June 26, 2007
International Linguistic Silliness
I find the subtle differences between American English and British English endlessly fascinating. Leaving aside the obvious divergences, as in spelling and slang terms, I'm intrigued by the ways that Standard English words have acquired different meanings and are used for different purposes in the two branches of the language.
I bring this up because of a BBC headline on the Senate's recent re-consideration of the big immigration bill. The headline is "US Senate Revives Migration Plan". The intention of the headline writer is clear, and I suppose the British use Migration to mean much what we mean when we discuss Immigration, but still the use of the term has a weird connotation to a speaker of American English. I tend to think of Migration in terms of what animals do when they move long distances. "The Senate reached a compromise on the Migration Bill today; foreign guest workers will be permitted into the United States during the warm summer months, but must migrate to sunnier tropical climes when the bitter cold of northern winters looms."
My other favorite dicordant Britishism is the term "Redundancies." Redundancy has no special significance to Americans, and we tend to think of it only in terms of its standard denotation of duplicating other functions. You might speak of a redundant system in engineering or a redundant argument in a discussion. In England, though, "Redundancies" carries the same meaning as the American phrase "Lay-offs," large-scale firings that are not directly the result of malfeasance on the part of the worker but that are instead caused by larger macroeconomic trends.
Of course, "Redundancies," in the British sense, is a euphemism, the kind that passive-aggressive managers devise in the hopes that if the word used to tell someone they're fired is nice enough the worker might forget that they've just lost their job. "It's not that you're a bad worker, you see, it's just that, well, you're kind of redundant. The firm would love to keep employing you, as would I, but, well, through no fault of your own, your function is already done by somebody else. Completely our mistake. An over-hiring problem, really. Best of luck to you, though. Security will escort you out."
What's interesting is when the euphemistic sense of the word doesn't apply at all, which can leave someone unfamiliar with the term a bit confused. "The Thistlebottom Construction Company closed its door for the last time today, as trying economic times and a dearth of new construction starts forced it into bankruptcy. The firm's closure created 600 redundancies." It makes no sense when read literally; if nobody's working at Thistlebottom at all anymore, how can anyone be redundant? I suppose, if one wishes to get metaphysical about it, one could argue that now that it no longer exists the Thistlebottom Construction Company is in the business of doing nothing. Since there are a great slew of non-persons available at Thistlebottom to do Nothing, any actual persons employed there to do nothing would be redundant. On the other hand, one could argue that Thistlebottom is now in the business of Not Existing. While non-persons are superlative at the job of not existing, actual employees have a much more difficult time of it. While the actual persons would not be necessary, insofar as they are not advancing Thistlebottom's primary business activity of non-existence, they can't honestly be said to be redundant.
The question boils down, then to whether Thistlebottom is an ethereal entity in the business of doing nothing, or a non-entity in the business of not-existing. The question is intractable, so we must assume both that Thistlebottom exists and that it does not. This is known in Business Law as Schrödinger's Firm.
Posted by Zach at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2007
Vice President Cheney: Mixer of Metaphors
The defense attorney for Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame leak trial has just released a hand-written note, composed by Vice President Dick Cheney, about a meeting the Vice President had with Libby. The note says, in part,
"not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."
One either sticks one's neck out (readying it for the axe) or one throws oneself into the meat grinder. Sticking one's neck into the meatgrinder is very difficult unless one either a. sticks one's head in first (in which case, having your neck in the meat grinder is the least on one's worries) b. sticks one's body in first (same difficulty as above) or c. first separates one's neck from one's head and one's body (why?). The Vice President should pick one metaphor and stick with it. This linguistic flip-flopping should not be tolerated among our political elite.
