Whenever I talk about studying linguistics or being a linguist-in-training to somebody unfamiliar with Linguistics, I inevitably get asked how many languages I speak. This is a reasonable question, especially given that most people don’t know what it is that linguists do, but really, the number of languages we speak fluently isn’t really that relevant to what we actually do in linguistics.

There are people who hear “Linguist” and think “translator”. They assume (not unreasonably) that a linguist’s job is to learn as many languages as they can, then to use that knowledge to translate and decode new languages. There are linguists who work almost exclusively with their native languages and still have productive careers, and there are people who can fluently speak many languages, but aren’t really linguists. Much of what I do in my classes is studying grammar, sounds, and constructions in other languages, with the end goal of applying that knowledge elsewhere in other languages or theories. However, the goal of learning these other languages isn’t fluency, but familiarity.

Linguistics and the study of language, is, to a large extent, the study of patterns. When you sit down to describe a new language, you find patterns that explain how meaning is expressed, and then figure out the rules from those patterns. In linguistics classes, we study parts of languages not to be able to speak them, but to become familiar with the patterns and rules they use. Once I’ve become familiar enough with the patterns in the language, I can draw links to other lanugages and use that information as an analytical tool. Of course, it’s wonderful (and encouraged) to actually learn a language to fluency and to be able to speak it, but often, just knowing a few sentences or phenomena can be very helpful in studying other languages.

This all has really been driven home to me this semester. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently enrolled in a class called “Field Methods” where we (along with the professor) work with a speaker to describe certain aspects of the language and grammar. The professor is an incredibly experienced linguist, familiar with (and fluent in) many different languages. It seems, just from watching him work, that his biggest “Aha!” moments come when he matches what he’s hearing with another language or pattern that he’s familiar with. The pattern may not be identical to what he’s familiar with, but it’s similar enough to get the gears going.

Familiarity with other languages can also be helpful in teaching, based on my experience with my professors. English is a nice language, but it has its own specific way of doing things. You can’t discuss many aspects of sound, grammar and meaning if you limit yourself to one particular language of discussion. If a professor is familiar with other languages that do things differently, they can pull an example out of the air from a language they know to clarify something for a student. Even more importantly, they can link what they’re teaching to languages that they’re interested in, so that their passion can bleed through the subject matter into the students, and make even a lecture about word order interesting.

The more time I spend in this field, the more I understand that every language you study, however briefly, teaches you not just about that language, but about language in general. You can learn a great deal from being able to say “I saw the man make the arrows” in a language and nothing more. Even learning a few sentences and patterns from a dying language will teach you something, however minor, about language, the world, and human thought.

That wraps back to what I usually tell people how many languages I’ve had to learn to be a linguist. Those of us in Linguistics don’t study languages, we study Language. Although it’s wonderful to learn the languages you examine to fluency, it’s not required to do so to study the patterns therein.

That, or two. Sometimes, I just don’t want to get into it.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics | 1 Comment


Gather round, my readers, and I’ll tell you a little story of corporate missteps and sleazy language usage.

Last summer, in a kingdom far, far away, I was sitting at home with my parents, brainstorming about how to make our family’s business a bit more manageable. We use a cell phone as the main number for the business, which is also a personal line for one of the members of my family. We came upon the idea of trying to find a cellphone that allowed one to have multiple lines, so we could turn off the business phone line at closing, yet still be able to get in touch with the person who answers it on a personal line. This would be a convenient solution for everybody involved, so I set off to try and get information.

At this point, I called our cellphone providers, we’ll call them “Shingular” (or “the New Bay-TT”), to try and get some info on this possibility. After a few minutes on hold, I was connected to a representative (“Bonnie”). After exchanging the vast quantity of personal information needed to confirm that I’m me, our conversation went something like this:

