Pie Fight

Six-word stories

Wired (shudder) has asked a variety of "genre" writers to contribute their own efforts at a six-word story, the most famous and powerful of which is Hemingway's:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

She's a high talker

A link to a book looking at female vocal pitch around the world.

Tyler Cowen quotes today in more detail from a new book about the differences in average voice pitch among women in different countries:

Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women. American women's voices are lower than Japanese women's, Swedish women's are lower than American's, and Dutch women's are lower than Swedish women's. Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn't differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice. The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.

Which goes to show how powerfully culture worms its way into things that are widely assumed to be mostly biological. Most people believe that women have higher pitched voices as a matter of simple physiology, but it ain't so. It's mostly cultural, and anyone who watches old movies can attest to how the ideal of female voice has changed over the past 70 years.

The name's the thing

According to this site, Carpentieri is not among the 55,000 most common surnames in the US. (55k is as far as the database goes.) I’ve tried lots of friends’ surnames, and guess what – only the Italian names (Mobilio, Angio) fall outside of the top 55,000. Even friends with kind of weird non-Italian surnames (eg Weekley) are in the top 15k, as are Loflin and Poplin. McIntyre is of course quite high up.

There are enough Italians in the US that you’d think their names would rank higher – which makes me wonder: Do Italians have particularly disparate surnames, in the sense that there are a lot of surnames with small numbers of people carrying them? (Eg in contrast to names such as Brown and Jones in the Anglosphere, and Lee and Wang in Asia.)

And here’s a site that ranks the most common surnames and first names.

Phatic

From Word-a-day:

phatic (FAT-ik) adjective

   Relating to a communication meant to generate an atmosphere of
   social relationship rather than to convey some information.

[Coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). From Greek phatos, from phanai (to speak), which also gave us prophet and aphasia (loss of ability to understand language as a result of an injury).]

When you bump into your neighbor on your way out and say, "How are ya?"
you're engaging in phatic communion. The idea is not to inquire your neighbor's state of affairs but simply to create a feeling of shared goodwill. 

A big bag of words

Great post by Geoffrey Pullman on how language isn't a big bag of words, and how English isn't going to hell in a hand basket.

Add a word to a human language, the host and other guests on ToTN seemed to think, and the language is enriched (a caller mentioned hearing a student say "OMG" instead of "oh, my god", and everyone other than me thought that was fascinating; I said it was simply like Colonel Potter on the TV series M*A*S*H calling World War 2 "WW2" except that Potter's abbreviation was over twice as long as the original).  Lose a word, and the language is diminished (and losing two would surely seem like carelessness).  Change a word, however slightly, and the language is not just altered, but positively degraded.

I do not believe a language is a BBoW at all.  To me, it is a structural system, the particular words deployed in the structure being an independent (and much more rapidly varying) matter. But I was swimming against the tide here. Grant and Martha are both in love with lexicography rather than grammar: finding new words, gathering fresh slang, ferreting out rare nouns; and Neal was right in tune with that.  The dictionary is where the action is, they alll agreed.

What happened with a caller from San Francisco called Morgan was instructive, I thought. Morgan found it just intolerably irritating that people were shortening until to till and shortening through to thru (those were the only two examples she gave).

I leaped in, probably breaking several radio rules (sorry to interrupt, Grant; I think you were going to make essentially the same point), and I explained (audio available here so you can check what I actually said): Until is actually an early 15th-century embellishment of till, made by adding on before it (as in "Keep right on till the end of the road"). Eventually the two merged into one word, and the two synonyms lived alongside each other happily ever after. The word till is older, and has always been correct.  It has never been a contraction or shortening. (It is virtually identical to the analogous form in Swedish and various other Germanic languages.)

And through is of course not changed at all by the American practice of shortening its spelling to thru in informal documents. It couldn't possibly lead to any misunderstanding.

Yet, although all were agreed that too many people think English is rapidly going to hell, Grant did end up telling Morgan (by way of praising her for caring about language, I think): "Keep fighting!".  He said, "If you sit back and accept these things without battling for them, then that's the mistake. The mistake is not to say 'This is wrong'."

I demurred.  In a confusing scuffle where four people talked at once, I tried to say no, don't keep fighting, Morgan! There is no battle!  No degradation!  English is going to be OK!

Cunt

At Harry's place, a decent article on cunt. I certainly agree with his argument that using the word as an insult does not imply misogyny. For me, it's a strong version of 'asshole', not an insult meant to imply 'you're so bad you're as bad as female genitalia'. The latter has nothing to do with it's use as a cuss word; it's the simple fact that it's currently the strongest word in the language.

"Former" v "ex"

Discussing the phenomenon that is David Horowitz, Scott McLemee cites Hannah Arendt's observation of the all-encompassing difference between former Communists and ex-Communists.

After years of tracking his career, I had some hunches on how to interpret him. It was based on a piece called “The Ex-Communists” that Hannah Arendt published in 1953. You can find it now in a posthumous collection, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, which Schocken Books finally brought out in a paperback edition just last year.

Arendt started out by making a telling distinction between “ex-Communists” and “former Communists.” The latter group is by far the larger. Many people, she wrote, “at one time or another, and for the most varied reasons, belonged to a totalitarian movement, as party members, as fellow travelers, as sympathizers. Among them are people whose prominence in these parties was never due to their political importance, but who, because they had achieved prominence in some other field, lent prestige to the parties to which they belonged.”

Having belonged to the movement for any number of reasons, they also followed any number of courses upon leaving. Their earlier ideological affiliations “remained an important biographical fact,” wrote Arendt, “but did not become the nucleus of their new opinions, viewpoints, Weltanschaungen. They neither looked for a substitute for a lost faith nor concentrated all their efforts and talents on the fight against Communism.”

By contrast, the much smaller group Arendt calls the ex-Communists did exactly that. They tended to be minor functionaries who once enjoyed some authority within the movement, but otherwise did not have a base of talent or professional accomplishment to draw on, following their disillusionment. Given the political climate, however, they found a ready market for their story. They had, as Arendt put it, “become prominent on the strength of their past alone.”

Better replaced by "not"

Via Matthew Turner, typical Melanie Phillips bombast and balderdash. What's most interesting, though, is D-squared's observation about her language. First, and for your edification, the post:

"For the Sake of Britain, let's ALL stay in Tune", shrieks Melanie Phillips, tearing into the decision of the BBC to scrap its 'UK Theme', the 'medley of music which Radio 4 greets the day'.

Apparently Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer said that it had 'served its purpose'. Mel is not happy.

Served its purpose? This was tantamount to saying that Britishness itself had served its purpose.

Indeed:

The tunes now threatened by the BBC form part of our national memory. That memory must be protected, not removed. Otherwise, instead of a society that binds us to each other, we will find ourselves helplessly picking through its fragments.

First though, before this rant, she has a confession.

I have never heard the UK Theme.

Comedy gold. Now here's D-squared, in comments:

"tantamount" in that Mel paragraph is doing the same work that Robert Conquest noticed "essentially" doing in phrases like "the corporate control of the media is essentially the same as Communist censorship" - ie, a word that would much better be replaced by "not".

Most misunderstood sayings

Courtesy of K-Dro

Fuck all this social policy shit

Here's an article celebrating the Herculean swearing of the Serbs, who apparently put us sweet-tongued Anglo-Saxons to shame.

An interesting sidenote:

Swear words have not died out, as the Vojvodinian feminist and philiologist Dr Olga Penavin predicted in 1973. She expected that the development of Socialism would lead to a society free of conflict, where there would be no reason for swearing.