Johnson

THANKS for the many comments on the last post, suggesting topics (and keep them coming).  

Omulu and Human Child asked a few related questions about mixing languages. This happens at several different levels, for different reasons.  Omulu asked about untranslatable words like the oft-cited German Gemütlichkeit.  Gemütlichkeit is a kind of barroom cosiness with good friends, Bratkartoffeln and a nice local beer, or maybe a family dinner with intimate conversation and a good few laughs at the holidays. The Dutch have a similar word, gezellig, an adjective. The Danes like to call things in this category hyggelig. Hyggelig, like the others, is common, it's laden with associations, and it doesn't have an easy one-for-one English equivalent, so I hear my Danish mother-in-law calling things "cosy" all the time when I know she means hyggelig. I, for one, knowing cosy doesn't cover it, often say things are hyggelig to my wife, even when we're speaking English. This is one of the perks and joys of language-learning. My colleague posted a while back asking people to name words they'd like to import from foreign languages into English, and got quite a few answers.

Then there's another level of this: borrowing completely ordinary words from another language for play, because the other language is prestigious, or for no good reason at all. There is no reason to say Weltanschauung for "worldview", unless you just don't get enough chances to type two u's in succession and have tired of writing about vacuums. Many foreigners borrow English words like this these days, and it drives purists who speak those languages crazy pointing out the perfectly good native substitutes.  Probably my favorite is the handful of European languages that have borrowed "baby": das Baby in German for example. (The word Säugling, cognate to "suckling", is now quaint or old-fashioned.) 

But "code-switching", which Human Child brought up, is quite a different thing. Linguists use this off-putting term to describe people's switching back and forth between two dialects or languages they speak well, quickly and often. Some speakers of black English can put on their most buttoned-up English and then quickly switch to black dialect, like this reporter. (Warning: hilarious spontaneous profanity.  To those who call him "ghetto", I'd respond that he's just bidialectal.) Many Latinos in New York seem to do it almost randomly as they speak, as in the title of this paper on the subject: "Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español." Some linguists claim to see predictability in it; that the switches tend to happen more often at clause boundaries, for example, or that people switch to their first or home language when talking about more emotional topics. Those interested in more should click through to the paper and poke around the footnotes. Code-switching has many varieties and many motivations.

Finally, there's just plain language-mixing, like the portuñol that happens where Brazil and its Spanish-speaking neighbors meet.  Languages on semi-equal footing coming into contact on a daily basis can spawn a partly improvised, partly stable halfway-tongue.  If the languages aren't quite on equal footing, you can get intermediate results like the Saxon-Viking-Norman mix that produced English, still basically the Saxon language but with heavy input from French and Old Norse.

Language-contact is one of those things that is fascinating to linguists and infurating to some purists and nationalists. It's a fact of life, though, and I'm more in the "fascinated" camp, even if I don't agree with your Weltanschauung.

WATCHING college (American) football this bowl season, I was hoping my Georgia Bulldogs' free safety would return for his last season next year. (For those unaccustomed, college athletes may play only for four years total in America. Star prospects often leave after three or even two years if they are good enough to join the professional leagues.) Not only was he Georgia's best defensive player, but it was endless fun hearing his name: Bacarri Rambo.  The good news? He'll be back next year. Improbable fun fact?  His original name was Bacarri Fudge. 

Today, I learn of the Name of the Year contest, via Nancy Friedman. I'd never heard of it, but now I'm hooked. In short, the website lets readers vote on their favourite peculiar personal names, in a knockout-style tournament. Who will be the name of the year?  We're in the round of 16 already, so you can choose from Rockwell Bonecutter, Leviticus Payne, Ebenezer Noonoo, Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, Chuntania Dangerfield, Delorean Blow, Solo Alone, Yolanda Supersad, RexAchilles Imperial, Vernon Lee Bad Marriage Jr., Monsterville Horton IV, Taco B.M. Monster, La'Peaches Pitts, Neptune Pringle III, Heidi Hohl and Madz Negro.  Like Ms Friedman, I'm going to be voting for Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson to the end.  (In case you're suspicious, as I initially was, the Name of the Year editors have verified that these are all real people.) 

