I recently reread the brilliant New Yorker piece by Jack Winter titled  “How I Met My Wife,” as I prepared for a short radio segment about negative words that don’t have positive counterparts. Winter plays with dozens of “missing” positive words in the short essay, from “shevelled,” “gruntled,” and “chalant” to “persona grata” and “sung hero.”

The following sentence in Winter’s column prompted me to wonder, for the first time, about the origins of “old hat”:

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous.

I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary, which first cites the phrase in 1697 and provides the following definition:

 1. slang. The vulva. Also: sexual intercourse; a woman regarded as a means of sexual gratification. Now arch. and rare.

I can’t see your face right now, but I’m…

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Well, we have a government again. But since the debates over money and politics are due to rev up before their jets have even cooled, let’s take a moment to look at one very messy metaphor.

I’m referring, of course, to the so-called raising of the debt ceiling.

Since George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, plenty of ink has been spilled over political speech. Most of the ink, today, is devoted to ways of manipulating the public into thinking black is white and day is night. Occasionally, though, you run across a phrase so genuinely misguided that finding new language is not only a shrewd move but the only fair and sane step to take. When it comes to debt ceiling, you want to ask, as George Lakoff did last year of fiscal cliff, “Why do some metaphors have far more staying power than others, even when they give a misleading picture of a crucial national issue?”
…

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For some time, I have been planning to write a Lingua Franca post on Somebody Said Something Stupid Syndrome. SSSSS (as I abbreviate it) begins when an individual writes or is recorded as saying something strikingly venal, inhumane, and/or dumb. The quote is then taken up and derided—in social media or blogs—by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of other individuals. And then it spreads from there.

SSSSS is a growing feature of our discourse, for a couple of reasons. First: because so many more statements are recorded today than ever before, and humans are no less stupid than they have ever been, many more stupid statements emerge. Second, all the bloggers and posters need something to blog and post about, and Something Stupid Somebody Said (SSSS) would seem to be perfect fodder. All the more so when it confirms one’s worst imaginings about one’s ideological opponents….

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The Red Sox celebrate their World Series win. Photo: EPA/Jason Szenes

Last week the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, and while other folks were debating the bushy beards and the obstruction call, I was thinking about idioms. (Yes, this is what it’s like for me as a linguist and a sports fan.) I was also thinking it was a shame that the Detroit Tigers were not in the World Series, but that is not really relevant to this post.

The language of sport pops up in idioms all over American English, some more obvious and some less so. You don’t need to be a sports enthusiast to be using expressions from a range of sports in your daily speech. And I think baseball may have contributed more expressions than any other sport. (Readers, feel free to prove me wrong!)

Here’s a taste of common expressions from baseball, some if not …

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For some reason, my ears were tuned to a whole nother frequency last week. That is, I heard the word nother everywhere I turned. Mostly it followed the word whole, though I’d swear someone said, “That’s an entire nother story” once, and someone else dismissed “a complete nother idea.” There’s even a children’s book series by someone suspiciously named Dr. Cuthbert Soup that includes A Whole Nother Story, Another Whole Nother Story, and No Other Story (Whole Nother Story).

I knew the word was resulting from splitting another with an adjective, and that—as, occasionally, with split infinitives—the splitting was necessary for clarity of meaning. Another whole frequency wouldn’t mean the same thing, and An entire another idea is repetitive. Even a whole other frequency doesn’t have quite the same nuance of meaning.

Being curious, I went looking for nother, and…

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Let’s be clear: using ALL CAPS in texting and on Facebook isn’t just about yelling anymore.

Now, I must admit that I don’t actually have definitive evidence that in the early days of email and texting, writing in all capital letters was used only to express anger, but that was certainly all caps’ reputation. And typing in all caps, by accident or on purpose, might elicit the response: “Stop yelling.”

You can still find netiquette advice online about why it isn’t nice to type in all caps because it means you are shouting at people.

The students in my course “How Conversations Work,” though, have been filling me in on the multiple other uses of all caps.

For the most part, all caps continue to indicate increased volume: as one student eloquently put it, “I read them louder.” But the volume is more often about excitement or emphasis than anger.

Students shared some real examples from their own texts for me to include in this post. Here are a few examples that show excitement all caps:

• AHHHHH!!!! THAT IS FANTASTIC NEWS! I knew you would!! I am so, soooo proud of you!!!
• YAAAAYY I CANT WAIT
• INGRID MICHAELSON IS COMING TO THE FOLK FESTIVAL.

In the first example, exclamation marks complement the all caps. In the second, the added letters in the exclamation (YAAAAYY) also capture excitement. But in the third, the all caps alone show the texter’s excitement about this news.

Emphatic all caps, a device that appears in other written registers as well, appears in these sample texts:

• I LOVE this one!
• The mall doesn’t open til ELEVEN.
• I knew it was going to happen!!!!! WHEN?!!

The emphatic volume implied by all caps can also help texters show they are really laughing, now that “LOL” no longer usually indicates laughing:

• HAH I choose wisely

Students report that, in addition, the emphatic all caps can help highlight a punchline of a story, as in the following example:

• I was playing with tea lights and somehow ended up getting candle wax everywhere. Including INSIDE my pants. Not sure how that happened.

Perhaps more surprising to me, because it departs from the higher-volume connotations of all caps, is the use of all caps to indicate sarcasm. One possibility is to send the entire sarcastic message in all caps:

• I AM SO EXCITED TO TAKE THIS TEST

But all caps can also usefully distinguish a sarcastic comment from the rest of a text, as in:

• I was throwing up all night. GREAT RESTAURANT.

Texting must compensate for the lack of physical cues we have in face-to-face conversation for determining emotional content, including: facial expressions, tone and volume of the voice, hand gestures and other aspects of body language. Conventional punctuation marks are being repurposed to express emotion: For example, “okay” is neutral, but “okay.” (with the period) is a little bit stern if not a little bit angry, and “okay…” (with ellipsis) is downright unhappy and/or skeptical. Writing in all caps can do some of the expressive work too, especially for excitement and emphasis—and now some sarcasm too.

One student, as she left the room after the all-caps discussion, stopped to add this note about another way to express excitement: intentional misspelling. In other words, by taking the time to intentionally misspell a word, you can indicate to others the excitement you’re feeling that would—at least theoretically—cause you to type so fast you would misspell the word (e.g., “you must be kiddign!!”)

Many thanks to the students in my course for continuing to clue me in to the many inventive ways they are capturing emotion on the screen of a phone. I can’t help but be impressed by their use of the limited options on their keyboards to convey subtle interpersonal communications.

Microsoft’s astonishingly scurrilous campaign to damage confidence in Gmail is still active after nearly 10 years. Large ads in magazines repeat content from the Google-baiting website www.scroogled.com, which is dedicated solely to promoting fear of privacy invasions:

Think Google respects your privacy? Think again. Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy. Outlook.com is different—we don’t go through your email to sell ads.

Does Microsoft’s fear mongering work? Does anyone truly believe human beings could drink from the fire hose of the billions of emails that constantly gush through the Gmail servers? I wonder if typical users even grasp that it is a trivial task for a computer program to determine in milliseconds whether a given message contains a certain letter sequence, without any human wasting time looking at any of the text.

