We don’t often think of librarians as powerful people, but by choosing what to preserve, librarians can stitch history from a grab bag of remnants. Especially if those librarians work at the Library of Congress and they’ve been charged with carrying out the dictates of the National Recording Preservation Act.

Just what is the National Recording Preservation Act? Well, our old friend Alan Kennedy, former music industry insider and musical trivia nonpareil, is here to tell us.

The National Recording Registry

by Alan Kennedy

My son Devon, 16, has recently gotten interested in the music of the 1960′s. He’s spent the last few months immersing himself in the music of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, among others. I love this music too, so I enjoy talking about it with him and giving him my two cents. While looking around the web recently to learn more about the Grateful Dead album “American Beauty”, Devon found a mention on a website that the song “Truckin’” was designated a national treasure by the Library of Congress. He asked me if I had heard about that. I hadn’t, but I was curious to know more about these designations – like who was making them, what songs were being designated as such, and what the criteria were.

It turns out that our Library of Congress maintains an archive which preserves audio recordings considered important for future generations – not surprising – but which includes recent music recordings. The “National Recording Preservation Act of 2000″ was established to “develop a national program to guard America’s sound recording heritage”. As part of this act, the National Recording Registry and a National Recording Preservation Board were formed. The registry’s job is to maintain and preserve sound recordings which are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Beginning in 2002, this board began selecting nominated recordings each year to be preserved. The recordings must be at least ten years old.

A lot of what they designate is stuff you’d expect – early Thomas Edison recordings, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, etc. There are also comedy routines and folk, jazz, country, gospel, Broadway cast album, and classical music recordings. But fans of rock and pop music like me may be interested to know that songs and albums from the rock ‘n roll era (post-1955) make it in there too. Here is a list of rock, pop, and R&B music recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” – so far:

I’m surprised to see non-American artists on there like the British Invasion groups and Joni Mitchell, but I guess their influence on U.S. culture was deemed significant enough to justify their inclusion. Oddly, no Grateful Dead song is actually on the list!

The full list so far can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recording_Registry

“Language” has a fancy Flash-powered web-as-magazine interface, complete with flippy paper sounds. I can’t link you deep into it (which I suppose is how they want it), so you’ll just have to open it up and turn to page 30. Take a look here: Alan Kennedy’s “Colorful Language” in Language magazine.

Also, apropos of the orange discussion and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I heard someone today describe the unrest in Egypt as a “color revolution.” The term was new to me, but not to Wikipedia. According to the article, it describes places where “massive street protests followed disputed elections or request of fair elections and led to the resignation or overthrow of leaders considered by their opponents to be authoritarian.” Just how colorful will this map get before the dust settles?

It’s a professional hazard. Just as Mark Twain could never look at the Mississippi the same way once he became a riverboat captain, Simonson can’t look at the tombstone in a Western without thinking How did Helvetica (1957) and Eurostile (1962) end up on a tombstone in the year 1885?

When it comes to language, regular readers of the Star Chamber will know that frequent contributor Alan Kennedy is the local expert. This week he has a few thoughts to share about actors and accents.

GIMME SOME CAW-FEE! I MEAN COR-FEE….KOE-FEE ?

by Alan Kennedy

Many people whose opinions on film and TV I respect, and generally agree with, have recommended that I check out the series “The Wire”. This was an HBO police drama set in Baltimore which is now available on DVD. Indeed, the series has been acclaimed as one of the best in recent history – and for some, one of the best ever. So, I got the first “Season One” DVD and started watching with great anticipation. And a problem soon emerged. One of the principal characters on this hyper-realistic show, “Jimmy McNulty”, spoke with an accent that could best be described as an accent no one speaks with in real life. And, that, for me, was a problem too distracting to overlook.

I’ve heard of bird watchers who get annoyed if the chirping of a Canadian bird is heard in a film set in Florida, and musicians who fume when a violin is held incorrectly by an actor. My lawyer wife scoffs at legal dramas which depict events, decisions, and dialogue that would never occur in the real legal world (but she can keep watching). In my case, as a language teacher and accent modification coach, some bad accents are literally too distracting to sit through.

My subsequent check on the web revealed that actor Dominic West, who played the McNulty character, is from Yorkshire, in England. I could have foreseen there would be problems when I read in his bio that, to get the part, as he remembers it, “I just did my best DeNiro impression”. This was his preparation to play a Baltimore cop. In another interview, he revealed that he used a “general east coast American accent”. Really? Is that so. So – who were you trying to sound like? Robert DeNiro’s outer-boroughs New Yorker? A John Waters–style working class Baltimorian? A Harvard professor? Well – guess what it ends up sounding like…a guy from Sheffield England, imitating DeNiro in some scenes, remembering what his accent coach told him about Baltimore-speak in others (e.g. “hours” as [æriz]), and generally adding and dropping the post-vocalic [r] sound willy-nilly. I know, I know, some may say “Get over it! He’s a good actor, it’s a good show, accents are hard!” Well, I’ll cop to it. It’s clearly my problem, not Dominic West’s. In my defense, someone took the trouble to point out his dialectal inconsistency on a website, and posted an representative video sample here:

(warning: strong language)

McNulty’s English accent rears its ugly head

We all know that some British TV actors are very good – almost deceptively so, once you learn that they’re British – at convincing American accents. Hugh Laurie (“House”) and Ed Westwick (“Gossip Girl”) are often cited as current examples. In films, I have seen performances by such actors as Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman where the American accent is indistinguishable (at least its overall effect) from that of American co-actors.

And what is it about Australians that they can so often do convincing American accents? This phenomenon includes a long list which, to my mind, includes Kate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths (“Six Feet Under” & “Brother & Sisters”), Julian McMahon (“Nip/Tuck”), and, of course, the late Heath Ledger. I have heard different explanations for this, ranging from an alleged closeness of Australian English phonology to that of American English (I don’t buy that) to the idea that an Australian actor can’t have a successful career, or come to Hollywood, unless he/she has already demonstrated a convincing American accent in the first place.

APTITUDE FOR ORAL MIMICRY

Linguists and language teachers have long noticed that ability to mimic an accent (or the sounds of a foreign language) is not necessarily a function of “intelligence”. In fact, there is a school of thought out there, supported by research, that some people have a higher “Aptitude for Oral Mimicry” (AOM) than others, and it is quite independent from intelligence or other abilities, including acting talent. I think most of us believe this – it explains the valedictorian who gets an “A” in French but has a terrible accent. It explains the aforementioned Robert DeNiro, who doesn’t seem to be able to – or want to – act in a different accent. We don’t hold that against him, and indeed he’s widely considered one of our country’s best. Nevertheless, we notice those actors who do have this skill, and enjoy it. Many Brits have told me that Gwyneth Paltrow’s British accent is very good (and she keeps getting hired to do it, so the higher-ups must agree). Actors like Meryl Streep and Edward Norton – two of the best at this, in my opinion – can be relied on to perform believably in any sort of accent. 

My curiosity on this topic prompted a tour of the web, just to see what comments people were making – in print, on blogs, wherever – about actors who were especially good or especially bad in performing with an accent not their own. First off I will say that the names Sean Connery, Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves come up the most often, making this perhaps our Top 3 “Hall of Shame”. Speaking of Sean (common wisdom is “he sounds Scottish in everything”), quite a few pundits out there in the blogosphere have mentioned the 1986 fantasy film “Highlander” as a bad accent connoisseur’s dream. Here we have lead actor Christopher Lambert, a French speaker, trying to speak English with a Scottish accent, and sidekick Sean Connery trying to speak English with a Spanish accent!

