There are a great many words that are used all the time in Academia, but seldom outside of a scholastic context. Many of these words aren’t particularly useful outside of their specific academic context. An example of a word of this type from Linguistics might be fricativization, which is the process by which a stop consonant becomes a fricative over time (for instance, /t/ goes /s/). However, there are a few words which are definitely handy even outside of linguistics and academia, but really never seem to fall out of the ivory tower into everyday use.

Sadly, in an everyday social situation when one of these terms would really work best, you’re left with two bad options.

Your first option is to just use the term in whatever context you’re in, even if the people you’re talking to might not be familiar with the term. Unless you do this with an incredible degree of social grace, you’ll seem very much like an elitist, or like you’re trying to thrust your academic background in somebody’s face. Going on to explain the term is helpful, but even then, you’re still going to seem like you’re playing professor, not hanging out with friends. That’s just not cool.

Your other option is to circumlocute, or talk around, the word. Here, you’d just describe what the word means in context, without ever actually using it. So, for instance, rather than saying “I’m a phonologist”, you might say “I study the sounds of language and the rules that go with them”. This is much more socially acceptable and doesn’t have the same air of “look at me, I’m an academic”, but it can get awkward if you want to use the word multiple times in a conversation.

So, today, I’d like to create a new option.

To Posit

One of these academic terms that I think is quite handy in everyday life is the verb “to posit”. This means, roughly, “to assume something for the basis of argument”, or in other situations, “to hypothesize”. In Linguistics, we use this term pretty frequently when trying to justify a certain analysis. Here’s an example of its usage from a recent assignment of mine on the history of Polish:

In order for this jeste —› ješcie change to have any sort of naturalness, I must first posit an isolated (at least, based on this data) vowel epenthesis [Epenthesis is the addition of a sound between two other sounds], whereby an /i/ was inserted between the the [t] and the [e] of the 2pl form (jeste —› jestie).

Ignoring the rest of the specialized vocabulary and examples, I’m basically saying that for the rest of my argument to make any sense, I’m going to hypothesize (and to a certain extent, assume) that a vowel pops up between those two sounds at some point. Here, it’s in a very academic context, but there are definitely situations in everyday life where this word could come in handy.

For instance, you’re near campus and your football obsessed school is having a home game. You’re talking with a bunch of friends before heading off to have a tasty burrito, trying to plan your route through the pandemonium:

Friend: What’s gonna be the best route to take? Do you know which streets they’re gonna block off to let the drunken fans crawl home?
You: Not a clue, but based on the past few games, we can pretty safely posit roadblocks on Euclid and Regent.
Friend: Yeah, good call, let’s try University… or… You know, let’s just order pizza.

Now, for me, “posit” really is the best verb for the job here. If you said “we can bet on roadblocks…”, it would imply a great deal more security in your guess. If you said “Let’s assume roadblocks…”, it would make it sound like there’s no other option. Finally, if you said “well, let’s hypothesize that they’ve set up roadblocks…”, you’d sound like you desperately needed to get off campus more, and further than just the burrito shop.

Let’s posit further usage by readers of this site

As many of you have already figured out, posting these obscure words on your blog isn’t really a better way to use these words in conversation. Unless your friends are all avid readers of your site (and mine aren’t, for the most part), you’ll still have to explain these words or work around them.

However, I have a wonderful dream. First, I’ll talk about “positing” on my site. Then, maybe you will, because it’s much less confrontational when you use an obscure word oline. Then, your friends friend might use it. People will start bumping into it, and more and more, it will enter the collective consciousness of society.

Eventually, this effect will cascade until my final dream is realized, and I can walk into a bar, sidle up next to a very attractive woman, and say that “given the fact that you’re talking to me, that you’re expressing interest, and most importantly, that I find you very attractive, I’m going to posit a wonderful end to this evening”.

Unfortunately, even if I use the perfect verb in the perfect context, in that situation, I still posit a quick, firm slap to the face. It’d SO be worth it.

Program Note: Due to a recent plague of comment spam, all comments are currently set to await my moderation. If you don’t see your comment there immediately, don’t despair, I’ll see it and approve it shortly.

Speak English, Your In America Now

We, the Legal American workers of the USA, need to stand together NOW, to keep English as our only native language.

Foreigners are saturating the USA & are slowly trying to modify our national language to include Spanish, so it will be easier for them to live & work in this country.

