McPrefix McProblem

There’s an article titled McSexist over at In These Times, and seeing it made me realize just how confused I currently am whenever I see the Mc-prefix being used: at first I always (always; old associations die hard) assume it’s a McDonald’s Mc, but usually it ends up being a McCain Mc. [There's also the nonspecific trendy slang usage, as noted last year by Mr. Verb, but most of the times when I see these things in headlines, I'm going to assume it's a clever(trying) play on specifically McDonald's or McCain. And I'm usually right.] Would using the -cain part of McCain to make your puns be so bad? or restricting your usage of Mc- to when the base word at least kind of rhymes with cain (McPain, McLame, ok McSame, McShame, McWane, McSane, er, ok, maybe not)?

I mean, I guess in the end the abstract ideological connotations of McDonald’s and McCain are not totally dissimilar (corporate, thoughtless, environmentally bad, contributing to America’s demise, etc.). But still.

BTW, so far nothing at Harper’s on this, but it’s got to be only a matter of time. That such an index page exists is too weird for it to go further unused. Also, this Wikipedia article might need to be changed soon.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Asif Agha’s (2007) Language and Social Relations, in which the author attempts to provide a holistically semiotic approach to language use and its valorization. I’m only one chapter in, but in the introduction Agha usefully spends some time defining what he means by certain fundamental terms, including “language,” “language use,” and “social relations.” Within this discussion he embeds a pretty pointed critique of The Way Linguistics Has Gone (or so is how I read it) that I think would find sympathy with a lot of current practitioners (particularly sociolinguists, particularly people just entering the discipline), and it’s so nicely put that I wanted to offer it for your thoughts (because I’m betting that most people in the world, even most linguists in the world, won’t ever read the introduction to this book!).

A great deal of ink has been spilled in the last forty years in pursuing the assumption that the study of language is the study of ‘rules’ or ‘constraints’ on language. As with any fad, the time for this one has come and gone. There is a simple trick that forms the basis for – and explains the popularity of – the fad. The trick itself has two parts. Here’s how to do it. First, redefine what the word language means, preferably fixating upon a fragment or feature of language – let’s say the concatenation system of language, its syntactic and phonotactic aspects – and call this fragment ‘language’ (or even ‘Language’). Second, redefine the study of this fragment as the study of some restricted type of data about it, let’s say the study of decontextualized intuitions about it. If you’ve done this carefully enough, you can now amaze and amuse your friends by pulling a vast number of rules and constraints out of the hat of introspectable intuitions. And, now, the statement ‘the study of language is the study of constraints’ appears to be true. But a more accurate way of stating this truth is ‘the study of decontextualized intuitions can isolate plenty of features of aconcatenation system that appear as inviolable constraints to those intuitions.’ You can also do this for discourse. So, in your first step, you can redefine ‘discourse’ as some genre of discourse, let’s say ‘conversation.’ And in your second step, you can define your privileged data type as ‘transcripts of conversation.’ You can now come up with all kinds of formalizable constraints on discourse itself – the examples are right there, after all, in those very transcripts! – and appear to prove that the study of discourse is the study of constraints on conversation structure as long as you don’t worry about the question: For whom?

Suppose now that someone else does this, and you are part of the audience. Even if you spot the trick, you will find yourself in an awkward position. You might for instance find yourself inhabiting what Nietzsche calls a ‘reactive’ position, a position defined by the thing to which you are reacting. You might for instance find yourself saying ‘there are no rules or constraints’ or ‘there’s no such thing as syntax’ or ‘conversation has no structure’ or something along these lines. This would be an over-reaction.The real issue is that if the study of language proceeds by fetishizing restricted data about fragments of language the possibility that such a study could reveal something about social relations among persons across diverse languages and cultures simply vanishes. A better response is to locate the narrowed purview within a wider one. To observe, for example, that when syntacticians claim to describe the concatenation rules of a ‘language’ they are not describing a language at all, but only a socially locatable register of a language (often the register called ‘the Standard Language’), and the question of how they come to have any particular intuitions about it is part of what a social theory of language must explain. Or to observe that when the role of discourse in society is approached from the standpoint of some specific genre, such as ‘face to face conversation,’ the models identified as models of discourse make opaque discursive processes that connect persons at different scales of social grouping and historical time through that conversational encounter, but also through encounters whose genre characteristics are entirely different. An even better response is to make explicit the limits within which specific theories of language can explain aspects of it, so that the fruits of attachment to singular ideals can be enjoyed without nearby fields falling fallow. (Agha 2007: 7-8)

Language games, language games, language games…

I should probably just let Fritinancy take a crack at Pussy, a new energy drink, but I will just say that I believe it to be a totally unnecessary name. The manufacturers of course disagree:

Pussy is a 100% natural drink. No nasty chemicals and nothing manufactured. It is made for people looking for a natural alternative.