Let me illustrate with a rather intimate email that I happened to intercept last Sunday as it passed between two of your departmental colleagues:

Darling Carol:
I keep thinking about that incredible sex we had in my office yesterday. You were so hot! I hope there's no danger of your husband finding out (he'd probably come after me with a chainsaw; don't read your Gmail in the kitchen!) I guess the college would probably fire both of us if they found out the real reason we work Saturdays; but I'd risk anything to have you across my big filing cabinet for another hour of illicit pleasure!
Your secret lovemonkey,
Bob

Microsoft alleges that “Google scans the contents of your email and extracts what they think are relevant keywords in order to target you with ads.” The words “they think” is gross dishonesty: It falsely suggests that human judgment is involved. In truth, simply from the scale of email operations we know that Google’s ad-placement procedure must be based on fast algorithmic checking for the presence or absence of letter sequences on lists of words to which Google has sold the ad placement rights.

Let’s suppose that Gardening Unlimited has won the bidding to have Gmail place its ad next to messages containing either chainsaw or lawnmower; Kitchen Refit World has bought the rights for messages containing both kitchen and cabinet; Home Safety Universe has the rights for emails with both fire and danger occur; and DivorceLaw4You was the high bidder on the words divorce and attorney.

Bob’s message will check out as positive for chainsaw, kitchen, cabinet, fire, and danger, so when Carol sees Bob’s message on Gmail (and she will be the first to do so), she will also see advertisements for arboriculture hardware, culinary remodeling, and anti-combustion equipment in the right-hand margin (at least, under my doubtless oversimplified assumptions she will).

Does that really look to you like a violation of Carol’s privacy, or Bob’s?

Microsoft does make one remark in passing that we can agree with: Sometimes Google’s procedures “can give you ads that are inaccurate, inappropriate, or insensitive.” Carol’s ads are decidedly mistargeted: Bob’s message never talked about tree trimming, kitchen fixtures, or fire safety. DivorceLaw4You, possibly the firm most likely to be of future use to her, lost out because none of the words they won the bidding on were in Bob’s message. (Even if they had been, DivorceLaw4You wouldn’t have been allowed to see the message or learn the sender’s or recipient’s names, but would merely have been billed for the appearance of an ad on Carol’s screen.)

Carol is certainly in jeopardy—not from Google, but from Bob’s insane lack of discretion. Email is not the medium for such saucy communiqués. Her husband, Arthur, may suspect that her Saturday mornings on campus are not about class prep or research. Given her habit of using the name of the family dog as her password, it won’t be difficult for Arthur to log in to Gmail and access her recently deleted messages by double-clicking on the Trash mailbox. But then by the same means he could access her Outlook account if she had one.

Humans at the National Security Agency could probably also read Bob’s message if they wanted to; but by whatever means they can get access to Google’s servers to see Gmail messages, they can doubtless get access to Microsoft servers to see emails sent to Outlook accounts. Ad targeting has nothing to do with it.

The notion that Google ad-placement practices threaten our privacy is raving nonsense. You could only believe it if you had absolutely no understanding of the scale of email-handling operations (well over two million per second worldwide), or the simple-minded innocuousness of Google’s ad-targeting procedures, or the completeness of their automation. Microsoft spreads the myth of privacy invasion in order to scare the most ignorant users in the market.

We’re nearing the end of the year, which has me thinking about the annual Word of the Year vote at the American Dialect Society meeting in January. We’ll be in Minneapolis this year, and Grant Barrett (Vice President of Communications and Technology for ADS) is soliciting nominations for a list of possible contenders. I asked students last week if they had suggestions, and they came up immediately with twerk, turnt, and insta (as a noun and verb, < Instagram).

But I’m writing this post not to solicit nominations for 2013. Instead, I want to make a plea for a past word winner whose brilliance, I think, has not yet been fully recognized.

Each year we vote not only on the Word of the Year but also on, for example, the Most Useful Word of the Year, the Most Useless Word of the Year, and the Most Creative Word of the Year. For 2008, recombobulation area won the title of Most Creative Word of the Year.

If you haven’t been to Concourse C at the General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in the past five years, you may not have encountered the original (and as far as I have heard only—but readers, please let me know if there are others) recombobulation area, designated as such by its own sign. It is set up just after the security check point, a place where potentially discombobulated passengers can recombobulate: put their belts and coats back on, put their laptops and toiletries away, reload all their miscellaneous objects into their pockets, etc.

I cannot help but use the verb now—usually to myself, in my head—every time I’m putting myself back together after security, no matter what airport I’m in. But here’s the thing: I don’t just recombobulate at airports.

I am willing to admit that most days I have to recombobulate several times a day. For example, after I teach, which often involves me spreading my stuff all over the podium and front desk, I have to pull it all back together in order to vacate the room. That is, I must recombobulate. After I’ve been in a nonstop string of meetings, it helps if I recombobulate before I sit down and try to organize my thoughts to write a blog post. After I’ve made a complicated recipe, involving many ingredients and a whole lot of pots, I (and my kitchen) benefit from some recombobulation before I launch into the recipe for the next dish. And that is just a taste of my quotidian recombobulation efforts.

At the beginning of every semester, I make a point to tell students about the verb recombobulate, emphasizing its potential usefulness in everyday speech. They appear to agree. I then usually ask for their help in spreading the word. And yet, a search of the Internet turns up very little outside scattered references to the airport in Milwaukee and to the ADS Word of the Year vote in January 2009.

As a linguist, I am well aware that conscious efforts to “make a word happen” are rarely successful. Yet I think (or is it that I hope?) recombobulate has all the ingredients for success. Let’s consider Allan Metcalf’s FUDGE factors (from his book Predicting New Words) for predicting the success of a word:

• F(requency): OK, so here the word recombobulate doesn’t do so well (yet!). But keep reading. …
• U(nobtrusiveness): I would argue recombobulate has the potential to sneak into the language relatively unnoticed, given its systematic relationship to discombobulate. Perform a little back-formation (to create combobulate) and then add a prefix (re-), and voilà!
• D(iversity of users and meaning): Equally relevant to the young and old, multitaskers to multislackers (see the Most Creative Word of the Year for 1998)
• G(enerating new forms): A noun, a verb—we’re in good shape here.
• E(ndurance of the concept): What is the likelihood that we’re all going to become so combobulated in the near or distant future that this concept will not be relevant?

What part can you play in upping the numbers for Frequency? As you spread the holiday cheer this season, I hope you will also consider spreading the smile-inducing verb recombobulate—a small linguistic gift to folks who might find themselves in a recombobulating situation, be that in an airport or somewhere else.

I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years was a woman’s, at least in this country. Despite the impression that a female avatar would be “less knowledgeable,” than a male, according to the Stanford researcher Clifford Nass, Apple’s initial roll-out was given a female voice because female voices are preferred in the “helper or assistant role.” The exception, at least at first, was in France and in Britain, where users apparently go for knowledge over subservience. But the female avatar is ubiquitous enough to have spawned at least one Hollywood movie, Spike Jonze’s new “neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance,” Her.

