Skip to content
Home » Blog (hidden)

Blog (hidden)

Where have all the numbers gone? (Or 1 + 99 = 53 + 47)

In 2011 the American Dialect Society listed ‘the 99%’ among its Words of the Year. In 2012 ‘47%’ became the new politically-charged number. These numbers are connected in a way that might not be obvious.

Mitt Romney was recorded declaring, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” Because they pay no income tax, Romney suggested, 47% of Americans are dependent on government. This resembles a charge made in 2011 by conservative activists at the53.tumblr, which in turn was a response to the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated wearethe99percent.tumblr.

Why preschool hasn’t saved the world

Radio programs have recently celebrated a “new understanding” of the importance of preschool for success later in life. Related knowledge has been part of academic discussion for decades, but has had relatively little effect on how education is organized. To contribute to public understanding, I summarize Shirley Brice Heath’s “What no bedtime story means” (1982).

Student Essay Contest Winners (2012)

Undergraduate prize winner: Kamala Russell from the University of Chicago, with a paper entitled, Form and function: Character Viewpoint Gestures in Dialogic Narrative.
Graduate prize winner: Jennifer Guzman (UCLA), The Epistemics of Symptom Experience and Symptom Accounts in Mapuche Healing and Pediatric Primary Care in Southern Chile.

The i-word

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/linguists-york-times-illegal-neutral-accurate/story?id=17366512&singlePage=true#.UHfgZW_A9vs Accessed Oct 11, 2012 Linguists Tell New York Times That ‘Illegal’ Is Neither ‘Neutral’ nor ‘Accurate’ By CRISTINA COSTANTINI Oct. 1, 2012 José Manuel… Read More »The i-word

AAA Ethics Grant

Applications for AAA Committee on Ethics small grants for ethics curricular materials are due 2 November 2012. A grant of between $200 and $1,000 is available.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and English usage

Recently I have been re-reading James Thurber’s “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to English Usage”, a parody of Henry Watson Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The parody is built around a central conceit: that a language usage guide is equivalent to lifestyle or relationship advice. This is not merely a conceit around which to build a parody; it is also a fair assessment of what usage guides are used for.

Variation in inflectional morphology

“Variable or non-standard realizations of inflectional morphology in English” sounds rather dry and academic, but the placement of suffixes within compound words or phrases can sound surprising and even amusing. Arnold Zwicky and Mark Liberman recently noted unusual verb conjugation. Non-standard pronouns can be equally interesting.

Is “women and children” an outdated cliche?

The phrase, “women and children” to mean non-combatants killed by war strikes me as somewhat outdated. Non-combatants are not necessarily women or children, and women and children are not necessarily non-combatant. The phrase might risk a mis-recognition of the nature of political violence and its victims.

Syrian Jewish Mexicans and the Language of Everyday Orientalism

Ethnic distinctions are drawn among specific Jewish sub-communities in Mexico City. Ashkenazi, Sefaradi, and non-Jews tend to evaluate Syrian Jews negatively. This negative evaluation (implicit or explicit) constitutes a sort of “everyday language of Orientalism” parallel to Jane Hill’s everyday language of racism.

Another possible definition of “socialist”

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer says conservative Evangelical Christians view President Obama as “the avatar of godless socialism”. Do American Christian conservatives use ‘socialist’ to mean ‘insufficiently religious’? If so, their usage parallels that of Osama bin Laden.

The birth of a shibboleth

Record fans insist that the plural of ‘vinyl’ to mean “a vinyl record” is the zero-plural ‘vinyl’. This irregular form serves as a shibboleth for audiophiles. Since the form was regular (‘vinyls’) during the 1960s, I conjecture that the irregular form must have arisen relatively recently.

Can analysis of discrimination help overcome fear?

Chad Nilep reflects on work with Akiyo Cantrell to analyze reports from the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and its aftermath. Evacuees from Fukushima face discrimination based on vague fears of radioactivity or other danger. Nilep expresses hope that academic work can make a positive contribution to recovery.

Digital ethnography of linguistic multitasking in World of Warcraft

Lauren Collister, a Ph.D. candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, describes how digital ethnography deepened her understanding of multimodal communication within a team of World of Warcraft game players. Players use text, voice-over-IP talk, and face-to-face talk to accomplish distinct functions.