggestion for '/' as syntax to precede or enclose locations (as in '/Germany' or '/156 South Park, San Francisco CA/'), or my proposal for subtags (like '#sxsw.kathysierra' or '#w2e.PR') -- and these could lead to confusion or conflicts between contending approaches to the same purpose. -- Stowe Boyd

To protect itself from millions of dollars worth of taxes, Proctor & Gamble UK tried to defend a lower court's ruling that a Pringle is not a potato chip.

At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one -- but when?-- Adam Cohen, New York Times

Nowadays, layout editors can just expand the size of a photo or cheat the typesize to make a story fill a gap. But in the days before such digital magic, newspaper editors needed a steady supply of filler stories -- short items, just long enough to plug gaps of a few inches at the bottom of a page. The words "bus" and "plunge" both fit nicely in a one-column headline, and created a subculture of sorts among journalists.

"If a bus fell anywhere, they would cut that story from the wire and send it to the copy desk and put it in the paper, whereas earlier perhaps they wouldn't have," Siegal says. It was no longer a matter of how badly shorts were needed. "They became newsworthy in and of their own right because it was amusing to get the expression 'bus plunge' into the paper as often as possible."

Not all bus plunges were judged equal by the foreign desk, according to Siegal. "It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names," he says. "A bus plunge in Peru was infinitely easier to deal with than a bus plunge in Argentina or Paraguay."

Of course, it's callous to make light of anybody's tragic death. But by the gallows-humor standards of journalism, competing to publish bus-plunge shorts was fairly benign.

"It was more self-parody than anything else," Siegal says. "It was a very low-key, harmless parody of the stilted language characteristic of tightly formatted headlines." -- Jack Shafer, Slate

I'm blogging this because I'm amused... I had certainly noticed "bus plunge" stories, but it never occurred to me that the stories are a minimalist art form, inspired by the gallows humor of journalists. 

My favorite journalism anecdote is still the one about reporters routinely inventing a detail about a cat surviving a shipwreck.

The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. -- Arika Okrent, Slate

I never actually had to teach my son to read. He went smoothly from being read to, to reading along, to reading on his own.  The transition for my daughter has been a little rougher, so in the last year or so, whenever Carolyn showed an interest in reading, I've praised her for her accomplishment.

Last weekend we were driving to Denny's for a family treat when she read some random sign, and we habitually praised her.

She got a skeptical look on her face. "Everybody's treating me like a queen. All I did was read a word. I'm seven."

My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this.

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.-- McSweeney's

The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here's just a snippet:

I've never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like "guard her man" or "I had my man beat". Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such expressions. Instead, female athletes and their coaches seem normally to use girl.-- Mark Liberman

"We love you, but signing this agreement doesn't make us legal partners." -- Aviary EULA

That's from the "summary" column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side.  It's an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal documents that you have to assent to when you sign up for an online service.

This site is a good example of treating a user like a human being, instead of a pawn in a gotcha game. (Thanks for another good suggestion, Josh.)

A minor disturbance is a 6, while a major disturbance is a 6X. A major accident is a 7X. An officer wanting to grab something to eat? That's a 50.

Got that? 10-4. (Understood.)

Dallas police acknowledge there could be a slight learning curve for some officers and dispatchers. But they don't anticipate issues, especially because the department already has practice using plain language.

When Dallas housed Hurricane Katrina evacuees, several agencies used the same radio system. So, the departments "had to take care to use terminology that we would understand," Dallas Police Lt. Chris Aulbaugh said. -- Eric Aasen, Dallas Morning News

The article notes that different agencies with different codes had difficulty trying to work together after the 9/11 attacks.  The specialized language becomes a marker for members of the law enforcement community, but in times of crisis, according to the article, experienced officers realize you can get more done when you drop the specialized codes.

Many married women choose to hyphenate their married name and maiden name. But there are times when you just shouldn't!! (Mature Content) CBS 13

I laughed so hard my six-year-old daughter rushed downstairs to ask why I was crying.

You can't do this on dead trees.  A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal.

Four brief case studies, representing new and changing populations on campus. The group has left lots of time at the end for discussion. "We don't have any easy answers."

