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Books and Mortar

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A memorable (to me) segment on the old Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was “Share a Little Tea with Goldie,” in which a wide-eyed hippie, played by Leigh French, found various things to say “Oh, wow” about. I have been thinking about one particular episode in which Goldie excitedly demonstrated to viewers an invention she’d come up with. She took out her contact lenses, then wrapped wire around them in such a way that the wire curled around her ears and the lenses were in front of her eyes. She had, in other words, “invented” eyeglasses.

This has been on my mind because of a move Amazon took last month. The giant online retailer acquired some real estate in Seattle, filling the space with several thousand of the books it offers on its website, some knowledgeable clerks, and a few cash registers. Far out, man. Amazon “invented” the bookstore.

Amazon's brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

Beyond the obvious irony, the decision spoke to something that’s become increasingly clear: the report of the death of print books was an exaggeration. (No “greatly exaggerated” in the original Twain quote.) The most recent report from the Association of American Publishers, covering book sales in the first half of 2015, shows a 10 percent decline in sales of electronic trade books from the same period last year. Over all, print books (hardcover and paperback) have stabilized at about two-thirds of trade-book sales, e-books at 25 percent, and “other” (mostly audio) the remainder. Moreover, only a particular kind of electronic book has been consistently successful. According to Nielsen Bookscan, two-thirds of e-book downloads are novels, and of that group more than 60 percent are genre titles: romance (the biggest chunk by far), mystery, fantasy, and thrillers.

That makes sense. It’s been my experience, and the experience of virtually everyone I’ve discussed the subject with, that e-books don’t work very well for material (choose one or more of the following qualities) that is complicated or difficult, that one wants to remember, or that one is using as source material. It’s not just my friends and other geezers who feel this way. According to a review of the academic literature on the topic published last year by M. Julee Tanner of San Jose State University, even

the current generation of young people, the digital natives who should have no cultural bias for the printed word, report in survey after survey that they prefer learning from books to learning from screens; many report that if they do discover an important text on the Internet they are likely to print it out before attempting in-depth reading.

The limitations of e-books are not merely a matter of personal preference. The research has found that people really do retain less of what they have read on screens. Tanner gives several reasons that have been found for this, including:

  1. The importance of page geography. “When people are trying to locate a particular piece of information they have read, they can often remember where in a printed book they came across it — high or low on a page, verso or recto. and at a certain depth in a page stack. Paging back through a text to find a particular passage remembered by its location is the cognitive equivalent of retracing one’s steps through a forest, searching for familiar landmarks along the way.”
  2. The distraction and cognitive burden of hyperlinks. “Countless studies from the 1990s through the present have shown that readers of linear text actually understand better, learn more, and remember more of what they have read than readers of hyperlinked text.” The problem is aggravated, obviously, when one is reading a computer or tablet connected to the Internet and the whole virtual world is at your fingertips.
  3. Even though technology allows one to take notes on an electronic text, notes taken on paper are more effective. “Recent experiments … confirm that taking notes in cursive facilitates comprehension more effectively than typing notes on a keyboard, possibly because the greater speed of typing leads to verbatim notes, while note taking in cursive tends to be a synthesis of content in a reader’s own words.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Kindle Fire. I catch up on New Yorkers on it every night, and I greatly enjoyed reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 on it. It’s just that when I need to fully digest a nonfiction text, paper is the only way to go. That’s why I printed out M. Julee Tanner’s article, marked  it up, and had it on the desk in front of me all the way through writing this post.

 

 

 

 


Sing We

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carol_1541986cI grew up singing carols, and I am still singing them, these days in an interfaith chorus that gives an annual holiday concert with audience participation. Returning to the songs of one’s youth is always a sentimental experience. But with carols, particularly, I recall simultaneously relishing the rich language in these little ditties and feeling confused by what I came to understand as inverted syntax.

Poetry, and poetic language, often move the parts of a sentence into places different from ordinary prose. The rhyme may call for it, or the meter, or the desire to emphasize an image or phrase that might otherwise be lost. Still, when you consider that children sing many or most of these carols, the sheer quantity of inverted syntax is impressive. A sampling, with the relevant phrases in bold:

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.

Herod the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

Don we now our gay apparel

They looked up and saw a star
Shining in the east beyond them far,
And to the earth it gave great light

The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear’d and the soul felt its worth.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand

For many years, I thought “Don” was a person with some part to play in “Deck the Halls.” I thought the king was charging the day. I wondered why faith was beaming with hearts. None of this syntactical misunderstanding bothered me; I assumed that when I got older, I would get it. Some of the inversions, though, coupled with confusion over punctuation, manipulate the audience participants into singing a sort of sweet nonsense. Take the following lyrics, found online, for a famous carol:

Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace …

See the period after “bright”? It echoes the pause everyone takes at that point in the song. And this did bother me, even as a kid. What was round yon Virgin? I wondered. There seemed to be three people in this tableau — a Virgin, a Mother, and a Child. Add archaic language, and you have one member of my chorus who grew up thinking it was “Round John Virgin,” sort of like Wild Bill Hickok (especially confusing when you consider that the dad’s name is Joseph). Another thought a round young virgin (perhaps pregnant?) had joined the mother and child and was sleeping.

Choruses like mine attempt to communicate the more logical structure of the lyrics by way of pauses and sustained breaths; in the printed version, the result might be something like this

Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace …

Or perhaps, if holy infant is an apostrophe and not an appositive,

All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace. …

Either way, at least round is a preposition, not an adjective, the light shines round the people, and only two of them are in the scene.

Confusion notwithstanding, and religion to one side (which I know is difficult to maintain; these are Christian hymns), I think giving children inverted syntax to play with is a good thing. Most, it’s true, will sing lyrics like these and not think much about how the words actually fall into sentences. But then, most will not grow up to read Lingua Franca. Those with our strange proclivities may find puzzles to solve, in these carols, that could lead them from Joyful, all ye nations rise to a knack for the periodic sentence.

Meanwhile, God rest ye merry whilst ye Christmas or another holiday keep!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our National Anthimeria

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6a00d8341c4f9453ef01a73d6f4c92970dThanks, Nancy Friedman. Some time ago, I read a blog post by the naming consultant about the trend of anthimeria in advertising — that is, using a word as a different part of speech than normal, as in Turner Classic Movies’ “Let’s Movie” and Nutella’s “Spread the Happy.” (Movie, a noun, is being used as a verb, and happy, an adjective, as a noun.)  Friedman has collected examples for a long time, and a couple of months ago I started following her lead.

All I can say is, enough already. Ads using anthimeria are everywhere. They can be divided into several categories, and I’ll start with the most popular. Please note that merely using anthimeria isn’t the only way these copywriters are unoriginal. Quite a few of them of them anthimeria the same word (most egregiously, better), and at least one has copied somebody else’s slogan, word for word.

Adjective Into Noun

  • “More Happy” — Sonos
  • “Bring the Good” — Organic Valley Milk
  • “Watch All the Awesome” — go90
  • “Where Awesome Happens” — Xfinity
  • “We Put the Good in Morning” — Tropicana
  • “Ramp Up the Delicious” — Hamilton Beach
  • “We Believe in Possible” — St. Mary’s Hospital, New York
  • “Give Merry” — CVS
  • “Your Playful Is Showing” — Otezla
  • “Founded on Fresh” — Subway
  • “Better Starts Now” — Citizen Watches
  • “Sears — Where Better Happens”
  • “For Friends Who Reach for Better” — Michelob
  • “The Business of Better” — Vonage
  • “Better Matters” and the annoyingly tautological “Better Is Better” — Verizon

Noun Into Verb

  • “Come TV with Us” — Hulu
  • “How to Television” — Amazon
  • “Let’s Holiday” — Skyy vodka
  • “Let’s Holiday” (again) — Chico’s clothing stores
  • “Be Ready to Winter” — Infiniti
  • “How Do You Breakfast?” — Hamilton Beach

Adjective Into Adverb

  • “Live Fearless” — Blue Cross Blue Shield
  • “Build it Beautiful” — Squarespace

Interjection Into Noun

  • “More Aaah” — Canada Dry

Canada Dry was at least a little original. Likewise, I was a tad impressed with the slogan of my local public radio station, WHYY — “Get More Interesting.” It uses anthimeria to make interesting into a noun, but there’s also a double meaning: “Become more interesting.” Similar plays on words are used by Staples (“Where More Happens”) and Lufthansa (“Discover More”).

The trend has pursued me to the other side of the world. I am writing this from Australia, where I’m teaching a study-abroad program. I was alarmed to alight in the Melbourne airport last week, look up, and see an ad for a company called Pure Storage: “Impossible Has Left the Building.”

I am second to no one in my appreciation for anthimeria and the way it gooses the English language. Without it we would not be able to go for a run or have a go at something. Shakespeare would not have been able to write half of his lines. We would not have such literary works as Kenneth Koch’s book about teaching poetry to kids, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?,  or MTV’s series Pimp My Ride. Language peevers would not be able to peeve on impact as a verb (as in times of yore they peeved on contact as a verb).

Even the first hundred or so uses of anthimeria in ads could be seen as clever. But at this point, it’s a lazy, played-out cliché, and any copywriters who continue to resort to it should be ashamed of themselves.

