I love the expression “sudden death.” It refers to a FIFA tie-breaking rule last used in 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup, but most of matches in this year’s El Mundial, as the games are known to Spanish-language viewers of Univision, all felt like sudden death, at least in the round of 16, which concluded Tuesday. (By the way, Univision’s newscast has been far superior to ESPN’s, at least at the level of wordplay.) The Netherlands-Mexico match was a nail-biter (I’m Mexican!), as was Costa Rica vs. Greece. Watching these games is like reading a superb thriller: Tension is high and time seems to stand still.

Like much of the rest of humanity (according to various sources, half of the globe’s population is tuning in), I wait—patiently!—four years for this fiesta. This one in Brazil is among the best I’ve seen, and I’m watching every minute of it. This is the life for an academic: finding ideas even in leisure. To study what? The way Brazilians throw a party? Whether countries’ uniform styles, or their varied goal celebrations, reflect ethnic and nationalistic identities?

Seriously, the World Cup provides a range of topics for scholars to consider: Governance. Economics. Justice and morality. Theater. Masculinity. Not to mention the layers of meaning in carnival, carnaval do futebol in Portuguese. Let me ponder them one by one:

Governance. There might be 22 players on the field, but only one person matters in a game, and it isn’t one of the players. It is the referee. He is the judge, the pardoner, the decider. Teams compete to score the most goals, but they also work on the ref. He might be objective. But you know—everyone does—that there is no such thing as objectivity.

The ref’s authority is bestowed upon him by FIFA, world football’s governing body. To participate, all parties must adhere to its rules. It is a true international body, like the UN, the EU, or the Group of Eight. Unlike in those entities, however, no country exerts more power in, or more influence over FIFA. That makes the World Cup illustrious. This is a stage in which small nations like Chile (population: 17.5 million) are as important as France (65.7 million), Russia (143.5 million), and the United States (313.9 million). They all abide by the same rules. They dress the same way. They play the same number of games. Is this a model for global equality, or what? Obviously, finding a champion, whose reign lasts four years, is the purpose. But what does being the winner mean? Nada, really. It is about reputation, not about control.

FIFA is often criticized for being corrupt. And it is. The controversy over the Qatar games in 2022 are proof. Governance is never pure. Yet the World Cup is the best example I know of authentic, peaceful coexistence at the global level. Plus, as I wrote recently in  The New Republic, the World Cup is God’s way of teaching people geography, getting us out of our cocoons—making us realize, as ET said, that, yep, we aren’t alone.

Economics. We might think the World Cup is all grand spectacle, but it is also a marketplace of ability. Established players already play in La Liga, the Premier League, and on other important stages. Younger talent makes a splash, hoping to command top dollar, while high-end scouts appreciate—and, when needed, depreciate—those players’ value.

“Value” is the crucial word. What we see is worth money. Not only on the field. The host nation capitalizes on its investment by bringing tourists from everywhere. Billions are spent on broadcasting. The Brazilian smiles on the TV screen are lessons in joie de vivre. But value is also measured in spiritual power. Are the spirits favoring one team or the other? What voodoo practices must be performed to motivate a higher force to bring down an opponent? The value of certain religious practices is thus critical, showcasing how the material and spiritual realms are intertwined.

Justice and morality. Some games are Shakespearean. Like when Zinedine Zidane of France head-butted the Italian player Marco Materazzi in the 2006 final for insulting his sister—clearly, there is one thing more important than winning a World Cup, and that is honor. Or in the Uruguay-Ghana match of 2010, when Luis Suárez of Uruguay stopped a strike by Ghana with his hand. The goal would have eliminated Uruguay. Suárez was expelled, and Ghana got a penalty kick. But the striker missed, making Suárez a hero.

Real life isn’t fair. Neither is soccer. Moral decisions make each game a battle between good and evil. How do players reach a decision? Is it possible to balance reason and impulse?

Suárez is again suspended, this season for biting an Italian player. This is the third time he has engaged in such unsportsmanlike behavior, and he was punished the previous two times. He has now been banned from four months of play in FIFA matches. Suárez, in my view, suffers from mental illness. The biting wasn’t designed to push the game in a particular direction. He simply lost control. On the surface, his action doesn’t have much to do with morality. If he does warrant a psychiatric diagnosis, perhaps FIFA should use the incident to alert fans about the mental anguish players face during a match. Óscar Tabárez, the Uruguayan coach, bitterly complained after the incident, saying “this is about football, not about morality.” Most of the world did see it as immoral, or at least uncivilized. Yet Uruguayan fans agreed with Tabárez, saying—in a paranoid mode—that FIFA was after them.

So the World Cup is like a Dostoyevsky novel. When is a sinner an actual sinner? Is defending one’s honor as justified as Rashkolnikov’s killing of Alyona Ivanovna, an abusive old money-lender?

Theater. A graduate student could write a dissertation on the dramatic talents of World Cup players. Most must have taken a course, not only in pantomime but in melodrama. I haven’t seen any statistics, but the number of histrionic dives in the tournament seems considerably higher than in previous World Cups.

The king of them all—a veritable master of the art of pretending to suffer—is the Netherlands striker Arjen Robben. In the Netherlands-Mexico match, he worked the ref, Pedro Proença of Portugal, to exhaustion—until he finally got what he wanted: a penalty kick at a crucial point. Lo and behold, Holland converted it into a 2-1 win.

Americans dislike the theatrics, and, believe me, Mexicans were unhappy with Robben’s action. But life, like I said, is a spectacle, and fútbol, as Hamlet said of poetry, “holds the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature.”

Masculinity. Where else does one see 25 vigorous males on the field (counting the three referees) for an hour and a half, all in short pants, running, kicking, jumping, touching each other, doing all sorts of pirouettes, and competing to see who puts the ball in the net more often? None of these men is accused of being gay—not even Ronaldo, the Portuguese superstar, who loves taking his shirt off after scoring a goal and flexing his muscles. Are gender boundaries more flexible during the World Cup?

Subversion. Stereotypes are a dime a dozen in El Mundial. To start with, nationalism is pushed to its limit. Just look at the stands. Fans, scores of them, dress in their country’s flags, their faces plastered with the colors. They scream and shout patriotic slogans, cursing other nations. I cannot think of another forum where nationalism is as excessive. It is all in the spirit of partying, of course. And, in that context, becoming a stereotype is useful. Colombians show up as coffee makers, Mexicans as mariachis and Frida Kahlos, the Greeks come in togas, Italians as Luciano Pavarottis, Americans dress like Uncle Sam. Everything you ever hated about your own background is now beyond criticism. What does this say about respect and intellectual freedom? A lot. For the World Cup—and the one in Brazil for sure—is, as I mentioned, a carnaval, meaning it embraces subversion, turning it into a commodity. You can say whatever you want during those five weeks, you can pretend to be who you’re not, you can cry in public, as long as it is done in an atmosphere of camaraderie.

Social media’s role has been more important than in the past. Every match prompts endless tweets. The email conversations I have with friends around the globe are inspiring. Every major incident on the TV screen is accompanied by images Photoshopped in a matter of seconds, as when Memo Ochoa, the Mexican goalie, stopped an onslaught of attacks from Brazil and Holland. I received his image superimposed to the Corcovado, atop which stands the legendary statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. Or superimposed on a portrait of Neo in The Matrix.

Frankly, we academics are boring in comparison! We aren’t used to this much excitement, to the “sudden death”-like drama. El Mundial is fertile ground for academic, not to mention classroom, reflection. Let us wake up from our stupor and turn to this raw material.

Seenox (it bills itself as “the ultimate time waster website,” so you have been warned) offers yet another compilation of signs in China with hilariously botched English translations. An obscene instruction about what to do with vegetables; menus listing “roasted husband” and “fresh crap”; a portable “EXECUTION IN PROGRESS” sign for janitors to use; 40 of the usual suspects are there. But they are introduced by a passage containing two myths about Mandarin Chinese. One is that Mandarin is “the most spoken language in the world with around two billion speakers,” English coming in third with only 300 million-400 million speakers. The other is that translation between Mandarin and English is very hard.

There is no way Mandarin has two billion speakers. The government of the People’s Republic of China tends to overstate the figure for political reasons (because Mandarin is supposed to be the state’s pan-China lingua franca). But the China Daily (December 26, 2004) published the results of a survey of language use in the PRC showing only 53 percent of the population having an ability to communicate in standard Chinese. That would be 690 million people able to use Mandarin, at most. Success in using Mandarin is very important for employment and preferment in China, so in self-report surveys people doubtless boast about even a halting and imperfect command of it.

And as for English ranking third with 300-400 million speakers? I don’t think so. (I suppose Spanish is the alleged number 2, but that’s also not true.) English has about 400 million native speakers, but between one and two billion total users around the world; and perhaps more importantly it is becoming a genuine world language. It is an official language under the constitutions or governmental regulations of something like 85 countries around the world. Chinese has nothing like this degree of ubiquity. Apart from the People’s Republic and Taiwan (which of course the PRC claims is just a renegade part of PRC territory anyway), only the city-state of Singapore uses Chinese as a recognized official language. You cannot expect to go around the world conducting business in Mandarin. (Nor will this ever change as long as Chinese continues to be burdened by the most disastrously cumbersome writing system on the planet.)

