That Thing

It's time for another misguided article in the New York Times about language and how terrible Americans are at it.

This go-around the subject is the @ symbol and what the heck we're supposed to call it. What most of us (most of us Americans) call it, of course, is "the at symbol." The reason for this puzzles the piece's author, which seems strange. I mean, wouldn't you think a journalist could spare fifteen seconds to look it up if he didn't already know? It's called "at" not because it's now most often used in email addresses to signify that So-and-so can be found at, say, the New York Times, but because it's short for "at the rate of" and it was originally used to indicate the rate at which something was charged: 2 lbs. of onions @ $0.69/lb. (Did he actually not know this?)

Anyway, back to the part that really bugs me. After going through the adorable names other languages use for @—in Danish it's elephant trunk A, in Hungarian it's worm, and so on—and being reminded that Americans are a bunch of dopes with no vision, no sense of wonder, we get this pronouncement from a real-live linguist:

"It just doesn't seem like it's a habit of ours as English speakers. If you want to go for some sort of very, very general cultural metaphor, we go for function while the other so-called artistic cultures take an immediately holistic view. Instead of 'What do you do and who are you?' it's more, 'What do you appear to be?'"

Where do you even start with this kind of thing?

First off, "Americans go for function" isn't a metaphor. It's a generalization. 

Second, how is it more "holistic" to name things according to their appearance rather than their function? Or was that word chosen only because it would let her fondle a pet prejudice? I think it's clear that she meant those other cultures (the "artistic" ones!) are clever and cute and charming, and boring-old Americans go for the obvious answer.

(The piece also mentions that quotation marks are called "goose eyes" in Danish and "little paws" in Belorussian. To which I say: Now, hold on. Are you telling me Danes and Belorussians never use more prosaic terms to name quotation marks? I don't buy it for one second.)

Even if we ignore the astounding fecundity of American slang and jargon and confine ourselves to typographical symbols and numbers, we easily see that the piece's thesis is absurd. Here are some "holistic" terms English-speakers use for numbers and typographical symbols:

0  Goose egg
† ‡  Dagger and double dagger
!   Bang
…  Dot-dot-dot (not very clever, no, but also not the functional flavor of boring mentioned in the piece)
“”  Curly quotes (then there are also smart quotes and dumb quotes)
•  Bullet
/  Slash (not something functional, like demarcator)
⌘  (the Apple command key symbol) called clover, pretzel, etc. 
And what about dingbat?

None of these are "functional." They all describe the appearance of the symbols—sometimes playfully—and thus put the lie to the idea that Americans are a bunch of by-the-numbers halfwits. And remember, this is looking only at symbols. Imagine the rich—and virtually endless—stream of jargon from sports, medicine, the military, government, and every other trade, profession, hobby, discipline, and subculture you can name. 

This linguistic abandon and invention was something H. L. Mencken hammered hard in his The American Language, from 1919.

[T]he American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. [...] The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that “the creative powers of language are even now not extinct.” 

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech.

And then there's this:

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. […] It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. […] One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English.Bill-board is better than hoarding. Officeholder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.

But that's only H. L. Mencken talking.

You know, it's practically a law: Every generalization about a particular language variety or its speakers is completely wrong. It's true: we call @ by something pretty darn functional. What's your point?

Addendum: I realize now that I might have climbed onto my hobby horse a little prematurely. The piece didn't make a distinction between Americans and other English-speakers. It made a (spurious) distinction between English-speakers and the speakers of other languages. All that Mencken stuff up there is still true—and still worth reading—but not quite as super-duper relevant as I had thought.

Word Watch: conserve

Yesterday (9/01/15), I was listening to NPR (infinite geyser of weird pronunciations!), and I heard a correspondent pronounce the word conserve as "conzerve." Repeatedly. It was in a story about the sage grouse and the Endangered Species Act, but that's probably not relevant. Because I'm filled with curiosity about Our World®, I started thinking about this. Was it just a tic, or can we say something more interesting about it?

Conserve is typically (as in, virtually always or maybe actually always) pronounced "conserve." On the surface, this word looks like it's composed of two morphemes (meaningful components): con + serve. After all, English is packed with words that start with con- (contain, conceal, control, confer, and on and on). Let's leave con- and conserve alone for a minute and look at other prefixes that appear to combine with other morphemes to make words in a similar way.

For instance, re-, pre-, and de-. Notice first that these prefixes can have easily understood, "transparent" meanings. re- (can) mean something like again or back, pre- (can) mean before, and de- (can) mean something like negate or rescind. Look what happens, though, when those prefixes are combined with certain one-syllable words starting with s:

re + side = reside
re + serve = reserve
re + sign = resign
re + sort = resort

pre + side = preside
pre + serve = preserve
(Why is there no presign or presort? Beats me.)

de + serve = deserve
de + sign = design
(Deside? Desort? Nope, I guess not.)