Them, Themself, and They

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stan carey conspiracy keanu reeves meme - singular themself as a descriptivist plotThe Lingua Franca bloggers Allen Metcalf and Anne Curzan have written about the American Dialect Society’s laudable selection of singular they as Word of the Year. But they, like most commenting on the topic, have not addressed a pressing and, to a large extent unresolved, issue: the word’s corresponding “emphatic and reflexive pronoun” (in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary).

Dennis Baron and others have shown that they has been used to refer to singular nouns for centuries; the emphatic-reflexive dilemma was commented on as long ago as 1926, by H.W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage. He starts with a quote from an (unnamed) published source — “Everyone without further delay gave themselves up to rejoicing” — and notes that everyone, each, anyone, no one, and like words “are all singular; that is undisputed.” The discussion that follows is, as usual with Fowler, worth quoting at length.

In a perfect language there would exist pronouns and possessives that were of as doubtless gender as they & yet were, like them, singular; i.e., it would have words meaning him-or-her, himself-or-herself, his or her. But … we lack the French power in saying in one word his-or-her. There are three makeshifts: A, as anyone can see for himself or herself ; B, as anyone can for themselves; and C, as anyone can see for himself.

Here Fowler’s 1926 worldview comes into play:

No one who can help it chooses A; it is correct, & is sometimes necessary, but it is so clumsy as to be ridiculous except when explicitness is urgent, & it usually sounds like a bit of pedantic humor. B is the popular solution [interesting!]; it sets the literary man’s teeth on edge, & he exerts himself to give us the same meaning in some entirely different way if he is not prepared, as he usually is, to risk C. … C is here recommended. It involves the convention that where a matter of sex is not conspicuous or important he & his shall be allowed to represent a person instead of a man.

Whether that, with A in the background for his special exactitude, & paraphrase always possible in dubious cases, is an arrogant demand on the part of male England, everyone must decide for himself  (or for himself or herself, or for themselves).

Needless to say, in this day in age (as a student recently wrote in a paper), C is no longer tenable. The striking thing to me is that Fowler doesn’t event mention what seems to me to be the preferable solution. I refer to themself.

I imagine that he didn’t mention themself because it is sort of the verbal equivalent of an imaginary number, like the square root of negative two. The plural them- and the singular -self can’t logically go together, or so it would seem. But the OED has a definition for themself (“In anaphoric reference to a singular pronoun or noun of undetermined gender or where the meaning implies more than one: himself or herself) and has plentiful citations from sources in a variety of registers and eras, most recently:

1881   Memorandum 30 Apr. in Rep. Cases Supreme Court Nebraska (1912)  From the signing of this agreement said parties will live separate and apart from each other, and each for themself promises and agrees not to interfere or meddle with the personal actions of the other.
1905   Outlook 24 June   Every one at breakfast, she added, in an awed voice, ‘had a finger-bowl to themself’.
1946   G. Kanin Born Yesterday    If I ever seen somebody outsmart themself, it’s you.
1967   P. Nichols A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,   I don’t know whether anyone sees themself as an old-age pensioner.
2007   Glamour Apr.  Over-thinking is a person’s way of defending themself emotionally but it can lead to unnecessary paranoia.

(WordPress, the blogging platform used by Lingua Franca, puts a squiggly red line under each themself.)

To get a sense of actual usage, I used Fowler’s examples in Google Ngrams Viewer search, and threw in “anyone can see for themself.” Note the simultaneous rise in consciousness and decline of “anyone can see for himself.”

Screen Shot 2016-01-26 at 4.47.44 AM

Fowler’s  “clumsy” example A, “anyone can see for himself or herself,” is too long for Ngram. I searched the Google Books database (which the Ngram Viewer uses) and found a total of five hits, including one in reference to Fowler’s discussion. All dated from 1982 or later except for this appealing quote from First Steps in Southern Forest Study, by Daisy Priscilla Smith Edgerton (1930): “In this verdant Southland of ours, in the spring, anyone can see for himself or herself the young shoots even of the evergreen pine freshening up the tree.”

As indicated in the graphic, there are no uses of “anyone can see for themself” in Google Books. However, the more demotic Google search turns up 1,390, including, “Anyone can see for themself, since you obviously failed to back your LYING ASSertion up with any evidence, libtard.” The level of sophistication of that quote makes me despair a bit in my crusade for themself. So does the fact that singular themselves is currently more popular. (“Anyone can see for themselves”: more than 99,000 Google results.)

Writing for the OxfordWords blog in 2013, Catherine Soanes pointed out that themself was actually the standard reflexive pronoun for they from the 14th century till about 1540, when themselves took over. Flashing forward to the present day, she says that since singular they has become “largely acceptable” (this has been more true in Britain than in he U.S.), it might be argued that, logically, it should also be OK to use themself, it being viewed as the corresponding singular form of themselves. However, this isn’t yet the case, so beware of themself for now!”

Her “beware” and her exclamation point notwithstanding, I believe themself will prevail, over time. ”Anyone can see for themselves” definitely sets my teeth on edge. It really makes no sense, unless you are Sybil. It reminds me of the old joke with the punchline, “What you mean ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”

What do you say? Care to join me in my crusade to make themself the Word of the Year 2016?

Oh, Commas

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As the self-appointed watcher of commas, known to some (OK, known to myself) as The Comma Maven, I naturally was concerned when I saw the provisional title of my friend Craig Pittman’s forthcoming book about the weirdness of Florida. The book grew out of the tweets that Pittman (a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times) has been putting out for some time, like this:

 

Screen Shot 2016-01-28 at 9.40.00 PM

And this:

Screen Shot 2016-01-28 at 9.39.06 PM

 

(Craig is not connected with the person or persons who send out tweets like the following under the handle @_FloridaMan:

Screen Shot 2016-01-31 at 9.24.28 PM

)

Some months ago Craig took to social media to announce that this manuscript was at the publisher and his book was on its way to a July 2016 release. All good — until, as I say, I saw the title. It was Oh Florida: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country.

I felt strongly–very strongly–that he needed a comma after the Oh. And I told him so.

Oh Florida without the comma was “O Canada,” “Oh Tannenbaum,” “O Holy Night” — a sort of adulatory apostrophe. What Craig was going for was more the half-fond, half-exasperated sighing expression that I first heard my daughter Elizabeth Yagoda vocalize maybe a half-dozen years ago. You hear it in a variety of places and see it all over the Internet. (Click on the images for bigger versions.)

IMG_2629 IMG_2628 IMG_2627 IMG_2626

Now, admittedly, two of these four examples omit the comma. But I believe it’s necessary for an accurate rendition of the vocalization, with its pause and descending musical fourth between the Oh and the noun that follows.

So much for punctuation. That leaves the question of where this formulation came from. Jody Rosen has written at fascinating length about the 1909 Tin Pan Alley song, “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!”; the tune became a monster hit and the last three words  a lasting catchphrase. But that’s yet another slightly different Oh (the word contains multitudes), a winking cousin of “Oh brother!” or “Oh man oh man!”

The only origin story I’ve been able to find on the Internet comes from Know Your Meme, which has an entry for a four-panel graphic, in the last of which a dude says to a dog, “Oh, You.”

323

The site dates this meme to 2006. However, the most memorable “Oh, you,” as far as I’m concerned, was broadcast on NBC on the night of March 18, 1993. In the Seinfeld episode “The Junior Mint,” Jerry is chagrined to realize he cannot remember the name of the woman he is dating, and it would be embarrassing to ask her. (You might recall the episode if I tell you that one of his guesses is “Mulva.”) The “Seinology” website has the key moment:

(They embrace and a couple of light kisses and a hug)

WOMAN: Oh, oh Jerry…

JERRY: Oh … *you*…

I put this moment forth as the progenitor of “Oh, you” and subsequently of the all-purpose “Oh, [noun].” I await alternative theories and hypotheses.

And Craig’s book? You can see for yourself whether he took my advice. And while you’re at it, pre-order a copy. What could be bad about a book whose cover features a mustachioed orange in a ball cap smoking a cigarette?

Write if You Get Work

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Bob, as Wally Ballou, interviewing Ray, as the cranberry grower Ward Smith

Bob, as Wally Ballou, interviewing Ray, as cranberry grower Ward Smith

“If they like Bob and Ray, they’re OK.”

—David Letterman, on how to tell if someone has a good sense of humor.

Comedy, in addition to being hard, ages faster than unpasteurized milk. No one is a greater admirer of the best comic writers and performers of the past than I, yet I experience their work only with admiration, almost never with actual laughter. The one consistent exception is when I listen to recordings of Bob and Ray, the radio team of Ray Goulding and Bob Elliott, who passed away last week at the age of 92. (Ray died in 1990.) Bob and Ray crack me up.

The men were on the staff of a Massachusetts radio station when they teamed up in the late 1940s. At the start, and throughout their career, their stock in trade was a deadpan spoof of what was going out over the air. And at the basis of their comedy was a recognition (though, circumspect gentlemen that they were, they would never put it this way) of how much of the language of the airwaves was, at best, inane and fatuous; at worst, meretricious and debased.