These days, users can change Siri’s voice to male or female at their pleasure. Now there’s a social-science project in the making. Will more of us opt for the authoritative male voice, or the soothing female one? Will we want so-called male language, which apparently privileges exact numbers (two, five) or female language, which apparently waxes vague (some, a few)? Am I the only one who finds such assumptions about voice pitch and word choice a little disturbing?

In Japanese phone-answering systems, automated male voices get the responsible business, like executing stock transactions, but female voices field the majority of the initial queries. In fact, Japan’s chief marker of gender doesn’t lie with the virtual avatar, but with the thousands of real human beings who make up the bulk of professional phone respondents. Every year, the All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition yields a consensus on the ideal voice for fielding customer queries and complaints. Almost all the more than 12,000 contestants are female, and among them, higher voices are deemed more desirable. Delicate phrasing, the right balance of friendliness, and an overarching politeness complete the profile. This year, the winner, Kiyomi Kusunoki, did not speak “in a squeaky voice,” which I take as a sign of progress, but men are a long way from grabbing this particular prize.

One thing seems certain: If enough of us start opting for a male voice on our hand-held devices and GPS systems, Siri will no longer be called “sassy.” Nor probably will he or she (perhaps, at last, we should use ze) be called Siri, a name that originated with one of the inventors of the virtual voice, who named his daughter after “the beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” (In the U.K., the male voice has long been known as Daniel, meaning “God is my judge.”) Most alarming for its inventors, the virtual voice may devolve into, well, what it is: a technology rather than a personality, as the researcher Leila Takayama has explained.

And, we might add, a technology developed by folks who rely a great deal on common perceptions of what it means to be, and to express oneself as, male or female. Breaking new grounds in gender expectations is not, in this case, the destination on the virtual map.

Barack Obama in 2014
(Image from wrcbtv.com)

I’m saturated with Obama’s rhetoric. I’m not talking about his politics, which, in and of themselves, have been disappointing. The list of miscalculations, overreaching, and unfinished business is staggering: immigration reform, drone use, NSA, a stumbling health-care reformulation.

All that worries me. But his speeches put me to sleep.

I voted for him twice. The Republican alternative was unbearable—it still is. I thought Obama would be not just the first black president but the first one to be nonwhite; that is, that a multicolor America would find its leader in him. Oh, well! Latinos (I am one among 57 million) don’t have reason to cheer. At this point, I have the impression Obama will be, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, better at being a postpresident. David Remnick is already discussing the type of mammoth book deal the president is likely to get (and Michelle, too). They are set for life.

I’m referring to the exhaustion I feel toward Obamatalk. Part of a diminishing audience, I watched another State of the Union. Or shall I call it State of the Onion? Increase the minimum wage for federal workers? It’s about time. How about giving an executive order to make Dreamers become like the rest of us? Anyway, I said no politics. Obama’s speeches, I get the impression, are built through thin layers of syntactical lucidity. You peel these layers and get smaller ones until you’re at the center—of what? They are pyrotechnic: impeccable syntax, professorial parlance, verbal coordination, a rich lexicon. Yet they sound hollow, trite, repetitive. They have no sense of humor. (Even Saturday Night Live’s Obama impersonator, Jay Pharaoh, is uninspired.)

Let me say it: I can’t believe I’m writing this. Obama’s verve in 2004 was transfixing. And his presidential campaign was messianic. Any one of those speeches would excite me in countless ways. The content was right. I was hypnotized by their metrics, their cadence. More than speeches, they were sermons in the best Baptist tradition. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” And, from his victory speech on the second Election Night: “I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.” I liked the guy’s perseverance.

So what? Lots of empty words. Those who attacked him early on as being made of words, not of deeds, might have been right. The most he has done in this term-and-a-third is speak. He’s walked us through the onion’s architecture … and little else. Are race relations better now? Mmm … visit Arizona, or else ask Travyon Martin’s family. Gun control: Go to see a movie in Florida. Wall Street magnates paying the price? It never happened. In fact, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street shows how far we are culturally from such punishment.

Yes, Obama was the one we were waiting for, and he was the one who made us realize we’ve been waiting for ourselves. Washington intransigence is worse today than—what? (I saw a sign the other day in response to Edward Snowden’s heroics: “Less political prisoners and more politicians in prison.”) We shouldn’t blame Obama’s problems on him alone but on a systemic bankruptcy. It isn’t just his fault, really; the whole political machine is in disrepair. And exhaustion is exhaustion: expected, unavoidable. Still, I, with 315 million, live inside a helium balloon surrounded by what Latinos call verborrea.

I never thought I would one day long for George W. Bush’s malapropisms. During his two terms, I ridiculed him: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” And, “They misunderestimated me.” Like Cantinflas, the iconic Mexican comedian, W would get lost in his syntax. He would storm as he stammered. However, in retrospect, I like this unmasked stupidity. Plus, he spoke a second language: Spanish. Just as Clinton was heralded as truly the first black president, W was, until 9/11, the first Hispanic president. (Then everything turned into terror.)

Bush was monosyllabic whereas Obama is oversyllabic.

No doubt Obama has made his linguistic blunders, too. “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” And, “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.” They have no charm, though. Actually, his own overall charm is gone.

He had his chance of playing Messiah for a while. The preview was admirable, maybe part of Act 1. Now it’s clear it has been a lot of blah-blah-blah.

(What language will the actual Messiah speak when he shows up? I hope it isn’t Aramaic. At least in English we understand all the baloney.)

A cool data-visualization website called Information Is Beautiful has a page titled “Rhetological Fallacies: Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking.” Here’s a taste:

If the creator, David McCandless, ever does Fallacies 2.0, I hereby suggest an addition, “Appeal to Predictability: Purporting to score a blow against an opponent by accurately divining something(s) he or she has said, or predicting what he or she will say.”

The only source I’ve found that has commented on this phenomenon is, predictably, the remarkable site TVTropes.org. It has an entry called “Impossibly predictive,” with this definition:

A friend or someone else who knows a character well will tell another person how the first character will react to some piece of news. Often, he will quote the character’s reaction directly. Later on, when the first character receives the news, he or she will react exactly, down to the letter, how the friend said he would. Similarly, this trope can often involve one character preemptively pantomiming a character’s response as they stand behind them, showing off exactly how predictable their friend is (or how well they know him or her). This trope could also involve a predictable character’s friend finishing his sentences for him. If they’re really showing off, they will have the response written beforehand to show them. Finally, this trope is illustrated when a person counts down “three … two … one … ” to the other character having a reaction about something.

