David Brookes:

Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing. The word Dickensian doesn’t fully describe the madness of a system that cannot get rid of bad teachers.

Unless there was a huge number of teachers in a small, poorly heated ‘rubber room’, then the word Dickensian doesn’t even partly describe what he’s talking about. Or am I missing something?

When I was studying linguistics in college I particularly loved the type of sociolinguistics pioneered by William Labov*, which (simplifying greatly) iinvolves analysing masses of speech recordings alongside the personal and social characteristics of the speakers to uncover the movement of sound change through a speech community. It’s a lovely subject, with analysis that combines the abstract and the highly personal and that reveals a lot about people and society along the way.

If there’s a problem, it’s that the raw data can be quite expensive and time-consuming to collect, because to do proper comparisons what you want to end up with is lots of people from a particular language community saying the same word in a reasonably natural fashion. I’ve wondered in the past whether the internet might somehow open a door to the kind of mass vocal harvesting that might help in this area, all of which is a long-winded introduction to a fab site called Forvo.

It’s a nifty little site that makes it very easy for you to add recordings of yourself pronouncing words in your native language, and since starting last year they’ve got 171,000 words in 204 languages. Here’s Dublin in English and German, sláinte in Irish, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Farsi and, hallelujah, Dirk Kuyt in Dutch. And if you are still unsure how to pronounce ‘fuck’ in a variety of world accents, there are many people here who would like to help you.

It’s probably unlikely that Forvo or something like it will ever replace proper sociolinguistic fieldwork (not least because the recordings aren’t ideally ‘natural’), but if it takes off it could be of some value to researchers as well as being loads of fun for everyone else. For that to happen I suppose it needs to carefully tread the fine line between access that’s open enough to prompt a lot of valuable usage and access that’s so open it gets spoiled by varieties of abuse or toolery.

* If I’ve got a pop science book in me it might be something about Labov along the lines of ‘Freakoguistics! How one man uncovered the secret behind the way you speak’ or something similarly over-excited. Think this but with considerably more padding. Seriously though, Labov’s a mensch - among other things, check out this story of how his evidence helped free an innocent man from jail.

I was chatting to an Irish girl at a barbecue here the other day and she asked if I spoke Irish, and I was slightly embarrassed to say that I don’t. Part of the reason came back to me when I read this post by Maria over at Crooked Timber:

it’s Monday today, so my thoughts turn inevitably to the Teileagoir. (Irish for slide projector, a term I only learnt as an an adult, and pronounced “tel-a-gor”). Every Monday, the Teleagoir would be loaded with a new set of slides in Irish, something along the lines of ‘Mammy and Daddy and Sean and Maire go to the cinema’. Each slide would have a picture of the scene and maybe some vocabulary to prompt us. For each one, we memorised a sentence of the story. We would do a couple of new slides every day, and at the end of the week we would recite the whole thing as a group without the pictures. How this might ever have translated into being able to speak Irish, I’m not sure. But I do remember the gut-clenching boredom that set in around Wednesday as we went through the slides for the 20th time. There wasn’t much a teacher could do with the Teileagoir.

From the sounds of it Maria finished primary school in the late 1970s or early 80s, but I can vouch for the continued use of the Teilagoir and its deadly dull slides through to the end of the 80s. Thanks to the crappy teaching methods used back then I will always have a ready-made excuse for why I don’t speak Irish, handy for deflecting blame from what in retrospect was clearly incipient West Britishness.

Many things in this Irish Times article about Ulster-Scots made me giggle, guiltily. First, and all too predictably:

The guttural pronunciation, which is almost Germanic in its harshness…

Glad we got that out of the way. Next, some guff from the natives about its advantages over English.

“Instead of a standard English phrase like ‘it’s a nice day’, we would say ‘it’s a brave nice day the day’,” explains Young. “Ulster-Scots is more descriptive. You can pack a whole lot into it.”

Yes. You certainly can pack more into a sentence with seven words than one with four. Now, as we all know, no minority language can possibly survive without some sort of government agency poking around at it. What would that agency be?

The development of Ulster-Scots is being overseen by Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch (the Ulster-Scots Agency)

That’s right! Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch. Or however you pronounce it - probably just like that. Except with a straight face.

As a vernacular rooted in rural life and with a tendency for retrospection, Ulster-Scots lacks equivalents for certain modern words used in standard English. Cue the neologism langblether, meaning telephone (lang for long and blether for talk).

“Somebody decided to create these words that didn’t make sense,” says Cromie. “We had to tell them to stop making words up.”