To be serious for a moment: many such names belong to black Americans. It has been a cause of both mirth and puzzlement for the more traditionally named. It's not hard to understand why those cut off for centuries from full American citizenship and human dignity might not choose Dennis or Steve for their children. Many blacks have reached for Swahili influences in choosing names, though most black Americans' ancestors came from western Africa, not Swahili's heartland on the other side of the continent. But many names are either borrowed from unusual sources (brand names like Courvoisier) or made up (Chuntania)—nothing African about either. And I can verify that I have seen an African-American checkout clerk in New Orleans whose name-tag read "Bellowney", and in the same store, a Sayonara. 

Experiments with identical résumés sent to employers, one with a distinctively black name and one with a white-sounding one, have found (surely to no one's surprise) that a DeShawn is less likely to get an interview than a Michael with the same qualifications. Racism abides. But Steven Levitt, in a paper described in his book "Freakonomics", analysed real-world people born in California. He found that those with distinctly black names fared poorly because they came from demographic groups (with poor parents, poor education) that predicted future poverty. Regression analysis found no effect from the names themselves.

So what's in a name?  Variety, individuality, culture, family, history and, sometimes, creativity. There's nothing racist at having a smile upon finding a Monsterville or a Chuntania. There's something pleasingly biblical about a hard-hitting Leviticus Payne (another American football player). Rockwell Bonecutter is proof that unusual monikers aren't limited to any race. Taco Monster, PhD, a Dutchman, shows that even if Americans might think you're the Cookie Monster's Mexican cousin, you can still make it as an epidemiologist. So Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. (convicted of assaulting his girlfriend) and Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson (accused of a string of bank robberies): whatever's in a name, don't blame your parents. Fates like these are your own to choose.

AMERICA'S Supreme Court heard a case about obscenity on broadcast television today. The New York Times notes that while the hearing was unusually lively, the judges don't look likely to overturn the authority past courts have given the government to fine a broadcaster—up to hundreds of thousands of dollars—for a brief obscenity.

What amazes me is the plastic definition of free speech invoked by one justice in particular.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who in other settings has been hostile to government regulation of speech, said there was value in holding the line here.

“This has a symbolic value,” he said, “just as we require a certain modicum of dress for the people that attend this court.”

“These are public airwaves,” Justice Scalia went on, adding: “I’m not sure it even has to relate to juveniles, to tell you the truth.”

By "in other settings...hostile to government regulation of speech", the reporter means that Justice Scalia believes it to be an unconstitutional restriction of free speech for governments to limit vast spending by corporations and unions to influence elections.  The Citizens United decision is rightly a controversial one. But if a jurist is going to be a free-speech purist, I'd prefer that he see it through. By what logic is Bono's "fucking brilliant" (5:44 in the video, one of the cases that has engaged the Supreme Court) a threat to the republic, while a SuperPAC is not?

Addendum:  I can't resist promoting teacup775's comment: "Now if Bono founds a SuperPAC that touts a candidate as fucking brilliant, we can hope to hear Scalia's brilliant reasoning as to why that speech is not protected."  Actually, I expect that if this should happen, Justice Scalia would find himself on the side of grudgingly protecting it. Maybe Stephen Colbert's SuperPAC can provide the test case. 

OUT last weekend with friends at a cool new burger restaurant in Brooklyn, I was taken aback by this sentence, which appeared on the menu above the many different burgers below.

"Burgers are served with organic beef unless otherwise specified."

Anyone else surprised by this?  Some of my dinner companions were surprised like I was; others read it with no trouble.

Continue reading "Unless what is otherwise specified?"»

MANY English teachers around the world use The Economist to help teach English as a foreign language.  We (the newspaper as a whole, and this blog) would like to help them out, but so far, ideas are hazy for how to do so.  Are there any English teachers, or anyone else, among our readers who have good ideas about how we might use Economist.com and this blog to teach English?  Please jump in in the comments if so.

DAVID CORN is an energetic journalist and usually a decent writer. But this Mother Jones article on Newt Gingrich is a textbook example of how not to mix metaphors.

The backdrop: Newt Gingrich had surged in America's Republican presidential primaries. Mitt Romney, his chief rival, didn't like that, and unleashed nasty ads on Mr Gingrich. These helped drag Mr Gingrich's poll-ratings down, and last night, Mr Gingrich fared poorly in the Iowa caucuses. Mr Gingrich's hopes for the nomination may now be dim, but at the very least, he seems to be prepared to use the rest of his campaign to destroy Mr Romney.