NICE TRY, YANK!

In the “Americans trying do British unsuccessfully” category, these particular performances come up a lot: Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”; Don Cheadle in the “Ocean’s 11” films; Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in “Star Wars” (but only for the first part of the first film, strangely); and – the clear winner –

Dick Van Dyke’s caricature of a Cockney accent in “Mary Poppins”. This is perhaps Hollywood’s most iconic bad accent. NPR Film Critic Beth Accomando maintains that the term “Dick Van Dyke accent” is actually used in England to describe failed attempts by Americans to sound British.

In the “Americans trying for other foreign accents” sphere, these are often mentioned: Brad Pitt trying to do Irish in “The Devil’s Own” and Austrian German in “Seven Years in Tibet”; John Malkovich trying for Russian in “Rounders”; Nicholas Cage going for Italian in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”; Rosanna Arquette going for Quebec French in “The Whole 9 Yards”; and Halle Barry going for Swahili (and then abandoning it later ) in “X Men”. I have to admit, I have not actually seen any of these films, but the performances keep coming up on the web as victims of mockery, so perhaps it’s just as well. 

As far as American actors trying to do a regional American accent not their own, a different list of performances predominates. In the category of “going for Southern”, Kevin Costner in “JFK”, Nicolas Cage in “Con Air”, and Meg Ryan in “Courage Under Fire” are often mentioned. People seem divided about Kevin Spacey in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”: some feel his bad accent caused the film to flop; others feel he did O.K. I have noticed that the Boston accent seems particularly hard to nail for many actors, even great ones. No one seems to think that Jack Nicholson’s Boston accent in “The Departed” was consistent or realistic (but many would also argue that he was great anyway). I would add that Alec Bladwin and Leonardo DiCaprio had accent trouble in the same movie, and honestly, after one hour of people talking about whose “faw-thah was a good kaw-up” and whose “faw-thah was a bad kaw-up” I had to turn it off. Yes, I “walked out of “ (TIVO-version) this Oscar-winning Best Picture because of the accents. A recent appearance by Julianne Moore on TV’s “30 Rock” was, to me, a classic example of a very good actor doing a very unconvincing Boston accent. Ditto Laura Linney in “Mystic River”.

YOU CAN’T FOOL ME, FURRINER!

Aside from Dominic West, I have found myself distracted by Joely Richardson (British) on “Nip/Tuck”, whose British vowels and [r]-lessness creep in to her speech every once in a while. I have not seen either New Zealander Anna Paquin in “True Blood” (trying for “Nawlins”) or Scottish actor Ewan McGregor(trying for American Southern) in the film “Big Fish” – but many comments on the web indicate that these performances have grated on the nerves of viewers. I can say that Jude Law’s performance in “Cold Mountain”, playing a Confederate soldier, was distractingly unconvincing (the patriot in me wonders which American actor lost a job opportunity for that hire to happen). According to one humorous blogger, Law’s southern accent was so jarring that after every line she half-expected the character to add “…by order of the his majesty, the KING!”.

IT’S OFFICIAL

I did find two published lists of specific bad movie accents from actual film critics, which I’ll share here:

Top-10 worst according to Empire (UK film magazine) in 2003: 

1. Sean Connery “The Untouchables” (Scottish English trying for Irish English)
2. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
3. Brad Pitt “Seven Year in Tibet” 
4. Charlton Heston “A Touch of Evil” (trying for a Mexican Spanish accent) 
5. Heather Graham “From Hell” (American doing Cockney)
6. Keanu Reeves “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (trying for British)
7. Julia Roberts “Mary Reilly” (trying for Irish)
8. Laurence Olivier “The Jazz Singer” – 1980 remake (Brit trying for New York Jewish)
9. Pete Postlethwaite “The Usual Suspects” (Brit trying for Pakistani accent) 
10. Meryl Streep “Out of Africa” (trying for a Danish accent)

Top-10 worst according to Beth Accomando (NPR critic & President of San Diego Film Critics Society): 
1. Mickey Rooney “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (trying for a Japanese accent)
2. Keanu Reeves “Little Buddha”/”Dangerous Liaisons”/”Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Beth Accomando explicitly named him “the actor who most consistently fails at accents”) 
3. Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” 
4. Demi Moore “Flawless” (trying for British)
5. Dennis Quaid “The Big Easy” (trying for New Orleans)
6. Hilary Swank “The Black Dahlia” (going for what’s described as a “strangely clipped, aristocratic accent which is a complete distraction”).
7. John Wayne “The Conqueror” (trying for some kind of Asian accent playing Mongolian Genghis Kahn) 
8. Dick Van Dyke “Mary Poppins” 
9. Humphrey Bogart “Dark Victory” (trying for Irish)
10. Arnold Schwarzenegger “Raw Deal”(Beth feels that in this early Ah-nold vehicle he seemed to be trying in vain to sound like a native speaker of American English, a tactic he later [wisely] abandoned). 

- I personally cannot agree that Meryl Streep belongs on the top list (or any such list)… I also think that if you fault Schwarzenegger for unsuccessfully trying to tone down his accented English, then you have to add in the likes of Penelope Cruz, Gerard Depardieu, Jackie Chan, Antonio Banderas, and a whole slew of non-native English speakers for whom the gap between “how their English sounds” and “how they want it to sound” is difficult to assess or prove.

So – what do you think? I find that people who like movies and TV usually have an opinion on this.

Please weigh in!

Now sit back and enjoy as our very own Star Chamber Language Maven (quick: maven… what language is that from?) Alan Kennedy regales you with still more language yarns, this time on borrowed words in English.

Can I Borrow a Cup of Déjà Vu?

by Alan Kennedy

Linguists use the term “borrowed” to refer to words that come into one language from a second, and get used frequently enough that they become like a first language word. As an example – we don’t really feel like we are speaking Swahili when we say we went on a safari (even though that is a word borrowed from Swahili; it means “journey”). You can often tell that a word has been borrowed from another language because the spelling seems non-English (e.g. tsunami, gesundheit, déjà vu) – but sometimes the non-English origin is not as evident.

When I first mentioned the linguistic notion of “borrowed words” to my wife Karen, she pointed out that it’s kind of a stupid term, because the language users are not planning to give the word back, nor have the originators been left without the word. [Queen Elizabeth to the President of Tanzania: "thanks awfully for letting us use the word safari. It has been ever so useful, but we’re quite done with it now, you may have it back".]

Similarly, another term for this phenomenon, “loan words” is inaccurate. [We like saying karaoke, and we refuse to give it back to Japan, goddammit! Take baseball in exchange. You’re welcome.]

Nevertheless, linguists use the term “borrowed word” or “loan word” this way, and it is a useful concept, despite the misnomer.

The term borrowing is not usually applied to words with roots from other languages (like Latin and Greek). It refers more to words that not only didn’t come from Old English (a Germanic family language) but which have been taken, whole hog, from some other language and eventually find their way into English dictionaries. Sometimes the words are borrowed just as they are, and sometimes they are modified in spelling or pronunciation to make them more “English-like”. Let’s take cocktails as an example. Vodka comes to us directly from Russian, водка, pronounced quite similarly in that language, and letter-for-letter transliterated into English letters. Whisky, on the other hand, comes from the Gaelic word uisge which means “water” and is pronounced “oosh-kyuh”. (I will make no jokes here about how Scots drink/consider/treat whisky like water, in deference to my hard-working immigrant ancestors).