Nonetheless, the translatability claim isn’t true either, despite all the photos of hilarious signs. Trained human beings do excellent translations between Chinese and English without any more difficulty than is found with any other pair. The myth of translation difficulty is driven by a stubborn tradition within China of not giving a damn: of assuming that translation is straightforward and mechanical, and that post-editing by a competent human is never needed. “Chinglish” signs are the result.

Some have probably been constructed through simple dictionary look-up, uninformed by any knowledge of English grammar. Others are the result of trusting the output of dumb statistical machine-translation programs. More than once people have photographed signs on which the English translation reads Translate server error: The error message was simply copied off a computer that produced no translation at all.

I am not sure whether Chinese sign-writers need no recourse to competent native speakers, or whether they long for them but have no way to find them. But they operate as if they assumed translation were mechanical and routine and easy.

Polysemy is the main spanner in the works. Human languages seem to love having phonological forms that bear multiple meanings. Neither Chinese nor English is unusual in this regard. Simple English words like post or charge have a dozen meanings or more. And in Mandarin the syllable gan, when pronounced with the fourth tone, can be translated by about 20 different English words, including “do,” “work,” “dry,” “manage,” “shield,” “embarrass,” “trunk,” “competent,” “go bad,” plus a four-letter obscene word meaning “copulate with,” banned here at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Machine translation programs and untutored Chinese-to-English dictionary users in China often, inexplicably, pick the last of these rather than a more appropriate sense.

Translating Chinese into English by taking the first English equivalent listed in a Chinese-English dictionary for each word, and stringing them together without asking a native speaker whether the result makes sense, is a virtual guarantee of amusing gibberish and occasional outrageous obscenities. The fact that in China this happens thousands of times a day has nothing to do with the language itself being hard to translate. There are hard-to-translate texts (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses), and there are careless and incompetent translators; but I don’t think there are any inherently hard-to-translate human languages.

James Rodriguez’s “poem of a goal” against Uruguay. The English commentator likened it to the cream atop strawberries on a summer night.

 
Borges, in an interview, once said that he didn’t like soccer. “But it’s popular,” the interviewer said. To which the author of “Emma Zunz” replied: “Stupidity is also popular.”

Too bad. He was an hombre de letras attuned to the changing nature of language. Indeed, he once wrote an eloquent defense of Argentine Spanish that was prompted by a stilted argument presented by the Iberian cultural historian Américo Castro. But Borges was allergic to popular culture—not tangos and gauchos, which he adored, but to sports, Hollywood (though he did love movies), and other forms of mass entertainment.

The just-concluded World Cup, in which Germany was once again crowed champion, has been enormously rewarding on various fronts, not the least of which is the linguistic mare magnum it symbolized. The tournament seemed to offer something for everyone, including collective hysteria, as in Brazil’s humiliating 7-1 loss in the semifinals, and the grotesque behavior (think Boris Karloff), of the Uruguayan player Luis Suárez, who bit an opposing player in the middle of an action-packed match.

I watched all 64 games. It was an exuberant and exhilarating endeavor. An average of one hour and 45 minutes for each meant I was hooked to the TV screen for 112 hours, or 4.66 days, the vast majority of which I spent with the amusing and extraordinarily creative folks of Univision. The newscasters were from all over the Spanish-speaking world, with Mexico and Argentina leading the bunch in terms of accents. It was a feast for the ear.

A couple of lines stick in my mind. “El esférico nooooo rueeeeedaaaa mááááás”—the ball (e.g., the spherical object) no longer rolls. This is the way the broadcaster would conclude the narration of a match. Or “un poema en forma de gol”—another broadcaster describing a gorgeous goal (it might have been by Colombia’s striker James Rodríguez) as a poem.

And did I feel ruffled, as some friends did, whenever these same broadcasters would react to the camera focusing on a gorgeous female fan in the stands, saying they wanted to marry her? That is, that they wanted to marry each and every one of the female fans whom the camera zoomed in on? Such verbal pyrotechnics might be unacceptable for the ESPN English-language folks, but on Univision, where, as it turns out, the portion of the female audience between 18 and 45 watching the World Cup was at times even higher than its male counterpart, this suggestive language isn’t forbidden. On the contrary, it proved to be a welcome recipe since the Spanish-language network was seeking to retain, and perhaps even to enlarge, for the five weeks of the championship, the enormous public, largely women, regularly watching telenovelas on a daily basis at the same time.

The languages of the World Cup were everywhere. I was at a Portuguese restaurant in Provincetown, Mass., for a Portugal game. I was with Chileans for the Brazil vs. Chile game, with Mexicans when Mexico played Croatia and the Netherlands. I tuned in to French TV to hear commentary on Les Bleus and Italian TV to follow the response to Suárez “going Hannibal” on defender Giorgio Chiellini. On YouTube and on the web I watched Argentine, Iranian, and Japanese World Cup-related commercials, all in their native tongues.

Of course, on the field there is only one language: fútbol. Although, what tongue do the players of one team use to communicate with the opponent and—especially—with the referee? It depends, of course. On rare occasions they share the same language but, more often than not, they resort to the lingua franca of soccer: English. In after-the-match interviews, it was astonishing to hear a handful of them (the Brazilian defender David Luiz, for instance) butcher it, which is more than forgiven since they aren’t international idols because for their talent as orators.

When I finally switched to ESPN after the round of 16, because I wanted to see some action in HD, I was mesmerized by what I found. Former players like Alexi Lalas (U.S.A.), Gilberto (Brazil), Rudi van Nistelrooy (Netherlands), Santiago Solari (Argentina) and Michael Ballak (Germany) were regular commentators. It was delicious to listen to this other salad of accents. Obviously, some were more articulate, more inspiring than others. Lalas has become a more versatile commentator than he ever was a player. In van Nistelrooy’s case, it wasn’t that he butchered the English; it is simply that he had little to say that was of interest, and what he said seemed to have used a lexicon of only about 500 different words.

Clearly, the mishmash of accents was not without a political agenda. Whenever a Latin American team was playing, at least one commentator had a Spanish accent. The husband of my editor at The Chronicle, who is a soccer ref, speculates that this is a strategy by ESPN to draw viewers from Univision. He is only partially right. Fluent Spanish speakers go automatically to a channel where their language is the primary conduit. So the strategy might be a way to court English-dominant Latinos.

Every four years during the World Cup, we all become enthusiasts. But we’re also racial and national profilers. A couple of days before the Germany-Argentina final, a friend from the Institute of English and American studies at the University of Düsseldorf asked me which side I was rooting for. I confessed to her what I also confess here: for me—and I know I’m far from being alone—rooting for a team of this global magnitude is never without historical guilt. In my house (I’m Jewish), whenever Spain is playing, someone, often me, makes a reference to the atrocities committed by Iberian soldiers in the Americas in the 16th century. The Dutch invoke images of Vermeer, Van Gogh, Anne Frank, and marijuana. The surgical precision of the German players generates comments about Auschwitz. And the Argentines? Well, after soccer, the most popular sport in Latin America is Argentina-bashing, which isn’t hard given their pomposity. (A current joke: Can you imagine an Argentine who not only becomes pope but make a profession out of his humility? It’s a biblical miracle.)

So the final between Germany and Argentina was a duel of conflicted loyalties. And a display of physical control. Whereas the Dutch had been aggressive in their body language (Arjen Robben, in particular, but also their substitute goalie, Tim Krul), the Germans and the Argentines are always controlled, careful not to abuse the ref’s mood.

(By the way, last week I wrote about “sudden death” at the World Cup. I later learned the term had been changed by FIFA to “golden goal” because of its negative connotations. Talk about politeness!)

All in all, this World Cup was, once again, a lesson in international coexistence and an opportunity to reflect on the aftermath of the Tower of Babel. Borges was wrong: fútbol has nothing in common with stupidity. It is about intelligence, strategy, equanimity, and stamina. An event of this magnitude shows the globe’s languages in collision but also seeking—or at least pretending to seek—harmony and humanity.

Sadly, it is only a game.

Linguists sometimes get discouraged about the rampant prescriptivism in public discussions of language. This past week was no exception, as many of us watched with some dismay as both friends and strangers online delighted over Weird Al Yankovich’s new song “Word Crimes.” As this song showed yet again, it can take only the smallest spark to ignite a stream of invective about “abuses” in/to the language and about those who commit these perceived abuses.

There’s much to say about the attitudes and ideologies perpetuated by the song, but I’m not going to delve into it here. Lauren Squires has already said much of what I would say—and better—in her excellent guest post on Language Log, which provides a linguist’s thoughtful and pedagogically oriented response to the song and its reception. And Lucy Ferriss will talk more about the song in tomorrow’s Lingua Franca post.

Instead, I am going to switch it up and let my Pollyanna side take over this blog post. This seemed like a good moment to note a place where I think the public conversation is changing in some promising ways: the  conversation about code-switching.

Jamila Lyiscott’s powerful TED talk called “3 Ways to Speak English” hit the main TED site in mid-June, and it already has over 1.5 million views. In this four-and-a-half minute video, Lyiscott celebrates the three varieties of English that she controls, all important parts of her identity, and challenges the widely held ideology that links “being articulate” with speaking a standard variety of English. To be articulate, Lyiscott importantly reminds her audience, is to code-switch: to control multiple languages and/or varieties of a language and to move among them (sometimes intentionally and sometimes without realizing we’re doing it) as part of navigating different contexts and communities.

