So what can the newly electrified cloud-based version of the Dictionary of American Regional English do that its paper antecedent can’t? If you’re lucky enough to have your own set of six volumes on your shelf, or have a nearby library that houses the print volumes that you can consult free, why would you pay $150 for a year’s subscription to the electronic version? Or why, in these times of tight budgets, should you ask your favorite library to subscribe for $1,200 a year?

The answer is simple. The paper DARE is essentially a reference work. The online version adds features that make it a tool for research as well as reference.

Here’s an example. Volume VI of the print edition lists the various answers given to each of the 1,002 survey questions, in order from most frequent to least. For some of the variants, quite a few in fact, the print dictionary provides maps. But the electronic version can create a map for every single response.

Question H5 asks, “What do you call a small amount of food eaten between regular meals?” There are more than 50 responses to that interview question, 18 of them with 3 or more respondents. The most frequent response is “snack” (843), and a glance at that map shows it’s nationwide. There are 174 responses of “lunch,” especially in the central states. “Piece” has 40 instances, especially from Pennsylvania west to central Illinois. “Bite” (32) is especially in the South. “Piecing” (10) is in the Midwest and West. “Knickknack” (7) is most often in Georgia, “knickknacks” (6) in North Carolina and Illinois—and you can instantly create a map that combines the two. And so on, down to single responses like “afternoon tea” (California), “bite between meals” (North Carolina), and “jack bite” (West Virginia).

Many of these maps are in the print volumes, but by no means all. Many of these words are in the print volumes, but by no means all. You won’t find the noun “bite,” for example, in the print dictionary.

This additional material is the raw material from which the lexicographers created the dictionary, and from which you can conduct your own research.

And there’s more. For every single response there’s a chart showing its social distribution—by age, sex, race, education, and type of community (urban to rural). It shows the overall distribution of responses to the question and the distribution of a particular answer or combination of answers. So, for example, we learn that “snack” is distributed equitably among social categories, but “lunch” is especially prevalent among younger people, women, and urbanites, and “piece” among older interviewees, whites, and rural population. “Bite” went more with older men.

All that is from just one of the thousand questions. And I haven’t even mentioned the audio features. Yes, with Digital DARE you can hear some of the words pronounced, 5,000 of them to start with.

So let the handsome print volumes rest on the shelf, and give Digital DARE a try. Have your library ask for a 30-day trial, and see for yourself.

Your hint about the outcome of this year’s Word of the Year vote at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS) is right there in the headline.

It was a lively gathering on a frigid Friday night in the Hilton Minneapolis, where we were all happy to have this very good excuse to be indoors. As always, we voted on other categories too, such as Most Outrageous, Most Useful, Most Creative, etc. You may have heard about other word-of-the-year votes over the past couple of months (e.g., Oxford University Press voted for selfie in November), but the ADS vote is the longest standing, and we wait until the year is over to vote. Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of ADS and a blogger here on Lingua Franca, started the meeting by noting: “We’re like the Oscars. We are the last. We are the best.”

Let me you give you the winners of all the categories and some highlights from our discussions here; the final vote counts are available on the ADS website. If you find you’re not sure what some of the categories mean, you’re in good company. As Allan Metcalf explained at the beginning of the meeting (of several hundred people), “We made these categories up many years ago. We never fully understood what they meant. They are open to interpretation.” Everyone present at the meeting can vote; we vote by raising our hands, and the count is, let’s say, a little approximate. The most important rule: You can vote with only one hand.

Word of the Year for 2013: because (introducing a noun or noun phrase, or sometimes an adjective—e.g., “because reasons,” “because Internet,” “because tired”). It’s not that the word because is new, of course (it dates back to the 14^th century). The word won, well, because language change. And at ADS, we like to celebrate the most interesting forms of language change we can find. In the last year, grammatically innovative uses of because have taken off in informal online writing—and now informal talk more generally. It used to be that because had to be followed by a full clause, but now you can just put a noun or adjective after it: “I’m stressed because grad school” or “I’m staying in tonight because -16 degrees.” Pretty cool grammatical stuff, featured in The Atlantic in November. The other contenders for Word of the Year: slash as a conjunction or coordinator (see Most Useful below); selfie (“a photo taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone and shared on social media”); twerk (“a mode of dance that involves vigorous booty-shaking and booty-thrusting, usually with the feet planted”); and Obamacare (“term for the Affordable Care Act that has moved from pejorative to matter-of-fact shorthand”).

Most Useful Word of the Year: because + noun/noun phrase, adj. It was a runoff between because + noun and slash. I nominated slash for this category and am fascinated by what I’ve learned from students about how they use the word slash in texting and online (which I’ve written about here on Lingua Franca)—for example, “That new coffee shop is great. Slash shall we go there on Tuesday?” That said, in the end, I voted for because. Because frequency. Because useful.

Most Likely to Succeed: binge-watch (“to consume multiple episodes of a series, maybe even a whole season, in one sitting”). Because Netflix.

Most Creative: catfish (“to misrepresent oneself online, especially as part of a romantic deception”—a term that came to prominence in national news last January when it was leaked that Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was a hoax). It came down to cats and dogs, so to speak: a runoff between catfish and doge. For those of you not familiar with doge, it is an Internet meme with intentionally ungrammatical exclamations (e.g., “much wow” and “how pronounce”) superimposed on an image of a dog, typically the Shiba Inu breed. “Such creative,” one supporter argued in support of doge. But in the end, catfish prevailed.

Most Unnecessary: sharknado (“a tornado of sharks, as featured in the Syfy Channel movie of that name”).  This one required no discussion. Really? A tornado of sharks?

Most Outrageous: underbutt (“the underside of buttocks, made visible by certain shorts or underwear”). How can this word not make you laugh? So while underbutt had some very outrageous competitors in the category (such as revenge porn, “vindictive posting of sexually explicit pictures of someone without consent” and s(c)hmeat, a blend of sheet + meat used to refer to meat product grown in a lab), the word seemed destined to win.

Most Euphemistic: least untruthful (“involving the smallest unnecessary lie” [used by James Clapper, director of national intelligence]).

Least Likely to Succeed: Thanksgivukkah (“confluence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah that will not be repeated for, well, a long time”).

Most Productive/Best Combining Form: -shaming (from slut-shaming). We added a new category for this year because we realized we had a lot of really good combining forms (a term linguists use sometimes when we’re not prepared to call something a suffix). It started with –(el)fie, as in selfie, drelfie (drunk selfie), shelfie (a portrait of your bookshelf), and twofie (selfie with two people). That form quickly had competition: -hack (< lifehack, and now studyhack, marriagehack, etc.), -spo (< thinspo, and now fitspo, sportspo, etc.), -coin (< bitcoin, and now peercoin, namecoin, etc.), -splaining (< mansplaining, now whitesplaining, journosplaining, etc.), and –shaming (< slut-shaming, and now fat-shaming, pet-shaming, etc.). In the end it was a –splaining vs. –shaming runoff, and no amount of linguistisplaining was going to stop –shaming’s momentum.

Our weighty voting responsibilities complete, we headed to the ADS happy hour.

May 2014 bring us many worthy lexical innovations to celebrate next January!

A colleague sent me a contest offering from the venerable American Scholar, magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Titled “Lingua Americana,” it begins by setting out examples of “wonderfully expressive [English] words that defy translation,” including flaky, finagle, and hullaballoo. Remember those words; we’ll return to them.

The contest then proceeds to list untranslatable words that it considers “a bit of a mouthful,” like schadenfreude, or simply unacceptably non-English, like frisson, simpatico, and mensch. For such “foreignisms,” we have not come up with truly English (or, in keeping with the title of the contest, truly American) versions.

Well, I’ll be dad-gummed. You mean we red-blooded Americans, with all our smarts and get-up-and-go, haven’t found a way to call a man a mensch except to call him a mensch? Gives me a helluva frisson just to contemplate it.

Okay, I’ll leave off the hillbilly snark. But isn’t it a little late, even for a publication calling itself The American Scholar, to start shutting the barn door on the English language? I thought we were the sponge language, the one that looks at newly arrived words the way my garden regards so-called weeds: as volunteers. Isn’t that how we got hors d’oeuvres? Bosses? Bananas and rodeos?

Let’s go back to those untranslatable English words. Flaky, obviously, comes from flake, that good old English word denoting soft bits of crust, snow, dandruff, what have you. There seems to be controversy over its origins, however. Some argue for Norse and others for Old High German; none argues for Kent or Philadelphia. Finagle, an Americanism meaning to obtain by trickery, doesn’t appear until the early 20th century but seems to derive from the Britishism fainaigue, which in turn combines feign, to pretend (from the old French feindre) and the French-derived ague, or “acute sickness.”

Hullaballoo grew a little closer to home, stemming from the Scots baloo, for lullaby, to which hulla was presumably added when the good-nights got out of hand. But then again, baloo itself has been traced to the old French bas le loup, or “down with the wolf,” a way of referring to calming lullabies.

Let us review. The American Scholar wishes us to enter a contest in which we find English words for such delightful but untranslatable expressions as schadenfreude, frisson, simpatico, and mensch. Well, I think I’ve got them. Ready? Schadenfreude. Frisson. Simpatico. Mensch.

Can I have my tote bag now?

Remedies for a plogged nose.
(Image courtesy of flickr.)

It could be the fact that it is below zero outside here in Michigan or it could be the sniffles that I seem to have acquired in the past 24 hours. For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about the word plogged.

I had a glimmer of hope that I could solve the mystery of plog  now that The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has gone digital. I knew that DARE did not contain plog  or plogged  as headwords, but I thought one of them might show up elsewhere in this amazing resource—in a quotation for another word, perhaps. But an advanced search of the full text of DARE came up with not a one (and if you’re interested in other regional variants for that expression, DARE provides “nary a one”  and “nary one” as other options).

I have used the verb plog  and the participial adjective plogged  (which is, in fact, more useful than the verb) my entire life. I had never given it a second thought until about 10 years ago, when students brought the usage to my attention.

