Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance has been controversial in linguistics and psycholinguistics for 50 years. The proponents of generative grammar presuppose it and rely on it, and have tried explaining the distinction many times, often unsuccessfully. I recently came across a neat way to encapsulate it that comes not from a linguist but from a mathematical meteorologist.

Psycholinguists (concerned with how language is really handled in human minds) and sociolinguists (interested in how language relates to social context) were horrified at Chomsky’s own exposition. The celebrated Page 3 of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) announces that the actual subject matter of linguistics is the intuitions about sentence structure of an imaginary “ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance.”

Older linguists were shocked, too. Linguistic science is concerned with depicting the unobservable grammatical intuitions of a fictive ideal person living in a monodialectal dreamworld where memory is unlimited and no one ever makes mistakes? Linguists whose training had involved the sternly empirical behavioral science of the first half of the 20th century saw all this as horrifyingly regressive, harking back to the bad old days when psychologists worked from intuitive hunches about mental life. Indeed, the very idea that linguistics was part of psychology appalled some, who had spent the previous decades trying to separate the rigorous description of grammatical systems from the experimental study of the behavioral and cognitive quirks of the imperfect organisms who use them.

And Chomsky was quite serious about shifting his discipline in a psychological direction: He insisted that intuitions were not just the evidence for theoretical linguistics (which was bad enough) but the subject matter. He even linked the subject back to rationalist philosophers of 17th-century France who spoke of “l’expression naturelle de nos pensées” rather than the structure of utterances, and “l’esprit de l’écrivain” rather than the content of texts. Quel horreur! Linguistics was being driven back to the time of Descartes.

Yet the competence/performance distinction is perfectly sensible; as a grammarian I couldn’t do without it for a minute. And I think it can be clarified nicely without any reference to intuitions, or to the “esprit” of an imaginary ideal being.

A recent Economist article tells me that Edward Lorenz, the pioneer of applied nonlinear dynamics, once distinguished weather from climate not in terms of averaging out daily weather over some longer period, but in a conceptually simpler way: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.”

Exactly what we need for the purpose at hand: Competence is what you expect; performance is what you get.

Suppose you want to state the facts about how many occurrences of the are found at the beginning of a simple definite noun phrase (NP) in English. The right answer is 1; the value is grammatical but *the the value is not. Yet counting occurrences of the as determiner in the standard corpus of 1987–1989 Wall Street Journal articles that computational linguists use for testing, we get a different figure: not 1, but roughly 1.0001.

Searching through over 2.25 million NPs beginning with the, we occasionally encounter phrases like the the previously most potent clot-dissolving agent, and the the Levitts, and the the loose ears of their opponents, and the the first two months of 1987, and the the utility, and the the 30-day grace period, and the the Soviet and Brazilian situations; and so it goes on. There are 231 occurrences of the the in total.

So if we hug the data too closely we get the silly conclusion that an average of about 1.0001 occurrences of the is right when constructing an NP with the definite article as its determiner.

The sensible view, of course, is to say that 1 is what we expect (because it’s right: English NPs really are limited to a single determiner), but 1.0001 is what we get on average (because writers occasionally type the twice by mistake).

That’s one way of explaining why Chomsky said that we cannot possibly base grammatical description on performance. A grammar is not supposed to predict the vagaries of what we will get. It is supposed to tell us what to expect. The expectation of one definite article per NP is the only one that we should take as our guide when trying to compose an utterance. In real life occasional repetitions occur (and doubtless very occasional errors of omitting the as well, though automated searching for those is much harder); but only because of sporadic and unintended mistakes. Not everything you come across is something the rules of grammar should allow for.

David Letterman played it straight after 9/11: “New York is the greatest city in the world.”

“What’s all this irony and pity?”
“What? Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?”
“No. Who got it up?”
“Everybody. They’re mad about it in New York.”
–Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

To paraphrase Philip Larkin, irony began in 1973, between Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Randy Newman’s fifth LP. The key text, for me, was the first paragraph of the preface of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions:

The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.

The kind of irony I’m talking about is verbal, which I define as a form of expression in which one makes a point or conveys an idea by saying something other than what one means. (It’s different from situational irony — the “Gift of the Magi” sort of thing — and dramatic irony, as in a novel where a character traveling on the Titanic excitedly discusses what he’s going to do after landing.). The term, which derives from a stock character in Greek comedy, the eirôn, describes a rhetorical device that obviously originated long before the 1970s, and is most famously employed by Mark Antony: “Brutus is an honorable man.” Anatole France, in the 19th century, adopted “irony and pity” as a sort of watchword; it got into The Sun Also Rises via the critic Gilbert Seldes. (The Language Hat blog has helpfully sketched out this history.)

Hemingway is the great modern ironist. His particular discovery and innovation was the invocation of strong emotion via (ironic) terseness. That extends to his characters, such as Jake Barnes, who remarks, “I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it.”

Irony wasn’t a mere technique for Hemingway: It was rooted in his sense that the standard literary language of his time was outmoded, false, and, to a certain extent, debased. He was the most influential stylist in 20th-century American literature, inspiring Raymond Chandler and other private-eye novelists, sports scribes like Jimmy Cannon and W.C. Heinz, “minimalist” short-story writers like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie (who early in her career incorporated as Irony and Pity Inc.), and Vonnegut, who, along with Donald Barthelme, expanded the comic possibilities of irony in the 1960s and 70s.

When I read Breakfast of Champions in 1973, the phrases that jumped out from the preface and gave me an I-needed-that slap in the face were “breakfast cereal product” and “their fine products.” I gathered, without being able to articulate it at the time, that Vonnegut was appropriating corporate and promotional language, thereby suggesting how debased it had become. But he wasn’t asserting that the products weren’t fine, which made what he was doing irony, not merely sarcasm.

And that brings me to Vonnegut’s fellow Hoosier David Letterman, whose final television broadcast aired last night. Think of Letterman mouthing the words “television broadcast” — or “beverage” or “ladies and gentlemen” or even introducing himself as “Dave” Letterman — and you get a sense that he was working similar effects, in the realm of the television broadcast. The opposite of irony is sincerity, and sincerity has for a long time been debased by TV talkers, with their sympathetic nods, creased brows, and phony concern. For years and years, Letterman was palpably not sincere in a single syllable he uttered.

Starting with and moving beyond the 1960s “put-on,” Letterman’s comedy generation did remarkable things with ironic poses. The list is long: Bill Murray’s smarmy lounge singer on Saturday Night Live; Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy; Albert Brooks’s faux standup persona; SCTV’s pinky-ringed Sammy Maudlin and Bobby Bittman (played by Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy); Martin Short’s Jackie Rogers Jr. and Irving Cohen on SCTV — and his whole self-presentation for the last 10 years; Letterman’s band leader and sidekick Paul Shaffer, with his groovy lingo, elephantine shades, and circus-clown sport coats. All took on the dissembling and self-aggrandizing affectations of an earlier show-biz era. (That this shtick played so well and lasted so long is testament to the pleasures and power of the old model. Again, irony and not sarcasm.) The younger Stephen Colbert went ironically all in to an extent never seen before, in his decade-long stint as a preening and blustering conservative talk-show pundit.

Of course, Colbert ended his run last year and will step into Letterman’s time slot in the fall, presumably playing himself. That’s appropriate. Irony is extremely hard to carry off over the long haul. Look at Hemingway, who was unable or unwilling to drop it and became a self-caricature.

Letterman’s pivot from irony has been a result not merely of getting older but also of a series of powerful events in his and the nation’s life. In 2000, he had quintuple bypass surgery and a glimpse of mortality. The following year was 9/11 (which Graydon Carter predicted would bring the end to the age of irony. Not so much.) Letterman came on the air less than a week after the attacks and delivered what was probably his most sincere televised declaration to date: “If you didn’t believe it before, you can certainly believe it now. New York City is the greatest city in the world.” In 2002, after his friend Warren Zevon received a terminal diagnosis, Letterman devoted an entire affecting episode to the singer; three years later came the death of his mentor, Johnny Carson. In 2009, after receiving blackmail threats, he acknowledged multiple affairs with staff members and devoted a segment of the show to a public apology to his wife and staff.

But the biggest happening was the 2003 birth of his son, whom he often talks about on the air, with warmth and emotion. Once, referring to his bypass surgery, he held up a picture of the lad and said, “This is the reason I think my life was spared, so I could be part of this kid’s life.”

In the run-up to his final show, Letterman has said what he means, a lot, expressing appreciation for his long run and gratitude to his longtime staffers and favorite guests, especially musicians. But it’s not that easy being sincere, especially for someone with so much irony in his blood. In these weeks, he’s tended to haul out go-to phrases like “Thanks for everything” and (when someone thanks him) “You’re too kind,” making him sound like he’s in a receiving line.

