Don't breathe the water

An AP story about a brain eating amoeba is making the rounds. Why? because there's been a recent spike in the number of cases reported. Infection is around ninety-seven percent fatal--only three survivors ever reported. It crawls up your nose and follows the olfactory nerve to your brain causing headaches and hallucinations and finally death.

Sounds pretty scary. And the spike this year was enormous. In 2007 Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis was reported to have caused about two-hundred percent more deaths than the yearly average from 1995 to 2004. The amoeba-- Naegleria fowleri --thrives in warm stagnant water. So global warming is expected to make it worse.

I've borrowed some of the language and some of the statistical rhetoric from all the stories I've seen. Brain-eating is a favorite in these stories. It's up there with flesh-eating in its impact. Maybe better. It's a lot better than infection. It sounds a lot scarier and more deliberate on the part of those ravenous brain eating mini-monsters.

And the statistics: In the story I linked to above Chris Kahn writes "The spike in cases has health officials concerned." Infections are exceedingly rare. So a spike is a complicated phenomenon. From 1995 to 2004 there were 23 reported cases. That's just over 2 per year. 2007 saw 6 deaths. About four more than the average. But is that a spike? Snooping around the CDC website I found that there were 6 cases in 2002 as well. Two each in Texas Arizona and Florida.

I've not been able to find the numbers for year to year cases tho I'm quite sure that they would make 2007's "spike" look less alarming.

But then how would the story make it into all the newspapers and TV newscasts?

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The spanjo can make it anywhere

Some of my favorite memories of undergraduate silliness were the great smokeouts of basement Cooley. Emu, Nature Boy, Big John and the King would each light up a huge cigar and choke the halls with a sweet cloud of Dominican smoke. But we weren't trying to act like grownups.We also regularly checked the door of The Halfway Inn Halfass at 3:30am to see if it was latched. When it wasn't we were able to satiate all our childish Mint Chocolate Chip and Superman ice cream needs.

Barry Popik has posted to ADS-L a brief report on the travels of an excellent Ann Arbor sandwich: the spanjo. The notable nosh--native to East Quad's Halfass (yes--just off basement Cooley)--has made it to the Big Apple. (For info on the city's nickname see Popik) Of the sandwich's journey he writes

I was reading today in Gothamist.com about a sandwich shop in NYC that offers the "spanjo" sandwich. It's spreading outside of Ann Arbor! (Too bad the Wikipedia entry was deleted last year [because] the sandwich wasn't popular enough.)

Alas. It deserves a page and more.

In his post he includes bits and pieces from Gothamist™, the menu from Papa Lima Sandwich in Brooklyn, Urban Dictionary, an RC wiki, a Friendster comment, a discussion thread regarding the deletion from Wikipedia (do a text search for "spanjo"), and an ILX bulletin board about Ann Arbor (A²~AA).

Mash all the recipes together and the sandwich is made of cream cheese, melted cheddar, Swiss Cheese, spliced apple, sauteed apples, and sprouts, on bread (possibly wheat, possibly toasted)--and some start by calling it a grilled cheese with some of the above. (Would that "spliced apple" be a typo for 'sliced-'? I remember them being sliced, not spliced--unless you consider that every ingredient is spliced into one sandwich. No--sliced.)

As I ordered the spanjo it was a grilled cheese of cheddar on wheat, with cream cheese, alfalfa sprouts and crunchy sliced apples. And that's the variety we'd expect from a weird sandwich in a strange dorm in a little cafe that says "Halfway Inn" on the wall (and all brochures and official web pages) but is known by everyone in EQ as The Halfass.

I first learned of the spanjo from my friend Susan who started at Michigan a year before I did. She told me I had to live in East Quad because that was the only dorm that promised to understand me. It was home to the Residential College where going to class in a bathrobe was common. It was the dorm that had Resident Fellows instead of Resident Assistants. Why? Just to be different.

Where I come from we have a word for this

Mr Verb recently posted a gateway to a brilliantly ignorant article at The Christian Science Monitor website. It's a grand ol' flailing attempt at linguistics by anthropology PhD student David Keyes. The CSM article is a shorter version of an earlier post on his own blog.

Mr Verb controlled his commentary--and with good reason. It's hardly worth the argument because the claims are quite ridiculous. But there's reason to think that a counter voice is necessary. Just look at the commentary on Keyes' blog. His readers love this stuff and they feel smarter having read it. Ay...(that's Spanish for Oy Vey).

His claim is simple. Soccer proves that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true.

Let's dive into this shallow end of argument:

Keyes references the "obscure theory about linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" claiming that it offers an explanation for the great chasm between "English" and "Argentinian" soccer. As an example he introduces the Spanish term enganche for a soccer position. He was confused when he first heard the word then he learned what it meant.

