Most animals bark a little

In The Hidden Life of Dogs, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas reports what she has learned about dog behaviour and psychology from watching different breeds in diverse environments and social situations. I like the observations she makes about the communicative aspects of barking and sniffing:

[O]nly the pugs took much interest in the human life around them, so only the pugs barked. Of course, most animals bark a little – which is to say that if surprised and puzzled simultaneously, most animals, including human beings, make a short, sharp call; the call is “Huh?” in our species. Highly domesticated dogs make an art of their puzzlement and bark insistently, alerting others to unexplained events. But not the huskies, who didn’t bark at human-generated sounds or happenings any more than they barked at birds in the sky, and surely for the same reason: the doings of the birds and the people lacked significance for them.

Is it true that most animals make such a sound? It depends on what’s meant by animals, I suppose: mammals or non-aquatic vertebrates may be closer to what was meant, but I still don’t know how true it is.

In any case, by the author’s reckoning I myself have, on occasion, barked in puzzled surprise, and maybe you have too. I don’t know if there’s another verb for when people make this sound. Huh is a good phonic approximation but it doesn’t lend itself naturally to inflection. Yelping is usually high-pitched and is associated more with pain. I’m open to suggestions of existing words or invented ones.

Marshall Thomas continues:

In contrast, the dogs took an unlimited interest in each other. When a dog returned after a brief absence, the others would quietly surround him and investigate him for scent – the scents of his own body, which would show his state of mind and probably a great deal more as well, and the scents of the place he had been, which he carried on his fur. They’d smell his lips and his mantle, his penis, his legs and his feet. Seldom, if ever, would they investigate his anus or anal glands, evidently because the information therefrom has to do with a dog’s persona but not with his travels. The dogs would investigate me too, particularly if I had been away a long time. They paid special attention to my legs from the knees down, as if I had been wading through odors.

“Wading through odours” is a lovely, memorable description, evoking the dog’s sensorial surroundings with appropriate emphasis on smell. What a rush of stimuli it must be for a dog to go exploring outside, where – save a minuscule stationary layer above the ground – the air is more subject to turbulence and so constitutes a fluctuating “garden of exotic flora and fauna”, to use a phrase from Lyall Watson’s book Jacobson’s Organ.

Humans’ sense of smell is puny by comparison, and our visual sense may have crowded the field in recent history, but our noses are still capable of delivering intense and subtle effect, sometimes transporting us instantly to another time and place. Most of us need hardly a moment’s thought to list many smells that give us particular pleasure; other smells might even make us bark.

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Related items: I’ve written before about word recognition in dogs and the claims made for their command of human language. On Tumblr I posted another passage from Marshall Thomas’s very enjoyable book, which includes the marvellous phrase cynomorphic substitute; you can read chapter one of Watson’s book on smell and pheromones online; and finally, here’s a fun drawing by Lili Chin of a Boston terrier’s body language.

Jumbling, tumbling

Between this blog and other active online haunts, I’ve been spreading my internet self a bit thin. But I’m a glutton for punishment, so I’ve started a Tumblr blog, provisionally titled Books & bits asthore.* So far it’s an erratic series of book excerpts, poems, and images from films.

Sentence first has been nominated in Macmillan Dictionary’s inaugural Love English Awards. You can vote for it, or for another language blog, on this page until 31 January. My expectations are non-existent, but I’m honoured to be in such great company, and I found a few new websites to explore. (Disclosure: I write for Macmillan Dictionary Blog.)

It’s a mild and sunny December day in the west of Ireland — Pseudocember, I’ve been calling it — and this is likely to be my last post before 2012. Thank you for your visits, comments, and innumerable kindnesses all year, and have a happy and peaceful Christmas.

moss on a wall in county Galway this morning

* I wrote about the Irish English word asthore here.