Right. So it’s a very descriptive language except when it comes to describing everyday objects. Then, whatever you do, you don’t make up a new word. You just stare at the telephone and jab your finger at it repeatedly.

Apparently there is quite a debate about whether Ulster-Scots (why not just Ulster-Scotch, if that’s its proper name?) is a dialect or a distinct language. I can’t offer an opinion but I note in this dictionary the entry ‘thruither’, which apparently describes a disorganised person, and is very similar to the word ‘throughother’ that my northern Granny used for a messy room and was presumably borrowed.

The Irish Times frequently refers to sexual assault when what is denoted is rape. You can see an example in this caption of a photograph of the Austrian man who locked his daughter up.

I’m not sure why this is. Possibly there is an idea at the Irish Times that it’s unwise to deem a crime rape before it’s been proven as non-consensual in court. Perhaps there really are good legal reasons for believing this term to be preferable - I can’t think of any but I could be mistaken. What I can say, from my imperfect knowledge of both human physiology and criminal law, is that it is virtually impossible to become pregnant through a sexual assault. It is not suitable to be used as an umbrella term or euphemism as it does not include rape or penetration. So the sentence in the Irish Times report that she “[gave] birth to seven children after repeated sexual assaults by her father” is gibberish.

Other news organisations (RTE, BBC) refer to Josef Fritzl’s ’sexual abuse’. This works well in this situation but I have no bright ideas for how to fudge the word in other cases.

Take THAT, ‘perspicacity‘.

Imagine Keith Richards gratuitously calling Amy Winehouse a “bitch” because she takes drugs, and pretending that he wouldn’t have taken drugs 40 years ago if he had known about “the effects”, and certainly wouldn’t have continued taking them if there was such a thing as “rehab”.

If anyone knew about the effects of drugs 40 years ago, it was Keith Richards.

The stupid fucking bitch.

Somebody called Jonathan Coulton has found a delightful message from Robert Redford in the Sundance Christmas catalogue:

“Holidays again. Forgive me while I dodge the rumble of the million footed throngs that have succumbed to the marketing ether for Christmas and its days.

Holiday. Can we, without disappointing the children and others who long for the surprise of gift giving, just look to a different value to digest, wherever you are? Those details that are natural and sometimes hidden? That have a satisfying and long lasting lifespan? Things that you miss when you’re away? That when someone might remind you, you say, oh yes, how wonderful. And of course the most vivid of details: loved ones who are there in body and spirit.

Happy holidays from all of us at Sundance.”

While you can sort of understand what he’s saying, as one commenter astutely notes, “there is the possibility that his cheese has slid off the cracker”.

Language Log reports that chimps in West Africa have been observed making pencils and, possibly, communicating through writing.

Using their hands and teeth, female chimpanzees were seen repeatedly tearing the side branches off straight sticks, peeling back the bark, and sharpening one end. Then, grasping these pencils between their thrumbs and forefingers, they made apparent symbolic indentations on large, flat leaves that they held in their other hands.

In one case, after using the pencil to make repeated marks on a leaf, the female chimp handed the leaf to a nearby male, who looked at it briefly, then scurried off as though on an errand of some kind.

What did it say? WHAT DID IT SAY?

Linguists studying animal communication are anxious to get their hands on the leaves that contain the alleged writings but so far the Senegal research team has been unsuccessful in their efforts to retreive any.

In most cases, the female has eaten the leaf immediately after her mate rushed off into the savannah.

Rather scarily, someone saw this and thought of me.

Cluebat: A metaphorical bat used to ‘beat some sense into’ someone who is blatantly stupid.

As deployed by Chris Dillow in a discussion about insuring against recession.

When you’ve got past the basic stage in learning a language, what you really need is conversational practice. But paying some native speaker just to chat to you is (a) kind of ridiculous and (b) expensive. What would be ideal is finding someone who speaks the language you want to learn and who wants to learn the language you speak. And if face to face conversation isn’t possible, the next best thing is over the phone. But that’s expensive too. Or at least it was, now that we’ve got free telephone calls with Skype. But how do you find a willing language-learning partner with Skype? Why, with The Mixxer. I haven’t actually tried this yet, because I haven’t decided which language to pretend to be fluent in yet. Maybe Swedish …

William Labov is the founder and probably still the leading light of sociolinguistics, basically the science of analysing apparently random speech variation as they link to social relationships and long-term language change. He makes this sometimes very technical field interesting, which it should be, really, and here’s a nice clip of him talking about his recent work on language change in North America and how regional dialects are actually diverging despite the influence of mass media.

Wow, a real gem of 20th Century American cultural archaeology here: How To Speak Hip, an authoritative and as far as I know accurate document of the speech of late 1950s jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.