I was talking to the students in an introductory English linguistics course, and I apologized if I hadn’t responded to any of their emails, explaining that something had gone wrong with my inbox. What I actually said was, “I’m sorry if I haven’t responded to your email. My inbox is plogged.”

Some students looked surprised, but I wasn’t sure why, and then one asked, “What did you just say?” I repeated myself: “My inbox is plogged.” The student laughed and said, “That’s not a word!”

“Of course it’s a word,” I responded, and I turned to the rest of the class for confirmation. I got only confirmation of the student’s position that this was not a word.

As I explained in teacherly way from the front of the room, it is a blend of plug  plus clog, hence plog. And the adjectival plogged  was stronger than plugged  or clogged; for example, if you have a really bad cold, your nose isn’t just plugged, it’s plogged. The students remained unpersuaded.

After class I returned to my office and checked the several major dictionaries there, and I couldn’t find plog. I talk often with students about how dictionaries don’t determine what counts as a “real word,” but the lack of confirmation of the existence of this word from multiple dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and from 80 students was disconcerting.

I called my younger sister, as I was quite sure we had grown up with this word. I got her husband, who clarified, “It’s not a word, but Kate uses it all the time.”

I later talked to Kate, and it just so happened that my mother (who is from Michigan and has lived in the D.C. area for 50 years) was visiting her. Kate confirmed that she thought we had grown up with the word and asked my mother, who stated confidently, “I have never used that word”—loud enough that I could hear her. Kate got back on the phone and said, “Mom says she doesn’t know it, but I’m sure she used it when we were growing up. I mean, your nose can be plogged, or the toilet can be plogged.” Then I hear in the background my mother exclaim, “Well, of course the toilet can be plogged!”

The spell checker in WordPress has rejected the word plog throughout this post, underlining it each time with a red dotted line. And it may be that it is a Curzan-family blend, completely idiosyncratic—but I have a suspicion it is not.

I’m curious to hear from Lingua Franca readers whether any of you know and use the (in my humble opinion) wonderfully useful and evocative blend plog—and if so, where you’re from and the contexts in which you use the word. Here in the middle of winter, can your nose get plogged?

Moonack in the sun (courtesy of Wikimedia)

On what we could have called Otchig Day, February 2, legend says the gopher rat will emerge from its underground burrow to look for its shadow. In case of shadow, this pasture pup will retreat underground, and we’ll have six more weeks of winter. But a cloudy day will encourage the johnny chuck to stay above ground, and winter will be over.

Most of us know this subterranean dweller by the widely used names groundhog and woodchuck. The recently published, newly online Dictionary of American Regional English labels woodchuck “chiefly North and Midland,” and groundhog “widespread but especially Midland.” Punxsutawney in southwestern Pennsylvania is in the Midland region, where both terms are well known. Why Phil chose to be a groundhog rather than woodchuck is a matter I’ll leave to the historians.

People in Appalachia often call it a whistle pig because, well, it somewhat resembles a pig, and it whistles, as you can hear on this YouTube video.

But those three names are only one part of the story. Thanks to the Dictionary of American Regional English, we know that the mud heaver has many more names. There we learn that the animal known to naturalists as Marmota monax has been designated by dozens of names since English-speaking denizens came to the shores of North America centuries ago. As names for this creature, DARE finds isolated instances of:

—gopher rat in Tennessee

—pasture pup in the East

—johnny chuck in Connecticut

—mud heaver in New Hampshire

—weather hog in Georgia and Tennessee

—hog in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia

—gopher in Colorado, New Jersey, South Carolina

Variety like this is perfectly normal for a language. There is a handful (at most) of widely known variants of a given item, but then many handfuls of little-used names. It’s because language isn’t hard wired but has to be learned, and because there aren’t naturalists watching each and every bull-beggar (Massachusetts), groundpig (Kentucky), or groundswine (Ohio) to make sure everyone agrees on what it is and what it should be called. You see an animal and attach a name you’ve heard, or perhaps make up one yourself. But to communicate with others, most of the time you are likely to use a well-known term.

Some of the names for the moonack (Maryland, Virginia) are obvious enough in their origins, groundhog in particular. The animal behaves like a hog and lives in the ground. Likewise mud heaver and weather hog.

But what about woodchuck? Well, in 1781 the author of a history of Connecticut explained, “The Woodchuck . . , when eating, makes a noise like a hog, whence he is named Woodchuck, or Chuck of the Wood.” An explanation that itself needs explanation. And it’s wrong.

No, since then the authorities have agreed that woodchuck comes from Ojibwa otchig or odjik, or Cree otchek. To complicate matters, that was originally the name of a different animal, the weasel-like above-ground forest dweller tree fox, aka pekan or fisher.

In any case, here’s hoping the ground chuck (New Jersey, Wisconsin) finds shade on February 2.

Correction (1/23/2014, 12:40 p.m.): Our blogging software mysteriously ate the first paragraph of this post. It has been restored and updated with the missing introduction.

I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The negative reviews, that is, the ones that said, “Wi-Fi here is really terrible.” Yes.

I’m uncomfortable in countries where I don’t speak the language. My short-term experiences in Italy, which include two Italians playing a joke by helping me onto a train going south rather than north at 2:00 a.m., suggest that in much of Italy, solo Italiano is to be expected. So while others are blogging this spring, I will be trying to learn enough of the language not to embarrass myself at the local trattoria.

My choices here in Connecticut are many. I can take a beginning course in Italian free at the college where I teach. I can attend a community-learning course at my local library. I can buy CDs or download a curriculum from Rosetta Stone. I can buy one of the dozens of Italian for Dummies-type books out there. I can download an app for my iPod. Decisions, decisions!

I haven’t learned a new language in 35 years. I became fluent in French and German by first learning them in school and then immersing myself. I spent a semester at a lycée in Belgium, two summers working as a pastry salesgirl in France, and four months as a waitress at a ski hotel in Austria. I was seeking adventure, not language fluency, but as anyone who’s had similar experiences can attest, after awhile you open your mouth and phrases start spilling out. In my twenties, living in Southern California, I determined to learn Spanish and signed up for a community-college course, where I found myself frustrated simultaneously by the apparently slow pace and my own inability to memorize at the speeds I had been used to.

Fast forward to 2014. I decided against the free intro college course, perhaps inadvisedly, because I figured its focus on grammar would be more than I needed, both in terms of the week-in-Tuscany goal and in terms of my own background in Latin as well as French. Conversational Italian, I told people, was what I was seeking. But before spending hundreds of dollars on Rosetta Stone, I thought I’d give the $5.99 iPod app, 24/7 Tutor, a try.

As far as it goes—and I expect other apps are similar—it’s not bad. For each level, I get a list of vocabulary, including handy phrases like dov’è il bagno, and various approaches to learning the list—multiple choices, puzzles, spelling, and speaking with audio feedback. The lists increase in complexity to phrases like Everything is so interesting! and Let’s go to the seashore. We’re not exactly discussing Dante, but that’s not our goal.

On the other hand, I don’t see how anyone who doesn’t already understand (in this case) romance languages can possibly memorize all these phrases. What sense can it make that giorno and pomeriggio take buon whereas sera and notte take buona? When you ask, familiarly, for a name, how are you supposed to remember not only to use ti but also to make the verb chiami when in the formal you use si and chiama? For such things, obviously, you have to grasp the nuances between the familiar and the formal and the convention of gendered nouns. As I work through my simple lessons, I find myself going online—and yes, I’ve now ordered a book—to conjugate the verbs, with their always fascinating irregularities. I’ve also gotten the basic rule about the pronunciation of the consonant c—though, again, had I not experienced similar conventions about pronunciation in other romance languages, I’d be going a little nuts with ci and chi and c’è and come.

And then I wonder: What about all these questions we’re asking? Where’s the bathroom, what sort of work do you do, what’s happening? Do the people who create these apps realize that travelers may actually ask these questions and get answers? “The bathroom? Well, it’s around the corner, behind the barbershop, 20 paces then turn left, you can’t miss it, there’s a public WC where you have to pay half a euro.”

Conversation, I think. That’s a two-way street, isn’t it?

The gold standard for these programs is supposedly Rosetta Stone, which is expensive and doesn’t get particularly good reviews. Its philosophy is “immersive,” in that nothing is given in English, but having been immersed, I know the difference between 24 hours a day among the petite bourgeoisie and 20 minutes a day in front of my computer.  Moreover, as a review in The Economist of Rosetta Stone’s Mandarin program points out, the one-size-fits-all approach of its pedagogy slams up against the idiosyncrasies of individual languages. “If you’re good at this kind of thing—if cracking brain-teasers in the Sunday paper is your idea of fun—you might well enjoy the challenge,” the reviewer notes; otherwise, you’re going to want to combine the program, as I’ll do with my $5.99 app, with a more traditional book.

Finally, there’s the test of actually speaking the language with a native. A friend who’s dating a French Canadian asked recently if I’d spend a few lunches speaking French with her so she can prepare to impress his family, and of course je suis ravie to do so. Rosetta Stone offers the Studio, live video tutoring with native speakers, that would seem to justify its high cost. But as another clever language-learning sort, Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 Months, points out, social-media sites will yield native language speakers almost anywhere—and, like me, they’re usually delighted to spend a few minutes chatting in a tongue they love.

Okay, I’m off. Divertiti while I’m gone. And if anyone has recommendations for vineyards near Siena or better language approaches for all us casual travelers, do let us know.

In a piece the other day about Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC chat show, Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times noted that Farrow “made an effort to seem hip. He referred to marijuana as ‘weed’ and made an aside about the Ukrainian opposition leader, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who was recently freed from prison, saying that she ‘also has amazing hair.’”

Yes, weed is apparently the broadly hippest current term for marijuana, that venerable fount of slang. (I’ll save for another day a discussion of the relative merits and nuances of amazing, fabulous, and awesome.) If I close my eyes and think about Conan O’Brien making a joke on the subject or Seth Rogen actually saying anything at all, weed is the word I imagine them saying. And indeed, just the other day, Rogen tweeted this:

(You can get to a video of Rogen’s testimony, which concerned the Alzheimer’s disease of his mother-in-law, by clicking on the image, but I warn you that that the joke, which comes in the first minute, isn’t that funny.)

