Click?

The Simpsons is pronouncing clique as "click". I've always pronounced it "cleeeek".

How do you pronounce it?

Let's change the meaning of circumnavigate

Circumnavigate means to travel all the way around the planet. But how often do we need to express that concept - especially now that it can be readily achieved and is no longer any particular feat (except of general endurance)?

Circumnavigate should instead have a meaning parallel to that of circumlocute. It should mean to find a route around something so as to avoid that particular something. Example: "The subway is down and the shuttle buses are way overcrowded, so it's best to just circumnavigate Yonge St. entirely."

Normally we'd use "avoid" in that sentence where I used the word circumnavigate; the nuance requiring a different word is that circumnavigate would imply seeking out and finding a way to avoid Yonge St., rather than just not going on Yonge St. There's a slight connotation of initiative and achievement.

Useless mnemonic

I already have a useful mnemonic for entomology vs. etymology: ent is close to ant, so that's the one with the bugs.

But I just randomly thought of another:

eNtomolgy: N for NO
etYmology: Y for YES

Playing dumb

I'm considering doing business with a place I've never done business with before, and that is either out of my league or just at the very topmost border of my league. So, as with all new interactions with an unknown quantity, I'm writing myself a mental script.

I've been spending some time on their website, so I'm in a position to walk in there knowledgeably and start making declarative statements. "Hi, I'm here to A, B, and C." I have enough information that I could even do it without upspeak. Unless there's an egregious disconnect between website and reality, I'm in a position to show as much confidence as I do when ordering a large double double at Tim Horton's.

However, I found in my mental script I kept landing on less confident-sounding constructions. I'm either hiding my knowledge ("Hi, I was wondering if you had anything like [insert description of thing that will lead me to A, B or C]") or making excuses for it ("Hi, I was looking at your website and...").

But why am I doing this? Why is my social instinct to hide the fact that I've looked at their website, to hide the fact that I have some basic knowledge of what they do and what they offer?

After thinking about this for a while, I'm wondering if maybe my childhood bullies are making me use these less confident constructions. In between time in school and time spent working customer service, the majority of my life was spent in contexts where demonstrating knowledge was discouraged. In school I'd be punished socially for uttering a five-syllable word or for showing prior knowledge of something we were being taught in class, and when working front-line customer service the customers would react poorly if my speech patterns or banter revealed that I was perhaps in their league intellectually. I ended up dropping my register by about 1.5 prestige levels just to get through the day smoothly.

So maybe because of all this, my social instincts are now telling me to walk into situations pretending to be ignorant?

Writing this, I thought of something I read somewhere on the internet once. A parent was writing about how they caught their teenage daughter playing dumb when discussing math homework with a boy, and basically told her it was unacceptable for her to do that. At the time when I read it, it occurred to me that perhaps she wasn't playing dumb specifically so he'd think he was smarter than her (with the assumption that he wouldn't want a girl who's smarter than him) but rather perhaps she was playing dumb as an icebreaker. She asks him for help, he can help her just to be nice and they have an excuse to sit together alone somewhere that's quiet with their heads bent over the same book. Then once he's explained the math, she has an excuse to give him a hug or a minor kiss to express her gratitude, and to do him a favour sometime later. Makes me wish I'd had that in my repetoire as a teenager! (Since I've always wanted prospective lovers to want or at least appreciate my brains, it never occurred to me to play dumb even as an icebreaker.) but now that I actually write about how playing dumb has been helpful socially in various scenarios, I wonder if this poor girl's social repetoire was hindered by her parent's insistence that she never play dumb.

On word choices

Antonia Zerbisias objects because some people on US TV talking about abortion chose and/or landed on the word "people" instead of the word "women."

This is really interesting to me, because I tend to say "people" instead of "women" in the same place for exactly the opposite motive attributed to the speakers here. It's something I started doing a long time ago in response to two things.

First, to avoid creating a Someone Else's Problem field, I don't specifically mention gender unless it's a case of causation as opposed to correlation.

Then, after reading some Deborah Tannen where she articulated how male tends to be linguistically unmarked and female tends to be by default Other and observing a number of interactions IRL where this manifested itself absurdly (example: a woman mentioned that she had just moved into the gaybourhood, and a man in the conversation made a stupid "don't drop the soap" type joke) I decided to deliberately make the female unmarked whenever it could be smoothly incorporated. So instead of saying "This is really dangerous, someone could fall down the stairs. If it's pregnant woman she could have a miscarriage and if it's an old lady she could break a hip!" I would say "...If they're pregnant they could fall down the stairs, and if they're postmenopausal they could break a hip!" I know it doesn't actually do anything - no one is going to think for a moment that it's a pregnant or postmenopausal man - but I'm doing it on principle and as an intellectual challenge. So far no one has noticed that I do this (or perhaps they have and just haven't said anything - in my line of work people tend to notice).

