Lynne Murphy

First, a quiz. Choose the country in which the following words or phrases originated, by writing either a “B” (Britain) or “U” (United States) next to the number. Answers are at the end of this post.

1. The bee’s knees
2. Debrief
3. Foodstuff
4. Hinky
5. Nitty-gritty
6. Poppycock
7. Quad (that is, square at a university)
8. To ramp up
   

The quiz is stolen — or, as Brits would say, nicked — from Lynne Murphy’s entertaining and enlightening new book, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English. Murphy grew up in America and since 2000 has been teaching linguistics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. That makes her the perfect person to chronicle the differences and similarities between the language as it’s used on either side of the Atlantic. Since 2006 she has done so on her blog, Separated by a Common Language. (The title of the blog comes from a remark traditionally attributed to George Bernard Shaw, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” Neither Garson O’Toole, in his authoritative Quote Investigator blog, nor anyone else has been able to find direct evidence of Shaw’s actually making the remark. O’Toole found a similar quote from an 1887 Oscar Wilde short story: “Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”)

Now, Murphy has gone big picture with the book. Having read it, I understand that if the phrase gone big picture had appeared in the British press, a significant number of people would go ballistic. As they would about the phrase go ballistic. That is because it is an article of faith among the British chattering classes that American influence — as in such locutions and in the poster child for the alleged despoilment, Can I get a coffee? — is ruining the Queen’s English. As I suggested in a Lingua Franca post in October, and as Murphy’s book definitively demonstrates, that view is a gross exaggeration.

There are two main problems with it. First, for all the go ballistics, big pictures, and can I gets, there are roughly the same number of British expressions that have traveled (British: travelled) west and become popular or established in American English. I have been chronicling them for more than six years on my blog Not One-Off Britishisms, and, after something like 500 entries — including go missing, go pear shaped, and go bonkers — the end is not in sight. (My latest post is about bestie, for best friend, which I didn’t realize was originally a Britishism till I read The Prodigal Tongue.)

Second, despite the undoubted examples of trans-Atlantic linguistic cross-pollination, American and British English remain distinct nationlects (Murphy’s coinage), in vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, and grammar. The grammatical differences are fewest in number but still pungent, as seen in these hyphothetical exchanges:

British blokes

A: Manchester United have a match today, don’t they.

B: Yes, have you got a ticket?

A: I might do.

B. Let’s meet for a McDonald’s and chat about it.

American guys

A: Michigan State has a game today.

B: Do you have a ticket?

A: I might.

B. Let’s meet for a burger at McDonald’s and talk about it.

The best part of The Prodigal Tongue is when Murphy drills down deep into these differences and emerges with unexpected narratives. I think my favorite is the account of the -ise suffix in such words as utilise and organise. That’s British, while utilize and organize are American, right? Not so fast. As Murphy writes, “It’s a complicated situation with a complicated history.” Such words entered English vocabulary in force in the 19th century — and, until the middle of the century, -ize spelling was preferred in both countries — as in lionize, minimize, and serialize. But in the second half of the century, British taste shifted to -ise spelling: perhaps inspired, Murphy says, “by the large number of 19th-century -ise words that were borrowed directly from the French, including galvanise, mobilise, and polarise.” At roughly the same time, Americans began to shift to -ize spelling, in large part thanks to its main cheerleader, the lexicographer Noah Webster.

Meanwhile, over in Britain, -ize saw a revival after it was championed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which began appearing in 1884. Then things changed again in the 1990s and Britain swung decisively back to -ise. Murphy ascribes that development to the rise of spellcheckers and the internet, which led, she says, to two lines of thinking: “1. spellings should be consistent within a document. … 2. if Americans are spelling it -ize, then -ise must be ‘the’ British spelling.” Today, she says,

-Ise is not just a suffix,; it is a badge of honour [note "u"], declaring to all and sundry I AM NOT AMERICAN. True to form, when wanting to look not-American, British English looks more French.

I learned (British: learnt) a good deal else in the book and if your to-read list hasn’t got (American: gotten) too long already, make a place on it for The Prodigal Tongue.

As for the quiz at the top, if you enjoyed it, there are more such questions here. The answers: 1-U. 2-B. 3-B. 4-U. 5-U. 6-U. 7-B. 8-B. If you got five or fewer right, you’re within the law of averages and you’ve proved Murphy’s point. Six or seven, you can count yourself as clever. And if you scored 100 percent, start your own bloody blog!

I could hardly believe my ears. The BBC, on a radio news program and then again on the 8 a.m. news, quoted a British politician as saying “I think we must also recognize that there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday agreement,” and as an aid to listeners they explained that “shibboleth” meant “outdated or unimportant idea”!

Staggering misinformation, I thought. But then just last week I happened to use the word shibboleth in another context while chatting over lunch with a well-educated American couple, and they asked me what a shibboleth was. They had never encountered the word before.

Maybe it’s old-fashioned of me to think that everyone knows the main Old Testament stories. So let me briefly relate the tale (originally told in Judges, Chapter 12) that led to the borrowing of the word shibboleth from ancient Semitic dialects into English.

Roughly 3,000 years ago a tribal leader named Jephthah served six years as leader of the Israelites. He came from a tough background. He was the illegitimate son of a prostitute, and his brothers had forced him out. He had been living in Tob, way out east of the river Jordan. But the elders of Gilead, in a large swath of land along the east bank (including Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben), needed a tough bastard to head up their military struggle against the people of Ammon, and chose Jephthah for the role.

One tribe who refused to support Jephthah in his war against the Ammonites was the Ephraimites, whose homeland was way to the west of the Jordan (see the map above). They became his enemies.

At one point in his campaign, Jephthah’s militia had captured an area south of the Sea of Galilee where the Jordan River could be forded. He and his men tried interrogating potential river crossers about their ethnicity to see if they were Ephraimites. Typically those who were Ephraimites had enough sense to deny it. But Jephthah happened to know a key fact about the phonology of the Ephraimitic dialect: It lacked a distinction between s and sh.

In English, sin and shin are different words; so are mess and mesh; and the sole difference in each case is the quality of that frictional sound — the hissing of s versus the shushing of sh. There are languages like Icelandic and Hawaiian that don’t employ any such difference. Ask a monolingual Icelander to say fish and usually you will hear what sounds like fiss. The Ephraimites’ dialect was like that.

So Jephthah’s men took to asking each traveler arriving at the ford to repeat back a word meaning “ear of corn” (it also means “river in flood”). The word was pronounced shibboleth in the dialect of the Gileadites. Monodialectal Ephraimites would say “sibboleth” instead, and would be killed on the spot. This simple dialect-based diagnostic enabled Jephthah and his men to kill a horrifying total of 42,000 Ephraimites.

Today in modern English a shibboleth is (according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary either (1a) a speech sound the utterance of which is a key indicator of a dialect or language difference, or (1b) a custom that has a similar outgroup-detecting function, or (2a) a word or saying or catchphrase characteristic of some group and typically not carrying much meaning, or (2b) a style of speech considered to pick out some group or class.

I have no idea where the BBC got the idea that at some point shibboleth had ever meant a small or unimportant detail.

It turns out that the Labour Party politician who used the word, Barry Gardiner MP, fully understands that shibboleths are primarily linguistic. He pointed out later, after the brouhaha arose in the press, that he had used the word “in its sense of ‘pass word’ or ‘test of membership’,” and had never intended to imply that he “thought the Good Friday Agreement was in any way outdated or unimportant.” (It might have been better if he had called it a fetish, or a bugaboo.)

