Wordly Musings

Some things stick with you.

Like, I haven't read (or had read to me) Winnie-the-Pooh since I was about, I don't know, 30 years younger than I am now.

It was never my super favorite set of stories anyway. I preferred Kipling's Just-So Stories.

But for some reason I have long remembered this bit from that one story where Pooh eats too much honey and gets stuck in the tunnel trying to get out of Rabbit's house:

"I thought at the time," said Rabbit, "but I didn't want to say anything,"said Rabbit, "that one of us was eating too much," said Rabbit, "and I knew it wasn't me," he said.

OK, that was me writing it down from memory. Thanks to the wonders of books that have gone out of copyright, I shall find an online version and check my work, which we may do here here in Chapter 2.

And I got it pretty close to right, except it's "only I didn't like to say anything," instead of "but I didn't like to say anything" (which I might have known, since it's more English) and the original does not italicize "me."

Also, this version renders the line as "one of us has eating too much," but that doesn't really make sense even as an old-fashioned Britishism, so I'm going to assume it's a typo.

The point is, I kind of love this. I love the way the language keeps looping back with the "said Rabbit," catching the sort of jumpy way he's talking, and the way it finally wraps up by switching to a decisive "he said."

It's stuck in my head for years and years, I suppose because I always kind of liked it, and only now it occurs to me to remember it again and think about why I liked it.

I'm only slightly likely to go re-read the whole book to better appreciate any other bits of fun prose, but I guess I'll always have that nearly-accurate memory of that one deliciously choppy line. I mean, unless I forget it.


On a slightly related topic, I also see here in Chapter 2 a use of quotation marks that you do see in older books, where they put quotes around the idea of what a character is saying, rather than using them to signify the exact words used.

For example, here in chapter 2 of Winnie-the-Pooh we have Pooh asking if there's any more to eat, followed by the line,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there wasn't."

It doesn't actually make sense that he would say "no, there wasn't"--wasn't is past tense, as is the story as a whole, but the question "is there any more?" is present tense, so the answer really ought to match. We would expect Rabbit to say "no, there isn't" instead.

So today we would either leave the quotation marks out of that line and just write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, No, there wasn't.

Or we'd match the tense to that of the question and write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there isn't."

I just finished Jane Eyre (no, I had never read Jane Eyre before, yes, as a former English major my head was perpetually hanging in shame), and that book is bristling with this kind of "quotes around the general idea of what the person said" usage. (Hmm...what kind of usage were those quotes just there? Never mind that now.)

And either way we know what's going on, so it's really not a concern for readability, but these days we tend to assume that quotes are for setting off the precise words used by a speaking character, or an exact quote from another text.

These are the words that were used! I was taking notes!

I think it's interesting that there was a time when quotation marks apparently had a more general purpose, signaling that a character said something, and this was the main gist of it, but the author isn't going to worry about exactly transcribing the dialogue.

This was basically the information someone wanted to convey, but I wasn't taking notes, so don't expect a script!

It would be a good way to get around writing differentiated character 'voices,' not that I'm saying that's what Milne or Brontë was doing.

Also, if you don't want to write dialect or accents but they would make sense for your story? This could totally save you!

I'm going to remember this when I start working on a story full of dialects and accents for NaNoWriMo.

Further Medical Update

Ugh. I've been sneezing and blowing my nose all day. Good times.

I never had allergies when I was a kid, but they've certainly come on in these later years. Thanks, immune system, for reminding me of the inexorable physical decay that flesh is heir to.*

I probably need to get out and eat more dirt.


*Some would say that, grammatically, this should be written as "to which flesh is heir," but I'm not about to argue with Shakespeare. I would advise you not to either.
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Phoneme Power

An interesting post on Why Evolution is True about the evolution of language. The post reviews an article that suggests, based on some intriguing phoneme studies, that language arose in southern Africa along with humanity and evolved into thousands of exciting variants as people moved around.

Nice work, humanity.

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Medical Spoken Here

Alerted by a Twitter feed I occasionally look at, I checked out this nifty tutorial on medical words, produced by my favorite consumer health information site, MedlinePlus.

It approaches medical language like, well, a language, giving root words for various parts of the body, and breaking large words into beginning, middle and end to show how one long word (say, echocardiogram) is based on three smaller parts, so that if you know that echo involves sound waves, cardio means heart, and gram means a picture, you can figure out what the word means.