If this does not ring a bell with you, then you have never watched a situation comedy. In fact, it’s become such a stale clam that any self-respecting modern sitcom can only use it in a self-conscious, meta way. A TV Tropes reader posted this example from the series Just Shoot Me (I recommend you sample some of the links, which lead to other TV Tropes entries):

Jack: Morning, boys.
Finch: Yes!
Eliot: Damn. (pays up to Finch)
Finch: (boogie dancing) I told you! He never says ‘good,’ only ‘morning’!
Jack: Ha!
Eliot: Damn! (pays up to Jack)
Finch: What?
Jack: I knew you’d dance like a jackass before noon! Come to poppa!
Eliot: Yes!
Finch: Nooo! (pays up to Eliot)
Jack: What?
Finch: Who says ‘come to poppa’?!
Jack: Everyone says ‘come to poppa’!”
Eliot: And again!
Finch: No, no, you didn’t say I have to pay every time.
Jack: So are you questioning the rules?
Finch: You’re freakin’ right.
Jack: YES!
Eliot: Daaamn!(pays up again)

This is all good fun. But I submit it’s rhetorically fallacious. That is, the trope implies that there’s something inherently wrong with being predictable. And it’s true, predictability can be correlated with a propensity for cliches or for automatic, mindless language tics, as with Dickens characters. But not always and not necessarily. If I wanted to mock a Zen master, I could nudge my friend and comment, “Check him out. Dollars to donuts he’ll say, ‘To achieve enlightenment, you must lose your ego.’” And he would say it, and my friend and I would chortle. But it would still be true that to achieve enlightenment, you must lose your ego.

What got me thinking about all of this is something that recently appeared on Jim Romenesko’s blog about journalism and the media. Two punks students at Boston University College of Communication wrote to Romenesko, “We’ve listened to our fair share of self-righteous, out-of-touch journalist guest speakers, so we created this bingo board”:

Ouch. I am a journalism professor and I have said some version of virtually every Bingo box’s contents. But, see, they’re true! Really, they are!

The appeal to predictability may be a fallacy, but it’s pretty darned effective, as my defensiveness reveals. When you’re skewered like that, any degree of protesting is probably already too much.

When I give a guest lecture, I try to conclude, “What’s the takeaway?” So what’s the takeaway? On the plus side, the fact that the two guys mocked the points in such a pitch-perfect way means they really absorbed them. Also, the chart is sharp; if my students could make fun of me so adeptly, I would be extremely impressed. As one Romenesko commenter said, “I see j-school has added snark to the curriculum, rather than allowing cub reporters to develop it organically on the job. I am OK with this.”

All seriousness aside, I take the admonition that in speaking to students, or anyone, it’s not good to be self-righteous or full of yourself or to mouth truisms or bromides that you remember you remember you believe. Yeats wrote that “the best lack all conviction”; but conviction is the least that should be expected from an educator.

And finally, I’m trying my best not to take Cliche Bingo as a personal attack. After all, to achieve enlightenment, you must lose your ego.

The etymology of Chicano is surrounded in mystery. I’ve seen its roots traced to Nahuatl, specifically to the term Mexica, as the people encountered by Hernán Cortéz and his soldiers conquering Tenochtitlán in the early quarter of the 16th century where known. In Spanish, the word is pronounced Meshika: the x functions as sh. Mexico, as a nation, opts to look at the Mexicas as their defining ancestors. Curiously, when first registering the name, the missionaries spelled it Méjico, with a j. It transitioned to an x when the country ceded from Spain, becoming independent in 1810.

In any case, Chicano might be an abbreviation of Mexicano, although Chicanos prefer to see themselves not as Mexico’s children but as its ancestors. According to legend, Aztlán, their Xanadu, located in either present-day northern Mexico or somewhere in the American Southwest, or maybe as far as Oregon, was the place where the Mexicans originated in their journey for a promised land, which they ultimately found in a region of five lakes where Mexico City was built. In their mythology, an eagle sitting on a rock in a lake, devouring a serpent—the symbol at the center of the Mexican flag—was a divine sign for them to settle there.

My research suggests that the original appearance of Chicano in print is traced to 1947, in a story by Mario Suárez published in Arizona Quarterly. I have also seen other etymologies for Chicano. The word acquired fresh currency in the sixties, during the civil-rights era. Some people spell it Xicano. (Curiously, I’ve never come across a Chicano calling himself Aztleño, meaning “dweller of Aztlán.”) On several occasions, I’ve seen the word connected with chicanery: according to Merriam-Webster, “deception by artful subterfuge or sophistry.” In this regard, the word suggests a double conscience, an idea—linked to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—that characterizes, broadly understood, the identity of minority people. Daniel Chacón has a collection of stories titled Chicano Chicanery (2000).

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Octavio Paz’s birth. Mexico’s only Nobel laureate for literature, Paz was an extraordinary hombre de letras: a poet, an essayist, a publisher, a diplomat, as well as “a philanthropic ogre,” a phrase he used in one of his numerous books to talk about the role of the state in modern society but which some of us, his admirers, prefer as a description of him. Paz’s ego was inflammatory: a true cosmopolitan, he was ready to devour you if you displayed any criticism of his oeuvre. In any case, arguably Paz’s most famous book is The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a monograph about the Mexican psyche. Influence by Alfred Adler and other late psychoanalysts, Paz used his considerable intellectual talents to offer incisive opinions on his own country’s ethos.

The initial chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude is called “The Pachuco and Other Extremes.” Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Paz lived in Los Angeles in the forties, where he was exposed to Mexican-American culture. Put succinctly, he found it appalling. Pachuco was a social type of youth: defiant, dressed up in a zoot suit with a hat, and embracing a distinct jargon. The ubiquitous comedian Tin Tan still personifies the pachuco. The best portrait I know of the era is Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979), about the zoot-suit riots of 1943.

Anyway, Chicanos hate Paz. Thus it seems unlikely, to me at least, that they will celebrate his centennial. For they believe Paz misrepresented them. In Paz’s view, pachucos—e.g., a particular type of Chicano—suffered from an overabundance of culture. And, even more scandalously, they were overwhelmed by an inferiority complex.

Is Paz right? In other chapters, he describes Mexicans as also suffering from that complex. Bizarrely, among Mexicans he is an icon, whereas among Chicanos he is Satan.

A student of mine from Los Angeles asked me that question. She wondered if the etymology of Chicano, a word the younger generation hesitates to adopt (they call themselves Mexican-American), might come from chico, not taken as child but as small. My student called my attention to Presumed Incompetent (2012), a collection of academic essays edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., about the plight of working-class women of color in academe. My student identified with the sections on Chicanas.

The question she raised, I said, comes at a time when the baggage behind “the inferiority complex” is being reconceptualized. It used to be that an inferiority complex was a defect. Nowadays, things are different—especially in the context of the debate surrounding “the triple package.” The thesis, made by the wife and husband writers Amy Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld, is that certain immigrant minorities (Asians, Jews, Hindus, etc.), on the road to success, exhibit three characteristics: a superiority as well as an inferiority complex, plus traction to make it to the top. The issue, of course, is why some minority groups display this traction and not others.

I will leave the answer to psychologists. In any case, since ancestral times Mexicans—and I am one—have nurtured an inferiority complex. Chicanos do  too. Is the name Chicano pushing them down, making them small? Can it be turned into an engine of success?

It all boils down, my student said, to “the colonial mentality”: Chicanos feel inferior because they have been taught to feel that way. But Hindus were also subalterns of empire and, depending on the region, so were Asians. Not to mention Jews, whose plight as slaves in Egypt is recalled every year during the Passover Seder.