Qualified US citizens who need to support their families are being refused employment in their own country because they don’t speak Spanish. This is happening on a daily basis. The unemployment rate is up and the government offices are making suggestions that we learn Spanish so we can get jobs.

This is wrong & something needs to be done. If we do nothing, in 10 years we will all need to know Spanish and have to push 2 to hear it in English! Please help stop the madness before it goes any farther.

We can not allow any modification of our national language.

We need stronger laws which require resident & citizen applicants to learn English in order to live & work in the USA. If not, than these companies that deal with non speaking English patrons, need to hire an interpreter and pay them what the average interpreter makes. To force the “legal” US citizen to speak a new language is Discrimination based on language.

We need new laws created to protect the English speaking citizens of the USA from any discrimination (like employment, housing, etc.)
Amnesty should only be given if the parties are willing to learn English and help change their family members coming over or who are already here.
Petition to NOT modify our native language to include any foreign language
Petition for stronger laws requiring all residents & citizens to learn & speak English in order to live & work in the USA.
Petition for new laws protecting US citizens who are refused employment in the USA simply because they do nospeak a foreign language.
Petition for new laws protecting the English speaking citizens of the USA from any form of discrimination (employment, housing, etc.).
We would like to thank Verizon Wireless for taking the first steps in realizing that we shouldn’t have to push one for English, it should be a given.

If you agree, take a stand & sign the petition.

Painful grammatical errors

Here at LinguisticMystic, I do my best never to mock people for grammatical mistakes. I’ll certainly comment on them, and when they’re particularly funny, I’ll share a laugh. However, in general, I think that one’s ability to adhere to an arbitrary set of “rules” set out for us by the richest group of language users shouldn’t be a category of judgment.

As many of you likely noticed, the author of this post mixed up the 2nd person possessive (your) and the identical-sounding yet differently spelled contraction of “you are” (you’re). This is often a problem because, as I said, they sound identical when spoken aloud, but in writing, there’s a very large difference between the possessive (“I saw your mom”) and the contraction (“You’re a mom”).

Now, I’m not pointing this out to attack the author as a person, or suggest that she’s uneducated. Instead, I’m pointing it out because this is a wonderful example of one of the few times when having impeccable grammar IS relevant and necessary. In some contexts, a badly placed grammatical error can significantly injure an argument, and the author’s your/you’re mixup here is one of these examples.

This error occurred only two words into a rather lengthy rant about how terrible it is that people aren’t using English and how English is going downhill. This particular error in this particular context is a lot like somebody standing up to give a speech on animal rights while wearing a fur coat. If you’re going to give this speech, you need to prove that you’re a good person to trust on matters of the English language, and this simple little grammatical error threw that all away.

However, this particular error isn’t the only thing of linguistic interest in this rant.

Official English sillyness

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when the author said that “in 10 years, we’ll all need to know Spanish and push 2 to hear it in English”. This is unrealistic for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is the assumption that the tide could turn in 10 years, in either direction.

I consider myself to be nearly fluent in Spanish. I suspect that, if dropped in the middle of Mexico City, I could likely survive quite well, albeit with the normal crop of grammatical errors. I’ve never lived abroad, although I’ve traveled to Spanish speaking countries on a few occasions and worked in a number of Spanish speaking environments. I’ve gotten this degree of language mastery the American way, by learning the language in isolation in classrooms from a young age. How long did this take? Roughly 8 years of Spanish through Middle school, High school, and College.

Now, keep in mind, I adore grammar. I love it. I truly enjoyed these classes, and didn’t particularly slack. It’s just that, well, getting good with a language takes time. Sure, it could be shortened with immersion classes and living abroad, but I’d like to think I’ve had a pretty average language education.

For me and my flexible young brain, it took me eight years. Just imagine if a monolingual fifty year old was “forced” to learn Spanish. According to Wikipedia, around 82% of people in the US speak English only at home. Even if an evil Spanish-speaking conspiracy literally forced everybody in the country to learn Spanish, it’d likely be at least 10 or 15 years before most people could use it as a primary language.

However, that’s not going to happen. An 82% majority doesn’t just drop their native language without a gun to their heads, especially when it would require years of expensive and difficult schooling. Not to mention that English is probably the fastest growing language in the world, and it’s a prestige-language for many.

So, I’m quite tempted to say that the author here is appealing to the “defend the fatherland” attack-when-threatened instincts of the masses, rather than to any sort of logic. These fear based arguments are (sadly) pretty common these days, but to a linguist, this one is just plain silly.

When it comes to sillyness, though, there’s one statement that takes the cake.