I'm pretty good with basic medical language just from reading stuff, but I did learn that 'myo' refers to muscle, leading me to think "Aha! Myocardial = heart muscle!"

The things you never bother to look up despite having the internet right to hand 10 hours a day. Or, I guess, the things you never bother to wonder about, that's the interesting part. I can read 'myocardial' 100 times, and not even think about the fact that I don't completely know what it means.

It has something to do with the heart. If someone comes to the reference desk interested in it, I can look for it. Need there be more?

Anyway, for someone who doesn't read a lot of medical terms while finding papers for medical students and so forth, I think this tutorial could be pretty helpful.

Nice one, MedlinePlus.

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What Doesn't Kill Us, Makes Us Irritable

Hurricane Earl was supposed to break this heat wave for us, yet here I am, still sweltering away like a gently steaming pot of broccoli!

Or something.

When I get hot and irritable enough, my metaphor-generating prowess suffers.

The point is, it's raining, and it may even be cooling off outside, but here in my lair where there's no cross breeze, it's still...I don't know, maybe 88 degrees, and humid. Which may not sound that bad, but it really is, because I'm a sensitive soul who can't take the heat and therefore spends limited time in the kitchen (this is true--I go in there mainly to retrieve the peanut butter).

Yeah, I enjoyed my visits to Alabama (Roll Tide!), but I don't know if I could live in the south. With the heat and the sweatiness, it would be a nonstop irritability party for me. I suppose one gets used to it, or else learns to love air conditioning, but I cherish the idea that this will eventually pass.

And give way to bone-chilling cold and the opportunity to slip and break your ankle on the icy sidewalk, which is why some people do prefer to live in the south. Trade offs.

Here's another thing about the south, though: we should really stop using a Southern accent as comedy shorthand for 'dumb hick.' I love the Simpsons, but they do this all the time (well, pretty much every time they need a dumb hick, anyway). Everyone does.

Nobody with an accent gets off completely free, of course. If you talk funny, by whatever standard, you're fair game. Southern accent, Texas accent, Boston accent, New York accent, Minnesota accent, whatever. (I'm obviously relying on US regional accents for my examples here, but I expect it may be the same in other countries.)

Fortunately for me, Montana has kind of a neutral accent as far as the US is concerned, plus we moved around a lot, so I don't have a very distinctive speech pattern (as far as I know--not that anyone thinks they have an accent, it's everyone else who talks weird).

Thus I mostly escape the taunts of the other children on the schoolyard, except when I slip up and say 'pop' instead of 'soda'.

Shut up! That's what we call it!

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Letters Aloud

For some reason I was thinking this afternoon about the way that it absolutely did not compute, when I was younger, that in some places the letter Z is pronounced 'zed.'

I grew up pronouncing it 'zee,' and then we spent some time in Canada, and it just made no sense. How can you call it something besides 'zee'? That's its name! You can't just change the names of things!

I was aware that people spoke different languages, and sometimes had different accents even when speaking the same language, but for some reason the names of letters were non-negotiable.

That thing is a 'zee,' damn it, that's part of its essential nature, and I will brook no opposition. I mean, I will concede that in Nova Scotia people call it 'zed' for some unfathomable reason, but they're wrong.

Not necessarily wrong in a malicious way, you know, just horribly, horribly mistaken.

It made me think about how we attribute characteristics to things, and can come out of habit to see these characteristics as immutable, even if they actually look quite different from another angle.

Yeah, there really wasn't a moral there, I was just musing.

I would like to note that I've matured somewhat since then (getting older than nine will do that for you), and I currently have no objection to alternate pronunciations of the letter Z. Call it what you will, good people. The important thing is that we all use it to spell 'zebra.'

Now if you want to introduce an alternate spelling of zebra?--oh, you're wrong.

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It's They!

Via Alas, A Blog, I find this Motivated Grammar piece in defense of the singular 'they.' Foremost among the many reasons we should chill out about it: it's been in use just about since people have been writing in English. Some fine examples from various time periods are presented.

Yes, it seems we've always known that "he or she" can be awkward and that the generic masculine seems weird when used to include female persons. That's all very well when you're not actually that interested in talking about female persons, but sometimes it's just unavoidable to include them in a sentence.

I myself have been pursuing a poorly organized campaign (consisting of occasional mentions on this blog) in favor of calling everyone "it," which if memory serves you will find in E. Nesbit's Five Children and It.

