So, I thought I’d share this delightful bit of language use. Today, I noticed that in one of the bathrooms on campus, somebody had scrawled “(Expletive) this whole joke of a university”. A charming sentiment, to be sure, but the real beauty came when somebody else, with a different writing instrument scrawled a bold and emphasized “N” after the “a”, making it “…joke of aN university”, along with a variety of remarks disparaging the original writer. So, it sounds like somebody else wants to prove the writer of the above to be stupid or inarticulate by emphasizing grammar/spelling mistakes. This would be a bit petty but acceptable, if it weren’t for the fact that the original was, in fact, correct, as the corrector would have realized had he tried to pronounce his correction.

Generally, the “a”->”an” shift occurs when the article “a” bumps up against another vowel, in situations like “an enemy”, “an ooze”, or “an alien”. However, what the corrector failed to realize is that this rule is invoked by spoken vowels, but not always by written ones. So, in the case of “University” or “Uvula”, there’s actually a glide before the “oo” sound, which constitutes enough of a consonant to allow “a university”. Any attempts by a native English speaker to pronounce “an university” or “an youth” requires the use of a palatal “n” (like the spanish “mañana”), a sound that we don’t produce naturally and easily.

This phenomenon is called “overcorrection”, and starts to get into sociolinguistics. It generally occurs when people are self-conscious about their grammar and want to make sure they’re speaking “correctly”, but instead, they overapply the rules, resulting in constructions like “and whom is your lovely companion?” at the office christmas party.

This is a sad relic of perscriptivism (the idea that there is one correct way to speak a language) which spills over into everyday life, which could be quickly cured by a dose of descriptivism, the linguist’s ideal that people speak how they speak, it should be described, not changed or criticized.

So, although I disagree with the speaker’s sentiment, his spelling and grammar were largely acceptable. For everybody else, remember, every time you overcorrect on petty grammar points, a sentence-final preposition loses its wings. Please, think of the prepositions.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Humor, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Speech and Grammar Errors, Tirades | 6 Comments


So, I was wandering the halls of the campus the other day and stumbled across this poster (click the thumbnail for full size):
MONEY

Although the camera phone picture doesn’t capture it terribly well, they’ve boldfaced letter such that it spells out “MONEY IS GREAT” down the page. I can hardly expect that they’d think this would somehow subconsciously tempt people into their business/pyramid scheme/web of crime, but still, it’s fascinating. Given my past interest in subliminal advertising, I found this as a humorously bad example of the idea, and I figured I would share.

So, really, ideas like this are floating around all the time. It’s often a tricky mystery to find them all, but if you’re observant, you might just pick one up.

Tagged with Corporate Language, Language Humor, Language Usage, Notes | Leave a Comment


So, I was sent a magnificent link today. Nominally, it’s an article about offensive terms sneaking their way onto personalized (or “vanity”) license plates. Some of them are a little humorous, but one in particular jumped out at me. From the letter (uncorrected):

“I would like to share my deepest concern about custom plates that your department issuing to the customers.”
…
“I would like to give you an example of such custom plate. The number is “CTO XYEB” registered in NY. In Russian it mean “one hundred penises” in a very dirty language.”

Now, having studied some Russian in the past, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this. Although it could easily have been an unfortunate random letter combination, the English letters “CTO XYEB” correspond to the cyrillic letters spelling a vulgar equivalent of “one hundred penises” (pronounced, “Sto huyev”) in Russian, and with amazing grammatical correctness, too.

In Russian, when counting an object, the declension of the word changes (a different ending is placed on it). So, one object is in the Nominative case singular, two is in the nominative plural, and five or more is in the Genitive Case plural, changing ‘Odin huy’ (one penis) to ‘Sto huyev’ (one hundred penises). So, in addition to be quite dirty, it’s quite grammatical.My apologies, by the way, for the transliteration. Cyrillic fonts seem to break my blogging software.Whether some enterprising young Russian speaker slipped one past the DMV, or whether a random motorist was stricken with a rather interesting random combination, this is another magnificent example of cross-linguistic translation and censorship difficulties, and a good reminder that with thousands of languages out there, it’s tough not to offend somebody sometimes.

So, if you see a brown Mercedes in Brooklyn with this magnificent license plate, you’re welcome to inform the driver of the mistake and recommend a trip to the DMV, give him or her a few choice words in Russian, or, if you’re like me, fall down laughing in the gutter. It’s all good, really.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Humor, Translation and Translation Theory | Leave a Comment

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