And, as inevitably happens when an ironist puts away his mask, there’s a bit of the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect. When Oprah Winfrey finally came on his show, ending their years-long feud, or “feud,” Letterman told her, “It means a great deal to have you.”

“Does it really?” she replied. “Or are your just doing your Dave thing?”

Ironically, you couldn’t really tell.

We are all going to have to get used to the word metadata. Explaining what it means in simple terms is quite tricky, for it is a genuinely abstract concept. (And let me warn the purists up front that in this post I am going to be treating data not as the plural of the Latin word datum, but as an English singular noncount noun like air, fun, furniture, information, or water: I will say the data is stored, not the data are stored.)

As a preliminary shot, one could say that in any domain where data has to be recorded, there has to be a scheme of some kind for recording it, and any description of that scheme–data about the way the data is organized–can be called metadata.

Examples will help. The metadata for a book will be the information on the reverse of the title page or in the library-catalog entry: title, author, year, publisher, place of publication, ISBN, and so on (you could add all sorts of other facts). Book metadata is what Google Books has been struggling to correct since its spectacular metadata errors started being publicized by people like Geoff Nunberg and Mark Liberman on Language Log (see here and here and here, for example).

For a phone call the typical metadata would be calling number, called number, time of connection, length of call, and so on. And for an email or a text message, sender’s address, recipient’s address, sending machine, recipient’s machine, date, subject line, and so on.

Crucially, “Call me Ishmael” is not part of the metadata for Moby Dick; that’s the first three words of the content. And “Hi, honey. Are you still at the office?” (or “Lou? Tell Enzo the hit is going down tonight”) is not part of the metadata for a phone call.

It is not clear to me whether Senator Rand Paul truly believes that important freedoms are being stripped away from Americans by the actions of the National Security Agency, which up until midnight on Sunday, May 31, was systematically recording telephone-call metadata for large numbers of mostly innocent Americans. The alternative would be that he is being disingenuous: He simply thinks his status as a possible Republican presidential nominee will be enhanced if he argues against the trustworthiness of government agencies.

But it would demean him to assume that. I think it is more charitable to assume he truly believes what he says. Though that means attributing to him what I take to be a rather stupid belief.

What secret stuff are they involved in, these ordinary Americans who believe that if an NSA computer had a metadata stash including the numbers and times and durations of their phone calls they could no longer live their lives in freedom?

I am solidly in favor of my government knowing everything about all the phone calls made by anyone anywhere. When the time comes for a terrorist to be identified before a bomb plot is carried out, I want everything about who has called who to be available to all of the law-enforcement agencies. My life could depend upon it.

It is unreasonable to demand (as Rand Paul apparently does) that the government should only be able to have phone-call metadata retrospectively, after obtaining a warrant for an intrusion into the privacy of a specific named individual. It may not be clear which individual to target. The NSA may need to comb through the terabytes of data about flurries of calls to certain numbers in certain areas at certain times, in order to ferret out the possible locations of hitherto unknown participants. Who knows what might be called for? People are finding these days that you can spot the beginning of an epidemic simply by watching the flow of certain words on Twitter in certain areas (“Think I might have the flu!”).

If and when a terrorist plot is suspected, I want law-enforcement agencies to have access to all possibly relevant information. Mere access to phone-call and email metadata seems absolutely minimal.

So, NSA, take my metadata! Stash it and organize it and sort it and search it at will. I’m not hoarding dark secrets about who I called last week. But I’m keen to make sure no more of my fellow citizens get killed by terrorist bombs. Rand Paul can scream as much as he wants; I am unmoved. I want my government to have a better chance of preventing terrorist plots. If Senator Paul seriously thinks that is less important than keeping it secret that cellphone 9374895 contacted cellphone 4284459 in a certain area code for three minutes at 4:17 p.m. last Thursday, then he’s nuts.

My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction writer, interested in how personalities respond to rhetorical maneuvers. It hasn’t been lost on me that the majority of highly rated comments in newspapers like The New York Times come from a handful of commenters, who seem to make a full-time job out of logging on to major journals and Internet sources to post comments that get up- or down-rated by a majority of comment-readers like me. I’ve also been intermittently curious about the posts that get deleted for “inappropriate content” as well as the unseemly rants that sneak through the Internet filters.

But I hadn’t made the leap from reading comments to considering blog-commenting as a specific form of writing until I came across the (to me) eye-opening post by Kevin Duncan on a site called boostblogtraffic. Apparently there is a long-range purpose to posting blog comments: to persuade popular bloggers to notice you, and to then make reference to your blog in their blog, thus giving you more traffic and more reader comments (likely by hopeful bloggers) posted at the end of your own story or list of funny cat videos or advice to recovered evangelicals … or whatever. Apparently we go round and round until we end where someone is trying to make money selling something, or perhaps not even then.

What sets this writing form apart from others?

The wooing.

According to Duncan, blog commenters are trying to score a big date with the blogger. Like any suitor, they do best to hone their approach: It’s possible, according to Duncan, “to stumble into marriage, kids, and a house with a white picket fence even if you turn up to your first date with a mustard stain on your shirt and use the pickup line, ‘Did you hear about Pluto?’ But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s likely.”

He goes on to warn against first-date faux pas like using a gravatar (which I just this second learned is a globally recognized avatar) as your image, because “you know you’re sexy. Show us that smile!” Ditto using a false name (“Using your real name on a first date is just the right thing to do”); dumping links in your comments (“Imagine you’re on a date and, halfway through, your date asks if you have life insurance”); failing to read the post (“Ever been on a date with someone from Match who didn’t bother to read your profile?”); and repeating what the post said (“Ever had a date where the other person repeated everything?”).

Better to greet the blogger, by name, unlike the date that launches right into talking about his day. Better to pay the blogger a compliment (“You meet your date for the first time. ‘Wow! I love your outfit,’ you might say.”). Be sure to add value to the exchange. (Here, our analogy diverges from romance to food: “No one cares how good the appetizers are if the main course is a garbage sandwich with no mayo.”) Finally, leave the object of your desire with a parting promise (“After a successful first date, each person is usually looking for a clue that the other enjoyed themselves … and when wooing a popular blogger, you’d be smart to let them know you’re interested in a longer-term relationship.”)

Once I got this far in my new understanding of the Art of Blog Commenting (let’s call it ABC, shall we?), I began fantasizing about how you, the loyal commenters of Lingua Franca, could begin wooing me. You could greet me by name (“howdy, if you’re feeling folksy”): “Howdy, She Who Is Carried to the Light.” (Only don’t repeat that; remember the warning.) You could pay me a sincere compliment, say on my effective disguise before the paparazzi. You could add value by sharing a personal insight (“Did you find something particularly relatable?”), when you read about my 12-year-old terrier. And above all, be sure to leave me with a promise. Promise me you’ll use the serial comma. Promise me you’ll stop haranguing me and my buddies about singular they, and instead you’ll start appreciating our tart sense of humor, our keen insights into gendered speech, and especially my clever titles.

Then, only then, baby, you’ll have me forever.

But wait. Didn’t Bon Jovi say love is war? Apparently so. Because Duncan advises, once he’s done with all the lovey-dovey stuff, that “great comments alone won’t catapult you to world domination.” But “comments are perhaps the most misused — and least understood — weapons in the ambitious blogger’s arsenal.”

Yikes. Let’s just be friends, OK? And keep your hands to yourself.

Preparing for my vacation next week, I posted a query on Facebook, which read in part: “Looking for suggestions for a couple of novels to really get into on vacation. Am not looking for tales of emotional distress, pain, suffering, etc. I can get that at home.”

I got a lot of recommendations, one of which included a plot summary that began, “Malaya, 1951. Yunking Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the …” Yo, what part of “emotional distress” don’t you understand?

Another respondent, a professor of English, wrote:

Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence (1920). Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (early 30s). I’m aware you may very well have read one or both, but if it’s been awhile they are great fun to re-read. Not to mention discover for the first time. There’s of course emotional distress in both, ’cause they’re novels, not lullabies, but it’s all in how it’s handled, yes?

Sensing a subtle (or not-so-subtle) dig, I commented, “Not lullabies, but yes, what I respond to and am in the market for are sort of smart grown-up bedtime stories. No attempt to be ‘real’ (which is a sucker’s game after all) but a consistent and intriguing world, plausible and intelligently rendered enough not to irritate you or make you suspend your disbelief, verbally inventive and precise, with a plot that pulls you in like a magnet, surprises, and ultimately satisfies.”