Marijuana itself is an anglicized corruption of mariguana or marihuana, Spanish terms for the Cannabis sativa plant, traditionally known in English as hemp. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the “currency” of marijuana “increased greatly in the United States in the 1930s in the context of the debate over the use of the drug, the term being preferred as a more exotic alternative to the familiar words hemp and cannabis.”

Most of the slang variations date to that period as well, including weed. In 1929, American Speech included it “Among the New Words” and defined it as “marijuana cigarette.” Three years later, the OED cites Chicago Defender as reporting, “The humble ‘reefer,’ ‘the weed,’ the marijuana, or what have you by way of a name for a doped cigarette has moved to Park Ave. from Harlem.” It doesn’t surprise me that the first author cited using the term in its currently popular manner (no the in front, referring to the drug in general rather than to a cigarette) was the master, Raymond Chandler: “They were looking for … a suitcase full of weed.” (The Little Sister, 1949.)

For decades, weed lurked in the weeds, as it were. Google’s Ngram Viewer (showing relative frequency in American printed sources) gives a rough sense that it started making its move to prominence in the early 1990s:

Ngram Viewer includes data only through 2008, but it appears the trend has continued and weed is now on top. In Google Books searches confined to 2013 publications,  smoke marijuana pops up 69 times, smoke pot 94 times, and smoke weed 149 times. That is also the sense one gets from Urban Dictionary, whose users have been inspired to contribute 225 separate definitions for weed. The most popular one, with more than 39,000 “up” votes, was posted by “AYB” and is short and sweet: “God’s gift to the world. Brings peace when used wisely.” Although Urban Dictionary’s custom is to follow the definition with an example of the word used in a sentence, AYB was apparently too distracted to comply and gave the sentence, “Pass the blunt, dude.”

Urban Dictionary also offers definitions for the weed derivatives weeda, Weedabis, Weedable, Weedache, WeedAcres, Weedacus, Weedafarian, Weedagasm, weedage, Weedaginity, Weedaholic, Weed aint no drug, weedajuana, Weed Album, Weedalicious, Weed and Feed, weed and pussy, Weed Angel, weed anthem, weedar, Weedarded, Weedarm, weedasaurous-rex, and Weed-ash.

Consequently, it didn’t surprise me that the wrong-number text message recently left on my phone concluded: “And I have no weed.”

Why the recent weed dominance? It seems clear to me that it’s a generational thing. In the 1990s, a new generation of users wanted to distance themselves from their parents’ dope or pot (the latter dates from 1930s and apparently originated in African-American slang). Weed was already in the lexicon, and provided a nice implicit variation on the hippie-ish grass.

Plus, its funny. For some time, it has been generally understood that anything related to marijuana is or is potentially humorous. This is probably due to a combination of factors: the illicitness of the drug, the fact that stoned people sometimes giggle, the fact that their actions can be perceived as comical (viz., Cheech and Chong), the widespread sense that unlike, say, alcohol or heroin, weed is not ultimately harmful. In any case, I, for one, chuckle when confronted with the word weedar. Not to mention “the munchies.”

Weed has not completely penetrated mainstream journalism. The slang term most often found there is pot, probably partly because it’s so useful in headlines. Just the other day, my local Philadelphia Inquirer had an article called “Pot an Election Issue?” that used marijuana eleven times, pot six (not including the headline), and cannabis and weed one time each.

The New York Times is a bit more proper and allows weed in its news columns only in direct quotations, as in the Ronan Farrow case. Otherwise it sticks to marijuana, even in the face of extreme word repetition. A front-page article published on Thursday, “Pivotal Point Is Seen on Legalizing Marijuana,” uses marijuana 27 times (not including the headline) with the only variations being “the drug” and (once) “cannabis.”

Times columnists follow different rules, of course. A couple of months ago, David Brooks published a column that took a dim view of marijuana legalization. It began:

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.

But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.

One does not associate David Brooks with uninhibited frolic. He is actually sort of the anti-Seth Rogen, and if the two of them are both using weed, I predict Rogen will fairly quickly start using something else. Something else as a word, that is.

Scott Simon: “My word!”

I don’t get it when people say or imply that people on NPR all talk alike. To me their voices contain multitudes.

To be sure, there’s no question that, if the factors that determine dialect are age, ethnicity/race, class/education, and  region, NPR folk skew heavily oldish, white, overeducated, and from the U.S. quadrant that’s north of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Minnesota-Dakotas line. It has to be that far west so as to include Garrison Keillor, whose voice is probably in the mind’s ear of most of those who say that people on NPR all talk alike. (Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion is actually not an NPR show, but people think of it as such, and it airs on NPR stations.)

My friend Andy is probably also thinking of Keillor, among others, when he complains that NPR journalists are too “empathetic.” Our arguments on this point have gotten so predictable—me screaming, “How can you complain about a journalist being empathetic?! Are you arguing for the alternative?!,” him chuckling indulgently—that we’ve agreed to a moratorium on the issue. But sometimes I see what he means, about not only Keillor but also the hosts Scott Simon and David Greene, who, when questioning someone who has gone through an unfortunate series of events, tend to lower their volume a few decibels and raise their pitch half an octave, so as to indicate they feel his or her pain. Greene’s voice actually sometimes trembles a little bit. Simon, for his part, favors some peculiarly old-fashioned locutions, like saying “I beg your pardon” when he misspeaks and “My word!” when an interviewee says something surprising. And, like Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep, he has a go-to belly laugh that I find a wee bit forced. On the other hand, the hearty laughter of Terry Gross, Rachel Martin, and Brooke Gladstone feels well earned to me, and I like it. One cannot bring up NPR laughs, of course, without invoking Car Talk’s Tom Magliozzi, the sincerity of whose chortle has divided listeners for years. I tend to come down on the favorable side, though I respect the naysayers’ brief.

Also annoying to me is the “smile in their voice” (my wife’s term) of host Melissa Block and correspondent Neda Ulaby.  I dread the prospect of a two-way between them: The smiles will drown out the content.

As you can see, I’m a little too into it. And my sense of the universe contained within NPR-speak is probably a function of the narcissism of small differences. That is, I listen so much that the variations are bound to strike me more than the similarities. One embarrassing example: I collect the favorite speech particles of hosts. Linda Wertheimer: “Now.” Cokie Roberts: “Look.” Inskeep: “Oh.”

Not surprisingly, to my ears, NPR voices cover a great deal of real estate. The Southern contingent includes Debbie Elliott, good-old-boy-sounding Southwest correspondent Wade Goodwyn, New Orleanean Roberts, and Eleanor Beardsley, whose “lawl” (for “law”) is redolent of her native South Carolina. Where the Magliozzi brothers talk Boston to their core, you have to listen more carefully to pick up Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman’s New England vowels.  Jackie Northam’s Canadian inflections are so pronounced to me that, during her reports, I sometimes have to remind myself that I’m not listening to Joni Mitchell rapping about how nobody asks Van Gogh to “paint ‘Starry Night’ again, man.” Robert Siegel has erased his native New York from his speech, but not so Susan Stamberg, who sounds like my New Jersey relatives. The speech of Gross, a Brooklynite, is mostly NPR-neutral, but not completely, as when she introduces Rosanne Cash as Johnny’s “dawwter.” (Gross’s characteristic “anyways” may be a regionalism or it may just be a personal idiosyncrasy, like her fulsome “thank you”s at the end of interviews or her insistence on spitting out the word “died,” as if to call attention to her refusal to use a euphemism.)

NPR doesn’t do so well in the generational or ethnic department. The latter is a difficult area. I’m sure that aspiring African-American and Latino broadcast journalists get the implicit or explicit message that they shouldn’t sound too African-American or Latino, and NPR recruiters have to contend with the consequences. There seems to be a bit more space for South Asian or Hispanic inflections, as from Richard Gonzales, Felix Contreras, and the splendid Mandalit del Barco, whose signoff rivals Silvia Poggioli’s in brilliant ferocity. But when it comes to African-American representation, I, for one, have to peruse the photos at the staff directory page to grasp that NPR is actually more racially diverse than it sounds. (You can also go to the page if you want to learn the spelling of Ofeibea Quist-Arcton.)

Gene Demby, of the Code Switch team, is pushing the boundaries both racially and generationally: He combines glottalization, the little-seen male vocal fry, and “So”-starting responses to questions. Much of the younger cohort seems to have emerged out of This American Life, where Ira Glass (now not so young) made casual inflections and vocal-mannerisms-bordering-on-speech-impediment acceptable, if not cool. I can hear his influence on Radiolab, on Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt’s “TLDR” podcast (where the hosts greet each other by saying “Hey, Alex”/”Hey, PJ”), and on the Planet Money economic-news team. Planet Money’s Zoe Chace probably has the most distinctive voice on public radio, a fact acknowledged in her NPR bio:

There is much speculation on the Internet about where Chace picked up her particular accent. She explains that it’s a proprietary blend: a New England family, a Manhattan childhood, college at Oberlin in Ohio, and a first job as a teacher in a Philadelphia high school.

Educational diversity is the real nonstarter for NPR voices. The unique selling proposition of the service is intelligence, which is what I grasped when I first became a fan some 25 years ago, driving across the Oklahoma plains over the course of a long research project and becoming acquainted with the All Things Considered Dream Team of Siegel, Wertheimer, and Noah Adams. I quickly realized that they were smart, tough-minded, great storytellers, quirky, and, yes, empathetic. Siegel, whom I consider the best interviewer I’ve ever heard (short-course division; marathon honors belong to Gross), sounds like a college professor, but what’s wrong with that? Wait, I’m a college professor!

It says a lot that the closest thing NPR has to dese-dem-and-dose guys are the Magliozzis, who between them have two bachelor’s degrees from MIT, one M.B.A., and one Ph.D.

The alleged chasm that separates American from British English is often discussed in highly emotional terms. It probably won’t make me popular on either side of the Atlantic when I say that I think the differences have been wildly, insanely overstated. To cite just one example, I once met a British woman in Edinburgh who told me loudly and confidently that Americans had completely abandoned the use of adverbs.