The language from which English has borrowed the most, by far, is French. A quick glance at a selection of fairly common words which we all know, and which are in the dictionary, makes the case:

… and this is just a partial list. Note that in almost every case, we English speakers are not pronouncing these words using usual English pronunciation rules. No one rhymes “buffet” or “chalet” with “get” by mistake (or “Chevrolet” for that matter); no one rhymes “corsage” or “sabotage” with “luggage”. We know these French rules so well, that they have become almost like alternative English pronunciation rules. Why do we English speakers borrow so much from French? Well, the Norman Conquest of England has a lot to do with it. And besides that, look at a map – France is England’s close neighbor. In that situation, linguistic borrowing frequently results.

Like all languages, English has borrowed many food words. The reason is perhaps self-evident. Which is easier to say: “I like sliced raw fish placed atop portions of sticky vinegared rice” or “I like sushi”? If people in some foreign locale have created an awesome dish with many ingredients or a specific recipe, it’s convenient to just take their word. Like any other words, some food words are borrowed fully (spaghetti, croissant, baklava) and some are modified a bit as they come into English (pretzel comes from the German bretzl; saffron from the Arabic زعفران “za’faran“). Because food words are so culturally rooted, English speakers have a sense that that they are using borrowed words when they say things like shish kebab (Turkish), smorgasbord (Swedish) or dim sum (Cantonese).

For non-food words, English speakers (according to my informal poll) tend to be less clear about where a loan word has come from. I’m not talking about obvious ones like karaoke or boomerang or aloha. I’m thinking more about words like cobra (Portuguese), robot (Czech), and boondocks (Tagalog). Even if you know a word is a loan word, you may not be able to guess which language. Can you guess where we get the words maven, chimpanzee, or yacht? Give yourself a minute.

O.K., the answers are Yiddish, Bantu (Southern Africa), and Dutch. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know. This stuff is really not considered common knowledge.

Native American Indian languages have contributed many words – not just in place names, but in words that seeped into American English and then became part of English at large. Aside from the culturally rooted terms like moccasin, teepee and tomahawk that we all tend to know, there are many words for animals (e.g. chipmunk, moose, coyote, possum, raccoon, jaguar, cougar) and foods (e.g. pecan, squash, persimmon, avocado) that English speakers did not likely know about until they came to the Americas. Well-known concept words from native American languages include totem (Ojibwa), kayak (Inuit) and pow-wow (Narragansett).

Here’s a little story using borrowed words. Take minute to read it and, if you want, underline words that you think probably came into English directly from another language.

I’m going on vacation next month, and this time I’m really gung-ho to head northward to satisfy my wanderlust. I have visions of cruises in and out of icy fjords, maybe stopping to sled across the tundra. I’m staying in an ice hotel – which even has an indoor health center; I can’t imagine a sauna in an igloo! The last trip I took was a fiasco, really a catastrophe. We went to Bali, thinking it would be a relaxing, angst-free time. The brochure for our resort showed guests in turquoise silk pajamas, eating caviar, shopping in colorful outdoor bazaars and feeding orangutans and giraffes. The reality was a run-down place which bordered a kind of jungle canyon. We had a feeling there was something less than kosher about the place as soon as we drove up. For one thing, it was covered with graffiti. The little kiosk which sold shampoo and things was always closed. Our bungalow was tiny; the bed was more like a futon with a saggy mattress. The room was stuffy but we couldn’t go out onto our patio to get a breeze because the weather seemed to veer between monsoon, typhoon and tornado the entire time.

Ready? here’s the answer:

I leave you with this final thought: hakuna matata.

No, that saying was not an invention of the Disney Corporation. It’s real Swahili language.

But you knew what it meant, didn’t you?

Which word is more colorful: color or colour?

If you’re American, do you ever color your “colors” with an occasional “U” to lend your prose a sense of savoir faire? At any rate, have you ever wondered where the U went? A lovely blog called COLOURlovers addresses this question with an informative post called Color vs. Colour – The Great Spelling Battle. The short version is that when Noah “Dictionary is My Last Name” Webster saw colour he saw red. If you know what I mean.

By the way, from the COLOURlovers site, I also recommend the Color Legends posts (Part I and Part II).

When it comes to teasing apart the idiomatic weirdness of language, no one is better than Rambles contributor Alan Kennedy. So we are tickled pink this week to have Alan tell us about the strangely liberal and incoherent use of color across cultures. Take it away Alan…

Color My World

by Alan Kennedy

Readers of my previous entries may recall that I do a little lesson with my ESL students which they find both practical and entertaining — reviewing some of the common color idioms that we have in English. If you have not given this topic any thought before, you may be surprised at how many we have in English. These are often idioms in the truest sense, because they have figurative meanings that one probably could not “guess” from the color associations themselves (i.e. yellow-bellied, once in a blue moon, red tape).

The seeming arbitrariness of some of these is underscored by the fact that in other languages these colors have different associations and are used in idioms with completely different meanings. When Korean speakers say that someone has a black heart they mean he has an ulterior motive — nothing to do with the “cruelty” idea it connotes for us. A thriller novel in Italian is un libro giallo (a yellow book), unrelated to the scandal-mongering notion of our yellow journalism. It turns out that many — perhaps most — languages have color idioms of this kind. My lesson, and the subsequent discussions it prompts, has allowed me to collect some of these non-English ones, which has now turned into a bit of a side project for me. I have written before about how a black eye for English speakers is a blue, purple or grey eye in other languages – and mentioned a few others – but I’d like to break this topic out a bit more.

In English, he is blue means he’s sad (unless he’s in the Blue Man Group, a less likely meaning). You may be surprised to know that the German translation, er ist blau, means he is drunk or stoned. We have a white lie (“Your haircut looks great!”). For the Turks, this is a pembe yalan – a pink lie. The Koreans go one step further with the “lie” color idioms. They have a great one: a red lie, which means a lie which everyone knows is a lie. (“We use when talking about politicians”, one student told me. Some things are so universal). I thought this was my all-time favorite “lie” color idiom until one day, out of the blue, a student from Munich told me that her compatriots lie the blue out of the sky when they’re really shoveling it. Now that’s a colorful one.

A lot of French color idioms are already familiar to us (film noir, la vie en rose, carte blanche) but did you know rire jaune (to laugh yellow) is to give a forced, insincere laugh? Good one, non? How about faire quelqu’un marron (to make someone brown), which means to cheat on someone?

So here’s a question: is inexperience blue or green? The French say être fleur bleue (to be a blue flower) for naïveté. The Japanese seem to side with the French – they say an inexperienced person has a blue butt. We English speakers, on the other hand, might say she’s so green about the unseasoned newbie in the office. That is, unless we add “with envy”, in which case we are talking about something else entirely. Of course, “that company is very green” probably refers to being environmentally aware…
Circling back to French, they get vert de peur (green from fear). You still with me?

Good. Let’s stick with green. In some dialects of Spanish, ponerse verde a uno (to become green to someone) means to tell someone off. I guess we could imagine a heated U.N. debate whereby a violently angry Spaniard becomes green to a Frenchman, who in turn becomes green with fear. This situation may not necessarily impress the Russian delegate, who feels зелная скука (green boredom) — utter boredom — at the all-too-familiar situation. On the other hand, the reaction from the Thai delegate might be that her body turns green (she becomes angry), especially if she supports the French.
Perhaps, to lighten the mood, the Spaniard will tell a green joke (chiste verde) — a dirty joke — once he has cooled off. All of this is of less concern to the Italian delegate, who has bigger problems: he is at the green (al verde) — by which one means he is broke. (The American allegedly tried to embezzle some money for him, but sadly he was caught red-handed, so the Italian remains in the red).