A student in my class this summer made sure I knew about this video on the first day of class, after I had gone over the syllabus and noted that we would be talking about code-switching. I was excited that she had already seen it—and seen it outside the context of a university classroom.

On the syllabus for this course (which is a first-year academic-success course, not a linguistics course), I included three pieces from NPR’s blog Code Switch, which started in April 2013. When I googled “code-switching” this week, the blog is the second site that comes up, and two of the pieces I assigned (“How Code-Switching Explains the World” and “Five Reasons Why People Code-Switch”) pop up as sites three and four. In other words, this topic has jumped the boundaries of the realm of linguistics—and I think this is a really good thing for students and teachers, among others.

The first of these two posts from Code Switch launched the site. It explains how the creators are thinking about the term code-switching and includes several video clips to illustrate code-switching in action. Early on Gene Demby writes:

You’re looking at the launch of a new team covering race, ethnicity and culture at NPR. We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we’ll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we’re looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We’re hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities—sometimes within a single interaction.

I have no quibble. Yes, when I’m teaching code-switching in an upper-level linguistics course, I will often differentiate between code-switching and style-shifting and get into other technical matters. But honestly, I think it is great to have a wider audience thinking about the ways that we all change our language in relation to different cultural and linguistic spaces and in relation to different parts of our identity in less technical ways. And if it helps to use code-switching as a broad umbrella term for all of that, let’s do it.

This summer I asked students to write part of their own code-switching story, just as Eric Deggans does in the blog post “Learning How to Code-Switch: Humbling but Necessary.” The students wrote powerful pieces that linked languages/language varieties to different aspects of their identities and highlighted their linguistic savvy as they navigate different spaces. The title of this post itself was inspired by the student who started his piece with more formal standard edited English and then wrote that sometimes it’s important to be switchin’ it up. (A colleague of mine in physics also successfully taught this unit on code-switching. I add this to say that you don’t need a degree in linguistics to facilitate this important conversation with students about linguistic diversity and identity.)

It’s exciting to me that code-switching is emerging as a less technical word that we can use in all kinds of classes to talk about our everyday experience with language in a way that legitimizes all the different language varieties that students bring with them to college, as well as the ones they will continue to develop in college. It also brings into focus the discerning knowledge students have about which of those varieties they choose to use in an educational context and which they reserve for other spaces and why. As we make some of that intuitive knowledge more explicit, we can then reflect together on the lifelong process of honing these linguistic tools and adding to our code-switching toolboxes—recognizing the cultural value of standard language varieties without letting that overshadow the cultural value of the many other varieties that students control.

The dinner-table conversation touched for a few moments on Usain Bolt, earth’s fastest biped, who’s in Scotland to ensure a win for Jamaica in the men’s sprint relay at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow (mission accomplished!). Apropos of nothing more than this brief mention, a 70-year-old guest at my table suddenly remarked with a scowl: “I don’t like Jamaicans.”

The conversation froze. Was this hate speech? The woman seemed serious: Somehow an entire nation of about 2.9 million people, plus its large diaspora outside the country, had incurred her generalized dislike. Yet she hadn’t actually made a defamatory generic claim about Jamaicans: It wasn’t quite like someone saying “That’s typical of the Jews,” or “Germans are such pigs.” Nonetheless, it seemed an extraordinarily prejudiced thing to say. An awkard lull descended on the table. My mind raced as the silent seconds ticked away.

The first Jamaican I really got to know was someone I met when I was 20. I married her. For many years I had a Jamaican mother-in-law and brother-in-law, and three Jamaican sisters-in-law who were raising my two lovely nieces and handsome nephew. My wife and I had Jamaican neighbours and Jamaican friends. We raised a son in North London’s racially diverse community.

Some of my Jamaican relatives by marriage were rich and successful, like Uncle Donald, an ambassador. Others were dirt poor, like the people who welcomed me warmly when we made a surprise visit to the settlement in the hills above Kingston where my wife had lived in idyllic rural poverty as a little girl (and where I was able to practice a little of my Jamaican Creole, a language that Jamaicans won’t usually speak with outsiders).

Further back than that was my time as a rock musician. My school friend Pete Gage and I formed a band fronting Jamaican blues singer Errol Dixon. Later we formed the Ram Jam Band, and often played clubs like the Flamingo in London and the Ram Jam Club in Brixton (named after our band) where the audiences were replete with Jamaicans.

Later at the University of York, where I began studying language, I met other Jamaicans, like the sociolinguist Pauline Christie. In all I’ve known hundreds of Jamaicans. And, it occurs to me (not that any general conclusion follows from it), I cannot remember one that I disliked.

Embarrassingly, the daughter of the septuagenarian bigot was present at my table. But in the event, she was the one who broke the icy silence. She asked her mother, “How many do you know?”

“Two,” said the woman. “Both in prison, actually.” (She had done some part-time teaching in a prison decades earlier, and must have encountered them there.)

My mind roiled with things to say, like: “Really! So you’ve met nearly a millionth of the population!”

But perhaps, I thought, it would be better just to explain that for many years I was a member by marriage in a Jamaican family (she didn’t know that).

Or maybe I should be more forthright: Throw the prejudiced old biddy out into the street and tell her never to sully my doorstep again.

Ultimately, with some exercise of willpower (or was it merely cowardly inaction?) I chose to simply remain silent.

It’s not my job, I told myself, to humiliate or berate or educate every prejudiced person I meet. I hadn’t been able to persuade my own mother to eschew racism (in her late 40s she had spurned my Jamaican wife sight unseen, on grounds of race alone). How successful was I likely to be with someone else’s mother, 20 years older?

Embarking on either a quarrel or a sermon would have embarrassed the daughter (a friend, who did know about the ethnicity of my first wife), and left the old woman sullen and angry. Probably baffled, too: Wasn’t she entitled to dislike Jamaicans, simply as a matter of personal taste?

In a way I feel that I failed a test: I had an opportunity to speak out in a social context against to a highly prejudiced remark, and I ducked it.

Yet in another way I’m proud I kept my temper and avoided a scene: The world doesn’t revolve around me, and I don’t need to seize every opportunity to demonstrate my ethnic broad-mindedness. Being morally in the right doesn’t guarantee being in a situation that is a suitable one for a public evincing of moral righteousness.

I still don’t really know whether to feel proud of my self-control and politeness or ashamed of my passivity and indecisiveness. Judge me as you think fit. But first think about whether you have ever been in an analogous situation, and about what you yourself would actually have said or done. Because when we legislate against hate speech on campus, we put in place moral quandaries of similar sorts that our students may sometimes have to face.

On Thursday, in the National League Championship Series game between San Francisco Giants and the St. Lous Cardinals, Giants outfiender Travis Ishikawa came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Jon Miller was announcing the game on the Giants’ radio affiliate. “Now the stretch,” Miller said. “Here it comes. There’s a drive, deep into right field, way back there. Goodbye! A home run. For the game. And for the pennant. The Giants have won the pennant and Travis Ishikawa is being clobbered as he comes down the third-base line and he is mobbed at home plate. It’s Travis Ishikawa. Travis Ishikawa with the Bobby Thomson moment.”

Joe Buck, calling the game for Fox television, was more concise: “Hits one into right! The Giants win the pennant.”

Buck’s second sentence, as all true baseball fans recognize, was an allusion to perhaps the most famous call in baseball history. Russ Hodges made it 63 years ago:

Lockman with not too big of a lead at second, but he’ll be runnin’ like the wind if Thomson hits one … Branca throws …

There’s a long drive … it’s gonna be, I believe … THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they’re goin’ crazy, they’re goin’ crazy!

(It’s interesting to me that Hodges would have said “not too big of a lead” rather than “not too big a lead.” I had the idea that “big of” was a more recent thing. Further research is called for.)

Both Buck and Miller were aware of the parallels with Thomson’s 1951 “shot heard round the world,” hit against the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca. Of course they were. Baseball is that sort of game

Buck said in an email to The New York Times’s Richard Sandomir that the win-the-pennant line was “was bouncing around in the back of my mind” before the home run. “How can you not? Even if it hadn’t gone out of the park, I was still going to say it ’cause it applied. It just made it cooler that the ball got out. You have to anticipate those moments.”

Sandomir’s article ran through a couple of other calls of Ishikawa’s shot, including the desultory one by the Cardinals announcer, Mike Shannon.  On Fox Deportes, both the announcer Pablo Alsina and his partner, Jose Tolentino, referenced Hodges, though not by name, which made it more awesome. Alsina said in Spanish, “And Ishikawa says …” And then in English:  “Bye-bye, baby.” I didn’t know till I read Sandomir’s piece that Ross Hodges’s trademark home-run call was “Bye-bye, baby” (he didn’t use it on the Thomson shot).

Tolentino also went from Spanish (“Say it, Pablo”) to accented English: ‘The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

While reading and listening to all those calls, one of the things that struck me was their tense: exclusively present, with the exception of Miller’s one oddly formal-sounding foray into the past perfect (“the Giants have won the pennant”). Sports broadcasting is one of an odd series of arenas in which the present tense flourishes; some of the others are screenplay and play-script stage directions, magazine profiles (though not in The New Yorker), contemporary fiction (most definitely in The New Yorker), song titles, and newspaper headlines (but not the articles they are on top of).