People have being exaggerating the trans-Atlantic dialect distinctions ever since Oscar Wilde (in The Canterville Ghost, 1887) remarked that the British “have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, June 3, 1944) called it “a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language,” and Dylan Thomas (The Listener, April 1954) spoke of European and American writers and scholars being “up against the barrier of a common language.” (George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said something similar, but this has never been substantiated: No one cites a source.)

Well, I have been hearing and using the varieties of English in America and Britain for decades, as a citizen of both countries, and the one thing that has always struck me about the differences, particularly in grammar, is how tiny and insignificant they are.

Warren Murray recently touched on this topic in a blog post for The Guardian about which form of English the newspaper’s internationally read online content should use, and I hunted through his piece looking for cited differences, but he had almost nothing. He mentioned realise versus realize, but first, spelling conventions cannot differentiate languages (Bosnian and Serbian do not count as distinct languages simply because the Serbs like using the Cyrillic alphabet where the Bosniaks prefer Roman letters), and second, this is not a trans-Atlantic difference anyway. Defenders of the -ise spelling do tend to be almost entirely in Britain, but there is no clean American-British split. Even in British sources the ratio of -ise to -ize is only 3:2. And as the excellent Wikipedia article points out, two quintessentially British publications from Oxford University Press, Henry Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) and the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, endorse the the -ize spelling of that suffix, for good etymological reasons.

Murray mentions just one grammatical difference between American and British English: Obama met Putin Tuesday is American syntax: British English tends not to use the nouns that name days of the week as temporal adjuncts (it uses preposition phrases with on, as in Obama met Putin on Tuesday). Murray thinks it would be “potentially jarring for a significant part of the audience” if The Guardian ever used the former construction, and doubtless it would: People are astonishingly susceptible to being jarred by such trivial differences. But how many robust and verifiable contrasts are there?

They are remarkably few and far between, and they are nearly always a matter of preferences rather than absolute prohibitions. For example, Americans like using the preterit rather than the perfect in clauses reporting past time with present relevance (I already did that), whereas British speakers clearly prefer the perfect (I’ve already done that). But speakers of both varieties can always understand both constructions.

Closer to being absolute is the limitation to British English of the special use of the verb do in cases of omitted verb phrases, as in I don’t know if she understands French, but she may do. Americans would say she may, without that final do. However, they immediately understand it when they hear British speakers using it.

If pressed hard I might be able to find two or three more such slight divergences (ended up in hospital is British, ended up in the hospital is American, and so on); but most trans-Atlantic differences either involve nothing more than pronunciation (most Americans pronounce the r of car and have the vowel of hat in words like glass, and the majority of British speakers don’t), or are merely differences in word choice, almost always choices among nouns (in Britain a truck is often called a lorry, though truck occurs as well).

The exaggerators paint a picture of two countries prevented from understanding each other by a host of baffling and apparently nonnegotiable linguistic differences. That’s not what I see. I see a language that is amazingly homogeneous across hundreds of millions of speakers spread across a gigantic territories on several continents.

Many people seem to enjoy getting hot under the collar about Americanisms in Britain or Britishisms in America; but it can’t be the linguistic differences that motivate them. Looked at seriously, the tiny differences between standard American and standard British English are trivial, barely even worth mentioning.

The last time I dared to look at Tom Chivers’s article about my work and my views online (published inSeven, the Sunday Telegraph magazine, March 16, 2014, 16–17), the number of comments had risen to more than  1,400. And they formed a sorry spectacle. I couldn’t bear to do much more than skim a small quantity of the discussion. Even if the average comment length is no more than 50 words, the whole thing must be approaching monograph length. But not monograph quality.

If I had ever thought that the article might convey to the British public a glimpse of what linguists do and what the scientific study of language is like, I am disabused of that now. People’s main interests seem to be their own idées fixes; many of them ignored what Chivers actually wrote.

Not even the magazine’s headline writers seemed to have read his article. The online version is headed “Are ‘grammar Nazis’ ruining the English language?,” but of course I never mention ruining the language. English is in great shape, well maintained by its hundreds of millions of speakers, and so robust that nothing anybody does will be able to ruin it. The people who whine about how split infinitives are awful and prepositions should never end sentences are certainly wasting the time of educators and copy editors, but even if they were successful in their quest to reduce the frequency of the constructions they hate, that wouldn’t affect English itself.

The print version sits below an even sillier main header: “Do these words drive you crazy?” Neither Chivers nor I say anything about words driving anyone crazy. Our long conversation last September, over a lunch at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, never touched on word peeving. The topic was 100 percent grammar. Even when pressed for an example of a personal linguistic dislike, I chose a syntactically composed phrase, not a word. (I selected people of color, a strange euphemism from the diversity business that has always seemed to me to have a holier-than-thou stylistic flavor and a syntactically unEnglish structure. But use it if you like it.)

Agreeing to an interview with a journalist who wants to write an article about the modern approach to grammar means getting into the business of trying to communicate points to a wider public. Chivers chose the points to include, and among the ones on which he chose to quote me were these:

• Linguists have discovered a great deal about English since 1900 but schools don’t teach it.
• Linguists are neither “bow-tie-wearing martinets” nor “flaming liberals who think everything should be allowed.”
• The sentence Much of the data that needs processing are corrupted is flatly ungrammatical.
• I’m an educational conservative, firmly committed to teaching Standard English.
• I never corrected my son’s grammar when he was young, nor thought it necessary.
• Grammatical rules are tacitly negotiated in a community. Linguists try to figure out what the rules are, using evidence.
• Those who don’t like Standard English the way it is could always use some other dialect that they prefer.

One of the 1,400 commenters on these views said this:

Has anyone ever heard of Geoffrey Pullum? No? I thought not. His thesis is about as daft as some unknown professor of mathematics suddenly deriving self publicity by telling the world that 2+2 can mean anything you want. It doesn’t have to be 4, it could really be any modern number of which you may care to think.

A few remarks about how language can be looked at objectively and you need evidence to support a claim about the rules, and immediately I’m compared to a mathematical lunatic stipulating that 2 and 2 do not make 4! (And by someone who believes that “number of which you may care to think” is better English than “number you may care to think of”!)

The first email I got about Chivers’s article was from someone who read so carelessly that he thought I had written it, and that I used the phrase “grammar police.” He told me sternly:

Sir:

In you [sic] article you ask whether what you call the “grammar police” are ruining our language. No, they are not. When I ran a business I would not employ anyone who could not write a simple grammatical sentence on the application form.

So now I’m an idiot businessman who approves of grammar errors on application forms and is happy to take on illiterate employees?

In the immortal words of the Monty Python “Argument Clinic” sketch, this isn’t argument; this is abuse.

And I’m not even a public intellectual. I’m just a private intellectual who agreed to let Tom Chivers buy me lunch and put a voice recorder on the table. Doubtless real public intellectuals suffer far worse.

Our university administrations often tell us academics that they want us to engage with the public. But it often seems to me that on this topic the public doesn’t want engagement. They don’t even want an occasional date. They know what they already think and they’ll tell you angrily what it is; but they won’t necessarily listen, will they?

Michigan was buzzing last week with the news that the word Yooper is going to be included in the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary this spring.

For those of you who may not know, Yooper refers to someone who is from or lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (known as the UP, hence UP-er, or Yooper). Yooper is now a term of pride for many residents of the UP. According to Steve Parks (the man who lobbied for 10 years for the word to be included in Merriam-Webster’s), the term Yooper is “synonymous with resilience, solid work ethic, community spirit and taking care of your neighbor kind of thing—all those good qualities that are something lost in bigger areas.”

This quote from Parks appeared in an article in The Detroit News last Tuesday, an article announcing that Yooper would appear in “the dictionary.” The first line of the article reads:

Escanaba – After a more than decade-long campaign, the term ‘yooper’ is getting recognition in the dictionary.

Escanaba’s local paper, The Daily Press, ran a story the same day also with a reference to “the dictionary” in the first line:

ESCANABA – A familiar word referring to people who reside in the Upper Peninsula will soon gain more exposure as it has officially been approved to appear in the dictionary.

Both articles then provide details that indicate the news is actually more specific: the dictionary in question is Merriam-Webster’s. They do not, however, clarify that this is just one dictionary, albeit a major one, not “the dictionary”; and they do not note that the word Yooper has been in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language since 1999.

Ben Zimmer’s very good column on Yooper in the print version of The Wall Street Journal this past weekend is titled “Yes to Yooper: A Local Term Makes It Big,” and the first line talks carefully about what it takes to get a word into “a dictionary.” The online version of the column, however, runs this title: “Years of Lobbying Get ‘Yooper’ Into the Dictionary.”

I have long been fascinated by our reliance on the phrase “the dictionary,” as in “look it up in the dictionary.” It reflects our belief in the authority of dictionaries generally and suggests that dictionaries are indistinguishable—or at least don’t need to be distinguished because they are all equally authoritative.

If you listen to the way we often talk about words and dictionaries, you learn that dictionaries help make words “real.” A local radio station broke the big news about Yooper last week by stating that Yooper is now “an official word.”

I felt a bit like a wet blanket in a radio interview last week when I reminded people of two things. First, while it is great that Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries are now going to include Yooper, the word had been included in American Heritage for years, and it wasn’t accurate to say it was getting into “the dictionary.” And second, words are “real” long before they get into dictionaries.

As dictionary editors will tell you, they are watching and listening to us: tracking what we say and write and trying to determine which new words are going to stick and which words aren’t. Some words have staying power and some are fads; dictionary editors are trying to avoid including the short-lived fads. But they’re not saying those short-lived words aren’t real while they exist. If we’re using a word in our community and others know what we mean by that word, linguists agree that the word is real. It is a meaningful part of our language, even if it doesn’t last long.

In the case of Yooper, the question for dictionary editors was whether the word was regionally restricted, known mostly to those of us in Michigan, or whether it had spread more widely. Standard dictionaries like Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage tend to limit how many regional terms they include.

