Speculative Grammarian: The book

Shout it from the rooftops. Or just do like me and go stand on a street corner waving a Bible and scream it: 

The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics is out!

We were fortunate enough to get an advance copy back in the summer, all 360 freakin' pages of it, by Trey Jones, Keith W. Slater, Bill Spruiell, Tim Pulju and David J. Peterson. That copy has been closely guarded, and passed from hand to apparently increasingly grimy hand.*

At Team Verb, we're all pretty pumped about this. Or as one colleague put it:

This goes on the new MA reading list. Hell, this IS the new MA reading list.

Given that the old reading list consisted of stuff written between the Rig Veda and Bloomfield's Menominee Grammar, it would be a step forward, but can't you imagine the prelims: please open the Essential Guide to p. 194, and let's discuss "Are Turkish and Amharic Related? Are they ever!"**

And we're not the only ones excited about it. The 'advance praise' up front contains some names:

“Ever wonder why Vikings torched scriptoria? This kind of thing.”
     —E. V. Gordon
“Contains more than 100 basic words.”
     —Morris Swadesh
“Same reference as linguistics; different sense.”
     —Gottlob Frege
“Two uvulas down, way down!”
    —Sapir and Bloomfield, At the Bookstore

Seriously, this volume has not only a real place in the field, it also continues an important tradition. I keep Studies out in left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley (originally published in 1971 and republished, as pictured here, by Benjamins in 1992) on my desk at all times. I regularly give students the "supplementary glossary of linguistic terminology" from that. As much fun as wabiawization and haspiration are, you don't forget pheresis and apocop after you see the list. But it needed updating. The Essential Guide has six pages of "self-defining linguistic glossary" ... a bit of overlap with Studies, of course, but tons more stuff and covering a lot of the field:

• It’s a cleft that this sentence is.
• Je puedo Europanto sprechen.
• I can see that eyewitness evidential myself.
• Something’s gonna undergo grammaticalization.
• The Gricean Maxim of Quantity (“Information”) did that thing the other day, with the guy from that place.
• She looked at the zeugma with suspicion and magnifying glass.

And of course "Semantic bleaching is literally terrible."

The bulk of the texts is built around subfields —sets of pieces on typology, syntax, phonetics, whatevs. Richly illustrated even. I'm guessing anybody who reads this will find plenty of nuggets that they can enjoy and use.

I literally just ordered four fresh, clean copies of it and you can too, here, for $12.99 U.S.

* To the one who spilled what was obviously Hopalicious on page 95: I know who you are and disapprove as much of you wasting good beer as defiling this book.

**Actual article on p. 194, by April May June. I think I know a guy who dated her way back when.

Gotta go!

Portland rocks! Plus its residents have a great sense of humor. In case you can't read it, above the figures it says "phlush". But I mostly love the little icons.

Not mutually intelligible dialects of American English in the news

... or at least a classic failure to communicate. No discourse analysis needed, I suppose. Visit here for the real item (and the usual tons of cool stuff that Tom Tomorrow has). And as always, click to embiggen.

Gotta go, late for my bongo session downtown.

Discourse Analysis in the news

... from the latest print Onion. (Yeah, where else?)

So, you ask whether Deborah Tannen has started writing for the Onion. Nah.

By the way, I was pretty frustrated by the blog spam attack in September, and it took a while for it to stop (after reporting the attack, etc.) Time to get rolling again ...

Lexical Morphology Joke!!!

Last semester I taught intro to morphology, and one of the things we do in that class is go over the basics of Lexical Morphology. And in the course of that we talk about fun stuff like bookstore vs. *books-store, mice-infested vs. *rats-infested, and so on. So I was sitting around with a bunch of non-linguists, and we started talking about how every place has a place that they make fun of. e.g. the US in general has Polack jokes, although where my cousin Kate grew up in northern Wisconsin they were all Belgian jokes (really). And of course Canada has its Newfie jokes. One person said that when they lived in Pittsburgh, everything was West Virginia jokes. And he proceeded to tell us the following West Virginia joke (apologies to anyone from W VA; this is mention, not use): Q: How do you know that the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia? A: Because otherwise it would be called a teethbrush. !!! I just sat there with my head exploding for a while, and then offered to give them a half-hour lecture on the topic, which to my shock, they turned down.

American citizen can get along pretty well in his native language of English

See this, from the Onion.

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities?

This is far from my life, but it's sure funny ...

Font humor

I was cleaning out the old junk folder and found a real message that had ended there. (Happily, that's so rare these days that I don't check constantly anymore.) Anyway, h.t. to j.c. for a message that contained a suggestion for a bit of font humor. If you love Comic Sans, this may make your day.

Me, I'm mostly stunned at that people can hate a typeface. (Google 'Comic Sans' if you doubt it!)

What would you pay to have a few brews with Comic Sans and Papyrus? Seriously.

Yes!!! xkcd does language change ...

I'm not entirely sure that it'll sound equally old-timey, but the point is a fine one.

Breaking news: Chomsky to take it easy

The Onion is ahead of the curve, here:

Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once

It's wonderful, even by Onion standards. I suspect that somebody on the staff knows a fair bit about Chomsky, because there are what read like inside jokes: Various mainstream media stories about him report that he watches pretty 'regular' TV shows and likes fast food, maybe even specifically hamburgers/cheeseburgers. The article raises both topics.

Dead langauge graffitti: U of Chicago students trying to outgeek Wisconsin?