• Kari Warren, " 'Did My Mom call you yet?" Teaching Millenial Students (And Their Helicopter Parents)"
• Heidi Hanrahan, "'I've got to pay the rent': Teaching the Working Class Student"
• Elizabeth Vogel, "'What does analysis mean?': Teaching the mainstreamed ESL student."
• Bethany Perkins, "'You just don't understand': Teaching the Asperger's Student"

Overall, but not universally or uniformly, a theme of working against the institutional expectations for the benefit of the students.  I was a little surprised at this, I suppose because I feel great confidence in my own institution's ability to support the students it admits; I've served on the admissions committee, and our discussions often hinged on whether we have the resources to provide the level of support that a student needs.

As it happens, each of the four female speakers chose a male student for the case study. (I asked them whether that was intentional, and the panelists looked fairly shocked and told me they hadn't even noticed.)

These are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

Kathleen Blake Yancey offers a thoughtful overview of the challenges and opportunities that technology brings to teachers of English. I particularly like her analysis of an effort, organized by high school students, to get AP test-takers to insert the catchphrase  "THIS IS SPARTA!" into their exams.

['T]he students understood the new audiences of twenty-first century composing--colleagues across the country and faceless AP graders alike.They understood one audience--the testing system--and knew how to play it. Several of the students were concerned enough not to want their scores to be negatively affected, as they revealed on another site where college advisors answer questions (answers.yahoo.com)--and those queries were removed, too!--but these students--and there were thousands and thousands of them--were quite simply bored enough to take the chance. Put differently, they refused to write to a teacher-as-examiner exclusively; they wrote as well to live teachers who might be amused at the juxtaposition between a serious claim about John Wilkes Booth and THIS IS SPARTA. Put differently still, they wanted not a testing reader, but a human one.

Unfortunately, I can only find a PDF of Yancey's report, on a page that includes links to lots of other stuff (if the hosting page displayed an abstract, that would be a start). 

While the average internet user has a fast enough connection that it's not that much of a burden to download the files, forcing web readers to download PDFs are a usability abomination, like a mobile phone that's cabled to the wall so you don't lose it, or a horseless carriage with a fake horse head on the hood and a poop-distribution mechanism in the trunk.  

We can gather that the National Council for Teachers of English still feels its core audience needs to hear this 21s-century message in a 20th-century medium.

You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick.

When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, "I am..."). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided - the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

[...]

The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.-- Association for Psychological Science

What appears to be a smiley winks out from an 1862 transcript of a speech by ==|;o)>

NY Times City Room

Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White's brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar nonsense. Both propositions are wrong and dangerous, yet tacit acceptance of them is widespread.

I have heard of a boss who openly declared that he wouldn't have anyone working for him who would write a split infinitive. When I assault that as ridiculously misguided, a perversion of grammar sensitivity, it's not because the important thing is whether adverbs go in between the meaningless marker to and the accompanying plain verb in an infinitival clause. I'm not an idiot, and I don't think the exact location of adverbs and other verb phrase modifiers is something to organize your life around. But that's the whole point: it's not me who's doing that, it's this insane boss. What makes the issue a serious one for me is that a man would judge intelligence and employability on something like this. It does indeed display pig-ignorance of English syntax and literary usage to be hung up on split infinitives, but that's the less important point. The more important side of it is that this boss is a maniac who has his priorities all wrong. I'm worried not about where his adverbs might go but about where his marbles have gone. The danger is not about modifier location but about whether he will be an insane boss in other ways as well. --Goeffrey K. Pullum, Language Log

Nick Montfort just e-mailed a link to his brilliant textual interpretation of Star Wars. Great use of characters in a purely linear narrative environment.

I haven't been to the Modern Languate Association's annual conference in the last several years, in part because the time slot (between Christmas and New Year's) is horrible if you want to spend time with your family (imagine that!).  Some of it is just sour grapes -- I pitched a few proposals to the MLA that didn't get accepted, but the proposals I pitched to the 4Cs did get accepted, so I went where my scholarship was a good fit.

Last year I blogged about my frustration with the 4Cs conference hotels that don't make wireless access available to attendees, which not only frustrates presenters who assume they'll be able to show a YouTube clip during their presnestation, but also severely limits the amount of liveblogging that happens. I wasn't staying at the conference hotel, so I didn't have wireless access during the conference, so this year I chose not to liveblog... I imagine many others made a similar choice. It's frustrating to be presenting on a Web 2.0 topic, without being able to demonstrate Web 2.0 techniques to your audience. 