The Dictionary of American English (DARE), whose mission it is to record regional terms that get left out of other dictionaries, has an entry on Yooper, with this definition:

A person who lives in or is from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; the dialect of such a person; hence nouns Yoopanese, Yooperese.

The DARE entry also cross-references troll, a term sometimes used to refer to residents of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, given that we live under (i.e., below) the Mackinac Bridge. We’ll see if that meaning of troll ever finds its way into a dictionary like Merriam-Webster’s or American Heritage. In the meantime, for those of us in the peninsula of the trolls, that meaning of the word feels real enough.

Members of Golden Dawn break up a dictionary launch in Athens. Photograph by Victor Friedman.

Salzburg, Austria—Mozart’s beautiful city provided an ideal locale for the conference I am attending here, where Slavicists and Balkanists have been discussing the role of ideology in grammar. Salzburg is close enough to allow scholars from Croatia or Kosovo or Macedonia to attend easily, without being actually in the Balkan region itself.

Matters relating to the great Balkan laboratory for sociolinguistics and politics can be discussed more freely here than in the somewhat tense atmosphere that prevails in regions to the south and east. I have sensed chilling shadows of buried hatreds on more than one occasion during casual social interactions in both Banja Luka and Dubrovnik.

Mere expression of scholarly opinion on a macrosociolinguistic topic, or even just publication of a grammar or dictionary, can put you in physical danger in some southeastern European countries. A fellow invited speaker here learned that the hard way.

Victor Friedman is a world expert on the Balkan politico-linguistic situation. He wrote the first American book about Macedonian, a Slavic language spoken in the Republic of Macedonia and parts of adjoining states. He has been awarded honorary doctorates or elected to national academies or learned societies in Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia. In June 2009 he was speaking at the launch in Athens of the first Macedonian/Greek bilingual dictionary to be published in Greece, when the proceedings were violently invaded by bull-necked Greek skinheads.

Like every scandalous incident in the modern world, the event is documented on YouTube. (In the video, Victor is second from the right on the podium, from which he risked taking the photo above.)

The thug, some wearing heavy police-style riot-protection helmets, were from Chrysi Avgi, the far-right party known in English as Golden Dawn, which had been holding a rally nearby. They stormed in and blocked the doors; they ripped the banner off the podium; they screamed “This is Greece!” at the audience and called them prodhotes (traitors); one of them aimed a swing at Victor with a helmet (but an associate held him back); they ripped the cables out of the TV equipment; and they took the display copy of the dictionary away.

Such is the behavior of the neofascist right, with its passionate commitment to Hellenist fantasy. Golden Dawn members maintain that the Slavic language known as Macedonian simply does not exist. They see it as treason to even hint at its existence.

Why treason? Because, among other reasons they would give, Greek honor and territorial integrity must be defended. (For more than you ever want to read on the counterposed arguments of the Greeks and Macedonians, see the interminable Wikipedia article on the weird Macedonia naming dispute.)

Of course, the mere existence of a minor South Slavic language could not possibly carry geopolitical implications for Greece’s boundaries, even if there is a bilingual dictionary for it. There are Macedonian speakers living within northern Greece, but their presence could only have such implications if we were to accept a strange and radical new principle of international relations: that wherever a significant population of speakers of the main language of country X live within region Y of country Z, country X has the right to take over the Y territory, simply on the grounds that X speakers live there.

That principle would perhaps license the Republic of Macedonia to annex parts of the region of northern Greece that (unfortunately) bears the same time-honored name, Macedonia. But the Republic of Macedonia has never given a hint of support for any such principle.

And surely everyone with any sense repudiates it. The principle would justify absurdities like—oh, let me just make one up at random—that Russia would be justified in seizing Crimea or Kharkiv or Donetz from Ukraine. No one would buy that. Would they?

Don’t answer that. My question was merely rhetorical. The last thing I want to do is upset you-know-who (that is John Kerry’s job). Soon I will leave Eastern Europe and its territorial tussles far behind, to give talks at the University of California at Berkeley (April 21) and at Stanford (April 24). No buried hatreds there, unless you’re stupid enough to wear a red shirt, which I’m not.

What do John Boehner and Rachel Maddow have in common?
Image: Screen shot from MSNBC, via The Blaze

One cannot but be dismayed by the extent to which pollution of thought is endemic in our culture.

The illness is ubiquitous: in Washington, in academe, on the radio and TV, among activists. Being clear, explaining oneself lucidly, seems to be an endangered form of human behavior. Was clarity ever better regarded? Or is the current attitude toward it a constant in history? One could blame the educational system, seldom pushing students to express themselves neatly, in clean and tidy ways. But that’s an easy target. After all, we are what we teach and vice versa.

In any case, I want to offer here an ode to clarity, to make a call for its worthiness—and to do it clearly. As a word, clarity isn’t just beautiful but also elegant, even peaceful. Like the word moon (in Spanish, it is even more melodious: luna), it enchants me, it makes me surrender to its sound. Merriam-Webster defines clarity somewhat unclearly, as “the quality of being expressed, remembered, understood, etc., in a very exact way.”) That etc. is unneeded. The same idea could have been expressed more economically, without the accumulation of passive verbs followed by obnoxious commas.

And what exactly does very exact mean? Exactness is a synonym of accuracy, so very exact must mean very accurate, that is, with anal-retentive precision. I, for one, am not talking about such extremes. Clarity is the capacity to be simple, unambiguous, on target, without blubber. It is about the freedom to choose the right thoughts, and, in succession, just the correct words to express them.

That the purpose of language in general is to communicate isn’t debatable. The question, as I’m suggesting here, is about the quality of that communication. When a sentence is unclear, is the problem at the level of language or is it at the level of thought? After all, language is thought articulated in words.

Amy Tan, in her essay “Mother Tongue,” describes her surprise at people’s response to her mother’s broken English. As an immigrant from China, her mother struggled, upon arriving to the United States, with forming syntactically correct sentences. The reaction was, in the eyes of others, that not only her language but also her thoughts were broken. That is preposterous, of course, for Tan’s mother was perfectly capable of expressing herself in Mandarin.

But the language of immigrants distracts from my thesis, which is that clear thoughts foster clear language. By this I mean that clarity might be an attribute of language only after our thoughts have been built rigorously—or, in the topography of Merriam-Webster, very exactly. And how does one reach clarity of thought? After a long process of careful, meticulous refinement. That, and nothing else, is what the life of the mind should be about: refinement of thought.

I consider the work of Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell models of clarity. Take Orwell’s sentence from “Shooting an Elephant”: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” The whole of imperialism is sharply encapsulated in it.

In expressing themselves, children tend to be enviably clear, perhaps because their verbal reservoir is limited but also because they have little patience for ornamentation. What they want, they are eager to get: refinement of purpose implies sharpness of tongue.

Grown-ups are at the opposite end. Might the problem be that, unlike children, adults don’t always know what they want? Or else, that we want too much, all at the same time?

When in need of laughter, my wife and I often do one of two things: watch a Marx Brothers movie (I am one of those who can recite entire sections of Duck Soup, and I start one of my courses, “Impostors,” with the mirror scene between Groucho and Harpo—or better, between Pinky and Firefly), or read Derrida. They take a diametrically different approach: the former is consciously hilarious, whereas laughter comes about in the latter by accident, among those who, like me, live outside the Derrida cult.

The following paragraph comes from “Of Grammatology” (1967):

The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity. The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity. A science of the possibility of science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?

Does dense, complex thought require dense, complex language? No! Wittgenstein, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, states that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

It is rather easy to ridicule the Derrida quote. That ridicule doesn’t come from taking it out of context but from the inscrutability of it construction. Scientificity? Grammatics? Historicity?

In Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter I), Cervantes, deriding the fluffiness of chivalry novels, delivers one of the novel’s famous sentences (translated by John Ormsby): “the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.” Now that, unlike Derrida’s grammatocalifragilisticology, is a clear refutation of the unclear.

Maybe Derrida, secretly, is mocking understanding. I say maybe because I’m not sure. Or perhaps, a clown at heart, he seeks to undermine clarity, and, proving Wittgenstein wrong, to show that what can be said at all can also be said obfuscatingly. But does that mean it is deeper?

Again, No! Depth of thought doesn’t bring about linguistic malfunction.

I have a philosopher friend who teaches at a university in upstate New York. Not long ago, he told me that philosophers thrive on the feeling of intellectual superiority. They look down at the rest of the mortals as mentally limited. The fact that women are hardly represented in philosophy departments has much to do, in his view, with this macho approach: to be a philosopher is to be able to communicate in coded (e.g., befuddling) language.

The whole thing is baloney!

But I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe against philosophers. Lack of clarity is everywhere. Can you follow Rachel Maddow’s labyrinthine sentences? How about those of Speaker of the House John Boehner? His statements are usually short but seldom clear.

Shouldn’t we hold our politicians accountable when their ideas are blurred? Wouldn’t it be constructive to fire TV newscasters who don’t make sense, who talk in a spiral? Isn’t the classroom the place to teach clarity to the young?

Talking about the young, here is one more thought (that relates to Amy Tan’s mother): speaking in dialect doesn’t mean one is hazy. The other day, I heard a girl on a Brooklyn street say, “I can’t take nobody no more.” A common complaint that ain’t pretty but is clear.

Language changes, clarity doesn’t.

William S. Burroughs

An interesting Slate piece a few months back by Matthew J.X. Malady noted many Twitter users’ disdain for commas. It’s not just a matter of being frugal with punctuation in order to fit a thought into 140 characters. Punctuational minimalism has emerged as one of the hallmarks of casual online style—social media, texting, commenting, message boards. One inescapable example, which I’ve previously discussed, is the sea change in email greeting from “Hi, Name” to “Hi Name.” This is by no means exclusively the province of kids and illiterates. I recently came on this comment on the philosophy blog LessWrong: “Anyway [no comma] yes [no comma] I can see that teleological capture is problematic. However [no comma] I can’t do away with it completely.” (Exceptions to the minimalism rule are ellipses, question marks, and exclamation points, which have spread online like Asian carp in a predator-free freshwater ecosystem.)

