Audio lingo

This blog normally focuses on text, sometimes on images and video. Audio is relatively under-represented, so what follows is a selection of podcasts and interviews I’ve listened to lately, in a language-and-linguistics vein.

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Some of you already know about Lexicon Valley, a new podcast on language from Slate, hosted by Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo. There have been six episodes so far, 20–40 minutes long and covering such subjects as syntax, taboo words, pseudo-rules and Scrabble. The show is entertaining, well-researched, and sometimes surprising.

Critical reaction from linguists and others has been very positive. Arnold Zwicky, who features in one show, is impressed, while Neal Whitman finds it interesting and linguistically sound. Dave Wilton thought the first episode fun and first rate, despite one minor criticism; Joe McVeigh (“excellent”) and Crikey (“treasure”) also praised it.

Lexicon Valley is on a temporary break but will soon be back with new episodes. Listeners are invited to comment and suggest ideas for future coverage.

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Since 2009, to mark National Grammar Day in the U.S., John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun has been writing humorous pulp serials which he calls Grammarnoir. This year they reappeared as podcasts: Grammarnoir 1 (2009) (text); Grammarnoir 2 – Pulp Diction (2010) (text); and Grammarnoir 3 – The Wages of Syntax (2011).

Grammarnoir 4 (2012) has yet to be broadcast, but the script is online in four parts: one, two, three, four. Each serial plays with the style and language of hard-boiled crime fiction, and is packed with drama, derring-do and editorial wit.

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Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of the three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang, gave a lively and fascinating interview with New Books Network about slang in all its rambunctious glory. A voluble and thoughtful speaker, he discusses lexicographical research, historical attitudes to slang and taboo, the Urban Dictionary, and more.

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In 2001, Judy Swallow on NPR’s The Connection hosted an interesting discussion about language between Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace – both articulate and passionate commentators on language. They are rather more prescriptivist in their outlook than I am, but don’t let that put you off. One listener calls in to criticise different than, insisting it should be different from. Her reasoning was quite strange:

If you compare two things, one’s gonna be up and one’s gonna be down, and then you use than, but if something is simply different, it’s different from the way it used to be.

(It’s possible she said gotta rather than gonna; I couldn’t tell.) Garner defended the usage, saying that different from would have been “very awkward and difficult” in the instances in question. My post on different than, from, and to, which received a fresh flurry of comments recently, shows that different than is acceptable.

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Finally, a shout-out to A Way with Words, a public radio favourite hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, which I’ve been enjoying for years and recommend highly to anyone unaware of it. Etymology, wordplay and dialectal variation are recurring themes.

If you know any podcasts or other audio material that you think I might enjoy, language-related or otherwise, feel free to suggest them.

Sparsed and cahooted

I encountered two unusual derivations in prominent places last week, and want to note them briefly.

First, Laura Slattery’s Irish Times report (5 April 2012) about investigative journalism by RTÉ, the state broadcaster, contains the following line:

New investigative television documentaries from the unit will be “sparsed throughout the year”, according to RTÉ director general Noel Curran.

The adjective sparse, meaning dispersed or (thinly) scattered, is common enough. It comes from Latin sparsus, past participle of spargere “scatter”. But sparsed is much rarer. The OED dates the participial adjective to the late-16th century and calls it “rare or obsolete”, and the verb sparse to around the same time: M16–E17.

COHA has no matches for sparsed or sparse (v.), which surprised me given their semantic transparency. But the form does appear online; there are other instances of “sparsed throughout”, for example.

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Nick McGivney on Twitter drew my attention to cahoot (v.), a creative shortening of the phrase be in cahoots, meaning be in partnership, often secretly. On the RTE Radio 1 show Drivetime (4 April 2012, at 1:42:50 approx.), Michael Fitzmaurice of the Irish Turf Cutters and Contractors Association said:

Out of the blue yesterday, both the EU and the Irish government cahooted together and decided, “Naw, we’re not goin’ to let ye cut yeer turf.”*

Cahooted here seems to have been used as a synonym for conspired or colluded, but perhaps with slightly different connotations in the speaker’s idiolect. Cahoot(s) (n.) first appeared as U.S. slang, possibly from French cahute (cabin, hut) or cohorte.

I found no evidence of the verb cahoot on COHA either, though again it appears informally online; Wiktionary has an example from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “our leaders were lying, tricking and cahooting with Halliburton”. But the usage is sparse.

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* yeer means your (plural) and was formed from ye by analogy with your. Both ye and yeer are common in colloquial Hiberno-English.