He was suggesting that opponents of Brexit were exaggerating the Irish problem, using “Oh, but what about the Good Friday Agreement?” as a kind of catchphrase: It was becoming a signature locution for anti-Brexiteers. I don’t agree with his reasoning (to me, the return of a policed border between Eire and Northern Ireland after Brexit, without some kind of U.K./E.U. customs union, looks like an incipient administrative nightmare that could indeed reinvigorate violent Irish republicanism); but that’s beside the point here. The BBC seems to have ignorantly promulgated a linguistic error.

Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen appeared for a court hearing last week after the FBI’s raid on his hotel room and office. (Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images)

The commander in chief turned to Twitter the other day, as he does.

The pair of tweets was remarkable, even for him, containing misspellings (the word is “flunky,” the New York Times Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter is Maggie Haberman), a possibly actionable defamatory statement (the supposed “drunk/drugged up loser” is identifiable, according to Haberman, as the former campaign aide Sam Nunberg), the usual poor punctuation and woo-woo capitalization, and what would have to be described as an outright lie. I’d give Trump a pass on the chummy snap of him and Haberman that immediately blew up on Twitter, as she may have been one of an assembly line of photo subjects at a White House event.

Rather, it’s the at least five on-the-record interviews he’s given Haberman, as president, that blatantly contradict the “who I don’t speak to” claim.

However, what interested me most about the tweets is Trump’s use of flip. To be sure, he’s not the only one to apply the verb to the “businessman for his own account” (whatever that means) Cohen. Check out this montage from Late Night With Seth Meyers:

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines flip as “to cooperate in the prosecution of a criminal case against an associate.” The first citation in  Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from the 1960 book The Scene, by Clarence Cooper: “I won’t flip on you. I’ll never flip on nobody again.” In his final novel, At the End of the Day (2000), that master of argot George V. Higgins used it in the slightly narrower intransitive sense of turning state evidence: “He’s the one that made Bernie flip and Bernie gave him me.”

Flip is an astonishingly productive word, especially for slang. Nowadays, one hears a lot about Democrats flipping Republican districts and shrewd investors flipping houses. The phrase “flip the script,” which originated in hip-hop in the early ’90s, is now widely used to mean turn a situation around. (Green’s Dictionary’s first citation is from 1991, Pete Rock and CL Smooth: “Okay, you wanna act trife and flip the script.” Trife: “Being in a tough situation, being hopeless or helpless, living in poverty. Rough, difficult, troublesome.” —Urban Dictionary)

Then there’s flipping burgers, flipping someone the bird, flipping out or flipping one’s lid (meaning either to go crazy or go crazy for someone or something), Flip as derogatory slang for Filipino, and flip phones, the persistence of which seems to inspire a feature article every month, like clockwork. And all that is dealing only with the more socially acceptable meanings of flip. Here’s a screenshot of Green’s entries on some of the others:

For more on the history of the word, see Ben Zimmer’s piece last year in the Wall Street Journal.

Back to Michael Cohen, the most interesting thing about Trump’s use of flip is what it apparently acknowledges about Cohen: that he actually has damaging information to offer the authorities.

George Clooney played a fixer in the 2007 film “Michael Clayton”

Then again, fixers usually do. That word has been widely applied to Cohen, including by Ana Cabrera in the Seth Meyers sequence and, somewhat more surprisingly, routinely in the pages of The New York Times. For example, a recent sentence in the Times read: “Mr. Cohen served for more than a decade as a trusted fixer for Mr. Trump, and during the campaign had helped tamp down brewing scandals about women who claimed to have had affairs with him.” That’s surprising because the word, which began as American slang in the late 19th century, implies underhanded and possibly illegal dealings.  The Oxford English Dictionary quotes a definition in a 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang: “one who acts as go-between for thieves and bribe takers. Example: ‘If you get a rumble, send for Jones, the mouthpiece; he’s a sure-shot fixer and can square anything short of murder.’” More recently, the word has been used more neutrally by foreign correspondents to describe a native employee who helps out with translation, procurement, and bureaucratic bottlenecks.

But Cohen, what with his payoffs to Stormy Daniels and other people with potentially dangerous stories to tell, is definitely a fixer of the old school. Will he end up flipping? Let’s flip a coin.

The Canadian William Shatner pronounced the word civil-eye-zations, even though the character he played was from Iowa.

I have in my repertoire one parlor trick. I do it when chatting with someone whose speech is generally unremarkable, but who employs a pronunciation like “global-eye-zation” (the vowel in the third syllable rendered /ai/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA) instead of the typical American schwa (“global-/ə/-zation”). I say, “I bet you’re from Canada, aren’t you?” And they invariably say, “Yes!” (In this post I use the word American to refer to a resident of the United States.)

It’s one of the few pronunciation that Canadians have retained from Britain; others are pronouncing the first a in pasta as in cat or hat, the long o in process, and the aspirated t in the middle of words like pretty and butter. (Americans’ customary so-called tapping makes them sound like preddy and budder.) You can hear this long i when Canadian hockey players and fans refer to teams as organ-/ai/-zations, and in the Canadian William Shatner’s rendition of civilizations at about the 25-second mark of the opening monologue of Star Trek (right before an infinitive is boldly split):

Although Shatner spoke the words, the character he played, James Kirk, is supposed to be from Iowa. The fact that the producers nevertheless allowed civil-/ai/-zations to stay suggests that to them (as opposed to me), the departure is subtle and maybe not even noticeable.

In any case, I predict my little trick is not long for this world. That’s because Americans have started to adopt the /ai/ vowel in such words. The data I have to support of this assertion is admittedly preliminary, but suggestive:

• In 2014, when someone on the Word Reference.com Language Forums asked about the pronunciation of organization, two Americans responded that their countrypeople alternated between the  /ə/ and the /ai/ forms.
• Again, on the crowdsourced pronunciation site Forvo, two Americans offer pronunciations of organization, and they split the same way.
• The /ai/ version is creeping up more and more on NPR. Just in the past week or so, I’ve heard the reporter Shannon Dooling say author-/ai/-zation; a newsreader (I forgot to write down the name) say denuclear-/ai/-zation; and, on the WBUR program Here and Now, Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the New America Foundation, say organ-/ai/-zation. Dooling graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (though she did get a master’s at the University of British Columbia!) and Ghosh from the University of Connecticut.

There is another, similar set of words, such as missile, agile, futile, mobile, hostile, and fertile. Brits pronounce the two syllables with roughly equal stress and use /ai/ for the i, while Americans accent put the accent on the first syllable and use a schwa, for example, missəl. An informant reports that in the corporate world, rhyming agile with mile is all the rage, and I’ve noticed more than a few Americans very British-ly refer to their phone as “my moh-bile.” But this trend awaits further research.

As for the -/ai/-zation words, I note that Ghosh is in his late twenties and Dooling in her thirties; the organ-/ai/-zation guy on Forvo and the NPR newsreader both sounded in that age group to me. And this fits in with a number of other words, spellings, and pronunciations that I’ve noticed gaining popularity among the young: spelling gray as grey and adviser as advisor; pronouncing often as off-ten and sometimes going full oftentimes; saying neither to rhyme with MacGyver rather than beaver; using whomever even when whoever is called for; and saying amongst and amidst instead of among and amid.

What the new uses have in common is that they either are or appear British and therefore (?) fancy. Arguably, there is a general human desire to seem fancy. But why would this generation linguistically act on it more than other generations? And why haven’t they adopted other British habits, like, say, the aspirated t? I confess I’m stumped. If and when a real-eye-zation hits me, you will be the first to know.

“You can observe a lot by just watching,” Yogi Berra once supposedly said. To which I’ll add, you can learn a lot about developments in the language by just hanging out on Twitter and Facebook. To prove the point, here are some highlights of a week just passed on those sites.

To start out, I noted this tweet from John Dean (yes, that John Dean):

The link is to a photo of Meghan Markle’s dog peering out of a limo, but what interested me was Dean’s use of pix — traditionally slang plural for “pictures” — in the singular, instead of pic. It struck me — and I tweeted — that I had heard that before. The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower responded with a clever takeoff on a famous Variety headline: “STICKS NIX HICK PIXES.” The writer Joshua J. Friedman did some actual research, searching Twitter for the phrase “a pix” and reporting that he came up with a bunch of examples. I just did the same search myself and also came up with a lot of hits, for example:

Word person Nancy Friedman commented that the same thing has been going on with tix being used as singular for “ticket.” A search reveals she is correct:

There are a handful of singular pixes in the Google Books database, the earliest from a 1998 novel; singular tix does not appear. Neither is it in any dictionary I consulted, including Urban Dictionary and Green’s Encyclopedia of Slang, both of which I would advise to get on the case.

A couple of days later, still on the theme of the royal wedding, John P. Evans, an Englishman, tweeted a link to a segment on John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight.

John remarked: “This whole thing is a cringefest but one thing that baffles me (almost as much as that famous British phrase ‘top o’ the mornin’!') is how many of them seem to think ‘Cheerio’ means ‘Hello’??”

I asked him about the actual meaning of cheerio, which I realized I was unclear on, and he responded: “It means ‘goodbye’! Merriam-Webster says ‘occasionally a greeting’ but I’ve certainly never heard it used that way …”

Another Englishman, Ellis Pratt, weighed in: “I was taught it originally meant ‘Chairs to go.’ When people travelled in sedan chairs in early 1800s.” That etymology is out and about but pretty clearly is false. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word came from the nautical expression “Cheero!”: “Used as a friendly greeting or a call to attract attention.” The OED also sheds light on the hello/goodbye controversy. The main definition is “Used to express good wishes upon parting … “; the first citation is from a 1914 Rupert Brooke letter: “Cheeryo! (as we say in the Navy).” There’s also a “used as a friendly greeting” definition, but the dictionary says it’s “now rare”; in keeping with wedding coverage, the two most recent of the three citations are from American sources.

That same day, the lexicographer Kory Stamper — a smart and lively presence on Twitter — had a tweet I liked:

I’ll resist the urge to mansplain, other than to say that the OED thinks it’s a word, with citations dating to 2008.

The next day, someone I follow retweeted this:

Don’t worry if you’re clueless on the nature of the BBQ controversy or the identity of Mistah F.A.B. What’s important is the odd-sounding phrase “is brothers with” instead of  the customary “is @Mistah FAB’s brother.” A search revealed it’s fairly common on Twitter, and I expect it to gain popularity. That’s because it echoes another formulation I first heard from my students and now is pretty common: “I’m friends with him” instead of “He’s my friend” or simply “We’re friends.”

Why the new, longer construction? I don’t know, other than to say it’s consistent with a currently fashionable verbal ungainliness that I have referred to as “clunk.”

Finally, a Facebook rabbit hole. Stuart Semmel, a Yale historian and astute observer of language, put up a poll asking people which phrase was more familiar to them: A, “The be all and end all” or B, “The end all be all.” I, like virtually all of his friends, chose A (which derives from a line in Macbeth), and in fact don’t recall ever encountering B. But B is a thing, specifically among young people: Stuart’s post was prompted by his teenage daughters’ use of it. (A usually has an “and” in it, while B does not.)

The phrase was used at least one time before the 21st century, according to the OED, by Thomas P. Thompson in the Westminster Review, 1830: “This is the end-all and be-all of the anti-liberals’ piety.” But that appears to be an outlier. To my knowledge, it doesn’t pop up again till 1986, in a line in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off posted by one of Stuart’s friends: “… Because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end all, be all of human existence.” More recently, it’s been a favorite of the writers of South Park, including this line of dialogue from a South Park video game: “Monica: Well look, Babe is my friend. I think she’s really great. I don’t know if she’s the end all be all of girls, I mean … she’s a little two-faced if you ask me.”

Well, it’s time to start a new week on Twitter. So cheerio.

Yogi Bear and picanic basket

I have been living in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia, for coming on 25 years, and I am finally getting a handle on the way people talk around here. For example, if they say, “That drawling is mayan,” they are not referring to the way Southerners speak or to a Mesoamarican civilization, but rather claiming ownership of a pitcher they have made, possibly with a crown. (The Harvard Dialect Survey shows that while Southeastern Pennsylvania is ground zero for that distinctive pronunciation for crayon,  it does spread up and down the East Coast a bit.)

Those four examples — drawling, mayan (for “mine”), pitcher (for “picture”), crown — actually bear on the topic that’s on my mind. It strikes me that the majority of Delcoisms either add a unit of sound, or phoneme, to the standard pronunciation of the word or leave one or more out. Linguists call the first strategy epenthesis and the second syncope.

Syncope makes more intuitive sense, as it streamlines the word and saves time and effort. Pitcher comes out easier than picture, and crown than crayon. (Other non-Delco-specific examples of syncope are the common two-syllable pronunciations of vegetable and caramel and the George W. Bushean nucular.)

The particular town I live in is Swarthmore, and it wasn’t long after I moved here that I discerned a split in pronunciation: Natives and longtime residents efficiently said Swahthmore, while newbies (and, interestingly, Swarthmore College students and faculty) insisted on taking the effort to voice that first r. It has been estimated that you have to live here three decades before you go full Swahth. That gives me five and half years to go.

Other local syncope examples are tempacher for whether it’s hot or cold, Pennsavania for our state, Sah-er-dee for the sixth day of the week, folage (sometimes foilage) for the leaves of a flower or tree, and liberry for where you get books.

The degree of epenthesis here is, to me, surprising. The first time I noticed it here was when I was writing a profile of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who at that time lived (and maybe still lives) in the Philadelphia suburbs. I interviewed one of her neighbors who said, in connection with Ms. Eisenhower’s regular-galness, what sounded like, “She shops at the ackamee just like everyone else.” “The what?” I asked. “The ackamee,” she replied. I eventually realized she was referring to Acme, a regional supermarket chain.

Other examples I’ve heard are remanents (for remnants), incidences (for incidents), mischievious, drownded, and annexed (for annex).

The phenomenon turns out not to be so unusual or surprising. At the rhetoric site Silva Rhetoricae, the Brigham Young professor Gideon O. Burton remarks, “Epenthesis is sometimes employed in order to accommodate meter in verse; sometimes, to facilitate easier articulation of a word’s sound. It can, of course, be accidental, and a vice of speech.” “Vice of speech” is harsh, but I can see the “easier articulation” in the way the basketball announcer Dick Vitale says athalete and Yogi Bear says picanic basket. Other examples are inserting a p or b in words so they come out hampster and cumberbun, and sticking a vowel in Hamtramck, Mich., to yield Hamtramick.

Another local pronunciation is neither syncope nor epenthesis but substitution: saying street as shtreet and strong as shtrong. And of course it’s far from merely local. I first became aware of it through Michelle Obama, and I hear it just about every day via the NPR All Things Considered host Audie Cornish. The phenomenon, sometimes called “S-backing,” has been widely examined and discussed; this blog post by Neal Whitman has a lot of good information and citations. Whitman gives a host of examples, including a line  from Beverly Hills Cop (1984), where Eddie Murphy’s character says: “The only reason these officers were in a shtrip club….” I haven’t been able to find much discussion of when and where S-fronting originated, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that Murphy, Cornish, and Obama are all African-American.

However, it’s possible that the origin is more regional than racial. Whitman cites an article on the topic by David Durian which in turn refers to research by the legendary University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov. In the 1970s, Labov found, S-backing “was fairly pervasive in Philadelphia speech.” As we in Delco might say, darn shtraight.

Fieldworkers compiling the “Dictionary of American Regional English” in 1972.

Have you enjoyed the taste of a cabinet this summer? If so, unless you’re a termite, you are probably from Rhode Island or neighboring southeast Massachusetts. The entry for “cabinet” in the Dictionary of American Regional English will tell you: Most of us know it as a milkshake.

That’s what you’ll find when you look in the pages of the print edition, a first resource for any word used only in certain parts of the United States. Years of fieldwork in the 1960s and ’70s, involving researchers taking “word wagons” with recording equipment to interview local residents throughout the country, plus extensive reading of printed sources (and, more recently, internet searches), have resulted in six imposing volumes with 41,564 entries encompassing 59,582 different senses, published from 1985 to 2013.

But why is a drink a cabinet, of all things? “Etymology uncertain,” the print dictionary says.

Fortunately, DARE isn’t committed entirely to paper. When the final volume, with indexes and maps, was sent to the printer, the dictionary went online, like any good 21st-century reference book, with the advantages of searchability and universal access. If your library doesn’t have it, you can subscribe to DARE online for $49 a year, via the publisher, Harvard University Press.

Meanwhile, the online version is updated quarterly at the dictionary’s headquarters, at the University of Wisconsin. In the past, my Lingua Franca posts have offered samples from the first nine quarterly updates. Since then the editor, George Goebel, has produced three more. You can find them all, free of charge, here.

The most recent is the 12th, dated spring 2018. And this one happens to answer the question of where cabinet (the milkshake) comes from.
It’s a shortening of the term “royal cabinet.” And that in turn comes from the brand name Royal Cabinet, used for a number of drinks, such as Royal Cabinet Champagne, widely advertised in the latter 19th century. DARE online says the name was “presumably meant to suggest that they were suitable for a monarch’s private chambers or cupboard.”

Other improvements in the 12th update include revised entries for “ascared” and for “Dutch band,” a variation added to the entries for “bull band,” “kettle band,” and “rattle band,” all names for “a group of people gathered to create a noisy racket, usually as a mock serenade for a recently married couple.”

The 11th, in winter 2018, includes “coveite,” for “one who lives in a remote part of the mountains”; and “cane chewing,” for “a social gathering at which cane is chewed”; and “all anymore,” for “all gone, used up”; and various new and revised entries for animals.

The 10th, in fall 2017, has “Amarugia,” for “a real or imagined area considered to be ‘back of the beyond,’”; and about 20 variations on “mischief night,” usually the night before Halloween, “when children engage in various more or less destructive pranks.”

DARE was supported throughout its formative years by substantial government and private grants, but now it’s almost entirely volunteer. If another grant came along, however, the staff and organization would be available and ready to continue full scale.

What do you think, guys? Is “y’all” in trouble?

For some time, “y’all” has been assaulted by “you guys” aiming to replace it as the go-to second-person-plural pronoun in the South. Is the Solid South still holding firm at the Mason-Dixon line, or is “you guys” infiltrating and spreading like kudzu, as it is elsewhere?

I wonder because I know some claim that it is. In the Dictionary of American Regional English, the usage note for “you guys” says “orig. chiefly North; now widespread; esp freq. among younger speakers.” It backs this up with two citations that indicate the invasion has been on its way at least since the recent turn of the century:

2000 American Speech 75.417: Meanwhile, just as y’all seems to be spreading outside the South, you-guys is moving into the South, especially among younger speakers.

2002 Alcalde July–Aug 10 cTX: From this office … you can hear it in the classrooms, at the shuttle bus stops. “You guys know where this stops?” You can hear it in the bookstores and restaurants that encircle campus. “You guys know what you want to order yet?” I’m speaking, of course, about the impending death of the expression “y’all” at the hands of the address “you guys,” like an aggressive exotic species supplanting a native one.

In our South, nevertheless, “you guys” has felt pushback. It’s one of the “pet peeves” that the lexicographer Erin McKean wrote about for The Boston Globe in 2010, republished with more than 100 comments in Language Log.

Ever since “thee” and “thou” almost completely vanished from English by the 18th century, leaving the more genteel “you” to encompass the vacated singular space as well as plural, speakers of English have sought alternatives that would allow them once again to distinguish between second-person singular and plural.

One candidate is “y’all.” It goes back as far as the mid-19th century and has served as a sign of the South. The other, “you guys,” emerged around 1900 after complicated twists and turns from the name of England’s most notorious terrorist, Guy Fawkes, who almost succeeded in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605.

But back to my original question: Is “you guys” displacing “y’all” in the South — or retreating? Or is it a standoff?

And have you changed the second-person plural you use?

I haven’t done a careful study to find the answer. But I’d like to learn the situation on the ground today. So if you know the territory, could you take a moment to post your answer? Thanks!

Across the street from the building that houses the linguists, philosophers, and computer scientists at my university (on the left in the picture above) is the city’s huge central mosque. Hundreds of Muslims stream out of its doors after lunchtime prayers on Fridays to socialize in the courtyard. Men with men, of course (women have a separate exit door round the back).

A few yards away on the mosque side of the street is Maqbool’s, a grocery store run by Pakistanis (I’ll use that designation here, though many of the ethnic Pakistanis I interact with every day have Scottish accents, and some were born here).

Yesterday I stopped by Maqbool’s to buy fresh chili peppers (at about a fifth of the supermarket prices elsewhere!). Ahead of me at the cash desk was a young woman, chatting and laughing with the storekeeper in a language I had studied for a while at the University of York when I was an undergraduate: Hindustani (also known as Hindi-Urdu).

I watched with interest. Social interaction between the sexes in public is rather unusual in the local Muslim population. And then I noticed the woman’s long black hair flowing free around her shoulders. No nod toward standard Muslim head-covering at all, not even a loosely draped headscarf. That was unusual too. It occurred to me that she was probably Indian, not Pakistani.

As if reading my mind, the man behind the counter unexpectedly stopped speaking Hindustani and asked in English: “Are you from India?”

She said she was. There was a little more friendly Hindustani conversation, and she paid for her purchases and said a smiling goodbye.

The fact that at first he hadn’t noticed is a measure of the similarity between what Indians always call Hindi and Pakistanis always call Urdu. The two are often referred to, even by native speakers, as quite different languages — especially by those who are tempted to individuate languages by reference to writing systems (a practice that breeds much of the confusion over how many languages are spoken in China). A standardized variety of Hindustani known in India as Modern Standard Hindi is the designated official language of the Indian federal government; it is written (from left to right) with the Sanskrit-derived Devanagari script, and draws its learned and religious terminology from Sanskrit sources. And a standardized variety known as Modern Standard Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, written (right to left) with a script adapted from Arabic by the Persians, Nastaliq; it draws the learned and religious strata of its vocabulary from Persian and Arabic sources.

The religious, cultural, and orthographic differences were amplified in 1947 into a massive political separation when Britain partitioned South Asia into India and Pakistan. The process led to 14 million people becoming refugees. At least two million disappeared (the actual number killed in the violence as Hindus fled south and Muslims fled north has never been determined, but it was huge).

We have seen similar tragedies more recently elsewhere: The Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians of the former Yugoslavia use essentially the same language, but for cultural, religious, and above all political reasons they were reconstructed in the 1990s as distinct languages (see my June 2013 post, A Trinity of Languages), and the speakers were induced to fight disastrous and near-genocidal wars against each other.

Despite the disastrously hostile relations that have persisted between India and Pakistan (both nuclear-armed), language does not divide the populations of the Hindustani-speaking areas. Hindi and Urdu are not just recognizably linguistic cousins (like Hebrew and Arabic, or German and Dutch), but much closer — close enough to be called regional dialects of a single language. They share all of their basic structure, especially in grammar.

As long as it is just casual chat over the grocery counter, there is no communication barrier at all. And individual Indians and Pakistanis do not hate each other. Before 1947, Hindus and Muslims (and Buddhists and Christians) had coexisted fairly peacefully for centuries in South Asia.

Maqbool is a visibly Pakistani name (the letter q originates in Persian loanwords which Hindus generally don’t use); the young Indian woman could have noted that and shopped elsewhere.

The man behind the counter could have turned cold and unfriendly on realizing her nationality.

These things did not happen. Far away from the toxic political hostility and military posturing of the rival countries of India and Pakistan, they laughed and joked in a friendly way across the supposed barriers of language, culture, ethnicity, religion, dress, nationality, and sex.

Imagine, as John Lennon put it.

Cuenca, Ecuador

¿Adónde van? Asked the bus-station clerk in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, yesterday morning.

It’s a reasonable question. Where am I going?

A few moments later from a rear seat I watch the dust and urban squalor along the River Guayas transition to miles of lush banana fields before we reach Puerto Inca, where the change really begins. After a left turn, the bus climbs 14,000 feet in an hour. In that ascent, languages and cultures transform like flora and fauna.

As we approach the 13,959-foot Paso Tres Cruces, the continental divide from which all waters flow east to the Amazon and eventually the Atlantic, I huddle up to my son (who’s awake, surprisingly) and take out his jacket.

Santiago had been in Massachusetts speaking mostly English for several weeks. He seemed primed to get back into Spanish — and had any number of questions that 4-year-old boys ask people near them on buses: “Did you know I am from Puerto Rico? Have you heard Despacito? Are there fast trains in Ecuador? Does this bus have a big engine?”

There’s flash of light as we break the cloud cover. Heads pop up around the bus almost in unison and look about. The landscape from the clouds to the peaks is barren and windswept.

A woman next to us whispers: “Achachay.”

“¿Qué es achachay?” says Santiago.

“Tener frío mijo,” (“to be cold, my son”) says the woman. Some think the Kichwa term achachay is an onomatopoeia for teeth chattering. Kichwa, or Quichua, is the variety of Quechua spoken in much of Ecuador. Quechua is perhaps the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language in the Americas, and has a significant influence on Andean Spanish.

Santiago’s mother (my wife, Joanna, asleep beside us) speaks an Ecuadorian Spanish with many Kichwa influences — like atatay for “dirty”; mashi for “companion”; michi for “kitten”; and ñaña/o for “sister/brother” — but terms for “cold” don’t come up often in Puerto Rico.

The bus goes in and out of clouds again. In the distance are enormous mountains, brown and sparsely shrubbed near the top, dotted at lower altitudes with occasional huts amid a patchwork of tended fields. The graphite-black rivers that twist through the valleys are too far down to see from the road. 

After the pass is an hourlong descent to the plateau, a place treasured by empires: the Cañari then Inca and then Spanish occupied the region in the last two millennia, each renaming it in their own language. Now the capital city is called Cuenca and the province Azuay.

Arriving via bus from the coast is a rather peculiar experience.

After flights from Newark to San Salvador to Guayaquil last night, it was 86 F. at 9 a.m. when we left our hotel for the bus station. The docksides of the port were a mile away — but the salt air and smells of fish and garbage dominated the surroundings. Humidity fogged my glasses at the curb as we waited for the taxi. Our cab driver wore a guayabera that would not have been out of place in Mayagüez or La Habana, and spoke a Spanish not unlike that of the Caribbean, with great speed, nearly silent s, and intervocalic d.

He lowered the music as he leaned out the window to speak to me. On the radio was a song in Spanglish by Aventura, a Dominican-Bronx bachata group. I nodded about the five-dollar fare, blocking the sun with my forearm.

Mentally one is still in Guayaquil when the bus stops in Cuenca, 8,400 feet above sea level.

When the door of the bus swings open and you step down, the cool dry air of the mountains hits – and it’s clear you’ve carried the atmosphere of the coast intact with you inside of the bus. Walking those first few paces in Cuenca you’re still in Guayaquil, and stare about as if the surroundings were unexpected.

Grey, drizzly skies and mountains fill the horizon; people idling about the station are reserved, dressed in light jackets with dark tones; there is less noise, no blaring music. The language echoing about the hall has the sing-song tonalities similar to the Spanish in Chile and Argentina, a vocabulary infused by Kichwa, and the occasional voseo for second-person singular.

My sisters-in-law greet us and dote adoringly on Santiago as I get our bags.

“It was cold on the bus,” says Santiago. “¡Achachaty!”

I order an espresso at the station café, munition against the altitude.

Cuenca has a small colonial quarter up on a diminutive meseta surrounded by four rivers. I think of it as a Cañari-Inca-Spanish Nantucket tucked away in mountains that are beyond description. It is beautiful after the rain.

Pre-Columbian farming terraces (some still in use) rise up the banks at the confluence of two rivers, and above those are the cobblestoned streets of the town center, and above those is the cathedral.

The part of town around the market is Kichwa-speaking. Many in this area have relatives in Spain or New York, or have lived there and returned: There’s been a multilingual life here for centuries.

Now we are in a car bumping up and down cobblestones, with two or three conversations occurring simultaneously; laughter erupts every few seconds as Santiago’s cousins tell him new Kichwa words and he tries to pronounce them.

At the corner of Calle Miguel de Santiago and Calle Rafael Salas, streets named for two painters, we get our things from the trunk.

For just under two decades I have been coming to this place. It is the childhood home of Joanna and, by connections both cultural and physical, of our son. It’s where I’ve written two books, watched four World Cup finals, and considered applying to jobs in Puerto Rico.

As much as I would like to inscribe here the character of this unique corner of South America, to me it is a place where my mind is always re-engaged by the question: “where are you going?”

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.

U. of Barcelona

What was it like studying at a Spanish university?

Soto-González: The matriculation process went smoothly and classes were not as demanding as I expected. The professors are not strict with attendance or class participation. Sadly, the courses were given with a slightly Eurocentric perspective. Aside from the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba, they knew very little, especially on themes relating to art. The difference between my Spanish peers and Latin-American/Asian peers was noticeable with respect to grades, interactions with professors, and overall treatment: Xenophobia can still be a serious institutional problem.

Fernández de Jesús: At the beginning it was challenging. It took time to get used to the teaching style, since it is different from Puerto Rico, and at the same time I was adapting to a new country. After those early difficulties, things got easier, and overall the experience was satisfying.

How did professors and students respond to Puerto Rican Spanish? 

Soto-González: Often I had to explain the political relations between Puerto Rico and the U.S. for people to understand my constant use of Spanglish — and how I could change from one language to another in the same sentence without any problem. My peers loved it, and actually asked for help with their English. On the other hand, professors didn’t like it, and instead asked that every international student take a Catalan-language course (because we were in Catalonia, not Spain) and improve our Castilian.

Fernández de Jesús: Students and professors seemed confused by my accent, since Puerto Rican Spanish is not very common there. Puerto Rican immigrants are rare in Spain, and not many Spaniards have traveled to Puerto Rico. I was asked if I were Canarian, Andalusian, Cuban, or Dominican, and every so often Colombian or Venezuelan. Many people said my accent was funny in a positive way.

Did you experience any confusion because of the variances in Spanish between Spain and Puerto Rico?

Soto-González: I experienced many difficulties adapting to the language, even though it’s my native tongue. Even simple words were sometimes complicated. I expected “¡oye tío!” and lots of swearing but was surprised at the constant use of Catalan in Spanish — catañol. So it was not only a question of regionalisms and different words, there was another language mixed in the matter.

I had peers from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico, and for the first six months almost every conversation involved the “weirdness” of Castilian and the difficulties of the Catalan. But once we adapted, we started learning and using new words in our vocabulary.

Some professors didn’t know how to say some things or communicate a thought in full Castilian Spanish. In written assignments, they had to ask us individually what we meant because they didn’t understand us and we didn’t understand them. That was a fundamental factor in the learning and grading process; some faculty opted for ignoring more than half of the class and did not read their assignments.

There were also variances in Spanglish. It was surprising that Spaniards use many words from English that we don’t use in Puerto Rico. Like “bol” instead of “envase,” referring to a bowl, and “footing” in Spain means “jogging” rather than what it means in English. They also modify the spelling of some English words to make them more pronounceable in Spanish, like “cúter” for “cutter”.

Fernández de Jesús: The variance was confusing at the beginning, yes, but only with a few people, mainly the elderly. It was mostly related to pronunciation. The common struggle I had was that people asked me to repeat and to speak slower because it was hard for them to understand my accent. But I did not interpret this as people trying to correct me; it was just a normal issue when people with different dialects of a language interact.

My Spanish went through some changes, especially in vocabulary. There are many words in Puerto Rican Spanish that have other meanings or are different in Spain’s Spanish. I incorporated some Spanish phrases and words as a substitution for their Puerto Rican equivalents. I still even use some of them. My syntax changed in past and future conjugations: Spaniards tend to use the compound past (present perfect) for recent events and the simple future, in contrast to the simple past (preterit) and the occasional phrasal future tense of Puerto Ricans (estarán llegando instead of the Spanish llegarán). My accent and pronunciation changed slightly.

I had Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Argentinian, Chilean, and Dominican friends and classmates. They suffered fewer changes in their way of speaking Spanish, basically because they had other people of their respective countries to talk to in the area, while I did not.

Did you ever have to change a word or phrase to reduce the influence of English in your Spanish? 

Soto-González: There’s no doubt that Spanglish is a way of life. I came to reason with myself, and became very cautious about my expression depending on with whom I spoke. At the beginning I tried speaking only full-on Spanish; it didn’t work. The occasional “so…” and “anyway…” and “OK …” were constantly present. When I forced it, I couldn’t even translate them to Spanish. But in the end my Spanglish was more useful than anything: All of my peers said they envied it. Even with my faulty Spanglish-to-Spanish translations, my Castilian with these nuances seemed more complex, more eloquent, and sometimes more expressive than that of my Spanish peers and professors.

I realized in Spain that my English was excellent, and that sometimes it was easier to communicate in that language instead of Spanish.

Fernández de Jesús: Yes, this happened often. Otherwise they would not understand what I was meaning. I even learned the Spanish equivalent of some words and phrases which I did not know, since I always used them in Spanglish. On the other hand, I was surprised by the fact that some words that we mostly use in Spanish in Puerto Rico, in Spain they used them in Spanglish, like “stop” instead of “pare” for the traffic sign, “marketing” instead of “mercadeo,” “flipar” (“flip out”) instead of “caerse para atrás” or “entusiasmarse,” among other examples.

It was a great linguistic experience. My vocabulary and perceptiveness developed, and I can also say that now I can speak two varieties of Spanish.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.

I believe peak s-backing was reached on August 1, 2018. In a segment of NPR’s All Things Considered that day, the host, Audie Cornish; the NPR correspondent she was speaking with, Ayesha Rascoe; and the news figure being discussed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all engaged in s-backing, which is a term for pronouncing the s in a word as if it were sh. It’s called s-backing because you move your tongue toward the back of your mouth in order to do it. Some linguists refer to the phenomenon as “retracted (str).”

Here’s the segment. Rascoe says “shtrongly” at the 0:35 and 2:01 marks, Cornish says “obshtruction” at 1:27, and Sanders says “obshtruction” at 1:46.

The piece was no fluke. I feel that I cannot go more than a couple of hours before hearing someone say shtrength, shtreet, or shtructure.

As the NPR examples suggest, s-backing seems to occur most frequently in words with the “str” consonant cluster. But not exclusively: The Ohio State linguists Brian Joseph and Richard Janda encountered it in the words understand, disrespect, screen, sprinkler, still, school, and small. (A separate phenomenon, surely, accounts for the bizarre fact that roughly half of Americans pronounce grocery as if it were spelled groshery.)

The phenomenon was first observed, among Philadelphia residents, by the University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov in a 1984 study. It has subsequently been reported in Georgia, southern Louisiana, and Columbus, Ohio, and outside the United States in Cockney and Estuary English and in New Zealand.

I became aware of s-backing through Michelle Obama, a big user. The Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten once described her speaking style:

Here she is in London, talking about all the “ekshtraordinary” women she has met, and her father’s “shtruggle” with illness. Here she is as a commencement speaker, discussing “shtrategic choices.” Here she is talking about people being “stopped on the shtreet” because of the color of their skin. She says “frushtrated.” She says “shtructural.”

Obama is an African-American woman, as are Audie Cornish and Ayesha Rascoe. It would seem a reasonable hypothesis that s-backing is a feature of that language community. Or perhaps the former first lady, having been seen and heard so frequently, influenced the way they, and possibly also Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others, speak. But Brian Joseph, in personal correspondence, cautioned me against jumping to that conclusion: “Despite what many people think, there is much less overt ‘modeling’ of speech on popular figures. … I think that Labov has shown pretty convincingly that the people you interact with on a daily basis have more of an impact on your speech.”

OK, fine. But my admittedly less than comprehensive survey of the literature on this subject leaves me unsatisfied. Several scholars, including David Durian and Duna Gylfadottir (her paper is called “Shtreets of Philadelphia”), chart an increase in s-backing in particular cities and regions, especially among younger people, but I haven’t found anything that measures what seems to me a big increase on a national level.

And why do people do it? Durian’s paper, focusing on Columbus, Ohio, reports that s-backing is linked with an urban identity. And a 2011 paper by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler has some interesting findings regarding male speakers. Avoiding s-backing, she found, “carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent”; conversely, s-backing increases “perceptions of the complex style ‘masculine, unintelligent, straight man.’”

But that’s kind of it. I would love to see national research on how many people s-back, who they are, and (I know I’m asking for the moon here) why they do it. If such a study were to come down the pike, I would be exshtremely grateful.

Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie.

There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as a subject among high-school seniors in England. (I would bet the same holds for California, but I don’t have the figures.) At “A-level” — the key determinant of eligibility for college, roughly like a U.S. high-school diploma — 3,334 students took Chinese this year (up 8.6 percent on last year), and only 3,058 took German (down 16.5 percent since 2017).

I did a brief interview about this on an evening-commute-time radio talk show, discussing why Chinese is a tough subject (answer: the extraordinarily complex writing system makes for a vast memory burden), and which language high-schoolers should be advised to learn (answer: the language of the people you most identify with — simply liking people enough to want to speak the way they do is the most powerful determinant of success in learning a foreign language really well).

But reflecting on the topic later, I decided that the news media should have done more research on the story. How many of the 3,334 students doing Chinese had a Chinese family of origin? Britain, like California, has been absorbing Chinese immigrants for more than a hundred years.

For purposes of high-school language lessons, “Chinese” means Mandarin Chinese, a standardized variant of the language of the Beijing area. The Independent stated that Mandarin is “the first language of over 1.25 billion people worldwide.” It isn’t. (The number of true native speakers is probably well below 500 million.) In the Hong Kong area, from which a huge proportion of the Chinese immigrants are drawn, Cantonese is the local language (despite government denials). Nonetheless, immigrants who had some schooling in China would generally have been taught at least some Mandarin in school. That would tend to make passing the 12th-grade Mandarin Chinese exam pretty easy for a teenage immigrant. And even children who left China too early to have learned much Mandarin might learn a bit from parents or grandparents, enough to give them a head start.

Nothing wrong with that: Immigrants face many problems in their new land, and if in this respect they get a small advantage from their bilingualism, so much the better. But how many takers were indeed in the position of studying Chinese as a heritage language? Maybe such data are not collected. They should be. From the newspaper accounts you might think that flocks of far-sighted English teenagers were gravitating toward the very difficult task of learning Chinese in order to reach out to a coming world economic superpower. The situation could be very different: English teenagers becoming even less interested in foreign languages than they used to be, while ethnic Chinese increasingly take up the study of their parents’ or grandparents’ native language. It would be interesting to know which picture is closer to the truth.

Another question is about the expectations of those learning Mandarin. Are the A-level takers making the assumption that they will be able to master enough characters to be fully literate, capable of reading (or even writing) business or political documents in Chinese? Or are they mainly interested in developing enough spoken Mandarin to permit a little polite conversation? Traditional ways of teaching Chinese, ignoring pinyin romanization, treat the learning of several hundred characters as a sine qua non, but Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has often expressed the view that the traditional methods represent a huge mistake: If taught without the character system, using pinyin for taking notes, he says spoken Chinese is actually very easy to learn.

I was mulling these things over after the early evening radio spot when I realized that I still had time to catch a movie, so I went out to see The Meg, a creature feature about a team of marine scientists who discover in deep water off the Chinese coast that Carcharocles megalodon is not as extinct as they thought.

The film is much better than its initial reviews suggested. It turns out to be a very successful Chinese/American bilingual co-production (worldwide gross over $300 million and rising daily). The Chinese cast members sometimes speak to each other in Chinese with English subtitles. They include the distinguished leader of the scientific team, Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao), and his oceanographer daughter Suyin Zhang (Bingbing Li, giving a lovely performance as the female romantic lead opposite Jason Statham, playing the heroic rescue diver Jonas Taylor).

Listed in the final credits, along with enough special-effects people to populate a medium-size town, are the names of dozens and dozens of translators. Solid evidence that, if nothing else turns up, there’s paid work in today’s film industry for those who command both English and Chinese.

“Correct” summerhouse

“Incorrect” summerhouse

Correct summerhouse

Incorrect summerhouse

I have a distinguished colleague who unceasingly tries to persuade me to see that my attempts at descriptive grammar really have a prescriptive subtext. We were both participants in a workshop on the history and philosophy of linguistics last week, and the dispute reared its ugly head again.

Being a descriptive linguist has nothing to do with the crazy notion that “anything goes” or the absurd idea that everything anyone says has to be accepted as correct. So I acknowledge that rules of grammar have what philosophers call normative force, not in virtue of containing normative predicates like ought, but in the sense that they are intended to define a distinction (over an indefinitely large range) between two kinds of sentence structure: the kind that the described language has and the kind that it does not have.

But in my colleague’s view, though I may claim that I am trying to make a neutral statement of the right structural principles, my description harbors advisory or recommendatory force like a lurking virus. My humble scribe’s garment does not quite hide the uniform of the authority-wielding storm trooper glimpsed beneath.

The disagreement between us smoulders on without resolution, despite the responses I offer on each point. Let me illustrate a few of them. I will paraphrase my colleague’s positions as fairly as I can. (You may be tempted to doubt my sincerity in this, but you shouldn’t; I’m playing by philosophy rules here.)

Objection 1: So-called descriptive grammarians often slip into calling ungrammatical strings of words “wrong” or “bad” — self-evidently negative evaluative words. So the very terms in which grammarians talk reveal their underlying condemnatory attitude.

Response to Objection 1: No, they reveal nothing. Certainly, in casual talk, grammarians use terminology borrowed from ethics, like “wrong” or “bad” to characterize word sequences that violate the grammar of the language. We use “bad” to characterize putrid eggs, too, without implying any disapprobation or blame. It’s just a façon de parler. Mentally replace “x is bad” by “x is out of compliance with the principles of grammatical organization for the language or dialect under consideration” if you really need to.

Objection 2: Your book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, claims to be a grammar of “standard English.” The very name of the language you treat lacks neutrality, implying a standard that people ought to comply with.

Response to Objection 2: Call it something else if the usual term worries you. Call it Stuck-Up White People’s English if you like (though the late Kofi Annan spoke it too). The name we use for it is a complete red herring as regards the logical character of the grammatical rules it observes.

Objection 3: Even a supposedly simple descriptive rule like “The suffix s occurs on the end of any present-tense verb with a third-person singular subject” in effect suggests a model people should follow. Foreign learners will understand you as saying that they ought to put an s on the end of these verbs.

Response to Objection 3: In describing a structural regularity I am not recommending that it be respected. If I show you the design plan for my summerhouse, and you imagine that I’m saying yours ought to have a tilted flat roof like mine, that would be an insane misinterpretation. There is no covert recommendation that you should build yours just the same, or that you should build one at all.

As it happens, given an accurate description of a language, a learner can misinterpret it as a recommendation to speak in accord with it, and will be well served in that respect (it’s the language they want to learn). This simply reminds us that accuracy of description dissolves the reasons for discord between descriptively and prescriptively motivated grammarians.

Objection 4: But millions of English speakers around the world never put an s on the end of present-tense verbs with third-person singular subjects. Your grammar is defining them as thereby getting something wrong. That too is prescriptive.

Response to Objection 4: But without an account of the normal practice in the dialect that I describe, how can you even frame this objection? How can you identify the interdialectal difference? Dialect A may have a restriction which is completely absent in dialect B; dialect C may operate with a restriction similar to dialect A but different in detail. Describing any one of them is not tantamount to recommending in its favor or deprecating the others.

But the dispute grumbles on regardless. I will never convince my colleague, it seems. My only consolation is the warm feeling in my tummy that comes from knowing I am right. He seems completely intractable. Unless of course it’s me.

Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels
(Image via Wikipedia)

If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information, four times a year: the journal American Speech, sponsored by the American Dialect Society and published by Duke University Press.

And though it is scholarly and research based, there’s a surprising amount of information that is intelligible to anyone, even without special training in linguistics. The current editor is Thomas C. Purnell of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

American Speech covers everything from — well, just take a look at the latest issue, Volume 93, No. 2, dated May 2018.

It begins with a look at New York City’s three distinctive vowels as they declined in prestige from 1933 to 2003, as reflected in the movies from 1933 to 2003. Charles Boberg analyzes 22 films with actors who grew up in New York City and vicinity, playing New York characters.

Pronunciations in the South are next, a detailed study by Charlie Farrington, Tyler Kendall, and Valerie Fridland of what linguists call the “Southern Vowel Shift.” They find that the Southern vowels are dynamic, involving movement, as well as distinctive positions.

Moving on to the vowels of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wil Rankinen finds UP pronunciation sounding more and more like Canadian. He notes differences between Finnish-American influenced UP dialects and those with Italian-American influences.

The main section concludes with Soohyun Kwon’s study not of a whole region but of one individual, the prominent linguist Noam Chomsky. Born and raised in Philadelphia, at age 27 Chomsky moved to Boston, where he lived for more than 50 years, leaving three distinctive Philadelphia vowels behind. Kwon compares recordings of two of Chomsky’s talks, in 1970 and 2009.

Not all of this will be immediately comprehensible to nonspecialists, but next come three articles on “teaching American speech,” aimed at bridging the gap. Charlotte Vaughn, Tyler Kendall, and Kaylynn Gunter write about a three-week lab for an introductory-linguistics course focusing on intensifiers like very, really, and super. Mark Canada suggests teaching linguistics through lexicography, in this case writing a definition for a word the student has made up. Finally, Julie S. Amberg and Deborah J. Vause tell about “a scaffolded curriculum for the introductory-linguistics class.” This included team interviews with students who do not share exactly the team members’ speech.

That’s all for this issue. Other issues include the regular feature “Among the New Words,” about neologisms; book reviews; and a “Miscellany” section of short articles. You get both print and electronic versions as part of membership in the American Dialect Society, or otherwise by subscription.

Donald Trump has a unique way of speaking and writing. But for a president his language is not unprecedented. Or not unpresidented.

In 2004, after considering the speech of all 42 different presidents until then (Grover Cleveland, you recall, was both the 22nd and 24th president), I found two qualities that we the people look for in the language of our presidents: They should be dignified — but also down to earth.

Dignity came first. George Washington, who knew he was establishing the model for the presidency, needed above all to be dignified, because he represented the dignity and status of the new democratic United States of America. Civilized countries in the 18th century were still mostly governed by hereditary aristocrats and royalty, outstanding supposedly because of generations of good breeding. The United States audaciously organized itself on the radical premise that all men are created equal, and that leadership would depend on merit, not ancestry.

To demonstrate this, our president needed to appear equal to the crowned heads of Europe. Washington, of course, did just that, speaking and writing with force and dignity.

Washington was much on the minds of his immediate successors, who like him were cultivated and dignified. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and J.Q. Adams all followed with Washington’s ideal in mind. And all of them came from elite families, provided with education, travel, and experience in matters of state and government.

As late as 1828, nearly 40 years after Washington became president in 1789, someone writing about presidential styles would have made it clear that there was one essential quality for a president: dignity.

And then came Andrew Jackson. In contrast to his predecessors, he was born in a log cabin in the wilderness to dirt-poor Scotch-Irish immigrant parents. Most of his presidential predecessors had college educations, in a time when going to college was rare, but Jackson had only a year or two of formal education. Nevertheless, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans had learned to read and write and speak eloquently long before he became president. He continued the tradition of presidential dignity, but he added a second admirable trait — he was down to earth.

He became president in 1829, defeating the most highly educated president of all, John Quincy Adams. The son of our second president had gone on diplomatic missions to countries as varied as France and Russia, had been a U.S. secretary of state, and was Boylston professor of rhetoric at Harvard while serving in the U.S. Senate.

Quincy’s partisans could scarcely believe Jackson would be a serious contender for the presidency. In newspapers, the Facebook of that time, they spread the fake news that Jackson could barely read and write. How could he, with such a hardscrabble background?

But the franchise was widening, and the 1828 election made it clear that Americans wanted a president who would be of the people, not above them. So Jackson was elected and then re-elected. For the rest of the 19th century, being born in a log cabin was such a positive quality that candidates rewrote their biographies to include it. It helped Abe Lincoln, of course, and he was the real thing. But William Henry Harrison, born to a distinguished Virginia family and college educated, would be portrayed as the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate leading to his victory in 1840.

Nevertheless, Washington’s example of cultivation and dignity wasn’t eliminated. Jackson was after all a gentleman and well-spoken, like most of his successors, but now a candidate would have an additional advantage if he was down to earth. Down to earth but cultivated; cultivated but plainspoken: These have been our expectations, or at least our hopes, ever since. Notable examples of down to earth, unpretentious presidents include Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Barack Obama could be down to earth too, having both African-American vernacular and sojourns at Columbia and Harvard Law School.

So where does President Trump fit in? Obviously, his language is down to earth, way down, deeper than any president before him. His manner of down-to-earthiness is his own, molded by his use of Twitter. He is so successful at being down to earth that he makes little attempt to appear dignified or cultivated. That’s a break from the dignity we have expected from his 43 predecessors.

The current crowned heads of Europe, as well as their democratic leaders, are shocked at his coarseness. And his election shocked supporters of his Democratic opponent, just as Jackson’s election shocked Quincy’s partisans. In that way, though not in eloquence, he has more in common with Andrew Jackson than might appear at first glance.

Allan Metcalf is the author of Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush (2004).

Jonah Hill in his younger days

Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on October 30, the actor and director Jonah Hill was talking about his childhood obsession with movies. “I had ran through so many films,” he said.

In a 2017 interview also on NPR, the director Bryan Fogel talked about Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian doctor who masterminded the doping of athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympics. “What happened at Sochi he was incredibly upset about,” Fogel said, “because he had went from being a scientist, meaning his whole life is — yes, it’s doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, but he was using science to beat the system.

You see what Hill and Fogel were doing, grammatically. They were using the preterite (ran, went) instead of the past participle (run, gone). This is by no means a new thing. Writing in 1781, John Witherspoon decried the “vulgarisms” had fell, had rose, had broke, had threw, and had drew. 

Such constructions have long flourished in the American vernacular. Joseph Whitehouse, a Virginian on the Lewis and Clark expedition, wrote in his journal, “At this run, we were met with by Robert Fields, (one of the party that had went with Captain Clark).” A line of testimony in an 1870 murder trial went, “I had a laugh as to how I had went through the arrangement.” The narrator of William Faulkner’s 1931 novella “Spotted Horses” says: “Flem had done already disappeared; he had went on to see his wife.”

Often, a double substitution is made, with the participle being used instead of the preterite. “She gone home,” or, as in the lyrics of “Frankie and Johnny,” “He done her wrong.”

In the fourth (1936) edition of The American Language, H.L. Mencken notes, “The substitution of the preterite for the … participle seems to me to be increasing of late, and such striking examples as ‘How old of a cat have you ever saw?’ are surely not uncommon.” He remarks that Ring Lardner’s unlettered letter-writing  ballplayer Jack Keefe, in You Know Me Al, favors have wrote, have ate, have went, have drank, etc., etc. (For example: “I says Do you supose the people over there has heard a bout me and he says Sure because they have wrote a lot of letters asking me to be sure and bring you and Mathewson a long.”)

All the people and characters quoted above are Caucasian, but the construction is also a feature of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). In her dissertation, The Evolution of AAVE in a Rural Texas Community (1995), Patricia Cukor-Avilla quotes an informant using both had went and had took: “Cause we had went to — one day my mom had took us out to eat. We had went to, to go eat. Then we had went to the mall, then we had went to Quick As A Flash.” In a 2012 interview, the African-American former baseball player Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd said: “Some of the best games I’ve ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I’d say two-thirds of them. If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played.”

I believe the substitution is still increasing — as Mencken perceived it to be in 1936 — with the added wrinkle that it’s currently seen not only in speech but in various kinds of online writing. (It still is virtually absent in published and edited work, other than in dialogue.) Another difference is that it is showing up among unexpected people. Jonah Hill and Bryan Fogel are city-born Caucasians who both went to the University of Colorado. And my colleagues report preterite-for-participle increasingly showing up in student papers. Some of this is probably due to white kids mimicking the lingo they’ve heard from rappers. But that’s not the whole explanation: This construction just seems to be in the air.

The Corpus of Global Web-Based English, consisting of about 1.9 billion words published online in 2012 and 2013, shows the geographical distribution of Hill’s had ran, with the highest popularity in Ireland, followed by Great Britain and the United States, and then Canada:

Had ran shows up a lot on Twitter as well, with these hits in a seven-hour span:

Three of the tweeters in that screenshot are from the U.S., two from Britain (had ran turns up an awful lot in football contexts), and one from Japan.

I have never said had went or had ran, but I would like to, quite a lot. The “mistake” just feels somehow stronger and more emphatic than the standard version.

“If I had gone outside this morning, I would have frozen my keister off”: tame.

“If I had went outside this morning, I would have froze my keister off”: vivid and crisp.

So when the conversational time seems right, I may just try to work a preterite into a participle slot. I’ll let you know how it turns out.