There were three particular types of broadcast discourse that they satirized. The first was advertising — and in this they were following in the commodious footsteps of Will Rogers and others. The second was the particular formats of radio entertainment, notably the soap opera. The odd thing is that you could listen today to an episode of Bob and Ray’s long-running serial Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife (as the Bob and Ray website generously allows you to) and be thoroughly entertained by it, without having any sense that it was a dead-on spoof of an actual soap, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife.

In the third area they were pioneers, and their contributions are just as relevant today as ever. I refer to the extemporaneous or quasi-extemporaneous talk of broadcast personalities — news anchors, heads who talk about politics or sports or business, call-in DJs, reality-show hosts — which is ritualized, unoriginal, insincere, sometimes mindless, and almost always false. What’s worse, it never comes to a halt. The broadcaster’s dread of dead air is such that to avoid it, he or she will spew a string of words that individually have meaning, but collectively amount to utter nonsense.

Bob and Ray were around at the beginning of this glossy fake talk, and they skewered it brilliantly. Consider the beginning of one of their classic bits (which you can also listen to at their site).

Ray: Tonight we’re talking to Darrel Dexter, the Komodo-dragon expert, from Upper Montclair, N.J. Say, would you tell us a little bit about the Komodo dragon, doctor?

Dr. Dexter (Bob): Happy to! The Komodo dragon is the world’s largest living lizard. It’s a ferocious carnivore found on the steep-sloped island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rintja, Padar, and Flores.

Ray: Where do they come from?

Dr. Dexter: [Mystified pause.] The Komodo dragon, world’s largest living lizard, is found on the island of Komodo, in the lesser Sunda chain of the Indonesian Archipelago, and the nearby islands of Rinja, Padar, and Flores. We have two in this country that were given to us some years ago by the late former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, and they reside in the National Zoo, in Washington.

Ray: I, ah, believe I read somewhere, where a foreign potentate gave America some Komodo dragons. Is that true?

Dr. Dexter: [Pause.] Yes. The former Premier of Indonesia, Sukarno, gifted our country with two Komodo dragons — the world’s largest living lizards — and they reside at the National Zoo, in Washington.

Ray: Well, now, if we wanted to take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon — where would we take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon? …

I can never hear the word “potentate” without thinking of the Komodo-dragon expert.

As David Letterman (one of their comic heirs, along with Garrison Keillor and Bob Newhart) recognized, discerning listeners have always appreciated Bob and Ray and seen the seriousness underneath the comedy. Adam Gopnik wrote in 1990: “Their genius was to see before anyone else that the real rhythm of the media culture was stately, slow, and tirelessly attentive. Meticulous consideration of the blatantly absurd; calm interrogation of the thunderingly bizarre; fatuous cheerfulness displayed in the face of the outrageous; the syrup of cordiality poured on the whole range of human dementia — that was what Bob and Ray alone caught.”

Kurt Vonnegut, in the foreword to a Bob and Ray collection published in 1975, observed that their routines “feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane. And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray’s characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity.”

It’s very sad that Bob is gone, but somewhat cheering to know that his son Chris and his granddaughters Bridey and Abby are thriving in comedy. Moreover, 2,000 of his and his partner’s routines are available on iTunes, and many CDs are on offer at their website, so fans such as I will never not have some Bob and Ray to listen to.

Beyond that, there isn’t much to say, except to close with these great comedians’ trademark sign-off:

“This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work.”

“Bob Elliott reminding you to hang by your thumbs.”

Leaps in the Dark: the Discourse of Brexit

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EUJust when you need maximally careful use of the uniquely human gift of language, everything goes to hell and people start throwing clichés around like ninja stars. Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, has just called a referendum for June 23 in which the electorate will address this question:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

And immediately everything is slogans and fearmongering and soundbites and similes.

The wording of the question was adjusted in September to make sure neither side had “Yes” as its favored answer. Referenda are well known to show a strong tendency to come out with Yes winning rather than No if those are the options, so to be fair, the Electoral Commission required a polar (yes/no) question to be replaced by an alternative question, and the alternatives are going to be (i) Remain a member of the European Union or (ii) Leave the European Union. But that was just fiddling with the question that would eventually be put. Now the actual campaign has started.

The most prominent locutions are leap in the dark and the synonymous leap into the unknown. It would be a leap in the dark for Britain to exit the EU (a scenario universally known now as “Brexit”), Cameron and other Brexit opponents constantly repeat. What would be the effect on Britain’s relations with its former EU partners, its balance of trade, London’s pre-eminence as a banking center, the defense of the realm, the threat of terrorism?

These interrogatives are of course offered as rhetorical questions, aimed at provoking nervousness about change. If instead they were sincere questions, an answer could easily be given: Yes, of course, we cannot foresee the future, so by leaving the EU, Britain would be making a move whose consequences 10 years down the pike cannot be predicted. But the future always has that property. Remaining in the EU would similarly have unpredictable consequences for coming decades. The recent financial turmoil in the euro zone and the recent floods of Syrian migrants into southeast Europe blindsided the EU. Promising to stay would be a leap into the unknown.

People holding the remain-in view are referred to contemptuously by the other side as “remainians”: a word contrived to sound almost exactly like Romanians, so that it conjures up images of Balkan gypsies making use of their EU guarantee of free movement to cross the English Channel and beg in British streets or sponge off the welfare system — the anti-EU brigades think that is exactly the sort of thing that the EU’s principles facilitate.

There isn’t a similar mocking term of abuse for those who want to leave the EU, though “outers” is often applied to them. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, had claimed in the past that he had “never been an outer,” but on Sunday he announced he was going to campaign for Brexit. (The pound sterling immediately slumped from $1.44-something to $1.40-something, revealing what international investors think about Britain going it alone.)

The way Johnson put things in an unscripted announcement to journalists outside his house, it sounded as if he wanted the electorate to vote to leave and then negotiate a better deal for getting back in. Cameron promptly ridiculed him with a divorce analogy. He knew couples who had instituted divorce proceedings, he said, but none who instituted divorce proceedings as a prelude to renewing their vows. It got some laughs in the House of Commons.

That is the kind of fare that is being served up to the British public: clichés about leaping into the void, scornful nicknames, metaphors about marriage breakup. What is needed is copious careful analysis followed by meticulous and lucid explanation in layman’s terms, and that’s not going to happen.

The EU is surely the most powerful allied bloc of independent states in the world. A referendum on whether it should drop from 28 countries to 27, with Britain (the fifth largest economy in the world) going it alone like Switzerland or Norway, is extraordinarily important because of its long-term consequences. It is not like a presidential election in the United States. If (to take an obviously fantastic scenario) a loud-mouthed, self-promoting, nonchurchgoing, populist bigot, famous from two divorces and several bankruptcies and a reality TV show, were to win the presidential nomination for a major party, and ultimately win the presidency, it could be undone in four years. The negotiations and upheavals and permanent adjustments if Britain ceased to be an EU member, by contrast, would occupy decades. The issue calls for a lot of quantitative analysis and very serious discussion in carefully framed, neutral language. And I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see between now and June 23.

Who You Calling Phobic?

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LiliElbe In Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony, the presenter J.K. Simmons described The Danish Girl as a film about someone who had undergone “gender-confirmation surgery.” I immediately recognized the phrase — which I wasn’t aware of encountering before — as a foot soldier in a political war. That is, Simmons’s formulation implicitly cast aside other terms for the same thing, such as “gender-reassignment surgery” or the old-fashioned “sex-change operation,” so as to advance a point of view. As a plastic surgeon has written on Huffington Post, the older names

suggest that a person is making a choice to switch genders. From the hundreds of discussions I’ve had with individuals over the years, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not about choice; it’s about using surgery as one of the therapeutic tools to enable people to be comfortable with their gendered self. … if such surgery helps confirm the way a person feels he or she was meant to be, shouldn’t the name reflect that truth?

A term like “gender-confirmation surgery” almost begs to be mocked as “politically correct,” the implication being that right-thinking people are hijacking the language in order to force their point of view on everyone else.

There is no question that a cause is behind the wording, and there is no question that examples abound. Not long ago, I listened to an interview with Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, on the public radio program Here and Now. I was struck by the way she consistently referred to people “having obesity,” for example, “we also see that employees who have obesity are more likely to be fired or terminated from positions because of their weight.” Elsewhere in the interview, she addressed this wording, saying she favored, “people-first language with obesity, which involves putting people first rather than labeling them by their disease or disability. … Essentially it involves referring to people who have obesity or are affected by obesity, rather than an obese person.”

The “have obesity” thing is relatively new, but people-first language has been around for decades. It has been criticized all the while, and in fact advocacy groups for the deaf and blind have both publicly rejected it. The charge — not without merit — is that it promotes euphemism and stylistic awkwardness. One advocacy group actually advises replacing a sentence like “Schizophrenics have a mental illness” with, “Individuals affected by schizophrenia are considered to have a mental illness.”

That’s easy to mock, but I don’t criticize the effort or the purpose behind it. Today, language is very often the crucible in which attitudes and subsequent policy are forged, and any side that ignores this fact suffers for it. And it’s not as if these efforts sully the language, because no language is pure. After all, “gender-reassignment surgery” advances a worldview of its own.

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz is recognized as the first person to fully exploit this idea, most famously when he persuaded the party to oppose the “death tax” rather than “inheritance taxes.” All of a sudden, the public was irate about a longstanding and hitherto uncontroversial levy. Liberals — excuse me, “progressives” — have followed suit, and had some success when they rebranded “global warming” as “climate change.” They are currently trying to replace”gun control” with “gun safety.”

