freeway

Posted on March 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

Here, listen to a good song while you read this. The one is not an explication of the other. They’re just on the same general subject, and in the same kind of mood.

Our lives are in league with the freeway. I grew up in the wide-open west, and the limited-access twinned highway was the power line of life. Once you have connected to it, you move fast and smooth, and at night you are a streak of light. I love being in motion. For many or even most of us in North America, our cars are extensions of our selves, two-ton metal protective prosthetics that let us be free to go, that give us power and speed. And the freeway is the freest way.

We’ve had the word freeway for a century and a quarter to refer to an unimpeded access way. For three quarters of a century we’ve meant a highway that you are free to use for free, free to drive on freely and free not to stop – but not free to stop, and not free to get on or off except at interchanges. Free to go fast, but not free to go as fast as you want – if you do, and you’re caught, it’s sure not free. Free to use a car, but cars are not provided for free. And you’re not free to go anywhere but where it goes. It is an electric cord of traffic: enter it and exit it only where it connects. And the cities fly by. There is no turning back.

“Freedom is a scary thing,” Laurie Anderson sings. “Not many people really want it.” What we want is freedom not to have to be too free. We don’t want the burden of too many choices, too many people to have to contend with, too many things to have to look out for. Just give us a limited set of options and let us take the express route on one. Freeways are not freedom to choose; they are freedom from having to keep choosing.

But even that much freedom is not free. I don’t just mean that we pay for the freeways with our taxes – for their construction, their maintenance, their policing, their ploughing – I mean that when we all choose them, they are full of all of us. Freeways exist as an extension of society, they are built by our governments, and they get us from people to people, but when we are on them we want to be free from other people, and the drivers on a busy freeway are no longer free from having to deal with strangers. Strangers on a sidewalk have eyes that see and extensions that swing and are somewhat soft, but strangers on a freeway are nothing other than chaotic boxes, hostile, hard, unpredictable, with eyes that beam light at you rather than taking it in from you. You are not free even to move at speed. You have become a mote in a flow of cooling magma.

But we can build more freeways, yes? Widen them? Offer freedom to more people? Freedom to tie up so much of your money and time and nervous energy in your car, yes. Freedom to go with thousands of others to an off-ramp that leads somewhere that is no larger than it was before, that can handle no more cars than before. Yes. Try connecting a fire hose to your dishwasher and see how that goes.

I drive freeways. When I have to. I choose the smooth fast flow when I can’t get where I’m going within a reasonable time any other way. And then, at last, I exit. I turn away, to a two-lane highway that weaves through the trees and connects to driveways and sidewalks and stores and people walking. A thousand choices to make and things to think about. And that way I am free.

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There is to be no overthinking and no false agreement

Posted on March 11, 2018 | 6 comments

A colleague asked me about a grammatical judgement someone had questioned her on: a sentence of the type “There is to be no swinging the legs back, no leaning forward, no pushing down on the feet.” Surely it should be “There are to be…” said the person, because there are three things named. My colleague knew well that it’s is – if you use your native-speaker reflex, that’s the choice you’ll make unless you second-guess yourself – but there’s always the matter of explaining why.

Well, here’s a quick analysis of why. It has to do with no and the number it negates. Have a look at some sentences that most native speakers would find idiomatic (they all work without the to be as well):

“There are to be no flowers.” → negating plural

“There is to be no gardener.” → negating singular countable

“There is to be no water.” → negating mass object, which is treated as singular because it’s not plural (singular is the default in English and plural is the “marked” option)

“There is to be no watering the flowers.” → negating gerund representation of action, which is inflectionally the same as a mass object because it’s not plural

“There is to be no water and no wine.” → negating mass and mass, which is still mass and thus still singular (absence of mass is absence of mass; nothing plus nothing is still nothing)

“There is to be no watering the flowers and no drinking the wine.” → as in the previous one, singular because unmarked (equivalent to mass objects – no specification of plural number)

“There is to be no gardener and no bartender.” → distributively negating non-plural objects; compare “There are to be no gardener and no bartender” or “There are no gardener and no bartender,” which may sound not quite right

“There are to be no flowers and no water.” → may seem weird because it’s conflicting in number

“There is to be no water and no flowers.” → also weird, but possibly more acceptable because we default to the singular on existential predicates (why we often say “There’s flowers on the table” when formally it’s “There are flowers on the table”)

So negation of a mass object is a mass negation, and as such takes the singular, and negation of multiple gerunds is also by default singular because it doesn’t specify plural and because in any case it would get the distributive singular. It only gets plural if it is specified to plural (“There are to be no swingings back of the legs”).