The name Pussy shocks and demands attention - that’s the point. Inhibition is a recipe for mediocrity. This is a premium energy drink named with confidence.

Pussy: the natural choice. Duh. Wait, wait, this is better (bold mine):

Pussy is spontaneous, entertaining, optimistic and fun. It’s a starting point. A moment when something happens and when things begin – Pussy starts conversations. It believes in having a good time as often as possible.

Because we all know, pussies want to have a good time whenever YOU want to have a good time. They’re just sitting there, waiting for a good time. For you to have your good time way with them. All the time.

OMG JUST DRINK COFFEE OR TEA, PEOPLE.

(via Shakesville)

I am ambivalent as to Scrabulous’s demise: it’s not part of my Facebook profile or my daily (weekly, monthly…) activity. You might be surprised by this, given that many people I am affiliated with (linguists or otherwise) are in mourning as near-constant Scrabulous players, and everyone always assumes that linguists looooove Scrabble and its derivatives. Learning that this is not so might make you feel similar as to when you found out that I don’t care about SecondLife, or that I don’t care about The Da Vinci Code. I know, it will be hard to piece your schema of my persona back together after such a shock, but I am confident that you will learn. You will learn.

Rather than mourn Scrabulous, let us rejoice in welcoming the Jetpack!

Also, the other day I went to German Park, which is a giant beergarden set up north of Ann Arbor three times a summer for the public. They serve beer in buckets. Buckets. Anyway, being run by thoughtful German heritagists (?), the Park had set up ladies-only porta-potties for use by only ladies, to combat the inevitable super-long-and-miserable lines in the permanent ladies’ latrines. I think that as a rule all public places should have more women’s restrooms than men’s, but that may just be because I have to pee a lot. ANYway, on the doors to the porta-potties were signs reading “Damen only” (the regular bathrooms were labeled “Damen” and “Herren” for women and men). By around 9 pm, men were (of course!) subverting the paradigm and waiting in line for the “Damen only” toilets. At which point I heard this interaction occur in line:

Woman: These toilets are for women only! What are you doing here?
Man: I gotta go!
Woman: But it says “Damen only”! It’s for women.
Man: No, it says “Da men only”!
[laughter from all sides]
Woman: Well if you go in there, you’d better have a pink dress on.

Ah, da men. Would this joke work outside of the Midwest?

A while ago I saw this teaser on the NYT:

This use of its where their could equally have worked (and sounded much better to me) really struck me. At first I suspected there was some anti-singular-they prescriptivism at play here, because to me its sounds like you’re not talking about a human, whereas their does sound human. But, looking at MW (and probably other sources but hey, if one shot will hit the mark…) I find its as *canonically* used with child!

: of or relating to it or itself especially as possessor, agent, or object of an action [going to its kennel] [a child proud of its first drawings] [its final enactment into law]

I guess I just never noticed that this was a common usage before, but I have to wonder whether, if singular they had a history of more standard acceptability, its would be often used in this way. Whenever someone talks about a baby as “it” because they don’t know the sex yet, isn’t this something people chuckle at? I mean, everyone accepts it, but it always sounds kind of awkward, like, the parent is thinking, “Ha, you just used a pronoun that’s usually not used for humans, but I understand that you’re not trying to dehumanize my baby, you’re only indicating that you don’t want to get the sex wrong and cause even MORE embarrassment, haha, and this is my signal to tell you the baby’s sex.”

Actually, I’ll admit that “Why is it that letting go of childhood comes more easily to the child than to their parent?” screams out for a plural parents to sound totally fluid to me. FWIW. Discuss?…

Today I heard Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry say,

Yet in the age of constant hyper-news, the relentless Internet and the omnipresent YouTube, advisors mostly don’t want their candidates saying anything. They want them to smile and wave.

