Today, I’d like to highlight some interesting neologisms (new words, idioms and word uses) upon which I’ve stumbled recently.

Yard Sale — Noun, from Skier/Snowboarder parlance

This refers to a very bad fall when skiing, during which your skis, poles, hat, goggles and other accoutrement are ripped off of you and strewn about the snow. The origin doesn’t take a lot of imagination, it’s simply drawing a comparison between having all your gear spread out in the snow and spreading it out on your lawn for a yard sale.

“Then, I hit a mogul, and dude, it was a total yard sale”

BoBo — Noun, originally French, but imported

A contraction of “Bourgeois Bohême”, it refers to a yuppie (rich, young businessperson) who pretends to be a hippie and/or socially conscious through involvement with Eastern Religion/Decorating, Yoga, New Age beliefs, Fair-Trade Organic Shade-Grown Vegan Coffee, and conspicuous charity. There’s a level of inherent hypocrisy here, taking the Humvee to the “No blood for Oil” rally and paying $5000 for a luxury meditation retreat.

My city (Boulder, CO) is a true haven for these types. They’re attracted by the hippie reputation of the city, but also thrilled with the accessibility to modern conveniences and businesses. Perhaps the epitome of the BoBo mindset can be experienced by a quick visit to Now & Zen, a merchant which sells, I kid you not, “Zen Clocks and Timers”. Instead of a conventional tone, they knock against a Tibetan Singing Bowl. These are upwards of $100 each, and, last I checked, actual monks get up at sunrise, by natural means. However, if you’re a Bobo, what better way is there to express your spiritual consumerism than with a “tibetan phone bell”?

“Are Rob and Erma bringing little Samsara?” “Nah, they’re going to drop her off at the Meditation Center on their way to work over at Exxon.” “Ugh. They’re such BoBos”

Nascar — Noun, originating in the blogging community

“Nascar”, in the blogging context, refers to the sometimes endless list of social bookmarking site icons on the side or underneath blog posts. These are used by site authors to garner more clicks on social bookmarking sites (which help people to share interesting content and make things more well known online). See the below example:
Nascar

The etymology (word origin) stems from the visual similarity of a blog like this to a NASCAR race car, which is generally plastered with many smaller advertisements.

“I’ve chosen not to put any Nascar on this site, but I don’t mean to pick on those who have. I just prefer the cleaner look.”

Toolgazing — Verb, origin unknown

This is a very colorful, humorous and poetic term for a very awkward situation. For those who might not share my Y Chromosome, American Men’s Restrooms usually have a wall with 2 or more urinals, all flush (no pun intended) with the wall, and often there are no dividers between these urinals, so men just line up side by side. “Toolgazing” refers to the act of a man glancing over at the exposed genitals of the other men urinating next to him. This is not looked upon nicely in the men’s restroom community, and those few who persist are very likely to enrage or offend the victim if caught.

“Fred’s kind of weird. One time I caught him toolgazing in the restroom at work”

Victory Lap — Noun, found among college students

A “victory lap” is the fifth year of classes taken to complete a four year degree program in college, and is often the result of a change in concentration or a school transfer. A person who is taking a victory lap is often called a “Super Senior”.

“Are you graduating this spring?” “Nah, I’m taking a victory lap, I have to take a Literature class”

Stall Call — Noun, origin unknown

A “stall call” refers to the act of placing or receiving a phone call while using the restroom. Some people are reluctant to make or take stall calls, but others seem to see no problem with the practice, even taking heroic measures to hide the associated sounds of flushing and sink usage.

“Who is Jim talking to in there?” “He’s making a Stall Call.” “Eww.”

That’s it for this episode of Neat Neology. If there are any you’d like to see featured here in the future, let me know. I hope you’ve learned some new words, and that you find interesting ways to work them into conversation. Then again, I hope you don’t have to use all of them…

Tagged with Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments


Prologue: This post is around 6 months in coming, so I apologize for the length. I do hope you’ll find it interesting nonetheless.