From his original post:

The reason that I had so much trouble understanding enganche was because it was a position that didn’t fit into my frame of reference, which only had space for defenders, midfielders, and forwards.

That's like saying that I once found it so hard to understand French pomme de terre because my frame of reference only had room for spuds and taters. It's called not knowing the translation.

And as commenter Brett points out here, David's claim--that his ability to understand the position is hindered by his not knowing enganche--is felled by the fact that he has the word playmaker and he uses it. Not knowing how one vocabulary corresponds to another does not in any way equal not having the ablility to conceive as the other does. In fact he uses 2 terms for the idea: "a number ten" and "a playmaker". This apparent reliance on the idea that language-shapes conception would surely conclude for that for Keyes this position is twice as important and easy to conceive of because he uses twice as many words for them. Right? (if this sounds like the Eskimo-words-for-snow argument you can just take my word for it right now that it's all a crock. Better yet take Geoffrey K. Pullum's words.)

Likewise regarding the libero position Keyes says in his original post that "Franz Beckenbauer was a player whose unique style of play created the need for a new word to describe a newly created position."

Wait--if they didn't have the word for it how the hell did they come up with this hard to conceive of position? You see the problem here?

Then he introduces as evidence a dirty play in which the cleats are used in a tackle. Of the term La Plancha he says

Because there is a single word that describes this type of tackle, Spanish-speakers are more likely to be aware of the offense (and thus take offense at it being employed against them).

This is not to say that non-Spanish-speaking players are not sensitive to straight-legged, cleats-up tackles (speakers of all languages like their ankles in one piece). But the fact that a word exists to describe this kind of tackle heightens Spanish-speakers' awareness of it.

Heightens their awareness? So if somebody slashes my ankle with cleats and I don't have a single word for that I'm less likely to be upset? Really? It's having the word that allows me to be more aware and offended?

"Of course, players take offense at these types of tackles around the world" he says. "But [I would argue that] they are more frowned upon in Latin America." I suppose familiarity does breed contempt. Note that the bit in brackets is only included in his original post. In the CSM piece it was cut. Boo editor. Boo.

There are so many jumps in this argument--but to be fair they are necessary. Because there are so many gaps in the logic. And yet these stories have wings. I'm not sure what it is. Real linguistics and real psychology are so much more interesting and surprising than this. Why are people so willing to believe these people: they who claim that crisis and opportunity are the same word in Chinese even when that and similar claims have been satisfactorily refuted? Why do people still believe that women say more words per day than men do? Why do people believe that we can't think without language? Why is multilingualism considered a threat to the unity of our country? Why do people still read William Safire?

Well to end with one last petty and insignificant criticism of Keyes' article: Sapir-Whorf is not by any means an obscure theory. It's old and tired. It is dragged out and flaunted by scores of inept linguists manqués. It is a very commonly cited and abused theory and just as commonly (and more effectively) disputed.

[Update: Let me just add that it's a 'hard' reading of S-W that has been tossed aside. There's little doubt that language plays a role in our categorization of concepts. An appropriately 'soft' reading of S-W might go so far as to say that language sheds a little light on concepts at work. But once phrases like can't imagine or understanding is limited start creeping it it's time to grab the reins.

But I do not claim that language and thought are unrelated. That's just silly.
]

Pulling Punchlines

I recently wrote about an incongruity on The Simpsons between script as performed and script as...scripted. In a Monday evening rerun of the episode "Eight Misbehavin'" (production code BABF03) I heard Apu (voiced by Hank Azaria) utter the line "Pirates are wild!" while the subtitle showed "Pilots are wild!" This is just a misheard phoneme. And a reasonable one. The l~r alternation from one approximant to another makes perfect sense. The two sounds even occur as allophones in Korean.

But later in the show Apu expresses his appreciation for "the good folks at Sony" when he receives their generous gift of a large-screen television. The subtitle for the line read "the good folks at Ampyo." I can't think of any allophones that would explain that alternation.

It's another instance of an apparent script change that didn't make it to all terminal forms. Unlike the Spungoes/Cowbogs switch -- a choice between joke1 and joke2 -- this switch is between real brand and fake brand. And neither is a true punchline. Ampyo comes closer but it doesn't go beyond throwaway joke.

One possible factor: Sampyo is the name of a Korean construction group. Was it too close? The Simpsons is quite heavily linked to Korea--all the animation is done there. Such caution seems just as likely an explanation as does cutting "Ampyo" for calling too much attention to a flat throwaway.

