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The Real Thing

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I sometimes start my fiction-writing class off with an icebreaking exercise stolen from NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me. I call it “Bluff the Class” (cf. “Bluff the Listener”), and its purpose is to demonstrate to students that we all have a certain storytelling talent at our fingertips—we can make up a fake outrageous news story in 10 minutes or less. The exercise is similar to the parlor game Dictionary, in which players often discover their other talent, for creating fake dictionary definitions.

I’m not sure why I like these forays so much, except that they reveal the creative force of mundane categories. Which brings me to my current favorite: the Avery Durable View Binder With 2-Inch Durable Turn Ring, currently rated 4 stars on Amazon, with almost 1,200 reviews. The first hundred or so, from 2010-11, tout the advantages of the binder in what now seem like…

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Something Incomprehensible

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Sitting on the runway at Dulles, about to fly up to State College on one of United’s Dash-8s, I found myself behind two rows of university students, one on each side of the plane. It was the day of the Penn State-Ohio State football game and as we backed away from the terminal, the young people began a familiar cheer: They shouted, “WE ARE,” and waited for the response, for the small plane to rock with a matching-in-pitch-and-intensity, “PENN STATE!” The response didn’t come—a few passengers mumbled the school’s name but the cabin was, for the greatest part, silent, and the students—one of whom wore a PSU cheerleader T-shirt—did not try again.

It was a gray day in State College. It was a game day and the traffic was bad and my friend and I drove through groups of people heading for the stadium. I’d not been in town for a couple of years and noted the many signs…

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What a Game

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I told myself I was going to take a break from posts about language and politics after the election, but Robert Lehrman’s recent “Draft” column in The New York Times changed my mind. Mr. Lehrman wrote of President Obama’s policies going forward,

Naturally, whether President Obama can bring people together will be determined by more than a speech. Like tennis, it depends on players across the net. For the last four years, Republicans thought they could win with another game. Will Republicans, chastened by defeat, now change?

Though I gather that Michelle Obama plays tennis, Lehrman’s is the first reference I’ve heard to that game in talking about this year’s presidential contest. But we’ve exhausted practically all the others:

  • This year’s contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is best explained as the biggest football game ever. … The fourth quarter began…

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Third-World Blues

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Floridians waiting to vote. Credit: the Associated Press

Judging from a spate of recent references, we may soon reach the point where, to paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the third world and it is us.

This trend vigorously penetrated my consciousness via press coverage of the ridiculously long voting lines for the presidential election in many areas around the country. A Floridian who was turned away after waiting two hours to cast her vote in early voting told The Miami Herald, “This is America, not a third-world country.” Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman said on MSNBC, also in reference to Florida, “I’ve led delegations around the world to watch voting, and this is the kind of thing you expect in a third-world country, not in the United States of America.” As Mayor Michael Bloomberg of…

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Reading Denzel Washington in English 141

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A few years ago, following a stunningly silent moment in a class discussion, my creative-writing students let me know that race was indeed a taboo topic on campus, at least in polite conversation. (To be fair, creative-writing classes have often and famously suffered from an overabundance of politeness.) My response was to begin teaching a course I called “Race, [Creative] Writing, and Difference,” the title borrowed from the Kwame Anthony Appiah-Henry Louis Gates Jr. volume. We read some literature of race (Noel Ignatiev, Toni Morrrison, Kenji Yoshino, Mark Twain, many others), but the vehicle for the writing in the course is the personal essay, the most raucous and open-ended and close to poetry of the well-known prose forms. Phillip Lopate’s encyclopedic Art of the Personal Essay is the point of departure here—Lopate directs us toward both intimacy and experiment, he reminds…

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Information, Please

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The major ink the Obamas’ fist-bump cover gets in Wikipedia’s “New Yorker” entry suggests one of the problems with crowd-sourced reference works.

Allan Metcalf recently reported in this space that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had acquired and will presumably continue to publish Webster’s New World Dictionary. Roughly at the same time, word came that the Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus would no longer come out in print editions, only online. The editor-in-chief of the line said: “The traditional book format is very limiting for any kind of reference work. Books are out-of-date as soon as they’re printed, and the space constraints they impose often compromise our goals of clarity and completeness.”

He clearly has a point, especially when it comes to the subject matter in which he deals, words. Investigators in…

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Slinging Southpaw Lingo

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I broke my right wrist over the Thanksgiving holiday and am clad in a cream-colored cast up to the elbow. Being right-handed, I’m finding it dodgy to correct student papers, grade exams, etc., at the very end of the term. I also find myself in numerous conversations about handedness and brain dominance. Invariably I mention that I was born lefthanded—a “soft lefty,” in some parlance—and my parents tried switching me until research came out suggesting that such persuasion was not good for the brain. I blame all my mental failures, needless to say, on having been left in the middle. On the other hand, by the time I get this cast off, I may be able to sign my name or swing a tennis racquet from the other side.

