Category: Words Words Words

Weird little marks

I use a lot of apostrophes. And usually, I use them according to standard practice. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, “what would happen if I didnt?” Faulkner, Selby, McCarty, and Kelman get along fairly well without most of them. Lucy Ferriss thinks we might be better off without the oft-misused mark.

And even if all the apostrophes in the world were vaporized tomorrow, it wouldnt solve all usage and punctuation peeves. Wed have more energy to focus on the teeming millions who seem to think that the second person nominative pronoun is spelled u.

Seeking native speakers

The Washington, D.C. studios of Learning Ally, where I have been recording textbooks for a number of years, handles foreign language texts in addition to English language materials. The studio has put the word out that it is specifically seeking volunteers with proficiency in any of the following languages:

  • Khmer
  • Polish
  • Korean
  • Tagalog
  • Urdu

Do you speak one of these languages, and would you like to help? Do you know someone else who might be able to assist? Drop me a line, or contact the studio directly.

In search of a problem

New words acquired via studio reading: a couple of intermodal transportation schemes that don’t appear to have moved beyond the coinage of cutesy names: fishyback and birdyback.

Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.

Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.

Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus

Ben Zimmer antedates the Disney team’s most famous nonsense word, precious to user interface designers and testers worldwide, made canonical by Henry Spencer’s decalogue. With the primary accent on the “flaw,” the word appears in a 1931 humor column for a Syracuse University student newspaper under the byline of Helen Herman.

ᔥ Languagehat

Get on the boss

Julie Sedivy summarizes recent work by William Labov: there is evidence that the spread of a vowel shift that’s working its way through the northern parts of the Rust Belt (sort of an Albany-Buffalo-Detroit-Milwaukee axis) is being curbed by more conservative speakers to the south and west.

Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say…. But I suspect that political ideology may become an anchor for accents to the extent that large social groups collectively identify themselves by their political beliefs….

So perhaps it’s not surprising that George W. Bush acquired a distinct Texan accent, despite having abundant exposure to people from the Northeast, or why Barack Obama sprouted a mild set of Chicago vowels, even though he was fully an adult before ever living there.

ᔥ The Morning News

Cooper decoded

James Fenimore Cooper spends a surprising amount of space analyzing a real estate transaction in The Pioneers. The novel takes place in upstate New York, north of the Catskills, in 1793. These passages are from chapter XVI, and is an exchange between Jotham Riddel and the town patriarch, Judge Marmaduke Temple.

“So, Jotham, I am told you have sold your betterments to a new settler, and have moved into the village and opened a school. Was it cash or dicker?”

The man who was thus addressed occupied a seat immediately behind Marmaduke, and one who was ignorant of the extent of the Judge’s observation might have thought he would have escaped notice. He was of a thin, shapeless figure, with a discontented expression of countenance, and with something extremely shiftless in his whole air, Thus spoken to, after turning and twisting a little, by way of preparation, he made a reply:

“Why part cash and part dicker.”

Dicker here has the sense of barter. But, as well shall see, Jotham’s sale was mostly dicker.

“I sold out to a Pumfretman who was so’thin’ forehanded [well-to-do]. He was to give me ten dollar an acre for the clearin’, and one dollar an acre over the first cost on the woodland, and we agreed to leave the buildin’s to men. So I tuck Asa Montagu, and he tuck Absalom Bement, and they two tuck old Squire Napthali Green. And so they had a meetin’, and made out a vardict of eighty dollars for the buildin’s.”

Jotham and his buyer agree to arbitration to assess the value of the buildings. Each party chooses one arbiter, and the two arbiters between them choose a third. A tidy solution, if you ask me.

“There was twelve acres of clearin’ at ten dollars, and eighty-eight at one, and the whole came to two hundred and eighty-six dollars and a half, after paying the men.”

(12 ac · $10/ac of cleared land) + (88 ac · $1/ac of woods) + ($80 of structures) – (3 arbiters · $X/arbiter) = $286.50, so each arbiter received a 50-cent fee.

“Hum,” said Marmaduke, “what did you give for the place?”

“Why, besides what’s comin’ to the Judge, I gi’n my brother Tim a hundred dollars for his bargain; but then there’s a new house on’t, that cost me sixty more, and I paid Moses a hundred dollars for choppin’, and loggin’, and sowin’, so that the whole stood to me in about two hundred and sixty dollars. But then I had a great crop oft on’t, and as I got twenty-six dollars and a half more than it cost, I conclude I made a pretty good trade on’t.”

It would seem that Jotham has indeed flipped his property after one growing season for a $26.50 profit, but I wonder how much is “comin’ to the Judge,” and for what? Property taxes?

“Yes, but you forgot that the crop was yours without the trade, and you have turned yourself out of doors for twenty-six dollars.”

“Oh! the Judge is clean out,” said the man with a look of sagacious calculation; “he [the buyer] turned out a span of horses, that is wuth a hundred and fifty dollars of any man’s money, with a bran-new wagon; fifty dollars in cash, and a good note for eighty more; and a side-saddle that was valued at seven and a half—so there was jist twelve shillings betwixt us.”

