Archive for the ‘2004’ Category

« Older Entries |

Searching for meaning, Bulls in the thick of it

Thursday, September 30th, 2004

The Chicago Bulls’ slogan for their current season-ticket campaign is “Through Thick and Thin!”

The implication is clear: If you’re a true fan, you stand by your team in
good times and bad (and buy season tickets either way).

The slogan may seem to concede the team’s prospects this year are not that
good; there’s little need, after all, to appeal to fans’ endurance, patience
and loyalty if you anticipate a successful season. But the team says the
slogan is meant as a token of appreciation for Bulls fans, who have
supported the team through recent losing seasons. It is not meant as a
warning of things to come.

“In the last six years, we’ve compiled the worst six-year record in NBA
history, in terms of wins and losses, and yet our attendance cumulatively
has ranked No. 1 in the NBA,” says Steve Schanwald, the Bulls’ executive
vice president of business operations, who helped come up with the slogan.
“The fans have supported us in good times and bad. We thought [the slogan]
was a good tribute to our fans to illustrate how they have stuck with us no
matter what.”

But is the team worried the slogan suggests fans should prepare for another
rocky year?

“People can interpret things any way they want,” Schanwald says. “The
intention of the campaign is to say that Bulls fans have stuck with us in
spite of our record.”

One question about the slogan remains: is “thick” the good part or the bad part?

“Most people, when they hear the phrase applied to anything, the word
`thick’ means good times, and the word `thin’ means bad times,” Schanwald
says.

Under this interpretation, a “thin” year is like a “lean year” (which
WordReference.com defines as “not profitable or prosperous”). But the Oxford
English Dictionary suggests the opposite is true. Its first citing of “thick
and thin” is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” in 1386. When
the horse runs away in “The Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer writes, in his Middle
English, “And forth with wehee, thurgh thikke and thurgh thenne” (“And with
a `whinny’ he went, through thick and through thin”).

The OED says the phrase can be interpreted to mean “through thicket and thin
wood.” So “thick” is the bad part—the dense portions of the woods where
progress is most difficult. (This aligns with the meaning of the phrase “in
the thick of it,” meaning “the worst of it.”)

“THICK and THIN are substantivized adjectives [adjectives that function as
nouns] that apparently referred to a narrow passage and a clearing,” e-mails
Anatoly Liberman, linguist and scholar of medieval literature at the
University of Minnesota. “When horse riders of chivalric romances and
knights errant had vanished, the origin of the metaphor was forgotten.”

The phrase’s staying power, Liberman says, owes in part to its consecutive
“th”‘s and single syllables. “The phrase joined a host of alliterating
binomials like SPICK AND SPAN and SAFE AND SOUND,” he writes.

The tidy pairing of opposites in “thick and thin,” Liberman added, ensures
the phrase communicates its meaning of “no matter what,” even when its
original references to good and bad, or “thicket and thin wood,” have faded
from view.

Still, the medieval meaning could work just as well on a billboard. The
Bulls could say: “We may not be out of the woods, but we hope you’ll stay in
the saddle.”

Endings

  • Inspired by a contest by the Deutscher Sprachrat, or German
    Language Council, to find the most beautiful word in the German language
    (candidates include “Lebenslust,” meaning “zest for life,” and “Sehnsucht,”
    meaning “longing”), Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Kim Ode solicited
    nominations for the most beautiful word in English. The winner was
    “mellifluous,” which, appropriately enough, means “sweet-sounding.”
    “Serendipity” came in second, ahead of “lullaby,” “harmony,” “benign,”
    “murmur” and “anemone.” Of the more than 100 entries Ode received, no word
    got more than five votes.
  • A new version of “Metamorphoses,” the masterpiece of the classical
    poet Ovid, translated from Latin by American poet Charles Martin, includes
    some contemporary catchphrases. According to Mark Jarman in the summer issue
    of the Hudson Review, the hunter Actaeon, who stumbles into a deadly
    encounter with the goddess Diana, is said to be “wandering clueless.” A
    conflict between Perseus and Phineus makes the crowd go “totally ballistic.”
  • Should you ever find yourself matched with a speaker of Swahili in a
    chess match, consult the Web page “Chess Pieces in 64 Languages” by Finnish
    chess player Ari Luiro (www.geocities.com/jarvsk/nap-pieces.htmcq). Here you
    learn that “pawn,” for instance, is “kitunda” in Swahili, “sotilas” in
    Finnish, “poon” in Japanese, and “huu” in Mongolian. Luiro also translates
    “checkmate,” and notes that the word comes from the ancient Persian “shah
    mat,” for “the king is dead.”

Expectant parents form bonds through `belly talk’

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

Everyone knows how parents talk to their babies, using the childlike syllables and sentences we call “baby talk.”

But one researcher is studying how parents talk to the baby before it is
born. Sallie Han, a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s
Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, has a name for the attempts
of expectant parents to communicate with the baby inside Mom’s bulging
belly. She calls it “belly talk.”