Slang ‘helmer’ and the fun of new words

I have a couple of new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. First, The fun of new words considers the pleasure we get from playing with words, letters and language, with special focus on neologisms:

Wordplay, in a word, is fun. It can break ice and break conventions, exercise the mind and stretch the imagination. Language, like physical play, is a medium through which we can indulge our creative instincts. Some people channel this into inventing entire languages; more commonly it manifests in our love of coining and using new words. . . .

Portmanteaus are an especially popular type of new word. Here, much of the groundwork has already been laid in the form of two or more existing words. There is a surreal kind of entertainment in seeing words joined improbably together, and when newspaper headlines join in the game, these blends spread all the faster. [more]

Next, Helmer at the helm sketches the development of helm from its origin as a nautical term to later senses that have nothing directly to do with steering a ship:

Inevitably, the word has developed metaphorical uses. At the helm means in charge, and you can be at the helm of a government, business, sports team, film production, and so on. Words such as steer, saddle, and pilot have broadened similarly, from navigation and transport to more figurative senses: a steering group could be in the saddle guiding the direction of a pilot project. . . .

I’m especially taken by a Hollywood slang usage:

Helmer in particular interests me. Most commonly it appears as a surname, but in US English it has become a synonym for film (or TV) director. I see this usage especially in film reviews and reporting, for example in the Hollywood Reporter (“the helmer’s 1978 horror classic”) and Variety (“the helmer switches to color”).

Helmer appears in Variety‘s slanguage dictionary, which contains what Julian Gough, in a comment, describes as “an internally consistent version of English that reads like the snappy, jazzy dialogue in a Howard Hawks script”.

You can read the rest here, or browse my archive of Macmillan articles.

Link love: language (40)

Below is a batch of language-related links (my 40th!) — some short, some long, mostly recent, a few from the archives.

Feel free to skip what’s familiar, ignore what doesn’t appeal, share what you like, or go off on a tangent in the comments.

Tarantula punctuation mark.

Does slang belong in school?

“Get your X on.”

Purposeless eye dialect.

Plagiary and plagiarism.

On the medieval origins of bookmarks.

Does your silent reading voice have an accent?

What countries are the most linguistically diverse?

Etymology-Man on tidal wave and tsunami.

A pronunciation pronouncement.

Is the subjunctive mood disappearing, and does it matter?

Cowslip: cow’s lip or cow slip?

The heartbreak of Random Capitalization Syndrome.

Erin McKean on arm party and other fashion vocabulary.

Inside the mind of a synaesthete.

How Charles Dickens helped shape the lexicon.

Why click consonants sound so different in English and African languages.

Zadie Smith on flexible accents.

Two-item sentence comprehension by a dog.

Paraprosdokian.

[previous links]

‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze

‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend.
‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers — white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink, plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out and her hair, dyed blonde, stood out, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a moulting hen about to attempt flight.

This passage appears in Edna O’Brien’s Irish Revel, from her short story collection The Love Object (1968). I like her list of curlers and the unsparing description of Eithne’s hair, but I’m quoting it here because it contains a curious abbreviation — def. for definitely — that I don’t remember seeing in written dialogue before.

Nowadays, definitely is often abbreviated as defo by teens and 20-/30-somethings. My younger sister has introduced me to several novel clippings she and her peers use, and which are an ongoing source of familial amusement and interest. Some of what follows I owe to her; others I came across elsewhere. Some are old, some new.

Besides defo there is hilar (hilarious), wev(s) (whatever), obvs and obvo (obviously), morto (mortifying), fabbo (fabulous), abso (absolutely), natch (naturally), /kaʒ/ (casual), dodge (dodgy), and tradge (tragic) — which through semantic inflation can be used to refer to pretty much anything mildly regrettable. The exaggeration is often deliberate, and lends the utterance an ironic or tongue-in-cheek quality.

LOLcat linguistics: I can has language play?

Oh hai. Few internet memes have enjoyed the cultural penetration and staying power of LOLcats (examples; home; Wikipedia). Whether they annoy you, amuse you, or please you to the point of purring, there’s no avoiding them online, and they’ve even infiltrated the physical world.

LOLspeak (the language of LOLcats) is too new to have attracted much scholarly research to date. But there is some, and it features in “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak”, a presentation by Jill Vaughan and Lauren Gawne at the Australian Linguistic Society’s annual conference in 2011.

Vaughan and Gawne identify LOLspeak as a form of language play that serves in-group cohesion: if you’re in on the joke, you’re part of the community. They show how a LOLcat simultaneously builds two identities: the ubiquitous cat and the internet-savvy human that gives it its idiosyncratic voice.