I came into Linguistics without a real direction, specialty or desire. Truthfully, it was more fate than anything that found me here. Today, I’d like to discuss a little bit of how I found Phonetics, why I love it, and why you might love it too.

Linguistics and Fate

When I started college, I was a Russian language major. I took a year worth of Russian language and culture classes, but I rapidly realized that their teaching style was going to kill me. A “Non-Grammatical Approach” to teaching grammar strikes me as about as effective as a “Non-Driving Approach” to Driver’s Ed, and the Russian department’s adherence to it was driving me crazy. As it worked out, I should probably be sending “Thank you” notes to the people whose terrible textbooks drove me from the department, as their failings brought me to my true passion.

The fall of my Sophomore year, I enrolled in Linguistics 2000, “Introduction to Linguistics”, just out of curiosity. I didn’t know what Linguistics was, but I decided to take it anyways, chalking it up to “College is a time for experimentation”. Well, it grabbed me. Hard.

By midterms, I had added Linguistics as a second major. By finals, I was feeling liberated. By the start of the next semester, I had dropped the Russian major (studying the language on my own instead), and l leaped off into the Linguistic Unknown. I’ve never made a better decision in my life.

Phinding Phonetics

In my intro to Linguistics classes, we touched on all the different fields of Linguistics, but only barely so. We spent a day or two looking at slides of the various IPA characters, briefly discussed the fact that English has around 10 more vowels than everybody thinks we do, and then moved on to the next field.

However, Phonetics really reached out and grabbed me. Phonetics, simply put, is the study of sounds in language, and can involve how we make sounds, how we hear them, and even how sound waves transmit information. I picked up a book, started studying the IPA, and used it in my other side projects (mostly in language creation). As soon as I could, I enrolled in the actual undergrad phonetics course, learning more and more about Phonetics, and at that point, I realized I could no longer deny my love for the sounds of language. I found myself making more and more clicks, glides, and trills, even in bed as I was going to sleep, and sometimes, I found the sounds of speech more interesting than what people were actually saying. Last year, I took the Master’s level Phonetics course offered by my school, and it sealed the deal: I love Phonetics.

I want to share the gospel of speech production; I want to show people that speech is more than just an everyday occurrence, and I want people to know that the alveolar tap in “later” can be just as graceful and precise as any figure skater’s finest trick. I’m passionate about Phonetics, and I think it’s genuinely important. Let me try and explain why.

What do speech sounds have to do with invisible aliens?

All linguists need some background in Phonetics, even if they don’t find it as interesting as I do. I remember that in my undergrad phonetics class, a lot of people really didn’t like it, and even though they wanted to be linguists, they didn’t understand why. Well, I’m going to try and explain why you need Phonetics. Let’s use a metaphor here:

We’ve likely all seen bad Sci-Fi action movies. More specifically, you’ve probably seen a movie where they have to deal with an invisible enemy. Sometimes it’s a guy in an invisibility suit, sometimes it’s a killer alien, sometimes it’s a stealth ship. No matter what, they always lose three or four expendable characters to some invisible menace before they wise up to what’s going on.

Now, imagine you’re writing a grammar of a language that’s never been described before, but you’ve never really had any phonetics training. You’re making good progress, analyzing the structures, translating words, and figuring out what the speaker is doing. Then suddenly, disaster strikes. You’re stuck with these two (made-up) sentences:

1. nalo bi (meaning “He saw the shrimp”)
2. nalo bi (meaning “He saw the necklace”)

You’ve checked and rechecked your data, but every time you ask the speaker to say those two sentences, he or she tells you the same thing. You’ve checked with other speakers to make sure it’s not a context thing, and when you repeat them back, you’re either “mispronouncing it”, or their translation varies. At this point, you’ve got the Linguistic equivalent of an invisible alien attacking your grammar.

In our bad Sci-Fi movie, what usually happens once they figure out that the invisible aliens are, forgiving the internet meme, in their base, eatin’ their doodz? Well, the nerdy guy in the basement workshop rigs up a set of (ultraviolet/thermal/spectral/force)-imaging goggles, which let you see the aliens clear as day. Then, they all go outside with their spiffy goggles, kill the aliens, get the parts for their ship, and get back to Earth. In bad movies, all you need to do to defeat an invisible alien is to learn how to detect it.