The “There are to be…” thought is clearly an example of overthinking. It’s false agreement, because although there are multiple noun phrases, the agreement is with not the quantity of noun phrases but the quantity signified by them. A native speaker’s ear will normally by reflex give the singular, but we override that reflex if we overthink. It’s like thinking too hard about the muscles used in standing up: swinging the legs back, leaning forward, pushing down on the feet… you may end up stuck in your chair until you stop overanalyzing it.

If you’re interested on more on there is versus there are, by the way, I’ve covered the topic a couple of times, once on this site in “There’s a couple of things about this…” and once for The Week in “There’s a number of reasons the grammar of this headline could infuriate you” (their title!).

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calliblephary

Posted on March 8, 2018 | Leave a comment

This word is nothing to blink at. Or maybe it is – that stack of vertical lines might throw your eyes off for a moment. But how do we open it up?

You might look in the middle first and see blep, which probably sounds like dyspepsia. Add a letter, though, and you have bleph, which you may have seen in a medical term somewhere. Blepharitis? Blepharospasm?

Let’s start at the beginning. You have call, which seems familiar enough. Or perhaps you have callible. Able to be called? But what is able to be called? Um, phary? Would that mean you could call Pharrell Williams? Well, that would make some people happy, though others might throw shade. Perhaps it’s related to phare, which means ‘lighthouse’? So calliblephary would be a lighthouse available on call?

In fact, it does have something to do with shining beacons that can be swung your way. But the real bits are calli, as in callipygian, from Greek κάλλος kallos ‘beautiful’, and blephary, from βλέϕαρον blefaron ‘eyelid’.

So it means ‘beautiful eyelids’? Or ‘the state of having beautiful eyelids’? Not quite. The –ary in this case is an instrumental suffix, as in aquarius ‘water carrier’ (yes, I know that’s from Latin; this is an English word, not a Greek one). So calliblephary – which, by the way, is meant to be said “cal a blef a ree” (/ˌkæləˈblɛfəri/) – means ‘eye makeup’ or, more specifically, ‘eyeshadow’.

I came of age in the ’80s, and I must say I still have a bit of a fondness for a nice striking green or blue (especially mildly iridescent) eyeshadow. One doesn’t get to see that too often these days, but it seems to me at least that it’s on the way back. Perhaps the word will be too. I have hope that occasionally a literate lady or lad will say from the bathroom, “Have you seen my calliblephary applicator?”

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On wine tasting and grammar

Posted on March 6, 2018 | 2 comments

I talk about word tasting regularly. But actual wine tasting has a lot in common with opinions on grammar.

I’ve tasted a lot of wine in a lot of places served by a lot of different kinds of people, and one thing that’s pretty consistent is that the people who know the least about it have the most rigid and snobby opinions. It seems they’re insecure and make up for it with bluster and strict rule-following. Meanwhile,those who know the most about it have a well-informed open-mindedness and are focused on enjoying it. Compare tasting experiences with different people pouring:

Person who has taken a one-day course in wine and wants to come off as an expert The winemaker
[wears business formal attire] [wears a puffy vest over an old button-up]
“You will taste blackcurrants, plums, and black pepper in this. Eucalyptus? No, there’s none of that.” “What do you think? …Eucalyptus? Yeah, I see what you mean! I think that’s the 5% tempranillo and maybe some of the terroir.”
“This wine matches well with roast beef and grilled meats. …Oh, no, never have red wine with white meat.” “Don’t tell anyone, but I opened a bottle of this red blend with Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey is just a stuffing and cranberry sauce delivery system, right?”
“That’s not ready for tasting. It needs three years in the cellar.” “Here, let me get you a barrel sample. We’re bottling this next year… It’s looking really promising.”
“Please. Let me get you a clean cup. You don’t want to contaminate the taste.” “Just use the same glass. The next one’s darker anyway. I’ll swap up when we get to the sweet wines.”
“Oh, those grapes are completely different. You could never mistake the one for the other.” “I thought I was trying a Merlot from Oregon and it turned out it was a Pinot Noir from California!”
“Never chill red wine!” “Try this Grenache chilled. You’ll be surprised how well it works! Refreshing, right?”
“This wine is a higher-quality wine at a higher price point.” “Taste this! You won’t believe how little it costs!”

