Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our observations are those of the disinterested listener. We may note, as I have, our tendency to cling to expressions now considered old-fashioned or stiff. But what of the ways in which we find the expressions of the zeitgeist coming out of our own mouths?

I can’t recall what my husband and I were talking about during a long hike last week, but I heard myself say — twice! — something on the order of “Good on him!” I felt simultaneously puzzled and a little ridiculous, like someone stealing an expression from a language she doesn’t speak. Of course, when we returned home, I did my research. Most sources trace good on you to Australian idiom. The stress is often on the preposition, something like “Good onya.” And while it’s hard to track the spread of an idiomatic expression that could mean something else — e.g., “That outfit looks good on you,” would never be confused with “Eating celery is good for you” — I’m not the only one who has heard young Americans say Good on you when they mean a sincere compliment, while relegating Good for you to sarcasm.

For me, I realized when I tried to analyze my own adoption of the term, a subtle distinction exists even when both terms are used sincerely. When I said “Good on him!” during our walk, I wasn’t simply congratulating the person we were talking about, as I would someone who’d won a prize (there, I suspect I would still say “Good for him!”). Rather, I was according this person a certain degree of moral virtue, as someone who had acted unselfishly or painstakingly. Mind you, I had thought none of this through before the words popped out of my mouth. But unlike other expressions I’ve found myself unconsciously adopting over the years — there was a time, humiliating to recall, when I used awesome to voice even a nanoparticle of admiration — I feel no desire to eliminate good on you from my vocabulary. After all, there’s nothing particularly rational about the preposition for in the expression I’m used to, and having both in my lexicon gives me nuances I like.

Beyond this particular expression, I know my style of speech has changed. I use like as a tic, not to the degree of my students, but far more than I did 20 years ago. The same is true even for Terri Gross, that most consistent of interviewers, who in her 1990 interview with Tim O’Brien uses “I mean” a fair amount whereas in her 2015 interview with Marc Maron she sprinkles plenty of likes through her conversation. Close friends are increasingly using subject pronouns as objects of prepositions, and I know they didn’t do so in their 20s.

Since last week, though, I have made a project of asking others in my age group whether they think their style of speaking has changed in the last quarter-century. We’ve drifted, each time, into an exchange over what’s happened to language generally. But with the exception of gender-neutral terms (singular they, he or she, and job descriptions), the adoption of which we wear as a sort of badge of honor, no one in this small sample copped to individual shifts in idiom. No one else thought they used like frequently; no one else recalled saying good on rather than good for or based off of rather than based on; everyone claimed a hearty rejection of popular terms like massive, totally, killing it or seriously. When I allowed that I find my own idiom changing, they hastened to reassure me that it wasn’t so — or at least not, like, totally.

But it is so, and I don’t mind. Good on me, I think. Language, like life, is change. How it differs from the rocks.

Teaching them who Buddy Holly was would be more valuable than trying to make them shun covertly inflected mandative clauses.

For grammar bullies “the subjunctive” is sacred ground. Reforms proposed for the British national curriculum in 2012 required teaching use of the subjunctive not later than sixth grade. People seem to think the subjunctive is a fragile flower on which civilization depends; without our intervention it will fade and die, and something beautiful, fragile, and important will be lost.

As usual, virtually none of the things people believe about the subjunctive or its status in English are true. Most purists who witter on about it couldn’t actually pass a test on distinguishing subjunctive from nonsubjunctive clauses to save their sorry asterisks.

But then they don’t have to: Merely mentioning the subjunctive approvingly and urging that it be taught is enough to establish one’s credentials as a better class of person — one who knows about subjunctives.

This post is simply an attempt at surveying the facts (imperfectly; but see Rodney Huddleston’s beautiful treatment in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, henceforth CGEL, pages 993–1,000).

It’s not about verbs. English has an odd fondness for homophony or homography in verb forms: Grammatically distinct forms of verbs often share spellings or pronunciations, so you get fewer distinct shapes than you might have expected in the inflection table; but it’s crystal clear there is no point in having a “subjunctive” box anywhere in that table. Not a single verb in the language has a special subjunctive shape. CGEL distinguishes three tensed forms and three untensed for typical verbs. Here’s the array for shake and bake:

Shake has distinct shapes for the preterite and the past participle; bake doesn’t. Both share shapes for the plain present and the plain form (the latter is used in imperatives, in infinitivals, after modals, and elsewhere). Yet one verb in English—the weirdest yet commonest one, namely be—has a plain form different from all its other forms: be does not share its shape with is. Notice the contrast between present tense and imperative with shake and be (I underline the crucial forms):

With both verbs you can contrast present-tense clause with imperative; but with be you actually see a different verb form shape.

Now I’m ready to define English subjunctive clauses. They are finite yet tenseless clauses with their verb in the plain form. Virtually all are subordinate clauses, usually introduced by the standard finite-clause subordinator that. (A few optative main clauses with subjunctive form survive, relics of a bygone age: Heaven help us, God damn you, God be thanked, Long live democracy, So be it, etc.)

The subjunctives that are most robustly present in contemporary English are what CGEL calls mandative subjunctives. They go with verbs and adjectives of necessity, cruciality, or demand. A typical example (with the subjunctive clause underlined):

Finite clauses with pronoun subjects have to have nominative pronouns, hence we find he, not him. The finite declarative subordinator that is the same as in Jill says that he is punctual, but in [2] the subordinate clause verb (be) is in the plain form.

Today many speakers of Standard English substitute the plain present for the plain form in mandative subjunctives, and say It’s vital that he is more punctual and so on. Yet even they have a subjunctive-clause construction, covertly, because they too see sentences like [3] as ambiguous:

No contrast in meanings has been lost: It says either that Jill demands shoe-wearing or that she affirms I’m already a shoe-wearer.

By replacing first person in the subordinate clause by third person, we can make the difference pop into view for those speakers who use overt subjunctives, because two shapes emerge:

These patterns are simple, robustly entrenched—and not very important. If overt subjunctives disappeared completely, it would matter very little: Everyone would then be a covert-subjunctive speaker. Ambiguous sentences would be more frequent to some tiny degree (Lane Greene discusses one here). But English-speaking civilization does not hang on this, and there are many things more worth a sixth-grade teacher’s time than whether the final s should be left off wears in [5]. Teach them what planets are; why dogs die; what the courts do; who Buddy Holly was; something more important than the footling matter of whether overt or covert mandative clauses are better.

[One footnote: Many discussions of English grammar refer to the were of If only there were something we could do as a subjunctive, often as the "past subjunctive"; but it's a totally different construction, the irrealis clause. The irrealis is overtly distinct only for the verb be (with every other verb the preterite is used), and only in the first and third persons, and only for some speakers. It occurs in certain clauses describing situations not claimed to hold in this world. It doesn't talk about the past at all: I wish it were a different color certainly isn't the past tense of *I wish it be a different color!]

On the morning of April 1, I heard a BBC newsreader say (without levity, April Fool’s Day though it was) that Sajid Javid, the British government’s secretary of state for business, innovation, and skills, had “assured the steel workers that ministers were doing everything they could to save their jobs.” And for a few misguided milliseconds my brain was saying “Typical: politicians trying to protect themselves!” I had linked the genitive pronoun their to the most recent plural noun, ministers.

The scriptwriter intended something very different, of course. The Tata Steel megacorporation has been running British steel plants at a loss of more than $1.4 million, not per annum but per diem. When Tata announced last week that it planned to sell or close down this loss-making operation, government ministers knew it would mean the disappearance of thousands of jobs, and catastrophe for a town like Port Talbot, in Wales, that depends almost entirely on its steel plant. Mr. Javid faced instant criticism for not being on the case — a trifle unfair, since he was conducting government business 12 time zones away in Australia. But he made the grueling 24-hour flight back, and went straight to the Port Talbot steelworks to be shouted at. What he told them was that the government was considering all options for keeping the plant open to stop workers being laid off. We were supposed to associate their in the BBC sentence with the more distant plural noun, workers.

This sort of antecedent-resolution problem with pronouns is ubiquitous in both speech and writing. The notion that properly prepared prose avoids ambiguity is an absurd myth. Repeating it to freshman-comp students won’t make it true. If ambiguity were even mildly toxic, we’d all be dead. It surrounds us constantly.