Posted by Zach at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2006
Graffiti at the Met
I went to the bathroom during the first intermission at tonight's performance of Rigoletto by the Metropolitan Opera Company. All of the urinals were occupied, and even though all I had to do was pee I decided I'd rather wait for a stall than wait until the requisite number of urinals were abandoned for me to properly take my place (keeping in mind the essential one-urinal buffer zone). I'm glad I did. Inside the door to the stall I occupied was a sign that originally read "Please do not throw paper towels in the bowl." Somebody had defaced the sign by adding "to" after "in," so that the sign was now grammatically correct: "Please do not throw paper towels INTO the bowl." Upon exiting the stall I quickly surveilled the others around me; they each had the same sign, but only mine had been corrected, indicating that it was the work of some vigilante grammarian and not some Met-wide policy of cheap correction. To whoever you are, you Zorro of prepositions, wherever you may be, I salute you!
Posted by Zach at 12:50 AM | Comments (2)
March 07, 2006
Entropy
I have a linguistics question: how did Latin get so structured and formalistic? Actually, my question is a bit more general than that; as others have pointed out, a lot of ancient languages tend to be very highly structured. I'm curious about how they got that way.
To elaborate: Latin (and, based on Dianna's comments, Sanskrit) involves a large number of fairly complex rules, but those rules are pretty universally applied. Your verbs have to be conjugated to match the person and number of the subject, your nouns and adverbs have to be declined to match their function in the sentence. There are rules of pronunciation and accent that are universal, though nuanced, and that can result in the pronunciation of a word shifting as you conjugate/decline it. But here's the trick: There's a big messy mass of rules to remember, but if you remember the rules and how to apply them, you can work your way through just about anything. The exceptions are pretty few. Spelling, for instance, is universal. The same set of letters always make the same sounds, and if you know how a word sounds, you know how to spell it.
Compare this to English, which is essentially just one giant pile of exceptions. There are a few rules-of-thumb, but even these can't be relied upon ("I before E except after C. Or in Neighbor or Weigh where the 'ie' sound is "ay.' And also 'Weird.'") You can't rely on a pronunciation to know how a word is spelled, and you can't rely on spelling to know how a word is pronounced (Compare "Union" to "Untie").
But English is sort of a special case; modern English is the result of an enjambment of different languages over the course of thousands of years (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French, and then modern attempts to rationalize and modernize the languge). But even so, other modern languages are similarly unstructured when compared with the ancients. A lot retain conjugation, but few retain declensions. Many still identify three genders for nouns, while others have cut down to two, and others (English, in one of its more admirable qualities) don't bother assigning arbitrary sexes to inanimate objects and concepts at all.
So it seems like there's been a general linguistic move away from rigidly-structured rule-based languages and towards more ad-hoc, informal arrangements. And it's pretty easy to understand why. People need to communicate regardless of your fancy "rules," and they'll go ahead and do it even if they do it wrong. The more complex the rules, and thus the more education required to speak the language properly, the more likely vernacular simplifications become. Granted, there will be socialization towards these complex rules based in the fact that people can absorb them from daily life and they become second nature, but this same socialization will facilitate the spread of useful simplifications. As the variants multiply, people eventually end up speaking a language that is no longer recognizable. This language won't be as structured as the old one because it's the result of convenient alterations made by thousands of amateur linguists as necessity required.
So, yeah. The whole point of this is to say language used to be highly structured, now it's much more loose and disorganized, and it's very easy to understand how things moved that way. But here's my question: How did Latin (and Sanskrit, and others) get so highly-structured to begin with? A move from more organization to less organization makes intuitive sense. But where did the high levels of organization come from? Latin was not divinely ordained. Who, exactly, decided that adding a vowel after another vowel makes the first vowel short?
Of course, it could be that Latin (and others) just present the illusion of order to the modern learner. It could be that we're only getting the very highly-educated sources, the folks who are in a position to have learned all of the elaborate rules. Further, it's quite possible that the rules they follow are, themselves, artificial constructs that don't reflect the actual ad-hoc language that people spoke. Some unknown guardian of the Latin language, perhaps, took a look at the mass of informal arrangements that made up the language, invented a lot of descriptive rules of thumb, and these rules were promulgated and reinforced among the elite. The descriptive rules likely cut corners and left out exceptions, but they became the basis for written Latin, and in turn written Latin has become our source for How Latin Was.