You get the general idea. If you’re talking to someone who says “Never do that” or “Always do this,” you’re not talking to someone who’s spent their life enjoying wines. You’re talking to someone who’s more concerned with appearing to know something than actually knowing it and enjoying it. The fear of seeming ignorant is overriding – they associate lesser knowledge with lower status. Meanwhile, the people who really enjoy it and enjoy knowing about it also enjoy discovering it with other people.

So what does this have to do with grammar? It’s the same divide: The snobs don’t know a lot, and those who know a lot aren’t snobs. I’ve been a language professional for 20 years and I know a lot of other language professionals… and I’ve heard and seen no end of grammar grumblers. Here’s how it typically goes:

Grammar snob Language professional
[only reads literary fiction] [loves genre fiction and “trash”]
“Ain’t ain’t a word!” “Say it ain’t so!”
“These Twitterers don’t even know how to use proper grammar.” “Twitter English is fascinating. It adds so many levels of nuance.”
“Never end a sentence with a preposition.” “Grammar superstitions aren’t something I really cotton to.”
“Misplaced apostrophes upset me so much! I have to fix them!” “Did you see what that nitwit with the marker did to that sign? Someone needs to get a life.”
“A sentence always has to have a subject and verb.” “Not really.”
“There is only one correct English.” “I don’t wear white-tie to the beach. Why would I use formal English in a beer ad?”
“Singular they is an abomination.” “Yay! We’ve added singular they to the style guide! About time.”
“The language is in a dire state. People don’t even know what words mean anymore.” “Hey, look! Merriam-Webster just added a whole bunch more words! Ooh, including some new verbings.”
“Swearwords are a sign of limited intelligence.” “Did you see? Another study showing smart people tend to swear more. F— yeah.”
“When someone makes an error, I just have to correct them.” “Ha. Say what you want. I’m off duty and I don’t do freebies.”

People who enjoy wine enjoy wine in as many ways as possible and want other people to join in that enjoyment. People who enjoy language enjoy language in as many ways as possible and want other people to join in that enjoyment.

That doesn’t mean anything goes – you’re unlikely to see a wine lover drinking cabernet sauvignon with a tuna sandwich, but just because they are unlikely to taste good together. And most wine lovers have their favourites and least favourites. Likewise, language professionals have things they like more or less (there are certain turns of phrase I’m almost allergic to, but I know that’s me), and they can recognize what’s not going to work well on a page and fix it. That’s why they’re professionals.

The point is to get as much from it as you can. If you’re rigid about rules and who’s right and who’s wrong, you don’t really care about what you claim to care about. You just care about status. But since your pursuit of being “right” is making you wrong a lot of the time, well, as the saying goes, you just went hunting and shot your dog.

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kaleidoscope

Posted on March 4, 2018 | 4 comments

A kaleidoscope seems such a quaint thing now, so… analogue: a tube like a telescope in which little flakes of stained glass (or plastic) collide and are mirrored. A literal physical collide-o-scope! A toy patented in 1817, so much simpler than the incessant stream of fragmented digital images that now fill our days with brain flakes.

The word kaleidoscope doesn’t come from collide, mind you. It’s καλός kalos ‘beautiful’ plus εἶδος eidos ‘form’ plus σκοπος skopos, which I’m sure you know has to do with looking; it traces to the verb σκέπτεσθαι skeptesthai ‘look out’ which, yes, is also the source of skeptic. So a kaleidoscope is an instrument for looking at beautiful forms.

Which, in my view, is just my eyes. The world is full of beautiful shapes, from the simplicity of soft shadows from stained glass to the intense complexity of people passing in a shopping mall or on an urban street – and I can have both within a quick walk of each other.

Nothing is unproblematic, of course; in our world we bounce off each other, and our frictions and collisions generate heat. But where would the world be without warmth and interaction? No need to take all at face value; there is beauty in wisdom, and wisdom comes from seeing twice, seeing deeper, seeing past, doubting what you see. Enjoy looking, but look out, be skeptical. See the slivers in the floor that is so prettily dappled with coloured light. Get the picture – and see how your own self getting the picture gets in the way of seeing it all clearly. And enjoy that too.