Neither side, of course, mentions abortion in their abortion-issue framing. It’s “pro-life” versus “pro-choice,” and it appears to be a standoff.

I have always felt that perhaps the most subtle and clever piece of political naming is homophobia. The term was used as early as 1920 as a rare medical condition, defined (by the OED) as “Fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex; also, fear of mankind.” But then in the 1960s some genius thought to use it to mean hatred of homosexuals. The genius — and perhaps the reason it caught on — was in medicalizing that hatred, as a phobia. I’m not saying it’s not true that people who hate homosexuals secretly fear them; I’m just saying the word is a great, more or less irrefutable, way of marginalizing the haters. It’s certainly a lot more potent than anti-Semitism, the root of which, weirdly, denotes a group of languages that include not only Hebrew but also Arabic and Amharic.

A comparable term that’s been in wide circulation of late is Islamophobia. An essay by Jennifer Oriel in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Australian, “Pathologising Free Thought Over Islamists,” calls the word an “ever-amorphous yet strikingly censorious tool of denunciation.” She charges, “by deeming politically incorrect thought a mental illness or phobia, the modern Left is resurrecting Soviet-style thought control.”

That seems a little extreme, but it’s worth noting that in 2012, the Associated Press style guide came down against both homophobia and Islamophobia, on the grounds that they are political constructions not appropriate for news coverage, other than in quotations.

The bottom line is that it’s a free country: Anyone can throw out any piece of terminology at any time, in the hope of advancing any point of view. But acceptance and survival are a different story. It’s a harsh semantic world out there, red in tooth and claw. Some political wording makes the grade — besides the examples mentioned, see Ms., Native American, and African-American – while some gets left in the ash heap of history. When was the last time you saw someone write womyn with a straight face?

As for gender-confirmation surgery, I have my hunches. But who knows? Let’s meet in 10 years and see if it’s still standing.

 

 

 


‘Gangsta’ Shakespeare

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“It will be like catching butterflies in the dark,” a colleague of mine commented.

He was talking about my signing up to teach a course called “Shakespeare in Prison” at the Hampshire County Jail, in Northampton, Mass. It would have a total of 30 students, half inmates and half Amherst students, and focus on the sonnets and a handful of late plays, including King Lear and The Tempest.

“The endeavor is laudable but impractical,” my colleague added. “Language is an impediment. You will be disappointed.”

I understood his message. Reading, in and of itself, is a chore for the young. Add to it a 400-year-old text, and the result is likely to be mind-numbing.

To prepare for the task, I familiarized myself with other efforts at bringing the Bard to the incarcerated population, including listening to Episode 218 of This American Life, titled “Act V,” about staging the final act of Hamlet on death row at the high-security Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.

In truth, nothing could prepare me for the experience.

Inmates, at least the ones I convene every Wednesday afternoon for a couple of hours, appreciate Shakespeare in full, sometimes in more distilled fashion than do the students from the outside world. Prisoners get the literalness of the language, as well as its metaphorical dimension.

These inmates are experts in raw emotions. They constantly — and sincerely — thank Shakespeare for delineating them (revenge, treason, rivalry, forgiveness) with such precision. They also get his syntax in astonishing ways.

One inmate memorized a soliloquy from Hamlet (“Ay, so good-bye to you.—Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and pleasant slave I am!”), then chanted it as if it was a rap song. He sounded like Snoop Dogg.

Soon after, a group of students rehearsed one of the exchanges where King Lear, the Fool, and Kent are in the heath, in a storm. Their dialogue felt like a conversation among three homeless men fending off police abuse.

I was stunned. So often, the media portrays inmates as lost souls rotting in prison, folks barely able to concoct a plausibly correct sentence. The approach is condescending: This segment of society, we are told, is broken without repair.

Baloney! “The fool doth think he is wise. …”

Each student in the course is required to write several creative pieces: memoir, fiction, plays, or essays. These pieces are centered on a Shakespeare prompt, such as “To thine own self be true,” “Nothing can come of nothing,” or “Death, the undiscovered country.” The task is to tie the argument to something personal, that is, to use the Bard’s words as a springboard to examine one’s own life.

One inmate wrote a diatribe about patiently waiting to leave jail in order to get back to his long-standing heroin addiction. The language he used mixed street jargon with Shakespearean lines like “deprive your sovereignty of reason.”

Another has been turning his creative pieces into a long narrative about a bunch of school dropouts in Holyoke who do everything to evade adulthood. In their moral dilemma, they oscillates between instinct and idealism, between Ariel and Caliban.

Perhaps the most ambitious of all written assignments is by a twenty-something inmate who didn’t finish high school and claims never to have been asked to write anything of substance before. He rewrote the entire plot of the Danish Prince — arguably the favorite of all Shakespeare plays among inmates — as “a gangsta tragedy in the hood.” A masterful composition!

A week ago, I showed a few of these examples to my colleague who had expressed skepticism about my endeavor at the outset. I told him that not only is language not an impediment, but the inmates completely grasp, and feel inspired by, Elizabethan and Jacobean English. I told him my students had caught the butterflies in the night.

 

Don’t Speak!

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In the funniest scene in Woody Allen’s last funny movie, Bullets Over Broadway (1994), the aspiring playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) tries to communicate his feelings to the stage diva Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest).

Throughout history, at various moments and by various people, not speaking has been recognized as an appropriate and perhaps necessary course of action. After being raped at the age of 8, Maya Angelou was mute for almost five years. In Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, the child-protagonist is similarly struck dumb after witnessing the atrocities of the Holocaust. On stage, silence is what unites the personae of Harpo Marx, the magician Teller, and Marcel Marceau.

The long Jewish tradition of never uttering the name of God is echoed in the Harry Potter books, where the chief villain is commonly referred to as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was renowned for his silence. (When asked why he spoke so rarely, he replied, “That you may babble.”) His disciple Cratylus did him one better. After Heraclitus observed, “You cannot step in the same river twice,” the younger philosopher replied, “You cannot step in the same river even once.” Aristotle tells us that Cratylus thereupon realized that since everything was constantly changing, “nothing could truly be affirmed” and concluded that “one need not say anything.” After that he communicated only by moving his finger.

A later philosopher, Wittgenstein, famously observed, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Following Wittgenstein (and echoing Kosinski), the literary critic George Steiner paradoxically made an eloquent case for silence in a post-Holocaust world. “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason,” he wrote in his 1967 book Language and Silence. “To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance of language as creator and bearer of humane, rational truth.”

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Thumper

And, of course, Thumper in the film Bambi said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

What occasions these thoughts is the current presidential race. You may have noticed that the race contains a candidate whose name sounds oddly like Thumper, and who in fact comes off more like a cartoon character than a statesman. In part because his statements are so outlandish and so frequently ignorant and/or wrong, the reaction to him has been pretty much the opposite of silence.

The chart below shows the number of times this candidate’s name has been mentioned in the news sites aggregated by Google News, compared with the other candidates in the race.

 

Xchart

The situation is even more striking in broadcast forums. A recent article in The New York Review of Books quoted research showing this candidate had, as of last month, received free air time that would have cost $1.9 billion to buy — nearly triple the other three major Republican candidates (including Marco Rubio) combined. The second-most-covered candidate was Hillary Clinton, who had gotten $746 million in free media.

The reason? Ratings. The New York Review article quoted a speech by CBS Chairman Les Moonves, in which he said that the ascendance of this candidate “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS… The money’s rolling in and this is fun … .”

I don’t mean to suggest that the media — and the rest of us, in our conversations in social media and the diner down the street — should ignore this candidate. When he wins primaries, that has to be covered; when he makes statements about his “policies,” they have to be fact-checked and analyzed.

But the endless chatter in think pieces and among the pundits, the endless airing of his speeches, press conferences, and phone interviews: There has been way too much of it, and it doesn’t serve any useful purpose, beyond a debased cage-fighting sort of infotainment. Like the boy who acts out in a fifth-grade classroom, this candidate craves our attention, and when we give it to him — whether positive or negative — we play right into his hands. What’s more, this is truly a Teflon candidate: pointing out his errors, his contradictions, and the absurdity of some of his positions never seems to affect his poll numbers.

I know it will be hard — emotionally and financially. But it’s come time to try, whenever possible, to say nothin’ at all.

Of course, there is a logical flaw in my position. In arguing not to pay attention to this candidate, I have devoted a blog post to him. I acknowledge the inconsistency. But at least I didn’t mention his name.

 

 

‘Punter’s Chance’ or ‘Puncher’s Chance’? I’ll Punt

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If [the Oklahoma City Thunder are] clicking on all cylinders, I give them a punter’s chance obviously to put the kind of firepower out on the floor to go head to head with the [Golden State] Warriors four quarters.

—Jalen Rose, quoted in The New York Times, April 15, 2016

As I have mentioned here before, I am the sole owner and proprietor of Not One-Off Britishisms (NOOBs), a blog devoted to charting British expressions that have become popular in the United States. And when I read the quote by Rose (a native of Detroit and famously a member of the University of Michigan’s Fab Five basketball team in the early 1990s), referring to two top National Basketball Association teams, I went into full NOOBs mode.