So, um. Any other explanations? Were ancient languages really so formal and structured, or do we merely think they were in retrospect? And if they were, how did they get that way? It makes sense for languages to become less structured, so how did these highly-structured languages come into being and become popular among the masses?
Posted by Zach at 06:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Latin: Very Useful
I scoff at those who insist that learning Latin isn't useful. Scoff! Thanks to today's self-guided lesson, if I ever find myself transported back in time to ancient Rome and selling myself as a prostitute on the docks, I now know how to say "Hello, sailor!" in Latin. It's "Salve, nauta!" (pronounced "SAL-way, NOW-tuh")
As for the lesson itself, I got most of the way through the exercises ("Sententiae Antique"). I was quite pleased with myself for translating the phrase "Without philosophy we often go astray and pay the penalty" into Latin (I believe the best translation is "Sine philosophia, saepa erramus et poenam damus"). Then I decided to call it quits for the night when confronted with translating "If your land is strong, nothing terrifies the sailors and you ought to praise your great fortune." I'm fuzzy enough about proper word order with conjuctions, and I don't even know where to begin with a conditional thrown in. Something like "Si patria tua valere est, nihil nautas terret et debes magnam fortunam laudare." I think. I'm probably completely wrong there, though.
Latin Conjugation of the Day: Basiare (To Kiss)
Basio (I Kiss)
Basias (You Kiss)
Basiat (He/She/It Kisses)
Basiamus (We Kiss)
Basiatis (Y'All Kiss)
Basiant (They Kiss)
Latin Declension of the Day: Mensa (Table)
Mensa (A Table)
Mensae (Of a Table)
Mensae (To a Table)
Mensam (At a Table)
Mensa (On a Table) (And that's a long "a" at the end, as opposed to the short "a" in the base form)
Mensa (Oh, Table!)
Mensae (The Tables)
Mensarum (Of the Tables)
Mensis (To the Tables)
Mensas (At the Tables)
Mensis (On the Tables)
Mensae (Oh, Tables!)
Today's unadulterated quote from a Roman author: "Philosophia est ars vitae" (Pronounced "pil-aw-SAW-pi-uh est ars WEE-tai") It's by Cicero, and means "Philosophy is the art of life."
Posted by Zach at 01:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 03, 2006
Quick Poll
If I were to say to you, "Civilization is a fun game," would that raise your hackles, grammatically-speaking?
Posted by Zach at 10:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 26, 2006
I Prophesied the Prophecy
Huh. You learn something new every day. A prediction of the future is a "prophecy," with a C. To issue a prophecy is to "prophesy," with an S. So the first is a noun, the second a verb. Interesting. Ish.
Posted by Zach at 03:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 03, 2006
To Boldly Split Infinitive That None Have Split Before
I'm working on (yet another) cover letter, and would like advice on a phrasing. Which sounds better:
"...I would love to have the chance to develop my abilities further..."
or
"...I would love to have the chance to further develop my abilities..."
?
Posted by Zach at 12:02 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 05, 2006
A Stupid Little Grammar Oddity
The general convention in fiction is to write in the past tense, e.g. "John walked into a bar." But the convention in literary criticism when writing about the action in a piece of fiction is to write in the present tense, e.g. "Midway through the novel, John walks into a bar."
I suppose this makes sense; from the perspective of the narrator of a piece of fiction, the action has already happened and the narrator is describing it retrospectively. But for the literary critic, it seems as though the action happens as you read it. Although by the time the critic writes, it's already happened, so perhaps it should be past tense. And from the perspective of the reader, the action of the book hasn't happened yet. A literary critic could, in defiance of all laws of grammar, write his descriptions in the future tense: "If you read this book, midway through John will walk into a bar." But that's just silly.
What's more silly, though, is the convention in historical writing. In history writing, everything is in the past tense, no matter what. This leads to some awkward and imprecise phrases. For example, suppose you wanted to summarize Oliver Wendell Holmes's Memorial Day Address. The convention in literary criticism would be to write:
"In his Memorial Day Address, Holmes argues that war is a force that gives life meaning."
