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!

Does it make sense to try to figure out which language is truly the hardest? This is the question that an entertaining essay in the Economist by Robert Lane Greene tries to answer. As you might expect, he doesn’t produced a single answer, but he does give some remarkable facts about languages with difficult sounds (!Xóõ in Botswana has more than twenty clicking sounds) and grammars (Bora in Peru has 350 genders).

My friend Alan, the famous Star Chamber guest author on all matters linguistic, forwarded the article to me with a note that he’d come across it on the Language Log. I recommend reading both the article and the Language Log commentary, because watching linguists argue is almost as much fun as watching statisticians argue, and there many fine points here up with which for discussion to be put.

I especially liked Greene’s comment on long words: “Agglutinating languages—that pack many bits of meaning into single words—are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them.” I am certainly guilty of this. Language Log commenter Bill Poser elaborates as follows.

A point that frequently arises is the idea that languages that pack a lot of information into words are difficult. Is it really self-evident that it is harder to deal with complex words than with multi-word phrases that convey the same information? If a language puts a lot into a word but does so in a transparent way, so that words are easy to parse, interpret, and construct, why should this be difficult? It may well be that the perception of difficulty here merely reflects unfamiliarity, which is likely true of quite a few of the features often cited as leading to difficulty.

Doubleplusgood pointgespoken! Nothing is more contemptible than familiarity, nor more exotic than something that is exoticnessful. Nevertheless, I can’t help but be tickled by a comment from a reader of the Economist article that in Inuit, one can say “it can be very slippery on the deck” with the assertion Quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.

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?

For example, did Galileo, while being tried in the Vatican for his heretical astronomy, say Eppur si muove (nevertheless, it moves)? Answer: no. But he should have. So he might as well have. Let’s just agree that he did and save ourselves a bunch of trouble, eh?

You’ve probably come across the “famous Goethe quote” that goes like this.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Sadly, Goethe said no such thing. My friend Bill (a Star Chamber contributor from way back) sent me this debunking link: German Myth 12 – The Famous Goethe Quotation. It’s a fascinating story. As the piece says, “Far too many online quotation sites have been slapped together and seem to ‘borrow’ quotes from each other, without much concern as to accuracy.” I’ve run into this phenomenon before myself, so I wasn’t surprised to find the “Goethe quote” here, here, here, here, and here.

It’s too bad, because it’s still a great quote, and a great quote looks better when it hangs off a big name. How disillusioning to learn that what Goethe really said (in Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil) was “I am a jam doughnut!”*

Must all our favorite stories turn out to be untrue? It reminds me of that old line from Mark Twain: “Everything is a myth.”** Or was it Winston Churchill*** who said that?

* Not true.
** Also not true.
*** There never was a “Winston Churchill”

This is the way they play Jeopardy in JMike’s imagination. Count all the quotes and make sure it compiles. And watch your step!

Today’s final Jeopardy! category is “Needless Verbal Cleverness” and the answer is:

It is the correct way to phrase the question when the answer is “The opening semi-rhetorical question posed in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand.”

Alyssa, you’re in third place with $3000, what is your response?

Who is John Galt?

No, I’m sorry, that is incorrect. And what did you wager? $3000. That puts you at zero.

Our reigning champion, Barney, is in second place with $11500. Barney, what is your response?

What is “Who is John Galt?”

Again, I’m sorry, that is incorrect. And your wager? $11500. There seems to be some unwarranted confidence on the part of our contestants to be needlessly verbally clever, and that puts you down to zero as well.

Carl, you’re in first place with $14000. And your response?

What is “What is ‘Who is John Galt?’”

That is the correct answer. And your wager? $9001. That puts you at $23001 and you are today’s champion.

Thanks for viewing, everyone. Come back tomorrow!

Thanks JMike!

Search engines can give us a sense of the vast destructive power of a rampaging snowclone. A search for “is the new black” returns just over a million documents. I propose a Saffir-Simpson style scale for snowclonic power based on Google reach and associated cultural damage. For instance, Category One snowclones are not dangerous and generally reach no further than the speech of unimaginative mouth-breathers and bloggers. Prose and newscast copy are affected in a Category Two outbreak. A Cat Five snowclone can rip the tongues from unwary media figures and warp the cultural institutions of an entire generation.

I mention all this because I came across this dandy visualization today: is the new at thediagram.com. One small corner of which reads: asleep <= awake => sleep <= sex <= to text.

Note: points will deducted from Gryffindor House for any mentions of our new overlords in the comments.

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 turkey cock (also known as a African helmeted guineafowl) was so-called because it was at one time imported through Turkey. So the funny American bird might be called The Bird That Looks Like That Bird I Know From Back Home That We Used To Buy From Those People in Turkey. Which is mercifully abbreviated to: turkey.

Okay, that’s easy enough. Polysemy is the word that applies here, and it happens all the time. It refers to the situation when the same word has different meanings, and it’s particularly interesting when there is a non-obvious connection between the two meanings that has been obscured by time.

It’s a Bohemian coffee shop.
We are going Dutch.
Would you care for some Scotch?
I’ll get out the good china.
I would like a Danish.
I am a Danish (cf. Ich bin ein Berliner)

But the really entertaining thing about the turkey is that it is some kind of champion polyseme. The word for turkey in Portuguese is peru. The French word is dinde (from d’Inde, meaning “from India”). The Turkish word for turkey is hindi. What is it about this bird that makes place names stick to it so thoroughly? Is there a reason why birds we eat get place names (Rhode Island reds, Cornish game hens) whereas birds we don’t eat get descriptive names (red-headed woodpeckers, yellow-rumped warblers)? And finally, is turkey an instance of metonymous polysemy or not?

I got launched onto this delightful topic by an entertaining and widely-cited article, How Turkey Got Its Name by Giancarlo Casale. It’s well worth reading.

(The picture shown here is a Meleagris gallopavo that started visiting my front yard last fall. You can just make out my daughter peeking out of our living room window.)

If you can’t remember the scene, watch this brilliant example of dynamic typography.

Oh, but first:

Now here’s the scene, as rendered by Jarratt Moody (and as seen at Motionographer): Say What Again.

If you’re in the mood for something more sedate and work-safe, here’s a nifty animated poem delivered as a typographical ballet: Lost. It’s quite wide because it’s designed to display on three large separate monitors. It was created by the Dutch studio Re*Nascent (and once again, I first saw it on Motionographer).