When linguists discuss semantics they employ subscript variable letters (often i, j, k, …), somewhat analogous to the variables in logical calculi and computer programming languages. So they might write [1] for the meaning where ministers are engaged in protecting their own positions, or [2] for the one where they are helping the workers.

It’s a very interesting fact that no spoken language has ever been found to include in its vocabulary an extensible stock of markers to signal where the linkages are between pronouns and their antecedents.

Some languages, like Navajo (Diné Bizaad), have a distinction between third person and fourth person (though in Navajo it is expressed in verb inflections, not pronouns of different shapes). The meaning difference is subtle; some sources say that definitely identified individuals get third person and vaguely delineated or inferred individuals get fourth person. Apparently when talking to others about a man who happens to be present, it is courteous to refer to him with fourth person, which sort of keeps the reference at arm’s length. I’m unqualified to give further details (I’m not an Athabaskan specialist; as the late great linguist James McCawley would sometimes say after a class exposition of some esoteric point, “I’ve already told you more than I know on this topic”).

What I do know, however, is that although grammatical features like person, gender, number, and case sometimes help to prevent confusion, no language has an open set of words or affixes used simply to prevent multiple references to distinct people from being confused where grammatical features don’t suffice.

Languages with such devices are easy to envisage. Instead of he, she, it, etc., English could have had multiple pronouns like heej, heek, heem, etc., and sheej, sheek, sheem, etc., and iteej, iteek, iteem, etc.; and matching noun suffixes -eej, -eek, -eem, etc.

Even a small number of them could helpfully clarify (for example) jokes about ethnically diverse sets of men walking into bars and suchlike. Here’s a sample joke in an imagined dialect of English. I’ve set the special suffixes in red for ease of reading. The Englishman gets -eej, the Scotsman gets -eek, the baker gets -eeb, the Englishman’s pocket gets -eep, etc.

An Englishman-eej and a Scotsman-eek walk into a fancy bakery shop. Heej snatches two cookies-eet off the counter and pops themeet into hiseej pocket-eep without the baker-eeb noticing.

“See?” heej mutters to himeek; “You’re just not smart enough.”

“Wrong,” heek replies. “Watch and learn.”

“I’ll show you a really good magic trick,” heek says to heeb.

Heek calmly picks up a cookie-eef and eats iteef. Then heek takes another one-eeg and eats iteeg too.

By this time, heeb is getting suspicious, and asks angrily what’s so damn magical.

So heek says to heeb: “Now look in heej’s pocket-eep!”

All pronoun ambiguity gone. It would be as good as having subscripts or variable letters. But in all of the world’s 7,000-odd spoken languages there isn’t one that attempts anything like this, despite how much it might help comedians, newsreaders, lawyers, or the rest of us.

Noting that I’ve written about the hip-hop/youth/New York trend of glottalizing (that is, “swallowing” the t before the last syllable) such words as important, button, and Manhattan, a reader recently e-mailed me, “I was intrigued by how Hillary Clinton glottalized her last name … as early as 1992. Not surprisingly, she changed it back to Clin’T'on in her campaign video last year.”

The reader included links to two YouTube videos. The first, a fairly amazing comedy bit at a 1992 roast of Ron Brown, suggests the complexity of Clinton pronunciation. I count four ways the name is commonly said, beginning with two sorts of glottalization: going all in and swallowing both the n and the t (“Clih-ən”) or the sort of modified glottalization Hillary employs in the clip (at about the 1:20 mark), voicing the n but not the t–”Clin-ən.” This is similar but not identical to the pronunciation of the town of Clinton, in upstate New York: the townsfolk apparently say “Clinen” — with no t and no glottalization, as if to rhyme with linen. (I’m not counting that as one of the four.)

In the second clip, a current campaign ad, Hillary’s pronunciation of her last name — which comes in the last couple of seconds — has indeed changed to “Clin-ton,” with the second syllable fully voiced. That’s three. The fourth seems to me the most common, and I recall that when Bill Clinton came on the scene in the early 90s, there was talk of this being the authentic Southern pronunciation. It’s “Clint-n” — in other words, alveolar stop with nasal release. I picked up that term from a fascinating discussion of the varying pronunciations of button and butter on this blog about dialects. If any specialists have a quibble with the terminology, please weigh in in the comments. (As if I had to ask.) Another blog has some tips for non-native English speakers on learning how to say Clint-n and mount-n.)

Like all politicians, from our current president on down, Hillary Clinton speaks in different ways before different audiences and on different occasions.  Last year Bloomberg Politics published an article called “Tracking Hillary Clinton’s Use of Every American Accent East of the Mississippi” (a sound clip is included). The title was a little hyperbolic, as the article talked about only three particular speech habits Clinton has slipped in and out of over the years: the Southern “glide switching,” or pronouncing the i in child or like as ah; “Northern Cities Shift,” (a characteristic of her native Illinois), or pronouncing the word cat so it sounds like kyet; and the Obama-esque g-dropping, that is, talkin’ about makin’ the economy better for workin’ families.

The variation in how one can say Clinton is rare among presidential names. This century there have been only two that allow for any uncertainty. Most recently, I remember that when Ronald Reagan first came on the scene, my father pronounced the first syllable Ree instead of Ray. Various people on the Internet testify to using or hearing that pronunciation in his pre-Presidential days, but at least in the introduction to this 1954 clip from General Electric Theater, the man himself says Raygun. (The clip itself is a fascinating acting meetup between Reagan and James Dean.)

The other ambiguous name was owned by two presidents, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. One still hears it pronounced phonetically, with the first syllable rhyming with muse. But that is wrong. I say so with certainty because Theodore addressed the question in 1898, in a reply to someone who had asked about the pronunciation:

As for my name, it is pronounced as if it was spelled “Rosavelt.” That is in three syllables. The first syllable as if it was “Rose.”

An English teacher living in Jerusalem wrote to ask me to resolve a dispute about a test question. Someone had set a correct/incorrect test on the preterite (the simple past, e.g. took) vs. the perfect (e.g. have taken). This was the test item (the students were supposed to circle the correct form of the verb inside the parentheses):

Some of the teachers who discussed the question felt that without further information neither sentence could be deemed incorrect. But many (some native English speakers and others native Hebrew speakers) disagreed. They felt that only the perfect could be correct; the preterite was not grammatical at all. Who was right?

Let’s number these two sentences for reference:

[1] I have just received a message but I haven’t read it yet.

[2] I received a message but I haven’t read it yet.

There can be no doubt that both [1] and [2] are grammatical in Standard English. So a test item asking for students to choose between them is really dumb.

Tragically, English teachers in various parts of the world (the Middle East is only one) love questions of this kind. For a couple of years I occasionally corresponded with a teacher in Iran who occasionally sent me questions of this general sort for adjudication. I answered as politely and helpfully as I could, hoping that I was assisting English language education in the Persian-speaking world, but eventually I pointed out to my correspondent that the work was dull and repetitive, because all she ever asked me to do was to say which of two examples was “correct,” and my answer was virtually always that both are correct but with certain slight and subtle meaning differences.

She gave up on me immediately: I never had any more correspondence from her. She vanished. I think if I had just chosen A or B at random each time and mailed back answers like “B is correct and A is incorrect,” with invented reasons, she would have been delighted. But I would have been giving unknown students grades assigned at random, which would feel like a violation of the linguist’s analog of the Hippocratic Oath. So I told her the truth, and she stopped consulting me.

The present case is of exactly the same sort. In [1] we have two simple clauses in the present perfect coordinated with “but.” Nobody could fault the sentence. The only difference with [2] is that the first of the two clauses is in the preterite. But since nobody could imagine that I received a message is ungrammatical, the question can only be about whether you can combine a preterite clause with a present perfect clause in a coordination when they refer to related situations.

Well, to see that the answer is yes, so [2] has got to be fine, it may help to try mentioning a specific time. Imagine someone whose phone goes ‘ping’ when a text arrives, saying: I received a message an hour ago (I heard the ping), but I haven’t read it yet.

Now keep in mind that temporal adjuncts like an hour ago are never obligatory. Adding a temporal adjunct that fixes a time in the past for received to refer to may improve its informativeness, and give us more clues to the context, but it can’t change its grammaticality.

The only interesting point raised by [1] and [2] is that the two sentences reflect a weak trans-Atlantic dialect difference in preferences. British English speakers tend to prefer the present perfect when talking about past events with present relevance. So take a case with an adverb like already, which implicitly introduces relevance to the present moment: British speakers will favor We’ve already done that, while American English speakers tend to prefer the preterite: We already did that.