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sh, shh

Posted on March 2, 2018 | 2 comments

Is sh a word? Sure. It’s even in dictionaries. They call it an interjection, though it really functions as an imperative – when you say “Sh!” you mean ‘shut up’ or ‘be quiet’ or ‘shut your festering gob’ or ‘stop making that dreadful noise’. But we can’t say it really is an imperative, syntactically, unless there are other forms that show it to be a verb: “Will you sh?” “OK, I am sh-ing. I have sh-ed.” Doesn’t really work, at least on paper.

We could say “Will you shush, I am shushing, I have shushed,” but we all know that shush is not sh. No, shush is almost polite. There’s nothing polite about sh. It’s most often a high-handed command issued with full assumption of the right to correct and boss around. When not irritable, it is at least familiar: a winking correction to a friend or descendant.

Well, OK, I suppose that’s all more true of shh. The shorter form, sh, is quicker and less expressive, a drive-by hushing. Conversely, a more forceful one would be shhh. Or maybe sshhh? Hm. Hmm. Are those different words or are they multiple versions of the same word? Hmmm.

Well, at least hm, hmm, and hmmm are clear enough in the spelling department. We lean towards shhh over sshh by convention, but it’s all just one sound, not two; there’s no place where s ends and h starts – that would be something of a mishap. We need two letters just because we got saddled with this alphabet from a language that didn’t have the sound we spell sh at the time the alphabet was set.

Just that little movement of the tongue back towards the palate can make the difference between peccadillo and tibia (sin and shin), between drink and transport (sip and ship), between being seated and… you get the idea. The “sh” sound, which linguists render in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃ/, is palatalized. While /s/ belongs to the higher-pitched “hissing” fricatives, /ʃ/ belongs to the lower-pitched “hushing” ones. Both are sibilants; both are stridents. Both are audible at some distance, but I’d say “sh” carries more.

Well, I’ll say for sure that you can hear it across a theatre. It is irrefutable evidence of the presence of someone who does not have proper respect for others or for the occasion. Seldom do I attend a live performance of music, dance, or drama without hearing someone on the far side of the place issuing a “Shh!” to some noisemaker near them. I rarely hear the person they’re addressing; the quiet speech that provokes it doesn’t carry nearly as far. One ought not to talk during performances, of course; it’s not very considerate. But far less considerate is the person who, instead of leaning forward or back and quietly saying, like a proper Canadian, “Sorry, could you please not talk?” prefers to issue a loud passing of gas through tongue and palate audible across the auditorium and almost certainly on the stage. So rude – far worse than the offence that provoked it. For heaven’s sake, shushers, do be less strident.

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Poetic inversion in all of us command

Posted on February 27, 2018 | 7 comments

Originally published in Active Voice, the national newsletter of Editors Canada

Our anthem has been updated! It’s gotten royal assent! If you haven’t yet, you will need to get used to singing “true patriot love in all of us command.” And, perhaps less frequently, to hearing people complain about the change.

Some will contest the grammar: “Shouldn’t it be ‘in all of our command’?” And some will fulminate against the perceived “political correctness”: “It’s an inversion of the natural order!” Both sets of people are off base, but – inadvertently – the second set have the answer to the first set’s complaint. It is an inversion… but a grammatical one.

Here’s the old version: “O Canada, our home and native land, True patriot love in all thy sons command.” What don’t you see there? An apostrophe on sons. It’s not a possessive! The sentence is an imperative – a command (fittingly). It addresses Canada (the O gives that away), says it’s our home and native land, and then tells Canada, “command true patriot love in all thy sons.” Only because it’s an anthem, and it’s in a formal register, and it’s poetry, it moves the verb to the end to make it work with the metre and rhyme.

This is something we ought to learn in school: poetic inversion, or anastrophe if you like twenty-dollar Greek terms. Poetry often made use of it when end-rhymes were in vogue: “‘Sir,’ said I, ‘or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore’” is from Poe’s “The Raven”; “Else the Puck a liar call” is from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You occasionally find it in other national anthems; Nigeria’s has the line “Arise, O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey.” But for our own times, with free verse in the ascendancy, we’re more likely to hear anastrophe from Yoda: “Begun the Clone War has.”

The grammatical confusion is no surprise; you can’t hear the lack of apostrophe. But if it were “all thy sons’ command” – and now “all of our command” – the sentence would have no verb; command would be a noun. As it is, it’s not saying that true patriot love actually is in all of our command; it’s an imprecation, fervently wishing that Canada command true patriot love in all who sing the anthem.