This seems somewhat inappropriate, but if you've grown accustomed to reading literary criticism you're used to long-dead authors being drawn into the present tense. The historian would write the sentence this way:
"In his Memorial Day Address, Holmes argued that war was a force that gave life meaning."
Now Holmes has been put in his proper place in the past, but so, unfortunately, have his sentiments. Holmes wasn't making a historical argument; he was making a philosophical statement. He intended to say that war would give life meaning as much in 2006 as it did in 1884. Moreover, we can't tell, reading the statement, whether Holmes even meant that it gave life meaning in 1884; the sentence can be plausibly read as saying "War once gave life meaning, but it does not any longer." Unfortunately, this is the proper way to write the sentence in a history paper. Absolutely everything that isn't a quote goes in the past tense. I would argue that the best way to write the sentence would be:
"In his Memorial Day Address, Holmes argued that war is a force that gives life meaning."
This puts Holmes in the past, and indicates that Holmes intended no restrictions on his meaning with respect to time. Still, the sentence feels wrong when said out loud, thanks to the mixing of tenses.
This is probably why literary critics keep things in the present tense. It sounds better and avoids at least some confusion. And eventually you stop noticing how odd it is to read about ancient Greek authors writing in the present tense.
Posted by Zach at 03:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 03, 2005
More word nobbling
I was thinking about this subject last night, and what should I find this morning but a good example of exactly the problem I wished to complain about? This comes from an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter:
I think our course with the Iraqi forces verges on the absurd: It is all about us training them. The question arises: Training them to do what? If it is a matter of knowing how to use a Kalishnikov in order to kill other people, I think most military-aged Iraqis don’t need our training. If it is a question of training Iraqis so they behave and act like American soldiers, that’s well and good. Except that is not what is needed in the circumstances we will be bequeathing them. What is needed is motivation based on loyalty to the powers that be. That will mean loyalty to various Shiite militias with a clerical connotation and loyalty to the two major Kurdish formations. Plus, perhaps eventually, loyalty to some Sunni militias based on a tribal allegiance. The motivation is not going to be created by American sergeants who are -- quote, unquote -- "training" them how to behave like American soldiers.
My problem is with the scare quotes. Scare quoting, for those who don't know, is the practice of putting a word or phrase in quotation marks to indicate something akin to sarcasm or skepticism. You can see it in the last line of the quoted paragraph.
Now, you'll note that this example contains both scare quotes and the verbal scare-quote signal, "quote, unquote." I feel this is an error on the part of the transcriber; in addition to cleaning up any ums and ahs, as well as various ineloquencies in phrasing, the author ought to have also removed the "quote, unquote" and just put quotes around training, since the signal "quote, unquote" is essentially just a remark on how the ensuing word should be perceived if it were in writing. As it stands, it makes the speaker look silly.
Nonetheless: I have a strong aversion to scare quotes precipitated in part by their abuse. While grading papers for a class at Berkeley I discovered that students have an alarming tendency to use scare quotes in formal papers, even the ones who stringently avoid other varieties of informal language. This is a rule that, I feel, ought to be hammered into students starting from their first courses on composition: Scare quotes are an informal stylistic technique that should always be avoided in formal writing.
I actually had a professor for a seminar who was asked, as we prepared to write our final papers, about the use of scare quotes in writing. He bristled a bit and told us that scare quotes are never acceptable. He went on to point out, correctly, I think, that scare quotes are essentially unnecessary. Most of the time you can remove the quotes and make no other change, and the sentence conveys exactly the same meaning in context. Take the passage above. The entire paragraph is about how Brzezinski thinks the training is fundamentally doomed to failure. Scare quoting the word "training" at the end does nothing to enhance his overall meaning or convey any additional nuance. The professor's advice was that if you can't convey the point of a given paragraph without using scare quotes the solution is to re-write the paragraph to convey your ideas better rather than to rely on the implications of scare quoting a word to make your point for you.
Further, even looking at just the sentence by itself, out of context, you can convey the exact meaning of the scare quotes by adding a few words. Take out the scare quotes and add "Alleged" or "So-called" before the word you want to scare quote. You now convey all the meaning you intended without the use of vulgar informalisms.