In researching her dissertation-in-progress on the habits of pregnant
parents in America, Han said she became interested in belly talk, which
she defines as “speech and other communications directed toward the unborn
child”—including stroking the belly and even playing music for the
baby.

Han’s interest turned especially personal when she became pregnant with
her daughter, now 6 months old, and she and her husband began their own
“belly talk.”

“I would wake up and the baby would kick, and I would say, `Good
morning,’”she said [in a phone interview]. “Or if I was drinking orange juice and
the baby kicked, I would say, `Oh, you like orange juice.’”

“There’s a lot of commenting on baby activity,” Han said. “Women in my
study complain about when their baby’s foot gets under their ribs, and they
say, `Can you move your foot please?’”

While baby talk is usually delivered in the higher registers of the
voice, the pitch of belly talk varies, Han said.

“Sometimes people use that baby-talk register: `Oh, cutie,’” she said,
mimicking the style of speech. “Sometimes people use plain old adult
talk: `Hey, what’s going on in there, kid?’ I was surprised that people didn’t
always do that cutesy talk.”

Belly talk is not just for women; Han said many fathers are eager to get
in on the one-sided conversation.

“The men I talked to wanted to feel involved and present in the
pregnancy,” Han said. “Some would actually put their mouth on the belly button and
talk into it. It’s a moment of bonding between the couple as well as the man
and child.”

Han believes belly talk is an American practice, and comes from cultural
ideals of child achievement.

“In the United States, there’s an emphasis on getting a head start in
parenting and being sure a child becomes educated and gets a good start
in life,” she said. “It’s a newer phenomenon. I’ve looked through pregnancy
advice books and you didn’t see anything about talking to the child
before birth before the ’80s or early ’90s. Now there’s more awareness and
concern about how to make the child smarter, better, faster.”

Han emphasized that there isn’t any evidence that talking to an unborn
baby increases its intelligence. But there’s no deterring the parents who are
bent on birthing an honor student. There’s even a book called “Oh, Baby,
the Places You’ll Go! A Book to Be Read in Utero,” an adaptation of a Dr.
Seuss book, and CDs called “Mozart for Mothers-to-Be” and “UltraSound: Music
for the Unborn Child.”

But is belly talk getting through to the unborn listener? While the
fetus develops hearing capacity at about 20 weeks, studies show only
low-frequency sounds are audible through the walls of the womb. In fact, scientists
caution that putting loud sounds up against the abdomen may disrupt the
sleep patterns of the fetus.

Still, various studies suggest a baby can learn to distinguish its
mother’s voice before birth. Last year, the journal Psychological Science
published a study of 60 pregnant mothers in China that found the heart rate of the
fetus increased when a tape of its mother’s voice was played to the abdomen
and decreased when a tape of another woman’s voice was played.

Whether or not the baby is listening, Han said belly talk is an
important form of bonding for a parent.

“People in my research really seem to look at it as a way of getting
close to a baby,” Han said. “They’re making this expected child—in some
ways an imagined child—a true presence in their lives.”

Endings

  • Two London newspapers reported last month that hospitals’
    efforts to outsource the work of transcribing doctors’ orders is causing some
    humorous but dangerous errors. Typists in India, transcribing sound
    files of doctors’ dictated orders, supposedly rendered “phlebitis left leg” as
    “flea bite his left leg” and “below knee amputation” as “baloney amputation.”
    British blogger Ray Girvan (www.raygirvan.co.uk) wasn’t buying it. “This
    very much rings my urban myth alarm,” he wrote. Girvan noted that the
    claims of these translation typos were made by a British organization of
    medical secretaries, and medical secretaries are directly affected by
    outsourcing. He also found that alleged instances of “flea-bite-his” and “baloney” in
    in-house medical transcriptions had been circulating on the Internet
    since 1996.

Bilingual writers reflect on their ‘Mother Tongues’

Thursday, September 2nd, 2004

Learning a new language means more than memorizing a new vocabulary and
mastering different rules of grammar. It also means adopting a new way of
matching words to experience and memory, as “The Genius of Language: Fifteen
Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, $23) illustrates.

This collection of essays by bilingual authors—most of them immigrants to
the United States—chronicles not only each writer’s life’s story, but
also what editor Wendy Lesser calls “the process of being embraced or
enveloped by English.” As Czech native and contributor Josef Skvorecky puts
it, each writer struggles “to be at home in a language.”

The essays also eloquently explore the links between childhood and language.

“I dwell on all of these childhood memories because German is for me the
language of memory and loss, a linguistic Prelude [to my life],” writes
Thomas Laqueur. The echoes of his German-speaking mother’s call,
“Thomaslein,” for “little Thomas,” still have special resonance, he says.

“Tommy, which is what they called me in West Virginia, has always sounded
silly to me; Tom is just a name; Thomaslein is very sweet,” he writes.

Gary Shteyngart, whose bad dreams contain dialogue in his native Russian,
calls his essay “a child’s farewell to the language that once choreographed
his entire world.”

