The past few months have been a very exciting time in my life. In addition to classwork, I’ve been working on my Master’s Thesis, taking MA Comprehensive exams, and continuing the sorts of unrelated research that bring me joy. In addition, I’ve been going through the doctoral program application process, and, much to my delight, the process of formally accepting the offer that I received. Unfortunately, this has left little time for linguistics writing outside of class, and as such, this blog has been neglected in the process.

I’d like to apologize to my readers, to those interested in the Cryptorthography Contest (which I would still very much like to see happen), and to anybody who has left a comment without response. Much to my amazement, even in my relative absence, the site has consistently gotten upwards of two thousand hits per week, mostly from search engine recommendations, and the fact that my past writings are still useful to people brings me no small joy.

So, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic will stay up and functional for as long as I can maintain it, and I do hope to start posting more regularly again someday.

However, I can’t promise a return immediately. What I can promise, though, is a very bad Linguistics pun to hold you over:

So, the English definite article ‘the’ walks into a bar with his old friend, the English indefinite article ‘a’. They sit down, order some drinks, and then ‘a’ asks “so, what’re you up to now these days? Still marking noun phrases?”

‘the’ nods its head, taking a drink. “Definitely”

Thanks again for reading, and I hope to return to posting as soon as I can!

Phonology rules!

Phonology is the study of the rules and systems which govern the use of sounds in a language. Some of these rules in English, for example, tell us that a velar nasal can’t start a word in English, that “in-possible” has become “impossible”, and that the /t/ sound is completely different after an /s/ than it is at the start of a word (it’s unaspirated). All these effects, although cool when studied closely, happen at a subconscious level, and really don’t have much effect on the lives of speakers.

However, Phonology can get really fascinating when a person is speaking a language not their own. Although anybody can memorize words and grammar in a second language, it’s a long process to be able to disregard the phonological rules of your own language and use the ones of the new language.

When a non-native speaker has an “accent”, what’s actually happening is that they’re speaking your language, but using some of the phonological rules from their native tongue. With time (and practice), an accent slowly goes away, but it’s often the last stage of language learning, and is the culmination of years of work.

Let’s look at a specific example. In Russian speech, you can never have more than one long /o/ sound in a word. Even if the word you’re pronouncing is written with several ‘o’ sounds (like молоко, ‘milk’), only the one of them in a stressed position (explained below) will be pronounced, and the rest will be reduced into an /a/ or /ə/ (the sounds in ‘pot’ and ‘sofa‘). So, молоко is pronounced ‘mahluhkoh’ (/malə’ko:/), never “mohlohkoh” (/mo:lo:’ko:/). For more detailed information on this rule, see the Wikipedia page on Vowel Reduction in Russian

From Car Sales to prostitution

So, we’re sitting in my High School Russian class one day and we’re discussing vocabulary related to buying and selling. Our teacher, a Russian woman who still has a very noticeable Russian accent, is explaining the scenario for the next dialogue she’d like to do in class:

“Alright. So, Nick, I would like you to pretend to come up to me on a car lot. We will talk, and then, I will ask you if you would like to buy my Volva…”

Now, at this point, around half of the class either broke out laughing or was a bit too shocked to say anything at all. It’s worth pointing out that in her speech, the /ʌ/ sound in ‘but’ or ‘putter’ was always expressed with an /o/ sound, so to us, it sounded exactly like she just asked a student to buy her vulva.

At this point, she was looking around the classroom, confused, and trying to figure out what she had said. Some brave soul asked her what exactly she was selling, and she repeated, “I’m selling my volva!”. Another round of snickering coursed through the room.

At this point, she started to get frustrated. “No, it is a car. A volva!”. Slowly, the snickering began to calm, until finally, she went up to the board and wrote out “Volvo”, then pointed at it. “See! Volva!”

A chorus of groans of understanding rang out through the room, and she finally regained her composure. I’m not sure she ever understood what she actually said, but in a way, I think it’s better that way.

Although I didn’t really get it at the time, what my teacher was doing is actually perfectly understandable from a phonological standpoint. She was stressing only one of the O’s that she saw in the spelling, and the other vowel was reduced. Because she usually used a shorter /o/ sound for the /ʌ/ vowel, we understood her as saying “vulva”, not “volvo”.

Thus, directly because of a phonological rule, a normal day of class turned into a celebration of cross-linguistic hilarity. To this day, I can’t look at a Volvo without hearing my teacher saying “Would you like to buy my vulva?”, and it’s my favorite example of phonology gone wrong.

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.