Is the phrasing awkward? Very. Could it be rewritten better? Much. Would a larger change ever get through parliament? I sincerely doubt it.

Anyway, we can’t let mishearings win the day. If we did, the French anthem might declare that Canada’s valour has been fooled twice and will protect our hearths and fingers: “Et ta valeur, deux fois trompée, protegera nos foyers et nos doigts.”* Nope. Won’t get fooled again.

 

*The original is “Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, protegera nos foyers et nos droits”: “And your valour, steeped in faith, will protect our homes and rights.”

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Pronunciation tip: Nguyen

Posted on February 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

I’m not going to tell you that Vietnamese pronunciation is easy to master. But there’s one Vietnamese name we encounter often that many of us are severely daunted by that is actually quite within easy reach for English speakers. It’s all about that NG…

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Does verbing impact the language?

Posted on February 24, 2018 | 8 comments

Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly.

A favourite crank for language cranks to crank is the demon of verbing. It wrecks our language, they protest! They target such usages as impacted and referenced in business-speak and medalled in broadcasting. While liberal-minded linguists may see these words as just more of the odd flowers that bloom in the spring (and spring up throughout the year, for that matter), the grumblers want to weed them out.

Just recently, for instance, the Guardian gave column space to one Jonathan Bouquet, who fumes at such conversions and would like to bin them all. He welcomes loanwords, he protests, but “there are some constructions that still grate”: impacted and reference, for two, and “Only yesterday, I heard a business reporter on TV use ‘headquarter’ as a verb.” He especially dreads “the fullest flowering of such manglings” during the Olympics, with medal and podium used as verbs.

I honestly can’t tell whether Mr. Bouquet sincerely believes what he writes, or whether he’s taking the, uh, mickey. Although his position is extreme, there are many who hold the same views. But it’s not really the movement of words from one class to another that nettles them – it is the movement of people from one class into another. They dislike the words because they dislike the self-important upstarts who use them: barbarous posers putting on airs and commandeering the language.

I state this with confidence because when they air their grievances they nearly always characterize the sources of these usages peevishly, and because they inevitably use – without comment, without even noticing – words that are the product of exactly the same process: verbs that were nouns first, nouns that were verbs first, adjectives that were nouns first, and so on. They accept and use the fruits of conversion, except when someone they don’t fancy uses a word that looks new to them.

Do I overstate my case? Consider verbs Mr. Bouquet used gladly: grate, flower, mangle. If I look at the rest of his brief rant, I see also – used ingenuously – the verb monitor and the noun import. But take a look at the rest of what I’ve written here. How many words can you count that are regularly used as multiple classes of word? Let’s see: crank, wreck, protest, target, broadcast, mind, flower, mangle, bloom, weed, matter, fume, bin, welcome, protest, dread, hold, class, nettle, like, start, air, pose, state, peeve, comment, process, fancy, rant, look… Look, whenever you scan a book (or book a scan), you’re sure to spy some verbing. English would not be English without it.

And if you’re fine with all those but not with impact, reference, medal, or podium as verbs, why is that? Is it because those latter four could be rephrased using existing words? Consider how many of the words you’re fine with could be paraphrased reasonably well. This is English. We are the ancient spice shop of languages. We have far more words than we need – but we can use them all to good effect. When we take dislikes to words, it’s almost always related to our ideas of the people who use them.

This doesn’t mean you have to use a word you don’t like. But it’s best to be clear on why you don’t like it.

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I woke up in the middle of the night to talk to the BBC about pronunciation

Posted on February 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

A producer from BBC Radio Solent (in southern England) asked me if I could be interviewed for their morning show. I said sure, when? How about 8:45 am? Hmm… England time or Toronto time? Oh, uh…

Well, anyway, I got up in the middle of the night to take a 3:45 am phone call and talk to Sasha Twining about how to say PyeongChang and a few other things. Here’s the link to the show: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05vswzq My segment starts at about the 17:10 mark and goes for about 5 minutes.

Sorry about the audio quality. We had arranged to use Skype with the phone as a backup but they couldn’t get the Skype to hook up so you’re hearing me on my phone headset.

Oh, also: the link to the show is only valid for 29 days. So listen to it by March 23, 2018, or you’ll be too late!

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