I believe I was the first observer to describe another present-tense hotbed, which I dubbed the “sports present.” It shows up  in post-game quotes from athletes and coaches, talking hypothetically and conditionally. I identified this more than 25 years ago, but it’s still going strong, as shown by the examples provided by my colleague McKay Jenkins, another devotee of the tense. This playoff season, Nelson Cruz of the Baltimore Orioles said,  “If you tell me before the series we’re going to sweep, I don’t believe it.”

A Philadelphia Eagles player, talking about one time in college when he changed the strategy for a play in a huddle, recently executed a rare triple-present:

“That doesn’t get quantified, but if I don’t change that call, we don’t get the play.”

Back to announcing, great calls aren’t always in present tense. Perhaps the greatest of all time is an interrogatory: Al Michaels’s “Do you believe in miracles?” And I thought of one that’s great, in my opinion, because it is in the past tense. That is an accurate speech act, after all, because the event being described has passed, and truth is power. Does anybody know the call I’m thinking of? (Hint: the sport is basketball.)

Update: As two astute commenters almost simultaneously pointed out, the present-tense call I had in mind was indeed JOhnny Most’s “Havliceck stole the ball!”

After Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants won the World Series Most Valuable Player award, Chevrolet called on a local regional manager to present Bumgarner with the keys to the truck that went with the award. On national TV. The man fumbled, lost his train of thought, and ended up blurting out that the pitcher was sure to like the truck because it has “class-winning and leading, you know, technology and stuff.”

Social media erupted, as only social media can do, in a festive mock-a-thon. The Twitter hashtags #technologyandstuff and #ChevyGuy exploded; the best minds of their generation emerged with creations like this:

Well #hardyharhar. Leaving aside that this dude was nervous (as well as being upset that his home team had just lost the Series), the fact is that he effectively expressed his meaning. There is certainly nothing wrong  or sketchy about the word stuff.  It has been used since the 14th century to mean “equipment, stores, stock,” originally in a military context. Shakespeare transformed it, as only Shakespeare can do. Marc Antony said, “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” and Prospero, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

John Donne reflected, “As soone as my soule enters into Heaven, I shall be able to say to the Angels, I am of the same stuffe as you, spirit, and spirit.” Sir Henry Wotton wrote in 1624, “I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuff.”

The “technology and stuff”-type stuff shows up in about 1700. Oliver Goldsmith availed himself of it when he commented, “Then they talk’d of their Raphaels, Corregios and stuff.”

A couple of centuries later, J.D. Salinger had Holden Caulfield observe, “I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.” That suggests the word’s euphemistic use. Donald Rumseld made it into The Yale Book of Quotations with the line, “Stuff happens.”

Stuff begat stuffing—that which is stuffed. And it lends itself to near-endless idiomatic variation, as in “Stuff and nonsense! Stuff and nonsense! Leave that to fools that never got beyond a sum in simple addition.” (Eliot, Adam Bede.) There’s the Right Stuff, doing your stuff, knowing your stuff, thinking you’re hot stuff, kid stuff, the small stuff (not to be sweated), and Jean Knight’s classic soul song “Mr. Big Stuff” (“who do you think you are?”).

It’s an endlessly useful word, helpful in referring nonspecifically to any collection or assortment, either material or conceptual. My understanding is that native speakers of other language, such as Korean, have problems with the noncount nature of it, and find it difficult to stop saying “stuffs.”

General Motors has not recently distinguished itself with a deft hand at public relations. But in this case it came through swimmingly.  On Thursday, the company embraced the hashtag and tweeted this on the Chevy Trucks feed:

Good stuff.

Residents of Barrett, Pennsylvania, sold t-shirts to help local police defray costs associated with a recent manhunt.

Back in September, Barrett Township, in Pennsylvania, was the center of a  manhunt for an armed fugitive and adopted the motto “Barrett Proud.” When the suspect was caught, in October, the entire region appropriated it and dubbed itself “Pocono Proud.”

This week The New York Times reported that after an 11-year-old Indiana boy, Calvin Clark, suffered a severe head injury in a football game, “his classmates came up with the saying #CalvinStrong, which soon popped up around the county, on T-shirts, on signs posted along the streets, and even on badges that were made and worn by first graders.”

The noun-adjective construction seen in both examples is most closely associated, of course, with “Boston Strong,” the municipal motto that emerged after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Writing on the Visual Thesaurus site, Ben Zimmer noted that “Boston Strong” sprang from Lance Armstrong’s “Livestrong” (which actually has a different syntax: verb + flat adverb) and the slogan “Army Strong,” which started in 2006. In the following years, Zimmer pointed out, its dissemination was pretty, well, strong, as witness:

• Country Strong: the title of a 2007 country song by Britni Hoover, later covered by Gwyneth Paltrow for a movie of the same name

• Jersey Strong: a phrase trademarked by the New Jersey fitness club chain Work Out World in 2007, repurposed after Hurricane Sandy for rebuilding efforts on the Jersey Shore

• Vermont Strong: fund-raising slogan used for Vermont after it was ravaged by Hurricane Irene in 2011

• Colt Strong: a motto of the Indianapolis Colts introduced for their 2012 season, changed to ChuckStrong after head coach Chuck Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia

• Aurora … Strong: the name of a community festival honoring first responders in Aurora, the Colorado city recovering from the 2012 theater shooting

• Newtown Strong: a slogan on T-shirts sold by a group raising money for the families of the victims of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

Participants on the American Dialect Society listserv broadened the discussion to other adjectives, bringing up “Built Ford Tough,” which dates from at least 1976, and the later “Dodge Trucks are Ram Tough.” Bill Mullins recalled “a line from the 1974 Planet of the Apes TV show. A human astronaut is helping an ape improve his farm’s productivity. He shows the ape how to build a better wooden corral fence. He builds one and says that it is ‘lock tight and bull strong.’”

It’s an odd construction. It’s not the same as “Me Tarzan you Jane,” where the verb to be is simply omitted, or a compound adjective such as “fork-tender,” “love-sick,” or “match-fit” (which Roger Federer, a few days ago, said he wasn’t). Rather, the space between the noun (X) and the adjective (Y) has various meanings: a reference to Y in the manner of X, an exhortation that X aspire to Y, or a more general invocation of the Y-ness of X.

It’s obviously effective. But at this point, X-adj. has turned into a cliché. And it’s become just too easy for this idiom to be used by idiots.

In October, the CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh reported: “Five football players from California University of Pennsylvania were arrested and suspended from the school after police say they beat and stomped a man outside an off-campus restaurant, then fled yelling ‘Football strong!’

“The victim was in intensive care Friday with severe brain trauma.”

So let’s give it a rest, why don’t we?

Stephen Potter

I told you about vocal fry. And you know all about uptalk? The inflection that was first discussed by Robin Lakoff in 1976, that was given its name by James Gorman in a 1993 New York Times article, and that continues to rouse the ire of right-thinking people everywhere?

Well, here’s a new one, which I started noticing a couple of years ago, among friends, colleagues, students, and National Public Radio interviewees (basically, my audio universe). It’s a way of voicing a list as if to imply that it contains even more items than the ones mentioned. 

Here’s an example, from an interview on the NPR show On the Media. The interviewer is Brooke Gladstone and the interviewee is health journalist Virginia Hughes. Hughes actually presents a trifecta—she uptalks at the beginning, vocal fries throughout, and, at the end of the clip, employs what I call “list lilt.”

Her voice goes higher on healthier and live longer, but it doesn’t sound like a question and isn’t uptalk. Rather, as I say, the rise suggests that people come to health stories looking for more things than just the two listed. Here’s another example, also from On the Media. The speaker is a professor named Seth Masket, talking about his involvement in a political film, and once again there are two items in the list.

In my observation, the tone can rise anywhere from a musical third to a whole octave on each named item; the magnitude of the ascent corresponds to the (implied) length of the list and also to a sort of ritualized, everybody-knows quality the speaker wants to convey. If an item is multisyllabic, then the end syllables go down a couple of tones, followed by the word and on the same note. The second item is up at the same note as the first item. As I say, there usually is no third item.

The list lilt is a vocalizing of polysindeton. That’s the rhetorical device of inserting a conjunction (usually and) rather than a comma between items in a list. You see it in the King James Bible, and Shakespeare, and Hemingway, and in these examples offered up by Wikipedia:

• “Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly—mostly—let them have their whiteness.”—Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• “There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places.”—Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

The list lilt is a pretty clever and economical move, allowing you to pack the rhetorical wallop of polysindeton without having to come up with all those examples.  Still, I’m not a big fan. It seems an unearned shortcut, a bit like the term “and so on.” If there are additional pertinent items, let’s hear ‘em!

But I’m more interested in observing and classifying this phenomenon than in judging it, and I’d be interested in readers’ sightings and observations. In the meantime, in the spirit of the great English humorist Stephen Potter, who in his book Gamesmanship advised unnerving one’s opponent by whistling a theme from Elgar, with one note wrong—and included musical notation for the passage—here is my rendition of the list lilt in the key of C.

Elaine May and Mike Nichols

“Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died.”

—Jim Carroll, “People Who Died”

I am getting so sick of people dying. I don’t speak of my friends—as Jim Carroll (1949-2009) so unflinchingly and memorably did in his 1980 song—but of writers, artists, musicians, actors,  journalists,  broadcasters, and other public figures whose work and presence have been an important part of my world. In just the past week, Mark Strand, Kent Haruf, and P.D. James passed away. Others we lost this year, in the literary arena alone, included Maya Angelou, Thomas Berger, Nadine Gordimer, Bel Kaufman, Galway Kinnell, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, quite a lineup.