A slip worthy of the ages

The conference, discussing Residence Hall life, took place on a college campus, and the 1000+ people attending were each assigned rooms in the Residence Halls on campus. So, everybody was staying in first-year dorms, with the same shared bathrooms, roommates, and tiny rooms as any incoming student would have. By no means were these luxury accommodations, but they didn’t have to be, we’re all used to Dorm life anyways, and what was provided was quite sufficient for the weekend.

Perhaps most wonderful Freudian slip I’ve seen in a long time happened during the closing ceremonies for this conference. So, myself and 1000+ other people are sitting in the main arena, and one of the conference coordinators is speaking to the entire group. He’s going through and thanking each different group or committee that made the conference possible, and then finally, he says (paraphrased) “I’d like to thank the University’s Housing and Conference services department for providing us with our unremarkable accommodations”.

A long moment passed, and then a good portion of the arena burst into laughter. He realized several seconds later what he had said, but by then, it was too late, and his correction was overwhelmed by the laughter, and his original meaning of “remarkable accommodations” was lost to history.

This is a truly amazing example of a “Freudian slip”.

Parapraxis 101

A Freudian Slip (or Parapraxis) is where one’s subconscious thoughts are somehow expressed on the surface through their words or actions. This often happens through name replacement (“I love you Laura” when Laura is your mistress’ name, not your wife’s), or through other “slips of the tongue” (“I would do anything to you” as opposed to “I would do anything for you”). No matter the form it takes, the most basic requirement for a speech error to be considered an instance of Parapraxis is that you end up communicating something you didn’t intend to but were likely thinking subconsciously.

According the Wikipedia article on Freudian Slips, Freud thought that these slips had a psychological meaning:

The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who described the phenomenon he called Fehlleistung (literally meaning “faulty action” in German, but termed as parapraxis in English) in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud gives several examples of seemingly trivial, bizarre or nonsensical Freudian slips in Psychopathology; the analysis is often quite lengthy and complex, as was the case with many of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Popularization of the term has diluted its technical meaning in some contexts to include any slip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, often in an attempt by the user to humorously assign hidden motives or sexual innuendo to the mistake. It is not clear, however, what Freud considered an “innocent” mistake, or if he thought that there were any innocent mistakes. The enormous quantity of slips analyzed in psychopathology, many of which are banal or apparently trivial, would seem to indicate that Freud felt almost any seemingly tiny slip or hesitation would respond to analysis.

Context is everything

The social power of these slips lies in the context in which they occur. For instance, had we all been housed in a five star hotel and the speaker still said “unremarkable”, it might still be funny, but it’d be more of a simple speech error. The beauty of a Freudian slip comes from the fact that it reveals the truth (or one’s true feelings), even while a person tries to cover it up.

Because everybody knew that the accommodations were, in fact, quite unremarkable, when he misspoke, it was both extremely funny and extremely telling. He unconsciously violated the social norm as well as catching himself in his own distortion of the truth in front of 1000+ people.

So, the moral of this story is that you’re never safe from your own inner thoughts. Although some people can become very adept at lying (or mild distortion of the truth), a single speech error could pop up and blow your entire cover. You can pay close attention to your words, and try to suppress your subconscious, but sooner or later, everybody slips up.

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

One example of a Bash.org quote about language is this one, reproduced here in its entirely:

< %kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde – I don’t give a shit
< %kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
< %kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
< %kiwibonga> in french
< %kiwibonga> that sounds like “I’m taking a shit in my hands and I’m keeping it for myself”

(For those unfamiliar with the source here, the above quote is referring to the English idiom “I don’t give a shit”, which means, roughly, “I really don’t care” or “I couldn’t care less”.)

This is a wonderful (and humorous) example of the fact that one cannot literally translate some idioms into another language and expect them to retain their meaning.

In many ways, an idiom is a phrase which has cultural meaning independent of the words that make it up. If I say “that’s the way a cookie crumbles” to a politician who just lost an election, I’m not implying that his campaign sat out too long, got stale, and then broke into small pieces when touched. Instead, I expect him to know that I’m saying that such things happen in life, and that I sympathize. There’s nothing in the words per se that carries the meaning, but instead, it’s based in a certain cultural knowledge shared by the two people.

When you start translating these idioms, you end up copying over the words, but the meaning is lost because there’s no shared cultural background. Once that’s lost, one has to read the literal meaning of the words, and thus, “I’m taking a shit in my hands and keeping it for myself”.

