A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

By Mark Twain

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lexicographers take note

The CBC recently announced that they would reduce executive bonuses by 50% next year, to which the Canadian Media Guild members, who face massive layoffs and wage rollbacks in the coming year, replied, “The CBC execs get bonuses?!”

Bonus outrage is officially all the rage these days. Nonetheless, the whole blowup over the AIG bonus debacle–which set this ball rolling in the first place–has its roots in a simple semantic problem. Most people conceive of a bonus as something extra. Business executives conceive of bonuses as a natural extension of their salary, subject to the same contractual obligations and expectations.

When the team of executives hired to fix AIG with the help of $170 billion from the government agreed to work for a salary of $1, it gave the impression to the public that they were taking a huge hit for the good of the world’s financial system. In reality, as people found out a few days ago, they actually agreed to work for a salary of a dollar, plus a million dollar “bonus” at the end of the year, which was just as contractual an obligation as their salary was. The trouble is, when the people who naively conceive of a bonus as being something extra heard that these AIG execs were getting million dollar bonuses, they got outraged, because there was obviously no fiscal success on the part of the company that would justify the distribution of an extra million dollars to each executive at the end of the year.

Of course, the bonus wasn’t extra at all. The executives signed a contract that stipulated they would receive an effective salary of $1 ooo oo1. When Liddy got pressured by Congress to allow clawbacks of %90 of that amount, the execs saw it, rightly, as a clawback of %90 of their salary for that year.

Obviously, in hindsight, calling contractually obligated yearly payments to corporate executives “bonuses” is horribly misleading and disingenuous, especially coupled with the announcement that the AIG bailout team would work for $1 salaries. This was an obvious and flagrant attempt to mislead the public, and it has been ever since the concept of contractual bonuses became the norm in executive retention. Nonetheless, it would be nice if corporate execs just played it straight and called the bonuses “salary,” because at least then we would all be talking about the same thing during discussions of exorbitant executive pay rates.

Passive voice: not what he used to be

As a follow-up to this post, I thought I should point out that Mark Liberman at Language Log officially declared today the end of the passive voice as we know it:

[D]espite this long history, I’m afraid that the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness [...] Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is “construction that is vague as to agency”.

And in case you were wondering, yes, the folks at Language Log have the authority to do that.

Well-educated people don’t know what passive voice is

For a long time those kooks over at Language Log have railed against people who think that writing in the passive voice simply means writing in a way that obscures the agency of the writer. In fact, the only thing passive voice has to do with is whether the subject of a sentence comes before the object or after it. I’ve made this handy diagram to illustrate the difference between active and passive voice:

That’s it. That’s all passive voice is.

I wanted to add an example from one of the books I was reading this week. Joey  Sprague, in her book Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers, writes that using “active rather than passive voice” is a good way to “call attention to the researcher as a person.” Of course, she’s right. But the example she gives, “‘I believe’ rather than ‘it seems,’” is wrong. A sentence beginning with “I believe” would indeed be in the active voice, but a sentence beginning with “it seems” would also be in the active voice, as in the example

……..subject                                        object
………..It          seems         that john ate the cookies.

where the object is a subordinate noun clause. If this sentence was made passive, it would be

……..*That john ate the cookies was seemed

The fact that people can make it through 12 years of postsecondary education without learning this distinction seems to reflect poorly on linguistics education in the North American school system, or something.

The Decline of Language

From McSweeney’s:

WTF Sestina.

BY MEGHANN MARCO
- – - -

2punk4punk: do you like nirvana, omg
grndflr76: yeah, but they ripped off the pixies, lol
2punk4punk: i know, wtf
grndflr76: i have the subpop 7″ of ’love buzz’, hahaha
2punk4punk: me too, stfu
grndflr76: yeah, from ebay, rofl

Bob WallHAX: I’m killin your doods, rofl
HALORuLEZ1337: U R just lucky, omg
Bob WallHAX: getting pwn3d, stfu
Bob WallHAX: you are teh suck, lol
HALORuLEZ1337: HEADSHOT, hahaha
Bob WallHAX: wtf

Lord Uber: you are LATE. where have you been, wtf
Sir Huzzah: with your mom, rofl
Lord Uber: oh, hahaha.
Lord Uber: do you think it’s funny to be late, omg
Sir Huzzah: yes lol
Lord Uber: well, you’re out of the guild so stfu

cowrieshell69: so then I said ”no, you stfu”
cowrieshell69: and he was all like, ”wtf!”
hardcandy98: you are so funny, lol
cowrieshell69: thanks babe, rofl
hardcandy98: hahaha omg
cowrieshell69: omg hahaha

Lord Uber: Dude, we have vanquished Ha’Xor the Elite! Hahaha!
Lady Mysterious: I’m not a ’dude’, stfu.
Lord Uber: I didn’t mean that you were, omg.
Lady Mysterious: Women play games too, wtf!
Lord Uber: I am so sorry, will you marry me, rofl.
Lady Mysterious: sure! lol.

sexxymcsexxerton: oh hello there, a/s/l, lol
pussykat87: 18/f/not tellin u, hahaha
sexxymcsexxerton: u r so hot more pix pls, rofl
pussykat87: that is enuff, stfu
sexxymcsexxerton: c’mon please, wtf!
sexxymcsexxerton: wait. these pictures are of mandy moore … omg

2punk4punk: I can’t believe you like them, omg. They suck, lol
grdflr79: wtf, their early stuff is really good, hahaha
2punk4punk: stfu, they are a ripoff, rofl

I can’t, I’m late for my ovular.