Dialectal equality in jeopardy on Jeopardy!

One of Friday's Jeopardy! categories comprised pieces of advice to future contestants. Every clue/question pair offered a little detail that would make the difference between a correct response and an incorrect response.

One of the Jeopardy! policies is that an incorrect spelling of a word doesn't count against you unless it changes the pronunciation. So "Sally Feeld" would be acceptable but not "Sally Fields". (The common but incorrect final S in her name was mentioned in one of the clues.)

A later clue read: "Please please please put the Y before the N when we ask for this site of the vocal chords cords." (tho "chords" would be acceptable on Jeopardy!--unless the question was asking for the correct spelling.)^{note below}

Accepted response: What is the larynx?

Adding a short comment on the correct answer Alex Trebeck specified the 'mistaken' form: "not the 'larnyx'" he said.

Now because the clue mentions Y I might guess that they're talking about spelling and not pronunciation. But you never know with Jeopardy! questions. Every once in a while their premise or claim deserves a buzzer.

And this clue is problematic. It shows a clear intolerance for metathesis in the common pronunciation: [laɹnɪks]--vowing to accept nothing but the slightly more common [læɹɪŋks]. (Vowels may be disputed but the relevant segments here are the [n~ŋ] and the [ɪ].) By this standard would they accept a spoken [ʤuləɹi]--a common pronunciation for jewelry? Would they penalize someone who wrote 'nucular'?

The problem here as I see is that the speakers who say 'larnyx' are not unaware of the other form nor are they mistakenly pronouncing it because of an error. Many people have learned the word this way because the pronunciation is an establish variant. They have probably been told by some ninny that they're saying it incorrectly. But they keep their pronunciation which is a witting choice--even if at a low-level.

We can get into the argument of standard and non-standard forms. But that's only going to get the Jeopardy! judges as far as an elitist and ignorant view of language variation can go. Right into the tar pit of...well--elitist ignorance.

I would understand if metathesis in 'earlobe' leading to 'eelrobe' was not accepted. That's a speech error. And it's not an attested learned/established variant.

I wonder how long ago Alex started accepting 'wasp' as an acceptable variant of 'wæps'.

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*[Update: So perhaps the judges would now have to accept "chords" as a variant spelling. As OUP's Ben Zimmer assures us they are in fact both common enough to be attested standard--or at least widely accepted--spellings.]

Quotidian complaints

This is what love of language has become.

I was just talking to my students today about this. Not the overuse of quotation marks in writing--but the peevologists who complain about it.

AP writer Jocelyn Noveck just gave Bethany Keeley's blog a big boost. And of course I'm a little jealous. Keeley started the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks in 2005 and started collecting submissions and posting pictures of signs posters ads documents...all illustrating the scourge of baffling quotation marks.

Due credit: the posts and the comments often work to explain or understand the rhetorical reasons for the quotes.

The article (perhaps more than the blog) persists with references to certain devices as annoying and unnecessary abuses misuses missteps and problems.

Noveck calls these "linguistic concers" and labels Keeley a "language-lover" which is too often used with the connotation of intolerance. Tho Keeley defends her generous spirit saying she doesn't feel superior to those whose usage she highlights.

'I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant,' she says (really). 'So I'm open to critiques of my own language. I make plenty of mistakes myself.'

I wouldn't call these quotation marks a mistake. They can be overused and they often lose their effect. But it really has nothing to do with grammar. I'd say this is as much a grammatical issue as emoticons italics and bold typeface are.

The story then takes a very odd jump to the overuse of quotations. Not quotation marks. Quotations.

'I have a thing against overuse of quotations, period,' says [Pat] Hoy, director of the expository writing program at New York University. 'Whether in academic or bureaucratic writing, it's giving up responsibility for what you're writing. It's a pushing aside of the responsibility to be the major thinker in the piece.'

So not only are quotation marks overused when they are not used only to mark attribution to a speaker or writer other than the person typing; now they're overused when they set off the very type of passage the peevologists are telling us they should mark: Only use them to set off quotations. But don't set off too many quotations! The salient connection is the tone of a people-do-bad-things-with-language fixation. Later in the article is fleeting mention of another blog that "tracks abuses of the word 'literally.'" I'm guessing that hopefully and singular their will soon have their own website...if they don't have one already.
[Update:
I cut out a few sentences in which Hoy is quoted regarding an early essay rejection that taught him not to quote so heavily. Perhaps I learned from it too.]

From whose bourn no babbler returns...

It's not that often that a linguistics story makes it into water-cooler conversations. But National Geographic has propelled the issue of language extinction into prime time and front pages. And here.