I had never encountered punter’s chance, but I knew that in Britain, punter is a common word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it originated in the 18th century to mean “A person who plays against the bank at baccarat, faro, etc.” In Lynne Murphy’s discussion of the term in her blog, Separated by a Common Language, she says it was then generalized “to mean any type of gambler and from there to mean someone who pays for something, and particularly a man who pays for a prostitute’s services.” (This has no relation to the kicking play called the punt in American football and resulting metaphorical verb meaning to put off or delay a decision or action.)

From that, one can deduce that a punter’s chance means a small but not nonexistent chance, such as a bettor against long odds would have. One needs to deduce because the phrase isn’t defined in the OED or any other dictionary I’ve found. Indeed, it is a rarely used expression, on either side of the Atlantic, with scarcely more than 1,000 Google hits. The Rose quote represents the only time it has ever been used in The New York Times. The earliest use I’ve found is this tantalizing one apparently from an Australian financial publication called The Bulletin in 1973:  “At their present price of $2.30 the shares look good value in this market and it’s a punter’s chance that another free issue could be in the wind.” More solid is a quote from a 1986 article in The Hispanic American Historical Review —”He made promises he had only a punter’s chance of keeping.” A 2006 headline from The Times–“Vengeful Ponting Has Given England a Punter’s Chance”–made clever use of the nickname of Ricky Ponting, Australia’s  cricket captain at the time: “Punter.” Four years later, The Daily Mail noted: “It is not just the weather that might give an outsider a punter’s chance in Japan, but the fact the circuit presents a challenge unique in modern motor sport.”

My hypothesis is that punter’s chance is a rather brilliant eggcorn stemming from a more established (and more American than British) expression, puncher’s chance. This one comes from boxing and refers to the fact that even if you’re an outclassed underdog, you can win a match with one knockout punch. The first use I’ve found is from The New York Times in 1961: “Gene Fullmer today remained the favorite to defeat Florentino Fernandez, but the Cuban was given a puncher’s chance to score an upset.” It has been used 68 times in the Times since then, and it now shows up in all sorts of nonboxing and nonsports contexts, such as this from Nick Paumgarten, writing about the novelist James Salter in The New Yorker in 2013: “Among many writers, and some literary people, he is venerated for his sentence-making, his observational powers, his depictions of sex and valor, and a pair of novels that, in spite of thin sales and obscure subject matter, have more than a puncher’s chance at permanence.” Another former NBA player and current analyst, Vinny Del Negro, said last week, referring to the Dallas Mavericks’ playoff series against Oklahoma City, “You always have a puncher’s chance when Dirk [Nowitzki] is on the court.”

Talking of punching, to punch above [or more than] one’s weight is, according to the OED, a “chiefly British” metaphorical phrase derived from boxing and meaning to have more “power or influence [than] one’s status or significance allows or implies.” The first citation is from The Economist in 1986: “Though only some 12 percent of Nevadans are Mormons, they punch more than their weight.” It’s in full cliché mode now, with 5,340 hits in a Google News search. It is also a proper NOOB, with roughly as many of the hits from U.S. as from U.K. sources: e.g., “Russia, too weak to confront NATO directly, relies on two methods to punch above its weight, military analysts say” (The Boston Globe, April 16, 2016).

The phrase apparently really took off in the 1990s due to a widely quoted comment by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd of Britain that the country punched above its weight in foreign affairs. Hurd subsequently denied “ever having expressed so crude a sentiment,” according to an Economist article in 1995. “He has ordered searches of electronic databases, defying anyone to find an authoritative attribution of the quote to him.”

No word on the results of the search.

 

The Social Consequences of Switching to English

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I commented here a few months ago on the status of English as a planetwide communication medium and some aspects of the “undeserved good luck” that got it that unlikely status. “The race for global language has been run,” I said, “and like it or not, we have a winner” (see this Lingua Franca post). English continues to expand its reach, and spreads at an increasing rate; many have noted, for example, that the European Union is moving in the direction of conducting most of its business in English. But even I was surprised by a recent article in the Singapore Straits Times telling the story of what happened when an entire Japanese company went English-only, cold turkey.

The article, which is worth reading in full, is by Hiroshi (Mickey) Mikitani, the chief executive of Rakuten, which runs Japan’s largest e-commerce website and a slew of other such services.

Mikitani was ruthless: He simply announced that the whole company was switching its operational language. No negotiation. Japanese out, English in. Don’t speak English? Tough. Deal with it. Take night classes.

Soon after the switch he conducted a board meeting entirely in English, and each time a nervous executive in a navy-blue suit asked cautiously if he might explain something in Japanese, the answer was no: Say it in English, or don’t say it. The board meeting took twice as long as a normal one.

That was five years ago. Today, Mikitani says, the culture and even the dress code are showing all the signs of having been altered by the imposition of the English language. It makes the Whorfian idea, that your native language determines how the world looks to you and thus constrains your thinking, look tame. Mikitani postulates that the language you adopt will change your whole relationship to the world, from your clothing to your interactions with your superiors in the workplace.

English “has few power markers,” he points out. “Its use can therefore help to break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society and reflected in Japanese conversation, which could boost efficiency.” What he’s alluding to is that English does not have a system of grammatically obligatory honorific levels the way Japanese does. Think of something rather like the French tu / vous distinction, but several times more complex, and spread from the pronoun system into the verbal inflection system.

Roughly (and I admit that I’m being very rough here), you can’t just say something in Japanese, you have to make a forced choice in verb form between saying it in a direct and plain way (which might seem rude), or saying it in a polite way (as TV announcers always do), or in a decidedly respectful way (usually not used when talking about yourself), or in a humble way (which of course you always use when talking about yourself).

Compounding the problem of how to phrase things, there are also certain linguistic choices that will indicate your indifference to whatever it is you’re speaking about, or your awe and respect for it, or your contempt for it.

The language prescribes the space within which Japanese people conduct their linguistic business and manage their social relationships, and sets up a social minefield. If you were to say arimasu, or (heaven forfend) even aru, in a context where the standing of the addressee called for gozaimasu, then you are cruising for a bruising. Or at least a dose of shocked silence and possible subtle retribution later. A few ill-chosen verb endings and you could ultimately be walked to the building exit on the arm of a security man, carrying your desk-drawer contents in a cardboard box.

At Rakuten the complicated management of respect levels fell away after the switch to English, says Mikitani, and good riddance to it. He had wanted to “break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society,” and he claims the anglophone policy jump-started that. “A new casual vibe permeates our office, with employees happily shunning the monotonous navy suit typical of the Japanese workplace,” he says; he speaks of the language policy “breathing new life into a moribund business culture.”

These very strong claims do surprise me. I would have expected that an all-English-all-the-time policy might improve a company’s ability to collaborate with other anglophone organizations, and perhaps save a bit of money on interpreters, but not that it would revolutionize the whole internal corporate culture. That would have surprised even Benjamin Lee Whorf. By Mikitani’s account, English must be powerful magic.

The Versatile Octothorpe

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octothorpeNot being a tweeter, I rarely think about the octothorpe, now known more commonly as a hashtag. I do mark students’ papers by hand, though, and one thing I tend to insert — when no one is spelled as one word, or when a fictional story leaps from one block of time or point of view to another — is a mark for space, indicated by #. Then, just yesterday, I had to submit a prescription number over to the phone to my local pharmacy and was instructed to press pound when I was done.

Hashtag. Pound sign. Space. And then there’s the use of the octothorpe to replace the word number, as in “He was #4 in the queue.” How did those little cross-hatched horizontal and vertical lines come to mean so many different things?

1024px-Libra_pondo_abbreviation_newton

Newton’s handwritten libra pondo sign.

Apparently it begins, like so much else, with the Romans, whose abbreviation for libra pondo, or pound weight, was (as it still is) lb, but with a stylized l including a finishing, cursive-like slash across the center, to distinguish it from the number 1. By 1850, bookkeepers had adopted two uses of the octothorpe: If it followed a number, it retained the sense of pounds, but if it preceded a number, it simply indicated number. For a long while, the octothorpe was a handwriting shortcut; it didn’t appear on keyboards until the late 19th century, and wasn’t called the pound sign until the 1930s. (For that, you had £, meaning British pounds, or lb. for avoirdupois weight.)

So how do we get to hashtag? And while we’re at it, who ever heard of octothorpe?

Well, for centuries artists have used cross-hatching, the drawing and intersecting of various series of close parallel lines — think the engravings of Albrecht Dürer. The word hatch devolves into hash, which is what this sign is still called in much of the former British Commonwealth. Then along comes a guy named Chris Messina, a Google developer who had the idea of using a sign as a way to bring together people who were discussing the same topic online. He chose the octothorpe because it was already handy on his phone. Why was it (along with the star sign, or *), on the phone? Well, Greek alpha and omega were originally introduced for the extra spaces on the rectangular keypad with which we’re all now familiar, even when we’re told to “dial” a number. But a Bell Labs specialist decided those were too arcane for most touchpad users, and he opted instead for symbols that, by then, were ubiquitous on typewriter and computer keyboards and could be used for special functions.