Two deaths hit me the hardest, men “of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” The first was Tom Magliozzi, of NPR’s Car Talk, with whom I’ve shared my Saturday mornings for 15 years or more, and who with his brother, Ray, formed the greatest comedy team since the similarly-named Bob and Ray. (And we should all be thankful that the great Bob Elliott is still with us. Maybe he can team up with Ray Magliozzi for Bob and Ray II.) The second was Mike Nichols, who, of course, first became famous as half of another splendid comedy duo, Nichols and May. In the early 60s, he moved on to directing, first in theater and then in film, helping bring to flesh the texts of an incredible range of writers—Neil Simon, Buck Henry, Nora Ephron, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, merely to start the list—and eliciting the best work of an equally incredible range of actors.

I was moved to post on Facebook:

With Ephron gone, and now Nichols, who’s going to fill their shoes? Who’s going to mark the human condition with intelligence, wit, earned pathos, high craft, and the best sort of seriousness? Mike’s running mate, Elaine May, stepped away from the main stage decades ago. More recently, the Brookses (Jim and Albert) have inched away. Steve Martin turned out to be an introvert. The Woodman [Woody Allen] took himself out of the running. I have high hopes for Dunham, but she still needs a decade or two of seasoning. Does that leave us with … Lorne Michaels?

A number of my FFs (Facebook friends) offered nominations for a Nicholsian figure, the one that caught my fancy being Tina Fey. Not coincidentally, like Nichols and May, she came out of improv comedy in general and Second City in particular. Her writing on Mean Girls was surgically brilliant, and her shepherding of the great ensemble sitcom 30 Rock suggests that she may, like Nichols and Ephron, have the gift of gathering talented people together and bringing out their best work.

Another FF had this comment:”Sorry Boomers, all worthy art will die with you. That’s the end. (I’m kidding.)”

That might seem harsh but it actually made me feel a little better, in reminding me that not only baby boomers but all of us have generational myopia. We think that the figures we grew up with are uniquely great (and for me, they typically aren’t fellow boomers but rather from the generations before).  However, human capacities being what they are, that can’t possibly be true. (Can it?)

Mike Nichols wasn’t a writer himself but he had much to teach those of us who are. After he died, NPR replayed an interview he had done with Robert Siegel. At one point, Nichols talked about how coming to this country from Germany at the age of 7, not knowing a word of English, and furthermore having lost all his hair a couple of years earlier as a result of whooping cough, meant that he would always on some level be an outsider.

There’s a good part, which is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking, because  you’re constantly looking for the people who just don’t give a damn. And, you know, these increase as you go through life. And because I learned to hear what people are thinking—quite literally—because I needed to, I think it stood me in good stead. It’s probably why I’m in the theater. I could hear an audience thinking when I was in front of them, which was a terrific advantage, A, in improvising because I knew where to go and, B, in confidence because you could make them like you. A thousand people liking you, and you hear it—that’s not bad.

It made me think that one of the most important things separating good from not-so-good writers is the sort of ESP Nichols was talking about. In drafting a piece of prose, those in the first group can discern when a potential reader might be bored, or puzzled, or intrigued, and adjust the work accordingly. Those in the second just plow ahead. Put another way, if you’re self-confident and secure—an insider—writing probably isn’t for you.

George Gissing

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The new paradigm for creative folk, that is. Dispense with jobs, with their soul-deadening cubicles and time clocks (metaphorical or literal) and bosses looking over your shoulders—but also, admittedly, with their clockwork paychecks and medical benefits—and become your own brand. That meant establishing yourself online: with a blog or social-media presence or Huffington Post column. None of these offered any remuneration, and mounting and maintaining a website can indeed be pretty expensive, but they could offer great promotion for what you had to sell, be it book, CD, paintings, lecture tour, consulting services, whatever.

George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street, took a look at the (sorry) state of freelance, or hack, writing, at the beginning of the mass-media era. Maybe the new technology would offer better opportunities? With my professor’s job, I had the luxury of giving it a try. It was like the old joke. (This version is from the My Western Wall website.)

The melamed (Jewish religious teacher) of Chelm was speaking with his wife.
“If I were Rothschild, I’d be richer than he.”
“How can that be?’” asked the wife. “You would both have the same amount of money.”
“True,” he agreed, “but I’d do a little teaching on the side.”

Writing for Lingua Franca would never make me as rich as Rothschild, or even a third-string shortstop. But the folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education are honorable folks, and they pay me and my colleagues a darn sight more than Arianna Huffington pays her serfs writers. It’s in the same ballpark as the fee Calvin Trillin reported receiving from The Nation—the high two figures. And the bigger point is that this is a prominent perch from which I can express my small insights and hawk my wares.

If you look to your right and scroll down till you get to my mug, next to it you’ll see some book titles in blue. If you click on them, you’ll be taken to Amazon.com, where, with just one more click, you can have them for your very own. But wait, there’s more. Because I’m a member of the Amazon Associates program, these are special links, like the magic beans in Jack and the Beanstalk. If someone follows them and buys anything at Amazon, I get (in addition to my author’s royalty, if they buy one of my books), an additional 6 percent of the purchase price. Ka-ching. Or, rather, ka-ching-ish. Below is a statement showing my Amazon Associates earnings, which Amazon calls “Advertising Fees,” for the last couple of months. They usually fall well short of Trillin territory.

I direct your attention to the second link next to my picture, You Need to Read This, followed by an excessively long subtitle. That one demonstrates the extent to which I have gone all-in with the new-paradigm program. As the blurb notes, You Need to Read This is an e-book containing essays about writing and language I’ve done for Lingua Franca and other sites. A major publisher “published” it, which in this case meant providing an attractive cover and design, copy-editing services (although the pieces had already been copy-edited), and promotion.  I wasn’t given an advance (as is customary in paper-book publishing), but from the first copy sold, I was paid a 25-percent royalty (as against 15 percent in paper). And with an attractive price point of $3.99, the book was sure to fly off the virtual shelves.

Again, not so ka-ching. Last week, I got my first payment for the book. It revealed that it had been downloaded a grand total of 164 times. With Amazon Associates fees, I barely made it over the Trillin line:

Clearly, we are in early days for the new paradigm. Its economics are problematic, to say the least, but no one can deny that it has presented some interesting developments and opportunities. A few years ago, I started a blog on the subject of British expressions that have become popular in American English, like ginger, early days, go missing, and, most recently dodgy, my 372nd post. It might seem like a narrow topic, and it is, but narrowness turns out to be one of the things at which the web is brilliant (to use another Britishism). There are great blogs devoted to cover songs, to images of movie stars riding bikes, and to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture, especially tattoos.

Sometime this week, probably on Friday, Not One-Off Britishisms will get its one millionth page view. Who knew? I haven’t made a single cent from the blog, but presumably it’s promoted the Ben Yagoda brand, such as it is. More important, it’s been enormous fun, especially in the witty and knowledgeable band of readers and commenters it’s attracted. And I still have my teaching on the side.

Marvin Gaye

A couple of years ago, the BBC published an essay on that staple of British journalism, the terribleness of Americanisms polluting the mother tongue. The Beeb invited readers to send in their own pet peeves and got such a response that it published a list of the 50 that were sent in most often. The top five, in reverse order, were:

• Deplane.
• 24/7.
• Two-time or three-time, as in “two-time award winner” (though I don’t see how else that could be said).
• Least worst option.
• And the N0.1 most hated Americanism, as described by Steve, in Rossendale, Lancashire: “When people ask for something, I often hear: ‘Can I get a ... ‘ It infuriates me. It’s not New York. It’s not the 90s. You’re not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really.”

There’s no doubt that this formulation is often heard on this side of the Atlantic, in coffee bars, liquor bars, and informal eateries. I’m not sure what the objection is. Would Steve prefer the imperative “Give me a cup of coffee,” the gnomic “Coffee,” the declarative “I’d like a cup of coffee,” or the interrogatory (and very British) “I’m terribly sorry, but would it be terribly inconvenient to arrange for me to be served a cup of coffee?”? None seems ideal.

Moreover, like many of the despised Americans, can I get a is in reality of mixed national parentage. In an 1837 article in The New Monthly Magazine, published in London, one finds: “not even when I desire it, can I get a potato boiled to my liking.” An 1858 Hand-Book for Travelers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland, also published in London, gives the Norwegian translation for “Can I get anything to eat?” (“Kanjeg faanoget at spise?”)

The expression does seem to have taken on an American cast by 1902, when a Mr. Crafts testified to a Congressional committee: “I went up to the boy at the entrance of one of these lunch rooms and said, ‘Can I get glass of milk?’ He said, ‘No.’ ‘Can I get a cup of coffee?’ ‘No.’”

But my searches through the Google Books database, where I found the above quotations, suggest that the phrasing was relatively uncommon for much of the 20th century. It appears to have been propelled into prominence by Marvin Gaye’s 1963 hit “Can I Get a Witness.” The website Songfacts.com observes, “The title is a phrase commonly used in black churches and has a very spiritual connotation: When the preacher asks, ‘Can I Get A Witness,’ he’s asking the congregation for affirmation, often met with the response of ‘Amen!’”