Enjoy your cooked circles of Freedom-Flour

In her little petition, the author proposes one of the most ridiculous ideas that I’ve heard in a while:

Petition to NOT modify our native language to include any foreign language

Whoa there, Mrs. Official English. This is a bit of a tall order, as forbidding any further borrowing of words from other languages is a bit ridiculous. As I’ve discussed before, English is ripe with borrowings from Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and even Arabic.

So, to categorically forbid the borrowing of new words into English from other languages would be inconvenient and juvenile. We’d be forced to come up with new words for all the items we might absorb from other cultures. Thus, rather than being able to simply use the word “tortilla” (from Spanish), we’d have to come up with a new word for it. Perhaps we could just use a compound word (“Thin flour-bread”). Maybe we could just make a new, English-sounding word for it. Or, maybe we can take a page from the US House of Representatives’ playbook and come up with a nice, jingoistic name for them. I suggest “cooked circles of Freedom-Flour”.

However, even if we were to start creating English words for everything, it really wouldn’t help what she’s afraid of. As Shakespeare points out, a rose by any other name will smell just as sweet, and no matter what you call a new idea or item from another culture, it’ll still affect our own culture. Sure, you’ll avoid having any foreign words, but if you’re still importing foreign items into our society, I suspect she’d still think our culture was “in danger”.

So, sure, you could try and bind the language (impossible) in such a way that it won’t absorb foreign words (unfortunate), but really, all you’d be doing is halting the progress of English, and weakening the language. Really, if this author succeeded, she’d probably just end up hurting English and making other, less hogtied languages seem more attractive.

Relax, Breathe. Your English is safe

I’ve used this quote several times before, and I’ll use it again: A language user trying to prevent language change is like a gardener trying to prevent continental drift. Every time these official English people stand up and yell, it becomes more apparent that it’s completely futile. English is going to do precisely what it’s going to do, and all the ranting and cute little laws in the world aren’t going to change that.

Even disregarding that futility, the fact remains that English isn’t going anywhere. Sure, more and more, it’ll be beneficial to be bilingual. Barring major wars, though, I don’t think there are any Native English speakers alive right now in the US who will have to completely switch to another language to survive here within their lifetime. Sure, English will change, but it’s not going away any time soon.

So, why do they keep arguing these points? Well, as I’ve said before, when people say nasty things about another language, it’s generally because they want to say nasty things about the people who use it, but are afraid to do so. I suspect that this too is another little bit of anti-immigrant or even racist sentiment that’s been dressed up in a little suit and clip-on tie and paraded around as a linguistic issue. Luckily, there are people who oppose it (notably including Senator John McCain and the Mayor of Nashville), and the proponents of these ideas remain on the fringe.

Next time you hear one of these people pop up yelling about saving English from those mean, nasty other languages, take a second to realize that it’s a really a linguistic non-issue. Make up your own mind on the subject, but just make sure that you rip off the false linguistic premises. Only once you’ve done that will you be completely aware of exactly what this sort of argument and mindset is supporting.

However, a recent edition of “Comedy Goldmine” is simply too magnificent not to feature here. The theme? Foreign Language Screw-Ups.

Although they’re all pretty funny, it seems like most of them can be broken down into a few different categories of speech error.

False Cognates

A foreign language word is considered to be a “cognate” if it’s similar in both sound and meaning to a word in one’s native language, and they both descended from the same source, either from a mother language or through borrowing. For instance, in Spanish, the word for ‘computer’ (computadora) is a cognate, as is the word for ‘volunteer’ (voluntario). These cognates happen frequently when two languages borrow heavily from the same language. In this case, English and Spanish both have many words with Latin roots.

However, it’s not uncommon for foreign language students to accidentally use a “false cognate”. These are, as you might suspect, words that sound very similar in two languages, but have different meanings. The textbook Spanish example is assistir (‘to attend’) and atender (‘to assist’). Sometimes, the mistakes can be innocent, but sometimes…

Frog writes…

Last year on a vacation to Cuba I rented a moped and managed to break it. When I returned it to the rental place I used my awesome high school Spanish to say I was ‘embarazado’ about what happened, meaning to say embarrassed. Turns out ‘embarazado’ means ‘pregnant’. I’m a guy.

Note, it’s not just English speakers who can make this mistake:

Dark Chicken writes…

This brother and sister I knew grew up in Mexico and were eating at a restaurant in the States. Well, the brother kept on bothering the sister, so she finally yelled, “Stop molesting me!” The restaurant went dead silent and everybody stared.