Speaking of red, linguists have determined that if any world language has only one a lexeme for a color besides black and white, it is always red. It should be no surprise, then, that there are many good “red” idioms. Here’s a sample. The Russians say красная крыша (red roof) for a place illegally protected by police. Arabic speakers say show the red eye for being strict with or disapproving of someone. Inexplicably, Italians call the egg yolk the rosso d’uovo (red of the egg). Speakers of Mandarin Chinese say he is big red and big purple for someone who is popular and famous.

A few more blue ones: a Brazilian says está tudo azul — “everything is blue” — when all is right with the world. Rare steak for the French is biftek bleu. Here’s another of my all-time favorites: Germans blau machen (make blue) when they decide to not go to work for no real reason. Nice! (And somehow, seemingly, very un-German!).

I heartily welcome any other additions to my project data from any multi-lingual/multi-cultural readers of this blog. Please don’t lose any sleep over it (or pasar una noche en blanco — as they do in Spain.) But seriously, I am rolling out the red carpet to welcome all contributions. I am giving you the green light, as it were. The offer is right here in black and white. O.K., I’ll stop.

One final thought to leave you with:

Can there be such a thing as a blue-collar blue-blood?

One of the odd things about learning a language is that it’s easy when you’re young and hard when you’re old. We feel bad about having to teach our children the strange rules of language, but they aren’t really troubled by it. In a sense, they’re the ones who made the problem in the first place. Kids are the ones who cook simple pidgins into rich creoles. There is a time when our brain can effortlessly spin and juggle complex new grammars. In some cases, it seems to border on the extravagant flourish of a peacock display. The Luganda language of Africa, for example, has at least ten different noun classes (not counting the plural forms), essentially genders like masculine, feminine, neuter, large things, skinny things, wet things, and so on. Each one has a different associated affix to memorize. What on Earth were they thinking? Who made this up? You can bet it wasn’t some Luganda government subcommittee. It had to be the kids. You can’t learn this stuff as an adult. You can’t even make it up as an adult.

It seems baffling that difficult and exceptional constructions aren’t eroded from the language by use, as a tumbling stone is smoothed by a watercourse. But there you have it.

Alan teaches English to adults. That puts him in the hot seat when the language gets weird. Here’s what he has to say.

Aiming on Moving Targets at the Lake Michigan

by Alan Kennedy

In my last entries here I focused quite a bit on some of the socio-cultural issues that have arisen in my ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Some readers/friends have told me they’d be interested to learn more about the challenges of teaching the actual mechanics of the English language.

Off the bat I’d say that the two most difficult things to master, for learners from any native language background, are the use of articles and the use of prepositions.

I have written before about how important it is to know, and teach, the grammar rules of English, but when it comes to these two topics, the “rules” are sketchy and hard to generalize. Aside from that, the biggest challenge is the challenge faced by any language teacher – English is constantly changing,
and is therefore a kind of moving target.

The articles in English are “the”, “a” and “an”. “The” is called the definite article, and “a/an” is the indefinite article (we only use “an” before words staring with noun sounds). Many languages – including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian – the native languages of many of my students – have no
articles at all. In these languages “I see a book” and “I see the book” translate roughly as “I see book.” Can you imagine, therefore, how hard it would be to understand the nuance of difference between “The elephant is a large mammal” and “An elephant is a large mammal”? Students
struggle with these articles all the time – and often resort to using none rather than guessing which one is best. Of course, sometimes using no article is correct – we say “The Hudson River” but not “The Lake Michigan, “The U.S.A” but not “The France”, and “it’s easier for
the rich” but not “it’s easier for the attractive”. (“Aaaaaah!” shout my students, in despair.) There are some rules for certain situations, but my experience shows that no book or teacher can teach natural-sounding use of articles in English perfectly.

Use of prepositions – in many languages, not just English – has an arbitrariness that we native speakers take for granted. For example: we say “she is married to a lawyer”, “I worry about my problems” and “I can count on my friends”. Spanish speakers, (translating into English) say “she
is married with a lawyer”, “I worry for my problems” and “I can count with my friends”. Are English preposition choices better or more logical than Spanish ones? Not really. Why do we say “I said to her…” but not “I told to her…”?

Pretty random, no?

Me: No, Chang, it’s not ‘I am familiar about that’ Guess again.
Chang: I am familiar to that?
Me: Nice try! Not quite. One more guess.
Chang: I am familiar of that?
Me: No…
Chang: Teacher, you have convinced to me that prepositions are hard!
Me: No ‘to‘. Just ‘convinced.’
Chang Aaaaaaaaaaah! (pretends to bang head on desk)

Cross-language translation of prepositions often corresponds very unevenly. As just one example, the Russian preposition “Ð’” (pronounced like our “V”) can be accurately translated as “into”, “to”, “in” and “at”, depending on context.

We call errors with articles and prepositions the “last things to go” – in that, with very fluent speakers, these kinds of misuses are the hardest to correct. When you hear people like Celine Dion or Antonio Banderas speak English, these are the type of things that trip them up. The only real way to master the native-like use of articles and prepositions, I think, is to read and listen to a lot of English so that you can almost absorb it by osmosis and “hear in your head” what sounds right and wrong. This is
what I tell my students.

So now back to the “moving target” idea…

One of the challenges of teaching any second language is that languages are constantly evolving. Certain grammar rules, stylistic elements, and vocabulary featured in some ESL texts are, upon closer inspection, either moving away from everyday use, falling gradually out of use, or even out of use
altogether in natural American English. Conversely, new words enter the lexicon all the time which will not be featured in published ESL materials (yet) but are common and useful for comprehension. This seems to be particularly true in the areas of technology and in the shifted use of nouns as verbs.

English is famously flexible with its creation of verbs from nouns without changing the word – some linguists have estimated that as many as one-fifth of all English verbs began as nouns. As just one example – “e-mail” has become a verb, and a common, natural-sounding, malleable one at that, which can be conjugated like any verb (e.g. “I was e-mailing him yesterday…he had e-mailed me the day earlier, and by tomorrow we will have e-mailed each other several times”). We can see a similar pattern with words like “blog” and “google.”

The challenge becomes, what do you teach?

Language learners want to speak and understand English as it is really spoken, and if a teacher tells them that something is “wrong”, even if they heard it on the subway or on a sitcom, they get suspicious and sometimes frustrated. This challenge is much more present in teaching speaking than it is with
writing, where a more conservative or formal style is appropriate. If a learner’s goal is to write university papers or business correspondence in English, or to do well on a standardized language test, then the “textbook” ESL is probably a good route to go; but what if a learner’s goal is different? A few examples where “textbook” ESL is at odds with natural spoken American English include these:

1. WHOM is dying. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum of UC Santa Cruz posted this on the Language Log website (referencing Monty Python): “Kiss whom goodbye. It is rarely heard in conversation now, and just about never in clause-initial position. This word is nearly dead. It is close to being no more. It has all but ceased to be….this is almost an ex-word.” Even among educated speakers – and certainly
for younger Americans – you will not hear this word in casual speech. “That’s the girl who I was telling you about” no longer sounds like the glaring error it may have been fifty years ago – and “that’s the girl about whom I was telling you”, coming out of the mouth of a twenty-something American would
sound positively bizarre.

2. SUBJUNCTIVE TENSE with the “be” verb in sentences like “If she were going, I would go too” (as opposed to was). These days you are as likely to hear “If I was rich…” as “If I were rich…”. To wit: on June 3^rd, the executive producer of “CBS Evening News,” was quoted as saying about Dan Rather, “We are very much a hard news program. I wish Dan was watching more closely. A lot of people here are very disappointed with him.”