It was not long afterward that I first encountered the culinary application of Can I get a. In 1974 or 75, my college creative-writing teacher David Milch (later a legendary television writer and producer) wrote and had the lead role in a short film titled, as I recall, Pilgrim. It took place in the Pilgrim Diner, an actual hash-house. In one scene Milch sat down in a booth and asked the waitress, “Can I get eggs over easy, with wheat toast?” It struck me as a cool way of ordering and eventually was recognized as such by multitudes, including Mickey Rourke, a 2003 New York Times profile of whom began: “‘Can I get a little bowl of water?” Mickey Rourke asks sweetly of the waitress at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, pointing down toward the small dog skittering around between the table legs.”

Possibly as a result of can I get a, the word get currently has a strong association with food. My daughters, in their twenties, will tend to talk of “getting” lunch, where I would normally say “having.” In the title of Jerry Seinfeld’s web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” the word getting has a complicated meaning, essentially: ” …  on their way to an establishment where they will order and consume … ”

There have been additional musical invocations as well. A 1998 song by Jay-Z, “Can I Get a … ” includes the passage:

Can I get a WOOP WOOP
to these n***** from all of my b******
who don’t got love for n***** without dubs?

Better not tell Steve.

(Credit: We Love Philosophy)

A few years ago, a Spanish psychologist and his team of researchers asked about 700 students to decide whether they would kill one person to save five. It was a version of the classic trolley dilemma: A small train is trundling toward five people on the tracks who will perish in the crash; you see this from your perch on a footbridge and realize you can save them by shoving one of your fellow pedestrians—a fat man—off the bridge, into the train’s path. Do you do it? Only 18 percent of the students said they would, when answering in their native tongue. But when presented with the scenario in a foreign language, one in which they were proficient, the proportion of pushers jumped to 44 per cent. (Not for this conversation, but has anyone ever tested whether responses change when it’s a skinny man you’d be sacrificing?)

The researchers proposed three reasons for the difference. Because processing the question in a foreign language is more difficult, perhaps the students were more tempted to choose a response randomly. But when presented with a less extreme scenario, where they could save the five potential victims by flipping a switch rather than personally pushing their neighbor in front of the train, the difference in responses shrank to one percentage point (81 percent would flip the switch in their native language, 80 percent in a foreign tongue). If the students were choosing randomly, you would have expected about half to push the man and about half to flip the switch.

Maybe, instead, it was an issue of culture rather than language. But the pattern held whether the researchers questioned native Spanish speakers in English or native English speakers in Spanish.

Ruling out those explanations supported the third theory: that people behave in a less emotional, more logical and utilitarian manner when operating in a foreign tongue. Albert Costa, the psychologist who led the study, puts this down to the context in which people learn languages—that is, as a child at home among family and friends, versus in school—as well as their proficiency, with further research showing the gap in responses shrinking as study participants’ foreign-language fluency rises.

Costa and others have already pointed out that this less emotional reasoning could be a business advantage: Here’s to corporations in search of heart-headed leaders looking across borders. As someone who spends a lot of her time among young scientists working hard to improve their English, I wonder what the impact might be on the world of research. The Munich University of Technology has (not uncontroversial) plans to hold all its master’s levels courses in English by 2020. This is seen by many as a headache for German professors and students alike, but there’s no denying English is the lingua franca in science and technology today, or that English-speaking programs will attract talent from abroad (students and staff) much more than German ones. Perhaps because these arguments are so sound, no one has yet felt the need to claim that working in a foreign language sharpens the scientific mind. But if we buy that, universities in the English-speaking world might also take note and consider forcing their students to try reasoning their way through problems in Spanish, Chinese, or even German.

Of course, science is not all logic, but I have a feeling creativity might also get a boost when we leave the familiar terrain of English. Anyone who has learned a second language knows the challenge of working around vocabulary you don’t know; surely this flexibility should transfer to other areas of the brain. Maybe that’s Professor Costa’s next project.

Meanwhile, here’s some art to accompany all this science: Akhil Sharma reading Tobias Wolff’s “The Night in Question,” which features a trolley dilemma or two of its own.

Gender neutrality, however loudly announced in official pronouncements or in the news, creeps into our own set of norms on little cat feet. In my case, I realized it had made another inroad when I was settling in at a symphony performance and heard the voice over the loudspeaker: Ladies and Gentlemen, please silence your cellphones and other electronic devices.

Why Ladies and Gentlemen? I thought. Why can’t he simply say, Symphony Patrons? Must he remind us at the outset of our socially assigned gender and its prescribed behavior (Act like a lady!)? And then, as the violins began tuning, I started wondering about the usual school announcements that begin Boys and Girls …  What about those? Why not Students? And why is it Boys before Girls but Ladies before Gentlemen?

Good thing the first piece on the program was Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” which managed to pull me out of the rabbit hole of such speculation so I could enjoy the concert. I returned to this pesky issue only when I learned of the City University of New York Graduate Center’s memorandum on gendered salutations. As a strong suggestion—not, the lawyer Saundra Schuster emphatically maintained, a mandate—the Graduate Center’s policy

is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties. … Accordingly, “Mr.” and “Ms.” should be omitted from salutations in any correspondence with a student, prospective student or third party.  For pronouns used in the body of a letter, refer to a student or prospective student by that person’s full name.  For example, in the body of a letter, you would say “Chris Jones,” when you previously would have referred to “Mr. Jones” or “Ms. Jones.”

Those of us who have written countless letters of recommendation or academic warning might find this directive problematic. For individuals within the academic hierarchy of the university, we have gender-neutral honorifics at the ready: Professor Jones, Dean Jones, President Jones, even Dr. Jones for the free-floating Ph.D. But what of the student, the administrative assistant, the career services counselor? Many of us already use “Chris Jones” at the first mention of the individual, e.g., “I highly recommend Chris Jones for admission to your graduate program in engineering.” But when we refer again to the individual farther down in the body of the letter, we make a calculated decision. If the candidate is relatively young, or our relationship goes back many years, we may use Chris as the name. But if the candidate—or, more problematically, the individual about whom there is some concern—is older, or our relationship is more formal, we generally choose the last name with some sort of honorific; the blunt use of the last name alone, e.g.,  “Jones has had some difficulty staying on task in recent months,” feels dismissive. Are we now to repeat Chris Jones … Chris Jones … Chris Jones throughout the correspondence? Feels needlessly repetitive. Other solutions have a vague Communist ring: Student Jones; Assistant Director Jones; Librarian Jones. Might as well go with Comrade Jones and be done with it.

The websites to which the CUNY memorandum sends its hapless recipients are no help in solving this practical problem. They discuss the singular they, ways of reconstructing sentences to avoid he or she, the use of gender-neutral terms for job descriptors, and so on.

One is tempted, then, to throw up one’s hands, or to label the whole effort, as The Daily Beast does, “a mind-boggling waste of academics’ and students’ time and energy.” Certainly, the CUNY memo presents a problem without a clear solution, and I have no solution at the ready. But 50 years ago, those who proposed Ms. as an honorific were laughed at; those who advised that terms like fire fighter and mail carrier should be used in place of fireman and postman were told such things would never change. The otherwise sound advice in John Gardner’s 1983 The Art of Fiction implies, to the 21^st century reader, a strange exclusivity:

It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it should have been brown. …  It’s feeling that makes the composer break surprisingly from his key, feeling that gives the writer the rhythms of his sentences. … The great writer has an instinct for these things. He has, like a great comedian, an infallible sense of timing.

A generation from now, I suspect symphony-goers (if there are symphony-goers, and I hope there will be) will be addressed in some way other than as Ladies and Gentlemen, and we’ll all feel fine about it. Maybe, by then, we’ll have figured out a respectful, gender neutral, nonclumsy way to refer to Chris Jones in the second paragraph of that imagined letter. That we don’t have a solution yet doesn’t mean no problem exists.

Scalia: Sarcastic

In the slim annals of professorial humor, one of the cherished entries concerns an anthropological linguistics conference where the speaker declaims, “In languages all over the globe, one finds examples of the double negative denoting affirmation, but never the double positive denoting negation.” At which point a guy in the back of the room stands up and says, “Yeah, sure.”

I’ve been pondering sarcasm since Adam Liptak’s recent New York Times article about a law review essay by Richard Hasen called “The Most Sarcastic Justice.” And just who might that justice be? Hello! Duh! Spoiler alert!! It’s Antonin Scalia. You were expecting maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg????

Sorry, don’t know what came over me.

Hasen scoured law-review databases for references to Supreme Court opinions and found that Scalia’s were referred to as sarcastic roughly seven times more frequently than the second-place finisher, Samuel Alito. Interestingly, as the Times piece points out, Scalia—a self-described “snoot” when it comes to semantics—might not accept the methodology. Hasen explains that he charted descriptions of opinions as “sarcastic or caustic … or a similar term.” Liptak found that the five occasions where Scalia has actually used the words “sarcasm” or “sarcastic” all denoted a more restrictive meaning: saying one thing to mean the opposite or near opposite. In 1994, for example, he argued that “modify” cannot mean “to change fundamentally”:

“Modify,” in our view, connotes moderate change. It might be good English to say that the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility, but only because there is a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm.

I share Scalia’s sense of the word. As I see it, irony is a more general figure of misdirection, encompassing a wide range of differentiations from the intended meaning, some of them subtle. Sarcasm is blunt irony: saying black when you mean white. But it turns out that meaning arrived relatively late. The word comes from the Greek σαρκάζειν, meaning “to tear flesh, gnash the teeth,” and the early citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, starting in the 1600s, all have the more general sense of caustic expression. Black-means-white isn’t suggested until a quote from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848): “Mrs. Firkin … flung up her head and said, ‘I think Miss is very clever,’ with the most killing sarcastic air.” (Of course, sarcasm in this sense was used long before that, to great effect by Shakespeare.)