I saw this mentioned first at languagehat then I saw it discussed by Claire Bowern at Anggarrgoon.

The discussion at Anggarrgoon is of specific interest because the post is an honest and critical reaction to some of the methodology of the study and some of its claims as well as the implications/premises of the story as it has been covered by the media. Bowern observes:

It seems peculiar to me that I should have had lunch and dinner with [David] Harrison just about every day for the two weeks preceding his trip to Broome and he never mentioned (to one of 2 linguists actively working on these languages) that he was going there.

Better yet: Harrison has taken part in the exchange.

Go keep up with the discussion.

You took the words right out of my thesaurus

My friend had a good blog going a while ago. But his dissertation became more important. So he abandoned the blog and the URL. Before he dropped his blog he had a good reader base and pretty high Google™ PageRank™.

Now the URL and the title are back. But by another author. At first I thought it was a cheap ploy by a shameless plagiarist not just to ride the coattails but to steal the identity of an established blogger.

Reading the posts a little more carefully I'm wondering not who but perhaps what is writing this stuff.

Well, I thought it was all over for this clump of hippies. The bulls usually had no compassionateness for druggies, and when the driver dove back into the avant garde and rummaged through the baseball glove box looking for non-existent papers, mumbling that we would all have got to acquire out, I knew we were finished!

We obediently drop out of the avant garde as casually as we could, attempting to look square (hard to do), and trying desperately not to interrupt up laughing. We knew that if one of us would get laughing, it would all be over. So barbed our tongues, we all just stood there, lined up by the pumps with sheepish smiles — a assortment crew if there ever was one.

The "writer" goes by "alice" and she has apparently done this with several blogs. Her profile page lists 15 blogs. Some automated piracy of URLs I suspect.

It looks like there's some text laundering going on here (in one post Mark Liberman uses the term 'sploggers' for this sort of thing). [Update: take a look at Mxrk's post on a similar phenomenon: patchwork poetry.]

Here are a few phrases followed by what I believe is the intended phrase. Some of these are just awkward translations. Some are fine synonyms for a single word but not when it's part of a phrase--eg baseball glove is a perfectly good switch for glove in the sentence 'my bat is sitting next to my glove/baseball glove'--but it doesn't work in the sentence 'the registration is in the baseball glove box.' It looks to me like "avant garde" is a bumbled translation for car. Why?

• acquire up ~ get up


• cod my bagged luncheon ~ ? my bag lunch


• pickup motortruck truck ~ pickup truck


• as many other flower people that would suit ~ as many other hippies as would fit


• the occupation sight ~ the job site


• "Let's blend some cement," ~ "Let's mix some cement"


• State of Volunteer State ~ State of Tennessee


• solar H2O warmers ~ solar water heaters


• achromatic hosiery ~ black hoses


• halt for gas ~ stop for gas


• we establish ourselves faced with a dilemma ~ we found ourselves faced with a dilemma


• the gas army tank ~ gas tank


• inquire a few questions ~ ask a few questions


• rummaged through the baseball glove box ~ rummaged through the glove box


• we would all have got to acquire out ~ we would all have to get out


• to interrupt up laughing ~ to break up laughing


• a chronic job ~ a constant problem


• New House Of York ~ New York


• the mediocre folks ~ poor people


• acquire a small protein ~ get a little protein


• take attention of ~ take care of


• never did happen out ~ never did figure out


• to Capital Of Tennessee ~ to Nashville


• The whole topographic point ~ The whole place


• nil seemed to work ~ nothing seemed to work


• we had no pick ~ we had no choice


• to maintain track ~ to keep track


• the adjacent morning ~ the next morning

Any ideas on "cod" in "cod my bagged luncheon"?

Read the post here

Is Yahoo Serious?

I can't call it a snowclone. I'm not sure what name I would give for the pattern--other than 'tired joke.' A story on NPR about James Burrow's new sitcom starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton has been given the title "'Back to You' Crew: Sitcoms Are Serious Business." No one expects this headline to elicit a laugh of course but it is playing with the connotations of serious. Jokes are serious? How can that be? I thought jokes were only funny!

A Google™ search tells us that the following are "(a) serious business" in a search for "[X] are (a) serious business":

• Games (5X)


• Cybernet games


• Legos


• Toys (3X)


• funnies


• Funny Ads


• comedies


• comics (4X)


• jokes (2X)


• hoots and hollers (ie laughter)

Those were all found within 200 results (100 each for [X] is serious business and [X] is a serious business). These reversals were not the most common subjects--they make up about 10% of all results.