At times, “The Genius of Language” vividly illustrates particular features
of a certain language, giving readers a feel for its texture.

When Bharati Mukherjee, a native of Bangladesh, learned English, she “missed
the onomatopoeic phrases in Bangla that mimicked the blowing of the wind,
the drizzle of rain and gurgle of waterfalls,” she reflects. “Next to the
drawn-out vowels that made spoken Bangla a euphonic language, English
sounded harshly energetic.”

Luc Sante says something similar about his native French. When he translates
a nuanced French phrase to English, the result, he writes, “is a coarse
cluster of dentals, and it is over in a second and leaves no echo.”

Sante translates one of his favorite French poems to English, and remarks:
“It has none of the music or the magic, in part because of the tendency of
English to condensation and bluntness, away from the silken chains of
prepositional phrases that give French its incantory power.”

For other writers, individual words evoke a feeling or reminiscence that
English cannot match. M.J. Fitzgerald, who lived in Italy as a child, writes
about “a sea whose intensity of blue can only be contained in the Italian
word azzurro. The word blue, an anodyne descriptive term, does not convey
that childhood sea, but azzurro brings it all back.”

At times, the tension between two languages is so complex that a writer
cannot keep them from crowding each other out.

Ariel Dorfman says he labored for months to begin his memoir, unable to
decide whether to write it in English or Spanish. He “could not venture one
word in either language without feeling that I was betraying one or the
other,” he writes. “Whenever I wrote anything about my life, in either
language, it simply sounded . . . false, falso, fraudulent, fraudulento.”
(He ended up writing it in English, then re-writing it in Spanish.)

Dorfman suggests that different languages have unique ways of shaping how a
speaker sees the world. So does Skvorecky, who writes about “the joy, as it
were, of being an additional human being [by] writing in an additional
tongue.”

Amy Tan, a child of Chinese immigrants, takes this idea a step further,
mentioning Benjamin Lee Whorf, the mid-20th Century linguist who said
speakers of different languages have access to different thoughts because of
their different words.

Tan repeats a myth that Whorf helped spread, that Eskimos (Inuit, as we now
call them) have a variety of words for the English word “snow.” Actually,
Inuit languages have about the same number of root words for “snow” as we do
with our “sleet,” “slush,” “blizzard” and so on, as linguist Geoffrey Pullum
showed in his 1991 book, “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.”

Still the tendencies, if not the vocabularies, of different languages can
reflect different cultural norms about things such as modesty and
individualism. As Ha-yun Jung writes of his native Korean, “The simple
English sentence `I want an apple’ sounds awkward when translated, word for
word, into Korean. A Korean person is much more likely to say something that
could be translated as, `It would be nice to have an apple.’”

“I live on, not feeling whole in Korean or English,” Ha-yun Jung concludes.
“For me, one language is complementary to the other, one always lacking a
capacity that the other has. And I have a fear, constantly, of not quite
being understood in just one language.”

Add this to life list: `Birding’ has inspired flock of words

Sunday, August 22nd, 2004

Peter Cashwell leads a double life. He’s an English teacher who likes to bird. But using the noun “bird” as a verb can get you in trouble in English teachers’ lounges.

“Even as I draw my pay for teaching grammar … `to bird’ is a regular part of my vocabulary,” Cashwell confesses in the opening pages of his book “The Verb `To Bird’: Sightings of an Avid Birder” (Paul Dry Books, $22.95).

Cashwell, who lives in rural Virginia, apologizes for this apparent impropriety but explains that “bird-watching” won’t do.

“The term suggests that we . . . sit passively and stare at [birds],” he writes. “In reality, those who bird pursue birds, observing them, memorizing their names, learning their field marks and calls, chasing them over hill and dale . . . . I doubt that clock-watchers act this way around clocks.”

The verb “to bird” is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1576, but then it referred to hunting and trapping birds. Only within the past two decades, Cashwell says, has “birding” begun to replace “bird-watching.”

Cashwell also considers the case of the cardinal bird, skeptical of the story that it was named for the resemblance of its red feathers to the robes of Catholic cardinals.

“It seemed a stretch to me that in the Southeastern portion of the country [where the bird is most prevalent], a heavily Protestant area, people would see a red bird and the first thing they think of is a high-ranking member of the Vatican,” Cashwell said in a phone interview. “I found out that it was the explorers, not the Protestants, who had done the naming, and they were from Catholic nations or were Catholic themselves.”

Other than his reflections on bird and cardinal, Cashwell writes more about the practice than the vocabulary of birding. But birding has, in fact, inspired or appropriated a whole flock of words, as you can see at the online version of Peter Weaver’s Birdwatcher’s Dictionary (www.birdcare.com/bin/searchdict). Among Weaver’s entries:

Anvil: A hard surface a bird uses to smash the shells of snails or clams to obtain the soft insides. According to legend, as recorded by the 1st Century Roman Historian Pliny the Elder, the Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head, mistaking its bald surface for a stone.