All of which has me thinking about the soft bigotry of our anti-lefty language. My break being the result of a fall, I can be accused of having two left feet. If I do…

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Poetry in the Marketplace

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Apollo, god of poetry, courtesy of Stephen Vincent

My friend Stephen Vincent, a Bay Area poet and raconteur, was in Turkey last summer and snapped a picture of the sculpture of Apollo at Nemrut just as the sun was coming up.  Beardless Apollo, the god of light, prophecy, healing and plague both, and music. And poetry. Shelley wrote (in “Hymn of Apollo”), “I am the eye with which the Universe/ Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.” At a poetry reading in San Francisco last week Stephen said, of his encounter with the god, “I thought I should ask him, Do you have any thoughts about creative-writing programs?”

In the creative-writing industry one commonly comes across metaphors for and references to the mercantile. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs—the venerable old AWP—is the…

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I Guess ‘It’s a Thing’

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A couple of weeks back, NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a piece about the word random. It definitely was something I would be expected to like. After all, I am the NPR guy di tutti NPR guys. All the presets on my kitchen table radio are set to different public radio stations. On Twitter, I follow Steve Inskeep, Mike Pesca, David Folkenflik, and Don Gonyea. (I even know how to spell their names.) And I’m pretty interested in language as well.

But the piece was disappointing. It basically seemed to be about the fact that random has come to refer not only to an action made without deliberation or an event not following a pattern (the traditional meaning) but also, in the OED’s words, to something “Peculiar, strange; nonsensical, unpredictable, or inexplicable; unexpected.” The trouble is, that meaning has been around at least since 1988, the date of this OED citation from The New York …

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#infallible

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With the arrival of  @Pontifex, Pope Benedict XVI has joined the ranks of the Twitterati.

Benedict’s predecessor on the papal throne, John Paul II, introduced e-mail to the Vatican’s communications network. But tweeting—the haiku of social media—seems an intervention of a different order.

For more than a million tweeters, Benedict’s entry into the arena is the digital equivalent of the Latin exclamation Habemus papam! (“We have a pope!”)—the announcement that St. Peter’s latest successor has been chosen by  the College of Cardinals.

We must like our popes, since we have so many of them. Pop music, drug culture, and golfing give us the pope of mope, the pope of dope, and the pope of slope. There are persons or things to claim the title of the pope of chili and the pope of yes! while art history’s Sir John Pope-Hennessy was called “the Pope,” such was his authority.

The…

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Reading in the Waiting Room

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“The Timbertoes,” from “Highlights” magazine

My ophthalmologist’s office was crowded. The doctor was behind, there would be a real wait. The place was packed with people (including myself) in unfashionable shades, post-op wear. I found a seat then realized that I had not brought a book or a newspaper.  I was at the mercy of the magazine rack and a meager rack it was—Sports Illustrated, Highlights for Children, and a glossy publication about bat conservation.

As a child, I had never cared for Highlights. I’ll not address here the multiple issues of “Goofus and Gallant” but will mention another feature of the magazine, “The Timbertoes”—it’s a cartoon about “a little wooden family and their adventures.” The adventures are dull by any standard. I’d not thought of “The Timbertoes” for years until…

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Publishers in Transition (and the Readers Who Love Them)

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This morning my Twitter feed led off with this message from RandomDigital, the electronic arm of the august publishing firm Random House:

@RandomDigital: Please support media companies in transition by buying a physical copy, or subscribing.

 

Lo, how the mighty have tweeted.

I felt as if I had just passed a pet store with a sign in the window that read “Please buy this puppy while we’re busy bioengineering a dog that doesn’t require walkies.”

It’s no secret that even the great traditional publishers are scrambling to reinvent themselves. If they’re going to stay in business, even the Big Six, of which Random House is one, need to reach readers devoted to electronic toys—which is to say everyone under 20, half of the literate population under 70, and even a goodly number of the quill-and-ink-pot set when no one is looking. I’ve just made up these faux usage stats, so…

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The Mixed Blood Project

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This will be my last post for Lingua Franca. It’s been a good experience but I need to put my shoulder to some other wheels.

Last month, in Berkeley (at University Press Books), we launched the third issue of Mixed Blood, the national publication I started with two friends at Penn State. (Mixed Blood began auspiciously—it’s the result of a series of late afternoon conversations at Whiskers, the company bar at Penn State. The publication continues to reflect the interests and involvement of its founding editors—Jeffrey T. Nealon, William J. Harris, and me—but its new home is the University of California at Berkeley.)