In each of these words, the verb that begins with an s-sound when the word stands alone begins with a z-sound when combined with these prefixes. Just like that strange "conzerve" above, right? Not so fast!

Reside, reserve, resign, and resort aren't always pronounced as "rezide," "rezerve," "rezign," and "rezort." When the prefix re- has its "transparent" meaning—that is, when the meaning of the whole word is an obvious, "mathematical" combination of the prefix and the verb—those verbs are pronounced with s-sounds, just like they are when the words stand alone as independent words.

That is, when reside means "to side something again" (or "to install siding again") it's pronounced "re+side" (with an s). When reserve means "to serve again" it's pronounced "re+serve" (with an s). When resign means "to sign again" it's pronounced "re+sign" (with an s). And when resort means "to sort again" it's pronounce "re+sort" (with an s). But in what sense does re- mean again in reside ("to live in")? Now that you mention it, in what sense does side mean side in that word? Where is the sense of signing in resign ("to step down from a position")? Where is the sense of serving in reserve ("to set aside")? They're not there. Those words only look like they're combinations of meaningful parts.

So! It's only when the prefix+verb combo has a meaning that can't be derived by looking at the meanings of its parts that the s-verbs are pronounced with z's. In other words, it's only where there's a distinction between a-word-made-by-combining-parts and a-word-that-only-looks-like-it's-a-combination-of-meaningful-parts that we can sometimes see those s-verbs pronounced with z's.

Let's return to "conzerve." It's clear to me that that word came about on the analogy of what happens to s-verbs when they're combined with prefixes like re-, pre-, and de-. But notice that con- (lacking as it does an easily understood, "transparent" meaning) doesn't lend itself to those tricky pairs (like pre+side vs preside, "to side something ahead of time" vs. "to supervise or lead proceedings"). There's no possible confusion between "conserve" and "conzerve," because con- doesn't really mean anything on its own. Notice also what kinds of things con- typically gets stuck onto. It often only appears to combine with verbs: contain, conceal, control, confer. Tain isn't an independent word. Nor are ceal, trol, and fer. Nor are many of the "words" con-'s cousin com- "attaches" to. Look at compel, compare, combine, compute. con-/com- just doesn't work the same way as re-, pre-, and de-.

And that's why "conzerve" is weird.

Update (9/11/15): I just heard (on NPR, naturally) "rezources." This appears to follow the story I tell above (except "resources" is a noun, so who knows?), where we expect to see a distinction between "resources" and "rezources." Even though the verb resource (meaning something other than "to source something again") would be pronounced "rezource," I still think the noun "rezource" is bizarre.

The S-Word and the Other N-Word

A few months ago, a news item caught my eye. It was about efforts to remove the word squaw from place names in Oregon. (Here's a list of proposed changes.) Similar efforts have gone on—and continue to go on—in other states.

For ages, before white people got to it, squaw wasn't a problematic word. It didn't refer to or have anything to do with copulation or defecation, for instance, the two things most likely to spawn euphemism as well as insult. It doesn't appear to have been a charged word.

According to my exhaustive* research, squaw can be traced back to a Proto-Algonquian word, *eθkweːwa (something like "ethkwaywa"), which meant woman. This developed into various forms in Proto-Algonquian's daughter languages, for instance iskwēw (Cree), xkwē (Lanape), ekwēwa (Shawnee), and ikwe (Ojibwe). And in Massachusett, the language the Europeans first made contact with in that part of the world, the cognate was squa. Oh, let's just go ahead and spell it squaw. This was first put into print in the early 1600s and was said to mean woman.

In time, when used by white people, squaw came to belong to a category of words we tend to find offensive—words that name female members of racial or ethnic groups. Because words like these—like negress and Jewess—are used within contexts of bigotry, misogyny, and racial hatred, they're all suspect, and they've fallen from favor. They now sound not only offensive but also archaic. They are dehumanizing, almost... zoological. It's hard to imagine even the most racist racist using them with a straight face, although I bet there are plenty who are game to try. In light of that, it's unsurprising that squaw would come to be offensive, even if it started life innocuously.

All of which makes me wish people argued against the word on those grounds. The case against squaw doesn't sound hard to make: it belongs to the category of racially defined gendered terms we have largely rejected, and I'm sure it had acquired an unsavory history as a racist, sexist slur. Instead, the arguments for ditching the word seem to involve falsehoods about the word's origins, and that's the part of the story that bugs me.