My favorite, though, is the word with which I began this examination: octothorpe. As always happens when I’ve recently learned a word, I like to use it all the time. Clearly the octo- prefix refers to the eight points create by the sign, so at first I thought octothorpe was the ancient Greek name, so much more satisfactory than the term “@,” which we unpoetically call “the at sign.” Sadly, no. It was coined sometime in the 1960s, again by an employee, possibly Don Macpherson, at Bell Labs, but the exact origin remains a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its chief explanation as Macpherson’s involvement with a group attempting to get Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals returned from Sweden; the thorpe was then an homage of sort to the Olympic runner. But a Bell engineer testifies in The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word History that the original word was octotherp, and it was kind of a joke. Another source in the OED alleges that “‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.” Thorp is indeed an archaic term for a village, though I’m not confident that the engineers at Bell Labs knew that. But if they did, they were mighty prescient. The hashtag, after all, is like the shingles hanging from the virtual pentices of our global village. Come ye here to talk about #MelaniaTrump, gather ye over there for #womancard.

Finally, let us not forget the many uses of the octothorpe (which I’ve now written eight times!) in emoticon creation. How else could you picture a smiling person in a fur hat?

#:-)

 

Sad!

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It is no news that the person I call the presumptuous Republican nominee for president likes to use exclamation points in his tweets. Take a look at a tranche of his Twitter feed:

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One might think this would be common punctuation on Twitter. One would be mistaken. Of the 50 most recent non-Trump tweets in my feed, only two contained exclamation points. (More commonly, a sort of humorous emphasis is added through ALL CAPS.) But for Trump, this is not only a trademark bit of Twitter punctuation; he also has a trademark one-word-sentence-exclamation-point combo:

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This is not to say that exclamation points aren’t common in other genres. They are de rigueur in text messages and short emails and Facebook comments, so much so that responding “Great.” instead of “Great!” to an invitation for drinks can come off as decidedly unenthusiastic and possibly sarcastic. For what it’s worth, a 2006 academic study of an electronic message board and an email list found that females used exclamation points more often than males, and that the marks commonly “function as markers of friendly interaction.”

In literature, this punctuation mark has not had the greatest reputation. Sheilah Graham recalled that F. Scott Fitzgerald cut all of them out of a piece of writing she showed him, explaining, “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own jokes.” They did find a home in comic books, which were deemed to need a hyperactive tone and got it via  punctuation (as well as onomatopœic coinages and heavy use of boldface type).

exclamation1

Exclamations had a moment in the sun in the 1960s, first in the titles of musical comedies: Oliver!; Hello, Dolly!; Fiorello!; and the doubled-barreled I Do! I Do! and Oh! Calcutta! (That was probably why the “Jeb!” on Jeb Bush’s signs gave his campaign the faint feel of a musical that closed in Philadelphia.) Then Tom Wolfe started using exclamation points — along with italics and ellipses and how own invented words, like swock — as an ironic way of evoking both his characters’ consciousness and the supercharged zeitgeist. Here’s part of his description of Baby Jane Holzer in his 1964 profile “The Girl of the Year”:

Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened — swock! — like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing over a coat made of … zebra! Those motherless stripes! Oh, damn!

Getting back to Trump, his use of this punctuation isn’t limited to tweets. In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, he wrote, “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller (which it will be anyway!).”

The “statements” issued on his website often work their way up to a closing exclamation. Here was his response after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he wasn’t “ready” to make a Trump endorsement:

I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda. Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people. They have been treated so badly for so long that it is about time for politicians to put them first!

I spoke to the co-author of The Art of the Comeback, Kate Bohner, and she said about Trump, “He speaks in exclamation points. There was not a traditional intercom system in his office.” She said that when he wanted to summon his assistant, Rhona Graff, he would just shout, at the top of his lungs, “Rhona! Get in here!”

In the 18th century, the Comte de Buffon observed, “Style is the man himself.” His point was that a person’s writing style does, or should, reveal essential parts of his or her character. It would seem that Donald J. Trump has achieved such a unity.

Next: Trump’s use of Crazy Bernie Sanders, Lyin’ Ted, Goofy Elizabeth Warren, Crooked Hillary, and his single-handed revival of the Homeric epithet!

 

Just Like a Woman

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naked-cartwheelOn occasional Thursday evenings I participate in a figure-drawing circle. Artists of all abilities sit with their easels in front of them and a nude model in the center, who poses first in short stints, then in a “long pose” broken by five-minute breaks. A month or so ago, a new model, very young, intriguing-looking and flexible, posed for us. She had short hair tinged blue (as was her pubic hair), multiply pierced earlobes, a petite figure. There was something different about the way she held herself, or the way her body seemed to fit together, that intrigued me as I sketched. (Not that my charcoal drawings conveyed any of this; I am a terrible draughtsperson.) When we took a break and she donned her robe and began talking to one of the artists, the difference became immediately clear. Her voice was a warm, slightly gravelly baritone. When we returned to our drawing positions, I noticed her Adam’s apple and the set of her jaw, which hadn’t seemed so obvious to me before.

The researchers Sarah Ferguson and Jaime Booz at the University of Utah are studying the effects of “clear speech” on the acceptance of transgender men in society. “Transgender women say sometimes they are doing fine in public until they open their mouth, because the voice is low,” says Booz, himself a transgender man. “That can be a safety issue.” Using a recorded database of 41 talkers in conversational speech and clear speech — the slower, higher-pitched way we talk to people with impaired hearing — Booz and Ferguson asked 17 participants to rate 656 gender-neutral sentences as being more or less “masculine” or “feminine” in sound.

Masculine and feminine are, of course, subjective qualities, highly charged when it comes to discussing transgender issues. Caitlyn Jenner feminine brings up 262,000 Google hits, the top ones focusing on Jenner’s voice. An individual who transitions from male to female after puberty will retain whatever huskiness their voice already had. But a female voice, to many of us, is not the same thing as a feminine voice. Truisms like this from a website offering advice on developing a female voice — “Women are not as concerned with the meaning of a word so much as its context, and that context is expressed in a more flowing, graceful manner. Women will round the edges of their words to avoid cliffs and walls” — blur these categories in ways that plenty of women, trans- or cis-, associate with a world where a woman’s voice carries little power.

Then there’s this clip, from Cambridge University Press’s Clear Speech:

Besides its being mostly a woman’s voice, the clip — with its careful articulation and slow pace — makes me think of an elementary-school teacher’s voice, the sort that is holding its temper in check while the teacher tells the rowdy class to settle down.

But Booz insists that the point of the study — and of vocal training in general — is not to enforce a binary choice:

I specifically wanted to capture small differences in gender ratings both between talkers and within talkers (different sentences said by the same talker). I was looking for something much more nuanced than a binary choice, especially because I was looking at whether or not the same talker could impact femininity ratings by making a speaking style change. Same voice, different behavior.

As Booz observes, vocal physiology affects the pitch and timbre of a voice, but so do “socialized factors”: “Children, who have similar vocal anatomy, regardless of gender, start imitating adult speaking patterns at very early ages.”

With speaking, as with wardrobe, body sculpting, gait, and so on, transgender people make tough decisions whose effects go beyond the tiny proportion of people who are transgender. Do we want women — and, by extension, little girls — to sound feminine, or do we want the definition of a woman’s voice to transgress boundaries? One voice trainer points out that “the actual difference in pitch between the sexes is minimal. In fact, the overlap of range between the sexes allows for almost ANY individual to fall well within accepted norms of pitch.” Do we want to “reserve” certain words for men, others for women? Booz describes his own voice as “sing-songy.” “Our goal in voice and communication training with a transgender person,” Booz wrote to me,

is to help them find a voice that is comfortable for them. Whether or not that voice is perceived as male or female is a different question. For some trans people, how their voice is perceived will be crucial above all else. … I transitioned specifically for voice changes, as my voice was the thing that caused me the most anxiety. I am very happy with my pitch now, but I find that I still get perceived as female by children. . . . With adults, I typically am perceived as a gay man. I’m comfortable in my voice, so these assumptions don’t bother me.

When the model in my drawing class spoke, she did so in a baritone that seemed confident and even musical. For her sake, and for all our sakes, I hope she feels as comfortable as Jaime Booz. She’s already come so far. She told one of the artists that she was studying to be a circus performer. At the end of the drawing session, still stark naked, she executed a lovely cartwheel. Her smile at the end spoke volumes.


A Postcard From Schleswig-Holstein

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Screen Shot 2016-06-21 at 5.23.28 PMKiel, Germany — The Kieler Woche is a huge weeklong festival of art, music, culture, theater, and maritime recreational events, held on the western shore of a fjord, in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, that opens to the Baltic. (One tends to think of Germany as being mostly surrounded by land boundaries, but up here it has both an east coast and a west coast, from sea to shining sea.)

My room on the waterfront has a panoramic view of yacht races, processions of tall-masted “windjammer” sailing ships, a constant scattering of kayaks, skiffs, and speedboats, and the daily arrivals and departures of cruise liners and Scandinavian car ferries. (I saved a fellow American from linguistic puzzlement. He was asking hotel staff: “How can I get to the … umm … I don’t know how to say it: F, J, O, R, D?” They were baffled. “It’s fjord,” I interjected, pronouncing for him the most famous Norwegian loanword in English, “and you don’t need directions. All of the blue expanse down there is the fjord.” He was delighted; his quest was over.)