This comes from the false Spanish cognate, molestar, which means (completely innocently) ‘to annoy’ or ‘to bother’.

False cognates can make for some wonderful communication issues, but they’re not the only source of interlingual hilarity.

Secondary Meanings

In many languages, it’s common for words to have several meanings. Just like the English “cock” can either denote a male chicken or the male sexual organ, languages are littered with minefields of multiple meanings.

When a non-native speaker looks up a word in the dictionary, especially a small dictionary, it’s not uncommon to see several options listed. So, if a Spanish speaker wanted to tell a woman “You have a pretty cat” and looked the word up in a dictionary, there’s a decent chance that, quite innocently, he’ll use the word “pussy” instead and he’ll end up complimenting her genitalia. Here’s one wonderful example of a hilarious alternate meaning:

QueenOfMistakes writes…

The only thing I can think of was when I was in my German class and we’d been having a heatwave. I said “Ich bin heiss” (meaning “I am hot”), which made my teacher laugh.

Apparently, saying “Ich bin heiss” is one way of saying “I’m horny” in German.

This can also work the other way around. Sometimes, a language will have a word with two meanings, and in the other language, each meaning has a distinctive word.

Luebbi writes…

When I was in London with my class (German students), something hilarious happened at the airport. We where standing in a queue and some Brits came around and started to cut in line. A friend of mine yelled: “You can’t come here! There’s a snake here!”, which not only baffled the British couple, but made everyone else, including our teacher, laugh out loud.

The German word “Schlange” is used both for snake and queue, and he used the direct translation.

Grammatical Errors

Sometimes, you can have all the words right, but a little tiny grammatical error will get you.

Fhqwhgads writes…

Back in High School, while on a class trip to Italy, one of the guys was hitting on a local chick. He was doing well, until he used the word “bello” (instead of “bella”). She slapped him and walked away. Never call an Italian girl handsome.

Here, the writer failed to take into consideration the fact that in Italian (as well as in many other languages), adjectives are marked for gender. In English, we have separate words (a girl is “pretty” and a guy is “handsome”), but in Italian, that little tiny morpheme (unit of meaning) is able to completely derail even the most persuasive of pick-ups. The gender distinction can also change the meaning of words…

Mortanis writes…

Back in high school French, we had to pair off and interview your partner, then relate their day back to the class in French. A friend of mine interviewed a girl, and promptly reported to the class “She likes to play with her cat”.

But used the feminine for cat, which is slang for pussy. Was pretty enjoyable to watch our fairly attractive French teacher start snickering over something like that.

Misleading Mispronunciations

Nearly any foreign language one studies will have some sounds that are different from those in your native language. As a phonetics student, this brings me great joy, but when speaking another language, these differences can lead to some wonderful errors:

Ayreon writes…

“Cook” in Dutch is “kok” which is pronounced “cock”. A friend of mine once tried to “thank the cock for the nice meal” at a restaurant.

A co-worker of my dad’s name is Dick de Cock, which is a perfectly normal name in the Netherlands. However, when he got a promotion and suddenly had to travel all over the world, he got a lot of weird looks.

Here, I suspect that the Aspirated/Unaspirated distinction might be causing problems:

sewid writes…

Walking around crowded night markets in Taiwan after getting a taste of my first giant chicken schnitzel I asked my girlfriend how to say chicken schnitzel in Mandarin which she told me was “gi pai”

Much to her amusement when I misheard her, thinking she said it “gi bai” i loudly proclaimed in Mandarin to all around that I loved “gi bai”

Which I found out shortly sort of means I love vagina.

All it takes is a simple change in the voicing of a consonant to go from loving sausage to loving the polar opposite. Scary, huh?

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of ways to mess up in a foreign language. Between treacherous false-cognates, deceitful second meanings, grammatical gaffes and malicious mispronunciations, sometimes a second of speech may seem like an ocean of opportunity for offensive communication.

However, the beauty of it all is that generally, people laugh when such speech errors are made. If somebody knows you’re a foreigner, you often get the benefit of the doubt.

The moral of this story: Next time you’d like to compliment a girl’s pussy, you’d better have an accent, or else you’re going to be very, very pregnant.

LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:

(Code)

I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

On Saturday, I posted about Apple’s guide to blocking “profanity” in the Dictionary application. Well, shortly after I finished the post, I became curious about the blocking itself, and began to wonder what Apple actually considers to be profane, and how effective this filter actually is.