From the fact that my email correspondent was so emphatic that [2] was acceptable, I could tell she had grown up in America (I told her so, and she told me I was correct; she went to Berkeley). But that doesn’t mean British speakers disallow sentence [2]; it’s just that in the majority of situations, if the receiving of the message and the not yet reading it were both being treated as having present relevance, British speakers would find [1] more natural.

But, as is often the way with the very limited number of American/British syntactic dialect differences, both dialects have both sentences.

So I wish people would avoid using this sort of differential preference in grammar-test items, testing for knowledge of a fictive grammaticality distinction. If “Correct/Incorrect” test items are to be used, the “Incorrect” choice better be genuinely incorrect.

In 1985, to much acclaim, Harvard University Press published an ABC of American English — the first volume of the monumental Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by Frederic G. Cassidy and covering the first three letters of the alphabet.

That was more than 30 years ago. And the fieldwork on which much of the dictionary was based (it also made extensive use of other studies and examples) took place in the 1960s, half a century ago. So what has happened since?

The last volume of the completed DARE, edited by Joan Hall, was published in 2013. In a previous century, that would have been that — six volumes in print, perhaps to be reviewed and updated at some time in the future. But we’re in the 21st century, where dictionaries live on after print publication and remain rejuvenated in the cloud of cyberspace.

Now, instead of those hefty volumes taking up more than a foot of shelf space, you can subscribe to the entire DARE, complete with tools that make possible instant search results that would take forever using paper.

What’s more, DARE now provides quarterly updates online, correcting and augmenting the material in the print volumes. Last year I wrote about the first two updates.

Since then there have been two more, provided by the new Chief Editor George Goebel, and they are still free to all. The full dictionary requires a subscription, but you can see all of the updates without charge at the All Updated Entries page on DARE’s website.

Each update has more than 50 entries, both revisions and new ones. Update 3 continues emphasis on the letter B with new entries like bean breaking, a Kentucky term for “a social gathering at which bean pods are broken into short lengths for drying or canning,” earliest attestation 1969; beetle organ, an Arkansas term for a juke box, earliest example 1938; bendoe, an old-fashioned New England term for thin ice and the game of bendoes where you venture out on that ice, documented as early as 1860.

And to show that there are new regional distinctions too, there’s parking ramp, in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, the name for a multistory parking structure, with the earliest example from 1933.

The fourth update covers everything from belly flower (a California wildflower) to briggity (in the southern Appalachians, restless or aggressive), but it pays special attention to the many terms for slingshot, among then beaner, bean shooter, bean flipper, beany, and rubber flipper.

And by the way, are you fit to carry guts to a bear? See for yourself.

Correction (5/20/2016, 12:04 a.m.) An earlier version of this post misspelled the first name of DARE’s first editor. He was Frederic G. Cassidy. The post has been updated to reflect that.

“Tarzan has always had bad optics — white hero, black land — to state the excessively obvious,” wrote Manohla Dargas in her review of The Legend of Tarzan in The New York Times.  This time around, the muscular white expanse of Tarzan is supplied by Alexander Skarsgard, who induces no eye strain. The use of optics is another matter.

Optics, the science of light and lenses and sight, has given way in popular use to the sense of “the way in which a situation, event, or course of action is perceived by the public. Freq. in political contexts.” That’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s reading of the usage, which dates to 1973.

Optics vs. reality: Something looks bad, whether it is or not. The formulation good optics is rarer, and points to the default connotation of optics as a troubling condition of perception.

The language brigade has been on optics for a while. In 2010, Ben Zimmer wrote a take-down of the term optics in the Times. He even cites William Safire, in his final language column, ruminating on the emergence of the usage.

In a 2012 Guardian column on the then-forthcoming U.S. election, Oliver Burkeman cited Ben Zimmer’s earlier piece. His opening salvo: Are there any bits of American campaign jargon more annoying than the word “optics”?

The come-on floating over Burkeman’s essay reads “‘Optics’ is not just ghastly jargon coined by D.C. insiders. It also unwittingly describes politics’ disconnect from people’s reality.”

This use of optics has had a new boost  this summer. A public exchange between former president Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch created a tempest on a tarmac. A long article in the Times concluded with a quote from the former Obama adviser David Axelrod, who  had tweeted that “it was foolish to create such optics.”

The National Review took exception not only to the meeting, but to this use of optics. A pull quote in David Harsanyi’s essay reads “Acknowledging that the meeting was bad ‘optics’ is a way for Democrats to intimate that there was nothing unethical about it.”

Patrick Healy reported in the July 26^th  New York Times that should Hillary Clinton win the White House, former president Bill Clinton “may not even have an office in the West Wing, given the undesirable optics” of the unprecedented situation.

Ghastly jargon, political evasion, or rhetorical sedative, the rise of optics is a reminder that when something doesn’t look right there are consequences regardless of the probity of the actors. Optics is about impressions, appearance, the way someone might interpret what is seen. In that, optics isn’t necessarily about facts.

Caveat lector: You don’t have to be a national figure to be subject to this sense of optics. If you want to put 10 bucks in the church collection basket but you only have a twenty in your wallet, what do you do?  In theory, you can drop in your twenty and fish out two fives. You’ve made a 10-dollar contribution, but the optics are terrible.

Day-to-day life obligates us to avoid creating unwanted optical illusions. But in this vertiginous election run, we’re in need of guides to help us distinguish appearance from reality, and reality from reality TV.

If that’s a question of optics, bring on the optometrists.

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A distinguished computational linguist from the University of Colorado, Professor Martha Palmer, is about to begin a lecture in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh under the title “The Blocks World Redux,” when she realizes that (like all of us) she had learned the word redux (it means “restored” or “revisited”) from printed sources, and neither she nor the person introducing her has any idea how to pronounce it.

Two linguists in the front row spring instantly to her aid. “Riddúx,” I tell her confidently, stressing the second syllable, as in redúction. “Réddux,” says my friend Mark Steedman simultaneously, stressing the first syllable, as in réddish. We stare at each other blankly.

“You seriously think,” asks Mark, “that Updike’s second Rabbit Angstrom novel is called ‘Rabbit Reddúx’?”

“And you think it’s called ‘Rabbit Réddux’?”

It was a standoff. Trying to intimidate each other with protestations of disbelief was clearly not going to get us anywhere.

Professor Palmer and her introducer saw which way the wind was blowing and very sensibly finessed the issue. The lecture began without anyone reading the title out. It presented new work on a “Blocks World” like the one used by Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU, an important artificial intelligence experiment in the 1970s. Winograd showed how instructions in ordinary English for moving blocks around (“Place the blue block on top of the green one,” “Put the red block into the box,” etc.) could be “understood” by a computer program, which demonstrated its “understanding” by executing graphically simulated block-moving operations. Martha Palmer’s team has been pushing the paradigm further, exposing crucial new layers of the necessary semantics in apparently simple utterances like “Add another block.”

But Mark and I were still worrying about that pronunciation disagreement long afterward. We both believe there are empirical facts about English grammar and pronunciation, and ways of confirming or refuting them. We consulted independent sources in an effort to discover the correct pronunciation of redux.

Back in my office I discovered that redux is not in John Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary or in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. No help there.

Back in his office Mark found out that redux was listed as an independent lexeme in Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary, with a short first vowel, and should receive stress on the penultimate syllable under the Latin stress rule. But of course what we really wanted was to be sure about English pronunciation norms, not Latin ones.

A Google search for “redux” displays a dictionary entry above the top ten hits, with a phonetic representation and a linked sound file. Excellent! But, to our horror, the phonetic representation specifies a pronunciation neither of us had considered, namely réedux, with a long [i:] sound in the first syllable, as in réedy; and worst of all, the sound file does not agree with it! It backs my pronunciation, riddúx. So we now had an authority, but it contradicted not only us but also itself. (I’ve reported the contradiction to Google; eventually they may fix it, one way or the other.)

Wiktionary complicates things yet further with the phonetic representation [ˈɹidʌks] (ríddux), disagreeing with all of the above — like Mark’s réddux, with initial stress, but with the vowel of rid rather than red.

The matchless Oxford English Dictionary gives two pronunciations: “Brit. /ˈriːdʌks/ , U.S. /ˈriˌdəks/” is what it says. That’s like réedux and ríddux — disagreeing with both Mark and me.