That meaning has since solidified. John Haiman, in Talk Is Cheap (1998), defined sarcasm as “overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal aggression.” In Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks, the Allen character says the gang should follow his plan: after all, when they were in prison together, his nickname was “The Brain.” “But, Ray!” one of the cronies replies, “that was sarcastic!”

Sarcasm speaks to adolescents. It certainly represented the height of wit when I was at Albert Leonard Junior High School, where “Yeah, right” was a common rejoinder. My students, not too far from that age, find it an inviting route to written humor, in lines like, “It was just a typical exciting Friday night in the lovely town of Newark, Delaware.” I try to help them understand that doesn’t really work on the page. Occasionally, sarcasm can actually be funny, as when deployed by a person or fictional character we know to be obsessively sarcastic, like Chandler Bing, Niles Crain, or Basil Fawlty. When a character in Fawlty Towers complains about the view, Fawlty responds: “What did you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically … ?”

Group sarcasm can be amusing, too. It always gives me a chuckle when a pitcher puts a strike over the plate after nine consecutive balls, sparking exaggerated applause from the crowd. Speaking of mute sarcasm in sports, David Beckham was once sent off from a soccer game for pointedly applauding a referee’s call that had gone against him; mild-mannered NBA star Tim Duncan was actually ejected for laughing about an official’s call, while he was sitting on the bench. 

Clearly, listeners or readers aren’t always going to get sarcasm; false positives and false negatives are pitfalls. I ran into this myself when, texting with my daughter Maria, I would write something like “That was a nice dinner.” She said the period came off as sarcastic and explained that if I really wanted to convey that it was a nice dinner, the proper punctuation was either no punctuation at all or a single exclamation mark. (Two might come off as ironic.) As this suggests, detecting degrees of irony and sarcasm online is an extremely difficult task, and failing to do so can cause problems. Last year, The Washington Post reported the Secret Service had put out a request for analytics software that could detect sarcasm in tweets.

Good luck with that. Sarcasm on the Internet is so endemic and multifaceted that not even the geniuses at Google could create an algorithm to consistently and accurately parse it.

Appropriately, The Onion deserves the last word here. The website once ran an item with the headline “Internet Rocked By Blogger With Sarcastic Sensibility.” They had found one Charles Edo, who “has taken the Internet by storm in recent weeks with a series of posts in which he conveys his opinions using the rhetorical device of sarcasm, sources reported Thursday.”

“A couple weeks ago he posted this thing saying he really loved the Dexter series finale, but it was weird—he kept calling the episode ‘great’ while detailing all of its flaws,” said reader Ryan Zalch, explaining his initial puzzlement with Edo’s sarcasm. “Then suddenly it hit me: This guy didn’t actually like the show at all. Somehow, he was writing the literal opposite of what he meant, going way over-the-top with what seemed like praise to express his hatred.”

“It’s this whole new way of conveying ideas about something,” Zalch added. “It’s confusing at first, but once you understand how it works, it’s incredibly impressive.”

Not bad.

I picked up The Philadelphia Inquirer last week and read an article by Jeremy Roebuck about how a judicial ruling had revived the onetime local news anchor Alycia Lane’s long-dormant lawsuit against her former station. Here’s the line my eye was drawn to: “‘We’re back,’ Lane’s attorney Paul R. Rosen singsonged in an interview Friday, giving his best Poltergeist impression.”

Free speech attacked yet again. Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, angered somehow by the privilege of growing up in peaceful Denmark rather than war-ravaged Palestine, sprayed bullets from an M-95 at random into the Krudttønden cultural center simply because a debate about free speech was being held there. He killed a filmmaker. (Later he killed a volunteer security man at a Bat Mitzvah celebration just in case we had missed his motivation. We get it: Islamist radicals hate Jews just as much as they hate free discussion.)

Like most academics, I see free speech as an indispensable moral and political value. The only protection for any of us from oppressors who don’t like the way we think or talk is a universal principle that everyone is constitutionally free to use their linguistic capacities to express their opinions, without being locked up and flogged (like poor Raif Badawi), or of course murdered. Those offended by anything I say should keep in mind that the freedom permitting me to say it guarantees their freedom to rebut it.

For we all have to take the rough with the smooth. I hear things every day that make me furious. Remember Sarah Palin’s fear-mongering about Down’s syndrome babies confronting “death panels” if the government did anything about health care? Infuriating. But as a committed American, I of course had to affirm her right to run her stupid mouth, rather than threaten her with … umm … a death panel.

I was similarly tempted toward ire and indignation a few weeks ago when the soi-disant “terror expert” Steven Emerson appeared on Fox after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and informed a gullible presenter (and presumably a largely catatonic audience) that Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England, was a Muslim-only city into which non-Muslims simply dared not venture. Maddening. Fox really does send in the clowns when an Islam-connected story comes up. Birmingham’s million inhabitants do include about 200,000 Muslims, but (trust me) they allow the other 80 percent to walk the streets freely, and they permit the rest of us infidels to visit.

But rather than rage against the crying of the not-so-bright, perhaps I should take a lesson from the British online reaction to Emerson, which was genuinely charming. No furious how-dare-you denunciations or death threats for offending proud Birmingham residents. Prime minister David Cameron said that he choked on his porridge when he heard the remark, and called Emerson an idiot, but online Brits largely opted for gentle linguistic humor, turning this American moron’s self-inflicted embarrassment into something that could be relished.

More than one person wryly suggested on Twitter that the familiar British gambling and social club organization known as Mecca Bingo might be controlled from the real Mecca.

Whole buildings, claimed others, are forced to wear the burkha in Birmingham (and they tweeted photos of scaffolded buildings modestly wrapped in protective plastic sheeting, like the one above).

One person tweeted that the real name of the Birmingham rock band Duran Duran is Quran Quran.

Yet another tweeter asserted that only 75 miles away Jihadi extremists had forced the city of Oxford to rename the Thames the River Isis. (The Oxford part of the Thames really is called the Isis; the word is only accidentally the initials of the mass murder organization styling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.)

My favorite was the proposal that the name of the nearby town of Nuneaton alludes to Ramadan, being a corruption of “none eaten” (the state your food should be in at the end of your day of fasting).

Emerson rapidly admitted error and offered apologies to “the beautiful city of Birmingham,” as if he had made a quick trip there and been won over. He even claimed to be planning a donation to a children’s hospital in the city. He must be panicking that his reputation as an international terrorism expert is in tatters. He shouldn’t. I’m sure he’ll be back on Fox before long, asserting that Denmark has adopted Shariah law, or that Prince Charles is already a secret Muslim.

But apologies to Birmingham may not be enough to repair his reputation in the eyes of the British. He made the further claim that in parts of London “there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire.” (Any statement that comes with three actuallys must be true.)

I’ve never noticed these sartorial cops when walking around London in Western dress, but don’t take chances: Pack some Arab robes and headgear if you’re visiting London this summer. At least, if you’re gullible enough to believe brainless terror experts like Steven Emerson.

In the meantime, speak freely, and laugh a little. Irony and ridicule are your constitutional right, and provide adequate responses to the infuriating Palins and Emersons and blasphemers of the world. Make puns, not war.

A concerned Lingua Franca reader writes:

Perhaps it is just here in Gainesville, but I find that the radio reporters, especially those reporting weather, use the possessive pronoun when referring to time periods: “Your Friday will be sunny.” “It will be below freezing on your Monday night.” Is this modern usage? Does it happen in other places as well? Is it acceptable?

I’d noticed this particularly in robocalls and fund appeals from local arts charities—Support your Hartford Symphony! Support your candidate! Support your local NPR station!—almost always with the possessive pronoun emphasized. The first time I heard this use of the second person possessive, I felt a little teed off. Who said I had any ownership of these organizations or causes? Soon I managed to live with the practice, contenting myself with a sense of your not as an attributive adjective but in my Random House dictionary’s second definition: “2. (used informally to indicate all members of a group, occupation, etc., or things of a particular type): Take your factory worker, for instance. Your powerbrakes don’t need that much servicing.”

But your Friday and your Monday seem a bit presumptuous. I did a little sniffing around the Internet and found that, indeed, when it comes to days of the week, we seem to be owning them more often than we used to. As I write, CNN’s homepage announces “5 New Things to Know for your New Day.” TGI Fridays cleverly encourages us all to “Find Your Fridays.” A Fox affiliate offers “Your Town Fridays.” Soundcloud has offerings “For Your Friday.” Toledo News offers “Your Day at 9.”

English has always leaned heavily on pronoun possessives and on the second person. We don’t wash ourselves the face, as the French and Germans do (Nous nous lavons le visage; Wir waschen uns das Gesicht); we wash our face. And we don’t use a pronoun like one to indicate a typical person so much as we employ second-person address, e.g. You never know what will happen.

Still, this insistent use of the second-person possessive to refer to a day of the week, or a political party, seems to me to have a kind of collar-grabbing quality. It may partake more of the idiomatic usage suggested by Random House’s third definition: “3. (used to indicate that one belonging to oneself or to any person): The consulate is your best source of information. As you go down the hill, the library is on your left.” In these examples, as in your Monday and your candidate, nothing whatever is lost by shifting your to the except a degree of nuance. If I think the consulate is the best source of information (presumably about a specific subject), then it follows that I consider it best for you; if you or anyone else is driving down the hill, the library will be on the left. We don’t notice these usages, because they seem thoughtful in their personalization. The person using the second-person possessive seems to be focused on our particular situation more than on a general truth.