My response: Etymology isn’t fate. Actually, unless one consents, fate isn’t fate either. After all, having a double consciousness is better than having only one.

This past weekend I escaped the polar vortex for a few days of vacation in warmer climes, and I found myself thinking a lot about the word perfect. It had nothing to do with the weather (which was lovely, but not perfect) or the hotel (also lovely, but is any hotel perfect?). It was the service. Not that the service was perfect. It just seemed that everything I ordered or said was perfect.

Server: “What can I get for you?”

Me: “I’ll take the salmon bento box.”

Server: “Perfect. And how would you like the salmon cooked?”

Me: “However the chef recommends it.”

Server: “Perfect.”

And:

Man at the front desk: “Are you checking out?”

Me: “Yes.”

Man at the front desk: “Would you like to confirm the charges and then do you want us to put it on the Visa on file?”

Me: “Yes.”

Man at the front desk: “Perfect.”

This weakened use of perfect as a conversational substitute for “great,” “sounds good,” “fine,” or “okay” has been on my radar for a few months. I’ve heard myself say it on multiple occasions,  for example to confirm a meeting (e.g., “2 pm? Perfect.”) or to affirm a friend’s decision (e.g., “Let’s get tacos.” “Perfect.”).

Is 2 pm the perfect time for the meeting or are tacos the perfect dinner option? Unlikely. But I’m not actually saying they are. Perfect, in this context, has a new meaning. As a response in a conversational adjacency pair or group (e.g., request-approval, question-answer-validation), perfect has come to be an enthusiastic affirmation and/or a super-polite one. It is highly other-oriented, complimenting the other person’s decision, choice, or suggestion.

This conversational use of perfect as a polite response is likely related to the hyperbolic use of perfect in polite conversation (e.g., “I love this gift—it’s perfect!” or “Thank you for such a great evening. The meal was perfect.”). The most recent edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, in fact, includes as its eighth definition of perfect: “Excellent and delightful in all respects: a perfect day.”

There is no cause for alarm here: word meanings weaken on a regular basis. And words don’t necessarily have to lose their stronger meaning as a result (although they sometimes do, which is also just part of the process of language change). Consider the verb starve, which still means ‘die of hunger’ but also carries a weaker—and widely used and accepted—meaning of ‘be very hungry.’

The word unique provides a fairly similar case to perfect. Historically, unique has meant ‘one of a kind’ and it still often does, but in day-to-day usage it has also weakened for many speakers to mean something more like ‘highly unusual’ (which allows people to say that some things are “more unique” than other things or “very unique”—a linguistic pet peeve for some folks). Just as things that are not one of kind can now be unique, things that are not faultless can be perfect.

If you hadn’t noticed the spread of “perfect!” before, I would guess you will now hear it all around you, perhaps even in your own speech. One of the dangers of putting these things on our collective linguistic radar is that once we start noticing them, we can start to feel vexed. And there is no question that the overuse of any word, be it like or right or lovely or perfect, can draw attention to the word itself in ways that can be distracting. But I hope you can find the weakening of perfect more interesting than worrisome—a perfect example, so to speak, of how a word can get repurposed to become a meaningful interactional gesture.

We’ve finally come to the end of Language Madness, and not a moment too soon. Just as Kentucky and Connecticut, two storied programs, will face off tonight in the NCAA men’s basketball finals (finals  instead of final  being another instance of rampant pluralizing), the LM tournament closes out with a classic matchup.

To recap, we started out with 16 “sins against the language.” As many have noted, they were a mixed bowl of wrongs. Some were mistakes or “mistakes” people love to hate, such as the finalist on the left side of the bracket, confusing its  with it’s  and similar errors. And some were common instances of clumsy or bad writing, such as the epic first-round matchup between Wordiness and Clichés. For each contest, the public voted on which they thought was a clearer and more present danger to the language, in Polldaddy polls posted either here or on my website.

Here’s the left side of the bracket:

And here’s the right side:

As with Kentucky and Connecticut, that second Final Four matchup  was a classic confrontation of two very different styles. I would have expected Between You and I to win handily. Peevers clutch it tightly to their hearts; several years ago, BBC listeners chose it as the mistake they hate the most. But the match went right down to the wire. That may be a result of a recent discourse arguing for the not-necessarily-wrongness of a more common formulation, along the lines of “Thanks for inviting my wife and I.” Whatever the reason, in a contest that literally went down to the wire and figuratively warmed my heart, Poor Word Choice won, 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent.

Watching the stately march of its/it’s  confusion through its bracket, I thought about that category of mistake, and the way it plays out where I see it the most, in my students’ writing. Specifically, I wondered whether apostrophes are more frequently wrongly put in, or left out. So I went out and got some data.  For readily apparent reasons, I rejected Google and other search engines that include traditionally published stuff, in which those errors would have been edited out, and went instead to Google’s blog search. I tried out four sets of phrases:

•  For using you’re  instead if your, “you’re mother” versus “your mother.” (I had to subtract from the “wrong” column 3,240 hits for “You’re Mother Teresa.”)
• For using your  instead of you’re, “your a genius” versus “you’re a genius.”
• For using it’s  instead of its, “it’s own” versus “its own.”
• For using its  instead of it’s, “its obvious that” versus “it’s obvious that.”

Here are the results, with the numbers along the vertical axis representing the percentage of times that particular mistake is made:

What are we to make of it? I confess I was surprised by the pitiful performance of the you’re-for-your  mistake, made only .7 percent of the time. I feel that I make it myself in e-mails and first drafts. Similarly, I would have expected it’s to be a more common mistake than its. It’s the only mistake in the bunch to have logic behind it, as we put an apostrophe before the “s” in every other  possessive. And the “winner,” made 11.4 percent of the time in my test, was a bit surprising as well, given that it’s the only one of these mistakes that Microsoft Word auto-corrects; to the extent that some bloggers were saved from themselves by Word, the real frequency was even higher.

The apparent takeaway is that the most common cause of this kind of mistake is a fairly usual suspect, that is, leaving out something, in this case an apostrophe, because your you’re in a hurry.

Geoffrey Pullum has graciously agreed to let me announce the result of the final following his Lingua Franca post tomorrow. So now, there’s only one thing left to do. Vote.

Theodore Parker

When Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, President Obama said, “Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.” Secretary of State John Kerry concurred, using exactly the same phrase. They were hardly breaking new rhetorical ground for the administration. In his first inaugural address, Obama stated, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Later, Obama declared that Putin was on the wrong side of history for supporting the Assad regime in Syria. He also said that Assad was on the wrong side of history.