This slide, for example, quoting the LOLcat Bible, demonstrates LOLspeak’s eccentric form:

The presentation is at once funny and informative. After briefly explaining the origins and context of LOLspeak, it briskly addresses its phonetics, orthography, lexicon, syntax, and morphology. We see how the surreal and deliberately mangled “cat-world discourses” reveal a playful sophistication and a “high level of metalinguistic awareness”.

See enough LOLcats and you’ll notice themes and sub-memes recur and become recursive. It’s creative but far from anarchic: linguistic norms have emerged but further subversion is always possible, even relished. Apparently some people have argued that LOLspeak is a creole, but “that’s just cos they want to use the phrase kitty pidgin”…

Here’s the video:

[via Superlinguo]

Neologisms, jargon, pragmatics and cant

Macmillan Dictionary Blog recently asked guest writers to choose their favourite “online English” word. I couldn’t pick a favourite, so I cheated and wrote about hashtags.

What struck me most, though, was that three contributors chose the word blog. In a follow-up post, “A blob from a bog”, I write that its multiple selection

surprised and gladdened me, because blog is a word whose sight and sound I’ve always liked but have seen subjected to severe scorn and criticism for as long as it’s been around. . . .

Blog resembles blob and bog in particular, and both of these signify wet, messy, unruly things. I like both words, but I can see how some people wouldn’t. Bog, as well as being slang for toilet (hence the pun in blogroll), has negative connotations such as in the pejorative Irish slang bogman or bog man, meaning “unsophisticated person from the countryside”. [more]

Dawn McIlvain Stahl, on the Copyediting.com blog, was also following the discussion of online words. She never liked blog but wasn’t sure why, so she set about finding “firm ground in the blog bog”.

My next post for Macmillan, “A pragmatic note”, is about the subfield of linguistics known as pragmatics, which I describe as the study of language meaning and use in context: interpersonal, social, and cultural.

Pragmatics is a very broad field with fuzzy boundaries, so my post isn’t an attempt at summary so much as a few notes on its main elements, along with expert quotes and links to further reading:

Pragmatics pays heed to social conventions and cultural norms – such as those of politeness, formality, and familiarity – and also to prosody, intonation, facial expressions, and gestures, all of which can vary considerably from one context to the next. . . .

In any conversation, we are likely to exchange both sentence-level information and more subtle, implicit information that must be inferred from the situation and from our experience of a particular language and culture – invisible meaning, as it is sometimes described. The ability to do this is called pragmatic competence. [more]

Paul-Charles Chocarne-Moreau – Opportunity makes the thief (1896)

Macmillan Dictionary’s theme for October was subcultural English, and under this category falls “Pinch a phrase from thieves’ cant”.

Here I look at the old jargon of the underworld, the secret lingo of street criminals and people on the margins of society: phrases like marriage-music (“children’s cries”), arsworm (“a little diminutive fellow”), and priggers of the cacklers (“poultry-stealers”):

Cant has been more spoken than written, and its precise origins are, unsurprisingly, shrouded in uncertainty. But it was once a vibrant vocabulary that served not only to identify someone as part of the subculture but to prevent those outside it from understanding the speaker.

Historically, this crooked corner of English met with considerable lexicographic interest. Early dialectologists seeking fresh slang for their collections would pay late-night visits to disreputable areas, partly out of linguistic interest but also as a service to society. . . . The idea was that by becoming acquainted with thieves’ and scoundrels’ “mysterious Phrases” we might more easily detect and deter their villainous activity. [more]

The above post links to several old dictionaries of cant and criminal slang that are available online. They make marvellous browsing material.

Finally, in “Caught in a webinar”, I briefly examine the newish portmanteau coinage webinar, asking whether it’s a useful and perfectly acceptable term or a faddish and objectionable barbarism. Opinion is strongly divided.

[P]eople complain that webinar . . . “should be banished on pain of death” . . . but if it is found useful enough for long enough, it will survive no matter how malformed some people consider it.

New words, especially voguish portmanteaus, tend to push people’s buttons, often for reasons that are difficult to discern – a gut reaction that just sticks. If you have reason to use webinar but you really can’t stomach it, you can always take advantage of the richness of synonymy in English by falling back on web seminar, online seminar, web conference, and so on. It’s worth the extra syllables if it keeps your blood pressure down. [more]

I mentioned that October was Macmillan Dictionary’s month of subcultural English. You can explore other monthly themes here, and you can browse my archive of articles on language and words here.

Comments are welcome; and thank you, as always, for reading.

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