Billing: This has nothing to do with accounting. Billing is the practice of touching bills in an affectionate way during courtship, and is often observed in pigeons. A British variant is nebbing.

Cain and Abel situation: A colloquial term for siblicide, or the killing of one sibling by another (usually the younger sibling is the victim, as in the biblical story of Cain and Abel). “It probably showed up in a paper somewhere, and someone decided to get cute,” said Jeff Brawn, associate professor of animal biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and treasurer of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Guano: A Spanish word for a pile of droppings, such as what accumulates under a roost. Bat guano is sold as fertilizer.

LBJ: Not the nation’s 36th president, but a little brown job—a bird that alights and then flies away too quickly to be described in any detail.

Lek: an assembly of birds in which males strut and dance in hope of attracting a mate. The word, which can be used as a verb or noun, apparently comes from the Swedish word leka, meaning to play. “It’s a great Scrabble word,” Cashwell said. “I’ve been challenged about that one a couple of times.”

Life list: The list of all the bird species a birder has seen in her lifetime. An addition to the list is called a lifer. Someone who earnestly seeks to add to her life list is called a lister (see “twitcher” below).

Mobbing: The harassment or attack of a larger bird by a gang of smaller ones. “This is something I’ve observed fairly frequently,” Cashwell said. “I’ve seen a handful of swallows chasing a hawk. It was like a small Apache attack helicopter attacking a bomber.”

Pen: a female swan. A male swan is a cob. “There are literally scores of terms for the males and females of individual animals,” Cashwell said. A male duck, for example, is called a drake, the female a hen.

Pish: the approximate sound a birder produces through pursed lips in an attempt to draw a bird closer. “It sounds strange, but it really works,” Cashwell said. “You can get a bird to fly out of the brush or down from the higher branches of a tree by saying `pish’ toward it.”

Twitcher: Someone who goes to great lengths to spot a certain species. Weaver suggests the name refers to the nervous anticipation of a birder on the lookout for a new addition to his life list. “Twitchers will drive great distances to see a rare bird in a particular area that may have blown in because of a storm or gotten lost,” Cashwell said.

Yaffle: the common name for the European green woodpecker, named for its laughing call.

Besides jobs, U.S. accents also being exported to India

Thursday, July 8th, 2004

With the outsourcing of American jobs comes the exporting of American accents. In Bangalore, India—the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent—the booming customer service call center industry depends on coaching Indian workers to talk like they’re from Wisconsin. Sort of.

The process is called “accent neutralization.” But in reality, trainers are out to transform, not just tweak, the speech of trainees facing the tricky task of dealing with often grouchy people demanding customer assistance.

The challenge is to slow the clipped Indian speech cadence and tackle the pronunciation of what seem like unnatural sounds to the trainees in order to be understood by North American and British customers. Although the Indian trainees typically speak English as either a native or a second language, English has a markedly different sound on different continents. Trainers in Bangalore say some Western pronunciation doesn’t come naturally to the people in their classes.

“Some Indian trainees take a little more time to grasp the sounds `v,’ `w,’ `ei,’ `th’ and `aw,’” Nina Nair, general manager of learning and development for the call center service 24/7 Customer, wrote by e-mail from Bangalore.

“[We] practice with words containing these sounds: wine, vine, vet, wet, vale, wail. We also have the students make up paragraphs using words with these sounds.”

Nair has trained more than 1,000 Indian call center workers. She teaches 20 people at a time in classes that last about two weeks, working on the phonetics, intonation and rhythm of American and British accents (other trainers handle the Canadian accent).

For examples of American speech, Nair says she shows her classes clips of TV shows such as “Friends” and movies such as “Pretty Woman,” “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Men In Black.”

“Intonation is taught [by] speaking out sentences with stress on different parts of speech,” Nair wrote. “`She likes them’ is spoken as `She laiks’em,’ with the stress on the verb `likes.’ `Can’t you?’ is spoken as `Canchyu’?”

These and other vocal exercises can become tongue-twisters in the mouths of Indians unfamiliar with Western speech. In “The Other Side of Outsourcing,” a documentary hosted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on the Discovery Channel last month, call center trainees were shown struggling with the R’s and T’s in a reading exercise that began, “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water.”

“Remember the first day I told you that the Americans flat the `ta’ sound?” the instructor asked the class. “It sounds like an almost `da’ sound. They do not keep it crisp and clear like the British. … They would say, `Insert a quarder in the meder,’ or `Beddy bought a bit of bedder budder.’”

“When we talk to an American over the phone, that’s when we open our mouths a little wider, like the Americans do,” one call center supervisor told Friedman.

The training may not be enough, however, to fool Americans into thinking their customer service calls are being picked up in Indiana instead of India. Internet message boards are beginning to register complaints from customers frustrated with overseas call centers.

“While the reps were polite, they simply would not speak clear enough English to be understood and could not seem to understand my simple questions!” wrote one computer customer at Silicon.com. “Sure, there are bad employees in the U.S. also, but they can at least be understood when they speak and can understand what you’re saying.”