3. REPORTED SPEECH – (sometimes also called indirect speech): these are the supposed rules for how we relay what someone has said in the past when we don’t quote them directly. Many grammar texts give the standard advice that you should “back-shift” the verb tenses. According to this rule, the quote “I am on my way” should be relayed as “He said he was on his way”, and the quote “I was in Mexico” becomes “he said he had been in Mexico”, etc. Additionally, “yesterday” needs to become “the day before”, “right now” should become “at that time”, and so on. The problem is that Americans rarely speak this way.

If you had just asked a colleague where he was last week, and gotten the answer about Mexico, it’s unlikely you’d relay this with a tense back-shift; it’s at least as likely that you’d say “he said he was in Mexico”. Even when telling someone what the colleague said 5 months ago, “he said he had been in Mexico”, while certainly not wrong, is marked as formal. If we make a distinction and say that we
abandon the reported speech rules for very recent quotes (i.e. “I ‘m coming!” “What did he say?” “He said he’s coming”), a learner may ask “well how recent does it have to be before I backshift the tense? This is an unanswerable question. The bottom line: teaching reported speech in English in a natural, native-like way using textbook rules may be impossible. Like learning how to use articles and propositions, it may best accomplished through osmosis.

4. “IT IS I” vs. “IT IS ME”. Grammar books say the first is the only correct form, but it seems no one under a certain age in the U.S. says “It is I” (i.e. on the phone)

5. AIN’T. ESL materials do not explain this word. English learners, who may hear it every day, often always ask the instructor about this mystery word. They want to know what it is and how it is used. Teachers can simply say “don’t use it, it’s not a real word” – but that hardly helps the learner when they hear it in every pop song and in film and TV dialogue. In the view of some teachers, “ain’t” should be in the grammar books – they should not ignore it simply because it is “non-standard”.

There are certainly other examples that can be discussed here – e.g. using “there’s” with plural nouns instead of “there are” (“there’s five ways to do it”) – but the above five are the glaring ones, to my mind. As a general rule, language teachers need to explain the distinction between standard English
grammar and other more colloquial forms, and then touch on it all, again depending on learners’ goals.

Equally important is that students know that if they use some very “slangy” forms without being a native speaker with a native accent that it can sound forced and artificial.

As evidence of this, look no further than the “Rush Hour” series of films where we are expected to laugh uproariously whenever the Hong Kong cop played by Jackie Chan tries to speak slangy American English with his co-star, comedian Chris Tucker. From the first film:

Tucker: You don’t know nothing about no war.
Chan: Everybody knows War. [singing] War! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, sing it again, you all!
Tucker: It ain’t ‘you all’, it’s “y’all”!
Chan: Yaw!
Tucker: Man you sound like a Karate movie. Y’all!
Chan: Yoll.

At least Jackie got the correct preposition….

The way names move across language barriers makes for a good spectator sport. I am reminded of what my nephew Ben wrote about the English names his students chose for an English class he taught in China. The difference, for example, between Shelly and Cherry can take a few tries to work out. And I recall a conversation from long ago in which Alan told me about some frustration he had with a Russian class. Russian names require special grammatical handling depending on the context. Ordinarily an imported American name escapes this special treatment, making life for an American student of Russian slightly easier than it might otherwise be. But Alan shares his last name with a former American president, and presidents (particularly Cold War presidents) get the full name treatment. So Alan was stuck managing complicated endings for his own name. Ach du lieber Himmel!

Here’s Alan…

Teaching Tricks to Sea Lions: More Adventures Teaching ESL

by Alan Kennedy

I have written here before about my experiences as a teacher of English as a Second Language to adults. Since the previous posting I have been working at two different schools in New York City – one a private language school, and one a university.

Most of the anecdotes that have most interested my friends and family have been mined from the culture clash situation that an ESL classroom produces, by nature. The truth is, I usually find that I have more in common with my students than less, but there is often inherent humor in talking about those differences of understanding, of outlook, and of experience. I try to remind myself that anything the students say which makes me laugh is the type of thing I might say if I were, say, studying Russian in Russia. I think my students know this. So I can laugh at the two Korean students who gave me a Hallmark-style Christmas card, addressed to me only, with flowery writing that said “to both of you” on the cover. Hell, there but for the grace of my Russian studies go I.

Almost all of my students from Taiwan choose an English name for themselves to use when they are in the U.S. (in contrast to, for example, Koreans, who sometimes do, and Japanese, who never do.) Although this may mostly be because of the difficulty we Americans have pronouncing Chinese names, I also think there is a cultural element at work.

I once asked a very serious Taiwanese student named Pei Shan why she hadn’t chosen an English name.

“Can’t you say “pay shan?” she asked, deadpan.

“Yes, of course” I said. “Easily”. It’s just that most Taiwanese students have an English name…Of course you don’t need one, no student does. I was only curious…”

“Well…how would I pick one?” she asked.

I told her there was an old-fashioned woman’s name, Patience, which was very close to her name.

“Well that would be ironic” she replied (it came out more like ah-ro-nih) because I am not patient.” She chuckled. “Not at all.”

Which surprised me more – that she knew how to use the word “ironic”, or that she had a sense of humor? One thing for sure – from then on I saw her differently.

I had another Taiwanese student, a very funny guy with a booming voice and spiky hair, who was always making jokes. His name was Chang Lee but he asked me to call him Lee because “it is easier for you to say than Chang”. (Really?) He sat next to another Taiwanese student who had taken the name Fernando. “I thought was English”, he told me, “until I come America and realize is Spanish – but I like”. As an aside, Lee’s English was better than Fernando’s, but Fernando egged him on and laughed uproariously at everything he said. When Lee was eventually upgraded from my class to a more advanced level, I asked him if he was cracking everyone up in the new class.

“No – I am not” he said. “I cannot be funny without patnah”.

I asked him to spell “patnah”; I didn’t understand.

“P-A-R-T-N-E-R”, he said, and nodded poignantly.

Then there was the Korean student named Bok Min. I had in her in class for a few weeks when she asked, one day, if I would please start calling her by her “English name, Min”.

Your English name. OK. Whatever you say. “Min” it was.

The strangest English “name” I have yet encountered was a young guy named Kai Chun who asked to be called “Sea Lion”. No kidding. I repeated it several times and wrote it on the board just to make sure I was hearing it right.

“That’s the name of an animal, you know…it’s not really a person’s name”.

“Yes. I know.”

“Why did you choose that name?”

“Because it was my brother’s English name also.”

I waited for more explanation. None came. He stared at me, blinking.

“Oh” I finally said.

So I called him Sea Lion. And actually got used to it after a week.

I have learned not to assume that adults from other countries will be familiar with our icons. This is of course okay, and lends itself to interesting language lessons that dovetail with U.S. cultural literacy, which students are usually eager to get. Most can name George Washington on sight, for example. Pretty many can name Martin Luther King, Jr. Many less, however, can name Abraham Lincoln – and even less can pronounce his name right (that damn silent “L”…).

I used the Elvis Presley recording of “Treat Me Nice” once to demonstrate improper use of adjectives in place of adverbs. When I asked the students if anyone could tell me anything about Elvis, one young Korean student ventured “he looks Italian or Spanish”.

I said that he was very American in a certain sense.

“He doesn’t look American” was the response.

This got me going a bit, and I asked “What does it mean to look American?” This may have been a mistake, as the response was a class-wide vibe of downcast eyes and uncertainty.

“Does Oprah Winfrey look American?” I asked. (perplexed look from Korean guy)

“Tiger Woods?” (silence.)