In a recent column, the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote that the Obama administration “has used the ‘wrong side of history’ phrase more than any I can remember. They particularly like to use it in foreign policy.” Goldberg claimed that for Obama this is “a sign of weakness. … Whenever things haven’t gone his way on the international scene — i.e., on days that end with a ‘y’—he or his spokespeople have wagged their fingers from the right side of history.” (Goldberg didn’t mention it, but Republicans have invoked WSOH as well. During Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings as secretary of defense in January 2013, Sen. John McCain berated Hagel for his opposition, as a senator, to the Iraq “surge”: “I think history has already made the judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”)

Goldberg argues that Obama’s use of the “right side of history” formulation, by contrast, is a “sign of strength. … On social issues like, say, gay marriage, it amounts to a kind of impatient bullying that you can afford when time is on your side; ‘Your defeat is inevitable, so let’s hurry it up.’” Gay marriage is indeed the apposite example. Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia announced, in reference to his decision to oppose in court the state’s same-sex marriage ban,  “I’m proud to say today the Commonwealth of Virginia stood on the right side of the law and the right side of history.”

To which Mike Huckabee replies, in essence, “History shmistory.” He recently said, regarding his opposition to same-sex marriage, “You’ve got to understand, this for me is not about the right side or the wrong side of history, this is the right side of the Bible, and unless God rewrites it, edits it, sends it down with his signature on it, it’s not my book to change.”

The earliest use of R/WSOH I’ve been able to find is from a 1903 book called In Old Egypt, by a rabbi named Henry Pereira Mendes. He writes of “Nachbi, whose grandson, like Setur’s was destined to make a name, though not on the right side of history.” Frankly, the meaning of the passage escapes me. The modern connotation starts to show up in the 1930s, as in this from a left-wing journal called Equality: “Of course the people on the wrong side of history suffer! Of course the Southern aristocrats suffered when they were wounded, and suffered like nobody’s business when they could no longer maintain themselves by the enslavement of other”—and there the excerpt on Google Books cuts off.

The popularity of both phrases steadily ascended, as this graph from Google’s Ngram viewer shows:

Goldberg’s critique of Obama’s repetition is fair. The president loves the idea so much that he even mangled a quote frequently invoked by the Rev. Martin Luther King, but originally formulated by the abolitionist Theodore Parker, so as to resemble it.  The Parker/King quote is,”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Obama wrote in 2010, “while you can’t necessarily bend history to your will, you can do your part to see that, in the words of Dr. King, it ‘bends toward justice.’” (For a complete account of that quote’s provenance, see this post by The Quote Investigator.)

But I have no objection to R/WSOH itself. It is no better and no worse than any other way of asserting that an action or position you find wrong or reprehensible will be exposed as such with the passage of time. Similar arguments have long been made by people of all political persuasions, including Parker and King. Yet I’m struck by the dramatic rise in use from the 1970s to the present. I don’t have a sense that this is a period when people have developed a particularly penetrating understanding of history’s arc. If anything, the opposite.

Moreover, overuse has removed most of the formulation’s flavor, in the manner of a piece of much-masticated chewing gum. Its trickling down from the great issues of the day to more mundane matters has further weakened it, probably to the point of uselessness. This was brought home to me while reading an article several weeks ago in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Referring to a Penn State basketball player named Maggie Lucas who had led the Nittany Lions in a comeback, the article said, “She refused to let the Lions fall on the wrong side of history—not in this tournament, not on her home court in State College, Pa.”

What do John Boehner and Rachel Maddow have in common?
Image: Screen shot from MSNBC, via The Blaze

One cannot but be dismayed by the extent to which pollution of thought is endemic in our culture.

The illness is ubiquitous: in Washington, in academe, on the radio and TV, among activists. Being clear, explaining oneself lucidly, seems to be an endangered form of human behavior. Was clarity ever better regarded? Or is the current attitude toward it a constant in history? One could blame the educational system, seldom pushing students to express themselves neatly, in clean and tidy ways. But that’s an easy target. After all, we are what we teach and vice versa.

In any case, I want to offer here an ode to clarity, to make a call for its worthiness—and to do it clearly. As a word, clarity isn’t just beautiful but also elegant, even peaceful. Like the word moon (in Spanish, it is even more melodious: luna), it enchants me, it makes me surrender to its sound. Merriam-Webster defines clarity somewhat unclearly, as “the quality of being expressed, remembered, understood, etc., in a very exact way.”) That etc. is unneeded. The same idea could have been expressed more economically, without the accumulation of passive verbs followed by obnoxious commas.

And what exactly does very exact mean? Exactness is a synonym of accuracy, so very exact must mean very accurate, that is, with anal-retentive precision. I, for one, am not talking about such extremes. Clarity is the capacity to be simple, unambiguous, on target, without blubber. It is about the freedom to choose the right thoughts, and, in succession, just the correct words to express them.

That the purpose of language in general is to communicate isn’t debatable. The question, as I’m suggesting here, is about the quality of that communication. When a sentence is unclear, is the problem at the level of language or is it at the level of thought? After all, language is thought articulated in words.

Amy Tan, in her essay “Mother Tongue,” describes her surprise at people’s response to her mother’s broken English. As an immigrant from China, her mother struggled, upon arriving to the United States, with forming syntactically correct sentences. The reaction was, in the eyes of others, that not only her language but also her thoughts were broken. That is preposterous, of course, for Tan’s mother was perfectly capable of expressing herself in Mandarin.

But the language of immigrants distracts from my thesis, which is that clear thoughts foster clear language. By this I mean that clarity might be an attribute of language only after our thoughts have been built rigorously—or, in the topography of Merriam-Webster, very exactly. And how does one reach clarity of thought? After a long process of careful, meticulous refinement. That, and nothing else, is what the life of the mind should be about: refinement of thought.

I consider the work of Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell models of clarity. Take Orwell’s sentence from “Shooting an Elephant”: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” The whole of imperialism is sharply encapsulated in it.

In expressing themselves, children tend to be enviably clear, perhaps because their verbal reservoir is limited but also because they have little patience for ornamentation. What they want, they are eager to get: refinement of purpose implies sharpness of tongue.

Grown-ups are at the opposite end. Might the problem be that, unlike children, adults don’t always know what they want? Or else, that we want too much, all at the same time?

When in need of laughter, my wife and I often do one of two things: watch a Marx Brothers movie (I am one of those who can recite entire sections of Duck Soup, and I start one of my courses, “Impostors,” with the mirror scene between Groucho and Harpo—or better, between Pinky and Firefly), or read Derrida. They take a diametrically different approach: the former is consciously hilarious, whereas laughter comes about in the latter by accident, among those who, like me, live outside the Derrida cult.

The following paragraph comes from “Of Grammatology” (1967):

The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity. The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity. A science of the possibility of science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?

Does dense, complex thought require dense, complex language? No! Wittgenstein, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, states that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

It is rather easy to ridicule the Derrida quote. That ridicule doesn’t come from taking it out of context but from the inscrutability of it construction. Scientificity? Grammatics? Historicity?

In Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter I), Cervantes, deriding the fluffiness of chivalry novels, delivers one of the novel’s famous sentences (translated by John Ormsby): “the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.” Now that, unlike Derrida’s grammatocalifragilisticology, is a clear refutation of the unclear.

Maybe Derrida, secretly, is mocking understanding. I say maybe because I’m not sure. Or perhaps, a clown at heart, he seeks to undermine clarity, and, proving Wittgenstein wrong, to show that what can be said at all can also be said obfuscatingly. But does that mean it is deeper?

Again, No! Depth of thought doesn’t bring about linguistic malfunction.