This is partly because I like objective, neutral language, and partly because I like robots (Vote Machine!) and partly because I like poorly organized campaigns. In the absence of any signs of success in this mission, however, I will happily promote the singular 'they' as an alternative, confident that it has sound grammatical foundations.

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Verbing Weirds Language*

With my fondness for words, I enjoyed this post on Dangerous Intersection about the use of 'text' as a verb.

I concur with the author: it seems incorrect, but it's the way people refer to the concept of sending text messages on their phones, so I use it.

Language changes, that's all. Sometimes I like new words/usages, sometimes I hate them (oh how I hate them), but if that's the way people are conveying information, I can only argue with them so far.

'Text' as a verb is actually not one of the ones I especially hate, but 'video' is. "I'll video that event for you," makes me blanch in horror. There's no particular logic to this contradiction, that's just how the words strike me.

The post also talks about how Twitter has tried to define using its service as "tweeting," only to find that many people say "twittering" instead. You can't always (or even usually) establish linguistic usage intentionally.

I myself prefer "twittering," not only because it derives more naturally from the name of the site, but because it sounds more like something I'd want to do.

Tweeting seems a little monotone to me, like belting out a single note over and over (maybe from a boiling teakettle?), while twittering suggests varying notes of discourse, like a bunch of birds sitting in a tree and vocalizing up and down the scale.

I am obviously reading into this my own prior associations with both words. Which is naturally the correct one.

Twitter with me, people! And text me if you want, but please don't video it.

*Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Wacky Accents

I greatly enjoyed the new Star Trek, though it did make me wonder once again, whence comes this convention that people with Russian accents say "w" instead of "v"?

We've got the young Chekov (Pavel Andreivich) giving a vocal authentication and being initially refused because he says "Wictor Wictor" instead of "Victor Victor."

But, but...Victor is a Russian name. Chekov has three Vs in his own name. Russians gave us the name for vodka. (Thanks!)

I mean...Russian doesn't even have a letter for W, but does have one for V (although it looks like what we use for a B). It even combines the 'v' sound with other sounds to form interesting combinations we don't use in English, like 'tv' and 'sv' and 'vm.' Russian is all about the 'v'!

And yet we have this idea that throwing a 'w' in is just the thing to do. At least, we recognize it when we see it, even if we didn't actually learn it in 30-Second-Accent class.

It's bemusing, I tell you.

This puzzle has also been noted at The Volokh Conspiracy, where the comments include various theories. The most plausible of these may be that native Russian speakers could mix up which of the words they'd tend to pronounce with a 'v' should actually have a 'w,' so they overcompensate and sometimes toss a 'w' onto words that should stay 'v.'

The other good explanation proposed is that Chekhov speaks "movie Russian," not actual Russian, and the accent is just different there.

On second thought, that one is probably the most likely. I also see this interview with the actor, Anton Yelchin, who knows what Russian accents sound like and who explains that he was intentionally employing a goofy '60s stereotype of a Russian accent because it fit the somewhat goofy mood of the film in general.

OK, I guess I'm satisfied.

Ascending the Peaks of Fabulousness

Did you know that there was a television show that "defined a generation"? 

About "the school where America came of age"?

Apparently Beverly Hills 90210 was way more momentous than I ever thought. All those times I wasn't watching it seem kind of wasted now. No wonder I'm so out of touch with my generation.

This really doesn't have anything to do with anything except that despite many years' exposure to advertising, I am still occasionally startled by the grandiose language used to hype things (in this case, the new 90210 show, advising me of its hot new awesomeness by summoning up the generation-defining ghost of the original).

Seriously, "the school where America came of age"? The whole country? All in unison?

And what does it mean to "define a generation" with a TV show, anyway? I suppose by saying "this generation was a group of people who potentially watched this TV show," which might be true, but is not very informative. 

But I imagine they mean to suggest that this show, rather than setting the parameters of the generation, actually says something about the generation: perhaps, as TV.com reports, something about how its members dealt with "travails as they tried to maintain their friendship while dealing with romances, family and personal crises, tragedies and countless drug addictions."

This is about who we are as a generation! 

If only we had been watching TV at the time. Some of us were probably too busy struggling with our countless drug addictions. Others of us simply didn't have televisions. In any case, I'm going to define my cohort right now as the Left Out of 90210 Generation. Life has been hard for us in many ways, but we bear up as best we can.