All this Mr Corn describes in an article headlined "Newt the Destroyer", comparing Mr Gingrich to Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Conan the Destroyer". Having brought barbarians into play, though, Mr Corn goes on:

"He would be Sherman. The former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia." If you're not familiar with Sherman, read up here. This is a very strange  thing to call Mr Gingrich. Sherman destroyed much of Atlanta and broad swathes of the rest of Georgia in order to reduce the Confederacy's ability to continue America's civil war. It was a brilliant but controversial strategy, and is still remembered bitterly in the state—Mr Gingrich's own.

In the very next sentence, Mr Gingrich, though, has become another, very different destroyer: "there are two debates this weekend in New Hampshire in which Gingrich can be a suicide bomber." Wait, is Mr Gingrich a cold-blooded general or a hot-blooded fanatic who will throw his life away to kill a few of the enemy?

Maybe neither. "Gingrich, as is widely known, entered the House in the late '90s, throwing bombs." OK, he is a grenadier, perhaps? No, he is an assassin who favours poison: "During his venom-laced rush to the top..."  Or perhaps he is not even under his own control?  "It will be as if a time bomb with a very long fuse has finally detonated." No, no, none of these. In a final flourish, Mr Corn says that Mr Romney may survive "the detonation of the Gingrich death star", which of course is not a victory for the owners of said death star. 

That is seven metaphors for Gingrich the destroyer, in one short piece. We all go a bit overboard with the language sometimes. The problem here is that each kind of destroyer here operates very differently, psychologically, tactically and strategically. A terrorist is not a barbarian, who is not a general, who is not a death star. Linguistically, these all fall in that awkward area between vivid, fresh and accurate metaphors (the kind recommended to writers) and metaphors that are so dead they are barely processed as metaphor (when people talk about political "tactics", the military origins of that word will not usually come to mind). Rather, those that Mr Corn deploys are fairly vivid metaphors—all seven of them, and that's the problem. They can't all be accurate. It's the Tom Friedman problem (see here, here or here). Mr Corn is trying too hard to be vivid.

Aspiring journalists and young writers, beware.

Addendum:  I managed to miss Mr Corn's last line, bringing the metaphor mix to eight: "But if Gingrich does go nuclear on Romney, it will be a fitting—and not unpredictable—end to a long reign of terror."

IT'S that time of year. Fretting about pounds put on over the long holiday break. Throwing Christmas wrapping into the fire. Contemplating gift returns. Beginning to wonder how much you really needed a long break with your extended family (though I must say truthfully that my in-laws are dead easy to spend two weeks with). Wondering which New Year's party will be the best. (My tip: low expectations correlate strongly with fun New Year's Eves.  Expectations for the Best Party Ever guarantee disappointment.) 

It's also the time of the year when dictionary-writers and lexicographers pick a Word of the Year. I've admitted that I'm not a Word of the Day person, nor am I particularly a Word of the Year person, with a polite and apologetic tip of the hat to a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society. The reason I personally don't get too excited is just how rarely the winners tittilate. A neologism or new sense of a word catches on, unlike the many neologisms that didn't, and lexicographers ratify what everyone else already knew: that lots of people were saying "occupy" this year, or that in Britain, the "squeezed middle" was the top political catchphrase of 2011. Merriam-Webster, being a dictionary maker, picked a word that many people looked up on its website, and so went with "pragmatic" instead of "occupy". Nonetheless, "occupy" is the frontrunner to win the Oscar of WOTYs, that given by the American Dialect Society. 

But WOTY season does give us a bit of time to talk about what a "word" is. Many people have objected to "squeezed middle" on the grounds that it is a tedious bit of political pandering. But others complain that it "isn't a word", but two words. Two words can be an ordinary phrase, as in "tall tree". Or they can become a compound, with a meaning above and beyond the compositional meaning of the two units. Last month Geoff Pullum wrote on Language Log that the Word of the Year "should be a word" and that "squeezed middle" was merely a compositional phrase. Mr Zimmer replied in rebuttal. So instead of being a Grinch about the WOTY business—I know many of you are wordniks, even if I'm not—I'll do a good turn and recommend this fascinating discussion about wordness. 