Skilled Twitter users drop commas, in particular, to punch up the comedy. Malady quoted a tweet by the writer Jen Doll on a day that Gmail went down for almost an hour: “I guess all those losers outside skiing or like at the movies or whatever missed out on this exciting adventure we just had.” Another Doll tweet shows that eschewing capital letters can have a similar result: “the kind of tired that involves being too tired to get up and pour yourself more coffee oh tiredness most foul.” Someone else I follow joked: “My mistake of course was foolishly thinking I understood time zones.” (I won’t describe the lead-up to the punch line: It’s not worth the time.) In all those examples, if commas are inserted in the traditional spots,  the tone stiffens and, to some ears, sounds positively Chaucerian.

Malady sees no strong evidence that this trend is spreading to more formal writing, online or otherwise. I generally agree, though I feel like I’m seeing more commas left out after appositives. (“Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize is appearing on campus this semester.”)

In certain quarters, the trend, if anything, is more commas. Dropping the suspense, the quarters I refer to are the offices of The New Yorker, the soon-to-be-90-year-old magazine that is the veritable St. Peter’s Basilica of the comma. For The New Yorker, using this punctuation mark in all generally accepted and even optional spots, including after the penultimate item in a series, goes without saying. The magazine’s secret sauce in generating commas is its extreme strict constructionist view of nonessential (also known as nondefining) elements in a sentence. Consider: “By the time Blockbuster got around to offering its own online subscription service, in 2004, it was too late.” Virtually everybody else would leave out the commas after “service.” The New Yorker insists on it, the logic being that otherwise, the writer would be implying that Blockbuster offered its own online subscription service in years other than 2004.

Some people count sheep to get to sleep. I lie in bed reading New Yorkers on my Kindle, counting the commas. Normally, six or seven in a sentence is a number that allows me to close my eyes and drift off. Imagine my surprise, a couple of months ago, when I came upon this, in a review of a book about William Burroughs.

The biography, after its eventful start, becomes rather like an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs’s self-absorption, with connecting stops in New York, where he lived, in the late nineteen-seventies, on the Bowery, in the locker room of a former Y.M.C.A., and, returning to the Midwest, in the congenial university town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last sixteen years, and where he died, of a heart attack, in 1997, at the age of eighty-three.

That’s right. Sixteen commas. I had the feeling that the magazine’s editors were having a laugh among themselves, which I was lucky enough to share in.

I think so much about  New Yorker commas that sometimes my head gets all in a spin, especially when pondering what I call the prepositional-phrase conundrum. It comes up in a series of prepositional phrases (as in Burroughs’s New York and Kansas experiences, above) or with verb-prepositional-phrase constructions, in cases where the verb is not preceded by a subordinate conjunction, such as the two “where”s in the Burroughs example. Consider these fairly recent quotes from the magazine:

1. “It first appeared in 1959, in Paris, as ‘The Naked Lunch’ (with the definite article), in an Olympia Press paperback edition, in company with ‘Lolita,’ ‘The Ginger Man,’ and ‘Sexus.’”
2. “Brigham’s Allentown and Pittsburgh clinics finally closed, in 2012.”
3.  Robert Frost “was born in 1874 in San Francisco, where his father, William Frost, a newspaperman from primeval New England stock, had taken a job.”

No. 1 (also from the Burroughs review) omits a comma after “appeared.” Presumably that’s because “in 1959″ is considered an essential element, as is “in 1974″ in example No. 3. But why? There was only one year that Naked Lunch first appeared, as there was only one year Robert Frost was born. And sure enough, in example No. 2, recognizing there was only one year that the clinics finally closed, the magazine’s copy desk kept or put in the comma.

But down that road leads madness. Abraham Lincoln died just one time, but even The New Yorker would never print the sentence, “Lincoln died, in 1865.”

Or, would it?

British empire, 1919. Image courtesy Historic UK

English is becoming a global lingua franca not just for trade, industry, aviation, research, and entertainment, but also for higher education. We scarcely needed the conclusions of a new research report by the department of education at the University of Oxford in collaboration with the British Council, released Wednesday, to tell us that.

Ph.D. students in countries like Finland or the Netherlands have (at least in my field) long been writing their dissertations in English rather than in Finnish or Dutch. But at undergraduate as well as graduate and professional levels, more and more non-English-speaking countries are making the decision to use what they are calling English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI).

Idealistic faculty members suggest this could lead to enhanced understanding between peoples of different countries. Canny administrators with an eye on the bottom line observe that they are far more likely to be able to attract tuition-paying international students if their courses are in English rather than Urdu or Uzbek.

Interestingly, some countries are resisting the trend: At least some institutions in countries ranging from Israel to Senegal and from Italy to Venezuela are reportedly holding out against EMI in public education.

One can sympathize: It seems unconscionable that languages with scholarly histories as broad and deep as Hebrew, French, Italian, or Spanish should cease to be thought appropriate for modern university instruction. Yet when you look at the figures for research publications in Hebrew rather than English, or the numbers of employment opportunities for graduates that call for facility in Italian rather than English, you can begin to see the compelling case that can be made for EMI.

Nothing about the dialect of the southern region of the island of Great Britain makes it especially suited to a global role. In fact, choosing English, with its maddeningly stupid spelling quirks (Finnish has none), and its nearly 200 irregular verbs (Swahili has none), and its phonology replete with brutally complex consonant clusters (Hawaiian has none), looks like a choice made by a committee of idiots.

But it was not. Accidents of history conspired to determine the present status of English.

Which language was spoken by the people who managed to gain lasting political control in North America and Australasia, and had temporary political dominance in all of southern Asia and most of eastern, western, and southern Africa?

Which language is spoken in the one place on earth where blockbuster movies for worldwide release are made on budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars?

Which is the main language used by the closest to approach Radio Earth, namely the BBC World Service?

Which is the only language used officially for government purposes in more than 60 countries?

Which has been chosen as the norm for all air-traffic control conversations?

A long succession of such accidents has put English so far in the race for dominance in global communication that it can hardly even be called a race now.

Some people talk as if Mandarin Chinese was gaining on English. It is not, and it never will. A Tamil-speaking computer scientist explaining an algorithm to a Hungarian scientist at a Japanese-organized scientific meeting in Thailand calls on English, not Chinese. Nowhere in the world do we find significant numbers of non-Chinese speakers choosing Mandarin as the medium for bridging language gaps. There are no signs of that changing.

The burgeoning of English is pushing ever-larger numbers of small minority languages into extinction, and many linguists lament that. There are two sides to the issue, though. It saddens us linguists that so many grammatically fascinating and diverse languages in so many language families should be dying out, yet who are we to tell an African father, proud of raising his children to speak a multinational lingua franca like Swahili or English, rather than the local dialect of his traditional village, that he is wrong?

We cannot insist that children should be raised speaking some dying minority language (be it Walbiri or Irish or Inuktitut or Mohawk) unless we have jobs to offer them that they can do using those languages.

People must make their language choices for themselves. If they are increasingly choosing to be educated in English, neither fans of linguistic diversity nor politicians taking pride in the national language have a right to overrule them.

Personally, I would never have proposed making English a global language for education or anything else, and I think my life has been rendered poorer by the fact that because I speak English natively I have never been forced by circumstances to develop real fluency in a foreign language. But nobody placed me on the committee to decide on the global language for education. There was no committee.

Theodore Roosevelt was apparently the first candidate to declare, “My hat is in the ring.”

If you’re looking for a great summer read, and you anticipate a summer with a lot of time on your hands, I highly recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit. Its 928-page length is to some extent a function of the fact that it covers four separate topics, each of which could have been a book of its own: a brief biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a brief biography of William Howard Taft, a study of the two men’s complicated political and personal friendship, and (the ostensible subject) an account of the two presidents’ relations with muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and S.S. McClure.

Adding bulk as well is Goodwin’s leisurely narrative, which is constructed on the foundation of carefully chosen and artfully deployed quotations, from the letters and journals of all the characters and from contemporary newspapers. These quotes illuminate the characters and propel the story but also showcase the lingo of the time, which seems to have been an especially fertile one for verbal innovation. As I was reading along, the thing that increasingly popped out at me was a kind of reverse Downton Abbey anachronism experience: the way people in the period—roughly 1890 through 1916—used and sometimes invented expressions that I’d guess would have come from a later date. The use of quotation marks (within the quotes) and phrases like “so-called” suggest that a good number of the terms had recently entered public discourse.

When Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York City, protestors (itself a modern idea) carried placards that read  “Send the Police Czar to Russia” and “Roosevelt’s Razzle Dazzle Reform Racket.” (Here and henceforth, I put the modern-sounding expressions in boldface.) Goodwin quotes TR worrying about consequences of the public perception “that the Republican party had become unduly subservient to the so-called Wall Street men—to the men of mere wealth, the plutocracy.” The World described a Roosevelt speech as an attempt to “out demagogue all other demagogues.” (I boldface here not only for demagogue itself but for demagogue as a verb.)

As the 1908 election approached, a friend pleaded with Taft to run for president rather than wait for a Supreme Court appointment: “For the love of Mike, do not go the Supreme Bench.” The Washington Post said Taft voiced opposition to rival figures’ “stand-pat attitude.” In a financial crisis, J.P. Morgan was hailed as “the Man of the Hour.” According to the Literary Digest, the defeat of a direct primary bill in New York was a “slap in the face” to TR, who was contemplating reversing his previous declaration and running again. At the convention, the pro-Roosevelt crowd shouted, “Four years more. Four years more.” (When the GOP faithful  directed the chant in Richard Nixon’s general direction 64 years later, they reversed the second and third words.) He ultimately decided not to run, clearing the way for Taft, who, after his election, made “a clean sweep of Roosevelt’s team.” On inauguration day, when Taft and TR embraced, witnesses “applauded like mad.”