I'm not actually trying to rag on the show, which I never saw but do not claim to be too good for, and which could have been great for all I know. (I could Netflix it!...nah.) 

I just want to quibble with clearly exaggerated descriptions, because I sometimes like to get nitpicky about language.

I would not go far in advertising. 

"Watch this show: it's based on another show of which you may have heard!" would be my kind of tag line. 

Now that's something that could define a generation.

Latin: The Language of Fun

Got Medieval brings word that a video game I never played (Zelda II: The Legend of Link, sequel to another video game I never played) has been translated into Latin, a language I never studied.

I'm filled with enthusiasm for this idea, for reasons I cannot completely (or at all) explain. I guess it's just that incongruous juxtaposition is awesome.

One Step Closer to 'It'

I see on Shakesville that during the week, the House passed new rules for gender neutral language in its official communications. As one who has previously whined about how I think we should just call everyone 'it,' I am pleased to see this step in that direction.

Check out the Shakesville post for thoughts on why gendered language is worth being interested in, rather than merely a petty, trifling complaint that we shouldn't be worrying about because there are more important things going on. 

Modern Academia

Tiny Cat Pants pointed out an intriguing (though as yet somewhat sparsely populated) social networking site: Academia.edu. 

To be fair, both Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day and Science Roll saw it earlier, but I must have been ignoring them. I was probably distracted by zombies or something. 

Aside from having a great URL, Academia.edu aims to list academics from all over the world, displayed in a tree format, with links to other people working in the same research area, other people from the same university, etc. It also offers said academics a handy way to have a professional webpage, and although it's not totally clear to me how this works (the FAQ is a little spare), it appears you can upload your papers, presumably to share.

You can browse departments or research areas, search for universities and people, and invite others to join, just as you'd expect from a social network. I imagine you can also send internal emails and such.

Signing up looks pretty easy, although I didn't try it since I figured I'm not an academic. There's no written guideline that I could find on who's allowed to sign up and who isn't (although the process involves placing yourself at a university), so it's kind of a self-defined community, but I'm not a researcher or anything, so I'm self-excluding.

Anyway, it really is pretty cool to look at. Try typing a university name and watch how neatly it scrolls!

I do kind of wince at the automatic news updates' use of the plural pronoun, as in "Muttonchops Wilkins (University of Whiskers) added themselves to the department Mathematics." 

I know, I know, 'they' and 'them' for an individual is commonplace now because it avoids the whole 'he or she' question. I recognize the issue and I can deal with the solution, which is at least easier than getting everyone to adopt some entirely new pronoun that we just made up.*

But 'themselves'? As if there are literally multiples of this person? Can't we at least say 'themself,' which, though a grammatical monstrosity, at least sounds singular---and, in a way, by its very weirdness calls attention to the fact that it's being intentionally used in order to address an accuracy issue with the language, and is not just sloppiness?

So that's my language whine of the day. Come on, Academia.edu, take a stand for decisive singular-plural pronouns! The people (by which I mean the various 'themselves' of me) demand it! We can make this good English, by gum!

Mmm...gum.

*Although honestly, I'd cast a vote for calling everyone 'it.' I like the utilitarian functionality. "Muttonchops Wilkins added itself to the department Mathematics:" what's so wrong with that? 

Of course, I have always secretly admired robots. But I digress.

But 'Innate' is so IN!

Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection had an interesting post recently on the use of the word 'innate' in biological, scientific-type contexts, where it seems there's not really a universally agreed upon meaning for it.

I've tended to use it more or less as a dictionary defines it, to mean some quality that just is in a thing. It doesn't have to be learned or installed, and by implication also can't really be removed or practiced away: it's just there.

But the post, arising from a talk the author heard given by a philosophy professor, discusses how this general understanding, while perhaps working fine for poet turns of phrase, is biologically vague and its use in research and scientific texts is somewhat problematic. 

The post talks about some of the things scientists seem to mean when they use the word, including approaches based on seeing traits as typical, as representing adaptiveness of traits, or as indicating fixity of traits.

The post covers this much better than that clumsy summary, and is an intriguing look at how language shapes what we talk about, and certain words may or may not accurately convey uniform impressions of the ideas we try to work with. 

Is what I mean to say the same as what you hear? And is either one of those things a useful summary of reality as best we understand it?

I'm interested in language, so this sort of thing is always good for some happy reflection for me. [Gazing into distance with goofy smile on face]