So, I’ve been teaching phonetics for a few years now, and each semester, I experience the joys of scrambling to find a word (or word-word pair) which exhibits a certain phonological trait or change. Because the examples you come up with on the spot are completely absurd, this brings me considerable joy.

For example, English has a phonological process called “Dental Assimilation”. In this process, an alveolar sound (like /t/, /n/ or /l/) becomes dentalized (made with the tongue behind the teeth) before dental sounds (/ð/ or /θ/). In order to demonstrate this (or better still, to test students), you need to come up with sets of words in which one word ends with an alveolar sound and the next starts with a dental sound.

Of course, there are a few common cases (“that thing”), but inevitably, in front of 66 people (or when asked to give an example on an exam), you can’t think of something reasonable like “can’t think”. So, you come up with something on the spot, and end up with something like “stupid thyroid” or “bell thief”.

To get these wonderful word pairs the recognition they deserve, I propose a neologism (a new word for an existing concept). I recommend that henceforth and forever more, a word combination which would be completely absurd in any context other than demonstrating phonology should be called a pine thug, in honor of the best/worst pair I’ve ever come up with in front of a classroom.

I know, I know, it’s tough to get a good neologism going. Most are gone within a few months (cf. “linsanity”), and barring political necessity (as has propelled “santorum“, a neologism created explicitly to mock Rick Santorum’s anti-gay stances), making a neologism stick is very difficult. However, I’ve known enough phonetics instructors (and students!) who acknowledge the agonies and ecstasies of pine thugs that maybe, just maybe, this one will take root.

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


This morning, Consumerist linked to an article in Primer Magazine (for some reason), titled “10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot”.

With a name like that, it couldn’t be anything but judgmental pedantry, but even in an otherwise eyeroll-worthy article, I found that several of these words are actually completely reasonable pronunciations, and several of them demonstrate interesting phonological processes. So, I’m going to discuss them a little bit.

Athlete (pronounced with a schwa in the middle, “Ath-uh-leet” /æθəlit/)

This is a very reasonable and common pronunciation, which I noticed extensively in the speech of even experts on the subject (Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a notable /æθəlit/ speaker. Here, the change likely comes from our dislike of having an interdental sound (/θ/) right next to a lateral (/l/). If you attempt to make the “correct” pronunciation, you’ll notice that your tongue is, in a sense, trapped between your front teeth, and to make a smooth gesture, you end up having to attempt to curve the sides of the middle and back of your tongue down. Which is unpleasant. So, it’s not shocking at all that speakers who use the word often may add the schwa.

(It’s also worth noting that there is no ‘H’ in Athlete, despite the author’s smug assertions that “there is no vowel between the ‘H’ and the ‘L’ in any of these words”. The English “TH” in this word is actually a single sound, a voiceless interdental fricative, which is nothing resembling an /h/. Once again, pedantry is seldom done well enough to be immune to further pedantry.)

Utmost (pronounced as “upmost”, /ʌpmowst/)

This is an awesome example of assimilation, two sounds becoming more like one another to make the speaker’s life easier, a phenomenon I’ve discussed before. Here, in the “correct” pronunciation, /ʌtmowst/, we have a /t/ sound, created at the alveolar ridge (just behind the teeth, try it) followed immediately by /m/, a bilabial sound created by pressing the two lips together.

When speakers are “mispronouncing” the word as /ʌpmowst/, they’re actually being more efficient, substituting in a /p/, also a bilabial sound, which allows them to simply close their lips (creating the /p/), then lower the velum (allowing nasal airflow) and start voicing to begin making the /m/. Going from /p/ to /m/ requires no additional tongue or lip movement, whereas going from /t/ to /m/ requires reconfiguration of the tongue and lips. Efficiency. Not quite the idiot pronunciation he’s claiming.

Sherbet (pronounced as “sher-bert”, /ʃɜɹbəɹt/)

Why does Primer Magazine hate assimilation? The first syllable has an “err” (/ɜɹ/) sound, why not the second syllable too? If we can keep the whole word vaguely “r-sounding” (“rhotic”, in phonetic terms), all the better. Speakers love regularity. Primer Magazine doesn’t.

“For all intensive Purposes”

This is really a horsed zebra. For further discussion of this, see a post I made last week.

Often (pronounced as “offen”, /ɑfɪn/)

How many Americans say “often” with the /t/, ever? This is textbook deletion of an unpleasant sound to simplify a cluster, and it’s one carried out by many, many people. Why bother with a /ft/ cluster when there’s no need to keep it around? It’s not like there’s another word, “Offen”, which this form of “often” could be confused with, and frankly, for speed, fluidity, and social reasons (in the US), the “offen” pronunciation is really a better choice.

Edit: OK, I misread this one completely in my anti-pedant rage. The author of the quoted article is actually _in favor_ of “offen” as the “proper” form, and I responded assuming that he, like so many others have, was arguing that “often” (with a /t/) is the only proper form. So, I’ve culled some of the anger from the post, and kept the phonology. Thanks, commenter!

Awry (pronounced as “aw-ree”, /’ɑɹi/ instead of “uh-rye” /ə’ɹaj/)

This word is a textbook example of why our writing system needs to be taken out behind the barn and dispatched as humanely as possible. Although “wry” is used for the proper /ɹaj/ pronunciation in the word “wry” (and only there), usually the “aw” digraph represents /ɑ/ (as in “claw”, “maw”, “awful”, “awkward”) and the “ry” represents /ɹi/ (as in “fury”, “worry”, “scurry”). I can understand the author feeling the need to state the proper pronunciation of the word, but his indignation at the thought that anybody could EVER think “awry” is pronounced “aw-ree” is just silly.