To learn a new language is to set yourself up for humiliation. But when you move to the country that invented your native tongue, you assume you’re on firmer ground. This is a dangerous fallacy.

The first winter I spent in Britain, as a stripling of a masters student, I lived in a house with four other foreigners—European all but not a Briton among them. It was on a routine shopping trip in early December that mince pies, as much a staple of a British Christmas as drunken office parties, first made their way into my life. I’d never before heard of them but the packaging was irresistible. It was a large red box with a picture of plump pies, one of them cut open to reveal generous amounts of filling spilling out of the glistening pastry. How could I resist? How could anyone?

I bought a couple of boxes thanks to Tesco’s generous two-for-one offer and put a batch into the oven the moment I returned home. When they emerged, they looked as inviting as on the packaging. I put them on a plate and—if you are any sort of purist, look away now—covered them in ketchup and chili sauce.

Readers unfamiliar with mince pies are probably wondering when this story’s punchline will make an appearance. I discovered that unforgettable December afternoon that if there is one ingredient mince pies do not contain, it is mince. (If you speak American English, this means "ground beef".) They did once upon a time—Wikipedia has an excellent entry on the history of the mince pie—but they are now sweet morsels for the festive season.

At the time, I was baffled and complained to some English friends. They were aghast and amused in equal measure. Nothing marks you out as a foreigner more than publicly discovering something every three-year-old knows. The whole thing put me off mince pies for life.

This is not a case of Americanisms versus Britishisms. Nor am I some sort of literalist who expects shepherds in his shepherd’s pie or cottages in his cottage pie. Words often change their meanings as they evolve. Sweetmeats, which mirror mince pies in their vegetarian tendencies, are based on an archaic use of "meat" as simply a word for "food". In the case of mince pies, though, the words stayed the same while the object being described transformed in character.

Changes in society can also affect meaning: British “public schools” are, famously, private schools, but public in the sense that anybody who can afford to pay the fee can enrol, as opposed to private tuition. The description only started sounding odd after the expansion of education and the rise of publicly-funded state schools.

And then there are those occasions when the dissonance is mainly ironic or metaphorical. Welsh rabbit (also called Welsh rarebit), a kind of British bruschetta slathered in melted cheese, has no rabbit and never has. It probably comes from a snide reference to Welshmens’ poverty or hunting skills. Toad in the hole, needless to say, contains no toad, but is a sausage concealed in batter; similarly, the American pig in a blanket is what the British, being prosaic for once, call a sausage roll.

But what about other languages that straddle various countries, like French, Spanish and Portuguese? Have our readers ever found themselves in similar situations when they travelled to a place where they spoke what they thought was the native tongue?

Tuesday night’s English Club, held in a near-empty café in Hanoi’s suburbs, began like this: First, we introduced ourselves and played a game. As we went around the circle we had to give our name, then think of an adjective beginning with the same first letter. Then each person had to recite those who had come before.

"I am Huong and I am... I am.. humorous!" Everyone laughed. "I am Anh and I ... active? Huong is humorous." "I am Doan and I'm dangerous. Anh is active. Huong is humorous."

"I am Yen and I'm interesting." "No! It must start same letter your name! Not just the same sound. Your name starts with a 'Y' so you must think of that word." "Aah. Young. I am young."

The government, as I've already written on this blog, has long seen English proficiency as the way forward. Primary schools are required to teach it but don’t seem to have been doing an excellent job. So instead of paying the high fees to study with a native speaker at a posh language school these Vietnamese had formed their own club. Each week they meet for food and coffee, speaking only English; Vietnamese is officially banned. After the games they hold a discussion on something. This week it was organ donation.

Their level of English was impressive. I’ve worked with people who have translation degrees or have studied the language all the way through university. But they often struggle to put a sentence together when speaking, since the rote-learning still practiced in many Vietnamese universities leaves little room for speaking skills.

"We’re very different to other clubs. We all know each other and we all have a good level of English. In some places people just show up and they can’t follow anything!" said Doan, the friend who invited me, later. Like many his age he believes English is integral to a good career at a good private or foreign company. He spends his off time at English clubs or speaking with expat friends, or in class.