I have a philosopher friend who teaches at a university in upstate New York. Not long ago, he told me that philosophers thrive on the feeling of intellectual superiority. They look down at the rest of the mortals as mentally limited. The fact that women are hardly represented in philosophy departments has much to do, in his view, with this macho approach: to be a philosopher is to be able to communicate in coded (e.g., befuddling) language.

The whole thing is baloney!

But I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe against philosophers. Lack of clarity is everywhere. Can you follow Rachel Maddow’s labyrinthine sentences? How about those of Speaker of the House John Boehner? His statements are usually short but seldom clear.

Shouldn’t we hold our politicians accountable when their ideas are blurred? Wouldn’t it be constructive to fire TV newscasters who don’t make sense, who talk in a spiral? Isn’t the classroom the place to teach clarity to the young?

Talking about the young, here is one more thought (that relates to Amy Tan’s mother): speaking in dialect doesn’t mean one is hazy. The other day, I heard a girl on a Brooklyn street say, “I can’t take nobody no more.” A common complaint that ain’t pretty but is clear.

Language changes, clarity doesn’t.

We are nearly five months into Britain’s “Year of Code,” an effort to promote computer-coding skills among Britons young and old. The British media’s coverage spiked in February, when the campaign’s director admitted she couldn’t code a computer to save her life, but has ebbed since.

Still, I’ve been taking advantage of some of the Year of Code offerings (which are not restricted to British residents), and spent a few hours last week at codecademy.com learning enough HTML and CSS to create a bare-bones personal Web page and enough JavaScript to produce some rudimentary animation. Neither was a particularly arduous experience, nor particularly rewarding; it was a bit like dipping into Turkish using the back pages of a Lonely Planet guide to Istanbul: You take in some vocabulary and grammar rules, but unless you start using what you’ve learned in a more practical way, it doesn’t really come to life.

The comparison with foreign language-learning is appropriate at the moment because a number of U.S. states are moving toward letting high-school students substitute computer coding classes for foreign-language requirements. (In Texas and Oklahoma, it’s done and dusted.) Advocates of the change argue that, aside from coding’s being a wildly useful skill at the moment, learning it exercises some of the same abilities as learning Spanish, French, or Chinese: pattern recognition, memorization, and concentration, to name a few.

Skeptics agree that coding is a skill worth teaching, but question the comparison with foreign languages. Yes, it involves recognizing and working within certain sets of rules—but then, so does math.

It’s of course invidious to suppose that you can’t learn both a foreign language and how to code, but there’s only so much time in a school day. My concern centers on the learning process. From what I know of coding, precision is essential. An extra <p> somewhere in your work can throw the whole thing into disarray. Foreign languages are very different: Even native speakers make hundreds of “mistakes” in a day, and it’s the rare one that actually trips up communication. Understanding this is critical to learning a foreign language. If you constantly aim for exactitude, you won’t speak a word; and if you don’t speak a word, you’ll never improve. It’s a lesson worth applying elsewhere in life, and I’m not sure you get it from coding.

Or maybe you do. I’d guess there are readers out there who know miles more about computer code than I do; perhaps they’ll weigh in?

And on the other hand, from what I’ve seen recently of interns entering journalism, students might do well to have a little more precision pounded into them.

Keeler and Powell: “It was grand of you to come!”

I read in USA Today  on Tuesday that Detroit’s Big Three auto makers have “committed $26-million to the grand bargain on which much of the city’s exit from bankruptcy is based.” The “grand bargain,” the newspaper went on to explain, is a complicated arrangement in which the Detroit Institute of Arts “and its masterworks will be spun off to a nonprofit trust for the equivalent of $816-million, with proceeds set aside to help reduce pension reductions for thousands of city workers.”

Needless to say, I wish the Motor City well, but (almost needless to say) the thing that intrigued me about the article was the phrase grand bargain. I was well aware that it had been used to describe the now-moribund efforts between Congress and the president to achieve a bipartisan plan for reducing the deficit. But the Detroit news made me wonder where, exactly, did grand bargain originate, and what (if anything) has it come to mean?

The first notable use in the Google Books database comes from Sir Walter Scott’s 1817 novel Rob Roy, in which a character, discussing a horse and using the characteristic Scottish dialect, says: “And I hae bought this on your honour’s account. It’s a grand bargain—cost but a pund sterling the foot.” This fellow uses the phrase literally—that is, to mean a really good bargain. But about a decade later, Thomas Carlyle, in an essay on the Faust legend, refers to the character’s “grand bargain” with the devil. That’s grand in the, well, grander sense we’re used to now. 

However, with a few isolated exceptions, the phrase didn’t start to be used to refer to political and diplomatic negotiations until the 1970s, as in a 1978 New York Times editorial on Mideast peace prospects advising President Jimmy Carter against “deeply involving himself in the intricacies of policing feeble little Lebanon and losing sight of the grand bargain he had envisioned.”

Soon after that, the phrase started to become notably more popular, as seen in this Google Ngram Viewer graph:

In the Times archives, grand bargain tends to pop up in clusters every few years to describe a certain sort of deal—one in which uncomfortable concessions have to be made by both sides in exchange for a hoped-for significant and mutually beneficial result. It really established itself in the early 1990s, in the context of what the Times columnist Leslie Gelb described as “a proposed Western plan for aiding Moscow to promote reforms.” After that, in the 90s alone, there are mentions of grand bargains involving South African racial progress, international trade, a chemical-weapons treaty, global arms control, and welfare reform. The phrase started being applied to D.C. fiscal talks way back in the summer of 2011, and it still is.

There is still no overarching budget deal, obviously, and when you go through the roster of proposed grand bargains, it cannot escape you that the majority of them failed. I don’t mean to say that the phrase caused the failures, but I do believe language is relevant in this narrative. Grand is an old-fashioned word, redolent of high collars and high sincerity, whether in the sense of momentous (the Grand Canyon, Grand Hotel) or wonderful. (My college buddies and I were tickled by Ruby Keeler’s bit of dialogue in 42nd Street, directed at Dick Powell: “Why, Jim, they didn’t tell me you were here. It was grand of you to come!”) Affixing it to a piece of statecraft, in this ironic age, can’t help bringing with it at least a suggestion of quixotic wishful thinking. It also retains a bit of Carlyle’s sense, of a deal with the devil.

All of which is to say that I sincerely hope Detroit gets back on its feet. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Casa Dante in Perano: good wine, bad Wi-Fi

Having left my post at Lingua Franca four months ago to work on a book and (very incidentally) dabble in Italian, I thought I’d launch my return (Sono tornata = I have returned) with a report. Thanks to a Lingua Franca commenter, I spent about 10 minutes a day from February to late May on the website Duolingo, earning lingots and hearts and wondering why this website seemed so obsessed with cooking in the kitchen. (Where else would you cook?) When I was out of town or idling away a few minutes at the dentist, I hauled out my iPod and worked with the more conversationally based 24/7, whispering phrases like Puoi aiutarmi a trovare into the tiny microphone and ignoring the raised eyebrows around me.