So, there’s a bit of phonological goodness wrung out of an otherwise dry and pedantic bit of prescriptivism. Which I am going to pronounce as “per-scriptivism” for the remainder of the day. Just to anger Justin Brown.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Change, Phonetics and Phonology, Tirades, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 3 Comments


So, I’ve been noticing a strong uptick in the use of “the cloud” to refer to online, decentralized storage, computing and program-hosting lately. No shortage of companies are talking about their “cloud computing” services (including my hosting company, Joyent), and it’s become one of those “gotta have it” corporate buzzwords, and it seems like no company’s marketing people will let them release a website, product or service which isn’t in some way cloudy.

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (“Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s coming “iCloud” information hosting service. Apple is increasingly targeting the non-tech-saavy crowd, and this service, like most of their recent developments, is meant to be largely transparent to the end user. Once you’ve signed up, iCloud will take your music, your photos, your documents, your books, your backups, your contacts, calendars and mail, and any additional information you add in through third party programs, and make it instantly available on all of your devices. As they put it on their own website: “Create a document, iCloud stores it, and pushes it to your devices”. Bam. Magic. You turn the service on and suddenly your data is on all of your devices. Who wouldn’t want that?

A rose by any other name…

They’re doing something linguistically fascinating, though: they make no mention of their machines, servers, databases or storage (at least on the user-facing sites). You create, something cloudy happens, it’s on all your machines. They’ve de-emphasized the middle step. Mind you, Apple’s not the only “cloud” provider to do this (Google Docs de-emphasizes the middle step too), but Apple is certainly the most flagrant. But why bother? Why de-emphasize?

Well, I’ve been toying around with a new hobby. Whenever somebody says “in the cloud”, I’ve found it entertaining to replace it with “on somebody else’s computer”. This simple replacement brings me much joy in the absurdity it creates and how oddly different it makes the act sound:

“Our main working copy of the paper is on somebody else’s computer for group editing, but it’s password protected so nobody but us can edit it”

“My data is safe, I store my address book, mail, passwords, documents and photos on somebody else’s computer.”

“Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer.”

When put like that, we’re emphasizing the storage, the step that Apple and Google and most of the other cloud providers don’t really want you to think about too much. We’re emphasizing the fact that your data is sitting on a hard drive in another state, watched by a sysadmin who you don’t know. We’re emphasizing that when you put something on the cloud, it’s no longer just yours, and whereas naive users might not hesitate to put something into an amorphous cloud, actually transferring their data onto another computer might tickle enough of their sense of privacy to make them hesitate to upload those bank statements or that racy note from a lover.

In addition, we emphasize the fact that the data is there for the cloud provider to use per the TOS. How much do you think that the recording industry would pay to analyze en masse the music library of hundreds of thousands of iGadget users, even if just for market research? How valuable would it be for a website to figure out where to advertise by asking a company storing passwords “in the cloud” which sites are also visited by people who have stored passwords for their site?

Simply put, putting your data “in the cloud” is amorphous. It’s a mystery, but at the end of it, it just works. Putting your data on somebody else’s computer can get the same ends, but it forces you to think about your data in between your machine and your other devices.

Clouds aren’t necessarily bad

This may sound like a paranoid luddite’s rant, but I use the cloud. I currently use MobileMe, Apple’s current iCloud equivalent, for calendar and address book syncing. I use DropBox to keep my grocery list current across all my devices. I have an SFTP provider for storing backups of my data between at-home backups, and in case of emergency. The cloud can provide, in addition to convenience, a type of security against loss. As a friend of mine pointed out on Google+ (a cloud app):

Somebody else’s computer, with extensive redundancy and backup systems, which makes it much less likely to be lost if my house burns down. It is one kind of security. Not the “no one else will look at it” kind, but the “I won’t lose it in a domestic disaster” kind.

This is certainly true, and one of the best arguments for decentralized, cloud-like computing. Data on my computer in my backpack is fleeting. Data on a well-backed-up server in Dropbox’s massive datacenter is much less likely to be dropped, stolen, lit on fire or broken. These services have a use, whether convenience, ease-of-use for non-tech users, decentralization, or simply as an offsite backup of your data.

The techies who have read this far are doubtless thinking “Come on, I knew this already”. Of course data stored in the cloud is stored on somebody else’s computers. Heck, geeks like myself can likely picture server farms, maybe even imagining the mass storage required. They have a good idea of what sorts of things cloud providers can and can’t do across petabytes of data.

It’s not like I’m blowing the whistle on a massive conspiracy here. Anybody who has thought more than 20 minutes about the idea of a cloud knows that information has to go somewhere, and has deduced that presumably, it’s sitting on somebody else’s computer. Apple’s not choosing to skirt the issue so they can “pull a fast one” on the entire internet, they’re doing it because it’s less intimidating to new users. Google Docs is neglecting to mention their servers because they don’t need to. That’s not why you should be using the phrase “on somebody else’s computer”.

We should be talking about uploading your documents onto somebody else’s computer with grandma when she gets her new laptop and decides that that “iCloud” folder is just like her hard drive. We should be discussing storing information on somebody else’s computer for the clueless CFO who wants to upload the company’s records onto DropBox to be able to work on them from his new iPad.

We should be talking about “the cloud” as storing information on somebody else’s computer so that people will think, if only for a second, about whether they care that that picture, document, or file is something they would be OK with storing on somebody else’s computer.

Because TOSes, “privacy policies”, talking around the issue and other calming language aside, that’s what the cloud is. It’s a vast collection of other people’s computers, and in order to decide intelligently whether you want your data there, you need to know where “there” is.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Corporate Language, Language and Thought, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 6 Comments

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