That professor's rant had such a profound impact upon me that I now refuse to use scare quotes in any context. Not in formal writing, not in informal writing, and certainly not when speaking to people. Verbal and hand-signal scare quotes annoy me to no end, for different reasons. The scare quote was invented to convey in writing a verbal emphasis that conveyed an additional meaning. If you can't convey the fact that you're being sarcastic or skeptical with your tone of voice, you don't deserve to be using sarcasm at all.
And now, a bonus rant on language: You will note my use of sarcasm in the preceding paragraphs. This represents surrender on my part. Sarcasm, as used above, is mis-used. Sarcasm comes from the Greek, where the root word means, "to tear flesh." Sarcasm, according to the OED, Merriam-Webster On-Line, and Dictionary.com, is a cruel and cutting remark. Sarcasm is defined by its meanness and wit. It is not necessarily a word or phrase indicating that the speaker actually means the opposite of what they are saying. That's verbal irony (as distinguished from dramatic or tragic irony). One can be sarcastic without being ironic and ironic without being sarcastic.
Some examples:
Person A: "I spit in that guy's coffee because he didn't give me a tip."
Ironic Reply: Person B: "That'll be a pleasant surprise." (Note that this remark isn't really cruel. It's not attacking anyone, but merely makes an ironic statement of fact).
Sarcastic Reply: "I see that forgiveness is not among your virtues." (Cutting, and every word intended to mean its dictionary definition).
Sarcastic and Ironic Reply: "How magnanimous of you." (Cutting, hostile, and "magnanimous" is clearly intended to mean the opposite of its dictionary definition).
Note that, as the various definitions make clear, verbal irony and sarcasm are often closely linked, but they need not be. Often, however, when people say "I was being sarcastic," what they really mean is "I was being verbally ironic." But, as I have discovered, "I was being verbally ironic," is both more difficult to say than "I was being sarcastic," and elicits quizzical reactions that require lengthy explanations such as this one. I have therefore succumbed to popular usage and use the word "sarcastic" when I mean "verbally ironic."
Posted by Zach at 03:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 20, 2005
Word nobbling
I just noticed this in a Washington Post article, and it annoyed me enough to post about it.
My younger sister told me a story about visiting the home of friends when the teenage daughter's date arrived. The daughter came downstairs in a T-shirt that read, "Strippers do it with poles." The parents seemed nonplussed; it was the boy who said to them, "You're letting her go out of the house in that ?"
This passage utterly misuses a word. Not that the contents of the article don't annoy me, but the misuse of the English language is what has me on a tear at the moment. Can you spot the mistake?
In the above quote, the author misuses the word "nonplussed." The sense in which they have used nonplussed there is "Ambivalent, not caring one way of the other, not having particularly strong feelings on a subject." This is the way you generally hear nonplussed used. It is completely wrong. Nonplussed does not, under any circumstances, ever, mean ambivalent. I imagine the incorrect meaning comes from a mistake in puzzling out the word's meaning (Non-plussed, without plusses, that is, not positive, meaning not caring. So nonplussed must mean not caring, or not positive, but also not really negative) coupled with frequent misuse.
Nonplussed means, and you can check the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Websters, or Dictionary.com to back me up, "to be at a loss for what to say, think, or do. Bewildered, confused, or perplexed." One can understand how so many people get the wrong sense of what the word mean; there are a lot of situations where, in the context of a sentence, describing someone as nonplussed, if you don't know what the word means, could equally well mean that they are confused or that they are ambivalent, since in either case it means that they won't act. And, as mentioned above, the word seems to lend itself by its construction to meaning something like "neutral" or "ambivalent." Nonetheless: that's not what it means. When the girl came down the stairs in her lewd t-shirt, the author almost certainly did not mean to say that the parent were shocked into utter speechlessness. She meant to say that they just didn't care, in which case nonplussed is the wrong word to describe them.