By the time I boarded my flight to what I’d begun dreaming of as the Land of Good Wine and Bad Wi-Fi, I knew just enough to know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know tenses. Anything that happened ieri, forget about it. From the conversational Italian I’d picked up (Sono nata in California = I was born in California), I’d gathered that past tense was formed from the root of the infinitive, but I had no notions about preterite or progressive, and no time to develop them. I could say Vorrei un bicchiere di vino bianco and know that I was saying I would like rather than I want a glass of white wine, but I remained ignorant as to the conditional in general and unable to use it in any other way.

I knew the formal/informal distinction existed, but at what level, and in what circumstances, and whether the formal meant addressing “you” always as third-person singular, or whether there was a second-person plural variation, utterly confused me. This was a consequence, in part, of my haphazard learning approach (a living, breathing teacher would have answered such questions), but it was also a result of the inconsistency built into the programs I was using. 24/7, for instance, made a point of noting that Ti fa male? (“Does it hurt?”) was written in the familiar, but gave no such indicator for Quanto ti devo dare? (“How much do I owe you?”), which likewise uses the familiar ti. And Duolingo allows both Dove sei? and Dove siete? as translations for “Where are you?” but it’s unclear whether the “you” here is being interpreted as both singular and plural or as both informal and formal.

Well, I thought as I settled in for the movie and the airplane meal, I probably won’t use any of it, anyway.

Readers, I have returned to tell you I was wrong.

First, to my consternation and delight, the Italians I met, primarily in the villages of Tuscany but also in larger cities, heard my clumsy overtures (Ho bisogno di qualcosa per decongestionante) and responded in Italian and only Italian. When the conversation got too thick, I’d grab at Parli inglese? or Parli francese?, but once they’d heard those initial vowel-ending words from me, I got no traction with other languages. So I was forced back on my scramble of words and phrases. They forgave my cascade of errors far more readily than I did. When I managed to conclude a complete conversation—like the one with the bartender at the local pub our first night in the countryside, where I begged him to grind me enough coffee for four people for morning because I’d mislaid the packet I’d bought in Siena, and we discussed the difficulty of gathering all one’s belongings off the belt at the crowded supermercato—I wanted to kick up my heels.

Second, of our small group of four, I was the only one speaking Italian at all. Ten minutes a day made me an expert. The effects were mostly hilarious. I got called over at an open-air market to engage in a series of questions about unrecognizable leafy vegetables that turned, as far as I could tell, into an argument among the locals over rughetta versus what we know as arugula. We found our way to our hotel in Rome, toward the end of the trip, via GPS, only to confront one-way streets that prevented our getting closer than three blocks. So the friend driving dropped the rest of us and reset the GPS to the rental return place, and I set about asking directions. By then, I actually felt competent, but as we made our way past the church and around to the left and left again up the alley toward the gate with the fountain, my dependent pals kept asking, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t we get someone who knows English?”

Well, ta-dum. By navigating to the hotel, I suppose I triumphed. But more, I’ve triumphed by evolving from a nonspeaker of Italian to a really poor, rudimentary speaker of Italian. Some nights and mornings in the exquisite Tuscan countryside, I talked myself to sleep or woke myself up going through the phrases I knew, combining them to form new ones. Many things about being in Italy brought pleasure, but engaging with the words, for me, ranked high on the list. Mi piace parlare italiano.  Now maybe I’ll actually study the language.

My all-time favorite Chronicle article, “Yagoda’s Unfamiliar Quotations” (mentioned here once before, in The Case of the Extra Word), is a reminiscence about a collection of unquoted quotables—memorable remarks by ordinary folk who never got famous.

You can pick up such remarks almost any day if you keep your ear tuned. Last week my partner, struggling to pinpoint why a friend’s outrageous name-dropping seemed illogical as well as irritating, burst out: “Status is not like pubic lice!” Nicely put: You don’t pick it up simply through intimate contact with someone who has it. The turn of phrase is one I will remember for a long time.

But some remarks by ordinary folk are more than just apposite and memorable; they encapsulate valuable insights about life. One such was vouchsafed to me a month ago as I walked on the Braid Hills near Edinburgh with a friend, the computational linguist Barbara Grosz.

She knew I was going to need the insight. I was about to head for California to clear out 30 years of miscellanea stored in the garage of my former home in Santa Cruz. Two weeks of dirty, tiring, and emotionally draining work (I just got back from it). Furniture, appliances, utensils, gadgets, tools, garments, fabrics, boxes, cabinets, books, papers, files, correspondence, mementos, souvenirs, photographs, paintings, ornaments. … It all had to go. The items deserving shipment to Edinburgh had long ago been shipped. Very few would find room in my suitcase when I left. Almost every item had to be sold, donated, burned, or taken to the dump. Yet the temptation to linger over each rediscovered object was strong.

Barbara Grosz had faced an analogously stressful situation many years earlier. In 1986 she resigned her research position at SRI International in Menlo Park, and accepted a professorship in computer science at Harvard. Everything essential in her office had to be shipped to Massachusetts.

Of course, the thoroughly modern academic of today can stash essentially all of her library and research life on an iPad. But back then researchers’ offices were complexly organized ecosystems of precious concrete objects. Libraries of books shelved according to intricate and idiosyncratic systems; temporally stratified piles of hard-copy correspondence; usually a three-year-old stack of documents waiting to be filed; often a few boxes of miscellaneous documents with no clear filing rationale.

And also a litter of desktop toys, ornaments, knick-knacks, and trinkets: an art-deco pen holder; the small carving of a Norseman that a departing Icelandic postdoc left as a thank-you; a tiny green vase presented as a gift by a Korean visitor; an engraved glass paperweight physically instantiating some minor award or recognition of service.

Sorting Grosz’s office into the relinquishable and the essential, and packing up the latter sensibly, was ideally a task for the office occupant herself, over a full month or so. Maybe two months. But in the end, of course, time ran out. Dr. Grosz of Menlo Park had to become Professor Grosz of Cambridge swiftly and smoothly without any intervening months of sifting and decision making. Professional removal men were called.

The two men who arrived were big guys. The office felt crowded once they were both inside it. And they didn’t want her inside it while they worked. So she gathered up one or two technical reports she needed to read, and told them that if they had any questions about how to tackle the task they should come down to find her in the unassigned office on the right at the end of the hall. They nodded agreement, and off she went, slightly nervous.

After a while one of them did indeed come down the hall to find her. She looked up as his huge frame filled the doorway.

“Yes? You have a question?”

“We’re done,” he said.

It didn’t seem remotely possible. How, she wanted to know, could they possibly have packed up the whole of her office–all those shelfloads of books and filing cabinets of papers and piles of documents and miscellaneous office bits and pieces—in what seemed to her to be such an incredibly short space of time?

The huge man looked down at her almost pityingly; the experienced professional confronting the amateur. She might have an abstract understanding of algorithms for solving the computational bin-packing problem, but she did not have true packing insight.

His response to her helped with clearing and packing situations throughout all the decades at Harvard that followed. It came back to me many times as I was clearing that garage last week. I’ll always be grateful for it.

What the man said was: “Lady, we don’t reminisce.”