By way of Alas, I just came across the word “ovular” for the first time. No, not the zoological term referring to ova or ovules; the feminist term referring to a seminar, but without the masculinist implications of the original term.

Ampersand at Alas cites the word in an essay by Christina Hoff Sommers, who traces it back to Joyce Trebilcot, one of her colleagues in feminist philosophy at Clark University. Sommers’s essay is vehemently anti-feminist, and she uses the term “ovular” to point out how feminism was “being hijacked by gender wars eccentrics.” While I would love to go on about Sommers’s essay, you may as well just read Ampersand’s post because he does a better job of critiquing it than I ever would, and says a lot of the same things.

I will take this opportunity to bring up that other semen word that feminists also have a problem with, dissemination. Whereas Ampersand points out that few feminists in the history of the women’s movement have actually been concerned enough with the word “seminar” to replace it with a gynocentric term, avoiding the use of disseminate does seem to be common in feminist literature. But unlike Sommers would imply, it is more often replaced with a neutral term like “distribution” rather than a gynocentric term like “disovulation,” and for good reason: making up gynocentric words to avoid masculinism in language is a good way to get labelled a crazy eccentric and to discredit the rest of your work. That’s why most feminists, even the radical feminists that I’m aware of, don’t do that. With the exception of its pronouns, English is suprisingly versatile and it’s usually not hard to find neutral language without having to make it up.

So is there a neutral alternative to seminar? Of course! How about colloquium, caucus, forum, workshop, tutorial, or symposium? In fact, these are all terms that I’ve heard real live feminists use. Sommers’ complaint, as we know, is that old spectre the straw-woman fallacy.

[Careful readers will notice that I use the gynocentric term "straw woman" rather than a neutral term like "straw person." As in the case of Trebilcot and her ovulars, my use of straw woman is political; it's a tactic for drawing attention to way gender in language can be taken for granted. However, unlike Trebilcot's ovulars, the term straw woman is quickly gaining currency as a legitimate alternative to the original formulation, and so my use of it cannot be cited as evidence that I am eccentric, or that I am making up words. A Google search for "straw woman" fallacy actually turns up more results that one for "straw man" fallacy, indicating that the choice of terms has become more a matter of taste than a reflection of gendered norms.]

Who/whom/who cares

I came across this exchange in Maclean’s Mailbag while I was waiting in the doctor’s office. Marie-Louise DeWitt wrote the following letter in response to the previous week’s cover:

Your cover line, “Who women want,” should read “Whom women want.” Have grammatical errors just become so acceptable that nobody notices them anymore?

It was followed by a letter from Christopher Allen:

My colleagues and I were discussing your cover line this week and I thought that some readers would be quick to criticize your grammar. Of course you were correct to use the word “who.” Assuming that the story is about what heterosexual women want (i.e. men), the implied sentence would read, “The men who women want” or “The men who are wanted by women.” The “who” is a subordinating conjunction, a signifier for the beginning of a relative (or adjective) clause. “Who” is a relative pronoun and because of that, it’s used in the subject, not the object. It wouldn’t be “whom” as there’s no recipient of direct action.

Even if you disagree with Christopher, which I do, there is also a third option that Marie-Louise alluded to: perhaps it doesn’t matter that the nominative case was used because the nominative case has become conventional, and the only people who would complain about it being an error are crusty, stuck-in-their-ways prescriptivists. As the Wikipedia article on who points out, the OED considers the objective case of the pronoun who to be “no longer current in natural colloquial speech”; an article by Lasnik and Sobin entitled “The Who/Whom Puzzle: On The Preservation Of An Archaic Feature” claims that the who/whom distinction is governed by what they call “grammatical viruses,” which are extra-grammatical rules that give language “prestige” status. In other words, English has changed since the prescriptions of grammar were written up 250 years ago under the misguided goal of fixing the English language “once and for all,” just as it had been changing for thousands of years before that.

Lasnik and Sobin’s footnote on their use of the term “prestige” to refer to this kind of language sums up Marie-Louise’s situation quite aptly:

The use of the term ‘prestige’ here is not intended to imply that the person who employs such forms in speech actually gains prestige – ponderous language may easily have the contrary result.

Fighting language change by upholding archaic rules of grammar only belies your ignorance of language, not your knowledge of it.

Question marks, uptalk, and HRT

In my last post (“The etymological fallacy”) I desperately wanted to end the post with the sentence

Perhaps the etymological fallacy is the mark of an idle mind.

but it sounded too dull and lifeless; I liked it much better with a question mark at the end:

Perhaps the etymological fallacy is the mark of an idle mind?