Me: I’d like to get some information on using two phone lines with a single phone, so we can have a business and personal number ring through to the same phone, ideally being able to turn the business line off at a certain point. Do you have any phones or plans that offer that as a feature?
Bonnie: Sure, hold on just a second and I’ll ask somebody
— 5 minutes of holding —
Bonnie: Alright, so you’d like to have a second line added to an existing phone?
Me: Yeah, if it’s possible
Bonnie: Which line?
Me: [I give her the number]
Bonnie: Alright, let me do some research, can I place you on hold?
Me: Sure
— 20 minutes of hold —
Bonnie: Alright, I’ve gone ahead and deactivated the number [our main business number], your new number is 30…
Me: Wait, what?!
Bonnie: You said you wanted to add a new line to the phone at [ the number], so I deactivated the old one
Me: No, no! I wanted to add another line in addition to the first. Can you reverse the change?
Bonnie: Oh. Well, you should’ve said so. I’ll put in a request to change the number back, it’ll be three to five business days…

At this point, the owner of the phone in question walks in to ask why her phone just cut out mid-call, and I’m in shock at the fact that a request for information has resulted in the deactivation of our business line.

I ask for a manager, and find out that yes, it does take them three to five days to reactivate a cell phone that they themselves turned off in around 20 minutes. I ask for a manager’s manager, because, well, we kinda need a business phone, and all they can offer is “We’re sorry to hear that, we’ll listen to the tapes to see if a miscommunication occurred”.

So, I give up. I get a case number, hang up, and glare angrily at their logo for a few minutes hoping for some sort of voodoo reactivation acceleration. Doesn’t work.

I called the next day to see if they had done anything. Still nothing. I called the day after. Nothing. The day after that. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Finally, I called a consumer affairs sort of person at Shingular and explained the whole situation on the fourth day of being without a business phone number. I spent my obligatory 10 minutes on hold, and then it happened. The sleaziest, most rank corporate doublespeak I’ve ever heard. He got back on the line and said “Well, we’ve reviewed the tape. It sounds like our agent did take too much initiative with your request.”

I think I actually started laughing. “Too much initiative”. I hope, for the sake of the man who said it, that that’s a canned line that they train people to use in these situations, because if he came up with that unprompted, I fear for his soul.

Framing: BS by any other name

This particular phrasing is a wonderful example of what prominent linguist George Lakoff calls “framing”. Framing, simply put, is the creative use of wording to change a person’s perception of a given concept, statement, or question. One uses words with a good connotation (associated feeling) to describe what people might consider to be a bad thing, in hopes that they’ll listen to the words, and not the nastiness that lies beneath.

The most common example is the Republican Party’s talking point of “Tax Relief”. They do their best to use this phrase as often as possible, because whenever they do, it helps advance their cause in the mind of the listener, however subtly, due to the wording. In general, we are “relieved” of an unnecessary burden, and “relief” is always a good thing. So, by talking about tax relief, taxes are lumped in with worry, ailments, pain, and discomfort. Although somebody might not want to cut taxes irresponsibly, who wouldn’t want to give people relief?

Our nameless Shingular executive has used framing beautifully here with “to take too much initiative”. Rather than apologizing or explaining that they’ve made an error, he frames Bonnie’s blatant mistake as a good thing. Everybody likes to hear about people “taking the initiative”, setting out to get things done, not just talking. We put it on resumés and job applications, and in our corporate culture, it’s quite a virtue. How on earth could I object to an employee going above and beyond the call of duty and taking too much initiative with my request?

Of course, this same strategy of framing bad things in the guise of excess good could apply elsewhere. We could claim that a man crushed in heavy machinery “recieved an overly passionate hug from the compactor”. We could argue that really, an aerial bombardment is a “free fireworks display for opposing troops at excessively low altitude”.

The problem, of course, is that if people see through your framing (especially when it’s this shameless), you end up seeming like a real sleazeball. For him to use a line like this is bad, but to use it to avoid apologizing is just heinous.

Unfortunately for the Shingular rep, I saw through it. Moments after the “too much initiative” line, I asked to be transferred to his manager. Luckily, she was nice, competent, and willing to help. Five days after the ordeal began, we finally got the line back, and they even threw in a free month for our trouble (this is the only reason I’m not using the company’s real name for google to find).

The morals of this story

This story has two morals:

Shingular/New Bay-TT customers, make sure and specify that you’d like the rep to ask you explicitly before they make any changes to your account. It might not be easy to undo anything.