This principle isn’t necessarily universal. If I said “A bird in hand is worth one hundred flying” (from Spanish), most people could understand it to mean the same thing as the idiom “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. “That’s flour from a different sack” (also Spanish), in context, would likely be understood to mean “That’s a whole different story”.

However, in most cases, the meaning of an idiom comes not from the words themselves, but from the originating culture. The moral of this story: When you translate idioms word-for-word, if the snake bites you, there’s no remedy in the pharmacy.

(That, or you’re playing with fire. Either way.)

Eliciting Data

Now, there are two ways to go about this. Preferable is to have the speaker tell you a story or narrative, which you can then go through and analyze line by line. This provides good, natural speech, and also lets you see a variety of constructions as used in real life.

The other option is to elicit translations of individual sentences. This seems to be the way that most language description begins. First, you ask the speaker how to say, for instance, “sheep”, and then ask them how one would say “I saw a sheep”. From there, you might ask how to say “You saw the sheep”, and keep slightly modifiying the sentences until you start to get enough data to do more complex analysis.

However, there are times where you want to figure things out, but don’t want to wait for them to occur in a narrative. When you’re fishing for certain grammatical forms and slowly making sentences more and more complex, the sentences look less and less plausible, and usually end up seeming quite funny, no matter the language.

The road to absurdity is paved with grammatical intentions

On one afternoon, we started with a rather normal transitive (has both an agent and a patient) sentence “He hit you”, then changed to “I hit you”. Then, we decided to look into verb Tense (timeframe) and Aspect (defining this is a whole post of its own). So, we went to “I hit you this morning”, still with good intentions, and then “I hit you many times this morning”. “I hit you last year” was next, followed by “I used to hit you last year”.

Then, things developed a more threatening tone. Looking to see if the future tense acted any differently, we asked our speaker how one might say “I will hit you”. From there, we asked for “In the future (but not now), I will hit you many times”. Then, “In the future, I will be hitting you regularly”, and finally, “In the future, I will be hitting you (not just once, but many times), regularly”.

At that point, we realized that we’d gotten a tad absurd, and went back to more normal subject matter (“I’ll be seeing you regularly”).

Sometimes, we just hop right to crazy

However, there’s not always a buildup. Sometimes, in the heat of the linguistic moment, we’ll stumble upon a certain contruction and want to substitute another noun or word, to see if it still works or if it changes the sound system. These can be truly wonderful.

Through this process, we’ve ended up with the rather disturbing “Sell me to him [the sheep]“, the slightly creepy “This is indeed my female sheep here”, the prophetic “Tomorrow, you WILL see vultures”, and the polygamous “the young man will marry all these women”.

Also, sometimes, you’ll want to test certain noun-forming suffixes. For instance, we we were given the word for “bad man”, and naturally, we wanted to know how to say “bad sheep”. There, we went to “the bad sheep made the kids drink alcohol yesterday”, and then ended up discussing a very bad wild boar.

Be careful what you say

Even with phonetics training and several years of language study under our proverbial belts, we can still mispronounce things. Usually, this just makes the sentence unintelligible to the speaker, but some times, we can mess up for comedic gold. For instance, in the language we’re studying, “ai go: fu:” means “I am at home”. When I said it back to the speaker, I misspoke and said “ai ga fu:”, which, after a bout of laughter, he translated as “I’m going to fart”. Although funny enough in a classroom, I’ve no doubt that these sorts of errors have caused more than their share of embarrassment, and maybe even a fight or two.

So, although linguistics is a serious discipline, the actual study process isn’t always completely serious. We manage to have some laughs, even while picking apart unfamiliar grammars, and I think that’s really one of the best parts of the job.

There are other perks, too. Although I’ve not had the occaision to use it yet, it is rather nice to know how to call somebody a “bad sheep” in Zarma.

In extreme Southwestern part of Colorado (in the Four Corners region), there’s a smallish city named Cortez, Colorado. The city is named after Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who began the Spanish Colonization of the Americas.

The truly beautiful part of it all is that Cortez is the seat of Montezuma County. Montezuma County is named after Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor at the time of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, who met with Cortés, and who was eventually killed due to the actions of the Spanish. The actions of Cortés (and his men) destroyed Moctezuma, ended the Aztec empire, and marked the start of Colonialization of the Americas.

Maybe locals are aware of this irony, maybe they’re not. Perhaps nobody made the connection when naming the area, or maybe Cortez was named long before Montezuma County came into existence. Who knows, maybe the county was named to offset the honor given to Cortez. No matter what, I find it to be a sick sort of funny that Cortez presides over Montezuma even today.

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?

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…