Ask the experts

I assume that, when looking for a good definition of profanity, Apple would check their own dictionary. Here’s how it defines “Profanity”:

profanity |prəˌfønədi| |proʊˌfønədi| noun ( pl. -ties)
• blasphemous or obscene language : an outburst of profanity.
• a swear word; an oath.
• irreligious or irreverent behavior.

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin profanitas, from Latin profanus ‘not sacred’ (see profane ).

For the record, I disagree with their IPA pronunciation (/prəfænəɾi/ is how I say it), but everything else sounds reasonable. So, according to Apple, all words that are swears, irreligious, “irreverant”, or obscene should be removed from the dictionary.

The hunt for profanity

Then, I set off to find obscene, irreligious, offensive, and swear-ish words. Gathered both from my own corrupted mind and from other sources (Urbandictionary, George Carlin’s Seven words you can’t say on TV, and more), I assembled these words in a list, and then slowly started plugging them in to Dictionary.app. Surprisingly, only one word that I came up with wasn’t in the dictionary, “Asshat”, not shocking given its relatively recent birth online. Everything else was included and defined quite academically. I also checked a few words that aren’t really obscene, but describe a tabooed act or subject (“fellatio” or “penis”)

Once I’d checked to see what was in the dictionary, I went about enabling the parental controls. This was actually a royal pain, and requires OS X server maintenance software along with some technical knowledge, but eventually, I got it done. (No, I don’t feel any need to post a walkthrough, read my last post).

Finally, I went back through and tried all the words on the list again. The results were fascinating, and words broke down into three categories.

Beware, this post gets rather packed with profanity after this point. It’s still all in academic context, I’m just trying to minimize the “Oh, think of the children” backlash.

Category One: Unchanged

Some of the words were present in the censored dictionary in exactly the same form as in the normal dictionary. There was no change at all to the dictionary entries for these words, and they were just as easily found as before.

To Apple’s credit, all the “innocent yet tabooed” terms (penis, vagina, fellatio, cunnilingus, dildo) were in this category, showing that they seem to have a healthy (in my eyes) idea of the difference between discussing naughty things and using profanity.

Also, Apple struck a good balance with religious terms considered to be swears by some. “Hell” and “Damn” were both uncensored, and their “profane” uses were discussed as well. “Blasphemy”, the most irreligious word I can imagine, remained.

Some of the entries in this category were a bit more surprising. “Bitch” and “Bastard” were fully present, even discussing derogatory meanings. “Boob” referring to the female breast (although not profane, still viewed negatively) was there. “Slut” and “Whore” were both present as well, unedited.

Much to my relief, “cum” was present and unchanged, both in latin and in English, even keeping the reference to it being an alternate spelling of “come”, whose orgasmic meaning is still present in its entry.

Category Two: Redacted Entries

This surprised me a bit, but there were a number of words which were still present in the dictionary, but redacted such that the “profane” uses were missing.

One example of this is the word “Pussy”. Here’s the normal entry:

pussy |ˌpʊsi| noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.
2 vulgar slang a woman’s genitals.
• offensive women in general, considered sexually.
• offensive sexual intercourse with a woman.
• informal a weak, cowardly, or effeminate man.

Here’s the censored, redacted version:

pussy |ˌpʊsi|
noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.

So, not only is the sexual meaning taken out, but the pejorative (insulting) “coward” meaning is removed as well.

There were other examples of redacted entries in the censored version. When you enable parental controls, “Cock” refers only to roosters, “Crap” is a dice game, “tits” are little gray birds, and a “prick” comes only from a needle.

Interestingly, some slurs were redacted to only include their normal meanings, so “fag” and “faggot” are no longer anti-gay slurs, just terms for a bundle of sticks, and a “dyke” isn’t an offensive term for a lesbian, but instead an alternate spelling for a large, water-blocking structure.

Category Three: Disappeared Entries

Some words were evidently too obscene to include at all (or lacked non-profane meanings). These entries were just taken out of the censored dictionary altogether, and a search redirects you to the closest word (“asshole” goes to “ashore”, for instance).

Some of these weren’t surprising. The F-Bomb and its derivatives (“fuck”, “fucker”, “motherfucker”) were all disappeared by the Parental Controls option. Vulgar terms for bodily functions and areas (“shit”, “asshole”, “piss”, “cunt”, “twat”, “bollocks”) all disappeared as well. Highly obscene sexually charged terms (like “poontang” and “cocksucker”) disappeared with the censorship as well.