“The relentless Internet” sounds totally weird to me, and I guess it’s because it makes me picture the Internet itself as performing some kind of action that won’t cease. Rather than being just a place/entity where unceasing things (YouTubery, bloggery, Facebookery, what-have-you) happen. A g-search reveals a number of uses of “the relentless internet,” but mostly “relentless” is modifying something that “internet” is already modifying, such as in:

the relentless internet hunt
the relentless internet problems
the relentless internet “spampaign”
the relentless Internet gossip
the relentless Internet push
the relentless Internet, magazine, and paparazzi coverage

I’m not sure if using “the internet” as something that’s capable of being relentless reflects some kind of age difference (like “the Google” [and maybe even "the omnipresent YouTube"]) or what. Speaking of that, ash at Organizing Grievances posted an interesting reflection on her dislike for “the Facebooks,” insisting that her dislike is in no way age related. This is the first time I’ve seen the -s from “internets” analogized to Facebook (it’s also the first time I’ve read such a stern defense of this sort, and for that alone it is worth the look!).

I have just returned from DC, where I performed this weekend in a tap show (read about it in the Post!!), and I noticed an interesting article in yesterday’s WaPo as I was luxuriously sipping coffee and reading the paper at one of my favorite coffeeshops in the District. The article is about how police in DC are starting to use anonymous text messaging for crime tips:

In a city where witnesses often are reluctant to come forward for fear of retaliation, Chief Cathy L. Lanier is hoping to get information about homicides, robberies and other crimes any way she can. And so the District is following the lead of Boston, Seattle and other cities in offering text messaging as an alternative to phone calls.

“I’m 40 years old, and I love text messaging,” Lanier said. “It’s a really quick, cool, easy way to communicate, and if I don’t tap into those people, I’m shooting myself in the foot.”

Now there’s a 40-year-old who moves with the times and understands cultural waves in technology! This is such a refreshing change from the ol’ “I don’t get it, why do teens like texting so much?! It’s so inferior to f2f or phone communication!” line. There is also an interesting segment in the article about interpretation of the messages:

Boston police officer Michael Charbonnier, who oversees the program there, said interpreting text messages was a challenge in the early weeks.

“The first time I got a text message, I didn’t know what I was reading,” he said. “It was all abbreviations and code words. They write without vowels, like ‘cu’ instead of ’see you.’ It was a little confusing.”

Annd there it is. Certainly can’t get through an article about txt without mentioning something like this. I’m not sure why an anonymous tip-giver would write “see you” to the police anyway, but probably Charbonnier was just giving an easy on-hand exemplar of the type of phenomena he recalls seeing; more evidence of the pervasiveness of nonstandard text-based usages on people’s minds. I wonder if I could get hold of police text message corpora for my dissertation?? That would make a totally fascinating study.

Mark Liberman at LL posted to a Dial “M” for Musicology post that gives a clever diagrammatic rendering of the process by which academics decide to ignore the ideas of others.

I think this probably happens a lot, but I can think of a related problem that’s just as annoying: when academics indulge their own “new” ideas without looking into whether other people are talking about them or not. That is, stopping after “Yes” at the “Is it New?” step and instead of asking whether anyone else is working on it, or even whether it’s really new or not, just assuming that no one else is working on it and it’s brand new and the wheel is there to be invented. It’s happened a number of times, even in my short life as a grad student, where (in whatever setting) some big old-school name is like, “Isn’t X interesting? Why haven’t linguists been looking at X? Here is a novel approach to examining X.” and then a bunch of less-big and possibly newer-school names are sitting there like, “Um, they have been looking at X for 20 years, and if you had done a Google search or asked some colleagues, you would know that.”

The third I-word is invoked by Ben Zimmer in a Visual Thesaurus Word Routes post about the problematics of terms for partners/significant-others/boyfriends/girlfriends, in which a new term, inti-mate (pronounced like intimate the verb), is discussed to fill this uncomfortable gap. I don’t like the idea of inti-mate because for some reason it brings to mind panties (perhaps because womens’ undergarments are often referred to as “intimates,” a fact I’m not sure the fellow who proposed using this term was fully aware of the implications of), and I *really* don’t want to think about panties (ewwww) every time I mention my inti-mate. FWIW, Mr. PC (who is not a live-in, and most people would still consider us young, so maybe this isn’t quite what Ben’s asking for) makes me refer to him simply as my “man,” and I am his “lady.” It’s quaint; it’s ironic, because the terms aren’t quite equivalent; and it preserves gender identification in a way I’m not totally comfortable with (so one advantage of inti-mate is that it’s free of both gender and age connotations).  But it works for us.