I don't really have a point here, I just think it's interesting.

Grammar Nazis

I suppose this was inevitable...



(Langlings: make sure you read the subtitles)

Why every organization should hire language geeks

Someone like me could have saved the Irish police a lot of trouble.

We need to refine our use of the word "rights"

You do not have the right to have a cup of coffee in the morning.

"WTF?" you're thinking, "I totally do."

No, you don't.

You're totally allowed. It's perfectly legal. It's your own coffee purchased with your own hard-earned money. No one is going to stop you. Most people will even offer you coffee if you haven't had any yet.

But it isn't a right. It isn't codified in the Charter or anywhere else.

This is a problem with our current usage. We tend to use the word "rights" to refer to stuff that you're allowed to do, not your actual codified legal rights. Even though we understand intellectually the meaning of capital R Rights, if someone tells us we don't have the right to something, we hear that we aren't allowed to do it.

I don't know if it's because of this or just related, but there's a lot of other sloppy usage. I've heard people say "Voting is a privilege, not a right!" Except it's totally a right. You sometimes hear people complain that people are so worried about their rights but not thinking about their responsibilities, as though they're opposites or prerequisites or something.

Let's watch our usage. It's an important word for an important concept. It won't help to weaken it.

Why does Michael Ignatieff's name end in -ff?

The surname Ignatieff is Russian. There is no double F in Russian.

Michael Ignatieff's Russian-born father spelled his name Игнатьев in Russian, and the standard English transliteration of the Cyrillic в is V.

So how did it end up being Ignatieff instead of Ignatiev, or even Ignatief?

Terminological note

For reference, the updated definition of saddleback.

Newsreel accent mystery

This is a US newsreel from 1944.



Hear the guy's accent? (He starts talking at 0:35.) Lots of black and white newsreel narrators talked like that (unless, like, it was always the same guy). But I've never heard anyone talk like that IRL, and I've never heard anyone talk like that in old movies. I wonder what the story behind the accent is. Unfortunately, I don't know what it's called and my attempts to google it have been unproductive.

There's a fucking H in it!

Is the H in "historic" properly pronounced in any dialect? I pronounce it on principle (a practice that predates Eddie Izzard, by the way), but I've heard people say "an historic" in Canadian, US, and UK English.

Two awesome things, one thing they should invent

1. Smurfs! There an international Smurfs translation index, plus Wikipedia has a list of how to say Smurf in any language you might ever need to say it in.

2. You know the expression "It's all Greek to me"? Have you ever wondered how they express the equivalent concept in Greek? Language Log has graphed how this plays out in different languages.

3. Things They Should Invent: a glossary of all the international translations of cromulent and embiggen.

Words, words, words! (NSFW edition)

1. From a Globe and Mail article on a new edition of The Joy of Sex: teledildonics! I wish I was into that sort of thing just so I could use the word on a regular basis!

2. From Savage Love (third letter): seroconverted! Initially I thought it was politically correct terminology and was both admiring it and wondering if it made the process sound too intentional, but it turns out it's proper scientific terminology. Way cool!

Things They Should Invent (incompetent linguist edition)

1. Google should publicly post how many pages they have indexed in each language. I'm sure some computer somewhere has this information because in non-English versions of Google you get the option to search only pages that are written in the interface language. It would help in cases where I'm trying to figure out if something is idiomatic. For example, the other day I was trying to figure out if a certain word is in fact a real word in a relatively small language that I can't speak or read. I googled the word, and got maybe a hundred hits. That seems low, but it is a small language and not the most common of words. What I really wanted to know is whether a hundred hits in the other language was proportionate to the number of hits I'd get for the equivalent English word in English. If the ratio of hits in each language was close to the ratio of total pages indexed in each language, then it's likely it was a real word.

2. HowDoYouPronounceThisWord.com You post a word, people reply with an audio file of its pronunciation. They could have some kind of functionality to make it super-easy to upload an audio file - you simply press "record" on the interface rather than having to save and upload your own file, for example. And, of course, there would need to be some kind of screening and moderation to prevent it from degenerating into Yahoo Answers.