Dialects and dimpsy doddermen

Time for a recap of what I’ve been writing for Macmillan Dictionary Blog over the last few weeks. The theme for July was small talk, so a couple of my posts are on this subject. In “Small talk is no small matter” I make some general remarks about chit chat and its uses:

[S]mall talk serves a useful phatic function. It helps us tune in to other people’s accents and dialects, and to get used to their presence and the ways they express themselves. Before moving on to more contentious topics, such as finance or politics, we will have spent time sharing images and idioms and agreeing light-heartedly about various uncontroversial matters.

If the context is business, talking about travel and accommodation is apt to be both interesting and potentially useful to the parties involved. We can share tips, learn about one another’s tastes and habits, and bond over common frustrations and experiences. [more]

“A guddle through the dialectal wordbank” offers a quick rummage, or guddle, through some of the vocabulary I encountered in a project by the British Library that aims to collect regional English words. I also introduce deargadaol /,dʒærəgə’ði:l/, an Irish word that crossed over into my idiolect when I was a child. If you were wondering about the dimpsy doddermen in the post title, wonder no more:

I like dodderman for snail (Norfolk / Suffolk), dimpsy for twilight or just turning dark (Somerset), nesh, meaning weak, delicate, or susceptible to the cold (northern England), and guddle, meaning rummage about (Northumberland and parts of Scotland).

Many dialectal words are given to plants and animals, and they often have colourful histories. Bishybarnabee, a Norfolk word for a ladybird, might be a reference to the 16th-century bishop Edmond Bonner, aka “Bloody Bonner”, because the insect’s red and black colours were associated with the bishop’s clothes – or with his notorious deeds. [more]

Back to small talk, with an Irish flavour: in “Top of the morning to yourself” I examine a well-known Irish greeting that no one in Ireland seems to use anymore except in jest or irony. I also write briefly about Irish people’s fondness for reflexive pronouns:

“Top of the morning to you” would, like begorra(h) (a minced form of by God), be considered an Oirishism or a Paddyism, something popularly associated with stereotypes of Irishness but which is seldom or never used by Irish people themselves. As a recognisable caricature it has a certain commercial value, so it occasionally appears in marketing campaigns as a shorthand for Irishness and whatever else that’s intended to convey.

I mentioned the traditional response, “And the rest of the day to you”, but the last word would be just as likely to take the form yourself. Reflexive pronouns are very common in Irish English, often used for slight emphasis, e.g., “Good man/woman yourself”, “Ah, ‘tis yourself!” [more]

“Dialectal drift” was a brief response to a lively recent debate over Americanisms, which I hope to address at greater length in a future blog post. Copyediting newsletter was kind enough to call it “the voice of reason”, but as I said to someone elsewhere, these things are relative; I read a lot of unreason on the topic. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

Given that languages and dialects undergo constant change, and blend and blur into one another, the purist point of view seems misguided to me. . . . Catchphrases and idioms (often AmE) spread quickly, and grievances over new coinages and linguistic conventions are often knee-jerk objections that develop over time into pet hates. But some of these neologisms eventually become standard, widely used, and even loved. . . .

The history of English is a history of many languages and dialects mixing with one another. It’s what they do. I think linguistic diversity can and should be enjoyed and embraced. Instead of getting wound up about phrases we dislike, we can celebrate not only the great variation that exists but also the fact that so much mutual comprehensibility remains. [more]

Finally, there’s “Are you open to open kimonos?”, a short account of the phrase open kimono. A rather strange but memorable metaphor, it has recently become popular in business jargon:

Given the widespread taboo over exposed genitals and even underwear, open kimono – often seen in the verb phrase open the kimono – is a vividly effective metaphor for conveying transparency and frankness.

It’s semantically similar to an open book, which refers to people, but open kimono refers to a way of dealing with information, especially sensitive information like strategic plans or financial data. It is consistent with how Diane Nicholls describes honesty in her article about its metaphors: “honesty is bare and open”, something I discuss further in this post. [more]

You’ll find all my articles for Macmillan archived here, and my introductions to them are here. Comments in either location are welcome; I’m particularly interested in people’s favourite regional words and their feelings about small talk.