Service Reps, please give us a little credit, and avoid using framing to try and cover your own mistakes. We’ll see through it, and your well-crafted lines will seem like a wealth of excessively fresh, free, waste-based organic fertilizer from America’s finest Cattle. See, it’s insulting when we use it with you. How do you think we feel?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language and Thought, Language Humor, Language Usage | 1 Comment


I’ve recently developed a minor affinity for a blog named LifeHacker, which shares little tips, tricks, and hacks that you can apply to your computer, yourself, and your life in general. It’s a decent site, and definitely worth a look if you’re bored.

However, what caught my eye today was not the content, but an interaction in a comment thread on optimizing your Mac. As such threads tend to do on any forum, it rapidly devolved into “Yay! Macs rule!” “Eww! Macs suck!”.

Applied usage of the Typo Defense

To support the “Macs suck” side, one poster by the name of “Quikboy”, posted as follows:

I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 4 years. It’s not really anything special. At first it may seem cool, but after a while, it’s just ok. It starts seeming like the same old, same old. They’re pretty expensive too. I got a Sony Vaio during Christmas, and I’ve decided to use it for my personal use…

Now, this is fascinating, because, as “Jamie Phelps” points out in the thread, MacBook Pros first came out last April. There’s no possibility, even if he had prerelease hardware, that he could have owned a MacBook Pro for more than a year or two. I assumed that he made a simple mistake and confused “Powerbook”, Apple’s previous line of High-End laptops, with “MacBook Pro”. Had he left it alone, he might’ve seemed a bit out-of-touch or unfamiliar with his hardware, but not actively decietful.

However, “Quikboy” wouldn’t go quietly. He snapped back with this post, a variation on the ages old “typo defense”:

@Jamie Phelps:

Sorry, my ceiling light was dim. I was using the numpad, and pressed 4 instead of one. If you didn’t notice, 4 is right above one. I didn’t see that mistake and submitted the comment. Sorry. It has been out for almost a year at least as far as I remembered. I bought it somewhere in March or April of ’06. Seems like a year to me.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean it’s well applied

To quote Abraham Lincoln, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”.If we believe his typo defense, then his intended post reads “I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 years.”

The problem here is that English marks plurality (the presence of more than one subject or object) in more than one place in a sentence. To change “I’ve used a MacBook Pro for 1 year”, we not only change the number, but we also add the plural morpheme (a chunk of sound that conveys a certain meaning) -s. In many cases, we’ll even mark a single object with an article rather than with a number (“had it for a year”).

So, even if he did, in fact, transpose the numbers due to a dim light on the keyboard, he also added an -s, and possibly even deleted an article. To me, it sounds like “Quikboy” got called on a lie, and didn’t have the sense to use a stronger defense (“Oh, I meant powerbook”). The Typo Defense failed him, but it doesn’t have to fail you.

Teh Pefrect Cirme

The Typo Defense is really limited in its applications. Here are some ground-rules.

You can only reliably argue one or two letters as a typo, not entire substitutions. You’d never get away with “You suck” “Huh?” “Oh, sorry, typo, I meant ‘You have nice hair’”.

Similarly, it’s more difficult to argue certain switches. “Quikboy” plays the “the keys are right next to each other” card well, but then fails because, as I pointed out, English grammar is sensitive to plural distinctions.

That brings us to the final rule, make sure that the sentence and sound structure doesn’t give it away. If you say “Wow, she’s quite got an a**”, you can’t go back and claim that you meant “She’s got quite a mass”. The a/an alternation will hang you.

When it works, though, the Typo Defense can be a valuable face-saving tool. Keep it in your “Oh no, what’d I just say?” toolbox right next to the Cat-on-the-keyboard Dodge and the “Oops, wrong window” absolution.

However, the best option might just be to come clean. The internet is resourceful and unforgiving, and some day, some linguist might highlight your post and dissect it, revealing the terrible truth. Wouldn’t that be creepy?

EDIT: Wow. Somebody just pointed out the Plurality error in the thread. See, there’s nowhere to hide…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet | 5 Comments

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