In response, 24/7 spokesman Shimonti Sikdar said, “If you look at the percentage of such complaints, it is less than 1 percent of the total calls. Rather than taking extra time to train the agents at the onset, it makes sense to give them continued education in accent and communication to maintain the call quality at all times.”

Endings

  • Nearly three years after moving to Italy, Rebecca Helm-Ropelato isn’t
    just learning Italian; she’s learning Italian idioms.”Where we say, `you’re pulling my leg,’ the Italians say, `you’re pulling my nose,’” Helm-Ropelato wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor.
    “Instead of `we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ the Italians admonish `not
    to bandage one’s head before breaking it.’ Italians don’t say `it’s raining
    cats and dogs’; they say, `it’s raining as if God sent it.’Helm-Ropelato says her linguistic progress is “piano, piano”—an Italian
    expression for “slowly, step by step.”
  • Roger Kimball nipped ambiguity in the bud in an essay earlier this
    year in The National Interest: “By `intellectual,’ I do not mean `bookish’; I do
    not mean `intelligent,’” Kimball wrote. “I mean characterized by a certain lofty
    moralism—smug, progressive, abstract, activist.”
  • Receptionists—make that customer service representatives—keep
    getting promoted, if their titles are any indication. Callers seeking news
    of people admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital are asked to hold for “the
    next patient access representative.”

Rico the dog’s vocabulary restarts linguists’ debate

Thursday, July 1st, 2004

One thing everyone agrees on: Rico is one special dog.

Researchers in Germany spotted Rico on a TV game show and brought him in for tests. What they found, the journal Science reported last month, was that the brilliant border collie seemed to recognize more than 200 German words. That kind of vocabulary was previously thought to be attainable only by children and specially trained animals such as apes and dolphins.

Asked by his German owners to retrieve a certain toy from the next room—such as a stuffed panda bear or banana—Rico scrounged around in a bin of toys and returned with the correct item 37 out of 40 times. When his owner asked for a toy Rico had never heard of, the 9-year-old border collie knew enough to retrieve the one item in the bin whose name he didn’t know.

This apparent ability to learn words, which scientists call “fast mapping,” was “comparable to toddlers,” the study said.

Rico’s owner stayed in an adjacent room during the tests, to ensure the dog was no Clever Hans—the horse who gained attention at the turn of the 20th Century for supposedly answering math questions. It was later learned the horse was just responding to subtle gestures from his owner.

Since Rico was on his own when retrieving the toys, his feat was heralded by scientists as a breakthrough for animal recognition of language. “The study suggests to scientists that the ability to understand sounds is not necessarily related to the ability to speak, and that some aspects of speech comprehension evolved earlier than, and independent from, of human speech,” wrote Daniel Kane at the Web site of The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But while there was no question that Rico’s skills were remarkable, the study did reignite a contentious debate among linguists about whether animals can actually understand language. Rico can fetch different toys, but does he understand what his owner is saying?

No way, fumed Geoffrey Pullum, author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Nobody doubts that mammals are capable of associating large numbers of aural stimuli with particular behavioral responses,” Pullum wrote at www.languagelog.org. “It’s the confusion of that with `understanding language’ that drives me nuts.”

Pullum was especially displeased with the Associated Press headline, “Research Shows Dogs Understand Language.”

“It is my belief that no dog ever actually understands anything, in the special sense of recognizing that it has been told something that might be either true or false, or understanding the meaning of something . . . or even dimly appreciating that there is such as thing as meaning,” Pullum wrote in an e-mail interview. “With dogs, despite the high degree of sensitivity to humans’ social cues, it’s all tied to immediate behavior, like Rico’s fetching behavior.”

In a 1987 study of Kanzi the bonobo, another gifted animal with a vast vocabulary, researchers wrote, “Our view is that Kanzi’s behaviors are more like the use of tools than the human use of language. Tools are the instruments by which we attain certain outcomes. They are not symbols.”

Kanzi, they said, “does not know that lexigrams [words and pictures] represent, symbolize, or name objects and events; rather, he knows how to use them in order to effect desired outcomes.”

In a commentary in Science on the Rico study, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom voiced the same cautions. Although the study “seems to vindicate” dog owners who “boast about the communicative and social abilities of their pets,” Bloom wrote, Rico “learns only through a specific fetching game.” Unlike children, who understand that words “refer to categories and individuals,” Bloom said, in Rico’s brain, there may be no difference between “sock” and “fetch the sock.”

For now, Bloom concluded, “It is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not.”

Endings

Scandals not only reveal politicians’ bad behavior; they lead to leaders’ lamest language. When Connecticut Gov. John Rowland announced his resignation last month in the face of an impeachment inquiry and a federal corruption investigation, he stated, “I acknowledge that my poor judgment has brought us here.” Meanwhile, asked why he told Illinois Republican leaders that he didn’t think his divorce file would be damaging, U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan told reporters, “I don’t think the phrase `I don’t think so’ is misleading.”