Finally, perhaps the most tabooed word in American society, “nigger”, is taken out completely, even though the original entry explains the taboo-ness as well as discussing the contemporary self-referential usage by those of the term within the African-American community.

So, what is profane in Cupertino?

I must say, I’m fairly impressed with Apple’s technology and their restraint. Although they did a very good job of censoring patently offensive words (category three) that have little value except as swear words, they also dealt with double meanings (“cock” or “pussy”) very well by redacting entries. Their censorship was neither too zealous nor too lax, and frankly, if they insist on allowing this, they did it well.

However, as I said last time, I still believe that the dictionary shouldn’t be censored. Kids will find the words sooner or later, and it’s better they find out what they mean from an academic source than from a google search.

I’ve brought my dictionary back to normal mode now, and I encourage people to keep theirs there as well. Parents should be attentive to their children’s language development, and explain what swearing is, why those words are a problem, and what’s not approriate to say at Grandma’s house. What you consider to be obscene may be very different than what Apple’s engineers do, so there’s no sense in having them tell you what you can look up.

Oh, and for those who are curious, “Windows” does show up in the Censored version. I guess that proves that it’s not Steve Jobs making the call…

So, a friend of mine on Twitter recently linked me to a post in Apple’s Support manuals entitled “How to prevent profanity from appearing in Dictionary”.

The obscene and filthy people at Oxford American Dictionary

As most OS X users know, Apple includes a wonderful program called “Dictionary.app” with every copy of OS X 10.4. This program lets you access an electronic copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus. There, you can find good definitions, etymologies, and pronunciations. You can even have it give pronunciation in the IPA if you tell it to do so in the application’s Preferences dialog.

The beautiful part of this is that it’s an entire dictionary. It may not be the full, unabridged version, but it’s very good for free software. You can find nearly any word you’d like in there, ranging from phone to phoneme to allophone. However, you can also find all sorts of profanity, defined in academic terms.

Take, for example, the treatment of one of the more vulgar words in the English language, “fuck”:

fuck |fək| vulgar slang verb [ trans. ]
1 have sexual intercourse with (someone). • [ intrans. ] (of two people) have sexual intercourse.
2 ruin or damage (something).
noun an act of sexual intercourse.
• [with adj. ] a sexual partner.
exclamation used alone or as a noun ( the fuck) or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.

(There’s much, much more about this fascinating word)

So, although it definitely contains the word and examples of the usage, one could hardly argue that it’s truly wanton and profanely using them.

Why censor the Dictionary?

Yes, the Dictionary app contains uses of profanity. However, these uses are all academic, and used in the context of describing the profanity itself. So, this raises the obvious question of why one would bother censoring the dictionary at all.

Perhaps a parent might be afraid that little Jimmy will learn those horrid, horrid terms. However, in order for little Jimmy to find them, he’d have to seach for them.

Once little Jimmy knows the terms well enough to search for them, chances are, his mind is already “corrupted” and he’s heard or seen the terms elsewhere. No matter how much fundamentalist parents desire to do so, you can’t make him unlearn what a word means, so there’s not a whole lot of point to keeping the largely academic discussion of the words away from him.

However, even if little Jimmy stumbles across a profane word online, perhaps it’s better that he looks it up immediately and gets the relatively tame information from the Dictionary App, rather than asking his third grade teacher what it means.

Either way, Profanity is a fact of life, and no matter how badly some people don’t want to hear it, it exists. Blocking objective, academic analysis of it won’t make the “problem” go away, and really, it’ll only make the word more tantalizing.

So, don’t censor the Dictionary Application. In the age of the Internet, little Jimmy will always be able to find out what a given word means, no matter how hard you try to censor him. Let Jimmy use the dictionary to find out what words mean in an educational sense.

Unless, of course, you’d prefer he just type “fucking” into a Google Image Search and start browsing. I didn’t think so…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – [Nashville] Mayor Bill Purcell vetoed a measure Monday that would have made English the official language of Nashville, saying it was unconstitutional, unnecessary and mean-spirited.

“This ordinance does not reflect who we are in Nashville,” Purcell said.

The measure passed 23-14 last week by the Metro Council required all government documents to be in English, except when multilingual communications are required by federal rules or are needed “to protect or promote public health, safety or welfare.’

Opponents and supporters of the ordinance agreed it was largely a symbolic slap at illegal immigration that had no significant effect.

Purcell said his legal staff had advised him the bill violated the U.S. and state constitutions and would be costly to defend.