Posted by Zach at 07:58 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
November 06, 2005
A random thought upon a familiar subject
Should a female masturbator be called a masturbatrix?
UPDATE: I just looked up Masturbatrix on Google and got 31,900 hits. I'm not as clever as I thought.
UPDATE 2: Actually, looking at some of the links, they don't seem to be quite what I had in mind. That is, they seem to be combining Masturbation on the part of a third party with a dominatrix who is in control of that masturbation. This is in keeping with the previously observed phenomenon of attaching dominance connotations to the suffix "-trix," when the only meaning that should be attached is "person who is female."
Posted by Zach at 04:31 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
October 20, 2005
Lauda me!
Well, contra my previous post, I've decided to take the first tentative steps in learning Latin. I justify this on the grounds that we use a lot of Latin in law school, learning the intricacies of Latin grammar will help me with English composition, and I'll be able to use it to read Classical and Medieval texts in their original language.
So I went to the Butler Library the other day and checked out the second edition of Wheelock's Latin. Interesting side note: It's published by Barnes and Noble. That is, this isn't a recent "Barnes & Noble Edition" tied to the brick-and-mortar bookstore chain. Before they were a chain, Barnes & Noble was a small book publisher and had a large store here in New York. Frederic M. Wheelock had his Latin primer published by them in the mid-50s. So, yeah. I suppose when I said this sidenote was "interesting," I meant it in the Mark Twain Date Game/Historical Term of Art sense of "Interesting."
Dianna has commented previously that one of the joys of learning Sanskrit is that the practice sentences tend to revolve around war and death. So far Wheelock's Latin seems similar. Wheelock draws upon classical sources for practice sentences and passages. This makes sense for teaching ancient languages, and I imagine Dianna's Sankrit books do the same. People don't learn Latin for travel purposes; there's seldom a need to invite somebody over for a party in Latin, nor do you need to tell somebody, in Latin, that the bureau next to the bookcase belongs to your Uncle Raoul. Since there's no practical conversational need for ancient languages, the assumption is you're using it to read ancient literature, so why not dive in to that and have you working with ancient literature from the start? This excites me because my absolute favorite parts of German were the (all too rare) times when we actually read German poems or pieces of literature. I believe this may have happened twice in my three years of German.
So Wheelock works with ancient texts. I think I was sold on learning Latin the moment I started the first chapter and discovered that the first verbs I would be learning to conjugate, in fact the first words of Latin I would learn at all, were laudare (to praise) and monere (to advise). The Latin practice sentences, thus far, seems to be focused on politics and stirring oratories, which suits me well. Labor me vocat (Work calls me), Mone me si erro (advise me if I am in error). Laudas me; culpant me (You praise me; they blame me).
Interesting thing about Latin (so far): At least for the present active indicative form of verbs, the subject and the verb of a sentence are rolled into one word. That is, when I say "laudo" it means "I praise" all by itself. There's no need for the pronoun I. So when you conjugate a verb you're including the subject with it. I make no representation for other tenses, voices, or modes, and I'm well aware that Latin is a tangled mass of tenses and declensions, so it's quite possible that this rolling-the-subject-into-the-verb thing doesn't apply universally, but I still thought it interesting.
Also interesting: We tend to vastly mispronounce Latin. By cross-referencing it with Greek, we have a pretty good idea of how Latin is pronounced, and most people pronounce it incorrectly. T is always hard, it never makes a "sh" sound as in "Caption." "V" sounds like a W, always. There's no such thing as the modern English V sound. C is always hard, as in "Caption." There's no soft "C," as in "Ice," "CH" is pronounced kh, not ch as in "Ratchet," and CC is pronounced as two Ks in a row, not ch as in "Focaccia." "AE" is pronounced like the English word "Eye." "I" at the beginning of a word before a vowel is pronounced like an English consonant y. Some implications of this: Cicero, often pronounced "sis-er-oh" was actually pronounced "Kee-kehr-oh." Iulius Caesar (his name was spelled with an I, not a J) would have said his name "Yoo-lay-us Kai-sahr" (and now you know where the German Kaisers got their title from), and when he spoke of his conquest of Gaul, he would not have said "Vay-nee Vee-dee Vee-chee," but rather "Way-nee Wee-dee Wee-kee." Finally, when you appeal to the Supreme Court to review your case, you file a writ of "Kayr-tee-oh-ra-ree" (Certiorari) not, as lawyers now pronounce it, "Shur-shoor-are-eye."