This sort of top-shelf “entertainment” (the word Graham Greene used for works of his such as The Ministry of Fear and Our Man in Havana, as opposed to his proper “novels,” like The End of the Affair) is pretty rare. And it’s a subjective business. Something that insults my intelligence can be very polite to yours, and that doesn’t mean I am or think I am smarter than you. I acknowledge that I’m picky. Millions of people enjoyed The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Goldfinch. Good on them, but to me the books were, respectively, unsatisfying, annoying, and very annoying. Most of the times I’ve tried science fiction, I haven’t gotten past Page 5. I have not dared try fantasy. I’m more inclined toward crime fiction, but I don’t go for series in which a detective or investigator reappears, unless they are written by Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, or Ruth Rendell. (Rendell’s standalone books as Barbara Vine are outstanding, too.)  I detailed some of the reasons for my antipathy in an 11-year-old essay to which I’m still getting cranky responses. The main one is that even the best of such series traffic in a subtle or strong hero worship to which I am not sympathetic.

So what else do I like? Maybe my two most enjoyable reading experiences ever were trilogies: Robertson Davies’s Deptford novels and John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People. (In both cases the second book is the weak link.) Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters.” Comic works (talk about subjective), like all of P.G. Wodehouse, and the academic satires Moo (Jane Smiley), Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis), Small World (David Lodge), and Straight Man (Richard Russo).  I admired and enjoyed the conceptual verve  and emotional heart of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life–and am planning to read Atkinson’s new “companion piece” to that book, A God in Ruins.

As I say, I got a lot of responses to my Facebook question. Based on a strong and convincing recommendation, I ordered Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. Based on the fact that the entire universe seems to love it, I ordered Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. It’s not a novel, but based on my own enthusiasm for his writing, I ordered Oliver Sacks’s autobiography.

I’ll be back from vacation in a couple of weeks, with plenty of summer left. I’d be interested in hearing what you folks enjoy reading in the hammock or the beach chair. And let’s make a deal: I won’t judge you if you don’t judge me.

Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. of the U.S. Marine Corps

Testifying before a Senate Committee last week, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., President Obama’s nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”

If you have had your face buried in philosophy books the last 30 or so years, the phrasing might have seemed odd — “existential threat” more likely calling to mind Kierkegaard or Sartre skulking in an alley with a dagger than geopolitical doings. But in recent years, the term has been widely used to mean a threat to some entity’s — usually a country’s — existence. The Obama administration certainly had no doubt as to Dunford’s meaning. Almost immediately after his testimony, Mark Toner, a spokesman for Secretary of State John Kerry, told reporters, “The secretary doesn’t agree with the assessment that Russia is an existential threat to the United States, nor China, quite frankly.”

The Oxford English Dictionary‘s various definitions of existential are all philosophically oriented. The most prominent one is, “Concerned with or relating to existence (freq. as distinct from ‘essence’), esp. human existence as seen from the point of view of existentialism; existential philosophy.” The first citation, in Danish, is from Kierkegaard himself, writing in 1846: “Den existentielle Pathos er Handling, eller Existentsens Omdannelse.” This was subsequently translated as, “Existential pathos is action, the reconstruction of the individual’s mode of existence.”

The phrase “existential threat” first pops up in historical databases in this context. In a 1965 art-history book, Werner Haftmann wrote: “In every one of his attempts to attain to essential reality, Van Gogh risked disaster. Such courting of self-destruction can be called pathological; Klee called it, ‘Van Gogh’s tragic attitude.’ Vincent’s painting was a response to an existential threat.” From a 1968 book, Religious Symbols and God: “Man, therefore, is seeking for being-itself, for some vital contact with that reality which possesses the power of overcoming the existential threat of nonbeing. ”

The first quotation I’ve found having to do with military threat is a sort of gateway reference, with the main context for the term still being philosophical/psychological. From a 1975 essay in the journal Social Research: “Such total wars, in which the enemy is satanized or monsterized and is felt to pose a horrible, existential threat, occur in preliterate societies, on very low levels of technology, as well as at more advanced stages of human development.” But shortly after that, the literal notion of a threat to a country’s existence starts to be more common:

•  ”With nuclear weapons, Iran would have the ability to inflict massive loss of life on American soil, along with massive disruption to the American way of life; it would also pose an existential threat to Israel.” —Robert A. Friedlander, Terrorism: U.S. Perspectives, 1979.
• “In Greenberg’s poetry the Arab has become an existential threat, a murderer who rises up against the Jew living in Eretz Israel, a ‘wolf-Arab’ or ‘animal Arab.’” —Zionism and the Arabs, a 1983 essay collection.
•  ”… countries shared a mutual, existential threat, namely the Palestinians.” Houston Chronicle, February 1986. (The ProQuest database provides only a snippet view, so I don’t know what the “countries” are.)
• An Israeli politician is indirectly quoted as saying that stabbings by Palestinians “pose no existential threat to Israel.” —The New York Times, April 1993.

That was the first use of the term in the Times, but it would very soon start its ascent to the promised land of diplomatic/journalistic cliché, as the Google Ngram Viewer chart suggests:

It will be observed that all those early uses pertained to Israel. That was generally the case in the early years of the phrase’s popularity, but lately it has busted out all over. Leaving out the Dunford quote, it has most recently been used in the Times to describe the exit of Greece threatening the Eurozone; artificial intelligence threatening humanity (this from Elon Musk); militancy threatening Egypt; and jihadists as a threat to Lebanese border villages.

I do find General Dunford’s use of the term noteworthy — there was a time when the idea of a threat to the United States’ existence would not have been thinkable, much less sayable. That time is past. Indeed, buried in the Reuters report of Mark Toner’s distancing of the State Department from Dunford’s remark was an ominous line: “Toner said Kerry did consider the rapid growth of groups like Islamic State, particularly in ungoverned spaces, an existential threat.” Ruh-roh.

(Thanks to Mike Mullen, the tennis coach at Swarthmore College, for bringing this up, shortly after he badly wrong-footed me with a backhand slice.)

I love this time of year in Edinburgh. The weather, of course, remains its usual disgraceful self: high winds with on-and-off rain the past few days. The gap between the David Hume Tower and the business school still funnels the wind into gusts that can lift small-framed people off their feet. In May this year we had hailstorms. But you don’t come to Edinburgh for equable weather. When I moved here from California, I vowed never to waste my time grumbling about the cold and the dark.

No, what I love about the coming of July and the approach of August is the gradually building excitement as the city prepares for the largest cluster of arts festivals in the world. The huge book festival in Charlotte Square comes in late August, but other events are much earlier: the Jazz & Blues Festival is already here, and half the center of town is barricaded off for it. But the core of the festival season, more significant even than the high-culture Edinburgh International Festival itself, is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (odd though it may sound to have a fringe as a core). The Fringe is absolutely enormous, dwarfing everything else put together. Quite apart from the music, experimental theater, burlesque, improv, dance, children’s shows, circus acts, and other genres, every standup comedian in the country (and quite a few from America and elsewhere) will show up in Edinburgh during August to try out the new shows that they will tour with in the fall or perform on radio or TV. This year the Fringe will host 50,000 performances.

How many will I be at? Well, proportionally, of course, virtually none of them. But getting tickets (they sell out at a head-spinning rate, and the queues are long) isn’t everything. I just enjoy the swirling crowds everywhere. The whole city is like one huge street party. Performers and their friends and supporters wander amongst the crowds handing out fliers and sometimes coupons for free tickets that evening if the house might have empty seats. Under the window of my office, the BBC sets up a big tent campus with performance space and ticket booths and coffee stalls and big screens and restaurants and bars and fast-food stands and seating areas. The area is thronged with people from morning till midnight. Some colleagues grumble, but not me. I love it.

Right at the end of the whole extravaganza (it’ll be on August 31 this year) there is a concert at which a live orchestra plays in the open air below a thousand-year-old castle over which a spectacular computer-timed firework show has been synchronized to the music. Everyone drinks wine under the stars, and weeps at 10 p.m. because it’s all over.

But before that, late in August when most of the comedians have obtained most of the laughs they’re going to get, the newspapers run stories about the funniest jokes the comedians told, and an official committee decides on the funniest of all.

As a linguist, I love jokes and standup comedy because of the wordplay.

Last year Tim Vine said: “I did a gig in a fertility clinic. I got a standing ovulation.” Deeply silly, yes, but it made me laugh.

Almost as silly as a joke by Bec Hill: “I used to think an ocean of soda existed, but it was just a Fanta sea” (junior-high level, that one, I admit it).