And that’s the source, I suspect, of the weather reporter’s quirk. You don’t get much more universal than weather, and reports of the weather were once considered the sine qua non of dull news. Now we have the Weather Channel, as well as louder, brighter graphics every day for the frenetic people who bring us wintry mix and overcast skies. No wonder they want to create the impression that they are speaking to their special someone. Ditto the advertisements I cited above.

When we’re grumpy (and note I am playing with a different pronoun here; I should really write When I’m grumpy, but I want you, my readers, to feel solidarity with what I’m about to say), we may react to WKBT’s “Your Monday Weather Update” with “Not my update, Buster, I’m headed for Florida!” But I admit to having been swayed by the local charity appeals. If it isn’t my local art museum, whose is it? And if it works as advertising, you can bet it’ll be around in the language for a good while longer.

The audience at a talk sees the visiting speaker ushered into the room to check the connection dongle for the projector and greet a few faculty acquaintances in the front row. A brief introduction, a 50-minute talk, and a small reception and perhaps a hosted meal. Two or three hours, all expenses paid. Easy work?

Not exactly. For the speaker, the experience is quite a bit longer. I have about a dozen lecture trips this year, the most recent at the Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany. The lecture slot (unusually early) was at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 24. Travel was unusually fast and trouble free. It went like this:

• –28h (lecture time minus 28 hours: 5:00 a.m. British Summer Time, Thursday, April 23): Wake, shower, dress, finish packing.
• –27h (6:00 a.m.): Sunrise. Call for a taxi; it arrives within minutes as usual. Great weather, light traffic. Taxi takes freeway bypass route because of roadworks in town. Speedy, but $15 more than usual. (Receipt fails to include the tip; that’s a few dollars of expense I won’t be able to document or claim. Memo to IRS: My travel expenses are always understated. On every trip I end up spending a little more than I can actually get reimbursed for.) At the airport by 6:45, and through security by 6:58.
• –26h: Egg-and-bacon roll and black coffee at the airport (neglect to get a receipt: another unclaimable expenditure). Café has a view over the runway: beautiful flying weather. Also free Wi-Fi that works. Check email, Lingua Franca, Language Log, Dilbert, Google News. Spot new Jack Reacher story in paperback on the bookstall at half price! Can’t resist buying it. Choice of reading matter now: brilliant formal semantics monograph, Continuations and Natural Language by Chris Barker and Chung-shieh Shan, or fast-moving suspense novel, Personal, by Lee Child. Which one will dominate my en-route reading?
• –25h: SAS flight to Copenhagen. Three-seat row to myself! Can’t remember when I last had such luxury. But only coffee and tea are free; even orange juice costs a euro. I choose black coffee; as does Jack Reacher.
• –23h: Descend into Copenhagen, a city I want to visit someday. But not today: just changing planes, and time zones: Here it’s not 10:00 a.m., but 11:00. Central European Summer Time. The transfer center is a bright atrium full of fresh green trees, quieter than a cathedral, the nicest airport space I’ve ever seen. But I’m on a mission: Grab a salami sandwich and find gate B10. Alleged free wireless Internet doesn’t work; registration programming glitch.
• –21h: Board an SAS flight for half-hour flight to Hamburg.
• –20h: Into Germany with no passport check (Schengen agreement). Heading north from Hamburg to Kiel on a shuttle-van service called Kielexx.
• –19h: Check in at Hotel Berliner Hof. Clean, functional room. Wireless works. (Neat fact: Showing my hotel key card gets me free rides on any bus in the city! All those rental cars kept off the city streets. Europe really knows how to do public transport.)
• –17h: Meet my host, Professor Lieselotte Anderwald; stroll along fjord to a rowing-club harbor-view restaurant where we watch huge car ferries leaving for Scandinavia while we dine with two faculty members and two smart graduate students.
• –13h: Back from dinner; final email check, then time for rest.
• –4h (6:00 a.m. Central Europe, Friday, April 24): Rise, shower, shave, excellent buffet breakfast. Check slide file; add a modification responding to the views of a colleague I know will be at the lecture.
• –1h: Get to campus, meet host. Desperate 15-minute struggle by three experienced local faculty to get projector responding to properly connected laptop. AV guy finally arrives and solves everything by pressing a single counterintuitively labeled key (“Enter|Mode”) on the remote. Slides immediately appear on screen.
• 0h: Showtime. Lecture roughly an hour (tried to compact it to 50 minutes but couldn’t).
• +1h: Question period. Intelligent questions from students; try to give answers that combine courtesy, content, and concision.
• +2h: Relax with host, chat awhile.
• +3h: Taxi back to Kielexx stop.
• +4h: Back at Hamburg Airport. Free wireless that works, courtesy of Turkish Airlines.
• +6h: Plane for nonstop flight to Edinburgh arrives late, but soon ready for boarding. Reading still alternating between Barker and Shan’s beautifully clear exposition and Lee Child’s almost unputdownable suspense.
• +8h (6 p.m. BST): Land at Edinburgh. Through passport control, out into the street, and onto airport bus in 10 minutes. Fantastic.
• +9h: Back in my own kitchen.

In total, then, not just a two-hour commitment for the speaker, but more than 37 hours in this case, over and above several days of lecture preparation. Don’t get me wrong, I like visiting new places and giving invited lectures, and this one was eminently worth doing. But being a visiting speaker is hard work.

It started with an email from my eclectic friend Wes Davis. He said he’d been reading Tinkerbelle, by, he told me, “Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, in 1965, took a leave of absence from his job and sailed a 13-and-a-half-foot wooden boat across the Atlantic, from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England.” He’d come upon a passage he thought would interest me. Manry is just starting out and it’s a beautiful day, “the wind strong enough to keep us moving along briskly.” He observes: “I told myself that if most of the days ahead were as pleasant as this, our trip would be a breeze, or, as the English say, a piece of cake.”

Wes sent me the quote because of my blog about British expressions that have entered American parlance, Not One-Off Britishisms. In particular, his sense (like mine) was that “a piece of cake” is as American as red velvet cake, so what was with Manry’s attribution to the English?

As usual in such matters, I turned first to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which yielded the graph below. (The blue line represents British uses of the phrase “was a piece of cake” and the red line, American uses.)

Thus at the time Manry was writing, it was still predominantly a British phrase, but that would soon change.

There’s a bit of noise in the graph — that is, it tracks not only the figure of speech but literal uses, like “What they served me was a piece of cake.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase is from a 1936 poem by the American Ogden Nash: “Her picture’s in the papers now,/And life’s a piece of cake.” But I feel that’s an outlier — merely a fresh metaphor concocted by Nash. I wasn’t able to turn up any uses until 1942, and all of the ones from then through the early 50s are English.

And specifically English military, and even more specifically, RAF. The first quote in the Google Books database comes from a 1942 Life magazine article written by an RAF pilot: “It sounds incredible considering that we were 150 miles from the target but the fires were so great that it was a piece of cake to find the target area.” The phrase, so redolent of the plucky fliers, really caught on. The same year, Terrence Rattigan’s play Flare Path has the line, “Special. Very hush-hush. Not exactly a piece of cake, I believe.” By 1943, it had become so well-known that Cyril Henry Ward-Jackson titled his book It’s a Piece of Cake: or R.A.F. Slang Made Easy.

As the Google chart indicates, American use started to pick up but often (as with Manry) with attribution to the English. A 1951 article in an American flying magazine had the line, “The radio operator’s weather reports show all stations ahead in good shape and as the English say, ‘It’s a piece of cake.’” Eventually, we took it to heart, and rightly so, since it’s a great phrase, nicely complementing easy as pie (which refers to a process, rather than a task) while still staying in the realm of baked goods. As with a number of other phrases — including bonkers, nonstarter, and ta-ta (meaning “goodbye”) — Americans have ended up using it far more than the Brits.

There’s a coda to the tale of a piece of cake. Fans of Roald Dahl may recognize it as the title of one of his short stories, included in his 1946 collection Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. That story is actually an extensive reworking of his first published work, an article in the August 1942 edition of The Saturday Evening Post called “Shot Down Over Libya.” In the piece, labeled a “factual report,” Dahl talks about being given the assignment, in 1940, to bomb a group of Italian trucks in the Libyan desert. One of his fellow flyers remarks, “Hell’s bells, what a piece of cake!” Another agrees, “What a piece of cake.” (This is retroactive evidence of an earlier British use of the expression than given in the OED, but can’t be included in the dictionary as such since the publication date is 1942.)

It wasn’t a piece of cake for Dahl. As the story describes, he had a bad landing and was badly injured. But the story was far from a “factual report.” His plane was not shot down, as the title asserts and the text strongly implies. His biographer Jeremy Treglown writes, ”He stopped twice to refuel, the second time at Fouka, where he was given directions that may have been confused by events. 80 Squadron was not where he expected to find it, and as dusk gathered over the North African desert and his fuel gauge fell, he decided to try to land.”

The 1946 reworking was presented as fiction but had a more accurate account of the forced landing. In fact, just about the only thing it has in common with the 1942 version is “a piece of cake.”