And that's enough Latin nobbling for now!
Posted by Zach at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 30, 2005
Trix
It is a curious fact of modern English usage that the only word currently in common use with the suffix "-trix" is dominatrix (I think; if anyone would like to correct me I'd be happy to hear it). Most other words that once used the suffix have now been shifted in popular usage to the masculine suffix "-tor." This is unfortunate, because "-trix" is such a fun suffix.
The upshot of this is that, for students entering law school (and here I am generalizing to all law students from my own anecdotal experience) who are now faced with a lot of words in common legal usage that end in "-trix," there is a tendancy to ascribe to them undeserved connotations relating to the word "dominatrix." Some favorties among those I've encountered so far: Administratrix (a female administrator), Testatrix (a female testator, or person who makes a will), Executrix (a female executor). All of which create in my mind a vision of women acting in their professional and legal capacity, embellished with S&M touches.
And now, a nerdy tangent: It is a well-known article of Dork Lore that in the Star Wars universe Darth Vader's personal Super Star Destroyer is called the Executor. This is a very cool sounding name (it's pronounced "ecks-ECK-you-TOR"), which is no doubt what Mr. Lucas, or whomever, had in mind when naming it. Nonetheless, an Executor is the person who administers an estate following someone's death. You can derive a contrived explanation for how this is a metaphor for Darth Vader's role, or maybe the empire as custodian of the estate of the now-dead Old Republic, but I would suggest that Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that Mr. Lucas had "Executioner" in mind, decided "Executor" sounded cooler, and went with the latter without thinking too hard. So here we have Darth Vader, towering over the bridge of his flagship, the Executor. "I am Darth Vader, Dark Lord of Probate! Sinister Master of Wills and Estates!"
Posted by Zach at 10:20 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 13, 2005
On the Importance of Being Careful with your Qualifying Language
My Civil Procedure professor, just now:
"Well, you know, we're all sort of like human beings, here."
Posted by Zach at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 29, 2005
Wir sollen ein Stadtbummel machen.
It's an oft-made point that the German language contains a lot of really handy words for which there is no ready English equivalent. Part of this comes from the fact that Germans are flexible about creating new compound words by ramming old words together. As a sidenote, my two favorite of those compound words are Krankenschwester (literally "Sick Sister," but actually the German word for nurse) and Bleistiftspitzer (pencil sharpener).
Most of the words English-speakers pine over come from the field of sociology, where the Germans did some pioneering work. Frequently mentioned favorites include Schadenfreude and Schmerzangst. I'd like to add the more commonplace but much more useful Stadtbummel.
Stadtbummel literally translates as "city walk." It's how I spend most of my weekends when I live in a city. The closest English colloquialism would be "walk around the block," but even that doesn't quite capture it. A Stadtbummel is a walking trip with no greater purpose than to be walking in the city. You might have a direction, or some goal, but your primary reason for going out is walking and experiencing the city itself.
I had a chance to make a Stadtbummel today (the grammar gets annoying when trying to plunk Stadtbummel in English sentences, which is why an English equivalent is needed). I had seen a neat advertisement down on East 60th street just off Lexington while wandering around yesterday, and I knew a friend would get a kick out of it. I had a three hour break between classes, so I grabbed my camera and hoofed my way down Broadway to Columbus Circle, then over to Lexington.
En route, I discovered a store that actually sells bulk grains at semi-reasonable prices. It's not Berkeley Bowl, but I'll settle, and they don't require a membership fee or work hours. I think I missed it in my previous gambols down Broadway because the name of the place is "Uptown Whole Foods." The national Whole Foods chain has begun to infiltrate New York, so I must have previously dismissed it as a branch of the upscale high-priced realtor. Uptown Whole Foods is a New York supermarket, which means it's small and somewhat expensive and the selection is poor, but it has quinoa and millet and kasha and organic fruit and it's an easy walk down and a subway ride back.