On a more adult note: Holly Walsh said, “I lost my virginity very late. When it finally happened, I wasn’t so much deflowered as deadheaded.” (Pushes the analogy between virginal innocence and horticulture just that little bit further till it falls off the edge, doesn’t it?)

“The other day, I went to KFC,” said Nick Helm; “I didn’t know Kentucky had a football club!”

I actually laughed out loud when I read one of Sara Pascoe’s lines: “You can’t lose a homing pigeon. If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, then what you’ve lost is a pigeon.”

Call me lowbrow, but I’m going to get tickets to a few comedy shows this August (I have no idea how I’ll choose which ones), and I’m going to laugh until the very integrity of my underwear is at risk. The Fringe is coming to town, and setting up shop right in the university’s central district, and I’m going to enjoy it. In September I will let you know about the linguistically cleverest jokes that were brought here this year. They’ll be silly, of course, and if you’re snooty you’ll look down your nose at them and turn to more serious fare. But hey, it’s summertime, and even if you don’t fancy a giggle, I certainly do.

Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler go for a walk.

In a video that is available online, you can watch Judith Butler, philosopher and winner of a bad writing award, speaking to a crowd at Occupy Wall Street. It is a short speech, pointed and incantatory, and Butler is brilliant.

A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone — the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker. This practice was probably introduced because there was a ban on the use of megaphones. During Butler’s speech, the repetition by the human microphone helps. It produces for us the image of her words being taken up by the public (so that we see philosophy as a public act) and we, her listeners, also get a chance to think through her words in the process. Critics of the Occupy Movement, Butler says, either claim that the protesters have no demands or that their impossible demands are just not practical. And she then adds, “If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible.”

Butler’s performance as a public intellectual is impressive because she is both lucid and difficult. (Is difficult really the word I want?) Put differently, I’m struck by her quick arrival at a knotty question and then the magnificent unfurling of, as if it were a flag being waved at the barricades, the repeated phrase about demanding the impossible.

Less than two years after that speech she read from her phone at Occupy Wall Street, I found myself seated next to Butler at a dinner at Vassar College. I asked her about that speech, and Butler said that she had written it “on the subway between West 4th and Wall St.”

I could not reveal at dinner that the reason I had asked Butler about her speech was my interest in having her talk to me more about the truth and pitfalls of the charge that academics are bad writers. In her performance on Wall Street, I had seen a retort to those accusations. Later, I sent an email asking Butler if she could help unpack the meaning of the phrase “of academic interest.” I chose that phrase because it seems to gather together rather succinctly the general dismissal of the work we do, or the questions we ask, and even the language we use.

Soon I received a response. This time Butler wasn’t addressing a crowd of protesters, and the register was understandably different. She wrote that “the phrase presumes that there is a firm line that divides the academy from the real world, and it is a way of marking a certain uselessness to what academics do or what happens inside the academy.” The phrase implied that what academics do makes sense only within their own, closed-off world, but, of course, part of what happens in the academy is the development of a set of questions about the world. Butler pointed out that the academy is sometimes the place where we call into question what we know and our sense of the world that has become naturalized over time. This leads to a certain disorientation that might be resisted by those who wish to remain in what Husserl called “the natural attitude.” Those who dismiss academics, Butler wrote, “fail to see that a reorientation toward the world” is also taking place within academe, one marked by greater knowingness and a heightened ethical or aesthetic responsiveness.

What form might this reorientation take?

In the documentary film Examined Life, we see Butler walking with the artist Sunaura Taylor in a wheelchair. Butler says to Taylor, “I thought we should take this walk together” and talk about “what it means for us to take this walk together.”

Taylor, who was born with arthrogryposis, says that she goes out for walks nearly every day, and that, like other disabled people, she always uses that word: “I’m going for a walk.” Butler asks her about the environments that make it possible for Taylor to take a walk, and in describing urban features like curb cuts and public transportation, Taylor explains how physical access leads to social acceptance. Butler’s questions help develop a discussion not only about what she calls the technique of walking but also a proposition that calls into question the alleged self-sufficiency of the able-bodied person.

For me, this is philosophy in action. In a discussion that is less than 15 minutes long, we have moved from what was a deceptively simple question about going out for a walk to a place where the ideology of individualism has been effectively challenged. Academic work here is embodied and urgent — and its language is as simple, and as complicated, as taking a walk.

The catcher and sage Yogi Berra was allegedly once asked if the name of the bottled chocolate beverage he endorsed was hyphenated. “No ma’am,” he is said to have replied. “It’s not even carbonated.”

Yogi was wrong on the first point, as you can see from this image.

But his confusion is understandable, so thorny can the subject of hyphens be. Even the Yoo-hoo folks appear to be hedging their bets, judging from the tininess of the hyphen on the label.

Hyphens are on my mind because a physician friend of mine sent me a draft document from a committee charged with formulating an “Expert Consensus Document on Patient Radiation Safety” for the American Council of Cardiology (ACC). One can see the thorniness already. Shouldn’t it be “Expert-Consensus” and “Patient-Radiation”? But that’s not the question for which my opinion was sought. Rather, it’s the proper form for the thing called, variously, x ray, x-ray, X-ray, and X ray.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen coined the name “X-Strahlen” for the radiation he discovered on November 8, 1895. The word was first translated in The New York Times early in 1896 as X-rays. By the end of the year, the Times had dropped the hyphen, but it gradually worked its way back in and was firmly ensconced by the 1920s.

Over time, a common pattern in English is two words/hyphenated compound/one word, as in base ball/base-ball/baseball. More recently, we’ve seen a shift from Web site to website — with, interestingly, hardly any use of the hyphenated form (and a lowercasing of the initial “W”). When William Carlos Williams wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in 1923, the one-word form of both wheelbarrow and rainwater had become common, but he unattached them — even putting them on separate lines — so we could more directly experience the component words:

so much depends
upon a red wheel
barrow glazed with rain
water beside the white
chickens.

However, the authors of the ACC document rightly dismiss xray and Xray: Compounds that start with a letter — “bringing his A game,” “B movie,” “C student,” “C-section,” “X factor,” and my own recent book, The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song — rarely evolve into a one-word form. (A notable exception is email, which is gaining on e-mail.)

In the matter of capitalization, the authors favor a lowercase x, and that’s where I begin to part ways with them. Just look at the “A game,” etc., list above — all uppercase letters. Again, e-mail/email is an exception, perhaps because, unlike the other examples, the e is an abbreviation. Along the same lines, I note that the n-word is more common than the N-word. C-section is C-section because “Caesarean” is a proper noun. The X in X-ray isn’t an abbreviation; Röntgen chose it to indicate the mystery of what the rays were made of.

The authors of the document and I part ways even farther, I regret to say, when it comes to hyphenation, or, more precisely, to the issue of logic versus comprehension. They write:

consider the two sentences: “We use x rays in medicine” and “We use x-rays in medicine.” Is the speaker referring to the radiation itself, or to the images generated by the radiation?  The first sentence uses the letter “x” as an adjective that describes the characteristics of the rays. The sentence refers to rays with properties of “x.” In the second sentence, the hyphen serves to point to a different meaning from the unhyphenated term describing the rays.  The hyphen joins two elements, neither of which stand alone to describe a radiologic image, but when joined refer to such an image. The hyphen serves to distinguish the images from the radiation, thus clarifying the meaning. We therefore proffer that as a noun, “x ray” is a compound expression using an improper adjective and noun to describe the electromagnetic radiation that is generated from non-nuclear volume of an atom, while an “x-ray” is an image acquired with the use of x rays. …

When used as a verb or an adjective, the word “x-ray” is hyphenated to clarify that it is a compound adjective or verb. For example, when referring to an x-ray tube, the x is meant to be combined with ray and not as an independent modifier of “tube.” Therefore it is hyphenated to signify this signify this relationship. Similarly, when used as a verb, the hyphen clarifies that the two words are combined to create an active verb. All the various uses are demonstrated in this sentence: “We generate x rays in an x-ray tube so that we can x-ray patients to produce x-rays.”

I not only appreciate but admire the thought and deliberation that went into this conclusion. But it puts forth a policy that cannot but lead to the gnashing of teeth and the pulling out of hair, not to mention readers who don’t follow the nuance and think the text is just inconsistent. On the other hand, what if the ACC followed the policy of The New York Times, the Associated Press, and The New Yorker and wrote “X-ray” in all occasions? I submit that not only would life be easier for writers and copy editors copy-editors copyeditors, but there would not be an iota of confusion or ambiguity among readers.

I expressed all of this to the principal author of the document. He replied, in part, that he learned long ago that “the physics community was supposed to use ‘x ray’ when referring to the radiation we call x. Distressingly, I found that even physicists were unaware of this nuance. And, most aggravatingly, editors take liberty with my manuscripts and convert all my spellings of ‘x ray’ to ‘x-ray’ or to ‘X-ray.’ At that point, I experience temptations of homicide.”