The stipulations go on varying like this from source to source, with no apparent way to determine which is correct.

Wikipedia notes that in Rabbit at Rest, a sequel to Rabbit Redux, Angstrom sees a story in a Sarasota newspaper headlined “Circus Redux”: “He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce it.” Nor does anybody else, it seems. Updike himself reports (in his essay collection Hugging the Shore, according to Wikipedia) that he says “ray-dooks”: different vowels (he must mean something like [ɹedʊks]), but unfortunately his nonce spelling doesn’t supply the crucial stress information.

Don’t go to YouTube for comfort. There are at least eight YouTube videos telling you how to say the word, and not only do they contradict each other (some say “réedux” and some say “riddúx“), but at least one features voices saying both.

Certain questions about human languages don’t have definite answers. Half a dozen plausible pronunciations of redux coexist. Select at will; no one can authoritatively refute you. But you may find it a bit unsettling that no one can authoritatively confirm your correctness either. You’re on your own. It’s a phonetic jungle out there.

Hugh Laurie can talk the talk.

The American characters in Genius — screening earlier this summer in art-house cinemas everywhere — are played by the following actors.

Thomas Wolfe: Jude Law (English)

Maxwell Perkins: Colin Firth (English)

Aline Bernstein: Nicole Kidman (Australian)

Ernest Hemingway: Dominic West (English)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Guy Pearce (Australian)

Zelda Fitzgerald: Vanessa Kirby (English)

I didn’t see the film, but I don’t have to in order to know the American accents are spot-on. In my experience, English and Australian actors’ American accents are virtually always spot-on. This is true of well-known players, like Damien Lewis in Homeland and Billions; Idris Elba and West in The Wire; and so much work by the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Toni Collette, Heath Ledger, and many more.

It’s true of relative unknowns as well. I just finished watching the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, where two of the three main male American characters are played by actors I wasn’t familiar with but whose British nationality is pretty clear from their names — Rupert Evans and Rufus Sewell. I hate to say it, but I found their accents more convincing than that of the third lead, who is American and whom I will not identify.

Playing Dr. Gregory House, Hugh Laurie is the Briton whose American accent has probably been heard by the most sets of ears, owing to House’s eight seasons on the air, and that is generally considered bloody brilliant, if not the best of all time. Laurie was pretty unknown here when the show began, in 2004, and many assumed he was a native. At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Laurie was co-presenting with fellow TV doctor Zach Braff and began speaking in his normal manner. Braff looked at him oddly and Laurie asked, “What?” Braff replied, “Oh, nothing, I just didn’t realize we were doing British accents.”

The phenomenon probably wouldn’t be so striking if the reverse process weren’t such a carve-up. Sure, the statute of limitations has passed on Dick Van Dyke’s “cockney” in Mary Poppins, and sure, Gwyneth Paltrow and Renée Zellweger produced passable if fairly vanilla English tones in Shakespeare in Love and the Bridget Jones, films, the latest of which will open in September. (You can judge Zellwegger’s accent by her voiceover in the trailer below.)

But on the whole, the history of American actors attempting to impersonate British people is an undistinguished one. (Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap don’t count — both of them come from English families.) Not to single out Anne Hathaway, who is a good sport, but she recently was justly dissed by James Corden in a mock-rap on The Late Late Show:

This isn’t just for me

It’s for the whole U.K.

Mad at your awful British accent

In the movie One Day.

It should be pointed out that not all British actors are great at talking American. The British website shortlist.com said Ray Winstone’s Boston accent in The Departed “sounds Australian” and accused Gerard Butler of doing “a playground American accent” in The Bounty Hunter. “It should be accompanied by waving a gun and calling someone ‘filthy punk.’”

But over all, the disparity is arresting and puzzling. Why does it exist? Various explanations have been offered.

1. Demographics and market capitalism. On a world-wide basis, the vast majority of characters in English-language films and television shows are American. As Lucinda Syson, a British casting director working in the U.S., observed in The Hollywood Reporter, “In Britain, we grew up on Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and Hawaii Five-0; we grew up with American accents, so British actors are able to have those accents as opposed to American actors, who would only see a few British shows.”

Moreover, because of the  disparity in roles, it is very much in Brits’ interests to learn to speak American, while capable American actors can do very well indeed without bothering to learn British.

2. Pedagogy and approach. Compared with American actors, Brits more often have intensive academic training, schooled in a variety of accents, not just American ones. In addition, their tradition of acting calls for working from the outside in, the “outside” including costume, hair, physical mannerisms, and accent. In the last seven or eight decades, American acting has been dominated by the inside-out Method approach, which focuses less on details and more on motivation and reclaiming emotion.

3. Physiognomy. An anonymous (and presumably British —s ee spelling of “characterized”) commenter on a Yahoo site devoted to this question credibly observes, “The American accent is characterised by its dominant ‘r’ sound. This strong ‘r’ tends to penetrate and pervade their attempts at other accents. Conversely, the British accent is more neutral sounding, so they can layer American characteristics over their natural accent without it showing through. Think of accents like canvases. The American accent has a thick, black base coat that’s difficult to paint over, the British accent has a thinner, lighter base coat.”

A final explanation of the disparity is that it doesn’t exist. To state the obvious, top American actors are well known to American audiences. As a result, the theory goes, we are hyper-aware of the flaws in any new accent they might attempt, whereas we implicitly give unknown Brits (see Hugh Laurie) the benefit of the doubt. This may be a reason why the American accent of the very familiar Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules drew criticism.

It’s intriguing but I don’t buy it. The best American actors are great at so many things, chief among them riveting our eyes to the screen. But give them a line in cockney, Mancunian, or even Received Pronunciation — well, the results won’t be pretty. Not that they asked for it, but my advice to them would be to work on their American accents. Otherwise, they’ll start losing even more roles to Commonwealth luvvies.

Flicker/Leimenide

The six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2012, continues to augment its coverage with quarterly updates by the chief editor, George Goebel, at the University of Wisconsin. The fifth update, for summer 2016, has just been published, with a dozen new entries and 40 revised ones. Most of the entries update or enrich the letter B, originally published in Volume I more than 30 years ago.

You can take a free look here.

What will you find? To begin with, a certain number of words associated with the South and South Midlands regions.

There, we are told, blackberries play a role in talk about weather. Blackberry weather is a cold spell in May during blackberry-flowering season. Blackberry winter is a spring or summer spell of cold weather. And blackberry rain is a spell of rain that comes in spring or early summer.

Also in the South and South Midlands, long ago, Billy Seldom was a name jokingly applied by slaves to wheat flour, which was rare at meals compared with corn bread, or Johnny Constant. As a later writer noted, “We called biscuits Bill Sildom and cornbread John Constant because we seldom had biscuits and constantly had corn bread.”

Likewise, a buzzard Christian was one who went to church only to attend funerals.

Even if you live in those areas, you may not have heard these terms. Workers on the dictionary looked for every regional word they could find, including rare and obsolete ones. But the evidence is strong, aided now by online databases.

Blackberry winter, for example, gets its earliest citation from a newspaper of 1883 in New Albany, Ind.: “Blackberry winter is what Uncle Joe Richardson calls it. He says it is a sure sign of a big crop, and always comes while the blackberries are in blossom.” The newest is from a 2007 newspaper in Lubbock, Tex.: “A few mornings ago, Houston awoke to a colder-than-usual day. … I told my co-workers it was blackberry winter — as opposed to Indian summer, which comes in the fall. … I’m sure I heard this term as a kid playing with my country cousins in Alabama. My co-workers say I’m nuts.”

Meanwhile, up along the New England coast, a buckie fly is a small stinging fly otherwise known as black fly. It’s called a buckie fly because it emerges in spring at the spawning season of a herring known as a buckeye.

In Texas, a bird’s nest on the ground is something that is good luck or easy pickings, as in this remark in an Austin newspaper in 1967: “Three birdnests on the ground, as they say when the same man owns the land and mineral rights and the operating and production of the wells.”

And we learn that both astern of the lighter and behind the lighthouse mean falling behind, at least in the Northeast. DARE explains that lighter in this sense is a barge; being astern of it would mean missing one’s ship. And lighthouse could have been a misunderstanding and reinterpretation of lighter.