Recently the 4Cs announced a search for a "web editor," but apparently the job description went out without any input from the fellow who had been volunteering for four years in a very similar position, and the move drew some criticism.

But it looks like blogging is part of the MLA's strategy to open up its conference to a wider audience.

Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA's executive director, is blogging the conference this year. That isn't the only thing that's new, as she explained in a conversation with The Chronicle. The pragmatic bent of many of the program offerings (see our previous blog post) is part of a deliberate strategy to respond to "the changing demographics" of the MLA's membership, Ms. Feal said. That means workshops and more teaching-oriented sessions to supplement panels devoted to lace collars in the work of Jane Austen (Ms. Feal's hypothetical example of a traditional MLA panel topic).

It's kind of a tradition for a journalist to get ahold of the MLA program, or maybe even attend a small handful of panel sessions, and then publish an article that makes the whole thing look like a bunch of navel-gazing, angels-dancing-on-pin-counting book nerds with nothing better to do than make up ridiculous things to say about obscure books, or obscure things to say about pop culture, or popular things to say about ridiculous books (or anything at all other than what literature professors are supposed to be doing, which apparently doesn't include presenting papers at the MLA).

Any group of experts is going to talk about things that don't make sense to outsiders, so it's not hard to cherry-pick with the intention of making the MLA look ridiculous. I think the MLA oranizers have the right idea in their intention to address changes in the profession and present, for a wider audience, a broader view of the totality of the organization's accomplishments.

Philipp Lenssen at "Google Blogoscoped" spotted a change in Google's panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in.

Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording "Report a concern" at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading "Report inappropriate image" - the title to the report page still uses that wording).

I really like what Steve Ersinghaus wrote about assessment.

One of the significant issues I've faced has to do with attitude. Mine, not the students. Typically I ask students not to worry so much about making the deadline, but that the deadline is real nonetheless. I've also informed my students that they don't have to complete their papers or exams. They don't even have to come to class. Why? Because this is true. Students don't have to complete work, take a test, or come to class. No prison sentence will come of this. They may not pass into hell, either. I used to worry myself to death about students completing their work and doing everything I asked. Now, I try not to. They've paid their money and will address their commitments to the degree that they able at a given time.

I typically tell students that if they want to be "assessed" then they should complete their work and come to class and study and study and study. None of this can be forced. The philosophy goes like this: if a student wants their performance to be checked at a given time, typically at those times when I set deadlines on the calendar, they are certainly encouraged to do so by handing in an analysis, research paper, or project. In this procedure, an assessment becomes an "opportunity" for a student to show their ability.

The "You paid your tuition, you can make your own choices" conversation is usually something that I only think about when a student is already in trouble.

One of my colleagues who teaches in another division, Victoria Marie Gribschaw, never says that she "gives" grades -- she merely "reports" them.  I've started adopting that language when I speak about assessment.  I also inform students that I don't "correct" their drafts, and if a student tries to thank me for a good grade, I say something like, "You should thank yourself, since you did the work."

But I haven't really ever tried to use the language of "assessment opportunity" from the very start of a class.

I did have some very exciting success this year in my entry-level new media class, "Writing for the Internet," in which I would

1. demonstrate a new task, telling the students that eventually they would have to do the task on their own, but that they would get detailed instructions and several opportunities to practice
2. give pairs of students a week to follow those instructions (wth a full class period devoted to an in-class workshop)
3. ask pairs of students to complete a timed, in-class exercise (telling them that this was practice for when they would be expected to perform the task on their own)
4. give individual students a task to complete in a few days (letting them start the assignment as homework and bring their problems to a workshop day)
   
5. require individual students to perform the whole procedure in a timed, in-class setting

Students really seemed to appreciate the chance to go over the material in stages. Of course, this works best for discrete, core skills; once students are synthesizing and evaluating, this many iterations would be very hard to manage. Asking students to complete a major paper in stages (thesis statement, bibliography, draft, and revision) is hard when students believe they should still be able to get a decent grade by banging out a "How I apply the material to my life" paper the night before the due date, as they did in high school.

In a content-heavy course, it's not easy to devote so much class time to workshops, so the "assessment opportunities" language may help students see the value of the prewriting assignments.