“Lucy Liu?”. (Giggle.)

“Jennifer Lopez?” (possible high-five from two guys in back who like to high-five, but I can’t be sure).

“Remember, ‘American’ is not a race, not really an ethnicity – we can look like anything” was how I concluded it. General silence ensued.

A bubbly Turkish woman saved the day. “Vere in America Elviz Prezley was from?”

“Mississippi” I answered, gratefully, writing the cumbersome state name on the board to impressed oohs and aahs.

Then we returned to the lesson on adverbial clauses.

One week we were studying a unit in our textbook with the theme “overcoming obstacles”. There was a black & white photo of Helen Keller on the first page, and I asked “does anyone know who this is?”. A timid Japanese woman ventured quietly

“Amish?”.

Not sure I had heard right, I repeated “Amish? Is that what you said?”

She nodded. I wrote on the board, A-M-I-S-H. She nodded.

“I’m not sure what you mean…” I said.

“Hide from Germany.” she said. Slowly it came together in my mind.

“Do you mean Jewish?” I asked.

“”Jewish. Yes”. She nodded.

“Are you thinking of Anne Frank?

“Ahh – - yes. Anne Frank.”

“Oh, okay. No, this is not Anne Frank, but I can see why you may have thought that.”

Amish folks had been in the news recently due to a tragic killing in Pennsylvania. To her, “Amish” and “Jewish” were just words; foreign ideas.

Although I have tried to arm myself with a useful battery of techniques for teaching grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary and the language teacher’s classic “four skills” package (listening/speaking/reading/writing), I often find myself most useful to students when I can explain the things that the language books can’t. My students are always interested in lessons which deal with what linguists call pragmatics – all those things about using a foreign language which go beyond grammar and vocabulary, and have more to do with nuance of meaning, casualness vs. formality, manners, inference, etc. Why is “could you pass the salt?” more formal than “can you pass the salt?”. This is stuff they did not learn in school, and one reason they come to the U.S. to learn English from a native speaker.

Once during a lesson about asking for favors, I tried to write down a kind of continuum of different styles – from the most indirect and polite (e.g. “I wonder if you’d mind closing the window?”) to the most direct (“close the window!”). A Japanese student pointed out that the constructions which sounds quite formal to us, like “you couldn’t close the window, could you?” was actually the common way to ask in Japanese.

At this, a Hungarian student said, “well then Russians are at other side, because for them ‘close window!’ is the only way to ask!

I asked her if she though Hungarian was more polite or formal than Russian in general. She thought about it and replied “Hungarians would say “Close window. Yes?”.

I like to do a little activity where we talk about idioms in English which use color words. There are so many: once in a blue moon, a green thumb, yellow-bellied coward, seeing red, etc. Truthfully, my favorite part about this is that it prompts students to share examples from other languages. In a previous post I mentioned the different colors used for a bruised eye. We say a person got a “black eye”, but Japanese speakers say a he got a “blue eye”, and if you think about this one for a moment it’s interesting.

Here are some other examples:

“A green joke” (Spanish) = a dirty joke

“I am purple” (Turkish) = like foot in mouth; embarrassed, caught out

“He is blue” (German) = he is drunk or stoned

“He is big red and big purple” (Mandarin) = he is famous and popular

“The red room” (Russian) = a recreation and reading room in a house

and my favorite:

“It’s the color of a donkey on the run” (Portuguese) = a color which is hard to describe

My job is not exactly hard to describe – after all, most of us have studied a foreign language at some point in our lives and remember the teacher. Well, that’s me.

I do think I wear more hats, though, than the guy who taught me to conjugate Spanish verbs did. I am often forced into the role of cultural literacy instructor, as mentioned, but also New York City tour guide, history and geography teacher, technical support person, cell phone company navigator, apartment living advisor, cultural sensitivity coach, and, it has to be said, President Bush explainer. He is certainly “big red”, but these days not so “big purple”…

As for my approval rating, it seems to be OK. The other day I overheard a student saying to another “I know how to say ‘thirteen’ and ‘thirty’ differently now. Those words pronounce different. Before, people always asked me which one I was saying. Alan taught me. There is a trick. Now I know the trick!”

The ‘trick’, by the way, is applying appropriate syllable stress.

There are two ways to say “trick” in Russian: “snoróvka” and “pódvah“.

I guess I need a good language teacher to explain the nuance of difference to me. One of these days…

Doing is one skill, and teaching is another, and the intersection of the two is disappointingly rare.

Happily, my friend Alan Kennedy, who has written here before about his adventures in the music industry, is talented at both doing and explaining. He’s here this week to talk about his fascinating new window on the world. He generally steers clear of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, but you just might learn something useful about Jennifer Aniston.

Rike Orion — Adventures in ESL

by Alan Kennedy

When I tell people that my job is teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to adults, I often get one of two follow-up questions. One is fair, and one gets my hackles up.

1. Do you have to speak students’ native language, whatever it is, in order to teach them? (fair enough, and no.)
2. That can’t be too hard – if you speak English, then you can teach someone else to speak it, right? (no! NO! wrong!)

For the first, I explain that in my instruction I use only English, and that works fine – and is in fact necessary for classes like the ones I teach, filled with people from different language backgrounds. I am basically building from what they already know about using English. (The exception is Spanish – which I do speak – and I will use this with Spanish speaking students one-on-one, but not in a class with students from other backgrounds.)

For the second, I explain that any good ESL teacher needs to understand the patterns of English grammar, pronunciation and lexicon (such as they are). As much as possible, English learners want to reduce the feeling that they’re making a stab in the dark every time they open their mouths. They want to know why we say things the way we do. After all, they’d rather learn to fish (verb!) than get a fish (noun!). Why, for example, do we say “so many apples” but “so much fruit” ? “I have few friends” is a lament, but “I have a few friends” is a statement of fact. Think about learning English for the first time – wouldn’t that be confusing? Why is “although she works hard, she’s poor” O.K., but not “although her hard work, she’s poor”? What are the rules? In this job, you gotta know.

So…how did I get here? The truth is, after 13 years in the music industry (see my previous post here on Star Chamber) I needed to do something new professionally. A few months of volunteer work practicing English with immigrants and foreign visitors sent me in this new direction. Last year I decided to get my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Certificate from Columbia University. My life became a blur of Noam Chomsky theories, unstressed syllables with the schwa sound, modal perfects, and non-restrictive adjective clauses. Having completed that taxing but genuinely rewarding process, I now find myself a New York State-certified language teacher. These days I teach at a private school for adult students in New York City, and also do private tutoring.

Cultural differences are often put under the microscope in this work – which is actually a side of it I love – yielding professional close calls as often as funny anecdotes.

Israelis are known for a no-nonsense style, and I had a tutoring student from Israel whose manner took real getting used to. When I would ask her standard ESL teacher questions like “do you know how to pronounce this?” or “do you know what this word means” she would shoot back “of course!” in a testy, almost offended way. I wanted to protest “you asked me, and pay me, to improve your English! What’s with the attitude?”. More than 50% of the time she was wrong, too. At first I was really taken aback by this until I realized that I just needed to translate “of course! (brusquely)” into “yes I think so”, culturally converting it to my American sensibility. This worked, actually, and the truth is she was a lovely woman. (Her biggest challenge: making the “H” sound.)