At the end of the day, ‘back in the day’ just means ‘past’

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien once owned a lavender Citroen, she recalled on the air June 10.

“Wow! That was back in the day,” her guest remarked.

“That was so back in the day it’s not even funny,” O’Brien replied. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Which “day” we are talking about is not always clear, but there has been a lot of going back to it lately.

This month, all in the same week, Auto Week wrote that the new Pontiac GTO “has standard features galore and build quality unheard of back in the day.” Fortune, in an article about airlines, observed, “Back in the day, bad service was the trade-off for low prices [before higher quality discount airlines emerged].” Newsweek said Slash, the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses now strumming with the band Velvet Revolver, “looks exactly as he did back in the day.”

A Nexis search for “back in the day” returns more than 3,500 results for the first five months of this year, compared with about 2,000 for the same period in the year 2000 (although Nexis does not distinguish between “the day” and “those days”).

The Google search engine yields more than a quarter of a million results for “back in the day,” five times as many as “back in those days” and 10 times as many as “back in my day.”

The origins of “back in the day” are obscure, but the consensus among linguists and word watchers participating in The American Dialect Society’s e-mail discussions seems to be that “back in the day” arose from hip-hop music circa the 1980s.

“I teach at Hampton [Va.] University, an historically black college,” writes linguist Margaret Lee in an interview by e-mail. “I remember my students using `back in the day’ as early as 1984 to refer to the relatively recent past, but usually a time before they were born. Before that, I remember it being used occasionally by hip-hop artists in TV interviews in the early 1980′s.”

“I don’t know that it originated in African-American English or hip-hop speech, but it has certainly gotten currency in those discourse communities,” says Drew Danielson, an administrative assistant at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in an interview by e-mail.

Danielson cites hip-hop songs titled “Back In The Day” by Young MC and Ahmad in the early 1990s. Recent albums by artists Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot have tracks called “Back in the Day.” Newsday wrote this month that the new Beastie Boys album features “the same kind of East Coast beats that Run-DMC and The Sugarhill Gang would have busted out back in the day.”

A movie called “Back in the Day,” starring rapper Ja Rule, is scheduled to open later this year.

As the phrase is currently used, “back in the day” seems to have two basic meanings: “long ago” and “was it really that long ago?”

For the first sense, consider O’Brien and her lavender Citroen. She was really saying, “That was so long ago it’s not even funny.” Here, “the day” serves a shortened form of “the days of my youth” or “the days when lavender was in style.”

“The day” can also mean “heyday,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “the period of greatest popularity, success or power; prime.”

Former Detroit Pistons player Rick Mahorn compared the crowds that cheered his championship team in the late 1980s to those who followed this year’s victorious Pistons. “I remember the crowd being just as loud, just as vocal, back in the day,” he told the Detroit News in a June 15 story.

One quirk of context: when someone uses “back in the day,” it’s generally a sign of pleasant nostalgia for days past. If you hear “back in my day,” get ready for a pronouncement on modern moral decline: “Back in my day, kids respected their elders” carries an overtone very different from “kids respected their elders back in the day.”

Sometimes “the day” isn’t really so long ago: “Compared to what it was like to start your own Web page back in the day, starting a blog is a breeze,” wrote the Macon [Ga.] Telegraph earlier this year in an article about the fast-changing Internet.

Younger generations may be latching onto the catchphrase as a rite of passage, says James Vanden Bosch, English professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

“I hear it only from twentysomethings,” he says. “It strikes me that this is early evidence of these youngsters’ awareness that they, too, are growing old, and suddenly their quite recent past — 7 or 8 years ago — constitutes a significant period of time and development.”

“It’s a way,” he adds, “of claiming to be old enough to have an interesting past already.”

Esperanto’s fans hoping it becomes `lingvo internacia’

Thursday, June 10th, 2004

“Saluton!” The greeting rings throughout the Sulzer Regional Library auditorium in Ravenswood as members of the Esperanto Society of Chicago gather for their monthly meeting. They have come to study and celebrate the language of Esperanto, invented in the late 19th Century to be an international language.

The meeting is conducted almost entirely in Esperanto, but the non-Esperantist visitor can pick out words here and there: “ne” for “no,” “dankon” for “thank you,” “estas” for “is,” and “unu” for “one.”

The headings on the membership roster sheet speak for themselves: “telefonnumero” for “telephone number,” “urbo” for “city,” and “Cxikago” for “Chicago.”

The 12 people at this meeting are preserving the dream of Polish physician Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, who in 1887 published a brochure titled “Lingvo Internacia” (“International Language”) under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto (“one who hopes”), outlining the basics of his invented language. If everyone could learn Esperanto as a second language, Zamenhof believed, different cultures could maintain their own identities and still communicate with each other.

Zamenhof designed Esperanto to be simple to learn, consistent in structure, and clear in meaning. He used root words derived from Latin, English and French, among other languages.