Finally, are you by chance a black-bumper? You can look it up in this update of DARE. Here’s a hint: You might hear that term in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Part of my teaching this semester (with my colleague Alice Turk) involves an exploration of space: the space of the remarkable array of speech sounds humans can produce. Consider just the vowel space, for example. Phoneticians map the infinite space of possible vowel qualities by reference to a set of reference points at the edge of vowel space: the final frontier. They’re known as the primary cardinal vowels.

The Primary Cardinal Vowels

When you say Cardinal 1, your tongue is pushed so high and far forward that if you pushed it any further the airstream squeezing out past your tongue and teeth would create audible friction. When you say Cardinal 5, the doctor should hardly need the tongue depressor. And Cardinal 8 is not just “Ooh!”; it’s the oohiest ooh you can ooh, with your lips so rounded that a pencil would barely fit in the hole. And by definition, adjacent cardinal vowels are auditorily equidistant: [e] (Cardinal 2) should sound just as far from [i] (Cardinal 1) as [ɛ] is from [e]; [a] should differ to the ear from [ɛ] to the same degree that [ɛ] differs from [e]; and so on.

For Cardinals 1 through 5 you don’t round your lips, but for 6 through 8 they should be increasingly rounded. The jaw is progressively more open for Cardinals 1 through 4, and for Cardinals 8 through 5. (Actually all this talk of jaw and tongue positions turns out to be merely a surrogate for an underlying acoustic reality, suggested by the more detailed map on the left, but I can’t cover that here. I’ll talk as if it’s all about tongue positions — a heuristically useful fiction containing more than a grain of truth.)

Vowels fairly similar to the eight primary cardinal vowels are commonplace — like oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium on our planet. But there are less frequent vowels too — the rare earth elements of the vocalosphere. The secondary cardinal vowels have the same abstract positions as the primary ones, but the opposite lip rounding:

The Secondary Cardinal Vowels

YouTube has videos for everything, the cardinal vowels included. Here, for example, you can see an animated vowel quadrilateral with audio of the famous phonetician Daniel Jones (1881–1967) pronouncing all of the cardinal vowels in a quavery monotone.

Some secondary cardinals are not easy to encounter viva voce. Scottish Gaelic is quite unusual in having the extremely rare Cardinal 15 as well as the fairly unusual Cardinal 16.

Cardinal 12 is more like technetium than the rare earths — it virtually doesn’t occur in nature at all. It’s basically an [a] with lip rounding, but rounding your lips while maintaining a wide open jaw position and tongue low at the front is a struggle. Hardly any self-respecting languages use Cardinal 12 (though Danish comes close).

This has still only scratched the surface. Many languages have more than 18 vowels. English has around 20 vowels (dialects differ), Cambodian has more than 30, and some languages have even more than that. How so?

First, various additional vowel sounds populate the interior of the vowel-space quadrilateral. (One is [ə], heard in the first and third syllables of banana. Others include the vowels of English pit and put.)

Second, many languages have diphthongs — vowel sounds that slide from one point to another in vowel space.

Third, vowels can differ in other features than mere position in the vowel-quality quadrilateral:

• nasal air flow (French has four nasal vowels);
• duration (Dinka, in South Sudan, uses three different vowel lengths);
• breathiness (Dinka also has breathy-voiced vowels);
• constriction in the pharynx;
• creakiness (“vocal fry”); and (very rarely, in certain languages of  southwestern Africa)
• epiglottal stridency.

(And I’m completely ignoring tone.)

I always enjoy teaching this stuff. The variety is amazing, the physiology is complex, the physics is fascinating. And as a practically useful introduction to one aspect of human linguistic diversity, it’s a wonderful subject for an undergraduate course.

What do bob house, boo-hag, and bullnozer have to do with each other?

In case you’re not familiar with these terms, a bob house is what people in New Hampshire, some of them at least, call an ice-fishing shanty.  A boo-hag, in South Carolina, is a kind of ghost, by one account a “witchy  woman … who can unzip her corporeal body and hang it up like a coat.” And a bullnozer, in the Appalachians and vicinity, is just another name for bulldozer.

But what do they have in common? Maybe a story of a boo-hag who went fishing in a bob house till the municipal authorities had it bullnozed?

Don’t give yourself blare eye trying to unravel that riddle. (Blare eye, in places in the West like Utah and New Mexico, is another name for insomnia.) The correct answer is — all those words, and some 40 others, are in the newly published sixth Quarterly Update of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

The six-volume DARE, nearly a half century in the making, was finished on paper a couple of years ago. But like other dictionaries worth their salt nowadays, rather than sitting inert on library shelves, it has an internet presence too. The updates are freely accessible, but you do have to pay a subscription fee (or get your library to do so) to access the whole 50,000 entries online.

This new collection focuses almost entirely on the letter B, since Volume 1 of DARE, published in 1985, is the most in need of updating. So there are new or revised entries for blankie-lie-low, a children’s game found in northern states ranging from New York to Wisconsin; baby face, another name for the Jersualem cricket found in western deserts, so called because “its markings, with imagination, can be seen to resemble a smiling face”; boot, the British name for the trunk of a car, now somewhat rare in the United States but formerly scattered in the South and “especially Ohio”; buckwheat pine, a Michigan term, perhaps obsolete, for a pine “with limbs nearly to the ground”; and bull grape or bullet grape, a term along the South Atlantic coast for what is elsewhere known as muscadine.

For dessert, Editor George Goebel serves up a Louisiana French treat from the last part of the alphabet: a say-so. What’s so delicious about that? Excuse me while I get  one; you’ll have to look it up for yourself.

The writer Tayari Jones recently posted a question on Facebook about a phrase she’s planning to use in her forthcoming novel: “Won’t He do it!” I immediately felt the interest of, say, a cat in catnip, and followed along. Here’s what I learned, and what it made me think about.

First, “Won’t He do it!” is a statement, not a question. It’s a statement of faith in God, and it’s been popular, apparently, for several decades as a call and response in black churches. Jones’s initial concern arose when three editors flagged the phrase as one they (like me, a white Northeasterner) were unfamiliar with. The outpouring of response to her query demonstrated that “Won’t He do it!” is popular among African-Americans not only from the South but also from parts of the Midwest and Northeast, especially those with parents or grandparents from the South and especially those whose upbringing has been, as one person put it, “churchy.” There was some debate as to whether to include also the response phrase, “Won’t He will!” — which of course, syntactically speaking, doesn’t add up, but since when have popular slogans hewed to prescriptive rules?

Jones’s concern, once editors brought the phrase to her attention, was that people (like me) might read it and think, “Won’t who do what?” and that question would set them off on a tangent leading away from the story. True, some might argue, as one respondent did, that the phrase isn’t “interesting or colorful enough to risk waking a reader from a fictive dream.” But there is that capital H in “He,” which believers and nonbelievers alike seem to recognize as Christians’ preferred style for the pronoun referring to the Christian deity. And most who got involved in the question felt that terms of art are used everywhere. As one person pointed out, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is full of tennis references that the uninitiated surely don’t get. We read at least in part to expand our world, and if we can’t capture the meaning via context, there’s always the chance to look it up. The cost of removing the phrase is that a particular character’s idiom or world view may fail to come across with the clarity and verve the author wants.

At the same time, it’s good to cross-check phrases that are familiar to us in a particular context, not so much to determine if they’ll be understood at all, but to be aware of how understandings may vary. In Tayari Jones’s case, one in-the-know writer’s view that the phrase connoted characters who were “religious, first generation college-graduate-at-most, black, not very affluent, low on analytical reasoning skills” drew plenty of controversy, suggesting that an expression used by poorly educated people in one district may be popular with well-educated people in another. The reverse side of that problem is the way phrases that may have been in the culture a long while can go viral when one movie moment or one pop star makes a signature of them. This happened with “Make my day,” after Clint Eastwood snarled it in Sudden Impact. And it’s apparently happened with “Won’t He do it!” because of the African-American pop star Tamar Braxton’s frequent use of the phrase. If the expression acquires enough fame or infamy, it can be a long time before a fictional character can use it in innocence again.

Writers weigh these questions whenever they create characters living in the contemporary world, with its cultures and subcultures. We are forever trying to distinguish between the culturally specific and the obscure, looking to create verisimilitude, possibly to assert an idiom as one worth knowing, but not to thumb our noses at our readers’ ignorance.

Meanwhile, “Won’t He do it!” should stay in Tayari Jones’s story, if you ask me, and I’ll be listening up for it from now on.