At that point, I agreed to disagree. In the meantime, remind me to tell you about my Twitter beef with the ace New Yorker copyeditor Mary Norris about the magazine’s hyphenation of “fellow-inmate.”

Teju Cole
Photo credit: Retha Ferguson

The use of the word prompt to mean incitement or cue has probably been around for 500 years or so, but its use in a narrower sense, as an instruction or directions for a writing assignment in class, is new to me. I swear I hadn’t even heard it until maybe a couple of years ago. “Professor, what is the prompt for next week?”

“Did you check the syllabus? Take this poem by Muriel Rukeyser, “Waiting for Icarus,” and rewrite it as if you were a reporter filing a story. Interview the speaker, etc.”

Everyone understands the idea of prompts. The use of #hashtags on Twitter, in my opinion, offers the most succinct example of incitement to writing. The novelist and photographer Teju Cole has used Twitter #hashtags to provoke public writing and image-making among his 190,000 followers. This exercise can become an extraordinarily creative, collaborative act. Cole is on a temporary (or maybe permanent) break from Twitter, but even as I started writing this post I saw that he was producing a new set of essays on Instagram, reposting photographs of the Mona Lisa taken by visitors to the Louvre, and accompanying them with his analysis of social photography, the ritual function of icons, and the optical qualities of digital compression.

Last year, on the first day of freshman composition, I introduced students to the essay form through Cole’s tweets about drones. Here was an elegant, eminently literary, entry into the contemporary world: a quick rewriting of the opening lines of the classics. I wanted students to throw away the five-paragraph costume-armor of the high-school essay. They were already masters of that particular form; they could now break rules and become inventive writers. We would explore other conventional as well as unconventional essays later in the course, but that first day I asked my freshmen to write essays about their first day at the college in 140 characters, #hashtag included. Cole also came in handy for my beginning journalism students, whether they wanted to offer critical commentary or report on news in more creative ways.

In a scene early in Open City, Cole’s award-winning novel, Julius, his protagonist, wanders into the American Folk Art Museum, and sees an exhibition of paintings by John Bewster Jr. Julius finds Brewster’s portraits of children unsettling. Later, he discovers that Brewster’s subjects, like Brewster himself, were deaf. Julius’s reading of the paintings, precise and slow, served in my class as a prompt for a visit to Vassar’s Loeb art center to look at the XL exhibit and then write about any one of the art works on display.

Careful seeing and critical commentary are part of the apparatus of Open City. The novel was praised by James Wood in The New Yorker for providing a rare example in contemporary fiction where literary theory was neither satirized nor flaunted to establish the author’s credentials. In return, the book has been popular in university courses. Cole told me that his readers in academe are enthusiastic about Open City because it “takes for granted some of the language that they use to think about the world.”

When I asked him if we could think of a writing prompt to which the response is the novel Open City, Cole said that a novel was an answer to a question or a set of questions, and you are only able to figure out what the questions are after writing the novel. And what did he realize after finishing his own book? That he had been responding to questions about mourning in the post-9/11 moment, that he had been working through how historical innocence and guilt affect personal innocence and guilt. And there was something else he discovered quite late: The novel was also “trying to be responsible to academic insight as part of the texture of life.”

Academic insight? Yes.

One of the questions Open City did not know it was setting out to answer, Cole said, was the following: “What does a novelistic space look like if the work of Barthes, Fanon, Butler, Foucault, Said, etc., are taken seriously as part of the world? Because, after all, they are indeed part of the world, and have actually helped improve it.”

According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than diagramming sentences, and she wasn’t all that far from the truth. As with the claim that Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is the longest sentence in the English language, calling Donald Trump’s explosion of language a sentence stretches the meaning of the word sentence. Verbal speech contains no punctuation, so the decision to punctuate this particular string of words as a single sentence was Slate’s alone. I count seven completed main clauses or compound main clauses (e.g. joined by but, and, a semi-colon, etc.), including the command “Look.” There are also several phrases, like “having nuclear,” that connect to nothing. The rest are adverbial clauses, adjectival clauses, or noun clauses used as subjects or objects or appositionally.

Reed-Kellogg diagramming is mostly a parlor trick, these days. Plenty of arguments make the case that it’s inadequate as a means to set forth English syntax. It happens to be a trick I know, and rare is the time I don’t learn something from it. Is it possible to learn something from diagramming the Donald?

Yes, I concluded, it is. First, I’m surprised that so much of a speech that sounds like pure blather actually does form a few coherent sentences, albeit fractured and interrupted by other thoughts. Second, If you can locate the main clauses I’m talking about, you can see, graphically, how much weight they have to bear. Take what I’ve pegged as the third main clause, the one that begins “that’s.” Those two words (one of them elided) have to carry the burden of an adverbial clause followed by a prepositional phrase with a noun clause carrying five verbs as its object.

Rhetorically, that’s as ineffective as asking me to pick up and carry a five-drawer metal filing cabinet. Ditto the clause (the second part of a very long compound “sentence”) that begins “the thing is.” It carries a compound noun clause modified by an adverbial clause as its predicate; moreover, it drags along an adjectival clause that has no fewer than five sub-clauses hanging from it, just one of them carrying two noun clauses in the object position followed by a whole architecture of complex adverbial clauses.

This isn’t fancy syntactical footwork on Trump’s part. It’s just bad rhetoric. The nouns that serve as subjects for all these clauses are—with implied nouns in parentheses—(you), uncle, you, they, you, they, they, that, you, I, I, thing, it, we, that, it, lives, you, (I), it, I, I, it, it, you, you, what, they, it, it, they, it, women, men, Persians, Iranians, they, they, who, that, nuclear, uncle, what. The verbs of the main clauses are was, (had), know, try, is, know, (is), is, and would have thought. My point in listing these words is that, if nouns (especially nouns as subjects) and verbs are the backbones of sentences, fairly weak backbones are straining to carry all these modifiers. The effect on Trump’s audience isn’t achieved via argument or even syntax, but by the repetition of those suggestive words they and it.

Finally, although my initial reading of the chosen section from Trump’s speech concluded that it was pure stream of consciousness, diagramming it actually yielded a couple of intelligible points. You may not agree with them, but here (I think) they are: Trump believes he is smart, as his uncle was smart, and he possesses the credentials to back up that claim. If he were a liberal, he thinks, “they” — i.e., the biased liberal media — would give credence to his intelligence, and would trust his views on nuclear power. As it is, the Iranians (and the Persians, whoever they are) are out-negotiating us — a truth he can perceive because of his intelligence.

Go ahead. Correct my errors. Or tell me I’ve wasted my time. It was more fun, at least, than listening to the guy.

Jon Stewart: “If you smell something, say something”

August 8 was a momentous day, at least in my geeky world. That was because The New York Times decided “bullshit” was Fit To Print. Twice before in its 164-year history (in 1977 and 2007), the paper quoted someone as saying the word, and it has appeared on the paper’s website, but its first straight-up print appearance, with no quotation marks, was in this sentence from Neil Genzlinger’s article about Jon Stewart’s final broadcast: “He delivered a monologue on the theme of bullshit, a word he used over and over in the span of a few minutes.”

The Times’s history with this and related words is interesting. In 1970, the legendary reporter J. Anthony Lukas was covering the trial of the Chicago Seven. In response to a police officer’s testimony, one of the defendants, David Dellinger, shouted out, “Bullshit!” Lukas knew the ejaculation was relevant, striking, and dramatic, but his editors, mindful of the paper’s “All the News That’s Fit to Print” motto, wouldn’t let him use it. Lukas’s solution was to characterize the term as “a barnyard epithet.”

This has been the New York Times’s motto since 1896. It still appears in the upper left-hand corner of Page One.

Incidentally, although Lukas is commonly credited with inventing the euphemism, a contributor to the Linguistlist listserv found a 1960 use in an Iowa newspaper: “But we trust that behind the scenes they are doing something more realistic. They might, for instance, remind Mr. K. [Nikita Khrushchev] that his barnyard epithets are hardly conducive to friendly talks.”

In any case, the formulation is elegant and has proved durable, especially in the Times, where it has appeared 87 times. Most recently, the paper last year referred to “a report that an Obama administration official used a barnyard epithet defying Hebrew translation to refer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

But “barnyard epithet” has a problem. It could refer to one of three things, each of which is slightly different: bullshit, horseshit, and chickenshit. Bullshit and horseshit are admittedly similar, but the former can have a praiseworthy connotation — as in “bullshit artist” — the latter lacks. “Chickenshit” — which was the word used by the Obama administration official — has two different meanings. The first refers to cowardice and the second, a favorite of World War II soldiers, was memorably adumbrated by Paul Fussell in his book Wartime:

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.