I can understand requesting people to know English for a service job, or if safety demands it. However, requiring a certain language background simply to vote, drive, or interact with the state is a rather roundabout way of saying that you don’t want non-English speakers in your state/town/country. It’s about damned time people recognized it for what it is, and it’s good to see the mayor judiciously smack down this particular batch of thinly veiled racism.

Link Spotlight

I’ve just posted another link to the sidebar, which will now display all links, rather than just the newest ones, and I wanted to give it some extra recognition. If you haven’t seen it, check out this video on the nature of form, content, and meaning on the internet. It’s really powerful, and quite interesting. More information can be found on the Kansas State University Center for Digital Ethonography Blog.

For one of my classes, I (along with five other people and professor) am working with a speaker of Zarma, a language of Niger. The goal of the class is to study the language and create a working grammar, then focus in on one particular aspect of the language we find fascinating. Right now, we’re in the process of translating a narrative about the marriage rituals of the Zarma people, and we stumbled across an interesting little tidbit.

To start off this narrative, our professor offered the speaker a greeting in Zarma, fufu, which is roughly equivalent to our simple “Hi!”. The speaker responded with ba:n sami wo:la (the colons indicate long vowels, “baan samee woluh”). This is a much more complex phrase, translating down to something roughly like “God be praised, my health is without problems”, or, more succinctly, “I’m doing fine”. The speaker explained to us that the fufu, ba:n sami wo:la interaction is a normal way of carrying out a greeting in Zarma. After the Ba:n sami wo:la, he went straight into the narrative.

My first thought at that point (which I’m not proud to admit) was that it seemed a bit pretentious. “What would they care how you were doing, all they said was “Hi”", I thought to myself.

Then, I realized. English is no less pretentious, I’m just more used to our system. Generally, at least in my bit of the English speaking world, a greeting includes some variety of “How are you?/What’s up?” interaction. First, the first person puts out a “how are you?”, the second person gives a generic answer, then asks the first person the same question back, and the first person answers generically. Only once that’s out of the way can a conversation begin.

Perhaps what’s missing from the Zarma greeting, in my culturally biased eyes, is the return question. It’s not “Hi”, “I’m healthy, are you?”, “I am too”. It doesn’t seem, based on the simple interaction, that the second participant actually cares about the first person.

The trouble with that point of view is that English speakers don’t actually care how you’re doing or what’s up, either. Take, for example, this made-up interaction:

(Fred walks into a gas station and goes to pay the attendant)
FRED: Hey
SHOPKEEPER: Hi, How are you today?
FRED: Well, actually, my prostate’s been acting up, so it’s an hour and a half of pain any time I have to go to the bathroom. Oh, and my dog died last week. So yeah, I’m having a tough time of it. How about you?
SHOPKEEPER: (extended pause) …I’m good
…

If you’re like me, reading that interaction likely caused at least a little bit of a cringe. It’s an unspoken rule that in general, when somebody asks you how you’re doing (or what’s up), they really, genuinely, don’t care. They want to finish the greeting and get on with life. You’re allowed a “Fine”, an “OK”, sometimes “Great!”, and maybe the occasional “I’ve done better, how are you?”. You are not, however, allowed to tell somebody how you actually are.

There are, as always, exceptions. If a family member (or very close friend) asks, there’s a higher probability that they do care, and you’re welcome to actually answer truthfully. Similarly, you’re allowed to answer fully if somebody makes a special effort to encourage it, either through intonation (“So how ARE you?”) or through context (when a doctor asks, you don’t say “Fine”, you actually explain what’s wrong). Similarly, a “What’s up?” can be answered truthfully if the person looks like they’re trying to arrange or accomplish something (“So, what’s up? Going anywhere?”), or if the person has a legitimate interest in your activities.

Sometimes when we’re only greeting each other in passing, we have absolutely NO interest at all in the other person’s activities, and don’t even bother to use the correct response. In the dorms, just walking by people you know, it’s not at all uncommon to hear a hybrid greeting, like “What’s up?” “Fine, you?” or “How are you?” “Not much”. Sometimes, you’ll stop to correct yourself, and use the right greeting, perhaps with a minor blush, but generally, it’s not even noticed.