According to Esperanto educational materials, students can expect to take about a year to become fluent in Esperanto—a fraction of the time it takes to master other languages. There are only 16 rules of grammar (compared with the book-length grammar guides for English) and no silent letters or irregular spellings. All singular nouns end in “o,” plural nouns in “j,” verbs in “i,” adjectives in “a” and adverbs in “e.”

The vowel endings give Esperanto an elegant sound, evoking Italian or Spanish.

As a would-be world language, Esperanto’s advantage is also its disadvantage. Because it has no nation of native speakers, Esperanto is culturally neutral and non-threatening. But its nomad status also means there has never been much political push for anyone to adopt it.

Still, Esperanto has a core following of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, “possibly millions,” who have some degree of proficiency in the language, according to the Netherlands-based Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), which lists members in more than 100 countries.

Six Nobel Prize winners spoke the language, and everyone from Leo Tolstoy to Eleanor Roosevelt to Robert F. Kennedy has endorsed using Esperanto as a global second language.

So have six popes; the Vatican makes its radio broadcasts available in Esperanto. Hundreds of people worldwide register for free Esperanto lessons at www.lernu.net.

Most members of the Esperanto Society of Chicago (www.esperanto-chicago.org), including natives of Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and the Ukraine, are advanced or fluent in Esperanto.

President Bill Mania opens this meeting by reading a report he wrote in Esperanto about attending a conference of Esperantists in “Sankta-Luiso,” or St. Louis, with his daughter Sarah, 9, whom he is teaching Esperanto.

Mania then suggests a group exercise: translate a short story by Guyanese author Pauline Melville into Esperanto, one page per person. Les Kordylewski, who learned Esperanto in his native Poland, gets a laugh when he says he would prefer to be assigned the “lasta pagxo”—the last page, which has only three lines.

Dr. Gertrude Novak, an Austrian native and a delegate to the UEA, closes the meeting with the report of a phone call she received earlier that day from a man in Congo who conducted the conversation in Esperanto—a reminder of how useful a universal language can be.

Like the majority of Esperantists, members of the Chicago society are idealistic but not delusional: They like the spirit of international goodwill that enlivens Esperanto but are not under the impression it is about to become a major world language.

“Esperantists tend to be well-read, environmentally aware, politically involved,” says Mania. “There’s a geekiness to it,” adds Robert Stalzer.

Marc Shafroth drove down from Madison, Wis., for the opportunity to converse in the language with other enthusiasts.

“There are four parts to a language: speaking, hearing, reading and writing,” he says. “With Esperanto, you can do all of them on your own except speaking. There’s no place to speak it except here. That’s the benefit of this.”

The Chicago club is mourning the loss of one especially tireless proponent of Esperanto, Kent Jones, a longtime member who died in February. A civil engineer, Jones promoted Esperanto as a way to reduce airline accidents involving pilots and control tower operators for whom English was a second language.

He also believed teaching Esperanto in schools would provide students with an effective building block.

“The formal study of English requires preparation . . . in the form of a model language—one without the snaggle-toothed problems of English,” he wrote in a 1996 letter to the Tribune.

“Esperanto should precede the formal study of English, because Esperanto can prepare the mind for it.”

Our not-so-sound language a natural for spelling bees

Thursday, June 3rd, 2004

Psychologist Greg Simpson was studying Korean with the help of a graduate student, a Korean native, when a thought struck him.

“You don’t have spelling bees, do you?” he asked her.

He had to explain what they were.

“She kind of laughed and said, ‘No, we wouldn’t have that,’” Simpson recalls. “Then she paused and said, `But I know why you have them.’”

Korean has a simple correspondence between spelling and sounds. English, with its many foreign influences and irregularities, does not.

“Spelling bees are largely an American phenomenon, something that is unique to the English language,” said Paige Kimble, 1981 champion and director of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. “We are simply not aware of any long-standing spelling bee programs in other languages.”

Indeed, the major spelling bees that do exist around the world—everywhere from Mexico to Japan to Saudi Arabia—use English words, Kimble said.

“In almost every other language, spelling is phonetic. There are very few rules, and once you know those rules, spelling is straightforward,” Kimble said. “English is this beautiful mess of words collected over centuries from languages all over the world. To become good spellers, English speakers have to learn a little bit about these languages and their patterns.”

Simpson, who chairs the psychology department at Kansas, has devised a way to study how the brain connects spelling to pronunciation. “There are two ways of getting to the pronunciation of a word,” Simpson says. “One is to look the whole word up in your mental dictionary. The other way is to translate the letters into sounds and basically construct the pronunciation.”

He has concluded that the more common the word, the more people tend to use the whole-word—or “lexical”—method to pronounce it. The rarer the word, the more people rely on the partial-word or “sub-lexical” method, mentally sounding it out.

Simpson found that English speakers take longer to react to rare words than Korean speakers react to rare Korean words. English speakers, he concludes, are fumbling around for the whole word; Korean speakers save time by using phonetics and sounding the word out.

Because their spelling rules are more consistent, Koreans are more likely to use them to pronounce a word, Simpson says.