The Times’s decorum on this issue led to awkward moments, notably in 2005, when the Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published a slim book called On Bullshit. The Times’s initial tack was to ignore it, but that proved untenable when it climbed to the newspaper’s best-seller list and remained there for 27 weeks. On the list, the title was given as On Bull. Elsewhere in the paper, it was referred to as On Bull—-. In a profile of Frankfurt, bullshit was referred to, oddly, as “[bull].”

The change in policy has come at the right time. As the success of Frankfurt’s book indicated, bullshit is a growing problem in our culture and it should be referred to by its actual name. The Times reporter Dave Itzkoff posted on Twitter a transcript of Jon Stewart’s closing remarks, and it’s worth checking out. Stewart noted that we are subject to increasing amounts of “premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract.” He concluded with some “good news”:

The bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time — like an I-Spy of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.

To my mind, nothing could be more fit to print than that.

Jo Brand delivered Geoff Pullum’s No. 4

August is gone, and with it the Edinburgh Festival and its fabulous Fringe. The grand orchestral concert with fireworks over the castle was on Monday night, the climax of a perfect summer day. All the most ambitious comedians in the country are now checking out of their rented accommodation and heading for the train station or the airport. And I have promises to keep.

At the end of my July 22 post I made a pledge: “In September I will let you know about the linguistically cleverest jokes that were brought here this year.” September has now begun, and the Edinburgh weather has clearly announced that it is officially fall. I am a man of my word, and I have prepared a Letterman-style Top 10 for you: the best 10 jokes of the summer from a linguist’s perspective.

I’ll begin with the outright winner of the official award, judged by a panel of 10 experts, which unfortunately I think is rubbish, and barely even scrapes in as my No. 10:

10. I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans-free. (Darren Walsh)

It is not even clear that this is original: Since the judges made their award, another comedian, Pete Cunningham, has claimed that he wrote it years ago and shared it with Walsh via Twitter. But never mind; onward and upward toward No. 1.

A little better than the Hans-free phone joke is this appealingly childlike riddle, which some people thought highly of, and the official panel ranked in its Top 10:

9. What’s the difference between a hippo and a Zippo? One is really heavy, the other is a little lighter. (Masai Graham)

A major linguistic staple of the humor business is the pun. This one plays on the everyday meaning of a word that also has a technical sense in a specific domain, and I thought it was smooth and lovely:

8. Never date a tennis player. Love means nothing to them. (Matt Winning)

This one is also a pun, and is by Walsh again, but is much better than the one that got him the award. It’s very simple, and was enormously popular:

7. My cat is recovering from a massive stroke. (Darren Walsh)

Sometimes you can take a very simple cliché and put a sentence before it that makes it unexpectedly funny. It happens in this joke:

6. I spent the last three days alone, trying to learn escapology. I need to get out more. (Pete Firman)

This one does something very similar, and also shares the property of requiring an understanding of a technical word of low frequency:

5. Recently in court, I was found guilty of being egotistical. I am appealing. (Stewart Francis)

This one seems to completely change the truth conditions of the preceding sentence by tacking on a single devastating preposition-phrase adjunct:

4. I am the one in my family who does all the driving, because my husband never learned to drive. In my opinion. (Jo Brand)

Hits you right between the eyes. And another joke of that kind that made me laugh out loud has an even more wonderful surprise element to it. You need to know that Waterstones is an important local bookstore:

3. I went to Waterstones and asked the woman for a book about turtles. She asked: “Hardback?” and I was like: “Yeah, and little heads.” (Mark Simmons)

I really chuckled at that. It did me good. And yet somehow the cerebral and lexicographical slant of this next one, with its Cartesian allusion, convinced me to rank it even higher:

2. If you don’t know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. (Ian Smith)

Quiet and thoughtful, but beautiful. And that brings us to my No. 1. As a linguist, I really had to assign top place to the only joke that trades on a technical term in syntax. So here it is, my winner:

1. Let me tell you a little about myself. It’s a reflexive pronoun that means “me.” (Ally Houston)

Does the reflexive myself really mean the same as the accusative me ? Believe it or not, there is doubt about that among semanticists. In this example, me seems not to be replaceable by myself without altering the meaning:

With me the sense seems to be that in the dream world my consciousness inhabited J-Lo, who kissed a dream-world replica of Geoff Pullum whose body I did not inhabit. If you replace me by myself you get a sentence describing a dream-world J-Lo kissing herself. At least I think you do. So perhaps myself doesn’t have exactly the same meaning as me in every context.

But hey, I’m not going to let semantic pedantry ruin things. It’s a lovely linguist-friendly joke, and it’s my winner for 2015.

Once a year, Flushing Meadows in New York turns into a 22-ring circus of tennis, and people start asking me, as a lifelong tennis player, what all those words mean. I wasn’t going to write about tennis lingo in this blog, but a new acronym in the sport put me over the edge. So here goes.

The name of the sport itself seems to have come from the French tenez, or “take,” which is purportedly what the server used to shout before firing the ball cross-court to begin the point. The game we play these days, whether on the red clay at Roland Garros, the grass at Wimbledon, or the hard court of your local public park (which is where I learned the game), is known as lawn tennis, to contrast it with real tennis. How did it get real? Where, that’s where the debates begin. Some say real is a mispronunciation of royal, others that it is the real McCoy, still played (rarely) today as it was in the days of Henry VIII, indoors on a court with four walls and a bunch of different rules that I’m not bothering to learn or explain here. The scoring system, I understand, is the same as for the tennis I know: Love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, ad, game. Weird, right? Apparently Billie Jean King thought so, too, and when she started to get the hang of it, she expected (who wouldn’t?) that at the very least the score following 30 would be 45.

Beginning at love, we find another debate. Is it from the French l’oeuf, meaning “the egg,” a round image similar to the bagel no one wants in the form of a set lost six games to nothing? Or is it a polite way to say zero, allowing that we polite tennis players are out there for the pure love—or honor, which in Flemish is lof—of the game? I tend to think the latter simply because the French don’t actually say l’oeuf when calling the score but pronounce, quite bluntly, zéro. (Then again, despite the etymological connection of deuce to the French deux, when announcing the even score from which a player must win two points to take the game, the French choose to say égalité. Go figure.) The first point you win, or lose, in a game is labeled 15 because the initial concept was that of a clock: if you need four points to win the game, each point is like 15 minutes on the clock’s hour. Yes, some players say 5, but that’s shorthand, never heard in the major tournaments. Then there’s 30; OK. Then 40. Huh? Here again, a controversy. Billie Jean King believed that, given the two games needed to win in the case of deuce, the movement along the “clock” needed to be abbreviated, so the score moved to 40 in order to leave room for 50 and then 60. This convoluted thinking seems unlikely to me. Simpler and more reasonable is another shortening, as from 15 to 5, of 45 to 40. So Billie Jean was right, only the slang got the better of us.

There’s even a twist on the word game Bananagrams, in which players are allowed only to create words used in tennis. Sounds tough, but it’s amazing how many of those terms there are, especially if you count words like breadstick (the 1 in a 6-1 set), shank, gimme, and handcuff. You can’t count acronyms, though, which means that the new “word” I learned during this year’s U.S. Open, SABR, wouldn’t be allowed. I heard the term in an interview with Roger Federer, following his third-round victory, when he was asked if he would be bringing out the saber against the American player John Isner. He doubted he would, he said, and the interviewer made some remark about his surely wanting to be able to produce more twins. I shall leave it to readers’ imaginations as to what I thought, at that point, was the Fed’s saber. But it turns out that SABR stands for Sneak Attack By Roger, also known as the Kamikaze Return and referring to Federer’s new tactic of rapidly approaching an opponent’s second serve so as to hit it near the service line in a sort of half-volley, throwing the server suddenly on the defensive. As to how the Fed thinks Isner might deal with the SABR — well, tennis is a polite sport, and we shall tolerate no further innuendoes.

Last week I promised to explain why I was recently browsing in a little German grammar book I have owned since 1963.

Here’s the straight truth. I have been invited to lecture on data and theory next March at a conference sponsored by the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. And I’m ashamed. Not because I’ll be lecturing in English — that’s the norm for international academic conferences, so no shame there. And yet I have something to expiate.

My German is barely a smattering — insufficient to converse even on simple topics; and what shames me is that I once spent 18 months living and working in Germany. Let me explain.