So, you’re still stuck staring at the “nalo bi” issue in your language. To you, these words sound almost exactly alike, but to the speakers, they’re obviously different. This is where Phonetics training comes in handy.

Phonetics: Invisible alien killer extraordinaire

You see, when we’re very, very young (less than a year), we can hear the differences between all of the different speech sounds in the world (a search for “Infant Phonetic Inventory” will put you on the right track to learn more). However, we’re all raised with a language, and after a while, we learn to subconsciously throw out the sounds that don’t matter in our language. In English, we rapidly stop caring whether our vocal folds are closed or open when we start a word (this is important in the Samoan language), and when people make an “n” further back in their mouths at the start of a word, our brain just turns it into a plain, alveolar “n”.

This is just fine for a monolingual English speaker, but when we get out into the field or study another language, it can cause us to stop seeing invisible aliens. People could be making two distinct sounds, but because they’re not present in our language, we won’t hear them.

You go get some Phonetics training. You learn about how different sounds are made. You listen to recordings and tapes of other languages to sensitize our ears. We study how sounds interact, and how to produce them. We get our ears, our mouths, and our brains to open up and hear the world not as English speakers, but as linguists.

Then, you go back to our invisible alien. They say the first phrase, you hear “nalo bi”, like before. They say the second one, and suddenly, you hear the difference. It’s not “nalo bi”, it’s “ŋalo bi”! The tongue is further back in the mouth, where our K is, and you’ve just been mishearing. You say it back, using your new skill at making the velar nasal (ŋ) at the start of a word, and they understand you. Through the magic of phonetics, you not only see the invisible alien, but you understand it, and can live in harmony with it.

See? Phonetics is phun!

Phonetics is really vital for anybody learning linguistics (or, to a lesser extent, learning languages of the world). We’re raised with one specific sound system, and it bends our mind. The study of phonetics can help free our mind, and let you see the complexity, beauty, and grace of the sounds of language that you’ve been conditioned to forget.

It’s a wonderful field not only because of the subject matter, but because it’s constantly applicable. A particle physicist can only do their work with million-dollar machines in labs. An engineer needs tools and computers to do their work. For a linguist or phonetician to work, all we need are ears, a brain, and language. We’ve always got our ears and our brain, and there’s nothing more omnipresent in human existence than language.

So, if you need a new hobby that lets you work from anywhere, enjoy the beauty in small things, and even catch invisible aliens, Phonetics is for you.

If you’d like resources in getting started, shoot me an email, or just go to your local linguistics department. A word of caution, though: mentioning invisible aliens probably won’t look too good on your application. We like creative people, but.. yeah…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Tirades | 4 Comments


I stumbled across this comic today, from the creative artist over at XKCD. As I’ve noted in the past, the artist certainly has an eye for language and linguistics humor, and I just wanted to share the latest such comic I’ve stumbled across:

Here’s a link to the full comic.

Perhaps I find this comic so funny because I know people who use the [adjective]-ass [noun] construction pretty frequently (as in “that’s a huge-ass building”). I’ve even been known to do it myself (I feel dirty). I eagerly look forward to mentally switching the hyphen as soon as I next hear the expression, even if it means I start snickering uncontrollably.

The fascinating part is that in speech, the (vast) difference between a “sweet-ass car” and a “sweet ass-car” is only expressed by timing and intonation (varying the pitch of one’s voice). Using Praat to tweak the intonation, you can fairly reliably change one into the other, and alter the meaning completely.

Think about it: at a completely subconscious level, we are able to understand complex changes in meaning expressed solely by a minor variations in the speed of vibration of a speaker’s vocal folds. The complexity, subtlety, and grace of human speech is truly amazing, and this phenomenon provides a wonderful ass-demonstration. Err, that’s not quite right…

Tagged with Language Humor, Notes, Phonetics and Phonology, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | Leave a Comment

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