Image by Jenny Chang, courtesy of BuzzFeed*

A recent Daily Briefing email newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education to its subscribers included this snippet of news from a sample of faculty members who mailed in about things they have learned from student feedback on their courses:

Shaun Bowler, a political-science professor at the University of California at Riverside, wrote that he had received a course evaluation reading, “His accent is a problem. Why can’t we have teachers who speaks [sic] English properly?” Mr. Bowler is from England.

That’s funny. But I hope you won’t be too shocked that I found it rather encouraging, in a left-handed sort of way. Let me explain

Far too many Americans regard British accents as classier, better, and of higher prestige than their own. At least the student quoted has escaped the shadow of the Old Country, and takes American English to be English spoken “properly.” If you take some variety of American English as your standard for what’s proper, then of course southern British is not proper.

So deal with it, immigrant Brits! In California, class rhymes with gas, which is what you put in the fuel tank of your car, in between the hood at the front (it’s not a bonnet) and the trunk at the back (which is not a boot). Rubbers are for contraceptive purposes, not for erasing pencil marks; cookies are not biscuits; public schools are not private; and regardless of whether you are trying to refer to a cigarette, a tedious task, or a junior schoolboy assigned duties by older boys, it’s probably best to forget there ever was such a word as fag, so just paraphrase, OK?

Of course, it’s true that many Americans are far too insular, and one of the key things they need to get out of a college education is the experience of encountering smart people with accents they never heard before, and may initially have trouble understanding. Treating every different kind of accent as weird and upsetting as you go through life in this globalized world would be babyish, so students who have never been outside Riverside County or seen a foreign film do need to grow up a bit linguistically. But I like the fact that this student wasn’t laboring under the misapprehension that his own American English was some kind of debased patois and only people from England speak properly.

When I first arrived in America so many decades ago, I relished the sound of high-powered academics, giants in their fields, speaking about linguistics in their native accents, whether it was working-class Brooklyn, or unreconstructed South Texas twang, or the kind of Chicago English that pronounces Chicago as one syllable (Shgaw). To me, this was just evidence that the accents of Brooklyn or Texas or Chicago were high-prestige.

How else could I view it? When I finally met in the flesh some famous linguist whose books I had seen in libraries in Britain, the variety of English they spoke instantly became high prestige in my estimation. I was truly shocked when I encountered American academics, way smarter and more famous than me, who confided that they had always thought their own accent was low-grade, and that my educated southern British standard English seemed to them more elegant and desirable and appropriate to the professoriate.

A few people (not usually academics) even thought, when I first moved to California, that my speech was “cute”! I didn’t want to be cute, any more than I wanted to be Britishly elegant and urbane. I just wanted to be an American linguist. And in accord with the basic principle of sociolinguistics that you tend to adopt the linguistic practices of the groups you identify with, I acquired at least something of an American accent (I still tend to have the syllable-final [r]-sound to this day).

That’s why I find something refreshing about the story from Riverside. Whether you regard him as innocent or ignorant, at least the student is utterly unaffected by old-time cultural cringing. He thinks speakers of educated southern British need to be sent to a speech therapist.

Professor Bowler is a distinguished professor of American politics and a dean at UCR, who not only has degrees from Aberystwyth and Essex in Britain but also, interestingly, earned a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis! I hope he chuckled as much as I did.

[[*Illustration courtesy of BuzzFeed, where it illustrated "Can You Guess the U.S. Accent?"]]

Exactly 58 years ago today (I write on December 17, 2016), E.B. White wrote a letter of protest to his editor, J.G. Case, who had been trying to get him to take some grammar advice and modify some of the proscriptive ukases in a usage book that White was revising. White wouldn’t yield an inch to what he called “the Happiness Boys, or, as you call them, the descriptivists”:

I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust … to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow. (I can write you an essay on like-as, and maybe that is the answer to all this; but softness is not.)

The conservative stubbornness was shrewd: White understood the general public’s masochistic yearning for strict linguistic discipline. The book remained judgmental, and ended up selling tens of millions. It still sells like hotcakes despite all that enemies like Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe can do. But I am not concerned with that today. I’m interested solely in the stereotype of the liberal from the English department (or of course the linguistics department), the guy whose willingness to allow will for shall, or like he intended for as he intended, stems — as White sees it — from the fact that he has no standards, and will allow anything at all.

The caricature of this advocate of laxity, with his “softness” and his cozy professorship, has endured down the decades.

Here is Michael Skapinker (Financial Times, April 8, 2016), reviewing (and grotesquely misunderstanding) the clever mockery of prescriptivism in Horrible Words by Rebecca Gowers:

Standard English is the [language] that gets you into the best universities, the highest-earning professions and the lists of published authors. It is all very well slumming it with those whose language excludes them from these privileged stockades when you can return to them every night.

Skapinker misreads Gowers’s subtle critiques of misguided word rage so badly that he depicts her as “slumming” among coarsely-spoken yokels, encouraging their poor usage (“telling people there is nothing wrong with the way they speak”), before retreating to the shelter of some gated community of the properly spoken. White’s tenured linguistic liberal is surely a fellow resident.

And here are some very similar remarks from Simon Heffer, in the introduction to Strictly English: An A to Z Guide to Avoidable Errors (2014), discussing academic linguists who had criticized a similar earlier book out of their “deep political views” about prescriptivism:

It’s all very well to tell a young person that he or she can be creative with the English language, while academic linguists sit back and revel in the patois that results. However, if that young person applies for a job, or writes a personal statement when seeking a place in higher education (other, perhaps, than in a linguistics department), he or she may well suffer consequences from being partly illiterate. …

From the comfort of a nicely endowed chair at a university it is easy to engage in the theoretical exercise of rubbishing attempts to keep English straight. It is small comfort to the victims of that ideology, some of whom will find themselves employed in callings beneath their potential as a consequence of the propagation of such idiotic ideas.

Where are they, these well-endowed linguistics professors who “revel in the patois” of “creative” grammar, accepting “partly illiterate” students as “victims” so they can major in linguistics and learn “idiotic” doctrines that lead to unemployability?

Could it be he has mistaken evidence-based work by linguists on controversial issues (like the positioning of however, or the modal-adjunct use of hopefully, or restrictive relative which, or modifiers after infinitival to) for advocacy of the insane view that standard English has no grammatical rules at all? Could he really read that carelessly?

Or (worse) could Heffer be obtuse enough to have confused (i) the study of nonstandard English dialects and creoles with (ii) the acceptance of grammatical laxity? I was an undergraduate at the University of York, where the late Robert Le Page encouraged research on Jamaican creole. But he didn’t confuse it with the language of instruction! One of his teaching assistants was the Trinidadian creole specialist Donald Winford, now a senior professor at Ohio State University. But before writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Caribbean creoles, Winford had earned a first-class degree in English literature from King’s College London. His scholarly works are in standard English, and he expected undergraduates like me to use that language too.

No professor I have ever met encourages “illiterate” usage, or academic writing in nonstandard dialects. Can anyone cite for me (in the comments area below or by email) an example of a real-life faculty member in any subject who even distantly resembles the White-Skapinker-Heffer stereotype of the hypocritical linguistic slum-visitor?

A stranger I will call DL recently emailed me an odious screed pouring contempt and disgust on nonstandard dialects of English. “Speaking broken English is often a sign that the speaker is monolingual in broken English,” it said; and “Sadly, rather than seeking to help such people, some in the linguistics profession see them as savages as noble as those in the Amazon or New Guinea.”

The phrase “some in the linguistics profession” is one more anonymized reference to the possibly mythical creatures that E.B. White called “the Happiness Boys“; but DL doesn’t supply what I asked for: names of specific linguists who encourage the “savages” by promoting ungrammatical English as a good thing. This passage of DL’s email struck me as particularly nasty and cynical:

Descriptivist linguists love nonstandard forms of language for the same reason that charities love poverty, psychiatrists love disorders, and criminologists love crime, they’re what keeps them in a job. If people in Harlem and Brixton spoke like most educated people in America or Britain, what reason would universities have to fund research into these exotic sociolects and ethnolects?

Brixton is a London borough famous for its high Caribbean immigrant population, and you know about Harlem. In case you had missed the dog whistle, this is about blacks. And DL is (to use an immortal phrase that I first heard from the sociologist Laurie Taylor in 1968) one of “the hangers, floggers, and let’s-bomb-the-woggers.”