First, I hope it won’t shock you too much when I tell you that I was a high-school dropout. High school bored me, and I simply didn’t try. A reasonable education was set before me in a decent school, and I spurned it.

Nonetheless, I had studied three foreign languages by the time I reached 16. How, you might ask, could I possibly have spent 18 months subsequently employed in a European country without learning its language to at least an elementary level? Teenage laziness? A bit, perhaps. But there was also a negative force that was largely beyond my control.

The determinants of language-learning success go beyond having an active human brain and access to data. Social-psychological factors intrude. Instrumental motivation is one: It is a useful encourager to know that learning the language will help you get ahead in your career.

Significantly stronger, though, is integrative motivation: Feeling that you like the people who speak the language and you want to be like them and share their life correlates powerfully with becoming good at speaking their language.

And there’s the rub.

The key fact behind my failure to learn German while among the Germans had to do with my employment. After dropping out of school I joined a British rock band called the Dynamos, and became a professional piano player doing nightclub residencies in the Rhineland area.

Almost every evening we were on stage playing music until late at night. And we spent most of the daytime together as well. The club owners who spoke to us used English. So did the staff in the clubs, and the fans who chatted with us during breaks, and the girls we had sex with after hours.

Our closest engagement with German came when seeking food and drink. But mastering utterances like “Gulasch mit Kartoffelklösse, und ein Bier, bitte” did not plant my feet firmly on the path to the language of Goethe, Kant, and Wittgenstein.

Restaurant interactions aside, no one ever expected or wanted us to speak German. In a sense we were expected not to: The whole point was that we were a band from Britain, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came from. That, at the time, was almost as good as coming from America. (Nobody wanted to go out to a club to hear German pop music; it was dire.)

To have been German speakers would have done nothing for any of us, professionally or socially. It might even have lowered our status.

Instrumental motivation? My professional goals would be advanced by learning a new piano riff off Jerry Lee Lewis or Fats Domino, but not by learning German.

And integrative motivation? No way. We didn’t want to be like German teenagers; they wanted to be like us!

Slogging through the grammar of der and die and das would have been a pursuit I did not have time for, one that would yield only negligible benefits.

When I moved back to England I had long hair, piano skills, and sexual experience, but only a negligible command of a kind of pidgin noch-ein-Bier German. I couldn’t conjugate a single verb; I couldn’t read even the headlines in a German newspaper.

Looking back now, it seems disgraceful. I will not even be able to engage in casual conversation with my hosts at the IDS in their own language next March. Let’s face it, I was browsing in my 40-year-old copy of Duff and Freund’s Basis and Essentials of German like a remorseful sinner fingering a book of Scripture.

Perhaps it is too much to ask of our wayward teenage selves that they should have been assiduous in doing just the things that would have best prepared us to be where we are today. Maybe I would never have listened. But there are a few words of belated wisdom I wish I could have dropped in the ear of the young Geoff Pullum before he set off for Frankfurt to become a rock ‘n’ roll pianist, never dreaming that he would one day be a linguist instead.

Slightly more than four years and a thousand posts ago, at the behest of the editor Heidi Landecker at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this Lingua Franca blog came into being. Since that time, day after day, our motley crew has mused, elucidated, queried, uncovered, advertised, challenged, and pontificated about language, more or less as Heidi and Liz McMillen, The Chronicle’s editor,  had envisioned. And you, dear readers, have responded with everything from dissertations of your own to completely irrelevant remarks, adventuring into niches we never had thought of. (Regarding niche, see Anne Curzan’s post of September 26, 2014.)

On this more or less anniversary it seems fitting to salute the erudite and elegant expression lingua franca itself. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it’s actually an Italian term, not an ancient Latin one, though the two look alike. Lingua  of course means “language,” but franca? A little history is needed.

Franca relates to France, but not in the way you might expect. The Franks were a Germanic nation, and when they conquered the territory of Gaul, some 1,500 years ago, their name became the name of the region, the France we know today.

And in the course of centuries, as ancient Latin developed into the modern vernacular languages Italian, Spanish, French, and the like, a trade language developed incorporating elements intelligible to all. And it was called, appropriately, lingua franca. Technically lingua franca  is a pidgin, “deriving its lexicon mainly from the southern Romance languages, first in the eastern Mediterranean and later throughout much of northern Africa and the Middle East,” according to the OED.

That lingua franca  is now history. But we use the term even today to designate a language or method of communication intelligible to all.

So here we have our own Lingua Franca, bringing together our intelligence, and yours, intelligibly. On to the next thousand!

But first, let me invite you to remind us of any particular post of the thousand gone by that has stuck with you, improved your life, or made the world a better place. Any recollections?

Refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, arrive in Bavaria. (Photo by Falk Heller/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

MUNICH — Spende, reads the sign leaning against a tent outside Munich’s main train station. Donations. Items needed for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been pouring into Germany in recent months. Germany, the final destination — the refugees hope — of long, arduous, often heartbreaking journeys from Afghanistan, Somalia and, in greatest numbers, Syria.

Bottled water
Baby formula (liquid)
Diapers
Apples

The list goes on. What it doesn’t include but might is Deutschlehrer (German teacher). Munich and, more particularly, the small Bavarian villages where many of the refugees are being sent lack the human resources to facilitate what politicians left, right, and center agree is a linchpin to any refugee policy: integration. A big part of which is learning German.

Munich’s residents are quickly ticking off what’s on the list; just a few days after Hungary began letting refugees through to Germany and Austria this summer, the city’s police had to ask people to stop bringing toys, umbrellas, and blankets for the refugees: They had more than enough. Whether what the teachers represent will be as forthcoming — a “Welcome to Germany” sign that won’t be furled up again after a few months — remains to be seen. Several politicians, including Minister-President Horst Seehofer of Bavaria, are gambling on a backlash, and even if Angela Merkel sticks to her stance that all refugees are welcome, she is careful to distinguish between “economic migrants” from the Balkans (not welcome) and people from still-war-torn lands.

Whether learning German is a priority for the refugees is another question. A young Bangladeshi I met on his way to the visa-processing offices was hoping to change his asylum status from Italian to German because he’d heard he could get by with English here — an impossibility in Milan. And he’s right, to some extent. The Technische Universität München, for example, is opening its classrooms to refugees whose studies at home were interrupted, and as many of those classes are in English as in German.

But for most jobs, at least some command of the language is necessary. Moreover, language classes might start to provide what these families and young men and old men need most: a path back to a more normal existence than what they’ve experienced over the past months and even years. A psychiatrist told The Washington Post recently, “I don’t think that all these Syrian children need trauma counseling. The social institutions that protect family, restore school and normality, are the most important things for mental health.”

Are Germans comfortable sharing these social institutions, potentially for the long term? Despite millions of Turks moving here since the 1960s, as well as waves of migrants (often with German ancestry) coming from the former Soviet Union, Germany has not come around easily to the idea that it might be a country of immigrants. And yet attitudes are changing, particularly among the young. The teen heartthrob of the moment is Elyas M’Barek, an Austrian actor raised in Munich whose father’s family comes from Tunisia. And where 20 years ago, “Kanak Sprak,” or Turkish-inflected, error-laden German, was a target of jokes and derision among native German speakers, it’s now considered cool in certain (non-Turkish) crowds.

The faltering German of the refugees might not fall into the same category, but it may prove just as healthy for Germans to hear as for refugees to learn — reminding the citizens here of their better selves, and helping them embrace the changing nature of their country, a land increasingly comfortable opening its doors to huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

I have recently encountered an endearing trend among high-school and college students, informally as well as in classrooms and in larger gatherings: collective finger-snapping. Once, in the middle of a lecture I delivered at the University of Oxford, someone began expressing approval by snapping her fingers, and within seconds the entire hall followed her. The same thing has happened in class discussions about varieties of love and ways of expressing them. At first the sound was distracting, but it quickly became evident that its purpose was congratulatory.

The tradition seems to me connected with spoken-word poetry. I’ve been at slam-poetry events where finger-snapping is the most visible way the audience connects with performers.

During the Occupy Wall Street movement, all sorts of hand signals were used to communicate, including “twinkles” (both hands raised with fingers pointing up and wiggling to indicate agreement) and finger-snapping as a sign of accord.

Sign language of this type, particular to a specific group, was also used during street marches and other organized community efforts, like the anti-austerity movement in Spain (also called Movimiento 15-M); public gatherings in Tahrir Square, in Egypt; and after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in France. In ancient Rome, the pollice verso was a type of hand sign used in gladiator fights to offer judgment on a defeated combatant. Exactly what the sign was is still unknown.