Apparently, squaw's humble beginnings were unremarkable until 1973, when Literature of the American Indian introduced the idea that the word is actually derived from the Mohawk word ojiskwa (or something like that), meaning vagina. Then, in 1992, a Native American activist told Oprah (!) that the word was Algonquian for vagina. The problem is that Mohawk isn't an Algonquian language. It's Iroquois. Algonquian and Iroquois are completely separate language families. (Picture Russian and Turkish and you'll see two languages from similarly different language families.) And the white people who first heard and recorded squaw were in contact with speakers of Algonquian languages. And still, if you ignore all that, all you're left with is... a coincidence. Two words in wholly different languages with similarish shapes and related meanings. That's not much to build a case on. It's not even circumstantial evidence. False friends, as they're called, are surprisingly common. Words that look alike don't always have a common origin. 

(You can pick any two languages and easily find loads of words that sound kind of similar and mean kind of similar things, even when the two languages have no historical or "genetic" connection. Let's do an experiment. I'm going to pick two languages from a list. Hang on. OK. Basque. That's interesting. Basque is an isolate, meaning it's not known to be related to any other language. To go with that, I picked Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken far away from Spain. You wouldn't expect to find many similarities, except for "cultural" terms like, say, telephone or taxi. So, after a few minutes with Google translate—of course this isn't authoritative; it's Google translate—I found a pair of false friends: Basque txakur and Bengali kukura, both meaning dog. Boy, is this case ever closed! A smashing success! Drinks for everyone!)

Regardless, this argument—that squaw is a crude, sexualized slur—is now so widely believed that it has taken on the kind of truth that only articles of faith enjoy. Regardless of its actual falseness, it has become true enough to render the word taboo. And so now, it has to go.

It reminds me of the controversy around "the other n-word" when it was used by an aide to the mayor of Washington, DC, in 1999.

As far as I can tell, the mayor's aide was guilty only of having a tin ear. True, the word he used has no racist pedigree, but how could anyone use it and not immediately hear within it a word that, to many of us, is unspeakable? The word niggardly—I have to admit that I'm uncomfortable even typing it—has been contaminated. You can mourn that, as the future-fearing language prigs usually do when word meanings shift and languages rub up against changing cultures. But it's not like we don't have other, perfectly serviceable words at our disposal for meeting the same purpose, ranging from the blunt to the flowery: cheap, stingy, tightfisted, miserly, penny-pinching, parsimonious, and penurious, to name only a few. I want to make sure this is very clear. I assume most English speakers don't even know this term. But, apart from the way the word sounds, it has nothing to do with that famous racist slur. The similarity is nothing but coincidence.

(In researching this piece, I found a Wikipedia article about the DC mayor's aide's use of the word—and many other peoples', too. Apparently, there was something in the air, and the word was thrown around—and objected to—like never before.)

No one will miss the other n-word. As rare as it was, it didn't even bring its own nuance to the table. Or, at least, none I'm aware of. Although it's an innocent bystander, lexical collateral damage, guilty only by association, I still say good riddance.

*I mean not exhaustive.

Ripped from the Headlines: Americans are lazy jerks

On p. 23 of today's (May 10, 2015) New York Times Magazine, we see the perfect expression of the kind of linguistic insecurity/chauvinism discussed in this blog post. In "How to Fake a British Accent" we are reminded that Americans are lazy (they "have particularly lazy tongue tips"), that Americans need to "clearly enunciate consonants," and that Americans "run words together." We also learn such bizarrities as the fact that "Americans speak with wide, almost grinlike mouths." (Could the dialect coach quoted in the piece simply be unfamiliar with the sight of people... smiling?)

First, this kind of generalization is (always) silly: Americans hold their mouths this way; Southerners speak slowly; Spanish-speakers always talk so fast! No. They don't. More important, I think, is the need to dispel the idea that American speech is the result of laziness. This has been common knowledge (that is, commonly believed but false) for a long time now.

(Remember the business about flaps in that NPR post linked to above? Most varieties of American English are more particular than the classic British "Received Pronunciation" English the thing in the Times Magazine is talking about. The phonological rules about all those t's, d's, and flaps depend on niceties that RP doesn't even notice. (USA! USA!) And you know what else? Those sounds in the middle of the word butter when spoken American-style aren't d's, you people who wrote the piece!)

Can we move past the idea that the British are the ones who naturally, innately, inevitably do language right? According to this piece, Brits even place an "infinitesimal space" around each word, as though each one were a precious bead on a chain. (How much do you want to bet a sound spectrograph would put the lie to that claim? Do people still use sound spectrographs?) Sorry, British people. You're just like the rest of us ugly clods—you run your words together, and you're stuck with the same imperfect equipment the riffraff use.