There are other ways to practice. A friend who used to work with me part-time decided to hang out in some of the smaller expat bars in Hanoi to spruce up her English. It worked a treat when it came to learning slang and varied colloquialisms, and understanding wasted foreigners for whom English was also a second language. But she took to it perhaps a little too well. When another friend of mine's mother was visiting from abroad, she greeted her with: “Hello, do you fucking like Vietnam?"

I RECENTLY bought a faucet online from Home Depot (a big-box home-improvement store, for those who don't know the company). It was my first Home Depot purchase. A few days after my faucet arrived, I got a marketing e-mail beginning: "We appreciate your business. Thank you for being a loyal customer." 

I've always found automatic thank-yous off-putting. I know that Home Depot's computers fulfilled my order and then automatically reached into a database for the desired thing they wanted to communicate to me. I can see the code in my mind. I'm not a programmer, but I imagine it looks like

if order == true

  puts 'Thank you for being a loyal customer, ' + name + '.'

It feels about as personal as a nice warm handshake from Robocop.

Can a computer be polite?  A human programmed it, and the programmer's human boss, somewhere up the chain, made a human decision that it's good to treat customers as though they are valued. They are more likely to return, and hopefully the mutual, repeated sales are good for all concerned. But that doesn't change the ick-factor for me: that it was an automated process that "thanked" me. I don't really feel thanked, as I would be in the mom-and-pop hardware store down the street. (But they didn't have the faucet that I needed.) Do you think that an algorithm can accomplish the human act of expressing gratitude?  (What about the many low-level service workers who are ordered to thank customers, and do it as robotically as they can without getting fired?)

Then there's one more thing: as mentioned, this was my first Home Depot order. I am not yet—I cannot be—a loyal customer. As long as we're programming, couldn't someone write an 

if order == first

puts 'Thank you for becoming a Home Depot customer, ' + name '.'

else

puts 'Thank you for being a loyal customer, ' + name + '.'

Really, though, the only thing that will determine whether I'm a loyal customer is how well my faucet works out.  

And Johnson thanks you, in any case, for sticking with this blog. Really.

ROMAN JAKOBSON, a linguist, is credited with the notion that languages differ not so much in what they can express as what they must express. The common trope that language X has no word for Y is usually useless (it usually means language X uses several words instead of one for Y). But languages do differ significantly in what they force speakers to express, something Lera Boroditsky talks about often in support of the "linguistic relativity" hypothesis.

I was thinking of this today when on the subway, I saw a young man whose shoulder bag bore six red buttons, with "I am loved" written in white, identical except that each was in a different language. They look like this. (I later learned that this is an old campaign that began with the Helzberg Diamond company.)

What struck me was that three of the buttons identified him as female: soy amada (Spanish), io sono amata (Italian) and sou amada (Portuguese). In each, the past participle of "to love" (amar/amare) must agree with the loved thing, and the -a is a feminine ending. The young chap should have had soy amado etc. The poor button-makers had to pick one or the other, and chose feminine.

The German forced no such choice: a man or a woman can say Ich bin geliebt, as the young commuter's pin did. And Russian doesn't require it either, but the translation is menya lyubyat, "they love me".  

And Russian (more than most languages) forces a bunch of other distinctions on English speakers. The average verb of motion requires you to express whether you're going by vehicle or foot, one-direction or multidirectionally, and in the past tense, makes you include an ending for your own gender. So "I went" would, in one Russian word (khodila, say), express "I [a female] went [by foot] [and I came back]." If you don't want to express all of that, tough luck. You have to. Jakobson himself was Russian. Perhaps his native language led him to the insight above; learning the English verb go might have had the Russian wondering "that's it? By what means? There and back, or what? We would never put up with this in Russian." 

When most people tell you some very unusual word "can't be translated", they usually mean words like these "Relationship words that aren't translatable into English": shockingly specific single words in other languages like mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." But of course mamihlapinatapei is translatable into English. It's "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." Needing several words for one isn't the same as untranslatability. 

What really can't be translated properly is "go" into Russian, or "loved" into Spanish, not because the English words are too specific but because they're too vague. Those languages force you to say much more, meaning the poor Helzberg Diamond people can't make a single button reading "I am loved" in Spanish for both men and women.  The traditional idea of "can't be translated" has the facts exactly backwards. Who knew that the truly untranslatable words were those that say the least?