Things I need mnemonics for

1. practice/practise (I know practise is the verb, but I want it to have a mnemonic on principle)

2. allemand/allemagne (one of them capitalizes but I forget which, so that should be included in the mnemonic)

3. continual/continuous (I have to look it up every. single. fucking. time.)

Separatist vs. souverainiste: an analysis

I've been trying to wrap my brain around the meaningfulness of separatist vs. souverainiste. My problem is that I was trying to think this through from a position of hegemony. I was assuming that my English was standard, and I was thinking in terms of "What was their reasoning in referring to the separatists as sovereigntists?"

I've been thinking and doing some research, and I've discovered the problem is that the meaning of "separatist" and "sovereigntist" in my English is skewed, and the real question to be asking is "What was their reasoning in referring to the people in question as separatists?"

Forget everything you know about Quebec for a second. In the world at large and in the English language in general, "separatist" is negative and "sovereigntist" is positive.

Separatists want to break away from something to which they belong, to destroy an existing union, The connotations are usually a bit extremist and a bit irrational (think Basque separatists, white separatists, black separatists, Tamil separatists, etc. etc.)

"Sovereignty," on the other hand, is a good thing. One's sovereignty over one's own body. Canada's sovereignty over its northern waters. Sovereigntists want to preserve their existing rights and freedoms.

They are two separate concepts. They are separate concepts in most parts of the English-speaking world, and they are separate concepts in cognate languages, including French.

(Now you can remember everything you know about Quebec again.)

However, we Anglo-Canadians are so used to hearing the word sovereignty used to describe Quebec separation (which, rightfully or wrongfully, we do perceive as a threat) that we tend to forget its positive connotations and immediately equate it with this perceived threat. It's like the words "life" and "choice" when discussing abortion. If abortion is the topic of discussion and one of those words comes up, it is not going to be taken neutrally.

So because we equate this positive word "sovereignty" with Quebec separation, we don't always distinguish between "separatist" and "sovereigntist". Certainly both words can be used very deliberately and advisedly in our English, but they can also be used mindlessly and interchangeably. Again, think about about the terms "pro-life" and "anti-abortion". Sometimes (depending on speaker, audience, situation, context) the choice of one or the other is meaningful and politicized. But sometimes it's just the word the speaker happens to land on.

Analogy: "sovereigntist" is like "potato chips". "Separatist" is like "junk food." They can be used to describe the same concept and they can both be used positively, negatively or neutrally depending on speaker/audience/situation/context, but the second one is generally more negative.

So what does this mean for Stephen Harper's speeches? I can't tell you. Why? Because I don't know how mindfully he chose the word "separatists" instead of "sovereigntists" in English. He (or his speechwriters) might have just grabbed the first word that came to mind. They might have chosen it to demonize the Bloc as much as possible. They might have chosen it because the people in question tend to refer to themselves as souverainistes and they don't want their base to view them as sympathetic. I have no way of knowing.

So how did the French end up being souverainistes? At some point someone changed it. Was this cunning and manipulative? There is, of course, room for it to have been, but it was not necessarily. It is a perfectly normal part of the French translator's job to make minor stylistic tweaks, and to be the one to realize "That line may play in Canmore, but not in Baie-Comeau" and edit it to something that will get the desired reaction from the Francophone audience. That's why you want mother-tongue translators. From a translational perspective, changing separatists to souverainistes is morally equivalent to altering a line that is a political catchphrase in the target language but politically neutral in the source language, or changing an abbreviation so it isn't a dirty word in the target language. Whenever it's in question, you always err on the side of not making people look like dickheads.

Was the PM aware of the different connotations? I have no way of knowing. I know that any sensible person does review their translated speeches before delivering them. I know that souverainiste is harder for an Anglophone to pronounce than séparatiste (sometimes this is a factor in word choices for speeches, sometimes not - I have no idea if it is for Mr. Harper). I know that Mr. Harper is coming from the same English as I am, so he may well not immediately recognize that separatist and souverainiste are in fact different concepts (I never thought about it before this speech happened).

So the take-away:

sovereigntist = potato chips
separatist = junk food

There is room for the difference in word choices to be calculating and manipulative, and there is room for it to be perfectly innocent. It all depends not on why they decided to refer to the junk food as potato chips, but on how mindful they were in choosing to call it junk food in the first place.

And regardless of any motives or lack thereof in word choice, the impact of the use of separatist and souverainiste is negligible when compared with the impact of all Mr. Harper's other comments on the Bloc's alignment with the coalition.