Jotham has accepted $207.50 in goods in lieu of cash (by his estimate), and a promissory note for $80, against a sale price of $288. At this point, he seems to be saying that that he will receive the balance of a dollar, or maybe a dollar and a half (12 shillings); it’s not quite clear. In a footnote later, Cooper writes, “In New York the Spanish dollar was divided into eight shillings, each of the value of a fraction more than sixpence sterling.” But he way I read it, the seller owes Jotham a balance of 50 cents, but in turn Jotham still owes the arbiters $1.50.

“I wanted him to turn out a set of harness, and take the cow and the sap troughs. He wouldn’t—but I saw through it; he thought I should have to buy the tacklin’ afore I could use the wagon and horses; but I knowed a thing or two myself; I should like to know of what use is the tacklin’ to him!”

Jotham has the horses and the wagon but no gear to hitch them to it.

“I offered him to trade back agin for one hundred and fifty-five. But my woman said she wanted to churn, so I tuck a churn for the change.”

I read this to mean that Jotham took the butter churn instead of the remaining cash, so no money changed hands at all. Except for those arbiters.

“And what do you mean to do with your time this winter? You must remember that time is money.”

“Why, as master has gone down country to see his mother, who, they say, is going to make a die on’t, I agreed to take the school in hand till he comes back, It times doesn’t get worse in the spring, I’ve some notion of going into trade, or maybe I may move off to the Genesee; they say they are carryin’ on a great stroke of business that-a-way. If the wust comes to the wust, I can but work at my trade, for I was brought up in a shoe manufactory.”

Even if the numbers don’t true up, they make more sense than the arithmetic in my friend Steve LaRocque’s Perfectly Good Airplanes.

Gwynne decoded

As far I can tell, Charles Goodnight is the only writer to use the name “Dirt Dauber” to refer to birds in the swallow family (Hirundinidae). Everyone else reserves that name for various species of wasp. From his The Making of a Scout, some frontier navigation wisdom:

‘The scout had to be familiar with the birds of the region,’ continued the plainsman, ‘to know those that watered each day, like the dove, and those that lived long without watering, like the Mexican quail. On the Plains, of an evening, he could take the course of the doves as they went off into the breaks to water. But the easiest of all birds to judge from was that known on the Plains as the dirt-dauber or swallow. He flew low, and if his mouth was empty he was going to water. He went straight too. If his mouth had mud in it, he was coming straight from water.’ (pp. 42-43)

Goodnight is cited in S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon, p. 198. David Sibley writes that American swallows of the genera Hirundo and Petrochelidon use mud to build nests. All are permanent Texas residents, at least by today’s distribution maps.

Maswera sei?

…I began to understand and speak Shona without being conscious of how I stepped away from the white noise of my own language to do so. …the world made deeper, richer, and sometimes, kinder sense. There is, for example, a reciprocation in Shona greetings that does not exist in English: “Maswera sei?” (How did you pass the day?) is generously answered thus: “Taswera kana maswerawo” (I passed the day well if you passed the day well). To which the original greeter replies, “Taswera hedu.” (I passed the day well, indeed.) The well-being of an individual depends on the well-being of others—I’m okay if you’re okay.

—Alexandra Fuller, “Her Heart Inform Her Tongue,” Harper’s Magazine no. 1940 (January 2012), p. 61

Boundary condition

Last summer, when we were shaking down the code for the books project, I would use the book Moby-Duck as a test case to make sure that the database schema could accommodate its preposterously long subtitle, The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost At Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. (Hmm, it looks like mighty Amazon doesn’t choose to deal with the subtitle’s vastness.) (Also, we liked to use the book’s forbear, Melville’s Moby Dick, as an example of a book with a ridiculously large number of editions in and out of print and with and without the hyphenated title.) Bill Morris poses the question (but doesn’t answer it conclusively), “Are Run-On Subtitles Literature’s New Flop Sweat?”

Titular

So I was writing an online squib that referred to the 1959 horror film by Georges Franju, known as Eyes without a Face in English. And I was surprised that the National Gallery capitalizes visage in the French version of the title, Les Yeux sans Visage. Now I thought I knew the rules for title capitalization in French, but it turns out that (a) I had never learned them properly (see what comes of getting your information from kids on street corners) and (b) there are three different conventions that various authorities follow. Laura K. Lawless explains.

The convention I taught myself was rule III, sentence capitalization: Les yeux sans visage. It’s the most egalitarian. Rule I, first noun and its adjectives, accounts for many of the titles that I see that confuse me: Les Yeux sans visage. Looks unbalanced. Rule II, all important nouns, strikes me as quintessentially French, since it calls for a judgment of which nouns are important: Les Yeux sans Visage. Sort if like the way taxes are assessed in France.

(By the way, some people capitalize the English title as Eyes Without a Face. I say that without is a preposition and I say the hell with it.)