As he rants on about “patois,” at one point he alludes to a paper of mine: “African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with mistakes” (in Rebecca S. Wheeler (ed.), The Workings of Language: From Prescriptions to Perspectives, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999, 39–58). That paper argued that sentence structure in the dialect linguists generally call African American Vernacular English (AAVE) cannot possibly be accounted for under the myth that AAVE speakers are simply trying to speak Standard English but are making ignorant mistakes, omitting vital function words, carelessly dropping consonants, stupidly negating clauses more than once, and so on.

AAVE has some tricky grammar and phonology. A slew of constraints must be met before a form of be can be omitted, as in He crazy. Inter alia, the clause must be affirmative, present tense, and non-emphatic, the subject must not be first-person singular, and the verb must not be clause-final. Consonant-dropping also has constraints: [d] is dropped in lend but not led; [t] is dropped in left but not lent; and there are specifiable phonological reasons. And in negative clauses AAVE regularly employs no-words where Standard English uses any-words, and inverts the order of subject and auxiliary, so Ain’t nobody heard nothin’  isn’t a double (or rather triple) negation; under the rules of AAVE syntax it’s just the normal way to say “No one has heard anything.” (Standard Italian and Polish have rather similar negation syntax.)

None of this implies any positive evaluation of AAVE; nobody is encouraging anybody to use AAVE in contexts where using Standard English would be a better plan. I merely aimed to correct some erroneous factual beliefs. But I was recently reminded of a political connection: DL’s hostility to nonstandard dialects does link to his clearly right-wing politics.

My copy of the November 2016 issue of Language (vol. 94, no.4) arrived yesterday, and it contains a fine paper by John Rickford and Sharese King of Stanford University: “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond” (948–988). [Update: It has just been announced by the LSA as the 2016 winner of the Best Paper in Language Award.] Rickford and King do a very careful analysis of the speech of the young woman who was a crucial witness in the murder trial of George Zimmerman

Rachel Jeantel gave her testimony in her Haitian-influenced variety of AAVE. (Interestingly, she is not monolingual in it. She is trilingual, fluent also in her mother’s native language, Haitian Creole, and her father’s native language, Spanish.) The jury found her speech unintelligible and ignorant-sounding, and treated her as not credible. The general public agreed, posting thousands of extraordinarily abusive comments about her in online newspaper comments sections.

She was the prosecution’s star witness. She had chatted by cellphone with the victim, Trayvon Martin (pictured above), a close friend of hers, as he described Zimmerman stalking him, right up to when he was shot. Her six hours of testimony contained crucial evidence that Martin died while trying to flee Zimmerman, and was not menacing him. But her testimony was completely ignored (no juror even mentioned her). Zimmerman was exonerated. Rickford and King argue that dialect prejudice and institutional racism contributed substantially to the prosecution’s failure.

It’s not just nonstandard dialects that are reviled, but their speakers. And that can affect the outcome of murder trials, which I take it is something that every citizen, whatever their dialect, has an interest in.

It’s January 25, and as everyone knows, that is the birthday of the Bard of Ayrshire: Robert Burns.

And since a small conference on the Scots language is being held today at the University of Edinburgh, there is surely only one possible choice for what to do tonight: We’re having a traditional Burns Night Supper.

A Burns Supper, though the format is informal and flexible, typically involves certain rituals, and of course certain characteristic foods. The food at our gathering will be fully in line with tradition: cock-a-leekie soup; haggis (one of my favorite dishes) with neeps (rutabaga) and tatties (potato); cranachan for dessert; whisky for the toasting.

For toasts are another standard feature: One of the male guests will be designated to give the Address to the Lassies (long ago it was a toast of thanks to the women who had prepared the meal, but in modern times it has morphed into a humorous speech about the female guests and women in general, edgy though that might sound), and a woman chosen from among the guests responds with a Reply to the Laddies. (“Should be amusing, but not offensive,” the Wikipedia article on Burns Suppers innocently recommends; I should think not!)

But the most important of the ritual speeches, virtually always included, is a recitation of the whole of Burns’s famous Address to a Haggis. It is a rare case of a poem addressed to a food item. I’m not sure I can think of another literary instance of a foodstuff appearing in the vocative construction (“O pizza, rich with herbs and spices, Cut up into eight broad slices, Well bedecked with pepperoni … “) — but maybe you can.

Somehow, in a brief meeting with the effortlessly persuasive organizer of our Burns Supper (how did she do it?), I found, bewilderingly, that I had agreed to take on the role of haggis addresser. And it’s a little daunting. Much as I enjoy public speaking, I must admit to being slightly nervous about this. The poem is in Early Modern Scots, the 18th-century vintage of a Germanic language markedly distinct from English in its phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax. References to “weel-swall’d kytes” or “skinkin’ ware that jaups in luggies” are not immediately intelligible to a Standard English speaker such as myself. I had to do some homework.

And here in my department there are world-class experts on Scots. I cannot risk mangling a single unfamiliar noun or mispronouncing a single vowel.

I arrived in this distinguished department direct from Santa Cruz, Calif., in the summer of 2007. I can well imagine some of the out-of-town guests at the supper tonight being surprised to see me chosen for the honor of reciting the famous address. Couldn’t they have nominated someone a little more ethnically appropriate than one of the American immigrants (who make up about a quarter of the faculty here)? Well, my ace in the hole is that certain aspects of my early life make me a little closer to being authentic than some might think.

Robert Burns, the most famous of all Scottish poets, was born in Alloway, Ayrshire. In the year preceding my birth, my parents were living a few miles south of there, in Girvan. My father was flying for the Royal Air Force out of an airfield at Turnberry (it is now a golf resort owned by Donald Trump — that man is everywhere). My birth was difficult, and my mother eventually had to be rushed by ambulance up the A77, past Alloway, to a hospital in Irvine 15 miles to the north, which is where I was eventually delivered.

So Burns and I are sons of the same soil. He had the bad luck to grow up in poverty and hardship, the son of an unsuccessful farmer, while I had the bad luck to be taken away by my parents and raised in southern England. I never really liked England. I escaped, emigrated to California, became an American, and worked there for a quarter of a century.

Ever since I accepted the professorship of general linguistics here ten years ago, I have certainly been a Californian immigrant, in a sense; but in a way I’m as much an Ayrshire boy as Burns was. Perhaps the spirit of the place will find its way into me when I draw a deep breath and commence my recitation tonight.

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftain o’ the pudding race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place
Painch, tripe, or thairm
Weel are yet wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my airm …

Yes; I think I can do this! It’s not about learning an alien culture; I’m autochthonous here. It’s just a matter of recovering my heritage.

Franklin School in Washington, D.C. (Image via Wikimedia Commons.)

The question mark was to get your attention. As of last Wednesday, we can change it to a period: A language museum.

On January 25, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development in Washington, D.C., announced that the historic Franklin School has been approved for development into a museum called Planet Word. The project is spearheaded by — and privately funded by — the philanthropist and former reading teacher Ann Friedman.

A friend who clearly reads The Washington Post closely emailed me last Wednesday to see if I knew anything about this what-clearly-seemed-to-her-surprising bit of news. I replied, “I’m on the Advisory Board!”

When Ann Friedman emailed me last summer about joining the board of language experts she had put together for Planet Word, it took me about, oh, two seconds to decide that I would say yes. Not only was I joining some wonderful colleagues on the board, but I was supporting a project that could make a real difference in language education.

Let me explain what I mean by talking about the introductory-linguistics course I teach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Early in the course we talk about how language changes, how dictionaries are created, and where some of the well-known usage rules (e.g., don’t end a sentence with a preposition, don’t use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun) come from. Suddenly “right” and “wrong” don’t seem like entirely stable concepts when it comes to language. By the time we get to American dialects and world varieties of English near the end of the course, and we read about the ways that people continue to be discriminated against based on the dialect of English they speak, students are often wondering why they never learned this material earlier in their educational career. As one student exclaimed this fall, “It shouldn’t be that I’m learning this only now that I’m in college! And what about the students who don’t take a linguistics course?”