This is cool. A student at Chicago has done a book on local graffiti in the Regenstein Library:

There are still plenty of nerds at the University of Chicago. Dombrowski has come across Reg graffiti written in Arabic ("a lot of it, actually"), Chinese ("a reasonable amount"), German, Turkish, Greek, Russian and Serbian. But that's not the nerdy part, of course. The nerdy part is: the graffiti she has found scrawled in dead languages; the graffiti that use the letters of multiple dead languages; and the graffiti scrawled in hieroglyphics. As with every piece of graffiti she locates, she took a picture of the hieroglyphic graffiti. Then she brought it to an Egyptologist at the university for translation.

Translation: "We did it twice in the morning."

Wisconsin is a modest state — if fish fry and cheeseheads are big things, it's hard to have a big attitude. But come on, Madison students, the gauntlet has been thrown down! We need collections of Madison's most arcane scribblings. How much Old Church Slavonic is there in Memorial? I know there's German graffiti all around. There MUST be Gothic. (Legend has it that student used to sing the school song in Gothic.) Who can document Mayan hieroglyphs?

Image from here. It's not the best we have to offer.

Peer Review

A group of us did a panel for graduate students at the just-concluded LSA, on getting published in Linguistics. (Here's a link to a summary, and here's a link to a website where our handout is posted.) I wish I would have known about the following video, though - I certainly would have recommended it...

Social networking humor

One of my favorite sources of dark humor is Despair.com. Click to enlarge.

If that's not your cup of tea, how about this:

Hockey chants: Metrics and politics

The University of Wisconsin has a "raucous, jeering, taunting student section" at home hockey games, as it was put here by the Anchorage Daily News. Last night, the University of Alaska – Anchorage Seawolves skated against the Badgers in the Kohl Center. The Badgers took a 3-0 lead and won 3-2. It was a 'physical game', as the euphemism goes, with two key Badgers injuries, one that looked bad.

I've noted the creativity of the student section before, chanting 'racist mascot!' when the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux come, and 'cite your sources!' when an opposing goalie had been kicked out of an earlier scholarship for plagiarism. These exemplify the metrical patterns that's clearly preferred:

x . x .

That is, two trochees – four syllables strong/weak, strong/weak. I knew that we'd hear "Whát's a Séawolf?", and was hoping that we'd get some Sarah Palin chants. Certainly she made an impression on folks who follow the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (which Wisconsin and Anchorage belong to).

Sure enough, when a Seawolf was ejected for a play that left Blake Geoffrion — yes, he's the son of Bernie 'Boom Boom' Geoffrion — writhing on the ice, the students just pointed at the Seawolf and chanted "Sárah Pálin", maybe calling him a loser. Shortly thereafter, they started a call and response:

Call: Sarah Palin. Response: Sucks.

Then:

I see Russia!

And finally:

Russian rejects!

The missus was hoping for this one:

You're no maverick!

Finally: Comma rage I like

From today's Onion (print edition):

Horoscopes
Virgo
The ghost of E.B. White will appear to you and exact revenge for every extraneous comma you've ever used.

Nice.

Spork blending: New frontiers

Consider the linguistic implications of this (and click on the image to see a bigger version) …

If you're not disturbed enough yet, just go to the original post and check out the roll-over.

The Onion: "Black Guy Asks Nation For Change"

I'm no big fan of puns, generally speaking. But if you can find one this good and keep it going for a whole freakin' article, you've got my attention. The full article is here, but here are a couple of excerpts:

CHICAGO—According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.

"The time for change is now," said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. "The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you — the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation — only you can deliver this change." …

After his initial requests for change, the black man rambled nonstop on a variety of unrelated topics, calling for affordable health care, demanding that the government immediately begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, and proposing a $75 billion economic stimulus plan to create new jobs. …

Those who encountered the black man Tuesday said he engaged in erratic behavior, including pointing at random people in the crowd and desperately saying he needs their help, going up to complete strangers and hugging them, and angrily claiming that he is not looking for just a little bit of change, but rather a great deal of change, and that he wants it "right now." …

"I'll be honest, when that black guy said he would 'stop at nothing' to get change, it kind of scared me," local mechanic Phil Nighbert said. "Just leave me alone."

I gotta eat dinner now, so don't have time to unpack this, but it's just brilliant in playing with stereotypes AND punning.

The Onion is good.

And a post on opacity is coming!

Another goalie video

I'm not sure whether comment is possible or necessary here, but this isn't like any McDonald's ad I've ever seen …

Nerd-sniping

Easy enough to make signs to snipe linguists, I fear …

Ballsy euphemisms

We, as a culture, are rich in euphemistic variations on the theme of balls in the meaning 'courage, guts', etc. Cajones seems, for instance, to be widely accepted and used. And we get a kind of euphemistic ellipsis pretty often, like in the usually sarcastic: "Must be hard to walk" [with balls that big.] A common part of that these days (no idea on the age of it) is variants on to grow some balls, etc. Last night's Daily Show, in fact, had a good example, graphically illustrated. See here.

In the context of increasing Democratic, oh let's say, "resolve", Ed Schultz today talked about somebody having "the ping-pong balls in his shorts" to get a job done. He later made a remark about ordering some ping-pong balls to be delivered to a particular US senator. I just caught that much, but it sounded like he might be starting a campaign to mail ping-pong balls to Democratic lawmakers.