Do dogs get a ruff deal, linguistically speaking?

Galway had its first Dog Expo this summer. I don’t have a dog, but I went with a friend who does. It was all fine fun until they started putting hats and boots on the dogs and catwalking them around the stage to bad dance music. Somewhat less silly was a tricks competition in which close communication between humans and dogs led variously to modest success, rewards, confusion, and disappointment.

Contrived acts aside, the communicative bond between the two species has long fascinated humans. I read Man Meets Dog (1950) by Konrad Lorenz lately and thought the following passage worth posting:

It is a fallacy that dogs only understand the tone of a word and are deaf to the articulation. The well-known animal psychologist, [Viktor] Sarris, proved this indisputably with three Alsatians, called Harris, Aris and Paris. On command from their master, ‘Harris (Aris, Paris), Go to your basket’, the dog addressed and that one only would get up unfailingly and walk sadly but obediently to his bed. The order was carried out just as faithfully when it was issued from the next room whence an accompanying involuntary signal was out of the question.

It sometimes seems to me that the word recognition of a clever dog which is firmly attached to its master extends even to whole sentences. The words, ‘I must go now’ would bring Tito and Stasi [an Alsatian and an Alsatian/Chow crossbreed, respectively] to their feet at once even when I exercised great self-control and spoke without special accentuation; on the other hand, none of these words, spoken in a different connection, elicited any response from them.

Lorenz describes a report from Annie Eisenmenger, who co-illustrated the book, about her Schnauzer, Affi. Supposedly, Affi recognised the words Katzi, Spatzi, Eichkatzi (diminutives of kitten, sparrow, squirrel) and Nazi, which was the name of Eisenmenger’s pet hedgehog and had “no political meaning in those days”.

Imagine: Nazi the hedgehog. Anyway, Affi reacted differently to these words, for example running from tree to tree at the sound of Eichkatzi; and, upon hearing Nazi, rushing to a rubbish heap where a hedgehog lived.

Lorenz writes that Affi “knew the names of at least nine people, and would run across the room to them if their names were spoken. She never made a mistake.” This is a second-hand anecdote, but Lorenz says he is confident of its truthfulness. Stressing the crucial difference between the behaviour of an animal in the lab and that of one who is free to accompany its human companion, Lorenz adds:

With the dog, one is seldom given the chance of achieving high feats of word recognition in the laboratory, since the necessary interest is lacking . . . . Every dog-owner is familiar with a certain behaviour in dogs which can never be reproduced under laboratory conditions. The owner says, without special intonation and avoiding mention of the dog’s name, ‘I don’t know whether I’ll take him or not.’ At once the dog is on the spot, wagging his tail and dancing with excitement, for he already senses a walk. Had his master said, ‘I suppose I must take him out now,’ the dog would have got up resignedly without special interest. Should his master say, ‘I don’t think I’ll take him, after all,’ the expectantly pricked ears will drop sadly, though the dog’s eyes will remain hopefully fixed on his master.

This subtlety of understanding is a far cry from the Far Side cartoon in which Gary Larson pokes fun at the tendency some people exhibit to harangue their dogs at complicated length:

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Many animals-and-human-language stories are of the YouTube Wunderhund variety: crude phonetic imitation. Others emphasise vocabulary. Some dogs can recognise hundreds of words, but to claim that this means a dog is as intelligent or linguistically advanced as a two-year-old human is pretty silly and meaningless, I think, and unfair to both dogs and people. It implies a facile interpretation of human and animal intelligence, an impoverished misinterpretation of language, and, for good measure, a hopeless anthropocentrism.

The comparison is misleading because it isolates one modest parameter — vocabulary, or perhaps just recognition of aural stimuli — and omits many other relevant ones. Syntax, for example, is a different matter altogether. I really don’t think dogs do grammar; kids begin to employ it from a very early age.