I’m here in Kiel to give an invited public lecture about the English language as part of Kieler Woche, and as usual I am enjoying Germany a lot. I come here often, and the smooth integration of the European Union makes it very easy in many ways. So it worries me that as this post is put up on The Chronicle’s site, the electorate in Britain, after a campaign of mendacity and reptile analogies, will be voting on a proposition that could see the United Kingdom quitting the EU.

The island of Great Britain was settled from Europe multiple times over the past 800,000 years, though the settlers repeatedly failed to make a go of it and died out. Even the Romans gave up on Britain. The Celts were the first settlers tough enough to establish themselves in the islands’ recorded history, and then from the fifth century AD the ultimately dominant population, from this very region of northwest Europe, began to pour in. Viking invaders from Denmark subsequently conquered the northern part of Great Britain in the ninth century but were eventually defeated. Then the Normans (Viking descendants living in northern France) conquered the country in 1066. Since that time there have been hundreds of much smaller and less significant waves of immigrants. Today half the country seems terrified that it is getting out of hand.

My postal vote (and I won’t be shy about it: I voted in favor of remaining) was submitted weeks ago. None of the arguments for leaving make any sense at all. A chance to leave the shackles of Brussels and free up trade with the world? Bunk. The EU is way ahead in negotiating trade deals, and leaving will kick Britain to (as Barack Obama put it) the back of the queue. Money? Britain contributes to the EU budget in accord with its size, deducts a fat discount called the “rebate,” and receives plenty of EU subsidies and grants in return. If Britain left the EU, it would save some money; but even a very small detrimental effect on the economy would wipe out the savings — and all economic experts think there will be such a negative effect.

Immigration is supposed to be the biggest issue for those who favor exiting the EU. The Brexiteers cry that Britain needs to be able to control its borders. But it already does: Britain is not in the Schengen Area: You need to show your passport to get in, and you can be turned away. Immigration from the EU countries has in any case been mostly beneficial (the immigrants are younger and healthier on average than the vastly larger British population on average). And mere cessation of paying dues to the EU will not stop boatloads of Albanians crossing the English Channel in inflatable launches, or desperate Eritrean migrants clinging to the underside of trucks trying to get to Dover, or Syrian refugees begging for asylum, because Albania, Eritrea, and Syria are not in the EU. The desperate struggles of people from such countries to get to Britain certainly constitute a crisis, but not a reason for quitting the EU. Yet the leave campaigners constantly muddy that distinction.

There are other arguments, just as fatuous. Nothing with any credibility favors pulling out of the EU.

And I don’t want to find in a few years that I need a visa or a work permit to accept lecture invitations from Germany or Spain or France or any of the other EU countries in which I work, just because a few right-wing Conservatives see political advantages obtainable through encouraging the fears of millions of embittered, suspicious opponents of immigration.

Brexit fans laugh at such talk, but I think the EU, a voluntary assemblage of 28 independent countries trying to establish peace and eliminate borders and harmonize regulations, is a brave and noble experiment in morals, politics, and economics. I’m not going to cast my vote to abandon it, and I’ll be very sad if I wake up on Friday morning to find that the people of Britain have voted thus.

Verb-Forming for Fun and Profit

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static.playbill.comI recently heard that a gay acquaintance of mine has gotten divorced. I mention his sexual orientation certainly not because there’s anything wrong with it but because it’s relevant to the matter of what the linguist Arnold Zwicky calls “two-part back-formed verbs,” aka 2pbfVs. Zwicky has been cataloguing examples of these, at Language Log and on his own website, since 2008, when he wrote about the verb form gay marry, which he had just encountered in a quote on someone else’s blog: “I did an interview with a guy in Seattle — totally random, I had never met him before — who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece, I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone.”

Zwicky observed that this was “undoubtedly a back-formation from gay marriage (with its nonpredicating modification), the result being a compound verb of a pattern (Adj + V).” (A back-formation is the term for when a word or phrase functioning as one part of speech yields a word or phrase functioning as another: the verb curate coming from the older noun curator, for example.) He wondered, sensibly, “Why would anyone use gay marry literally, when the context almost always makes the sex of the marriage partner clear? Isn’t gay marry redundant (and wordy) in context?”

Zwicky’s response to his own question was that the additional word is there for the sake of explicitness or emphasis. I think that’s true especially among people who are against gay marriage, as in an internet comment he quotes: “While I guess it should be legal to practice homosexualliy [sic] in privacy [sic], I believe it should be illegal to gay marry or to show gay affection in public. If this kind of thing is allowed, marriage in this country will go strait [sic] to hell.”

But there’s another reason, which he doesn’t mention, and which can be seen in the initial blog quote and in a headline he cites from The Onion: “Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens to Gay Marry.” The reason is that, because of its wordiness and redundancy, gay marry is kind of funny.

Zwicky next posted on the subject during the height of the 2008 political campaign, noting such verbs as absentee-vote and early-vote. (All of these forms are sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not, but I like the hyphen). They suggest a third reason for the construction: streamlining. Without the 2pbfV, one would have to say “vote by absentee ballot” or something like, “take advantage of the early-voting provision.”

Zwicky gave the formation a name, but another linguist, Neal Whitman, had started writing about it earlier, with 2004 posts about people-watch, fence-sit, underage-drink, and price-match.

Between the two of them (and with assistance from contributors to the American Dialect Society email discussion list), Whitman and Zwicky have come up with quite a collection over the years, including: ambulance-chase; backseat-drive (also drunk-drive); comfort-eat; doctor-shop; hate-watch (a television show, for example); serial-kill; slut-shame; speed-date; store-buy; substitute-teach; three-D-print; travel-write; and victim-blame.

One thing that fascinates me about the form is the variety of operations or meanings implied by the hyphen (or space). Say X is the first term and Y the second. In basic cases (including the first two examples in the paragraph above), the verb means “be an X-Yer” or engage in the practice of “X-Ying.” Sometimes, as in people-watch, it merely sort of formalizes the activity of  Y-Xing, that is, watching people. But other cases are more complicated: comfort-eat means “eat in order to comfort oneself”; doctor-shop, “shop for a doctor”; and hate-watch, “watch a show that you don’t like in order to get a kind of perverse pleasure out of its badness.” Generally, to the extent that “X-Ying” or “X-Y-er” is not an established thing, the resultant verb becomes pointed or funny — “marked,” in the linguist’s sense of an expression that perks up our ears.

The formation of 2pbfVs continues apace. In a recent interview, after denying that he favored “mass deportations,” Donald Trump said, “President Obama has mass-deported vast numbers of people — the most ever, and it’s never reported. I think people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody.” What he meant is anybody’s guess.

And that brings me back to my acquaintance. When I heard the news about his split, I (being me) wondered whether there’s such a 2pbfV as gay divorce. Talk about wordy and redundant! There is really no need for the gay. Whether you gay-married or straight-married, a divorce is the same thing. Yet get gay divorced yielded 2,380 Google hits the other day, including a promo for a fake ad on Conan O’Brien’s show for “Schmecky and Schmecky: Gay Divorce Attorneys.” One of the Schmeckys fast-talks:

Typical story: You fall in love so you get gay-married. Everything is going gay-fine. Then you hit a gay-bump in the road. … We’ll get you gay-divorced in no gay-time at all!

Like I said, kind of funny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Safe Space

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one-hundred-years-of-solitude-coverIt has become a recurrent motif in academic parlance in the United States to talk about security, not as a discipline but in existential terms. This isn’t surprising given the superabundance of bloodshed today. Campus is frequently called a “safe space.” Violence — physical, emotional, and verbal — has no place in it.

The premise behind this concept is sound, though it sometimes verges on sanctimony. It envisions the classroom as Robinson Crusoe’s island, where it is possible to start from scratch, to master the environment’s forces, to triumph over chaos. Indirectly, the word safe has pious connotations: to be safe, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, is “to be delivered from sin or condemnation,” to be above the fray, in “a state of salvation.”

It is a tall order. Being in class, everyone knows, doesn’t bring salvation. Instead, it plunges you into the contradictions that shape our lives. Safety is a basic principle of education: Knowledge results from trust, and trust comes from care. Yet whether we like it or not, violence is an unavoidable feature, our constant companion. Nature without violence is a contradiction.

Thus, in order to understand violence, the first requirement is to acknowledge it. The history of civilization — of any civilization — is by definition a history of barbarism, a struggle between alternative forms of order. The classroom ought to be where that struggle is analyzed, explored, and dissected. We study the role of violence in that struggle. To be safe in the classroom is not to banish violence but to learn ways of controlling it.

Do we overindulge? Take trigger warnings. They are designed to alert students of what is in store. Offering context is essential, as long as it doesn’t become an excuse for zealousness.

Last semester, after the first class in a course I teach on One Hundred Years of Solitude, a student approached me. She wanted to know if there were sexual scenes in the novel that she might want to avoid. I said yes, adding that they were integral to the metabolism of the narrative, that is, never gratuitous. Something the student said gave me the impression her inquiry had a religious component. I mentioned, respectfully, that one of them reminded me of the relationship between King David and Bathsheba. Soon after our conversation, I heard she had dropped out of school. I wished the discussion had been longer for me to better understand her fears.