Roosevelt himself emerges as a connoisseur of and innovator in verbal play. He loved the expression “I am pleased as Punch” (note capital P); Goodwin quotes him using it on three separate occasions. He wrote to his son Kermit, “I came out of the encounter with flying colors.” He observed to William Allen White, “Aldrich and his people really threw up their hands.” He reflected on the “dreadful lines of division” between “the haves” and the “have-nots.”

Some of his innovations haven’t survived, or have morphed a bit. When Taft offered to resign his post in TR’s administration, the president replied, “Fiddle-dee-dee!” He said, “I did not care a rap about Mr. Tillman’s getting credit for the bill, or having charge of it.” Questioned about White House responsibilities when he was about to go on a trip, Roosevelt said, “Oh, things will be all right. I have left Taft sitting on the lid.” The line instantly became a cartoon-inspiring catchphrase but soon faded.

Taft and his wife, Nellie, were no linguistic slouches, either. He observed that a rival political figure “keeps mum” and once wrote to her that he hoped she wouldn’t get “the blues.” And she to him, in reference to TR’s waffling on whether to endorse Taft: “I felt like saying ‘D—you, support who you want, for all I care.” On calls for him to be more Roosevelt-like: “that is not your style, and there is no use trying to force it.” After assuming the presidency, Taft professed to be “a fish out of water” in his new office. But he did love the presidential automobile and once instructed an aide to prepare it “to take a joy ride.” He wrote to the same aide, Archie Butt, that it must distress him “to see Theodore and myself come to a parting of the ways.”

If some of the quotes turned up in a television series about the period, I would immediately take to Twitter, complaining (wrongly) about the anachronisms. Nellie suffered a stroke that left her speech impaired, and one of her children wrote to a sibling, “She gets pretty depressed about talking.” A Congressional bill made what President Taft considered “inappropriate” increases in duties. TR’s daughter Alice wrote in her diary (referring to her husband, Nicholas Longworth): “Poor Nick angry—says I must ‘shut up.’”

And I could have sworn one quoted term dated from the Clinton administration. But no. David Graham Phillips wrote a muckraking series of articles in Cosmopolian about the dynamics among three phenomena: senators’ work on behalf of corporations, increase of their personal wealth, and the growth in their power. The word he used to describe it was “triangulation.”

The political and linguistic drama heats up in 1912, when Roosevelt challenges his one-time friend and protégé with what Goodwin calls a “spontaneous declaration”: “My hat is in the ring.” (The Oxford English Dictionary supports the idea that Roosevelt was the first person to use this expression in a political context.) His campaign manager called the Illinois primary “the day on which the Roosevelt ‘band wagon’ got its real start.” A reporter told TR, “I am absolutely convinced that you will be nominated hands down” at the GOP convention. The New York Times noted, “Each side makes confident assertions, but each side secretly is scared stiff.” The same paper mentioned Roosevelt’s call for “a living wage.”

After Taft prevailed at the convention, a couple of significant political trademarks were established. He called Roosevelt, now reclaiming some of his radical positions, “a real menace to our institutions” and said the main issue was whether the Republican party would remain “the chief conservator” of the constitution. His victory, he said, had “preserved the party organization as a nucleus for conservative action.” Roosevelt, meanwhile, was nominated by a new party that called itself “Progressive.”

Both men, of course, were defeated by Woodrow Wilson, and they retreated separately to nurse their grievances against the other. They ultimately reconciled, a process kicked off by a joint appearance in 1916. Republicans hailed the event as “a Big Love Feast.”

Linguists sometimes get discouraged about the rampant prescriptivism in public discussions of language. This past week was no exception, as many of us watched with some dismay as both friends and strangers online delighted over Weird Al Yankovich’s new song “Word Crimes.” As this song showed yet again, it can take only the smallest spark to ignite a stream of invective about “abuses” in/to the language and about those who commit these perceived abuses.

There’s much to say about the attitudes and ideologies perpetuated by the song, but I’m not going to delve into it here. Lauren Squires has already said much of what I would say—and better—in her excellent guest post on Language Log, which provides a linguist’s thoughtful and pedagogically oriented response to the song and its reception. And Lucy Ferriss will talk more about the song in tomorrow’s Lingua Franca post.

Instead, I am going to switch it up and let my Pollyanna side take over this blog post. This seemed like a good moment to note a place where I think the public conversation is changing in some promising ways: the  conversation about code-switching.

Jamila Lyiscott’s powerful TED talk called “3 Ways to Speak English” hit the main TED site in mid-June, and it already has over 1.5 million views. In this four-and-a-half minute video, Lyiscott celebrates the three varieties of English that she controls, all important parts of her identity, and challenges the widely held ideology that links “being articulate” with speaking a standard variety of English. To be articulate, Lyiscott importantly reminds her audience, is to code-switch: to control multiple languages and/or varieties of a language and to move among them (sometimes intentionally and sometimes without realizing we’re doing it) as part of navigating different contexts and communities.

A student in my class this summer made sure I knew about this video on the first day of class, after I had gone over the syllabus and noted that we would be talking about code-switching. I was excited that she had already seen it—and seen it outside the context of a university classroom.

On the syllabus for this course (which is a first-year academic-success course, not a linguistics course), I included three pieces from NPR’s blog Code Switch, which started in April 2013. When I googled “code-switching” this week, the blog is the second site that comes up, and two of the pieces I assigned (“How Code-Switching Explains the World” and “Five Reasons Why People Code-Switch”) pop up as sites three and four. In other words, this topic has jumped the boundaries of the realm of linguistics—and I think this is a really good thing for students and teachers, among others.

The first of these two posts from Code Switch launched the site. It explains how the creators are thinking about the term code-switching and includes several video clips to illustrate code-switching in action. Early on Gene Demby writes:

You’re looking at the launch of a new team covering race, ethnicity and culture at NPR. We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we’ll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we’re looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We’re hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities—sometimes within a single interaction.

I have no quibble. Yes, when I’m teaching code-switching in an upper-level linguistics course, I will often differentiate between code-switching and style-shifting and get into other technical matters. But honestly, I think it is great to have a wider audience thinking about the ways that we all change our language in relation to different cultural and linguistic spaces and in relation to different parts of our identity in less technical ways. And if it helps to use code-switching as a broad umbrella term for all of that, let’s do it.

This summer I asked students to write part of their own code-switching story, just as Eric Deggans does in the blog post “Learning How to Code-Switch: Humbling but Necessary.” The students wrote powerful pieces that linked languages/language varieties to different aspects of their identities and highlighted their linguistic savvy as they navigate different spaces. The title of this post itself was inspired by the student who started his piece with more formal standard edited English and then wrote that sometimes it’s important to be switchin’ it up. (A colleague of mine in physics also successfully taught this unit on code-switching. I add this to say that you don’t need a degree in linguistics to facilitate this important conversation with students about linguistic diversity and identity.)

It’s exciting to me that code-switching is emerging as a less technical word that we can use in all kinds of classes to talk about our everyday experience with language in a way that legitimizes all the different language varieties that students bring with them to college, as well as the ones they will continue to develop in college. It also brings into focus the discerning knowledge students have about which of those varieties they choose to use in an educational context and which they reserve for other spaces and why. As we make some of that intuitive knowledge more explicit, we can then reflect together on the lifelong process of honing these linguistic tools and adding to our code-switching toolboxes—recognizing the cultural value of standard language varieties without letting that overshadow the cultural value of the many other varieties that students control.

I recently returned from a vacation to southeastern Massachusetts, where my wife grew up and I know of as the home of the greatest restaurant in the world (apologies to Calvin Trillin, longtime advocate of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue joint in Kansas City). I refer to The Bayside, in Westport, Mass., which claims the honor via not only its chowder, fried clams, lobster roll, strawberry-rhubarb pie, and Indian pudding with vanilla ice cream, but also view from its dining deck of the Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary and the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.

The view from The Bayside.

As I noticed when I first started spending time up there, years ago, the most commonly heard phrase at The Bayside—and indeed at all restaurants in the area—is “all set,” often used in the second person interrogative mood and sometimes elongated to “all set with that.” I associate it with New England the same way I do “bubbler” (for water fountain), “rubbish”  (trash), “jimmies” (sprinkles), “cold meat” (cold cuts) and “ruf” (roof). In 2011, a blogger who calls herself Quidquid Katie and describes herself as a Southerner “in exile” in Boston, wrote in a post, “I had definitely heard people say ‘all set’ before I moved up here, and I probably even said it myself from time to time. But I had never heard it used with such a frequency until I moved up here. Bostonians say it CONSTANTLY.”

Quidquid Katie gave an example of a conversation you might hear at Dunkin’ Donuts:

CUSTOMER: I’ll have a coffee.
CASHIER: You want a donut or are you all set?
CUSTOMER: No I’m all set.
CASHIER: Okay that’s $1.25.
[money and coffee are exchanged]
CUSTOMER: OK am I all set?
CASHIER: You’re all set.

By the way, I had thought of “a coffee”—as opposed to “a cup of coffee, “some coffee,” or just plain “coffee”—as a Britishism. But it may be a New Englandism instead, or as well.

I personally like “all set” for its local color, especially the way the southeastern Mass. glottalization makes it come out something like “all seh.” It’s also useful and versatile, all the more so before the nationwide popularity of the comparable “I’m good.” But not everyone is charmed. A recent post on Joe Roy’s blog “Clear Writing With Mr. Clarity” presents an anecdote that the author says will “demonstrate how lazy and inconsiderate the promiscuous use of this cliché really is.”

A waiter served me an entire dinner using only six words, consisting of the question “All set?” three times:

When he first approached the table, he didn’t say a word of greeting; he simply left the menu.

When he saw that I had finished looking at the menu, he approached and asked, “All set?” I went along with the gag and assumed that he meant “Are you ready to order?” and I ordered.

When he brought my dinner, he said nothing.

When he saw that I had apparently finished eating, he approached and asked “All set?” I stuck with the gag and assumed that he meant “Shall I bring the check?” I said “Yes.”

He brought the check folder and left it, saying nothing. I counted out a quantity of cash and put it inside the folder.