I would create 4 tiers of the types of results. The first is use devoid of irony. The writers who claim that hurricanes, missles, eating disorders, drugs or allergies are serious are speaking with cheek clear of all tongue. The only slight reversal in the list might be something like "allergies": an affliction some people might consider a mere nuisance but which the writer is saying is a source of real suffering for some people.

I'll put the first list above into an opposing tier: opposing the 2nd list and directly opposing expectation. It's a list of topics that would often be considered contradictory to seriousness. In fact the definition of several of these could easily include the necessary quality that they are not serious. Likewise, serious activity might easily be defined as an activity/event that does not allow games or anything funny or comical.

The third tier would be a list of topics/objects that would not normally be considered serious and which might more likely be considered contrary to seriousness. Cupcakes, birthday parties, and noodles would rarely be defined as serious, but neither would I expect anyone to sp define a cupcake as a non-serious item. But if prompted to rate the seriousness my guess is that these types of objects would fall on the non-serious side. Only an impression--but I'm pretty certain... Non-seriousness may not be a necessary connotation, but seriousness might be an incompatible connotation.

One last tier is the completely neutral. Mowers, acquisitions, reunions and minivans have no typical connotation to either seriousness or non-seriousness. Claiming that these are serious business has no strong implication of bet ya didn't think so...like humor or burritos. Yes it does blend on the edge with the 3rd tier. Especially since inference is a slippery determiner of connotation.

There is of course no clear line between any of these tiers. And any arguement based solely on my inferrences is easily boring even to me. But there is an interesting pattern at each end--of either typical intention or reversal of intention--that favours repetition of items that are in the first two tiers. Illness and disaster are represented heavily as are humor and play.

Out of 200 results 26 said humor or play was serious business. Another 26 said disaster or disease was serious business. These 52 results were distinct results: repetitions were not counted. That left 148 results. The remaining 148 comprised a variety of results: food, legal procedures, machines (technology in general), cultural/mass-media references, hobbies, botany, biology, travel...and all the repetitions thereof.

I decided to leave out any search using "is" because I figured "are" made the point already. But the first 10 results for "* is serious business" turn up 2 results for "comedy"--so maybe using "is" would have made the point better.

Well clearly this is not quite the most scientific survey. So far from it in fact that I should just drop the litotes and say it flat out: this is not a scientific survey. But it does show a pattern with general antonymy that I mentioned in a post a while ago when I wrote

Somewhere in that encyclopedic matrix of 'what this word means' is an awareness of what the word does not mean and a sense of the word's opposites and even complements.

Sometimes that awareness is subconscious and sometimes its foremost in our intention. And that awareness leads us to rely too often on those opposed meanings--thinking too often that we are the first to come up with a clever use of a word.

Michigan vs Notre Dame: which fight song is harder to sing with a straight face?

I will always bleed blue. I just didn't know it would be from such a ripping wound.

Last week I went to Purdue's rout of the Eastern Illinois Panthers. And lightning struck. And the stadium was cleared. And few fans returned. But the faithful who returned to Ross-Ade Stadium had the thrilling opportunity to cheer and bellow in approval of Curtis Painter's record-tying 6 TD passes.

Michigan's first two home games have not been so exciting--for Wolverine fans. Lightning struck. And the Wolverines were burned. And The Big House was cleared. Only the faithful will return.

After last week's games I had to resort to phonetics for an argument that Michigan is an easier team to root for than Purdue. Most stadiums have familiar cheers that the home fans know how to perform. At Michigan it's a very simple and effective exchange of "Go!" and "Blue!" from one side of the stadium to the other.

[go:::ʊ]!
[blu::::]!

It works well because it emphasizes two simple vowels with stable formants. They're back vowels with good energy in the low second formant making a nice resonant roar with a lot of energy at those lower frequencies.

The Purdue crowd yells "Go Boilers!" in the same cross-stadium exchange. Boilers isn't as good for the cheer. The [ɔ] in "Boilers" is hard to maintain. It's shorter because it falls into the [ɪ] of the diphthong killing that 2nd formant. Then the [lɹ̩z] syllable has no true vowel in it. And a second unstressed syllable composed mostly of approximants just doesn't create much of a boom.

But who needs sustained back vowels when you're scoring so much more than your opponent? I'll take TDs over IPA in a football game.

Last year the Michigan/Notre Dame game was a contest between two promising 2-0 teams: the winningest team in the history of I-A football (vs the 2nd winningest) and the team with the highest winning percentage (vs the 2nd highest). Tomorrow will be an unprecedented 0-2/0-2 showdown between a two teams that have never before been played each other when neither was ranked (since 1936 when ranking began).

It's a coin toss. I just hope it comes up heads.


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Snow image from here.

Coin image from here.