Indeed, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, the paintings of Renaissance artists, the plays of Shakespeare, Don Quixote, One Thousand and One Nights, and Grimms’ fairytales are filled with violence. The Hebrew bible in particular is a dark, hostile narrative, with a vengeful god as protagonist. The same goes for studies in bio-genetics, political science, and history. They are about destruction as a cycle of rebirth.

Yet there are other aspects of violence that no one worries about. In another class, this one on dreams, I included a discussion of the movie Inception. I preceded it with a warning: The good guy, Leonardo DiCaprio, on a mission, shoots dozen of bad guys. If it is possible to compare them, both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Inception are exceedingly violent, although the latter feels far more aggressive. Not only that, it takes such devastation lightheartedly. (There is also a dream sequence that includes a suicide, which caused distress in a couple of students among the 80 enrolled.) Questioning it, especially among young people, seems unattractive because Hollywood violence is successfully marketed as entertainment. This, in my view, is how killing is endorsed by all of us.inception26

Do we have the courage to speak out? Would our protest make a dent? Should the movie theater also be a safe space? Discussions of violence used to be taboo on campus. That is no longer the case. We are more mindful than before about the traumas and psychological scars people bring into the classroom. All this is welcome, as long as we don’t turn it into a politically correct rejection of aggression as a reality of life.

It goes without saying that safety is at a premium in the contemporary world. (I sometimes imagine myself dying in a terrorist attack.) I used to doubt those who say things don’t get better, they only deteriorate. Social media seems to expand that deterioration exponentially. Fighting violence through reason is an endorsement of order.

My fear is that calling the classroom a “safe place” is stating the obvious. It fosters a façade for overprotectiveness. There is danger in that softness.

Brit Thesps Nail Yank Lingo

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Hugh Laurie can talk the talk.

The American characters in Genius — screening earlier this summer in art-house cinemas everywhere — are played by the following actors.

Thomas Wolfe: Jude Law (English)

Maxwell Perkins: Colin Firth (English)

Aline Bernstein: Nicole Kidman (Australian)

Ernest Hemingway: Dominic West (English)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Guy Pearce (Australian)

Zelda Fitzgerald: Vanessa Kirby (English)

I didn’t see the film, but I don’t have to in order to know the American accents are spot-on. In my experience, English and Australian actors’ American accents are virtually always spot-on. This is true of well-known players, like Damien Lewis in Homeland and Billions; Idris Elba and West in The Wire; and so much work by the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Toni Collette, Heath Ledger, and many more.

It’s true of relative unknowns as well. I just finished watching the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, where two of the three main male American characters are played by actors I wasn’t familiar with but whose British nationality is pretty clear from their names — Rupert Evans and Rufus Sewell. I hate to say it, but I found their accents more convincing than that of the third lead, who is American and whom I will not identify.

Playing Dr. Gregory House, Hugh Laurie is the Briton whose American accent has probably been heard by the most sets of ears, owing to House’s eight seasons on the air, and that is generally considered bloody brilliant, if not the best of all time. Laurie was pretty unknown here when the show began, in 2004, and many assumed he was a native. At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Laurie was co-presenting with fellow TV doctor Zach Braff and began speaking in his normal manner. Braff looked at him oddly and Laurie asked, “What?” Braff replied, “Oh, nothing, I just didn’t realize we were doing British accents.”

The phenomenon probably wouldn’t be so striking if the reverse process weren’t such a carve-up. Sure, the statute of limitations has passed on Dick Van Dyke’s “cockney” in Mary Poppins, and sure, Gwyneth Paltrow and Renée Zellweger produced passable if fairly vanilla English tones in Shakespeare in Love and the Bridget Jones, films, the latest of which will open in September. (You can judge Zellwegger’s accent by her voiceover in the trailer below.)

But on the whole, the history of American actors attempting to impersonate British people is an undistinguished one. (Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap don’t countboth of them come from English families.) Not to single out Anne Hathaway, who is a good sport, but she recently was justly dissed by James Corden in a mock-rap on The Late Late Show:

This isn’t just for me

It’s for the whole U.K.

Mad at your awful British accent

In the movie One Day.

It should be pointed out that not all British actors are great at talking American. The British website shortlist.com said Ray Winstone’s Boston accent in The Departed “sounds Australian” and accused Gerard Butler of doing “a playground American accent” in The Bounty Hunter. “It should be accompanied by waving a gun and calling someone ‘filthy punk.’”

But over all, the disparity is arresting and puzzling. Why does it exist? Various explanations have been offered.

1. Demographics and market capitalism. On a world-wide basis, the vast majority of characters in English-language films and television shows are American. As Lucinda Syson, a British casting director working in the U.S., observed in The Hollywood Reporter, “In Britain, we grew up on Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and Hawaii Five-0; we grew up with American accents, so British actors are able to have those accents as opposed to American actors, who would only see a few British shows.”

Moreover, because of the  disparity in roles, it is very much in Brits’ interests to learn to speak American, while capable American actors can do very well indeed without bothering to learn British.

2. Pedagogy and approach. Compared with American actors, Brits more often have intensive academic training, schooled in a variety of accents, not just American ones. In addition, their tradition of acting calls for working from the outside in, the “outside” including costume, hair, physical mannerisms, and accent. In the last seven or eight decades, American acting has been dominated by the inside-out Method approach, which focuses less on details and more on motivation and reclaiming emotion.

3. Physiognomy. An anonymous (and presumably British —s ee spelling of “characterized”) commenter on a Yahoo site devoted to this question credibly observes, “The American accent is characterised by its dominant ‘r’ sound. This strong ‘r’ tends to penetrate and pervade their attempts at other accents. Conversely, the British accent is more neutral sounding, so they can layer American characteristics over their natural accent without it showing through. Think of accents like canvases. The American accent has a thick, black base coat that’s difficult to paint over, the British accent has a thinner, lighter base coat.”

A final explanation of the disparity is that it doesn’t exist. To state the obvious, top American actors are well known to American audiences. As a result, the theory goes, we are hyper-aware of the flaws in any new accent they might attempt, whereas we implicitly give unknown Brits (see Hugh Laurie) the benefit of the doubt. This may be a reason why the American accent of the very familiar Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules drew criticism.

It’s intriguing but I don’t buy it. The best American actors are great at so many things, chief among them riveting our eyes to the screen. But give them a line in cockney, Mancunian, or even Received Pronunciation — well, the results won’t be pretty. Not that they asked for it, but my advice to them would be to work on their American accents. Otherwise, they’ll start losing even more roles to Commonwealth luvvies.

M22: Highway Sign and Trademark

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Fickr photo courtesy of Kathleen McDonald

M22 is not just another pretty face. In fact, not only is it not a face, it isn’t particularly pretty, unless you think a plain black-and-white road sign with letter M and number 22 on a white diamond on a black background can be pretty. But it stands for all that is beautiful at the west edge of the Michigan mitten. And that designation and design, curiously enough, are private property — as you will discover if you try to sell a T-shirt imprinted with that logo.

For nearly a century M22 has designated a Michigan state highway of a little more than a hundred miles, connecting Manistee in the south to Traverse City in the north. There’s a federal highway, US 31, that connects the same cities in just 64 miles, but you don’t take M22 when you’re in a hurry. Unlike US 31, M22 keeps to the shores of the “big lake,” Lake Michigan, and goes up the Leelanau Peninsula, featuring Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and back down again past Suttons Bay and alongside Grand Traverse Bay. It’s about as scenic as you can get.

So what’s the deal with private property? How can you own the M22 sign as a trademark?

It turns out that all you have to do is use it and apply for trademark protection. “Use it” means you have something to sell that uses the mark. In the case of M22, it’s a retailer in Traverse City that sells not just T-shirts but pants, hats, cups, buttons, refrigerator magnets, Frisbees, kites, and bottle openers. And that makes the most of the association of M22 with scenic views and the outdoor life. “At the heart of everything we do is a desire to share passion for this insanely amazing place,” the retailer declares. The company donates 1 percent of sales toward the preservation of Michigan’s natural resources, winning a Business Donor of the Year award from the Leelanau Conservancy in 2015.

A trademark doesn’t prevent anyone from using the mark for other purposes. The state can still post M22 signs along the highway and print the logo on maps; people can talk and write freely about M22, and use the state’s official highway logo, without paying a fee or getting the company’s permission. Only if people want to sell shirts or refrigerator magnets in imitation of the company’s products will they get a cease-and-desist letter from the company’s lawyer.

Still, the notion of trademarking a public state-designated highway sign bothers some people. Twice in recent years the M22 mark has been challenged by competitors who wanted to use the logo on clothing. One wanted a trademark for M119, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected it because it was too similar to M22′s.

The Michigan attorney general then stepped in and supported the petitioner, issuing an opinion that, since M22 was in the public domain, it couldn’t be trademarked. His opinion, however, was just an opinion. It had no effect on the USPTO’s previous approval of M22′s use of the mark. As M22′s lawyer pointed out, even the word “MICHIGAN” is protected by trademark for clothing, the trademark belonging to the University of Michigan.

So if you want to wear a shirt with the M22 logo, you’ll have to buy it from M22. Meanwhile, the logo has become so popular that people are stealing the signs. To replace the missing ones, the state is now making signs for the M22 highway that omit the M, in hopes that people won’t be so interested in them as souvenirs.

 

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