I suppose I’ll watch tonight’s Channel 4 documentary on stammering, but not without trepidation. Stammering can be a really unpleasant thing to watch, and stammerers are acutely conscious of that. However a stammer starts, it’s this awareness which can create the kind of vicious circle in which (to simplify) negative feedback eats at the relative confidence and self-ease that are important for fluent speech, making for a worse stammer, which makes for worse feedback, which makes for even lower confidence. At the bottom of the spiral, a person can end up hardly able to speak at all.

How and what we communicate is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as individuals, and even a mild speech impediment can be emotionally debilitating, and an incentive to hide from some parts of life - avoiding the telephone, running a mile from public speaking, narrowing horizons to what’s safe. I recently met a guy who chose to go to Manchester University over Durham because he found it easier to say. Naturally, that didn’t last long once he actually got there. It’s funny, but the most familiar words can be the hardest to say - when I attended a therapy session a couple of months ago just about everyone in the group said their own name was what got them stuck most often. I’m the same, and once when I was at some sort of summer camp as a kid, I pretended to be called something else just because it was easier. It’s ridiculous and it’s sad - hesitating when asked your own name is an absurd, stupid thing, and again it’s that knowledge that makes it all the more likely.

So, what’s the fix? There isn’t one, really (though this documentary might say otherwise) - once you stammer into adulthood it generally stays with you to some extent. But you can minimise it, partly by trying to desensitise yourself to real or perceived negative feedback (or as Troy McClure might say, “Get Confident, Stupid”). Since the aim is partly to be unconscious of and therefore unconcerned about the potential pitfalls in a conversation, it’s hard to deliberately and consciously achieve. It helps when the people around you don’t make a big deal about it and wait to hear what you’ve got to say. I’ve almost always had that, and I’m very grateful.

GLAUBENSKRIEG

For those who don’t speak the language, it transliterates to “belief-war”.

I saw it written on German telly last night, in a debate about that Islam vs. Cartoons thing.

I’ve been reading the latest Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Book, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nightdress, and loving it. I seem to remember a couple of years ago Ross kept having attacks of something resembling conscience, but so far this latest volume reads more like “Irish Psycho”, as he’s spent most of time basically focking people over. The constant stream of genius slang is still the best thing about it - like, Ross variously describeing the, eh, working class parts of the city where his son lives as Pram Springs, Knackeragua and, my favourite, The Fleck Republic.

I don’t have anything in particular to say here, so I’ll leave you with:

Chin-stroking analysis bit: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly represents the debasement of Ireland’s rich heritage of cultural and linguistic creativity into the habit of thinking up ever crueller (but funnier) names for people you don’t like. Discuss.

Surely-too-good-to-be-true Wikipedia extract:

Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is something of a cultural phenomenon within Ireland, and his name has become a byword for all that is perceived to be wrong in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Though it is largely viewed as satire, there are those who view Ross O’Carroll-Kelly as a role model and an idol. For example, some people have imitated Ross’ pastime of driving through disadvantaged areas in expensive cars, shouting “Affluence!” at passersby.

On “What the Stuarts Did for Us”, Adam-Hart Davis has just claimed that the term ‘hackney cab’ comes from the French haquenée or “ambling nag” (obviously, the precursors of today’s black cabs were of the horse-drawn variety). This sounded a bit off to me - does that mean the borough of Hackney is named after a kind of horse? Also, and I admit this may not be the most reliable source, I seem to remember Alan Moore having his lead character William Gull claim in “From Hell” that the place-name Hackney comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Hakon’s Ea”, which means something like “area belonging to some Anglo-Saxon guy called Hakon”.

So who was right? Maybe both of them. Here’s the online Etymological Dictionary:

hackney
c.1300, see hack (2).
hack (2)
c.1700, originally, “person hired to do routine work,” short for hackney “an ordinary horse” (c.1300), probably from place name Hackney (Middlesex), from O.E. [Old English] Hacan ieg “Haca’s Isle” (or possibly “Hook Island”). Now well within London, it was once pastoral. Apparently nags were raised on the pastureland there in early medieval times and taken to Smithfield horse market (cf. Fr. haquenée “ambling nag,” an Eng. loan-word). Extended sense of “horse for hire” (1393) led naturally to “broken-down nag,” and also “prostitute” (1579) and “drudge” (1546). Special sense of “one who writes anything for hire” led to hackneyed “trite” (1749); hack writer is first recorded 1826, though hackney writer is at least 50 years earlier. Sense of “carriage for hire” (1704) led to modern slang for “taxicab.”

So a hack is a broken-down nag who will do anything for money. Sounds like most journalists alright.