We’re hoping that Mixed Blood is something different, more than one more literary magazine—we invite poets to the UC campus to give public readings of their work and to give talks as well about the connections (or lack thereof) between the languages of…

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Biodestiny and All That Jazz

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dog-menstruation-L-9egYD3Hard-core discussions of gender have their own lexicon, as do hard-core discussions of anything. Like other vocabularies, this one has made its way into broader discourse as the relevant issue—gender—has entered public discussion. For most of us, terms like intersex, transgender, transsexual, heteronormative, and gender identity disorder have become clearly defined only in the last quarter-century. And it took a fair amount of what seemed, at the time, like ridiculous discussion before such terms were widely accepted in the LGBT community, not to mention among everyone else. So it behooves us to pay attention to a language controversy that some might be tempted to mock, namely the question of what to call a person who experiences a menstrual cycle.

According to Elizabeth Kissling at Ms., talking about “women who menstruate” is incorrect and even offensive. Not only do not all …

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Predicting Prudence From Tense Marking?

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munich in the rain800PX-~1

Neuhauser Steet, in Munich. Do Germans save more than English speakers because of grammar?

Keith Chen, an economist at the Yale School of Management, recently gave a TED talk about his claim (in a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review) that certain of people’s prudence-related behaviors are attributable to the grammar of future time-reference in the languages they speak.

English speakers say “It will rain tomorrow” (with the future-marking modal auxiliary will), where German speakers would say Morgen regnet es (literally “Tomorrow rains it”), and Germans turn out to save significantly more of their income than English speakers do. This, Chen claims, is no coincidence: Across the world, speakers of languages with grammatically obligatory future marking tend (according to their own questionnaire responses)…

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Txtng Rules

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800px-Texting_closeupTwo weeks ago I gave a talk to a group of University of Michigan at Ann Arbor undergraduates called “Txtng and the Future of English.” As a linguist who studies the history of the English language, I reassured the students that they are not ruining the English language, no matter what they hear from their parents or teachers or other trustworthy and concerned authorities. Some of the students looked gratified by this alternate perspective; others looked skeptical.

The changes in written English—and to a lesser extent spoken English—caused by texting and other electronically mediated communication (EMC) strike me as more interesting than worrisome. All living languages change, a fact that has worried people for generations. Benjamin Franklin’s distaste for the verbs colonize and notice now seems quaint. The recent rise of LOL and the verb friend seem to many less quaint.

We …

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Spurious Correlations Everywhere: the Tragedy of Big Data

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I promised (last Thursday) to say a little more about Keith Chen’s claim that obligatory future-tense marking in your language makes you less prudent in safeguarding your health and wealth.

Chen’s data on languages comes from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), and his evidence on prudence from the World Values Survey (WVS). Both are fully Web-accessible. Sean Roberts, who studies language evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, decided to investigate the other linguistic factors treated in WALS to see how they related to prudence. He compared the goodness of fit for linear regressions on each of a long list of properties of languages (the independent variables), using as the dependent variable the answers that speakers gave to the WVS question “Did you save money last year?”

The results (see this blog post for an informal account) were…

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A Hell of a Note

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Harold Ross

Harold Ross

No less than scratchy records and faded photographs, antique slang can powerfully and palpably evoke an era. Of course, the longer ago the era, the less intelligible the slang. Last week, for my blog, Not One-Off Britishisms, I was looking into the history of the verb pip (“to defeat or beat narrowly”) and found this 1838 citation from the journal Hood’s Own, or Laughter From Year to Year: “With your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,—getting hypped as well as pipped,—‘talking of Hoyle … but looking like winegar.’” I have no idea what any of it means—least of all the presumably hilarious misspelling of vinegar—and that’s a big part of why I love it.

For a recent Lingua Franca post, I spent some time rereading the work of Joseph Mitchell and was reminded…

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Rockin’ Robin

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8196645-two-simple-speaking-birds-on-wire-vector-rgbMy mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody and timbre of her whistle. “But what are you saying to them?” I’d ask as the birds tipped their heads quizzically from the perches in the tree.

“I’m just telling them hello,” she’d answer. “Letting them know they’re safe.”

Which they weren’t, always, given our cat, whose mouth she would sometimes force open to let an unwary and miraculously unhurt bird fly out.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are suggesting, not that Mom could really communicate with the birds, but that the language she used in her other verbal communications could have evolved from, or be related to, birdsong.

It’s a lovely idea, but less because of the…

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The Cliché Expert Gets Fired Up Over March Madness

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Coach K

Mike Krzyzewski, coach at Duke, whose team generates more than a few well-worn descriptives

(In his heyday, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, regularly graced the pages of The New Yorker, offering his two cents on the Silver Screen, the Great White Way, the National Pastime, and other arenas where catchphrases and bromides rule the roost. Although his wingman, Frank Sullivan, met his maker in 1976, Mr. Arbuthnot has improbably reappeared from time to time, including in the pages of The ChronicleWith the NCAA men’s basketball tournament set to begin, Mr. Arbuthnot is baaa-aaack.)

Q. Ah, Mr. Arbuthnot, long time, no talk. Can I get you a coffee, or maybe a Red Bull?

A. Naw, I’m good.

Q. Selection Sunday is just two days away. How do you break down the brackets?

A. No question, a lot of programs are on the…

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