Once during an in-class discussion about inventions I innocently mentioned the invention of the airplane by the Wright Brothers. “Oh no!” shouted a Brazilian student from the back of the class. “A Brazilian invented the airplane! Santos-Dumont! Americans always pretending was the Wright Brothers, but your President Cleenton finally he admeet was Santos Dumont when he come to Brazil!” she said, triumphantly. It was a true point of pride with her, and I had no idea what she was talking about. Turns out this little historical debate, not commonly known by most Americans, is known to all Brazilians. Who knew?

I had a student from Yemen who called me “meester” and could not bring himself to call me “Alan”, even though I reminded him that this was the custom in my class and I found “mister” overly formal. “I cannot call you that, meester” he finally said. “It is too formal for you but feels just right for me, so please.” At that I let it go, feeling somewhat chastened.

I once asked if anyone could explain the phrase “survival of the fittest”, and a Muslim student from Turkey explained Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as well as he could, adding “but this is not true and I do not believe it” at the end. I had two Japanese students in the front of the class, and I watched their jaws drop in unison at this last statement – they looked to me to comment or express surprise, which I was reluctant to do. My view is that I am a language teacher and it is not my role to grandstand, however much I may want to. The point is to teach language, not disseminate my personal worldview. Instead, I used this timeworn tactic:

“Does anyone in the class have a different opinion?”

And with that, one of the Japanese students was off. As politely as he could, he used every shred of his English skills to bring up “science”, “proof”, “the Galapagos”, and my favorite part – “how you think giraffe have long head?”

Although I teach the full gamut – grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic speech, and listening/speaking/reading/writing skills – I am most interested in pronunciation and accent issues. At Columbia, the point was made from time to time that having a foreign accent in itself is not necessarily a problem. The only problem, say progressive ESL educators, is intelligibility. If a Japanese student is trying to say “arrive” and I hear “alive”, this is confusing. If a Mexican student is trying to say “I live here” and I hear “I leave here”, it could cause a misunderstanding. But a Russian student saying “nuthink” instead of “nothing” will not cause intelligibility problems and this does not necessarily need to be “fixed”. These same educators sometimes prefer terms like accent modification to the more traditional accent reduction. I therefore try to focus on intelligibility with the lower-level speakers, as a necessary first step. More advanced students often tell me they want less of an accent, and so I try to help them as well.

I have learned to expect certain pronunciation difficulties from different language- speaker groups, and, I hope, how to help students attempt to get past them. All stereotypes aside, many Asian language speakers have real trouble with our “L” and “R”. In Japanese and Korean, for example, there is one consonant which falls somewhere in between these two sounds and it is only that sound with their mouths have been “used to” since childhood. I worked with a Japanese woman whose misfortune it was to work at a hair salon called “Barry and Valerie”. She said she dreaded being asked where she worked, because she knew she was in for painstaking few minutes of frustration and misunderstanding. I felt very “Henry Higgins” as I worked with her over and over to touch the top of the inside of the roof of her widened mouth with her tongue for “LLLLL”, and then keep the tongue off the top and round the mouth for “RRRRR” (“like a lion”, I would say. “Rike Orion” she would respond, solemnly.). After a few weeks she was much better, but she always needed to take a beat to psych herself up for it before going full throttle with “Bar-r-r-y and Val-l-l-er-r-rie!”

Many Korean speakers add an extra syllable to words that end in the “j” sound, so that “language” becomes “language-y”; judge is “judge-y” and so on. I have even (I think) coined a name for this – the “Korean Extra Syllable”, and I use this term with my students as if I got it out of a book, and they accept it as such. It is so common with my Korean students that I wince when they are reading aloud and I see one of these words coming – almost like oncoming traffic. If we get to “courage”, or “garbage” or “pledge” and I don’t hear the extra syllable, I am relieved, and happy for the student. Tiny, seemingly inconsequential dramas like this have become my new professional life.

Very often, Spanish speakers will apply the rapid, regular rhythms of Spanish to their English, giving it the sort of propulsive, staccato feel which is familiar to many Americans. Spanish is a syllable-timed language – each syllable gets the same “beat” unlike English, in which some syllables are stressed a lot, some stressed less, and some “reduced” (a stress-timed language). A consequence of this is that when Latin American students speak in class, I and the fellow Latinoamericanos understand them, but the others do not. This yields a somewhat comical pattern:

1. Student A says something very fast and with a Spanish rhythm, i.e. “eye-theenk-ees-goood-toe-haff-ang-oh-peeng-yon-aboudees”
2. Every other student turns to look at me, beseechingly.
3. I reply to Student A: “you think it’s good to have an opinion about this?”
4. “Jays” says Student A.
5. Other students nod in understanding.

Sometimes I am learning as much as the students are – to wit an exercise on idioms using color words. I had to explain “a black eye” to a class, at which point each student in turn told me that in their language they said “a blue eye”, “a grey eye”, “a purple eye”, etc. for the same phenomenon.

During a speaking exercise about cities, towns and villages, a woman from Mali told me “these are not just English words, these are English ideas. You would not call the capital of my country a city, because it has no tall buildings, but to me it is like a city. Sometimes, for Africa, the English words don’t match the ideas.” This really gave me and the rest of the class pause, we all knew what she meant. It was a simple insight, but an important one.
I asked one student from India what her native language was. “Telugu” she replied. Privately, dismissively, I imagined this to be some small dialect of Hindi spoken by her and her family. A quick check on the web revealed it to be one of the world’s top 20 most spoken languages, with about 70 million speakers. Suddenly, I was the provincial.

For me, the funniest anecdotes from my work are often the instances for which no training prepares you. One day we came across the idiom “All-American girl” in one of our readings. The students weren’t familiar with that one, so I asked them to guess the meaning. One guess was “white”. Another was “patriotic”. I explained that it was more the idea of a wholesome, attractive “girl-next-door” type (another idiom requiring explanation).

“Like Jennifer Aniston?” posited a female student from Korea, wanting a concrete example.

“Well, yes. I guess she could be a sort of all-American girl, sure” I replied.

The student’s hand flew up with a follow-up question. She intoned slowly, emphasizing her accent, eyes dead serious. “Why did Brad Pitt break up with Jennifer Aniston?”.

Suddenly I had the attention of the whole class, as, pens poised, they awaited teacher’s wisdom. I struggled for an adequate answer. (“I have no idea!” and “this is a language class!” both came to mind.) What I settled on was “Um…I think it had something to do with Angelina Jolie?”

“Mmm…Angelina Jolie” wafted up from the back of the class as two male students high-fived each other. The Korean student having nodded her acceptance of this answer, we resumed to business of American English idioms.

And this, for now, is my job. The bottom line (idiom) about my teaching (gerund), to sum it up (phrasal verb), honestly (don’t pronounce the “h”!), is that it’s a good gig (metaphor), and it’s nice work if you can get it (saying).

I’ll let him take over from here, but it is interesting to observe that, of his list of the three most important things that are poisoning the music industry right now, stealing music ranks last. What are one and two? Here’s Alan with the rest of the story…

The music industry: a view from the inside

by Alan Kennedy

When I was hired by Atlantic Records in 1991, in their international department, it was the culmination of a two-year process of trying to break into the music industry, and a very happy day for me. The music industry in the U.S. was a huge, thriving, high-profile business dominated by six companies – Warner Music, MCA (the Music Corporation of America), Capitol-EMI, Sony Music, Polygram, and BMG (Bertlesman Music Group). 1991 was the year that sales of CD’s eclipsed cassette sales for the first time, and the phenomenon of “re-buying” the records you already by replacing them with CD format was fueling a boom in sales. Each of the “Big Six” companies, as we called them, was comprised of many different labels. The Atlantic label was part of the Warner Music Group, and one of its shining stars. They had chart-toppers contributing to its success in those heady early-nineties days like Winger and Skid Row. It had around 400 employees, and offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Nashville.