Also I am tired of hearing about “Fannie and Freddie” or “Freddie and Fannie.” Why did someone name them so as to make them so easily personified?! Where are all the distasteful political cartoons?

Via Law of the Included Middle, I went and took the Survey of American Jewish Language being run by Sarah Bunin Benor and Steven M. Cohen at Hebrew Union College. And you should take it too, especially, apparently, if you’re NOT Jewish. I saw Benor give a talk at NWAV a couple years ago and it was *really* interesting (mentioned here), so I trust that the outcome of this survey will also be really interesting (and if you take it you can opt to get emailed the results). And in case the survey whets your appetite for learning about Jewish language and culture, here is something cool I also just found when I looked at Benor’s homepage: the Jewish Languages Research Website, which includes sound and text samples of Jewish languages.

(via Shakesville) Steven Levitt reports in Monday’s Freakonomics blog about an urban policy researcher, Jeffrey Grogger, at UChicago who did some analysis of the correlation between wages and speech, more particularly the quality of “sounding black”. Levitt:

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)…

Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each [sample voice collected from telephone surveys] and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.

Then he put this measure of whether a voice sounded black into a regression (the standard statistical tool that economists use for estimating things), and came up with the finding that blacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.

This is interesting, but not really surprising; it’s reminiscent of Purnell, Idsardi, and Baugh (1999) about housing discrimination. I looked at the actual report by Grogger, and I confess that he’s using some statistical wage modeling techniques that lost me at the word “signal,” so any more ambitious readers should read that and let me know if there are any red (or other-color) flags. There are some basic issues with the method in terms of generalizability - he was using speech samples from adolescents (age 12-16) with little work history, and his listeners who were identifying the speech were disproportionately white and female - but from what I can tell he basically followed a categorization task that’s become fairly common in perception research (like that used by Cynthia Clopper and David Pisoni), and he cites lots of relevant sociolinguistic literature.

Anyway, what I wanted to point out is not really related to the implications of Grogger’s findings, but rather to the way they are presented by Levitt. Several commenters on the NYT blog have pointed out that Levitt seems to be couching these findings within a preference for linguistic assimilation rather than an appreciation of linguistic difference, and this strikes me as particularly problematic. For instance:

If one believes Grogger’s effects are causal, then investing in the ability to not “sound black” looks to have a huge return — roughly of the same magnitude as getting one more year of schooling.

Yeah, except that since these are really probably discrepancies based on race as it’s perceived through language, inequalities will probably persist in some other way unless the underlying discriminatory attitudes are addressed. He also writes:

Of course, there is the issue of one’s identity. There may be personal costs associated with being black and not sounding black. But these costs would have to be pretty large. (When I have Asian Ph.D. students go on the job market in the United States, I tell them that I think there is rampant discrimination against non-English speakers and encourage them to adopt Americanized first names for the job market. Very few of my students choose to do so — either a testimony to the identity cost of pretending to be someone you aren’t, or possibly their lack of faith in my assessment of the amount of discrimination.)

The “identity” costs of “not sounding black” would have to be “pretty large” in order to make people refuse to “give up” their “blackness” for the sake of higher wages? That’s just a bizarre thing to say. Also, everyone should adopt American names? Way to band-aid the problem!

The issue is this: if what you are measuring is the relationship between “how black someone sounds” and X variable, you are really measuring the relationship between someone’s assessment of blackness and X variable. It is not in the end about sounding black; it is about being black, and sound is one way that gets perceived. The problem is that racial discrimination is being made on the basis of language, which is to say that the problem is racial discrimination, not language use. This is all pretty obvious, I guess, but when you talk about issues like this in terms of what the discriminated-against group can/should do to stop being discriminated against (i.e., people who ’sound black’ should work on ’sounding white’ and Asians should get names that make them sound American), you are doing absolutely nothing to fix the discrimination. You are in fact providing a frame in which the discrimination can persist and be attributed to someone’s failure to [assimilate/work on it/change/recognize that the financial costs outweigh the identity costs] rather than systemic power differentials.