From the start page of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. How’s it known by locals around the world?

German: Wikipedia
Italian: Wikipedia
Dutch: Wikipedia
Spanish: Wikipedia
Portuguese: Wikipédia
Swedish: Wikipedia
Polish: Wikipedia
French: Wikipédia
Irish: Vicipéid

A better comparison might be to look at how each language forms the suffix ‘-pedia’. If a language has a different way (from English) of spelling encyclopedia, does it also insist that Wikipedia be formed the same way? These languages have different ways of spelling encyclopedia:

German
Dutch
Swedish
French
Irish

These ones make Wikipedia fit how they spell encyclopedia (not counting accents):

Irish

I’m sure there are lots of good reasons justifying what amounts to the careful guarding of an empty safe. But still - making the French seem relaxed about anglicisation? Just… wow.

My friend Abu said something funny yesterday: “look aftered”, as in “they’re not very well look aftered”. Seems to be a case of the verb “look” and preposition “after” being joined into the verb “look after”. Google reveals a few examples of “look aftered“, many in classified ads or discussion boards, apparently quite a few of them from South Asian speakers (Abu was born in Bangladesh but raised in London).

Since there are also examples of “look aftering” and “look afters“, it does seem as if “look after” has become a simple verb for some people. I can’t think of any other examples of this kind of process, though.

Coincidentally, one of the results for “look aftering” leads you to the new album “lookaftering” by Vashti Bunyan, her second in 35 years, and which seems to be getting rapturous reviews. I might have to get it, if not for the sake of linguistic research then for the “intimate, unapologetic beauty drained of gravity or mystery that invites and comforts in one stroke, stronger than the gravest clock and gentler than a stray sigh” (Stylus magazine). I just don’t get enough of that kind of thing these days.

According to Stunned, “apparently Polish has overtaken Irish to become Ireland’s second language based on the number of people speaking it”. Pretty crazy if true - has anyone got any anecdotal evidence to support this hearsay?

Maybe Polish will soon become another new official language for Ireland alongside the recently added Simpsons Quotes. Oh, and anyone worried that this means a dimunition in importance of the Irish language shouldn’t worry - Irish was already irrelevant. Though maybe there’s a lesson there, and the way to ensure nobody speaks Polish is to teach it compulsorily in schools …

Proof if proof be need be that George W. Bush’s speeches consist not of sentences but of small, bite-size phrasoids: Mark Liberman, a linguist with too much time on his hands, produced a waveform image (dark parts are sound, light parts are no-sound) of the White House Press Conference in which Bush introduced Harriet Miers, his nominee for the Supreme Court. At some point Bush stops talking and Miers starts, and it’s easy to see where: it’s the point where the speaker no longer puts dramatic. pauses. in between. words and phrases. when there’s. really no need.

I don’t suppose Bush talks like this in private, so why does he do it in public? Maybe he’s picked up a trick from Tony Blair’s verbless sentences, which Simon Hoggart calls “those phrases which, by omitting a doing word, appear to offer a promise without making a commitment.”

Just what you’ve always wanted - a list of the 1,000 words most commonly spoken by a bunch of London teenagers in 1993, from ‘you’ at number 1 through to ‘putting’ at #1,000 via ‘fucking’ at #148, ‘blah’ at #637 and ‘arsenal’ struggling against relegation at #998. I wonder what would have changed if they did it now? Would ‘video’, at #752 in 1993, still be hanging in there? I suppose it would be all ‘Internet this’, ‘Smackhead Pete that’, ‘ride me sideways’ and what have you.

conversate (v.) - to have a conversation.

As in “When I get back I’ll conversate with you”.

According to a deeply unscientific Google search this word is cropping up on UK discussion forums, often sparking a flame war over what constitutes a proper word. But I think it’s a good example of a good old back-formation, “the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a compound and removing the affixes”.

In standard speech “converse” is preferred to “conversate” as the verb derived from (or forming the root of) “conversation”. But this seems to be quite different from how other verbs are derived from “-ation” nouns:
illumination -> illuminate
elimination -> eliminate
extermination -> exterminate

So for people to derive “conversate” by analogy seems fine to me. It’ll be interesting to see how much “conversate” catches on as people continue to back-formate their way through the English language!

The BBC has a list of slang as spoken by the young people of today. It features the following entry:

book - cool. The first option given in predictive text when trying to type c-o-o-l.

What they don’t mention is that I invented this. Years ago! It’s been a really bad in-joke between myself and Thomas ever since then. For similar reasons, we call Conor ‘Booms’, but not to his face because he wouldn’t know what we were talking about.