“The degree to which fluent adult readers seem to be using their knowledge of the sound system varies among languages,” Simpson said. “When the spelling of a word is a more reliable cue to how it can be pronounced, a reader might use that information more.”

Not only does Korean have a more consistent sound system, but its alphabet actually provides visual clues to how to produce a sound, Simpson said.

“Look at our letters N, D and T. Although their sounds are related—if you feel where your tongue is, you’ll see it’s in the same place for all of them—the letters don’t look at all similar,” Simpson said. “In Korean, sounds that are related are represented by letters that are visually similar to each other.”

In a spelling bee, whole-word and partial-word recognition may both come into play, Simpson said. Contestants may recognize an entire word from the word lists they study beforehand, or they may try to take it syllable by syllable or ask for the word’s language of origin, which the rules allow, in hopes of distinguishing between, say “-us” and “-ous.”

Before the National Spelling Bee crowns its 78th champion, contestants may lament English’s opaque orthography when asked to spell words such as “euonym” or “succedaneum” (two winning words in recent years). But Simpson said we shouldn’t necessarily disparage English spelling for its complexity.

“English starts taking a bad rap after a while,” he said. “There are some characteristics of English spelling that suit it very well. For example, were we to start our spelling from scratch, we would not spell sign, S-I-G-N. However, if we change it, then the connection between the words sign and signature would be lost.”

‘Wordcraft’ details birth of brand names, semantics of ‘berries’

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

There is a moment every marketer both dreams of and fears. It is the time when a brand name, by decree of the dictionary or whims of the zeitgeist, becomes a common noun or a verb. This can be a blessing—the ultimate validation of a name that is both catchy and meaningful. But it can also be a curse. The more widely a word is used, the harder it is to legally protect as a trademark. So we “xerox” a memo, “fed-ex” a package or “google” a blind date, to the chagrin of squads of copyright attorneys in corporate headquarters.

In a brand name’s infancy, however, the thought of gaining this kind of cultural currency is an inspiration to professional namers, says Alex Frankel in his new book “Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business” (Crown, $24.95).

Namers long to launch their creations into the vernacular—casual use around water coolers and in chat rooms. The lawyers can worry about the rest.

Frankel’s book, like a tour of a sausage factory or the U.S. Capitol, shows readers places they’ve never seen to explain processes of which some would rather remain unaware.

He describes how names are born—usually in magic marker on whiteboards, alongside myriad other suggestions—and how a select few make it big, sometimes bigger than the name of the company itself.

The trick for corporations is to contrive a word that doesn’t sound like a corporate contrivance. The more corporate it sounds, the greater the risk of a backlash against brand names among consumers.

Frankel, a journalist who started his own short-lived naming firm in Silicon Valley, chose five names to tell his story: Accenture, BlackBerry, Cayenne, e-business and Viagra.

Along the way, he introduces little-known but hugely influential naming firms such as Lexicon Branding in San Francisco—which coined Dasani, Febreze, Pentium, PowerBook and Zima, among hundreds of others—and Wood Worldwide in Manhattan, which has christened many best-selling drugs, including Paxil, Viagra and Zocor.

It was Lexicon that came up with the name BlackBerry for a hand-held computer made by its client, Research In Motion (RIM). With the help of linguistics consultants, it analyzed possible names’ semantics (meaning), phonetics (sound) and something namers call “sound symbolism.”

For the RIM device, Lexicon was seeking a name that would communicate the ideas ‘easy access’ and ‘quick response.’ One namer thought the hand-held communicator looked sort of like a strawberry, its tiny keys resembling the seeds on a berry’s surface. But he thought the word “blackberry” sounded better.

Lexicon brought in a linguistics professor to examine why.

“Black,” he noted, has hard and quick consonants that move the word along; “straw” begins with the sluggish hiss of the “S” and ends with a “w,” slowing the speaker down.

Dubbing the device “BlackBerry” also benefited from alliteration and symmetry—two five-letter parts, each beginning with a capital “B” (thanks to “intercapping,” or capitalizing a letter in the middle of a word).

RIM credits the name for BlackBerry’s success; it has sold millions, including 435 to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Viagra was even more of a verbal phenomenon, landing in the Oxford English Dictionary just three years after the product was launched in 1998.

The drug itself—sildenafil citrate—was patented by Pfizer in 1991 as a heart treatment. When researchers noticed the drug offered other benefits, Pfizer turned to Wood Worldwide for a name. Wood offered “Viagra,” noting the aptness of the word’s sounds for the nature of the drug’s remedy—”Vi” for virility or vigor, “agra,” meaning “claim” or “take” and suggesting the energy of “aggression” and the fertility of “agriculture.”

Seeing the birth of brand names may lead readers to look at the ever-growing place of brands in their own lives and speech, Frankel said in an interview by telephone.

“Part of my hope is that the reader would come away from this book and look at the world in a slightly different way,” he said.

“They would see their own vocabulary filled with brand names and wonder if that’s good or bad.”

« Older Entries |