Today, Atlantic has merged with another Warner Music label, Elektra, to form the Atlantic Records Group; the London and Nashville offices have closed down, the staff has shrunk to around a fourth of its former size, and the company – like all of the other “major labels” – struggles to maintain an acceptable share of a shrinking pie. There are now four major music companies, with the imminent threat of a further consolidation to three. MCA and Polygram merged in 1998 to form Universal Music Group (UMG); Sony and BMG merged last year to form Sony-BMG, and many music industry observers expect that Warner will explore a merger with EMI in the near future.

In the four years between 1999 and 2003, overall sales of recorded music declined by a staggering one third. Think about that – a huge industry, selling something which is a part of the daily life of many, if not most people, losing a third of its business in 4 years. By the early 2000′s, those of us still working in the industry would joke that it was like working for a typewriter company – you could see that people were buying less and less of your product, so you clung to your job for dear life and tried to ignore the writing on the wall. Postings to music industry chat board The Velvet Rope talked about the streets of New York and Los Angeles being littered with the bodies of former record company staffers – people who simply could not find work in the industry they loved. Some were having to re-invent themselves professionally, others were watching by the sidelines, morose and bitter, musing over what happened.

The downward sales trend continues. According to the music industry organization IPFI, global music sales fell overall by 7.6% in 2003. 2004 sales were claimed to be “flat”, but sales of physical formats (CDs, cassettes, music DVD’s) did continue to fall, and were offset by the increase in sales of digital music. This was thanks in part to lawsuits mounted by the major labels to stop individual internet music theft, and the deliberate flooding of online music file-swapping networks with bogus files. So far for 2005, according to the New York Times, the U.S. music industry has experienced an 8% decline in sales. An April 17th article by Jeff Leeds discussed the “beleaguered music industry”, noting that every major music company in the U.S. is “grappling with rampant piracy” and “shifting consumer habits” which have contributed to the demise of the industry’s profitability and size.

We can go back to my previous employer, Warner Music Group, and take them as an example. In the last year they’ve fired over 1,000 employees, dropped 30% of the artists on their roster, instituted salary cuts across the company and cut their budget for signing new artists and songwriters. Edgar Bronfman, the company’s head, insists that technological advances in music listening and purchasing will eventually benefit the industry and that the piracy problem will be tamed; that “the proliferation of new devices like the iPod and next-generation cellphones will soon raise the value of recorded music”. This all remains to be seen, however – and anyway it’s not strictly internet piracy which is the problem.

So what did happen? The answer I’d give is based on a combination of reading media coverage, discussions with music industry colleagues, and anecdotal evidence and observations I have collected in daily life. Put bluntly, I’d say this:

1. Recorded music is worse than it used to be.
2. Young people have other things that interest them which compete with recorded music for their attention and money.
3. Yes, it is easy to steal music files off the internet and most young music fans know exactly how to do it.

As for number one: Alain Levy, head of EMI Music, admitted to Billboard magazine last year that too many current music acts have been one-hit wonders and that the industry is not developing durable artists. Many others in the industry are quick to blame internet theft for the sales decline, but I think Levy is on to something and we must consider that maybe the industry is simply doing worse than before at selling something that people are excited about. A recent poll by Rolling Stone magazine found that music consumers believe that relatively few “great” albums have been produced recently, as compared with the past. I’d wager that the popularity of Apple’s i-Tunes is partly to blame here – now that it is easy and cheap to buy just one song by an artist (99 cents) it encourages the labels to focus on signing artists who can create that one saleable song. In real world terms this means that the mediocre garage band with one catchy hit gets a label deal over the brilliant new singer-songwriter – a potential Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell – with a catalogue of breathtaking songs but no obvious “single”. The landscape at American radio is part of this cycle as well. As radio stations become more and more risk-averse, more reliant on market research to develop narrow playlists of recognizable hits so they can sell more advertising, the idea of the hit single driving the whole industry
is perpetuated. Where are the new U2′s, the REM’s, and Aerosmiths? All I can see, quite frankly, is a bunch of bands with one or two good songs who are lucky if their career lasts beyond 3 years – literally. This is not just true of rock music – look at the pop world. Who are the new Bee Gees? Who is the new Madonna? Those artists have had decade-spanning careers, and hit singles in their forties. Who is on the pop charts today who will have a hit single in their forties? No one, I’d wager. Part and parcel of this is an increasing lack of “artist loyalty” among teen-agers, who still make up about 70% of recorded music sales in this country. When I was a teen-ager, I eagerly awaited every new album by Billy Joel, knowing I would buy it the day it came out, no matter what was on it. Have you spoken to a teen-ager about music recently? Speaking to my fellow over-thirtys, I hate to tell you, folks, but those days are gone with the wind. Nowadays you’ll hear kids say things like “yeah, they’re a good band but I already have an album by them, so I don’t need the new one” (an actual quote from my friend’s nephew).

Music simply does not mean to today’s young people what it meant for my generation. It does not occupy that central place in their lives – as a means of rebellion, of self-identity, or even as a leisure option. Moving to number two on my list of explanations, we have to look at all the things that now compete with buying and playing music for young people’s time and money – things that did not even exist 20 years ago like gameboys, X-Boxes, Play Stations, cellphones, text messaging, and even just surfing the internet. When I was 15, if I was in my room and not sleeping, reading or doing homework, I was playing a record. Period. Talk about “those days are gone”…to a 15 year-old of today, that probably seems like Little House on the Prairie. Yes, we now have the very popular iPod which kids can take with them throughout the day – but again, you no longer have to buy a whole album or even a 2-song single to hear an artist you like – it’s one song for 99 cents, baby, that’s it – that is, if you decide to pay for it.

This brings us to number three, and we certainly do have to acknowledge the role of the digital revolution in music. Recordings can now be turned into files of digital information which can be bought, sold, sent, or taken for free via that great morass known as the world wide web, if you know how. By all rights, any music that a record company has ownership of should only be obtainable as a music file buy purchasing it from said company, at the price they have set. When stealing music from the internet – “internet piracy” became rife in the 2000′s, mostly through “peer-to-peer” networks like Napster,
the labels fought back by identifying and suing individual offenders. This did seem to cause a noticeable slow-down in 2004, as did the practice previously mentioned of deliberately placing fake files so that users who try to steal end up with something they did not want. The hope is that these people decide to save themselves the trouble by just coughing up the money to buy legally. Nevertheless, the idea that music can, or should, be free greatly harmed the perceived value of the music industry’s commodity among young people. How can you convince someone to pay 15 dollars for something which they feel should be free? In addition, you might think that the emergence of companies who sell music digitally, on behalf of the labels, has created a whole new avenue for
work in the music industry – but so far, this sector has been dominated by a select few
like Apple and Rhapsody whose hegemony edges out fledgling outfits that want to work with the labels.

If you ask those working in the music industry today what the future holds, chances are you won’t get the same answer from any two people. Maybe the industry will bounce back, as Edgar Bronfman posits; maybe it will continue to shrink and ultimately rest at some smaller plateau level for a while; maybe the industry as we know it will disappear altogether someday. I’ll tell you one thing, though – I am not likely to be a part of it. I left Atlantic Records in 2004 and worked briefly with a UK-based internet music company who found competition with i-Tunes and the others so daunting that they had to close down their U.S. office after only four months. Now I am looking for work outside the “incredible shrinking industry”, and have become yet another casualty of the industry, looking for a professional re-invention of some kind.

Someone told me Smith-Corona might be hiring….