The whole trip took about 2 1/2 hours; An hour and a half to walk down, half an hour to get lunch and look around the area a bit, and then a half an hour to take the subway home. But the point of the trip was in getting there, not what I was actually doing. I spend a good chunk of my free time on these wanderings, and I wish I had an easy way of telling people how I spent my Sunday without prefacing my remarks with a lecture on the German language.
Posted by Zach at 07:06 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
August 26, 2005
On the quality of being "Interesting"
I must preface my remarks by giving credit where due; this insight is not my own. I heard this discussed first by David Henkin, a history professor at Berkeley (whose father, coincidentally enough, teaches law here at Columbia)
It is a peculiar but incontrovertible fact that the word "Interesting," as used in historical writing, and indeed most academic writing, when practically applied means the exact opposite of what it means in regular parlance. That is to say, we use the word "interesting" to denote something unusual or worthy of comment. In most cases, however, to the layman reading or listening in, we can substitute the word "boring" and attain far more accuracy and precision. I offer the following example, from a thesis I submitted in the Legal Studies department:
"This contrast between the commonly accepted role of constitutional courts and Holmes's formulation of the Living Constitution raises an interesting question."
Now, the more accurate re-statement:
"This contrast between the commonly accepted role of constitutional courts and Holmes's formulation of the Living Constitution raises a boring question."
I have found almost no cases, in reading academic papers, when making the above substitution did not, if I am being truthful with myself, make the statement far more accurate and honest than it was originally.
Posted by Zach at 06:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Quibbling over Semantics
As a law student, there's nothing I love better than quibbling over semantics. In light of that, I present the following argument: Something's been bothering me ever since I moved here. Now, don't get me wrong, New York is great. It's great for selection and ready availability of goods. It has great public transportation, it has great nightlife. A bit expensive, but what're you going to do? That having been said, there's one thing that New York is profoundly not great at: Having a populace that knows the proper preposition to attach to queues. To put it bluntly: One does not stand on a line, one stands in a line.
Those who have not been to New York or met New Yorkers fresh out of their home environs may not be aware of this, but New Yorkers, when they refer to the act of being within a queue, refer to it as "Standing on line." As in, "I'm standing on line at the theater," or "I was standing on line at the check-out counter." That is, they use the phrase "on line" where everyone else uses the phrase "in line." Moreover, if you speak to born-and-bred New Yorkers, they don't even see what the problem is. That is, I've spoken to people who were as puzzled by the phrase "standing in line" as non-New Yorkers are by "standing on line." They think it is the natural and proper way to express the concept.
I would submit that the correct preposition in this case is "in," not "on." I won't make the mundane point that my position is backed up by the majority of the English speaking world; just because vast swaths of the country and certain presidents I could name pronounce it Nukeular doesn't make it correct. Rather, we must examine the two options carefully. Both tend to imply a state of being contained within a conveyance or other thing larger than the member who is entering it. However, On tends to imply a state of riding on top of, of being in some sense above the object. In implies being contained within that object. When speaking of lines, the line extends neither above nor below its members. They are contained within it. When they leave, they have gotten out of it; they are no longer subsumed to the line. If there were in fact a physical line upon the ground that formed the guidepoint for the queue, then I could accept standing on line, as you are physically on top of the line. But in common use there is no such line on the ground, and this rendering is made nonsensical. I may as well be standing under line, referring to an invisible strand suspended above the heads of those queued up.
That having been said, I'm trying to adapt to saying that I am "standing on line," both because it helps me to blend in better and integrate to my new home, and because "standing on line"is one of the last of the few charming regionalisms that have gradually vanished as our language has been rendered more and more uniform. Nonetheless, when not in New York City, I will proudly stand in line, and I wish it to be known, henceforth and forever, that while I may adopt the local vernacular, I do not by any means consider it correct.
Posted by Zach at 04:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack