Asides

Dictionary.com on the word “mistress”

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

I’ve been harsh on Dictionary.com’s blog in the past, but they’re stepping up their game over there. For example, they have a post about how the word mistress is sexist. There’s no real equivalent for the man in an affair and the use of the word makes the woman in the affair seem immoral and the one to blame. The post cites others talking about the word and how journalists should probably stop using it (or be very careful when they do), and it quotes the AP Stylebook as saying that, instead of mistress, “phrasing that acknowledges both people in the relationship is preferred.”

But the post is also great because it discusses other words “used to describe women, particularly when it comes to sex and relationships, that don’t have a male equivalent,” such as spinster, tramp, housewife, and bitch. You should go give it a read. Follow the links in the article for more discussion. And think about how language can reflect culture – it’s not a surprise that the words used to describe women have more negative connotations than the ones used to describe men. People are and have been sexist. Time to change that nonsense.

Check it: https://www.dictionary.com/e/mistress-and-other-words-that-have-no-male-counterpart/

Short interview with Dr. Samy Alim

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In the Pittsburgh City Paper, there’s a short interview with Dr. Samy Alim. You should read it. It’s called “” and it’s all about language and discrimination. It’ll give you a taste of what kind of research Dr. Alim has done. If you like what you read, then go check out his book (with Geneva Smitherman, another great linguist) called Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.S., about how Obama’s masterful use of language is representative of the relationship between race, language and education in the US. That book is excellent.

I can’t pick a favorite quote from the City Paper interview. Just go check it out: https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/the-linguistic-dominance-of-white-western-english-and-how-to-recognize-and-disrupt-it/Content?oid=14230061

A Language Map of the United States

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There a new and interactive map of the languages spoken in the United States. It’s at http://languagemap.us/ and it’s pretty fun to play with. The data comes from the US Census Bureau so you can zoom in on counties. Neat!

Over on r/linguistics, the creator answered a few questions. And there’s an FAQ on the main page.

Online etiquette in a different language

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Here’s a very interesting article by Aviya Kushner about translation and internet language conventions. It talks about formality in language and how tricky that can be when moving from writing to spoken interactions or vice versa, as well as how quickly formalities fall away in emails and texting. And it does a great job explaining the politeness required (or expected) in different mediums. Check it out:

“Why Online Etiquette is an International Conundrum”

(h/t to @LangPol_JER)

Every kind of language has rules

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Yes, even the ones that you don’t like. Here’s a quote from Spoken Soul by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford (2000: 92). It’s perfect in expressing the point that all language varieties have rules:

Every human language studied to date – whether loved or hated, prestigious or not – has regularities or rules of this type [i.e. conventional and systematic ways of pronouncing, modifying, and combining words]. A moment’s reflection would show why this is so. Without regularities, a language variety could not be successfully acquired or used in everyday life, and this applies to Spoken Soul, or Ebonics, as much as to the “Received Pronunciation,” or “BBC English,” of the British upper crust. Characterizations of the former as careless or lazy, and of the latter as careful or refined, are subjective social and political evaluations that reflect prejudices and preconceptions about the people who usually speak each variety.

That is so good. The book that it appears in is about Black English (also called African American Vernacular English), so of course Rickford and Rickford had to address the (uninformed) idea that Black English is just “English without rules.” It’s not and it never was.

You don’t get to claim that some specific group(s) of people don’t have any rules to the way they speak. Because if you claim that, it will say more about your judgment of those people than it will about your assessment of their language. (Well, it will also say that you’re not very good at making assessments about language.)

Every language variety follows systematic rules. Every single one. Not some. Not most. All of them. They may not follow the same rules as each other, but they follow rules nonetheless.

#Themself all the way

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Oxford Dictionaries has a great blog post called “Is ‘themself’ a real word?” After showing that themself is indeed a really real word, they note that it’s still not quite acceptable in Standard English. I really wish it was though. It’s so perfect. Check out the post to see more!

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/01/15/themself/

#TeamThemself

A tired English “rule”

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Here’s a good example of why we split infinitives in English:

You may have heard that it’s bad grammar to split an infinitive. This is a made up rule that was taken directly from Latin. Thankfully, it seems to have been buried for good as people are starting to realize it’s a ridiculous rule. The infinitive is already split in English – there’s always a space between to and the verb. And you can see here that following the rule would produce some really weird sentences:

I wonder what it feels like to be not tired.

I wonder what it feels like not to be tired.

Both of those sound unnatural and unindiomatic.

Go listen to Fiat Lex

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If Lingthusiasm and The Vocal Fries have you yearning for more linguistics, never fear! There’s a new language podcast on the map. It’s called Fiat Lex and it is (quote) “A podcast about dictionaries by people who write dictionaries. Yes, really.” The hosts are Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler, two lexicographers of high renown! They’re up to four episodes now and they are all great. Go check them out!

https://fiatlex.podbean.com/

There’s good articles out there

Joe McVeigh4 Comments

Here is an article that I meant to write about earlier, but it got pushed down my inbox and forgotten (you all email yourselves articles that you want to read later, right?). It’s a great article on linguistics. It’s short and sweet – about one seemingly simple linguistic topic – and the journalist talked to a linguist. Hooray!

The article is on the use of There’s before plurals, as in There’s three cars outside. According to (Standard) English grammar, that’s technically wrong. But as Prof. Andreaa Calude points out, everyone uses there’s before plurals*. And the phrase may be increasing. Prof. Calude also had this wonderful thing to say:

“We measure speech by the same yardstick as writing, even though speech is done differently and has a different function,” she said. “The grammar of speech is different to the grammar of writing.”

“We’re not clued up with what happens in speech. We think it must be bad because it’s not like writing, but that’s not the case.”

I love seeing that kind of stuff in a news article.

So it’s not all bad linguistics press out there. You’d think it was if you read enough of this blog, but I wanted to mention that there are good articles out there too. Go give their writers a click for their good work: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/102419351/theres-a-reason-were-bending-the-rules-on-speech-grammar

*Side note: the article says that what comes after there’s is the subject of the sentence. I know some grammars have described it like this, but I would argue that there is the real subject of the sentence and what comes after it is a displaced or notional subject, which then gets analyzed as the subject complement (also sometimes called the predicate nominative, I think). It’s a minor point. I’m sure most people reading the article were taught that there isn’t the subject in sentences that start with there is/was/are/were.

Dictionary.com is picking up their slack

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Credit where credit’s due, Dictionary.com has been putting out better blog posts on language these days. A few months ago, I went hard on them for whining about millennials in a listicle. And a few months before that I raged on them for their uninformed listicle about words you shouldn’t use. But recently they’ve written interesting posts about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the changing nature of taboo words. They even had a listicle of quotes about the importance of net neutrality. I don’t care what kind of ad space they may be selling with these posts. That’s the name of the game online. I’d rather they get those clicks with posts on legit linguistic topics than with nonsense language shaming posts.

Dictionary.com also tweeted this and it is 🔥

So hats off to Dictionary.com for stepping up their game. I knew they had it in ‘em.