Rethinking K-12 language education in a more linguistically informed way is an ambitious undertaking. At its core is the key realization that linguistics is relevant to our understanding of the language we see and hear every day. My goal, which I share with students in my introductory linguistics course, is to see language incorporated into the curriculum in a much more exploratory way, where students are exploring how language works. As Kirk Hazen at West Virginia University has argued, students should be learning a little linguistics in early grades in the same way that they are learning a little geology, a little chemistry, a little biology, and so on. There is nothing more human than language, and students should learn about how language evolves, how dialects work, how they create new slang, how humans and computers learn language, and more — as they also learn the conventions of standard, formal writing (which right now too often gets equated with “what students need to know about language”). Kids love to play with language, and we could exploit that much more in the elementary- and secondary-school curriculum than we do.

This new museum promises to set the tone for language exploration for people of all ages. The description of Planet Word proposes “to make reading, writing, words, and language surprising, fun, fascinating, and relevant.” We hope to let people experiment with language technologies in a working language-research lab. Exhibits will feature language in all its variation, both spoken and written. The auditorium will host lectures on language, poetry readings, and the like. Most importantly, visitors will have the chance to play with language throughout the museum and seek answers to the questions they may bring (e.g., What makes a word a word? Do men and women speak differently? How could the New York Times dialect quiz pinpoint where I was from? How do puns really work?).

As it becomes less surprising that an entire museum could be devoted to language exploration (which is, of course, fundamental to the entire discipline of linguistics), I hope it will become more commonplace to see this same kind of linguistically informed language exploration in school curricula. This new museum has the potential to support the important efforts of linguists across the United States (and elsewhere) to design curricular materials on, for example, local dialects — and to inspire teachers at all levels to design their own linguistically informed lessons. And it is going to make for some great school field trips.

Image via Wikipedia.org

Many English grammar advice sites on the web are so dire that it almost seems rude to link to them. I don’t want to fail in my duty to clarify things by deconstructing them; yet it seems cruel to humiliate the poor well-meaning people who wrote them. So let me just say that somewhere out there is a dreadful page of confused drivel on a website maintained by a world-famous dictionary publisher, and its author begins by confessing a prejudice:

Whenever I hear something like I don’t know nothing about computers … I cringe and have to restrain a nitpicking urge to say, ‘two negatives make a positive: do you really mean that you know something about computers?’. However, as a Rolling Stones fan, I don’t come over all grammatically correct about ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.’ It’s completely illogical, I admit.

My heart aches when I see an opening like this to a page about the so-called “double negative” — it’s a familiar topic in usage handbooks, but one that I will argue should be ditched.

The writer is confusing two different language systems, and no conflict with logic arises in connection with either of them. It’ll be useful to color-code the languages I mention in what follows. When I give an example in Standard English, I’ll use a blue typeface; Italian will be green; and for certain nonstandard dialects of English I’ll use red.

In Standard English, [1] is is synonymous with both [2a] and [2b].

[2]a.It isn’t true that I know nothing about computers. b.I know something about computers.

Both sentences could reasonably be described as doubly negated: if [2b] is true then the synonymous negative versions in [3] are false:

b.I don’t know anything about computers.

— which means the doubly-negated [1] is true.

Now, in other languages, like Italian and Polish, the syntax of negation is different. It features something called negative concord, which requires multiple marking of a single negation. Thus the Standard Italian translation of [3a] is Non so nulla di computer. The negation is marked twice, by non and by nulla. But this is not a double negative. It’s a single negative, indicated twice in the morphology (the structure of the words) because that’s what the syntax requires.

Various dialects of English over the past 700 years (at least since Chaucer) have exhibited the same feature. And they are not extinct; I happened to mention one here a couple of weeks ago. In these dialects, the translation of the Italian Non so nulla di computer is I don’t know nothing about computers. It looks like [1], but it’s actually in a (slightly) different language with a different grammar.

Warning someone against using this construction when writing Standard English is really just advising them to use Standard English rather than Italian or anything else. And that’s hardly necessary.

You certainly should write in Standard English if you are writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education. But not if you’re writing a song for the Rolling Stones, whose songwriting role models have always (for more than 50 years) been African-American blues artists from the Southern U.S.A., native speakers of negative concord dialects. But hardly anyone needs to have this pointed out to them! I have seen some bad writing in my time, but I do not recall ever encountering anyone who wrote The tests didn’t find no contamination under the misapprehension that they were stating in Standard English that the tests found no contamination.

The web page I mentioned above (to which I studiously avoid linking), having completely missed the point concerning negative concord, then wanders on to mention various unremarkable Standard English constructions: not with adjectives that have the negative prefix un- (see “Orwell and the Not Unblack Dog” for a Lingua Franca post about a spurious criticism of that construction), and genuine cases of sentences with two semantically significant negations that cancel each other out: We can’t just not attend; It seemed impossible that it would not succeed; Nobody could be unaware of it; and so on. None of these raise any controversies at all; usage guides shouldn’t even mention them. And rolling them together with discussion of the negative concord dialects is worse than pointless. I wish usage-advice books and websites would stop doing it.

Victor Mair wrote on Language Log last month about a test in what appears to have been a third-year class in Chinese at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, in New York. What made it news in China (see in particular this story in the South China Morning Post) was that the test involved giving synonyms for a number of words written with Chinese characters so rare and archaic that many Chinese people were prepared to admit on social-media sites that they would not have been able to pass the test. This story has remained in my thoughts for weeks. It pulls together several worries I have about foreign-language instruction.

One is that too many people imagine that human languages can be conceptualized simply as big bags of words, so that teaching someone a language is a simply a matter of getting them to learn and repeat words and know their meanings. A language is not a bag of words: It’s a system for crafting sentences out of words. You could know every single word in a Hungarian dictionary and still not have a clue how to explain in error-free Hungarian that Katy seems to think Laszlo may have made Zoltan doubt the integrity of the promotion procedure.

Another relates specifically to Chinese. People confuse words and characters. The South China Morning Post quotes Professor Wang Hongtu as saying that most Chinese people know “5,000 to 6,000 words,” which is nonsense. In any language, native speakers generally know tens of thousands of words. Professor Wang means characters in the awful Chinese writing system — and there he probably overestimates: 2,000 to 3,000 characters is probably a lot closer to the truth. The glyphs making up the traditional Chinese writing system do not represent words; many words in Sinitic languages (a majority, in fact) have more than one syllable, and are written with at least two characters, sometimes in a way that makes the combination guessable (or at least easily learnable), but often not. This article on the Quora site has a lot of interesting information about how many words (and characters) the average Chinese person knows. Note especially the remarks of the commenter Shawnxuande Li, who expresses (after a prefatory apology for offense) the opinion that the “Chinese character system sucks.”

Literacy in China is much exaggerated by government authorities. The truth is that adults struggle to remember even a couple of thousand characters. Smartphones and similar helpful technologies lead to further atrophy. Things are further muddied by maintenance of the fiction that the Sinitic family is just one language with various regional “dialects” (they aren’t dialects, they are mutually unintelligible languages, but since the character system is adapted to write them, they look similar on the page).

In a post written during my bewildering one-week visit to Chongqing I mentioned that my traveling companion had taken several courses in Chinese in college, but not one single time did she turn out to be able to read anything in the Chinese script that helped us get around. Students in high school or college who learn hundreds of Chinese characters and a bit of the spoken language tend to have forgotten all of it by their late twenties unless they start maintaining a very close connection to Chinese life.

I am no expert in Chinese or writing systems or second language learning or teaching. I am just a concerned linguist with several interacting worries about foreign language teaching. I’m worried about (i) a lack of understanding of the practical purpose of teaching foreign languages; (ii) confusion between words and characters in Chinese; (iii) the widespread belief that a language is just a bag of words so that vocabulary size is a measurable surrogate for proficiency; and (iv) the consequent pointless teaching of rare words (which is basically the topic of the story from New York).

As Victor Mair has often stressed, if Mandarin Chinese is going to be taught as a general-interest subject to schoolchildren or college students it should be firmly based in an active command of simple, everyday, conversational language, informed by a thorough grounding in phonetics and a modest amount of linguistics more generally, using high-frequency words, and syntax appropriate to practical situations. And writing things down should be done entirely with the Pinyin romanization. The time-honored custom of drills in character after character, like the temptation to teach classical texts from earlier centuries, should be jettisoned.

But it’s not likely that educators will pay much attention to what I think. The long-established character-based rote-learning teaching methods for Chinese are deeply rooted in the very people who will be doing the teaching. Expect many more millions of hours of classroom time to be wasted over the coming years, as the economic rise of China leads more schools and colleges to think they should offer tuition in its language.