He noticed, approached, picked up the folder, waved it, and asked “All set?” for the third and last time. I assumed he meant “May I keep the change?”—he was hustling a tip. I said “Yes,” by which I meant to say “Yes, you may keep any money in excess of the check total. However, I believe that I have left the exact amount, to the penny.” I’m usually a heavy tipper, but this stiff was asking to be stiffed.

Mr. Clarity doesn’t give his geographic coordinates, but a little sleuthing led me to the unsurprising knowledge that he’s a New Englander, from Meredith, N.H.

The most memorable occasion when I’ve heard the phrase came not in a restaurant but on Luther Avenue in Somerset, Mass., where my wife grew up and where we used to visit her parents in the summer. Traditionally, the town would hold a 5K road race on the Fourth of July, with the finish line at the top of Luther Ave. The memory of being awakened by the pitter-patter of the leaders’ sneakers is a nice one. One year, we got dressed and watched as the middle of the pack made their way up this benign version of Heartbreak Hill. One of the neighbors, an 8-year-old  named Brady, had some water bottles that he offered to the runners as they passed. Brady also was obsessed with a particular superhero and spent every possible hour—whether awake or asleep—in this character’s getup, including the cape.

To appreciate what one of the runners said to him, you have to hear in your mind’s ear not only the glottalization of all seh, but also the non-rhotic pronuniciation of super as soop-uh. So anyway, as Brady holds the bottle out, the guy says, as matter-as-factly and respectfully as it’s possible to be:

“I’m all set, Superman.”

Paris Hilton and her tiny dog.

Certain books are so brilliant in idea and execution that they are deservedly and repeatedly revised, eventually coming to be referred to by the author’s last name long after his or her death. So we now have new versions of the 1743 A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist: Containing the Laws of the Game and Also Some Rules; the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language; and the 1926 Modern English Usage. We call them Hoyle, Webster’s, and Fowler.

I hope one day they are joined by Fussell—that is, a revised edition of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, published by Paul Fussell in 1983. To be sure, much of Fussell’s mordant Baedeker of mores still resonates. To give some of its flavor,  I cannot improve on Sandra Tsing Loh’s precis. She notes that Fussell

believes there are actually nine classes (Top Out-of-Sight, Upper, Upper Middle, Middle, High Proletarian, Mid-Proletarian, Low Proletarian, Destitute, Bottom Out-of-Sight). His Heart of Darkness journey wends boldly past unicorns (High Prole), ladies’ thimble collections (Middle), men’s hobbies (“One must learn that fishing in fresh water is classier than in salt, and that if salmon and trout are the things to catch, a catfish is something by all means to avoid catching”), the Sunbrella hat (for which he reserves a timeless—and I think appropriate—ire), “parody” hats favored by the upper-middle class such as Pat Moynihan’s tweedy bog cap, and the perils of the dark-blue visored “Greek fisherman’s cap” as advertised in The New Yorker (New Yorker ads themselves being, Fussell explains, crucibles of middle-class high anxiety). God forbid you get that cap in black leather (“Only six things can be made of black leather without causing class damage to the owner: belts, shoes, handbags, gloves, camera cases, and dog leashes”). He even threads through the subtle lexicon of tie patterns—from “amoeba-like foulard blobs” (Upper), signal flags (Upper Middle), musical notes (sliding downward), to Oh Hell, It’s Monday (quite low), with special horror reserved for the southwestern bola (“Says the bola, ‘The person wearing me is a child of nature, even though actually eighty years old’”).

But a lot has happened, classwise, over the last 31 years, including the near dying out of tie-wearing. I not infrequently find myself wondering what Fussell (who died in 2012, and was a generous and friendly acquaintance of mine) would make of current preferences in, for example, dog size. This would seem to be inversely correlated to social standing, with Uppers favoring horselike crossbreeds that rhyme with “oodle” and the Proles going for cute tiny pooches, but then you see a tough guy walking (or being walked by) a gigantic guard dog, and Paris Hilton affecting a chihuahua in her purse. Of course, where, precisely, would you place Paris Hilton on the class continuum? It is a puzzlement.

Then there is class-in-language, a huge topic that deserves its own book. One term I often wonder about is girlfriend, that is, when used by a female to refer to a (nonromantic) female friend: “My girlfriend Kate and I are going out to dinner.”  There’s a certain logical flaw to the usage. That is, in none of the other three kinds of friendships—a male’s male friends, a male’s female friends, a female’s male friends—is the gender of the friend habitually, or pretty much ever, named. (It is true that males often use gender-implying words for male friends: mate in Britain, buddy among American bros.) My sense is that there’s a strong class-educational-political component to this. That is, to the extent a woman is an upper-middle-class liberal who went to Swarthmore, she is unlikely to say “my girlfriend Kate” unless she and Kate are dating. The direct address form, originating in African-American slang, as in, “You go, girlfriend!,” is another matter entirely.

Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary, I was surprised to find that girlfriend was initially used in the platonic sense. The first definition is “A female friend; esp. a woman’s close female friend,” and the first citation comes from Harper’s Magazine in 1859: “A demure little widow, much more gay and girlish than any of her girl-friends when she chose to forsake her rôle.” (The second definition, dating from 1892, is the common one today: “A female with whom a person has a romantic or sexual relationship.”) I was also surprised to read that boyfriend (or boy-friend or boy friend) has been used in a nonromantic sense, as in this quote from a 1938 biography of Mark Twain: “His boy friend Will Bowen, one of the Tom Sawyer gang, was in bed with the disease.” That’s the last citation, jibing with my sense that no one would use the word this way anymore.

But girl-on-girl girlfriend persists. The most extensive discussion of the issue I’ve found is the commentary engendered by this question on Yahoo Answers:

My 24 year old female coworker just said she was excited to drink tonight because it was her girlfriend’s birthday. Do straight girls say this when referring to friends? I am gay so I only say girlfriend when I mean romantic partner, but I don’t want to assume that’s what she meant.

No one really got into the class aspect, but interesting generational and regional issues were brought up, as in: “I’m from New York [where] females say girlfriend all of the time. It is just a word that doesn’t really mean girlfriend. It basically means that hey if my man decides to leave me or i leave [him] i’ve always got my girl.”

On reflection, I’d hypothesize that this girlfriend gained popularity in reaction to recent discourse about males and females and their roles. Specifying the gender of a friend says that the friend’s gender is important or telling: that there is some difference in kind between a guy friend and a girlfriend. Feminism, generally speaking, does not believe that to be the case, and thus female feminists don’t say girlfriend. Other women do either because the feminist message has not filtered down to them or because, on some level, they don’t agree with it. As for men, they aren’t required to specify friends’ gender because double standard.

I have no doubt that all this relates to class as well. Hopefully, we will one day pick up Fussell and read precisely how.

Arthur Chu is apparently best known as one of the top Jeopardy! winners of all time, but since I haven’t watched Jeopardy! since the last millennium, I have no opinion on his style of play or use of the Forrest Bounce. I came upon him, instead, in an essay on his current voice-over work. Born to Chinese immigrant parents in the 1980s, Chu grew up “translating” their “broken English” into perfectly formed phrases, with rounded Rs and articles in the right places, so they could be understood at customer-service counters and restaurants. It’s an experience shared by many second-generation Americans, who go on to cultivate such accent-free pronunciation that, as Chu puts it:

The thing that made me weird as a kid was that my English was too perfect. My grammar was too meticulously correct, my words too carefully enunciated—I was the kid who sounded like “Professor Robot.” In order to avoid being a social pariah in high school I had to learn to use a carefully calibrated proportion of slurred syllables and street slang in my speech—just enough to sound “normal,” not enough to sound like I was “trying too hard.”

I’ve now listened to Chu on CNN, and he does sound amazingly pitch-perfect American, perhaps slightly Midwestern in his determined rs and long ees, but ideal for the kind of bread-and-butter work he does as the voice of corporate videos and voicemail greetings. What’s more surprising is his being cast as the voice of a Chinese person speaking heavily accented English. “It involves a lot of leveling,” he writes, “a lot of smoothing”:

The tongue stays closer to the center of the mouth rather than doing the pronounced, defined highs and lows that shape the L and R sounds. The vocal cords vibrate in smooth, singing tones rather than doing the little hop up and down that makes for a normal American English syllable.

Chu does not find the stereotyping offensive, because the image he’s projecting is of a Chinese person introducing Americans to the tourist attractions or history of China. Here, I began to part ways with his thinking. He compares the use of a Chinese-accented English to that of a Southern drawl for a video on the American South. But people in the American South speak English, whereas those in China speak Chinese. The video producers have to seek out, first, an English speaker, and second, an English speaker who can sound “authentically” Chinese by faking the accents his parents had in Albany, N.Y.

The second aspect of Chu’s fascinating exploration of his participation in the accent business that bothered me was his comparison of Chinese-American speech to other forms of “code switching.” Emphasizing the determined assimilation of Chinese-American kids into mainstream vernacular, his claims that “there isn’t a Chinese-American accent the way there’s a distinct cadence to how black Americans or Latino Americans talk. Most Chinese-Americans have a pitch-perfect “invisible” accent for wherever they live.”

It isn’t just that this statement vastly oversimplifies both the question of regional accent and the question of ethnic vernacular. It’s also that Chu is echoing a claim I’ve heard, without a shred of evidence, from white Americans who consider themselves completely unbiased: that they can “tell” when a radio announcer, for instance, is black, regardless of her origins or upbringing. That’s racism, and it’s disappointing to find it coming from a commentator whose own experience is so intertwined with questions of prejudice and assimilation. After all, as Chu writes,

To sound like a “normal” American is to wield privilege. … The English I grew up with as “real” isn’t the English I painstakingly forced on myself from listening to TV and my peers at school. It’s the English of my parents, complete with underpronounced L’s and R’s, dropped “and”s and “the”s, sing-songy and “broken” and embarrassing. That accent is real, but my use of it can never be. … After a lifetime of rehearsals and training, the “announcer voice” is my voice, and the only reliable way to sound “less announcer-y” is to put on an accent that isn’t mine, be it Brooklyn, Biloxi, or Beijing.

Now that is real, and requires no comparison to Texans or Latinos to get its message across.