Why can't people hear past the upspeak?

I've written about upspeak before, but the comments on this Language Log post surprise me (not so much the commenters themselves, but what they are saying about how people in general perceive upspeak). It sounds like some people can't hear beyond the upspeak. They hear upspeak and think "ditz" or "insecure", seemingly without giving a moment's attention to the words being used or the ideas being communicated.

That seems utterly bizarre to me. Why should my intonation blind my interlocutor to the fact that I'm using the words "intonation" and "interlocutor" rather than "how I'm talking" and "the person I'm talking to"? If, instead of "Things They Should Invent", I titled my blog posts with "I wonder if this exists?", why should that affect the perceived merit of my ideas (insofar as my ideas might have merit). Even if upspeak was a sign of insecurity, a useful idea expressed insecurely is still useful. If the solution to all our problems is a red widget and I say "Um, I kinda have an idea? Just putting this out there, I don't know if it's any good, but what if we got a red widget?" how could my uncertainty stop everyone else from immediately making the mental connection that yes, a red widget will solve all our problems?

When someone is talking in your first language, you hear their words and understand the content without any effort unless what they are saying is way too difficult for you. If someone is speaking with a low-prestige accent and clearly communicating good ideas, you still automatically hear the words and understand the ideas and can quickly grok that they know what they're talking about despite their low-prestige accent. It takes no effort to do this in your first language, your brain processes it automatically.

So why doesn't it do the same thing with upspeak?

How to do a reverse apology

Via Language Log, some guy walks around New York City apologizing to people who bump into him.

That took a minute, didn't it? We all do that automatically, it a basic part of Canadian etiquette.

The problem is, the guy in the article is overdoing it. His reverse apologies are really pointed and come across as passive-aggressive. A proper reverse apology has to come across as perfectly automatic, as automatic as saying thanks when the cashier hands you your change. It needs to be non-specific. "Sorry" or "Oops, sorry" will do just fine. "Sorry you dropped my apple" is petty and passive-aggressive. However, even if you are just saying the word "Sorry" and saying it automatically as soon as the incident occurs, you also need to say it like it's no big deal. Imagine you're walking through a subway station, busy day, a lot on your mind, striding briskly towards the platform (the train isn't there yet so you aren't running) and you bump into someone else. No big deal, no one is hurt, really your bag just hit their bag, no need to break stride, you say "Oops, sorry" and continue on your way, the encounter forgotten two seconds later. That's the kind of tone you need. In my corner of the world, that will elicit a sorry of equal or greater value. Doing anything bigger or more pointed for a minor incident in which you are not at fault will come across as passive-aggressive and put the other person on the defensive.

It would be interesting to repeat this experiment with someone who is fluent in reverse apologies, who does it automatically, and who isn't so actively seeking to change behaviour. Canadians who are currently in New York City (I'm sure there are some Canadians in New York City at any given time): spend a day apologizing like a Canadian and blog your findings!

I'll verb anything as long as it's concrete

Stephen Fry says:

New examples [of nouns becoming verbs] from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire.

I hate actioned, and it is ugly. But I don't hate it because it's ugly or because it's new, I hate it because it's abstract and non-specific. I'm fine with googling, blogging, commenting, twittering, youtubing, facebooking, texting, zaprudering, microwaving, dustbusting, shower-massaging, swiffering, PDFing, mp3ing, vasectomizing, tubalizing, essuring, LOLing, ROFLing OMGing WTFing and puppy-head-tilting. In every one of those cases it is completely obvious what the verb means, and in most cases it can only mean one thing (googling is obviously searching with google, although facebooking could be doing any number of things on facebook).

But with action as a verb, it's not clear at all what you're doing. In fact, it varies widely depending on context. It feels like the writer doesn't want to give any thought to what exactly needs to be done, so they're sticking the word "action" in and making me figure it out myself. I once received an email containing some information, followed in close succession by another email saying "That first email was for information only, you don't have to action it." Boy was I glad I didn't have to action it, because I had no idea how I might have "actioned" that email. It wasn't clear to me at all what might have needed to be done.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I may well be feeling this way because I'm a French to English translator. French verbs tend to be far more abstract than English verbs. In many cases (e.g. effectuer, favoriser, intervenir), you can't even translate the French verb or things will get ridiculous. You have to read and understand the entire situation and describe it in clear English, with the verbs being no more helpful than the blank in a game of mad libs.

After spending your entire workday making abstract verbs more concrete and vague verbs more specific, the last thing you want to do is go action something!