I thought it perfectly portrayed what I wanted to say, but with an invitation for a reader to agree or disagree; a sort of interactive cue – when I read the sentence with a question mark, I read it with steadily rising intonation as if it were on the verge of becoming a question. I refrained, though, because all of my training told me to do otherwise.

This kind of rising intonation is what a lot of people associate with the term “uptalk,” which is the “informal” term for the kind of rising intonation that you might have noticed in the speech of prepubescent girls (which is an association, I must add, that is stereotypical and not entirely true; Mark Liberman has shown that George W. Bush has the propensity to uptalk like a prepubescent girl in certain cases). Part of the stereotype surrounding uptalk is that it is an indication of the speaker being unsure of themselves and/or seeking reassurance from the audience. While it’s not clear from the existing research what exactly the etiology of uptalk is, just as it’s unclear what exactly the distribution is, there have been strong indications that both the distribution and the etiology are vastly different from what the stereotypes would suggest – not only do non-prepubescent girls use uptalk, but certain speakers use uptalk even in situations where they are very sure of themselves and their expertise.

The reason I said that uptalk is the informal term for this kind of intonation is because there is an alternate term that’s making the rounds as a “formal” or “technical” synonym for uptalk: “high-rising terminals,” or HRTs. Wikipedia redirects to the HRT page from an “uptalk” query, and a TimesOnline article that referred to Language Log also equated uptalk with HRT. Unfortunately, this is a synonymy that linguists at Language Log, Mark Liberman especially, would like to see wiped off the face of the earth. In a post entitled “Uptalk is not HRT,” he claims vehemently that

“High rising terminal” or “HRT”, invented by linguists, is a bad term, making a false claim about the phonetics of the phenomenon. It should be abandoned.

Mark’s claim was made on the grounds that pitch tracks of uptalk usually start from the middle or low end of the speaker’s range, whereas HRT is officially defined as a “a high tone beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement, and continuing to increase in frequency to the end of the intonational phrase.”

The reason I’m going on at length about uptalk and HRT is because I disagree with Mark about what the fate of the term HRT should be. I agree that using HRT to refer to uptalk is incorrect and misleading, but I think that HRT does have a legitimate type of intonation to which it could correctly refer, and that is the type that I mentioned at the top of the post. I think that in phrases like that one, where the terminal rise appears to start near the high end of the speakers range, could be referred to as HRTs if an analysis of the pitch tracks agreed that that is what’s happening.

The interesting thing to note is that if I were to use the term HRT to refer to that kind of phrase, the stereotype about the speaker seeking reassurance from the audience would be more or less true (which is a fact possibly corroborated by the use of a question mark to represent such a phrase orthographically). This type of phrase would also fit more accurately with the term “interrogatory statement,” which the author of the Times article used to refer to both uptalk and HRTs. It’s clear that there is a kind of declarative statement that is puposefully delivered as a question, and whether it is called an HRT or something else, I think it deserves more attention, and it might help clear up some of the confusion about the relationship between uptalk and HRT.

Etymological fallacy: the devil’s work

Arguing for the virtue of idleness, Mark Kingwell says,

[N]otice the etymological traces contained in the English words “negotiate” and “otiose.” Otiose means redundant or useless. Negotiate means to transact affairs, to conduct business. But the shared Latin root tells the story. Neg-otium, the negation of that which lies beyond use, is the origin of business. Business is an obliteration, a nulling, not a positive value in its own right. And what is negated? The very thing, idling, which we now condemn as useless. We have got it exactly backward.

This is specious reasoning at best. Two things are going on in this passage: Kingwell is erroneously equating negotiation with business, and in doing so, he is also committing the etymological fallacy with regard to the word negotiate. Anyone with fluency in English will likely agree that the word negotiate no longer means “not at leisure”; it has a specific meaning that necessarily involves two parties coming to some sort of agreement based on compromise. Kingwell’s assertion that negotiate is synonymous with business is false on two counts: first, the legitimate use of the term negotiate to mean “do business” has been obsolete for hundreds of years, at least according to the OED; and second, as we have seen, appealing to the etymological “not at leisure” connotation of negotiate in order to draw a parallel with business based on its etymology (busy + -ness) is fallacious.

Maybe if Kingwell had structured a “formal essay,” he could have made an argument for idleness that didn’t rely so heavily on the language used to talk about it. Is the etymological fallacy perhaps the mark of an idle mind?

Used/goes to go, please

I came across this sentence on Facebook the other day:

All people that used/goes to go to Boundary Community Elementary.

As far as I can tell, “used/goes to” is an amalgamation of “used to” and “goes to”, which appear parallel because they’re both followed by “to”; presumably “go to” is a continuation of “used to.” But here are the two sentences that were combined:

All people that go to Boundary Community Elementary.

All people that used to go to Boundary Community Elementary.

Where did “goes” come from? Combining the two sentences above produces

All people that go/used to go to Boundary Community Elementary.

My best guess is that the sentence was originally written as “All people that used to go to Boundary Community Elementary,” and then “goes” was inserted after the fact to take care of the present tense by someone who accidentally forgot about number agreement.