We can contrast English’s lack of caring with one example from the (quite complex) Samoan greeting system. In English, if you meet somebody on the street and they ask “Where are you off to?”, you’re not required to be specific. You can just say “Oh, I’m headed to the store”, and that’s just fine. However, in Samoan, if somebody of higher status (a chief/orator to a commoner, or an adult to a child) asks you where you’re going, you’re compelled to answer quite honestly, or else you’re being deceptive. Rather than just “I’m going to the beach”, you’d explain to the chief that you’re going to the beach to talk with your friend, then going over to the bar for a drink, then headed home to see your wife after that. Imagine telling that to the gas station clerk.

When you sit back and realize that in English, we don’t really care how people are or what they’re up to even when we ask, expressing one’s state of being without solicitation in a greeting doesn’t seem that unusual or pretentious.

So, if there’s one thing to learn from this, it’s this: Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.

This morning, as usual, I rolled out of bed to my computer and checked my RSS feeds. In doing so, this quote from a professor, taken from Sally Thomason’s latest post on the Language Log jumped out at me. Actually, that’s not true, it sprung into my heart, soothing my harrowed soul and putting as much of a smile as it could on my still-slumbering face. Here’s a bit of it:

…

I always emphasize that it’s not so much right and wrong, that people speak differently everywhere, but that there’s a certain amount of snobbery in knowing “standard usage” and adhering to it, like it’s a password that says, “I know the code, I have learned the secrets of this society of academics/lawyers/receptionists and can be trusted to behave appropriately.” I tell them they HAVE to learn it and know when to use it unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot on resumes and applications, but they don’t have to believe it’s God’s Preferred Way of Speaking English.

I’ve had more than one student come up to me after an ACT class and say, “You’re the first English teacher I’ve had who didn’t tell me my mother spoke like an uneducated hick,” or “This is the first time anyone’s explained why standard usage is important.”

It’s sad that pointless prescriptivism may keep these kids from top schools. But that’s why we absolutely HAVE to teach it to them, so they’re not fighting an uphill battle on the language front. They’re already at a disadvantage without the money, resources, and connections wealthy suburban Chicago students have in spades. It would be brutal not to teach them the “code” they need to pass the gatekeepers.

Laura Petelle (the author of this excerpt), you are, officially, my hero-of-the-day for February 9th, 2007. This all DESPERATELY needed to be said, and it sounds like you’re saying it, not just to Language Log, but the people for whom it counts.

Standard usage is just that, a standard of usage, but that term can be deceiving. Just because a language (or a dialect) is not the same as the accepted standard doesn’t mean it’s “sub-standard” or “uneducated”. Every dialect is grammatical, meaning that it conforms to its own specific grammar (and usually more frequently than the speech of those trying to use a “standard dialect”, and there are no “better” or “worse” dialects than any others. “Non-Standard” does not mean “sub-standard”, and I applaud Laura for teaching that.

Sadly, she’s right. Knowing the “whom”‘s of the standard dialect (of any language) can be seen as a showing of one’s social status, and a person who’s never been taught those sorts of things will be at a disadvantage due to a charming little set of social stigmas based on language use. So, as she says, we have to teach people the rules, but also let them know that it’s okay to ignore them at home. Just because I need to wear a tie to go to a wedding, doesn’t mean I should wear it at home while watching a movie. “Standard Usage” is a sociolinguistic tool, and although we need to know it, we don’t need to worship it.

So, Laura, if you’re out there reading this, you have my highest respects, and if you’re ever in the area, I’ll buy you a smoothie if you post your above comments outside the English department.

Don’t worry, though, they’re just across the courtyard from Linguistics. We’d have your back.

Here’s a link to the video on YouTube

As I said, I’m not really sure what to make of this. It’s a really beautiful video, and is exceptionally well made, far above the normal YouTube fodder. It also has a very interesting take on language, what constitutes language, and the sociolinguistics of Autism. If this is, in fact, a genuine look into the autistic mind, I’m very impressed, and I’ll definitely be thinking about language in a whole new way.

However, my internet cynicism is a bit too harsh for me to take this completely at face value. It doesn’t have any of the features of an “amateur video”, and as I said, it’s really a cut above 90% of what’s on YouTube. If this were to come out as something done by a few art students for notoriety, I’d be disappointed, but not shocked.

If this is everything it says it is, I have to thank the creator. It’s both brave and powerful, and exceptionally well done. It’s always good to have your worldview tweaked a little bit, and this video definitely did that for me. I hope it affected you as well.

(Also, as a note, you’ll notice that I’m not embedding the YouTube video in the page as many site do. I’m sorry for the (slight) inconvenience, but I think it’s the best choice for accessibility, compatibility, and the aesthetics of this site)