Dogs are intelligent animals and very sensitive to people’s cues, but the degree to which they understand our utterances is easily overstated and difficult to settle. A discussion at the Straight Dope Message Board shows how divided common opinion is. (The chat is also worth browsing for some of the anecdotes, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Do you own or know a dog, and if so how highly would you rate its inter-species communication skills?

Edit: Arnold Zwicky has posted a Wondermark cartoon on the subject, followed by a short discussion, at his language blog.

Walked and kept walking

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Walked and kept walking
till I saw turnstones
feeding in soft
sunlight falling
on an empty shore.
So I waited there.

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[This was originally a tweet in the heel of winter; it wasn't meant to become a lazy poem. To make it up to you, there are more birds here.]

Winter colours

Ireland has had record low temperatures this winter. My corner, the mid-west, has been spared the worst, but we got our share of snow, ice, freezing fog, and biting Arctic winds. All the more reason for long rambling walks…

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White snow-creature

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Blue snow with tractor tracks

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Green field disappearing

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Robin redbreast

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Orange sky over Galway Bay, with Brent Geese

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If you’re in the mood for more, here are some from last winter, and here’s the photo archive.

Curiosities of biological nomenclature

Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature is a wonderful website you might not have come across. Its creator, Mark Isaak, introduces it as follows:

Scientific names of organisms are not usually known for their entertainment value. They are indispensable for clarity in communication, but most people skip over them with barely a glance. Here I collect those names that are worth a second look.

And what a collection it is. Virtually every page offers an eye-opening, smile-inducing specimen – often several of them – with succinct and edifying commentary. You’ll find funny facts, strange stories, verbal delights and historical oddities. The site is divided into sections such as Etymology, Puns, and Wordplay, and its many sub-pages amount to a feast of fine browsing material, which is regularly updated.

An example of its taxonomic lore: I learned that Piseinotecus divae, a nudibranch,* gained its peculiar name after an incident in which one of its discoverers “stepped on [a] dog on the way to the kitchen in the middle of the night”. Apparently, Piseinotecus means “I stepped on Teco”, Teco being the name of a dog that belonged either to a diva or to Professor Diva Corrêa.

Chimera fans will appreciate Boselaphus tragocamelus (an antelope, pictured below) whose Latin name translates as “ox-deer goat-camel”; Chaetopterus pugaporcinus (a marine worm) is a “Chaetopterid worm that looks like the rump of a pig” (judge for yourself); while Vampyroteuthis infernalis is, more B-movie-ishly, the “Vampire squid from Hell”. Pun names include Apopyllus now (a spider), Daphoenus demilo (an extinct bear dog), Heerz lukenatcha (a braconid), Pieza deresistans (a fly), and Verae peculya (another braconid).

Offensive names are officially prohibited, but insults and imprecations slip through, sometimes cryptically. Other names are inadvertently indecent. There’s the beetle Foadia (its offence is acronymic), Fukuia (a snail), and Silybum (milk thistle). They get much ruder. Under “Valid Words in Other Contexts” we encounter an insect named Alienates, a beetle named Euphoria, a sea urchin named Disaster, a spinosaur named Irritator, a snail named Provocator, and an arachnid named Oops.

Among the Long and Short Names in the Wordplay section, I met Polichinellobizarrocomicburlescomagicaraneus for the first time; unfortunately, its identity remains a mystery. One page is dedicated to Drosophila melanogaster’s noteworthy gene names, which include currant bun, faint sausage, karst, prospero, skittles, snafu and splat. There are anagrams and tautonyms, rhymes and reversals, onomatopoeia and oxymorons (e.g., Anoura caudifera, the tailed tailless bat).

Names of living things are often redundant and are subject to ongoing revision. One reason for their proliferation is that some namers are “splitters” rather than “lumpers”. All the more reason to be grateful for a website that records and aggregates some of the most interesting and entertaining names in biology.

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* Nudibranchs are sea slugs from paradise.