I’ve made an effort to study the finger-snapping behavior, and I’ve reached an early conclusion: Finger-snapping is done delicately, respectfully, democratically, always in the middle of an event, whereas hand-clapping, which is by definition louder and more disruptive, is invariably reserved for the end. Also, finger-snapping, when done this way, always lasts, in totto, only a few seconds and is generally repeated three times in a row.

Most people use their thumb with their middle finger, and only very few their thumb, index, and middle finger. I’ve seen only one person using the so-called ring finger. Maybe there is a difference between finger-snapping done individually and in unison with others.

When I was growing up in Mexico, snapping one’s fingers was an action inevitably connected with class and, occasionally, with gender and ethnicity — and, unfortunately, it still is. The image that comes to my mind is of a patron in a restaurant snapping his fingers to get the attention of the waiter. The pattern is perceived culturally as a sign of arrogance: The haves feel they can get the have-nots to do as they wish, when they wish, through this automatic gesture. Often, though not always, the patron is Caucasian and the waiter is female and mestizo. I can’t for the life of me invoke in my mind the reverse: a mestiza snapping her fingers to get a Caucasian’s attention.

Finger-snapping is occasionally linked to tics, especially in people with Tourette’s Syndrome and other chronic-tic disorders.

As a behavior, it is, of course, as old as life itself. It was connected with dance and music in ancient Greece (the word is apokroteo). In Mediterranean music — in flamenco, for example — finger-snapping, or pitos, is an essential component that is used in syncopated fashion, adding not only to the rhythm but to the magic. It is usually done on the off-beat, on 2 and 4. In glee clubs, it shows up frequently. In fact, I’ve heard the joke that among certain glee groups, snapping is popular because you can‘t clap and hold a beer at the same time.

To me finger-snapping is connected with a popular expression I hear often these days: “Oh snap!” Popularized by comedians like Tracy Morgan on Saturday Night Life, it denotes surprise, even bewilderment. I make the connection because several students of mine, as well as their friends, often say it, most recently during a conversation in my office, while snapping their fingers, as if to apologize for an error: “Oh, sorry. My bad! I’ve messed up!” Otherwise, it occurs in countless other manifestations of pop culture. Think of Thing in The Addams Family. In the comics, Robin of Batman and Robin often snaps his fingers when an idea comes to him.

I love the way finger-snapping has acquired this new quality of joy to express understated, restrained public endorsement. I love when it is done by the young in an event I participate in: It creates a sense of community. I love its spontaneity, the way it serves as traction, involving the public in the performance, bringing sound and movement to silence and stasis.

(image from theverge.com)

If Twitter users want to respond to a tweet, they have three options: reply to it, retweet it, or mark it with a symbol of approval. Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has begun changing that symbol from a star to a heart, and the word the symbol represents from “Favorite” to “Like.”

On its blog, the company gave an explanation for the momentous shift:

We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.

That would seem to be a reasonable position, albeit a tad condescending and literal-minded. But it was definitely not perceived as reasonable by a substantial body of Twitter users, who turned out to be really attached to the star. They protested that it was capable of expressing a far broader spectrum of meaning than the heart. The main coloring lost, tweeters asserted, was irony:

The discussion was carried out with a level of nuance and, indeed, irony that was impressive given the 140-character limit. But I have to admit that I remain unconvinced about the gravity of the change, and the outcry seems to me an instance of the narcissism of small differences. Bottom line: You can heart/like a tweet just as ironically as star/favoriting it.

But the tilde? That is a different story. People have taken to putting tildes on either side of a word — like ~this~ — to indicate, well, here’s what Joseph Bernstein had to say in a January post on BuzzFeed:

The most common usage of bracketing tildes — or at least the one I see the most in my digital-media-heavy, arch, sincerity-averse Twitter feed — is used to signify a tone that is somewhere between sarcasm and a sort of mild and self-deprecatory embarrassment over the usage of a word or phrase. …

one special power of the tilde is to let the enclosed words perform both sincerity (I sincerely want to share this with you) and irony (Man are we both sick of people who share or what?) without a cynical effect. It may be the only gesture on the Internet, short of a many-thousand-word think piece, that can synthesize snark and smarm into something … else.

Just before the Twitter change, the productivity/messaging app service Slack snatched the tilde away from its users. Now, if you put tildes around a word in Slack, the word will appear in strikethrough. @SlackHQ tweeted.

The BuzzFeed senior editor Katie Notopaulos was unimpressed, noting: “Strikethrough humor is sooooooo 2010.” She tweeted a poll about the change, as follows:

It’s unclear how many of the nine hearts her tweet got were ironic.

Guggenheim Musem Bilbao, Louise Bourgeois sculpture Maman in foreground. [[Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz, Wikimedia Commons]]

People whose experience of Spain goes back many decades tell me that Bilbao was once a nondescript little steel town on a polluted river, best driven past and avoided on your way to somewhere nicer. But today, as I stroll along the riverfront walk overlooked by the grandeur of the University of Deusto, and watch cormorants dive into the Nervion and come up with fresh white fish (river cleanups cannot be faked), it strikes me as one of the most attractive cities I’ve ever visited. And I think it would be even if Frank Gehry had never made his stunning contribution to it.

Of course, it is mostly his extraordinary wavy, bendy, titanium-clad Guggenheim art museum that has made Bilbao a world-class tourist destination. But the whole city is a delight.

My visit here was made possible by an invitation to give a plenary address at the conference of the Spanish Association of English and American Studies (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, Aedean). I don’t think I’ve ever had a smoother arrival: British Airways landed 10 minutes early, disembarkation was swift, passport control took maybe a minute, and five minutes after scheduled touchdown I was in a fast cab heading away from the dramatic airport building and into town.

Aedean has a thousand members, and a quarter of them attended the conference. I had interesting conversations: Spain has some top-flight linguists and English-language specialists.

It’s always a delight to be in Spain. Smooth roads; wonderful food; and a sense of drama and bravado in everything — bridges, buildings, stylishly dressed dark-haired women (not an outnumbered minority in Aedean, by the way; in fact they predominate in the upper echelons of the association’s leadership). And for me as a linguist, another thrill as well.

Bilbao is the largest city of the Basque region of Spain, and every public sign or notice is in three languages: Spanish, English, and the excitingly alien local language, Basque.

The origins of the Basque language are a perennial mystery. What we know is that it has no proven relatives at all. It is not Indo-European, and shows not a flicker of similarity to Indo-European. The form of its verbs and the ergative/absolutive nature of its case-marking system have suggested to some that it might share ancestry with languages of the Caucasus mountains, but nothing of this sort is convincingly supported by etymological evidence. It seems likely that Basque is a survival of a language family that was spread widely across Europe thousands of years ago, before the Indo-Europeans moved in; but for all we can prove it might have come from another galaxy.

Sp just to be around it, to see it on signs and occasionally hear it spoken in the streets, is a thrill for a linguist. I noticed that it is not immune to the penetration of foreign vocabulary: The unified Basque used for public notices has borrowed Spanish roots for such concepts as “airport,” “center,” “person,” and “reclamation”; but about 98 percent of anything written in Basque shows no hint of anything that might relate it to any other language on earth.

So my visit to Bilbao, which is where I still am as I write these words, has been a pleasure as well as a useful engagement with many highly intelligent Spanish colleagues who study the structure of the English language.

Don’t envy me too much, though. Air France (the one airline I really hate) cancelled the second leg (Paris to Amsterdam) of the trip taking me to my next speaking engagement, in Utrecht, Holland. So I’m writing this at a table in Bilbao’s tiny airport (12 gates, two urinals, one fast-food café) with seven hours’ waiting ahead of me. If and when KLM gets me to the Netherlands tonight it will be late evening: standard dinner time for Spaniards, but not for the Dutch. This will be a long, hard day. Travel really is work.

Postscript (November 14):  Eventually, late in the day, I made it onto a direct flight from Bilbao to Amsterdam. The 8 p.m. Intercity train from Schiphol sped silently past the cars on the freeway and I was in my hotel in Utrecht within an hour. I ate a light supper alone and retired to bed. If I had boarded the first leg of my trip to Amsterdam without knowing that Air France had cancelled the second, I would probably have been stuck in Paris for the night of Friday, 13 November. As the world now knows, a wave of machine-gun murders and suicide bombings by Daesh fanatics erupted that evening in five locations across the city. About 480 casualties, at least 129 of them killed. At breakfast in Utrecht the next morning even my limited Dutch sufficed for me to understand the front pages of the newspapers: “Terreur in Parijs”; “Het 9/11 van Europa”; “Panik in de straten.” Suddenly I realized what had made my wife (a night-time BBC World Service listener) send a mysterious text message to my phone at midnight: “So glad you are not in Paris tonight.”